The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (90 page)

The commander of Fifth Fleet, Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, learned of the incident while the Iranians were taking the British back to their base. An experienced surface warfare officer with multiple tours in the Gulf, he had commanded the last Earnest Will convoy just as the Iraqis invaded Kuwait. He dispatched surveillance assets to monitor the British captives and had his
staff begin to develop some ideas about using force to get them back. But his British deputy waved him off. Her Majesty’s government did not want to escalate the situation. So Cosgriff watched as the Iranian military flew the fourteen men and one woman to Tehran.
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The incident surprised Tehran as much as London. Amangah had had no orders to do what he did, but his seniors in the Revolutionary Guard liked that kind of initiative. President Ahmadinejad quickly took advantage of the gift. The British prisoners became a propaganda coup for the Iranian government, which paraded them before news cameras. After twelve days, Ahmadinejad ordered them released, sending them back in Iranian-made suits and carrying a bag of presents courtesy of the Islamic Republic. Captain Amangah was handsomely rewarded for his actions. President Ahmadinejad awarded him a medal, and he took command of a major Revolutionary Guard force, jumping over a number of more senior officers.

Abizaid and the Americans took notice. In keeping with Napoléon’s maxim that “every soldier carries a marshal’s baton in his pack,” the incident provided a clear path to glory in the Revolutionary Guard. It would only serve to inspire more rogue and aggressive actions by the guard, Abizaid believed. “It provided every guard officer a model for how to get promoted,” said one U.S. admiral.

The CENTCOM commander did not share all of the administration’s views of Iran. He argued for a broader strategy to undercut Iran across the Middle East. He pressed for a new emphasis on Israeli-Palestinian peace to help improve America’s position in the Middle East and suggested the United States could entice away Iran’s only ally, Syria. After the overthrow of Saddam and before the insurgency took root, the United States held powerful bargaining power compared with a nervous al-Assad. It had a chance to cut a deal to curtail Syrian support for Hezbollah.

The army general repeatedly called for a meeting with the Iranians. “I did not want to talk to them because I wanted them to be our friends,” he said after he retired. “I wanted to talk to them to avoid miscalculations that so often lead to conflict, much like the same way we had during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.” He supported Richard Armitage in providing aid to the Iranians following the December 2003 Bam earthquake in hopes that the interaction between the American and Iranian soldiers and airmen might lead to a dialogue between the two militaries. General Abizaid
proposed including Iranian officers in the International Military Education and Training programs sponsored by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. These training programs emphasized democratic values and had been used for decades to influence military students on the virtues of the American way of life. Including Iranian officers, Abizaid surmised, would help break down the distrust of the United States. He also suggested cooperation on areas of mutual concern. Iran had a terrible heroin problem, with junkies littering Iranian parks high on cheap Afghan poppies. He suggested offering Iran nonlethal aid to control drug smugglers coming in from Afghanistan.
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These ideas did not sit well with the White House. Both the vice president’s staff and Abrams opposed any dialogue with Iran, with Abrams seeing accommodation with Syria as naive.
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Any assistance would only give legitimacy to the regime, and providing military training or assistance would only give them “unmatched” insight into U.S. military capabilities. Rumsfeld expressed concern about any military exchange programs, and none of Abizaid’s Iranian openings ever got beyond point papers and discussions.

Abizaid and the administration did agree on the growing danger of Iran’s ballistic missiles. Abizaid’s concerns found support in the U.S. government. At the State Department, supporting CENTCOM’s fell to another newly arrived appointee, John Hillen. With a goatee and short-cropped hair, the extroverted assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs had solid credentials both in foreign policy and in the military. He had received a bronze star during the epic tank battle of “73 Easting” with the Iraqi Republican Guard during Desert Storm. He then left the army and went on to earn his doctorate in international relations at Oxford University. Hillen proposed a new policy venture called the Gulf Security Dialogue. With the help of Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, Hillen wanted to get the Gulf Arabs engaged in working together in a common defense against Iran. He had no hope for a new Persian Gulf version of NATO, but just wanted to push forward in areas where they should be able to work together, such as missile defense.

Hillen worked closely with Peter Rodman at the Pentagon, and the two agreed on the policy framework underpinning the dialogue, which included deterring Iran, countering terrorism, and providing stability in the Middle East. The administration used this framework as a basis to significantly increase arms sales to the Gulf Arabs.

In May 2006, Hillen and Ryan Henry from the Pentagon traveled to all the Gulf countries to hawk the Gulf Security Dialogue and explore means of improving defense cooperation. Fear of Iran resonated in the Gulf. Peter Rodman even remarked that Arab-Israeli peace, which had always been a major topic of discussions, became a footnote. Hillen offered to facilitate greater cooperation with CENTCOM and among the other states. The United States offered to sell advanced Patriot missiles, new fighter aircraft, radar that could track missiles across the region, and even the brand-new Littoral Combat ship to the Gulf Arabs. Working through the U.S. military, they would integrate all this into a Persian Gulf–wide air defense system.

“The Gulf Security Dialogue mainly existed in the U.S. minds and in our memos,” said one midlevel official in the NSC. While the Gulf states feared Iran, they still would not operate as a collective. They refused to share their air defense radar data with each other and only grudgingly agreed to train together at a new U.S. air-to-air combat center in the United Arab Emirates. Qatar and Oman had close economic ties to Iran and did not want to unduly antagonize leaders in Tehran. “The U.S. could never even mention Iran as the adversary,” recalled one military officer. One Qatari official accused the United States of hyping the Iranian threat simply to sell more weapons. “Getting the Gulf states to do anything in consort is like herding cats,” recalled one Defense official.

Hillen and Rodman tried to counter this trend by going back to an earlier policy playbook to get a multilateral impact through a series of bilateral agreements. “The idea was to forge a series of bilateral agreements between the U.S. and the Gulf Arabs that ended up being a de facto coalition, with the U.S. as the linchpin on which everything depended,” recalled one Bush official. It was not ideal, but allowed the United States to lay the groundwork for more integration and cooperation in the future. It remained a work in progress, and over the coming years cooperation and coordination did improve, with hotlines installed between the militaries and some sharing of information. The United States increased its own missile defense system to provide a backbone to protect the Gulf states, with Abizaid approving sending three battalions of Patriot missiles to the Gulf.

Selling weapons to the Gulf Arabs has always drawn close scrutiny from Congress. Hillen and Abizaid worried about the political fight in improving the weapons of the Gulf Arabs. But President Bush had a better
understanding of Congress. During a December 2006 meeting in the Roosevelt Room, Hillen mentioned that some of the systems they wanted to sell to the Arabs might be controversial. The president snapped, “Not if it’s against Iran.”

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ran had a dual-track policy regarding Iraq. In the long-term, Tehran wanted a stable but politically weak Iraq dominated by Shia coalitions. While the Bush administration continued issuing policy papers confidently proclaiming that Iran feared the emergence of a democratic Iraq, Tehran’s diplomats actively supported the American democratic process, realizing it would guarantee a Shia majority in the government. In the short-term, however, the Iranians wanted a level of instability. Seeing the American military on their border as a grave threat, they wanted to bleed the Americans, make the cost of the occupation too high, and cause a chastened American government’s ignominious withdrawal. They encouraged Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and others to participate in the political process, and before the 2005 elections provided pictures and posters supporting the Shia United Iraqi Alliance party. Iran provided al-Hakim’s ISCI and Badr Corps more than $50 million a year and backed the American electoral process. Through their ambassador to the Court of St. James, Iran relayed its desire to work with Washington in free and fair elections in Iraq.
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The Bush administration ignored the offer, continuing to assert that the specter of Shias voting in Iraq would undermine the totalitarian neighbor. However, a November 27, 2005, State Department report, leaked by WikiLeaks, warned, “Iran is gaining control of Iraq at many levels of government.”
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Iran simultaneously increased its assistance to Shia militias opposed to the United States. The United States helped Iran in this when a U.S.-concocted plan to disarm militias integrated many of the Iranian-backed Badr Corps soldiers into the new Iraqi security forces.
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In the spring of 2004 a young firebrand cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, openly challenged the United States. The son of a prominent cleric killed by Saddam, al-Sadr possessed a family pedigree that appealed to many of the poor Shia, who flocked to his side. His militia force, the Mahdi Army or Jaysh al-Mahdi, grew in size and power with Iran’s support. Although al-Sadr shared Ayatollah Khomeini’s views of a pan-Shia movement, he remained independent and wary about Iranian meddling in his country. Iran supported him due to his widespread
support from the populace. The head of Iran’s Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani, despised him. Suleimani viewed al-Sadr as too reckless and thought his uncoordinated and independent actions only undermined Iran’s goals in Iraq. But in April, as the crisis erupted, the Quds Force still provided al-Sadr’s militia with medical supplies and three hundred rocket-propelled grenades. When the U.S. military crushed al-Sadr’s uprising in August, Iran dispatched both diplomats and Quds Force officers to mediate the crisis and cajole al-Sadr back to supporting the American-established interim Iraqi governing body.

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upporting the Iraqi militias became one of the most important missions for the commander of the Quds Force, the secretive arm of the Revolutionary Guard. In his late forties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a matching beardary, Suleimani was an aggressive, hands-on leader. He had distinguished himself during the Iran-Iraq War and quickly rose to be one of the youngest division commanders in the Iranian military. He had a very close, trusting relationship with the supreme leader, who appointed him to head the Quds Force in 1998. Although a part of the guard, the Quds Force reported only to Ayatollah Khamenei. It was organized into regional commands called corps, each controlling operations under its area (for example, Lebanon or the Arabian Peninsula) under Suleimani’s watchful eyes.
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For Iraq, the responsible corps was Department 1000, or the Ramazan Corps, commanded by Colonel Ahmed Foruzandeh, which stood up in the early 1990s to try to subvert the Shia against Saddam Hussein. Foruzandeh had three subordinate headquarters, each close to the border. When inside Iraq, the Quds Force operated from a series of safe houses and front companies, and it had a presence everywhere but the Sunni-dominated western al-Anbar province. Suleimani took an active role in the operations in Iraq. He covertly traveled to Basra to meet with Iraqis and frequently stayed at a forward headquarters established in the Iranian border town of Mehran.
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In late 2004 and early 2005, Iran held a series of meetings in Tehran to support newly emerging pro-Iranian surrogate groups opposed to the United States. Lebanese Hezbollah operatives attended several of these, as Iran intended to use them to conduct military training inside Iraq, which would help minimize Iranian fingerprints on their operations. While Iran maintained its support for the Islamic Supreme Council and other large Shia parties involved in the government, Tehran cultivated at least eleven smaller
rejectionist groups, several being splinter groups from al-Sadr’s Mahdi movement. This included Abu Sajjal Gharawi, who served as a commander under al-Sadr only to fall out of favor after the cessation of attacks on the coalition. He had close ties with Quds Force officers, and they frequently met in a Basra safe house. Another was Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani, who had a network of perhaps three hundred men operating primarily in Baghdad’s Sadr City. A dual Iranian-Iraqi citizen and former Revolutionary Guard officer, he maintained close ties with the Quds Force.
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To aid their surrogates, Quds Force operatives observed American forces and bases, meticulously noting convoy patterns and flight schedules. The large American air base at Balad and the U.S. embassy in the Green Zone were favorite bases for Quds Force surveillance teams. After a raid by U.S. forces in 2008, the Americans uncovered thousands of reports detailing Quds Force operations and attacks by their surrogates against coalition forces, as well as former Baathists, including retribution killings against Sunnis who had a hand in the massacre of the Shia during the 1991 uprising following Desert Storm. To aid them, the Quds Force recruited Iraqis—many of whom had fled to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War—living along the Kuwait border to provide additional information on troop movements. This supplemented information received by MOIS spies operating in Kuwait.