The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (94 page)

“I regret that I ended my presidency with the Iranian issue unresolved,” President Bush wrote in his memoirs. “I did hand my successor an Iranian regime more isolated from the world and more heavily sanctioned than it had ever been.” But he remained confident that his efforts would inspire Iranian dissidents and help “catalyze change.”
⁴⁹
The administration had provided a guide to continue the broad containment of Iran. While Iraq teetered between the two sides of the conflict, CENTCOM had positioned itself to deal with any eventuality. But the Bush policies to isolate Iran and “delegitimize” the regime had failed. The invasion of Iraq had placed Iran in a much stronger strategic position than it had been before with Saddam Hussein in power. Efforts at negotiations had proved equally fruitless. While the Iranians extended a halfhearted hand to cooperate in Iraq, they refused to entertain any talk about their killing of American soldiers. It fell to a new administration to pick up the pieces and continue to pursue peace or plan for war.

O
n Wednesday, January 7, 2009, three former presidents of the United States joined the White House’s current and forthcoming occupants in front of the president’s imposing wooden desk. After a few remarks by President Bush, they adjourned for lunch. In less than two weeks, Barack Obama would be sworn in to join the world’s most exclusive club. President Bush had organized the gathering as a show of national unity and support for the president-elect. As the two men warmly shook hands, Bush said, “We want you to succeed. Whether we are Democrat or Republican, we all care deeply about this country.”

Bush had another, less public reason for wanting to meet with Obama. Before the formal gathering with the former commanders in chief, the two men met alone for thirty minutes, sitting next to each other in the Oval Office’s blue-and-gold-striped upholstered chairs. Bush had avoided new foreign policy actions in his waning days as president that would commit Obama to courses that he might not support. But Bush wanted to talk with Obama in private about one exception: Iran.

“I have tried not to tie your hands,” Bush began. “But regarding Iran, I have approved a number of actions that commit you to certain things, and I want you to be comfortable with them and to understand why we are doing
them.” Bush then proceeded to lay out the broad details of his programs aimed at delaying and undermining Iran’s nuclear program, and he explained its various components, from military options to public messaging. Bush told Obama about some of the covert and overt operations under way, among them ones so close-hold that only a handful of senior officials were read into them. Many required time to play out, Bush said, and some of the more esoteric actions, such as those that lay in the world of cyber warfare or relied on other hidden tools available to the U.S. government, needed the new president’s support in order to succeed. Bush was under no illusion that any of these efforts would halt Iran’s nuclear program, but they might buy eighteen months to two years. This would give Obama and his administration enough space to get their feet on the ground and devise their own strategy for Iran and its nuclear ambitions. “I want to give you time and options,” Bush said to Obama.

Obama listened intently. He knew many of these issues, having been briefed already by the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General James Cartwright. The president-elect confided the details of the conversation with his new national security adviser, another onetime marine general, James Jones. Bush had wanted to transcend the hyperpolitical environment of the time and pass the Iranian policy baton cleanly to the next runner in order to forge a consistent American policy in response to the threat from Tehran. While Barack Obama grasped the importance of Bush’s words, the new president would decide for himself what to do regarding Iran.

F
rom the outset, the Obama administration recognized that Iran would be one of its most important national security challenges. During the campaign, Barack Obama had been openly critical of Bush’s Iran policy. During the primaries, Obama had stood out for his astute criticism that the invasion of Iraq had opened the door for greater Iranian influence in the Middle East. While he too called Iran a dangerous threat and a nuclear Iran unacceptable, candidate Obama argued that, as during the Cold War, the United States needed to have the strength of its convictions and talk to its adversaries. He called for a dialogue with Iran, proclaiming that he would sit down and meet with Iranian leaders without preconditions. “Demanding that a country meets all your conditions before you meet with them, that’s not a strategy. It’s just naive, wishful thinking,” Obama had said.
¹

On the surface, the transition went well. President Bush and national security adviser Stephen Hadley had gone to great pains to brief the incoming national security team on Iranian policy. The fact that Robert Gates stayed on as secretary of defense and William Burns continued on at the State Department only further smoothed the transfer. But tensions almost inevitably accompany a change of parties and administrations, and this transition was no exception. The new deputy national security adviser, Tom Donilon, was a smart and aggressive lawyer, but he was a Democratic Party political operative and not a foreign policy professional. In his first meetings he repeatedly stressed that this had to be Obama’s Iran policy and thus there was a need to eliminate any hint of “Bushism,” even if the policy had not substantively changed. This grated on the senior generals and CIA officers present, who had to sit mum and remain nonpartisan.

Despite Bush’s effort to bridge the two administrations, Obama and his appointees came to office concerned about Bush’s use of covert action in the war on terrorism. CIA rendition operations and the prison at Guantánamo Bay had been hot political issues during the campaign. On his first full day in office, the president signed an order to close the prison in Cuba.
²
Under the rationale of better presidential oversight, in the first few weeks after the inaugural the White House conducted an exhaustive review of all the presidential findings, including those related to Iran. During this process the president canceled several that Donilon and he viewed as inappropriate or unworkable. All this frustrated Bush’s appointed CIA director Michael Hayden and other career holdovers. They had been instrumental in developing these operations and now had to justify their earlier decisions while “educating” a new crop of senior appointees. Although Obama rejected a number of Bush’s plans, he embraced covert operations and expanded their use. CIA drone attacks against al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen and Pakistan increased by three fold under the new president.
³

While the National Security Adviser Jim Jones focused more on Europe, Iran fell into the portfolio of his deputy. Donilon preserved the Iranian small group that had been started by Stephen Hadley, and it continued to meet to discuss Iran three times a week without the nachos that Hadley frequently offered. But Donilon created a firestorm when he moved the small group to the larger White House Situation Room and invited ten people from the NSC staff to attend what had been a small, close-hold group. At the time, Donilon was not privy to the operational information relayed to Obama and
Jones by the outgoing Bush team and had no idea of just how sensitive the details were of efforts to thwart Iran’s ambitions. General Cartwright and the CIA deputy director, Stephen R. Kappes, refused to brief such a large gathering about their operations against Iran.

“I am going to take this to the president!” said a furious Donilon to Cartwright.

“I welcome bringing this in front of the president,” Cartwright answered sternly. “I am not going to discuss our sensitive operations in front of this large a group. It will leak out, and that will only limit your options in the future.” Cartwright had earned Bush’s respect for his calm and reasoned manner and would soon win Obama’s. Donilon finally relented and agreed to hold off the most sensitive subjects for another forum, but he continued inviting twenty people to the Iranian small group meeting. The national security adviser believed that any strategy for Iran had to be a broad-based approach, one that incorporated all the agencies of the U.S. government. There was such a thing as being too secret. By keeping the details to only a handful of people, it would be impossible to bring in all tools available to pressure Iran into peacefully stopping its nuclear weapons program.

F
rom the outset, Obama pressed for engagement with Iran. He personally believed the Bush administration had not seriously used diplomacy to address the tensions with the country. He wanted to test Iran’s willingness to negotiate and resolve the differences that divided the two nations.
⁴
The president offered to talk without preconditions, including the requirement that Iran first halt its uranium enrichment. In a series of speeches around Washington think tanks, administration officials echoed a new slant: that what was unacceptable was a nuclear-
armed
Iran, not necessarily a nuclear-capable Iran. Just six days after his inauguration, President Obama appeared on Arab television and said that negative perceptions lay at the heart of Middle East quarrels. By implication, he was sending a message that Iran and the United States needed to get beyond the usual knee-jerk reaction that each side was inherently out to get the other.

In Tehran, the election of Barack Obama divided officials. Iranian news media became infatuated with the first African-American president and broadcast a steady stream of reports that the election represented a repudiation of Bush’s policies and offered the prospect of better relations with the
United States. A number of Iranian diplomats expressed optimism about the prospects of better relations with the new American president. “The words of Obama were good,” said one such foreign ministry official. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad agreed. Just two days after the election, he took the extraordinary step of sending a congratulatory letter to Obama. “You are expected to make a fast and clear response to the demands for a fundamental change in U.S. domestic and foreign policy,” he wrote. “Iran welcomes major, just and real changes in policies and behavior.” The Iranian president’s supporters, including the foreign ministry, praised Ahmadinejad’s gesture as a constructive step toward ending thirty bitter years of estrangement.
⁵

But hard-liners within the Iranian government lambasted their president. “Today becoming a politician in the United States is synonymous with bowing humbly before Zionism,” wrote one commentator. These hard-liners countered that the Jewish lobby controlled both parties, so in spite of Obama’s rhetoric, no American president would make any real substantive change in policy toward Iran. As proof, they pointed to the appointment of Dennis Ross as Obama’s point man for Iran and the Middle East. Ross had recently come from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which Iranian leaders widely viewed as a key think tank for the Israeli-American axis. The powerful speaker of the Iranian parliament, Ali Larijani, said he was hopeful that Obama represented a real change, but thought it naive to think that the United States would make any substantive changes to its antagonistic policies, especially on the nuclear issue.
⁶

As for the one man whose opinion counted most, the supreme leader, he remained silent. Ayatollah Khamenei had never been sanguine about accommodating Washington. Anti-Americanism remained a pillar of the revolution of whose flame he was the keeper. He had endorsed the openings ten years earlier, following 9/11, but after the Americans rebuffed his overture Khamenei had no urge to repeat the mistake. Still, he did not publicly condemn Ahmadinejad’s letter to Obama. The only hint of his misgivings appeared in an editorial in a newspaper closely aligned with him, which implied that Ahmadinejad had “fallen for a mirage” in thinking Obama was different than Bush.
⁷

The one point on which supporters and skeptics of Obama in Tehran both agreed was the need for the Americans to make a tangible gesture. Lifting some of the sanctions would be a good start. Iran would not respond to mere words.

The State Department drafted different responses for President Obama to Ahmadinejad’s letter. When Obama took office, he refined the communiqué. At the outset, the administration had been bombarded by those purporting to represent the Iranian government or a moderate faction in Tehran. But Dennis Ross knew the disappointing history of using these intermediaries. Real decisions of this magnitude rested with only one man: the supreme leader. So Obama sent his response not to Ahmadinejad but to Khamenei. In the first of two letters to the Iranian spiritual leader, Obama suggested direct negotiations to resolve the nuclear impasse and offered the possibility of opening an American interests section in Tehran as well as cooperation in areas where the two nations overlapped, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama received a reply to his first letter from the supreme leader’s office. The polite but guarded response did not commit Iran to talks but highlighted Iran’s own grievances with the United States, including the freezing of Iranian assets dating back to the shah.

Obama pressed forward. In March, he recorded a three-minute greeting for the Iranian new year, Nowruz. This was the first of what would become an annual Nowruz message by President Obama. “I would like to speak directly to the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he began, calling the nation by its postrevolutionary name in an effort to show that regime change was not his objective.
⁸
“We seek engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.” After praising Iran’s rich heritage, Obama offered the country a seat at the community of nations and extended an offer for better relations. The American president closed with a bit of Farsi and a quote from the Persian poet Saadi: “The children of Adam are the limbs to each other, having been created of one essence.”
⁹