by David Crist
As the administration struggled to develop a new strategy, once again serious fissures developed within Carter’s foreign policy team. On March 1, 1979, the secretaries of defense and state met with the national security adviser for their weekly lunch date. The topic of the day was the Persian Gulf. Both Brzezinski and Brown favored an expansion of American bases in the area, which would serve to support a military force that could deploy rapidly to the Persian Gulf in the event of a Soviet move on Iran. But Secretary of State Cyrus Vance rejected this view. A more visible American military presence, he argued, would simply fuel anti-American sentiment, not just in Iran, but also throughout the Arab nations. The United States needed to demonstrate an interest in the welfare of the Gulf states, while at the same time keeping a low profile to avoid the perception of neocolonialism.
Two days later and one month to the day after Ayatollah Khomeini’s return, Brzezinski tried to force a decision in a top secret paper to the president. The crisis in Iran presented the West with a grave challenge, one that could spin “dangerously out of control.” When combined with the Soviet forces in Afghanistan that seemed poised to invade Pakistan or Iran, Brzezinski wrote, pro-Western Gulf Arabs lacked confidence in Washington’s ability and willingness to protect them. Brzezinski proposed a complete strategic reorientation toward the Middle East. He called for a massive expansion of military bases in the region, with forces dedicated to intervene to counter Soviet aggression, and a permanent naval presence in the Persian Gulf.23
By the end of June 1979, the chief architects of Carter’s foreign policy had sketched the outline of a new defense scheme for the Persian Gulf, called the Persian Gulf Security Framework. The strategy struck a balance between Brzezinski’s and Vance’s positions. The United States would strengthen its ties by means of bilateral agreements with pro-Western Gulf states. The agreements would provide the United States with access to military bases in and around the Gulf, and the United States would sell more weapons to Gulf Arabs to enable them to shoulder a larger burden of the defense of their oil fields. The U.S. military would position itself around the periphery of the Persian Gulf, poised to intercede directly into either the Gulf or Iran in the event of a Soviet attack. This approach respected the sensitivities of the Arabs, who wanted to work with the United States but did not necessarily want large numbers of infidels in the midst of the Arab heartland. The United States agreed to keep this strategy “low-key” and squarely out of the press while working quietly with the Gulf states to build closer military ties.24 The Defense Department focused on Oman, Somalia, Kenya, and Diego Garcia to establish their first bases. Saudi Arabia refused to allow any U.S. bases on its territory, but with a nod and a wink it secretly agreed to overbuild its airfields and military infrastructure with the tacit understanding that in the event of a real threat to the kingdom from Iran or the Soviets, the American military could use these facilities. After three years of haggling, the Pentagon would forge ahead to establish a rapid deployment force to serve as the principal intervention force for the Middle East.25
Great Britain gave permission for the use of its airfield on the tiny Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. The Pentagon spent nearly $600 million over the next four years to upgrade the airfield. The State Department reached an agreement with Oman for the use of four airfields and over the next three years spent well over $200 million to upgrade these bases for the U.S. Air Force and Navy.26 One on the island of Masirah—a British Royal Air Force base since the 1930s—was particularly well situated for American requirements. The isolated island lay fifteen miles off the Omani coast in the Gulf of Oman, but sat near the Strait of Hormuz. Following the signing of a ten-year lease agreement between Washington and Muscat in 1979, the United States expanded the small runway and built a second one to accommodate combat aircraft. In addition, the Americans upgraded facilities and buildings, pre-positioning sites to accommodate twenty-six thousand troops. This base would serve as a staging base for the failed rescue operation in Iran in April 1980, and would remain a key American facility for the next two decades, including providing a base for yet another group of American special operations forces, those that went into Afghanistan in October 2001.
Egyptian president Anwar Sadat quietly consented to allow U.S. forces to use his military bases. Egypt would serve as the logistics rear for U.S. forces defending the Persian Gulf and would be an important transit point in deploying troops to the Persian Gulf. Komer dispatched his deputy undersecretary of defense for policy planning, Walter Slocombe, to look at the Egyptian facilities. At age forty, Slocombe already was an experienced hand in the Democratic defense establishment, and in the coming years he would go on to serve as the number three man in President Bill Clinton’s Pentagon and would play a key role in the decision to disband the Iraqi army in May 2003 following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
After touring an airfield near Cairo, Slocombe headed down to a large, abandoned Egyptian military cantonment at Ras Banas, a peninsula jutting out into the Red Sea about three-quarters of the way down the Egyptian coast. Built before the 1973 Yom Kippur War with Israel, the facility included both a large runway and a port.27 The base was perfect, Slocombe thought. It sat astride the Saudi Red Sea ports of Jeddah and Yanbu, and would easily serve as another means to get U.S. forces into Saudi Arabia should the Soviets seize the Strait of Hormuz. It sat out of range of Soviet aircraft, and it provided an excellent base for massive U.S. B-52 bombers as well as a mustering area for a U.S. Army headed to Iran. With improvements, it could serve as a staging base for an entire American division. More important, it lay nearly two hundred miles from the nearest city, permitting the base to be built in secret. Both Secretary Brown and General Jones liked Slocombe’s idea. With congressional approval, the United States pumped more than $200 million over the next few years to upgrade the facilities, turning Ras Banas into a major hub for the U.S. military.28
The decision to establish a rapid deployment force touched off a contentious interservice squabble inside the Pentagon. No senior officer really wanted the new command, but if it was going to exist, every general or admiral wanted to control it as well as the money inevitably linked to the new mission. The army and air force proposed a three-star army general to command the rapid deployment force under the Tampa-based Readiness Command, the successor to Strike Command, whose responsibilities encompassed wartime deployment planning for army and air force units based in the United States. The army further added that it should be only a wartime headquarters, with the army-dominated European Command controlling operations in the Middle East during peacetime. Not surprisingly, the chief of naval operations, Admiral Thomas Hayward, took a different view. The rapid deployment force should be an independent force, he said, perhaps under the nominal control of Readiness Command, but with direct access to the Joint Chiefs, who would oversee military planning for the Middle East. This, the naval services hoped, would take the rapid deployment force out from under the army’s thumb and position it under the Pentagon, where the navy would have greater say in running the command. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs David Jones came down somewhere in the middle, generally supporting the air force and army, but with his penchant for micromanagement, he liked the idea of greater control over the rapid deployment force by him and the Joint Chiefs.
As the summer of 1979 waned and with the military still at loggerheads, President Carter grew exacerbated at the impasse. “Who is in charge? PACOM [Pacific Command]? EUCOM [European Command]? Or who?” the president asked Brown. The defense secretary tried to assure the president that they had made progress, but Carter would have none of it. The president scribbled in the margins of one of Brown’s memos, “I don’t see that any progress has actually been made.”29 Brown too grew weary of the endless haggling between the generals and admirals. “The rapid deployment force was to be an extension of military power,” Brown wrote to Jones, “not an excuse to justify more forces or larger budgets.”30
After months of debate, the J
oint Chiefs forged a convoluted compromise. The new rapid deployment force would be a separate joint, or all-service, organization, under the command of a three-star general. The force would report to the Readiness Command and be colocated with it in Tampa. However, the command would maintain a separate liaison office in Washington to allow direct access for the command to the Joint Staff and the senior leadership at the Pentagon. While not perfect, this was good enough for Secretary Brown. Two weeks before the embassy takeover in Iran, he issued a memo to General Jones ordering the new command’s founding by March 1, 1980. While primarily intended for the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, the new rapid deployment force would be called upon for “contingencies threatening American interests anywhere in the world.”31
Tall, broad shouldered, and square jawed, Paul Xavier Kelley looked like a marine. His demeanor exuded an intense confidence. Born on Armistice Day in 1928, the fair-skinned redhead was both proud and defensive about his Irish heritage. Critics and supporters both agreed that P.X. could be emotional, and he frequently took professional criticism personally, especially if it implicated his beloved marine corps. He was a devoted family man; the only priority in his life higher than the marine corps was his wife and children. After a command in Vietnam, he served as military liaison to the Paris peace talks that ended American participation in the Vietnam War. This assignment gave Kelley his first strong dose of Washington politics and American diplomacy. The latter, at least, left him less than impressed, as he observed the shenanigans of President Nixon’s secretary of state and national security adviser Henry Kissinger.32
On a Friday afternoon in the fall of 1979, P.X. Kelley received a phone call from General Jones’s secretary asking if Kelley would meet with the chairman the next day at ten a.m. to interview as the first commander of the rapid deployment force.33 The commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps had been lobbying hard to give the command to his service, and while Jones viewed this as a purely parochial move, the marine’s argument resonated throughout the defense secretary’s office.34 On Saturday morning, as Kelley prepared to drive over to the Pentagon, the chairman’s secretary called again to relay that Jones had been called to a meeting at the White House. She was not sure how long that meeting would last, but could Kelley please just stand by, and she would notify him when Jones returned?
“Well,” Kelley answered, “that all depends. You see, I’ve promised my granddaughter that I would take her to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs this afternoon, and that is one appointment I can’t miss.”
Fortunately for both the granddaughter and Kelley’s career, General Jones returned to his office at the Pentagon, and P.X. arrived around noon for an informal and affable meeting with the air force chairman. Dressed in his dark green service uniform with a panoply of ribbons on his left breast, Kelley looked as if he had come from central casting, and Jones quickly discovered that his mind matched his appearance. The chairman liked what he saw and offered command of the new rapid deployment force to the marine. As Kelley left the office, Jones said slyly, “General, enjoy Snow White.” The chairman’s secretary just grinned.
On March 1, 1980, the new command became a reality, now formally called the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF) and located at MacDill Air Force Base, a sprawling air base in Tampa, Florida. The base sits on a wide peninsula about five miles south from the tall buildings that dominate downtown Tampa. The sprawling air base of pine trees and palmettos is typical U.S. Air Force, replete with an eighteen-hole golf course, a marina, and a small but quaint beach, which looks out onto the placid Tampa Bay and affords a pleasant view of the cruise ships and merchants going in and out of Tampa. Established during World War II to train new bomber pilots, the base was featured in the 1955 film Strategic Air Command, an overt piece of air force propaganda starring Jimmy Stewart.
P.X. Kelley established his headquarters in a large, square, half-buried structure next to the runway on a remote corner of the base. Numbered Building 5201, it was better known as the “molehole.” Accessible by a single mile-long road, the molehole had been built in the 1950s to serve as a ready room and command center for nuclear-armed bombers waiting for Armageddon. As of this writing, it houses the Special Operations Command that runs the secret wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
The new command took shape, despite the lethargy with the four services in filling its 250-man staff. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan fostered a crisis atmosphere in the molehole, with officers routinely working sixteen-hour days. Less than two months after the command’s formal commissioning, Kelley held the unit’s first full-scale exercise in the mountains of Idaho. A modest effort compared to those that would follow, it involved flying in a single army battalion in a simulated defense of Pakistan against a Soviet invasion. This was the first of a demanding schedule of exercises across the Middle East, the largest of which would be Bright Star in November 1980, which involved sending some sixty-five hundred American troops for twenty days to the Egyptian desert in a biennial exercise that continues to this day.35
Kelley’s staff quickly began planning for World War III in Iran. They saw two possible Russian invasion plans. One would be a quick incursion designed to seize Iranian Azerbaijan, either to support a communist coup in Tehran or to forestall the Islamic Revolution from spreading to Moscow’s own Muslim population. The second, more serious threat involved a full-scale invasion of Iran by fifteen to twenty-four divisions, with the objective of quickly seizing the Khuzestan oil fields in southwestern Iran as well as the vital choke point, the Strait of Hormuz, to cut off the oil flow to the West.36 With Iran subjugated, as one U.S. war planner surmised, “The Soviets could undertake a subsequent offense operation against the Arab nations in the region.” Soviet aircraft could destroy Saudi Arabian oil facilities and cut the flow of crude to the West. Red Army tanks would be poised to threaten Turkey and the southern flank of NATO. U.S. military planners worried that the Soviets might try a lightning attack, using airborne troops to seize the Strait of Hormuz, perhaps even parachuting down on the Saudi oil fields and conquering the kingdom in a coup de main.
These American fears had an air of absurdity. Even if Moscow committed all its army coupled with extensive support from regional surrogates such as Iraq and Syria, Moscow would face a monumental task in conquering Iran, let alone the entire Middle East. The idea that the Red Army could sustain hundreds of thousands of soldiers with bullets, beans, and benzene over a thousand-mile-long supply route that ran over Iran’s formidable Zagros Mountains seems ridiculous in hindsight, especially in light of its military’s poor performance in Afghanistan. But in the panic that gripped Washington following the Soviet invasion into Afghanistan, no one in either political party questioned the reality of their anxiety, especially in an election year and in an administration already lambasted for being soft on defense.
Kelley’s war plans for Iran hinged on support from the Gulf Arabs.37 American troops and airplanes would muster in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Bahrain, both to safeguard their oil facilities and to serve as a staging base for a subsequent move directly into Iran. The U.S. Marines, backed up by naval carrier airplanes, would storm the beaches around Bandar Abbas, seizing the port and airfield and securing the Strait of Hormuz and Kharg Island, the latter location from which 96 percent of Iran’s oil exports flowed.38 Once the sea-lanes into the Persian Gulf were secure, three U.S. Army divisions would seize the northern Gulf port of Bushehr and then move inland to take the strategically positioned Iranian city of Shiraz at the foothills of the Zagros, and block Soviet forces moving south through the mountains, safeguarding both the Khuzestan oil fields and the Persian Gulf.39 Depending on what happened in Europe at the same time, as many as two hundred thousand servicemen and -women were allocated to the Iran invasion.40
Time became the critical watchword for American planners. The Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, estimated that it could provide only seven days’ advance notice of a limited incursion, and perhaps three weeks’ wa
rning for a full-scale invasion. But the United States could muster only about thirty-five thousand army airborne soldiers and marines to the Gulf within the first three weeks, and planners both in Tampa and at the Pentagon predicted it would take thirty days to move any sizable number of combat forces to the Gulf. Under the best of conditions, time was not on Kelley’s side in the race for Iran.41
However, Kelley had an ace in his deck of cards to buy time and halt the Soviet advance into Iran: nuclear weapons. The United States never shied away from planning to use nuclear weapons to defend Persian Gulf oil. Washington did hesitate to nuke the Soviet Union proper out of concern that such a move would lead to a full-scale nuclear war, one U.S. planners in 1982 surmised would kill 50 to 75 percent of the U.S. population. But Soviet troops inside Iran were seen as fair game. If the Red Army were poised to win the race for the Strait of Hormuz, tactical nuclear weapons would be the force of choice to stop them.42
The United States started from a distinct disadvantage in the nuclear balance in the Middle East. The Soviets arrayed a massive arsenal of strategic weapons toward the Persian Gulf, capable of devastating the area’s military bases, ports, and refineries and oil fields. Embedded within their armor and mechanized divisions were 152 tactical mobile rockets designed to carry nuclear warheads, as well as nearly 300 nuclear artillery shells. Larger ballistic missiles based in the southern Soviet Caucasus could easily reach any corner of the Middle East. Backing this arsenal were 283 aircraft capable of dropping nuclear bombs with a destructive power that dwarfed Hiroshima. U.S. intelligence detected nuclear storage bunkers at four Soviet airfields alone just to support an invasion of Iran.