The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (75 page)

A few days after the terrorist attack, Newbold walked into Feith’s office with a rough plan to strike al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan. Feith looked disdainfully at the marine general. “What are you planning that for?” he said. “Iraq is the target.”
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Newbold was aghast. “Iraq had not attacked the United States.” In 2002, Newbold retired in protest. Before leaving the Pentagon, he handed the chairman a scathing letter outlining the folly of the coming war with Iraq.

The weekend following the 9/11 attacks, Bush convened his foreign policy team at Camp David in Maryland. The discussions centered on the coming war in Afghanistan and how the United States could avoid repeating the errors of earlier empires. Wolfowitz made a pitch for attacking Iraq rather than Afghanistan.
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Going after al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan was more akin to a police action, explained Doug Feith, reflecting the views of many of the civilian appointees at the Pentagon. By striking at Iraq, you addressed the larger problem of state sponsors of terrorism, and that was “thinking strategically.”
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Bush rejected the argument, but Wolfowitz had laid down the marker for what would follow Afghanistan.

Douglas Feith was charged with developing defense policy for Secretary Rumsfeld. Thin with thick black hair, he was viewed by many officers as an arrogant ideologue. But Feith had a lawyerly precision. He drove subordinates crazy, proofreading their reports and criticizing comma placement even with time-sensitive briefings, but he proved adept at fleshing out Rumsfeld’s and Wolfowitz’s ideas.

The defense secretary wanted to put the “global” in the war on terrorism. He looked for a way of demonstrating unilateral American action, the ability to strike anywhere in the world to root out America’s enemies. He wanted an aggressive, offensive military strategy. Richard Perle, the head of the influential Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel for the secretary, agreed. He advocated a series of successive campaigns, including Iraq, Syria, and Iran. The U.S. military would defeat one, withdraw quickly to avoid a lengthy occupation that would drain public support and resources, and then swiftly move to attack the next country. This appealed to Rumsfeld.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Feith and Joint Chiefs vice chairman General Peter Pace developed a matrix of the global terrorist network as part of regular meetings on building a “global war on terrorism” campaign. One objective behind their efforts was to ensure that the nexus of weapons of mass destruction and terrorists did not occur. While some countries linked to terrorists, such as Syria and Libya, might be coerced into giving up their weapons, others, such as Iraq, Feith and Pace believed, were beyond compelling with diplomatic or economic tools. “For over ten years, every reasonable means had been tried short of military force against Saddam Hussein,” said Feith. Iran fell into a different category, Feith believed. “The United States had not tried to pressure the Iranians in a meaningful way using economic and political tools. Military force was not a serious alternative in 2001 and 2002.”
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American intelligence aided the design by playing a double game on linkage between 9/11 and state sponsors of terrorism. On October 18, CIA Director George Tenet passed a report to Rumsfeld speculating as to which countries might have a motive to conduct terrorist attacks against the United States, focusing on Libya, Iran, and Iraq. Both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz seized on this think piece as additional ammunition in their crusade to attack Iraq. When CIA analysts continued to come up short in proving this nexus, the Defense Department established the Office of Special Plans under Feith’s oversight. Headed by a taciturn policy insider, Abe Shulsky, its mission was to look for links between al-Qaeda and Iraq that the intelligence community had missed. The fact that Shulsky’s group did not find the link either did not dissuade the Bush Defense Department. An October 21, 2001, memo edited by senior defense officials Peter Rodman, Doug Feith, and Donald Rumsfeld summed up their views succinctly: “The absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.”

The hijackers who plowed their planes into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, caused Bush administration policy to congeal as ideology merged with power politics. Both Armitage and Powell quickly fell in line. Vice President Dick Cheney believed in power politics and executive authority. He fixated on the weapons of mass destruction argument. “If a terrorist group acquired a nuclear or chemical device,” he told a staffer, “they would certainly use it and create far greater damage than on September 11.” Believing that a higher power had placed him as president during this critical moment in history, George Bush embraced Wolfowitz’s goals for the war. He viewed the coming war against terrorism with a Wilsonian grandeur. The terrorist attacks now presented the opportunity to remake the Middle East based upon American values of the rights of individuals and not the whim of oligarchy.

A
trocity” is how Tehran’s
Iran News
described the slaughter. Some Iranian officials believed that the United States had created a1-Qaeda as a tool against the Islamic Republic. Conspiratorial-minded officials remained skeptical that such an operation could be conducted without the American government’s knowledge. But the magnitude of the attack as well as the culprits stunned the Iranian government and its populace.
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“My deep sympathy goes out to the American nation,” said President Mohammad Khatami.
“Terrorism is condemned and the world public should identify its roots and its dimensions and should take fundamental steps to eliminate it.” Mourners held a spontaneous candlelight vigil as thousands of people took to the streets of north Tehran chanting, “Death to terrorists.” Iranian soccer fans observed a minute of silence before a match with Bahrain. Even Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei condemned the attacks: “Mass killing is wrong, whether it’s in Hiroshima, Bosnia, New York, or Washington.”
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During Friday prayers at Qom, Ayatollah Ibrahim Amini said that the Iranian people grieved with the relatives of those killed, and the traditional slogan “Death to America” was absent from the crowds’ mantras.
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Tehran had mixed emotions about the new administration. President Khatami desperately wanted to improve Iran’s economy. He needed this for political survival, but also to show detractors within the government the tangible benefits from better relations with the West.
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Bush’s family ties to the oil industry appeared to be a good omen. Rafsanjani believed that pressure from American oil companies might lead to a lifting of the sanctions. Although his father’s assignment as CIA director caused some unease within the Iranian government, many within the Iranian business community hoped the Republicans would be more sympathetic to lifting the sanctions in order to make money for American companies.

If the terrorist attack changed the focus of the U.S. government, it portended a change regarding Iran too. The traditional American antagonist suddenly loomed as a potential ally. “The Iranians seemed shocked by the scale of the attack,” said Richard Armitage. Iran showed no enthusiasm for al-Qaeda or its Sunni-based objectives.

The perpetrators of 9/11 were harbored by a fiercely anti-Shia, anti-Iranian Afghan tribal alliance, the Taliban. Iran supported the main opposition group, the Northern Alliance, with close ties to the legendary Afghan resistance fighter who opposed both the Soviets and the Taliban, Ahmad Massoud. In 1998, Iran threatened to invade Afghanistan following the killing of eight Iranian diplomats by Taliban forces when they stormed the city of Mazar-e Sharif in northern Afghanistan. As a result, Iran increased its support for the Northern Alliance and the anti-Taliban forces. In the first half of 1999 alone, thirty-three cargo planes with 380 metric tons of small arms, ammo, and fuel arrived from the eastern Iranian air base of Mashhad to Tajikistan for transport to the Northern Alliance.

Since the late 1990s, the United Nations had sponsored meetings in Geneva with Afghanistan’s neighbors plus the United States and others with an interest in Central Asia to resolve the myriad problems caused by the Afghan civil war and the Taliban’s victory. Iran housed two million Afghan refugees. Afghan opium made its way through Iran’s porous border bound for Iranian cities as well as the streets of Europe. The seventh floor of the Department of State paid little attention to these discussions, which fell under the auspices of the department’s bureau that handled India and Pakistan rather than the Middle East. But the venue placed American and Iranian diplomats in the same room, and after September 11 the State Department saw this informal venue as a means of reaching out to Iran to leverage its access and cooperation with the Northern Alliance in the forthcoming American attack on the Taliban.

“The Iranians had the contacts to help us in Afghanistan, and appeared to be willing to use their influence in a constructive way,” said Flynt Leverett, a CIA officer serving as the director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council.
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Secretary Powell dispatched Ryan Crocker to meet with the Iranians in Geneva. As cover, the Italians and Germany were included to avoid the appearance of direct talks. But in fact, it would be the first face-to-face discussions between the two nations since 1986, during the arms-for-hostages debacle of the Reagan administration.

Discreet and experienced, and fluent in both Arabic and Farsi, Crocker served in some of the most demanding posts of the Middle East. In April 1983, he suffered superficial injuries from flying glass when an Iranian surrogate detonated a car packed with explosives in front of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. He headed the State Department’s Iraq task force following Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, before returning to Lebanon in 1990 as the ambassador. This would be the first of six ambassadorial appointments in the region, including Iraq in 2007 during the height of the violence following the U.S. invasion and Afghanistan during the surge there under President Obama. Crocker knew something about Iran. His first posting as a Foreign Service officer in 1972 was to the American consulate at Khorramshahr in southwestern Iran. A captive of the student protests on American university campuses at the time, Crocker arrived convinced that a leftist revolution would send the shah’s reactionary, authoritarian regime to the “dustbin of history.” He spent
two years traveling the countryside, talking to students and labor organizers trying to prove this thesis. “I could not have identified a politicized mullah if I tripped over one. I had no idea of what Khomeini was writing in Najaf,” Crocker recalled, lamenting his own naïveté. With the shah’s overthrow, Crocker realized the inherent problem of looking at another society through one’s own lens. “I learned the important lesson that you need to check your intellectual baggage at the door when you arrive in someone else’s complex society, and Iran is an incredibly complex country.”

Not everyone in the U.S. government agreed about the wisdom of talking to Iran. When Paul Wolfowitz heard of the Crocker mission, he wanted it shut down. John Bolton concurred, seeing it as a reward for bad behavior and distrusting anything coming out of the mouth of an Iranian official. One of the most strident opponents was William Luti, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs. A retired navy captain who rose to prominence as Newt Gingrich’s military assistant, he’d earned a doctorate from Tufts University with his dissertation on Operation Earnest Will and the escort of Kuwaiti tankers during the 1980s, in which he’d opposed the joint operation led by CENTCOM. “He is an extremely bright guy and a good friend,” said Tony Less, a commander during the tanker war, “but he is very right wing.”
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Luti was excitable regarding Iran.
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He openly advocated regime change rather than what he saw as fruitless talks with a duplicitous nation. Luti had Larry Franklin, a civilian staffer who shared his views, draw up a set of counterpoints against engagement with Iran. “Iran is a hostile nation,” Franklin began in an eight-point diatribe against the Islamic Republic. “Iran mouthed words of condemnation for the September 11 attacks, but actions speak otherwise.” It violated its international obligations, was duplicitous, and actually worked to undermine the Afghan government and fragment the country. “Iran must cease illegal programs and halt its terrorist ways.”
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But Powell and Armitage stood firm, and for once Rice herself interjected, concurring that meeting with the Iranians about Afghanistan could be useful. As long as the discussions remained at a low level and did not stray into other areas of U.S.-Iranian relations, the Pentagon acquiesced and raised no strong objections, other than to razz Crocker with a few good-natured jabs for “talking with the enemy” when he departed on a junket with Rumsfeld in Cairo in order to meet with the Iranians.
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Crocker supported meeting with the Iranians. “I generally believe in talking to anyone who will talk to you,” he said. “Maybe you will persuade them; maybe you’ll neutralize them; maybe you can just mess with their mind.”
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The Iranian delegation consisted of three individuals. In an echo of McFarlane, North, and Cave’s talks fifteen years earlier, all the Iranians had strong connections to the Revolutionary Guard commander, Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi, and to the supreme leader. One was a deputy foreign minister and an experienced hand in international political organizations, another a Revolutionary Guard general who had served as Iran’s liaison to the Afghan Northern Alliance. The third man was the most intriguing to the Americans: former Iranian ambassador to Afghanistan and Bosnia-Herzegovina Mohammad Taherian. His career blurred the distinction between diplomat and military officer. During the 1980s, as ambassador in Kabul, he had secretly funneled arms to the mujahideen, when the Reagan administration was engaged in the same activity. A decade later, as ambassador to Bosnia in the midst of the Balkan civil war, he had funneled Iranian military aid to the Muslims, an operation that included deploying two hundred to three hundred Revolutionary Guardsmen to Central Europe to fight for Bosnia. He had also held private meetings with the CIA on opposing the Serbs during his time in Sarajevo, a fact he informed Crocker’s delegation of during one of their lengthy chats.
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