by David Crist
Gentle prodding by the president finally broke the gridlock. Ronald Reagan understood the havoc Iran wreaked upon his predecessor, and the president took an unusually keen interest in the formation of a military command for the Middle East. “I endorse it with enthusiasm,” Reagan wrote to Weinberger upon hearing of his decision to form a four-star Middle East headquarters: “I have long felt that the importance of this region is such that we need the optimal command arrangements possible, and this means a separate command. I approve your decision and I look forward to the specifics of your implementation plan.” When a year had passed with no new command established, the president sent a polite yet firm reminder to Weinberger to update him on the specifics of the new command. The president put the Pentagon on notice to get on with business.11 It worked.
The Pentagon quickly finalized the details of the new Middle East command in spite of a last-minute effort by the navy to kill the initiative backed by the head of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, Alaska senator Ted Stevens.12 Weinberger approved standing up U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, as the military abbreviated it. CENTCOM’s area of responsibility spanned nineteen countries, from Egypt in the west to Pakistan in the east to Kenya in the south. Most of the forces assigned came from those already under the rapid deployment force, with both the army and air force establishing subordinate headquarters to support CENTCOM. The army reactivated the famed Third Army to command its divisions for the Middle East, which General George Patton had commanded in Western Europe as the spearhead of American armored forces in Europe during the Second World War.13 In order to smooth the concerns by General Barrow over control of CENTCOM, General Vessey implemented a tacit agreement that CENTCOM’s commander would alternate between the army and the marines. The understanding held for the next twenty years, until 2003, when pressures related to the troubled U.S. occupation in Iraq led to successive army commanders.
Weinberger’s decision ended General Volney Warner’s career. He turned down another major command in Europe and wrote to Weinberger that since “I no longer enjoy the support and confidence of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, request that I be relieved of my duties.” Weinberger concurred. An embittered Volney Warner penned a five-page letter to President Reagan blasting Weinberger’s decision and the parochial and ineffectual Joint Chiefs.14 Warner refused a retirement parade. Instead, he and some close comrades parachuted from a plane at Fort Bragg, where a keg of beer awaited the skydivers in the landing zone. “It was the way I wanted to go, with a few friends and a few beers.”15
The decision to form CENTCOM received a warm reception from the pro-Western Arabs. Just after sunset on the afternoon of December 16, 1982, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the affable and shrewd Saudi ambassador to Washington, arrived in Weinberger’s office to relay a message from the Saudi monarch. “King Fahd was one hundred percent in support of the newly created U.S. Central Command and saw it as a good move, one that sent the right signal to the Soviets,” the prince said. CENTCOM made Moscow very uneasy, Bandar added, mentioning that the Soviets had tried to convince Saudi Arabia that this was merely an American vehicle to take over the region. The king rejected this argument and stood firmly behind American goals in the Persian Gulf, Bandar told the secretary.
In typical Saudi style, however, Bandar ended the meeting with a straightforward pronouncement that his government would have to makepublic statements distancing itself from CENTCOM, but Weinberger should not pay any attention to those statements. Weinberger understood and nodded in agreement, and the meeting adjourned with a hearty laugh as the two men reflected on the duplicity that permeated the Middle East.16
The one notable Middle East country unhappy with America’s new defense scheme was Washington’s most stalwart ally in the region, Israel. The Jewish state worried about the ramifications of an American military command dedicated solely to the support of the Arabs, and hoped that closer military ties would strengthen the relationship between the two countries. Israel pushed forcefully for inclusion in the American defense plans for the Middle East. Knowing full well the hawkish Cold War views of the new civilian leaders in Washington, the Israeli government emphasized the Soviet hand in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Just a month after the inauguration, the Israeli foreign minister showed up in a Pentagon conference room to meet with Secretary Weinberger. Yitzhak Shamir repeatedly stressed to Weinberger that the Soviet Union created most of the region’s instability. “The PLO is a terrorist organization that works directly for the Soviet Union,” Shamir said forcefully, if not entirely truthfully, to Weinberger during one of their first meetings. Prime Minister Menachem Begin would repeat this mantra in his first meeting with Reagan in the Oval Office. He saw little difference between Soviet client states in the Middle East and those of the Warsaw Pact in Europe. He offered the use of Israeli air bases and ports, even going so far as to commit the Israeli air force to fly for the U.S. military over the Persian Gulf. In return, he wanted the United States to essentially scrap its recent agreements with Arabs supporting the rapid deployment force. Begin singled out Iraq as the key enemy for Israel, and by inference the United States, due to its large conventional military and budding nuclear program. That Israel’s anxiety over the military might of Iraq had little to do with the Cold War was omitted from the talking points, but the prime minister’s forceful advocacy for Israel as a Cold War asset to Washington affected American officials.17
Alexander Haig, now secretary of state in the Reagan administration, never needed convincing; he already viewed the Middle East through a Cold War lens and was an ardent supporter of Israel. Both he and Reagan believed that Israel should be included in CENTCOM, an opinion initially shared by Weinberger too.
However, both the Joint Chiefs and the civilians in the Defense Department swayed Weinberger to recommend against it. The Joint Chiefs believed that Israel lay too far from the Persian Gulf and that including Israel would jeopardize the important basing agreements with the Arab nations.18 The senior civilian responsible for military issues apart from the Soviet Union was a marine Vietnam veteran, Bing West. He warned Weinberger that Reagan was under the undue influence of a pro-Israeli staffer on the National Security Council, or NSC, and that this was why he wanted the Jewish state included in CENTCOM.
This insinuation greatly irritated Weinberger. “He’s the president,” the secretary responded to West. “Whose advice he consulted before making a decision is irrelevant.”
After meeting with the Joint Chiefs in the Tank on May 25, 1982, however, Weinberger reversed his position and wrote to Reagan recommending excluding Israel, Lebanon, and Syria from the new Middle East command out of deference to Arab sensibilities. “I do not entirely share this view, but we can always change it if need be,” Weinberger wrote.19
The replacement for P. X. Kelley and the first commander of CENTCOM was Robert “Barbed-Wire Bob” Kingston. Tall and thin, with a stern demeanor and explosive temper, Kingston was all about the business of war. “He had a gaze that said, ‘Don’t fuck with me,’” remarked Jay Hines, the longtime civilian historian at CENTCOM. He’d earned his moniker when he strung concertina wire around his command post to keep soldiers from walking on the grass. While no great strategic thinker, Kingston was a warrior, gifted with the natural ability to lead men in combat. As a young lieutenant during the Korean War, he’d led a hundred-man force up to the frozen bank of the Yalu River on the Chinese border and had repeatedly distinguished himself during the American army’s chaotic flight south following the Chinese intervention in November 1950.
Kingston had a long association with the CIA. After his first tour in Korea, he moved over to a joint military-CIA paramilitary organization that infiltrated South Korean agents into the north and conducted raids from submarines, blowing up trains and bridges deep behind North Korean lines. Kingston was one of the few Americans to go ashore with the Korean operatives on sabotage missions. “At the time, I thought it was great fun,” Kingston later said.20 After Korea, Kingston be
came one of the few military officers to be run through the CIA’s case officers’ course, which trained CIA officers to handle foreign agents. In the spring of 1967 Kingston took command of OP-34, a highly sensitive mission that sent teams of South Vietnamese agents into North Vietnam to try to organize an insurgency against the communist government. Begun by the CIA in the early 1960s, the military took over responsibility in 1964.
Shortly after his arrival, Kingston suspected the entire operation had been compromised. Of the five hundred agents dropped into the north, all had been killed or turned out to be double agents working for the communists. Kingston gave the bad news to his boss, Colonel John Singlaub—himself a legendary former Office of Strategic Services (OSS) agent who had parachuted into France before D-Day—in his usual blunt manner: “What do you want to tell Ho Chi Minh? Your teams are double agents and I can send Ho the message through them.”21
Kingston maintained his CIA contacts after arriving in Tampa as the new commander. He became a frequent visitor to its headquarters in Langley, Virginia.22 Kingston had a knack for obtaining raw CIA intelligence outside of the normal channels. This provided Kingston with unique information not normally available to a four-star general, and it eventually caught the attention of Deputy CIA Director Robert Gates, who ordered this back channel closed. Gates directed that only approved intelligence documents be given to CENTCOM, through the conventional channel of the Defense Intelligence Agency.23
The plan Kingston inherited from Kelley to defend Iran from the Soviets rested on the Zagros Mountains strategy. Now labeled Operations Plan (OPLAN) 1004, this rested on long-standing Cold War fears of a Soviet invasion of Iran that would threaten Western access to Middle East oil. It called for the deployment of four U.S. divisions and three aircraft carriers, first to secure the sea-lanes out of the Persian Gulf, and then to land troops at Bandar Abbas at the Strait of Hormuz as well as at the northern end of the Gulf near Abadan. From there, the Americans would advance northeast into the Persian interior, intent on establishing a defense line along the Zagros, a massive, jagged mountain range with many peaks in excess of ten thousand feet stretching from northeastern Iraq near Kurdistan then southeast and ending near the Strait of Hormuz.
As Kingston looked at revising the Iran plan, the one glaring weakness was how the Islamic Republic would react to a crisis between the superpowers. If the Soviet Union unilaterally invaded Iran, perhaps to support a pro-Soviet coup, Kingston concluded that Khomeini might set aside his hatred for the United States and cooperate with the U.S. military. A cooperative or at least passive Iran would immensely improve the U.S. military’s chances of success. CENTCOM hoped to work with the Iranian military and use it to defend the Khuzestan oil fields in southwestern Iran, which might alleviate Iranian concerns that the United States just wanted to seize the country’s oil.24
In August 1983, however, the intelligence agencies reassessed their assumptions about Iran’s placidity should the U.S. military arrive ostensibly to protect them against the communists. Iran, DIA analysts concluded, disliked the Americans as much as it did the Soviets and would be likely to resist both with equal vigor. A CIA assessment came to the same conclusion, noting that the Iranian government worried about a secret desire by the superpowers to repeat World War II and divide Iran: “Fear of superpower collusion to divide Iran into separate spheres of influence has been infused in the Iranian people by Khomeini and his clerical infrastructure.” If the Soviets staged a coup and installed a puppet government, as they had in Afghanistan, CENTCOM’s intervention would encounter stiff resistance. Iran would be convinced that Washington and Moscow were colluding to overthrow the Islamic Republic. CENTCOM would have to fight its way into Iran even before locking horns with the Red Army.25
Kingston revised his plans to reflect this reality. The U.S. military would now wait until after the Soviets first crossed the border into Iran. With the bulk of the Iranian army moving north to meet the Red Army, this would allow the marines and soldiers to seize the ports of Bushehr and Bandar Abbas without much opposition. More important, by waiting until Moscow struck first, CENTCOM planners surmised, the Iranians would be far more willing to cooperate with the U.S. military to counter an invasion by the communists.26
Kingston’s extensive background in covert operations was reflected in his belief that CENTCOM needed to develop an underground organization in Iran. If the proper arrangements could be made with the Iranian military, Kingston hoped to grease the skids for arrival of American troops and help organize Iranian resistance to the Soviets. Kingston looked to NATO plans as the model. In the event of war in Central Europe, the Pentagon intended to insert small teams of special forces behind the Soviet lines in Eastern Europe to execute direct action missions, blowing up bridges and attacking important targets deep in the enemy rear, and to conduct unconventional warfare operations, which entailed working with anti-Soviet guerrilla forces to foment a revolution within these less than enthusiastic members of the Warsaw Pact.27 To support this plan, the U.S. Army had secretly hidden caches of weapons and explosives throughout Eastern Europe.
Kingston developed an aggressive special operations forces plan for Iran. He formed a new, close-hold headquarters in Tampa called the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force, commanded by an army brigadier general. It would control the large contingent of several thousand Army Special Forces, Navy SEALs, and air force planes and helicopters that would conduct clandestine operations in Iran. The U.S. Army’s 5th Special Forces Group, specially trained for the Middle East with linguists in Farsi and Arabic, would fly in and establish its headquarters at Seeb, Oman. Its three battalions would then be dispatched to Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.28 Even before hostilities began, they would secretly fly into Iran and deploy near the mountain passes in its northwestern regions along the likely avenues of invasion for Soviet troops. There they would destroy select roads, bridges, and rail lines to hinder the Soviet advance. Meanwhile, other soldiers would make contact with Iranian resistance forces and begin to organize a guerrilla army behind the Russian lines.
Should Iran resist the Americans, Navy SEALs would quickly seize the important ports of Bandar Abbas and Bushehr and kill the defenders before they had time to organize any coherent defense. U.S. Marines or elite Army Rangers would then be hastily flown in to secure the port, a critical link in the support of the larger follow-on force of tank divisions.
Located in an unobtrusive compound outside of Washington, D.C., was one of the most closely guarded “black” units in the U.S. Army: the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA). Established in March 1981, ISA owed its creation to the Iranian hostage crisis and the subsequent failed rescue mission. The new organization would serve as a fusion group for tactical human, signals, and electronic intelligence to support special forces units. ISA’s first years were marked by some highly questionable actions. It provided financial and intelligence support for former Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel, and later fringe presidential candidate, James “Bo” Gritz in his fantastical schemes to rescue American prisoners of war supposedly left in Laos after the Vietnam War. In response, in 1982 Deputy Secretary Frank Carlucci temporarily suspended all ISA operations, noting in a memo for the undersecretary of defense for policy, Fred Iklé, that he found the organization’s excesses “disturbing in the extreme.” The next year Weinberger issued a new charter for ISA, placing it under tight reins under a command in Fort Bragg, and the organization soon put its past behind it, developing into one of the premier units in the U.S. military. By 1987, ISA, under the command of Colonel John Lackey III, swelled to nearly four hundred people, with distinct clandestine operations, signal collection, and communications squadrons.29
In 1983 Lieutenant General William Odom, the senior army intelligence officer, or G-2, tasked ISA with developing conduits and recruiting agents in Iran to support CENTCOM. Thin and with horn-rimmed glasses, Odom was a scholar-soldier. An expert on the Soviet Union with master’s and doctorate degrees from C
olumbia University, he’d risen to prominence as the military assistant to Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Odom thought that what Kingston needed were Iranian agents at a lower level who could actually help get U.S. troops into Iran—agents with detailed knowledge of roads who could tell you, for example, how much weight a specific bridge could hold.
“I’d like to have taxicab companies, trucking companies, hotel managers,” Odom said later, “recruits at a lower level but someone who could meet you at the airport and get forces quickly into the country.” With the support of the chief of staff of the army, General Shy Meyer, Odom elevated the priority level for human intelligence in Iran for ISA so it was second in priority only to spying against the Soviets in Europe.30
Working closely with the small group of officers under Kingston in Tampa, ISA formed two special detachments focused on Iran. Detachment E operated undercover out of the nine-story I.G. Farben building in Frankfurt, West Germany. The 1930s structure housed the U.S. Army’s V Corps headquarters as well as the military’s counterintelligence and clandestine operations for Europe and the Middle East. That detachment targeted exile and resistance groups within Iran, and soon expanded to establish another office in Pakistan from which it controlled operations and agents inside Iran proper.31 Detachment L, in the United States, worked out in the open to cultivate former Iranian military officers who would contact old friends and colleagues still in Iran who could obtain firsthand information on the state of the Iranian military.