The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (98 page)

To avoid this, in the spring of 2011 the U.S. Navy suggested establishing a hotline between the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and the Revolutionary Guard commander at Bandar Abbas. If an incident at sea occurred, either side could quickly pick up the phone and talk to his counterpart and defuse a situation before it became a crisis. The new Fifth Fleet commander, Vice Admiral Mark Fox, was an experienced, charismatic aviator who had shot down an Iraqi MiG on the opening night of Desert Storm. While he supported the idea, he held out little hope that Iran would agree to it. When the U.S. government floated the idea to the Iranians, Fox’s prediction proved correct. Iran refused to discuss the proposal. “The only reason for conflict in the Persian Gulf is the presence of the U.S. Navy,” said the commander of the Iranian navy. “If they leave, there is no conflict.” The idea of such a formal arrangement died.

Secretary Gates had not been pleased with CENTCOM. The commander, Admiral Michael Fallon, had stopped much of the theater planning efforts begun by Abizaid, concerned that it would only inflame tensions and lead to other wars, especially with Iran. Gates finally fired him for unflattering comments about the administration that appeared in a magazine. Into the vacuum a naval aviator named William Gortney offered up his own ideas, which captured the defense secretary’s interest and quickly moved Gortney from one to three stars. A tough taskmaster known by the call sign Shortney (a hybrid reference to his height and last name), he was a self-confident pilot with years of experience flying over the Persian Gulf. As the new Fifth Fleet commander, Gortney believed the early hours of any conflict with Iran were critical. It would take time for reinforcements to arrive, and in a war, his fleet would have to fight with the ships and planes it had on hand.

Gortney called his new idea “the come as you are plan.” It offered the first realistic view of the Iranian military in years. His staff devised a host of original ideas designed to kill small boats and take the fight to the Iranian navy. He would cede no water, but attack them anywhere from the northern Gulf to the Strait of Hormuz. Under his watch, Fifth Fleet experimented with forming surface task forces designed to hunt down Iranian boats. When Shortney left for a plum assignment in the Pentagon, his ideas remained a work in progress. But for the first time in two decades, the U.S. Navy had started to formulate a realistic scheme to grapple with Iran’s unconventional military might.

D
uring the course of Barack Obama’s first three years in office, his policy had morphed from one of hopeful optimism and an extended hand of friendship to harsh sanctions and preparations for war. He had accused Bush of not seriously engaging Iran in diplomacy, but by 2011 he had adopted a policy nearly identical to that of his predecessor. While critics accused him of being naive in his initial approach, Obama’s policy was more sophisticated than many realized. He knew the sticks of sanctions or military strikes were always there; what he did not know was whether Iran was seriously willing to sit down and discuss the differences that had divided the two nations for more than thirty years. As he discovered, the answer remained no. Any hope for an opening faded with the internal strife brought about by the Iranian presidential elections. As Nicholas Burns wrote in an op-ed praising Obama’s attempt to extend the hand of friendship: “Because of it, the United States had significantly greater cordiality to take advantage of Iran’s mendacity and to lead an international coalition toward comprehensive sanctions should talks fail.”
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With his overture rejected, Obama did just that.

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or once, Abdul Reza Shahlai was nervous. The normally unflappable fifty-six-year-old Quds Force officer had seen his share of hazardous missions. He had served in Lebanon, Iraq, and now Yemen as one of the most competent and trusted of Qassem Suleimani’s operators. He had given the final go-ahead for the 2007 attack on the training center in Karbala that killed five U.S. soldiers. He repeatedly displayed the initiative and resourcefulness needed by this independent special forces arm of the Revolutionary Guard. He now headed the Quds Force’s small but growing effort to help train and equip a band of Shia tribesmen in North Yemen whose decadelong insurgency had become a thorn in the side of the Saudi government. But now his name was all over the Western media as having been implicated in a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C. The brash nature of the attack had surprised even Iran’s most ardent detractors. Under President Obama, the U.S. military and the CIA had effectively forged an intelligence and killing team that had increased drone missile strikes fourfold against al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Yemen. Shahlai now feared that the next missile might be aimed at him. Suleimani reassured him that he would get him safely back to Iran.

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elations between Iran and Saudi Arabia had soured over the past decade. Iran held the kingdom (and its ally the United States) responsible for an upsurge in terrorist attacks by the separatist Baluchi group Jundallah, which had killed dozens of Revolutionary Guard soldiers and Iranian civilians over the past few years. Riyadh had sent troops into Bahrain to help crush the aspirations for equality of the majority Shia population there. The two countries had waged a proxy war in Yemen, with Iran backing a Shia Houthi faction. While Iran had no hand in starting the Houthi revolt, as the Saudis alleged, General Suleimani quickly seized on the insurrection to get Iran’s foot into the Yemeni door and provide weapons and some training to the insurgents. Iran suspected Saudi money of keeping afloat the Mujahideen-e Khalq. When prominent Americans such as former Joint Chiefs chairman Peter Pace and Obama’s first national security adviser, Jim Jones, publicly came out in favor of taking the MEK off the U.S. global terrorist list, it confirmed hard-liner suspicions that America was in cahoots with the MEK too.

The leaking of the U.S. State Department cables by WikiLeaks added fuel to the flames of Iran’s animosity. Dozens of cables revealed the duplicity of the Gulf Arabs, especially Saudi Arabia. Despite their pronouncements of friendship to the Iranian foreign minister, they privately urged the United States to take a harsh stand against Iran, including military action. During a March 15, 2009, meeting with the White House’s senior counterterrorism official, John Brennan, the Saudi king repeatedly stressed the dangers of Iran and its sway over Iraq and other Shia areas. “Iran’s goal is to cause problems,” the king said. “There is no doubt something unstable about them. May God prevent us from falling victim to their evil.”
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The kingdom’s ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, was a particular target of Iran’s ire. The slight, well-spoken ambassador was a favorite of the Saudi king’s. Polished and fluent in English, al-Jubeir knew Washington and had projected a good image on American television in the aftermath of 9/11. During a meeting with General Petraeus in April 2008, he had referred to the Saudi king’s approval of military action against Iran, speaking of the kingdom’s desire to “cut off the head of the snake.” When the cable appeared in the Western media, it infuriated many within the Iranian
government. Killing the ambassador in return would send an unequivocal signal back to the Saudi king that the snake could strike back.

In 2010, in a manner similar to its planning of Khobar Towers, Iran began searching for soft targets to attack that afforded plausible deniability. Iranian operatives started looking at Saudi and Jewish targets in Turkey and the Caucasus, with some Iranians spotted looking at American-owned business buildings in Azerbaijan.
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Saudi diplomats appeared on the target list. In May 2011, the Quds Force struck. Gunmen on motorcycles shot and killed the Saudi consul in Karachi, Pakistan, Hassan al-Kahatani, as he went to work.

It is a small world, and by happenstance, in March 2011, Abdul Reza Shahlai ran into his cousin, fifty-six-year-old Mansour Arbabsiar, who had recently returned to Tehran from the United States. The two had been friends as kids growing up in the city of Kermanshah, Iran, before Arbabsiar emigrated to Texas in the late 1970s. Although he was likable and friendly, life in America had not gone especially well for Arbabsiar. He attended Texas A&M University but failed to graduate. Settling in Corpus Christi and going by the name Jack, he tried his hand at a string of businesses. He opened the restaurant Gyros & Kabob inside the struggling Sunrise Mall, then the Stop and Buy store, and finally a used-car dealership.
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All failed. His wife divorced him, took custody of their children, and filed a restraining order against him. In 2010, he moved back to Iran.

During the conversation with his cousin, Arbabsiar talked about his frequent trips to Mexico. He mentioned that he had once assisted a friend in smuggling her two sisters across the Mexican border and into the United States. While selling used cars, he frequently traveled across the border and had developed contacts with Mexican drug dealers.

Shahlai hatched an idea. Would Arbabsiar be willing to approach his drug dealer acquaintances and ask if they would help kill or kidnap the Saudi ambassador in Washington? It would send a strong signal to both the Americans and Saudis: if you kill our scientists in Tehran, we can kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington. Arbabsiar had no interest in defending the revolution; his god was mammon. Given the prospect of a considerable windfall profit for his efforts, he agreed to help his cousin.

This would be a risky operation for the Quds Force. In past bombings and assassinations, it had used trained surrogates and religiously aligned locals inside the target country. However, Iran had no network of sympathizers
inside the United States to draw upon. Shahlai had little alternative if he wanted to strike in the U.S. capital. But he thought the risk looked minimal. Arbabsiar was a relative, not likely to betray him. He had a U.S. passport. He was clearly not an American double agent. By working through a Mexican drug cartel, the Quds Force thought it would be difficult to ever trace the scheme back to Iran.

The details of the plot remained closely held inside the Quds Force. It is not clear who had foreknowledge and whether Suleimani discussed the operation with Ayatollah Khamenei. But hard-liners such as the Quds Force commander continued whispering in the supreme leader’s ear to strike back at the covert war being waged against them; this appeared to be a chance to accomplish that and to send a message to the American administration. Had the plan been vetted in a larger circle, someone might have questioned the wisdom of using a used-car salesman and rogue drug smugglers to undertake a significant terrorist attack inside the United States. But it wasn’t. The scheme went forward.

Shahlai assigned his deputy, Colonel Gholam Shakuri, to handle Arbabsiar. An experienced Quds Force officer with a pronounced scar down his cheek, he gave Arbabsiar an envelope with $15,000 for expenses to fly back to Mexico and make the arrangements. Shahlai said they would use “Chevrolet” as the code word for the operation.
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In May, Arbabsiar made several trips to Mexico. He met with a man he believed to be a member of the ruthless Los Zetas drug gang. In fact, his contact worked for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. He was a man who had been arrested in the United States on drug trafficking charges, and in return for having the charges dropped, he’d agreed to work for American law enforcement. In their first meeting, Arbabsiar asked the DEA informant if he knew anything about C-4 and explosives and confided to him the plot to kill the Saudi ambassador. The DEA informant agreed to undertake the mission, saying it required four men and would cost $1.5 million.

“You just want the main guy?” the informant asked.

“Yes, the ambassador,” Arbabsiar answered.

The two met again on July 17. The DEA informant said his men had already conducted surveillance on the ambassador. He is protected by “eight to seven security people, but he eats regularly at a restaurant in Georgetown. I don’t know what exactly your cousin want [sic] me to do.”

Arbabsiar replied, “He wants you to kill this guy.”

“There’s gonna be like American people there, in the restaurant?” the informant responded.

“It doesn’t matter how you do it,” Arbabsiar replied. His cousin preferred that the ambassador be killed by himself, but “sometime [sic], you know, you have no choice.”

By the end of the meeting, the two men had agreed to blow up Ambassador al-Jubeir while he ate at the swanky Georgetown restaurant Café Milano. As down payment, Shakuri had two deposits totaling $100,000 wired to a bank account provided by the informant.