The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (99 page)

On September 28, Arbabsiar flew back to Mexico to serve as collateral to the drug gang to ensure that they received the rest of the money after killing the Saudi diplomat. With FBI agents tailing him, Mexican authorities denied him entry, and federal agents moved in to arrest him upon his return to John F. Kennedy Airport in New York.

Once arrested, Arbabsiar confessed and agreed to help implicate the Quds Force. He made several calls to Colonel Shakuri in Tehran. On October 5, Arbabsiar said, “I wanted to tell you, the Chevrolet is ready, it’s ready, uh, to be done. I should continue, right?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Shakuri answered. After discussing buying the car—code for carrying out the operation—the Quds Force officer continued, “Buy it, yes, buy all of it.”

When the Justice Department announced the arrests and the details of the plot, Iran publicly scoffed at the allegations. Iran’s foreign minister called it part of a “new propaganda campaign.”
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Privately, however, those who knew the details grew worried. Suleimani ordered a halt to many Quds operations and pulled back exposed operatives, as he had in 2007 when U.S. Special Operations forces came after him in Iraq. He then worked to get Shahlai back to the safety of Iran.

The exposure of the bomb plot came at a bad time for Iran. The country’s only real ally in the Middle East and its key link to Hezbollah, Syria, had been rocked by the Arab Awakening, which had started in the spring of 2011 and had already swept several Middle East despots from power. Having successfully quashed its own protests in 2009, Iran dispatched Quds Force operatives and trainers to help Syrian president Bashar al-Assad retain power, but the situation remained precarious. What’s more, the latest IAEA report, released in November 2011, sharply questioned Iran’s claims that it did not
have a covert nuclear weapons program. In light of the report and the foiled assassination, President Obama called for even tougher sanctions. When the United Kingdom agreed to the sanctions, the Iranians erred by taking a page from Iran’s past. Civilian-clad Basij militia stormed the British embassy in Tehran. The mob ransacked the building, burning pictures of Queen Elizabeth and tossing diplomatic paperwork across the embassy grounds. The international backlash harshly condemned Iran. In retaliation, London closed the Iranian mission.

The Iranian government tried to conduct damage control following its string of setbacks. The government backtracked and pledged better security for Western embassies. The supreme leader approved sending Iranian intelligence minister Heydar Moslehi to Riyadh to meet with Saudi crown prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz al-Saud. Iran hoped to smooth relations, with Moslehi denying that his government had approved any assassination of the Saudi ambassador in Washington. The Saudis listened, but remained skeptical of anything said by the Islamic Republic.

In 2011, the media was again filled with reports about a possible Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Every few years this story reared its head. In 2008, the Pentagon’s DIA even issued a report stating that this was the “defining year” for any possible Israeli attack. The following year, Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak told Secretary Gates that 2009 was the year his forces would have to attack or else the “consequences would be too great.” Both years came and went without any attack as Iran’s enrichment program continued struggling. But with each story, leaders in Tehran took notice, and the Iranian military went on heightened alert. In the latest saber rattling, Iran threatened to retaliate by showering missiles on Israel’s own nuclear facility. When Turkey announced it would host a new missile defense radar, Iran threatened to attack it too.

In the Pentagon, the prospect of being pulled into the conflict worried both Secretary Gates and his successor, Leon Panetta. Iran would assume the United States had been complicit in any attack and would retaliate against U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf. This would likely spark a regional war. Successive Pentagon officials spent considerable time getting the Israelis to think about the second and third order of effects of their attack. “They tended to default to the kinetic options and did not look at the long-term consequences,” observed James Cartwright. But the Israelis viewed military action against
Iran in the same way they did attacks on such other intractable foes as Hamas or Hezbollah: it was mowing the grass. If it bought a year or so, that was good enough.

After Admiral Michael Fallon was replaced following an unflattering magazine article in 2008, CENTCOM had a string of remarkable commanders. This included the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey; the architect of the successful strategy that turned around Iraq, General David Petraeus; his deputy, a smart and humble marine general named John Allen, who headed the Iran planning effort before taking over as commander in Afghanistan; and straight-shooting warrior General James Mattis.

The appointment of Mattis got the Iranian military leaders’ attention. He was arguably the finest combat marine to rise to four stars in a generation. He had commanded the battalion that first breached Iraq’s defenses in Kuwait in 1991 and a decade later the marine division that swept into Baghdad in 2003. While not especially politic, he was as honest as his hair was gray, and he knew war. A true scholar of military history, he had a library of military works that famously ran into the thousands of books. His guidance to his commanders frequently incorporated historical anecdotes to help illustrate his points. During one meeting with subordinate commanders, Mattis spent five minutes reading an exchange of letters between General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz during the Second World War. The two had famously clashed over controlling the war in the Pacific, but in this dialogue MacArthur was asking for help in diverting the Japanese away from his landings in the Philippines. Nimitz replied with a laundry list of steps he would take to aid his sometime service rival in order to ensure success for the army’s landings. While Mattis’s history lesson went over the heads of a few less erudite officers, the lesson resonated with the majority of them: he intended his subordinates to take initiative and find ways to support each other during a war.

Defense Secretary Gates approved Mattis’s choice for his deputy, a man who knew a great deal about Iran. Since his altercation with Revolutionary Guard speedboats in April 2003, now vice admiral Bob Harward had served on the National Security Council as the deputy commander at the premier special operations unit in Fort Bragg and had managed the detainee program in Afghanistan. He still possessed an understanding of the Persians that no
other senior officer could match. The SEAL repeatedly surprised Iran experts at academic conferences by speaking to them in fluent Farsi.

Mattis viewed Iran as one of the most significant challenges for his command. As one official said in a speech before the conservative think tank, the Institute for the Study of War, CENTCOM had three countries on its mind: “Iran, Iran, and Iran.” With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq winding down, the United States intended to keep forty thousand service personnel stationed around the Gulf, chiefly to contain Iran.
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As the ground wars died down, CENTCOM would revert to a posture akin to that during the tanker war, with the U.S. Navy safeguarding American interests.
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Mattis started reading Persian history and toiling through Persian poetry to get a better sense of his potential adversary. No warmonger, Mattis preferred to talk with the Iranian generals rather than kill them. “I have the forces to squash the Iran military if I need to; but I’ve seen a lot of war and really don’t want to kill young Iranian boys,” he said bluntly, responding to a question during a conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington in the spring of 2011.

In 2012, relations between the United States and Iran had reached another nadir. The United States was now bent on more sanctions to bend Iran to the UN Security Council’s and Washington’s will. Rebuffed and wiser, President Obama ratcheted up the pressure, with the Treasury Department finding new, creative ways to close loopholes in sanctions and strangle Iranian commerce. Just before the new year, President Obama signed tough new sanctions against Iran. Imposed by a near unanimous Congress as a rider to the defense budget, for the first time, the United States targeted Iran’s central bank, the means by which the country received payment for its oil exports. The twenty-seven nations of the European Union followed suit with a pronouncement that they intended to phase out all oil imports from Iran. Europe was the second leading importer after China of Iranian crude, taking 450,000 barrels of Iran’s 2.6 million daily output.
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Iran responded with bellicosity. The chief of Iran’s regular navy, Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, warned that his country could easily close the Strait of Hormuz, through which one sixth of the world’s oil flows. Sayyari, who came through the ranks of the Iranian naval special operations forces, was an aggressive combat veteran of the Iran-Iraq war and more akin to the Revolutionary Guard than his own naval service. In December 2011 and January 2012, both the regular navy and the Revolutionary Guard held large-scale and very public military exercises around the strait to demonstrate Iran’s resolve.
Iranian authorities warned the U.S. Navy not to send another aircraft carrier through the gulf. “The Islamic Republic of Iran will not repeat its warning,” said the head of Iran’s army, General Ataollah Salehi.

President Obama and his national security adviser Tom Donilon were in no mood to back down from this blatant threat against the world’s economy. Mattis was called back to Washington on a Sunday for two days of lengthy meetings at the White House, and the president publicly stated he would use force to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. In the end, Iran’s threat proved hollow as American air craft carriers continued transiting without incident.

The crisis over Iran’s nuclear program grew evermore ominous. In February 2012, the IAEA issued a scathing report about Iranian obfuscation. Inspectors were denied access to both scientists and Iran’s secretive Parchin weapons facility. Israel continued to beat the war drums. That same month both the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Martin Dempsey, and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon led successive teams to Tel Aviv to try to talk Israel out of taking any immediate military action. They met with somber Israeli officials. Rather than spouting the usual talking points about Iran, the Americans found their counterparts far more serious and circumspect. Donilon’s team returned to Washington convinced that Israel intended to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities sooner rather than later.

On March 5, 2012, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu met with President Obama in the Oval Office.
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The two men already had a strained relationship, and the meeting did little to overcome their divisions, including those over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Obama stressed that there was no immediate need to attack Iran’s facilities because all the intelligence pointed to the fact that the supreme leader had not even decided to produce a nuclear weapon. The tough Israeli pushed back, saying that they could not wait until Iran entered into a “zone of immunity.” They had to strike now in order to prevent Iran from having the capability to develop nuclear bombs. Publicly, Obama tried to placate Israel’s concerns. “My policy here is not going to be one of containment. My policy is prevention of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons,” the president said before the meeting. He added, “When I say all options are on the table, I mean it.”
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Both sides agreed on tougher sanctions against Iran’s central bank, aimed at curtailing their oil exports.

This growing international isolation and economic pressure only heightened Iran’s paranoia that the real goal behind U.S. actions was the over-throw of the Islamic Republic. Anti-Americanism remained a pillar of the
government’s policies, and no real change in this regard was likely to occur while the revolutionary generation remained in power. The young men who took to the streets, overthrew the shah, and fought eight years of a bloody war with an Iraqi government backed by Washington now had gray in their beards, but their attitudes remained the same. Like the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, who wrote about the rise and fall of the great empires as repeated cycles in history, the supreme leader and his inner circle remained convinced that the West was declining and the next empire, Iran, was on the rise. The United States and its regional lackey, Israel, like the Soviets and communism before them, were going to collapse. The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan showed that the United States was in retreat in the Middle East. While more realistic Iranian leaders like Javad Zarif understood that the reality was quite different, and Iran was never going to rival the United States in power, the fallout from the 2009 elections had marginalized many of these voices of reason.

While the 1979 revolution changed Iran’s government, the Islamic Republic maintained the age-old Iranian goal of being recognized as a regional power. “We should be the greatest power in the region and play a role accordingly,” said Hadi Nesanjani, who served in President Rafsanjani’s cabinet. While the new government was loath to put it in these terms, deeper even than the Shia religious motivations is an ingrained sense of Persian historical entitlement. As a nation, the Iranians predate all others in the region, with a lineage tracing back to the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great. A seat at the Middle East table is their natural right; it is the United States that stands in their path. Building this historical precedent, the Iranian Revolution had added a mission as the new defender of the downtrodden Shia across the Middle East and, by extension, all Muslims resisting the West and Israel. Starting in Lebanon, facilitated by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and most recently in Yemen and Bahrain, Iran provided a steady stream of military and economic support to these movements. This puts Iran squarely at odds with both Israel and the Sunni governments backed by the United States.