The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (92 page)

The nineteen Americans immediately returned fire and maneuvered back out of the kill zone. A soldier manning a 50-caliber machine gun spotted one Iranian with a rocket-propelled grenade trying to get around to the back of the column. A few well-placed rounds hit the Iranian, literally blowing him apart. When the Americans had gotten back away from the border, mortar rounds rained down around them, but inflicted no casualties. Iran briefly seized the Iraqis, who had been captured still drinking tea.
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In November, an eight-man patrol from the 4th Infantry Division out inspecting Iraqi border posts came under fire from three Iranian soldiers clad in fatigues across the border. The Americans returned fire, killing one and wounding another before the sole survivor fled.
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During the intense discussions about the surge, the civilian leadership at the Pentagon carried the water for the soldiers in Iraq. Rumsfeld pressed Hadley on getting it on the agenda. In November, after reading another intelligence report, Rumsfeld pressed Pace yet again on doing something about the Iranian attacks in Iraq. “If we know so much about what Iran is doing in Iraq, why don’t we do something about it?”
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The pressure from generals and diplomats in Iraq and outrage by Rumsfeld finally forced action. In just two months—record speed by Washington standards—the various agencies agreed on a strategy. Along the way, the only push back came from the vice president’s office. His foreign policy adviser, John Hannah, believed that Shia-backed militias did not represent a very significant threat. It was not a view shared by his boss.

On September 13, Hadley chaired a principals meeting. With Cheney’s concurrence, they agreed to a multistep approach to counter Iran inside Iraq. This included a new information campaign to highlight Iran’s activities and a directive for CENTCOM to develop a plan for a gradual escalation from nonlethal to lethal military operations to counter the Quds Force. In November, Abizaid came back with a proposal. The president and defense secretary gave the go-ahead following their meeting in the Tank on December 13. The authorizations were not as robust as Cheney wanted; there would be no killing of Quds Force except in self-defense, and American forces could not target Iranian operatives not actually engaged in supporting the militias.

The counteroffensive began less than a week later. The U.S. Special Operations Forces formed Task Force 88 (later changed to Task Force 17) to
carry out neutralization of the Iranian Quds Force. Conducting what the military calls advanced force operations, they worked with Iraqi agents and began conducting their own intelligence gathering and surveillance on the Iranian operations inside Iraq and just across the border. Using national intelligence assets, the American task force soon developed a good picture of the Iranians and Iraqis involved in the attacks and the EFP rat lines coming in from Iran.

On the evening of December 20, American special forces planned to raid a suspected Iranian safe house in Baghdad. An intelligence source tipped them off to a suspicious vehicle leaving the ISCI headquarters building. The Americans formed a hasty roadblock and arrested four men. Three carrying Iranian diplomatic passports were suspected MOIS agents, and one happened to be the Iranian military attaché to Iran’s embassy in Baghdad.

The next day, U.S. forces stormed the safe house and detained ten more men. While seven were Badr Corps officers and one was another MOIS agent, the United States had bagged two senior Iranian officers. “They were big fish,” a former special operations forces officer recalled. One was a colonel and the operations chief for the Quds Force, and his accomplice happened to be Brigadier General Mohsen Chizari, the head of the Quds Force operations inside Iraq.
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Iran immediately sent a démarche to the United States demanding the release of its “diplomats.” J. D. Crouch held a meeting at the White House, and the group decided to ignore the démarche. “Our actions will be our response.”
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Prime Minister al-Maliki was livid. While the United States immediately released those holding diplomatic passports, the Iraqi prime minister called in the American chargé d’affaires and an army general and demanded the release of General Chizari for lack of evidence. The United States relented and handed General Chizari over to al-Maliki’s national security adviser, who drove him to the Iranian border.

In the early morning hours of January 11, 2007, U.S. helicopters swooped down around a row house in downtown Arbil in northern Iraq. The building housed an Iranian consulate, but American intelligence suspected it really served as the Quds Force headquarters for Kurdish Iraq. U.S. forces also hoped to catch the soon-to-be commander of the Revolutionary Guard, Mohammad Jafari. Intelligence reported that this valuable prize had recently arrived in Arbil.
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U.S. Special Operations Forces surrounded the building and
used loudspeakers to call for those inside to surrender. Five guards standing outside immediately did, but those inside refused. The Americans stormed the building. While Jafari eluded them, they captured five Iranian Quds Force officers. The documents and laptops recovered proved a windfall for Americans in unraveling the EFP network. They incriminated the Quds Force in funneling weapons and support for those perpetrating the EFP attacks, including one in June 2006 that killed six American soldiers. Since none of the men had diplomatic passports, the United States threw them in prison at Camp Cropper near Baghdad. They remained in prison despite Iranian claims that they were “kidnapped diplomats” until 2010.

In February, the United States conducted yet another major raid. It arrested two senior Badr Corps officials, one of whom likely served with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. U.S. troops rounded up four Iranian nationals posing as journalists who had documents showing that they were Quds Force officers.

U.S. intelligence received another windfall in February 2007. A senior Revolutionary Guard general, Ali Reza Asgari, defected while visiting Turkey. Asgari had worked for years in Lebanon aiding Hezbollah and had served in Khatami’s government. He’d grown increasingly disillusioned with the government and apparently took the opportunity to leave while in Turkey.
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As the United States rolled up the Quds Force, the new defense secretary, Robert Gates, headed to the region to bolster support for the surge and the move against Iran. In January 2007, he met with Gulf leaders, who greeted him with the mantra that Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was an Iranian pawn. The Saudi king showed the most hostility to Iran. He expressed concern to Gates that the United States was secretly talking to the Iranians and was going to privately cut a deal. Gates reassured the king this was not the case, pledging continued U.S. support and no secret deals. The Iranians have many problems, and in overplaying their hand in Iraq, he told the monarch, “they are punching above their weight.”
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On January 20, Gates back-briefed the NSC in the White House on his trip, telling Hadley and the others that the Gulf allies were nervous. “They mistrust Prime Minister Maliki and fear Shia dominance—which they equate with Iranian influence—in Iraq.” All expressed support for the U.S. roll-up of the Quds Force. But “they all view Iran as the number one threat.”

The U.S. Special Forces operations caught the Iranians by surprise. After nearly two years of attacks, Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani seemed confounded by what had finally raised the ire of the Americans. The
seizure of the five Quds Force officers in Arbil especially concerned him. They knew intimate details of Iranian operations in Iraq, and this clearly compromised his entire operation there. Shocked at the sudden fortitude of the Americans, Suleimani scaled back his operation and pulled many of Iran’s Quds Forces out of Iraq due to concern that the Americans would seize them too.
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But the Iranians remained determined to challenge the American surge and would not give up so easily in Iraq. The secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council for National Security, Ali Larijani, privately confided to a Syrian official that Iran wanted to inflict much greater casualties. Iran began expanding its weapons flow, providing arms to any Shia group opposed to the coalition, especially al-Sadr’s independent Jaysh al-Mahdi militia.

One of these groups decided to take a few Americans hostage to barter the release of the five Iranians captured at Arbil or other Shia militiamen captured by the Americans. Qais al-Khazali led a newly formed Iranian-backed group called Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, or League of the Righteous. Thin with a cocky expression, he began his relationship with Iran in June 2003, when he and al-Sadr met in Tehran with Khamenei and Suleimani. He broke away from al-Sadr after al-Sadr joined the political process in Baghdad. After gaining approval during a secret meeting with a Quds Force officer and Lebanese Hezbollah, al-Khazali launched a daring operation against the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala, where nearly sixty U.S. Army soldiers lived and worked.

At five p.m. on January 20, five large black SUVs rolled into the fortified compound. Inside were between nine and twelve men, all dressed in American fatigues and helmets, with several speaking English. They mounted fake antennas to make the vehicles appear similar to those commonly used by the Americans. They easily fooled the Iraqi soldiers manning the guard post and made their way to the compound housing the American advisory team. In a hail of grenades and bullets, they stormed the office where the Americans were, likely aided by Iraqis inside the building. They killed one soldier and wounded three.
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The insurgents took four others captive, including two caught sitting in a vehicle, and then leaped into their SUVs and headed east at high speed. U.S. forces scrambled from across the area and closed in on the culprits. The Iraqi police found one dead soldier dumped on the side of the road. About four hours later, U.S. troops found the five SUVs abandoned on the road near a residential area. In the backseat of one, two soldiers had been
executed, still handcuffed together. The final soldier lay dead outside the vehicle.

U.S. and British forces tracked down those responsible. The underling who commanded the force that killed the Americans at Karbala met his end a few months later, killed by American special forces. Coalition forces captured al-Khazali in Basra in March 2007, then rounded up his brother and a Lebanese Hezbollah adviser, Ali Musa Daqduq.

Daqduq was a twenty-year veteran of Hezbollah who had served as the commander of the leader’s security detail. He arrived in Iraq in 2005 and worked with Iranian Quds Force officers to organize an Iraqi variant of Hezbollah. He made four trips to Iran, bringing several scores of Iraqis with him for paramilitary training. A disciplined soldier, when captured by the Americans he played deaf and mute for two months, garnering the nickname Hamid the Mute. He finally passed a note to his guards telling them that he could hear and talk; presumably enough time had passed to enable his accomplices to get away.
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W
hile Iran’s supreme leader denied any involvement, his surrogates at Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq responded by walking into a government building in Baghdad dressed as policemen and kidnapping five British contractors. They intended to use the hostages as barter to gain the release of their leader. The Iraqis executed four of the five, taking each out of his cell and shooting him in the back of the head. The Iraqi government finally brokered the deal in late 2009 that exchanged al-Khazali for the fifth British hostage, Peter Moore. The Iraqi militant then promptly fled to Iran.
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The administration looked at other ways to increase the pressure on Iran by going after the Revolutionary Guard. Hadley coordinated the broad U.S. campaign to expose the Quds Force, which included a wide-ranging set of nonlethal actions to expose the force, such as press conferences and selective leaks to reporters that highlighted its role in the use of EFPs. The United States exposed known Quds Force officers to Middle East governments and asked for them to be expelled.

President Bush executed one of the first salvos of this new scheme. On the morning of February 14, 2007, he held a press conference in the large, yellow-draped East Room of the White House. When asked by a reporter about Iran’s implication with the EFPs, Bush responded with his well-prepared talking
points: “What we do know is that the Quds Force was instrumental in providing these deadly IEDs to networks inside of Iraq. We know that. And we also know that the Quds Force is a part of the Iranian government. That’s a known. What we don’t know is whether or not the head leaders of Iran ordered the Quds Force to do what they did. But here’s my point: either they knew or didn’t know, and what matters is, is that they’re there.”

The president then forcefully put the Iranian government on notice that the United States intended to move against these networks: “If we find agents who are moving these devices into Iraq, we will deal with them.”
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On February 20, J. D. Crouch chaired a meeting with senior officials in the Situation Room to recommend to the president a wide range of actions to expose the Quds Force. The debate centered on whether to designate the entire guard or just its covert Quds Force as a terrorist organization. While no one disagreed about most of the plans, the military dissented about designating either group as a terrorist organization. Marine Lieutenant General John Sattler attended the meeting for the Joint Staff. Friendly, positive, and unflappable, the head of the Joint Staff’s plans and policy office expressed the concern of the chairman that designating military officers of another country as “terrorist” could backfire, especially if it was reciprocated against American special forces officers, who frequently operated clandestinely and have provided military assistance and training to insurgents. “The United States has always carefully avoided declaring military officers engaged in activities sanctioned by their government as terrorists to avoid the same being done to us,” Sattler pointed out.