by David Crist
Casey agreed with Weinberger. Supporting an Iranian insurgency was no different than what he was already doing with the Contras in Nicaragua and the mujahideen in Afghanistan. “An enhanced covert action program against Iran would provide reassurance to the Saudis and others of our serious interest in containing Iran,” wrote an NSC staffer in laying out for Casey and Weinberger the pros of a more aggressive paramilitary operation against Iran.
On July 13, 1982, President Reagan concurred with a recommendation by his national security team for the CIA to explore building an armed opposition against Iran. Feelers were sent out via intelligence circles to both Saudi Arabia and Oman about building an insurgency within Iran, including funneling arms for the insurgents through the two countries in order to distance Washington from the operation. A joint military-CIA team traveled to Oman to look at a proposed base for the guerrilla army on the Musandam Peninsula, the jut of land that the Strait of Hormuz wraps around. During intelligence exchanges with Baghdad, the CIA floated the idea to the Iraqis of working together to subvert the Iranian government. Not surprisingly, Saddam Hussein eagerly embraced the idea.
However, in the end Reagan never approved fomenting an armed counterrevolution within Iran. “The downside always outweighed the gain,” said McFarlane.9 The CIA eventually concluded that no armed group could seriously challenge the regime. The State Department consistently voiced concern that it would only fuel even greater anti-Americanism and destroy any hope of reconciliation, a view shared by many CIA analysts. After months of debate and discussions about building an insurgency in Iran, the idea died the death of inaction.
Building a spy network in Iran would not be an easy proposition. Iran was, in the parlance of the spy business, a “denied country.” With no American embassy to provide cover for CIA officers or to serve as a base of operations, the agency would have to infiltrate Iran from outside the country. The CIA established a new office to run its Iranian operations inside one wing of the I.G. Farben building in Frankfurt, the same headquarters housing ISA, the U.S. Army’s V Corps, and the military’s regional clandestine operations. It also quietly served as the main support base for CIA operations in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Langley called its new unit “Tehfran,” an amalgam of Tehran and Frankfurt. Germany provided reliable cover for the operation; after 1979, many Iranian exiles had settled there. Bonn maintained diplomatic relations with Tehran, and Iranians often traveled to Frankfurt. The CIA could easily bring recruits to the city for screening and training, as well as for the occasional rendezvous between handlers and agents.10
“Tehfran” began the painstaking process of recruiting agents. As Turkey did not require a visa for Iranian citizens, it served as a corridor for those trying to escape the repression under the ayatollah. Ankara and Istanbul swelled with Persian expatriates looking to obtain visas to travel to Europe or the United States.
Turkey quickly took center stage in the spy contest between Washington and Tehran. The CIA used the American consulate in Istanbul as a recruiting center for Tehfran, with an intelligence officer assigned to identify potential Iranians for recruitment. The grounds around the consulate became a favorite recruiting locale for American intelligence officers.
“It was a heavy workload,” recalled Philip Giraldi, who worked in the Istanbul consulate and ran its Iranian operations from 1986 to 1989. Sifting through the stacks of visa applications for those in the military or with political connections, he conducted around twenty interviews each week, with one or two showing promise. “Of these, one every couple of months we would actually go after and pitch. And the pitches were frequently successful.”11
The CIA found fertile ground among Iranian military officers. Many had attended schools in the United States and had close friends in the U.S. military. The navy and air force were the most pro-American, and Giraldi himself recruited three senior air force officers, including a brigadier general. CIA case officers across Europe were on the watch for important Iranians, people “needing a favor with information we could use,” as one retired CIA employee put it. Operating under diplomatic cover and using fictitious first names, the CIA encouraged their recruits’ sympathies for the United States or their abhorrence of communism. If that failed, the Americans used coercion to obtain cooperation, dangling a coveted visa to the United States for a recruit’s family in return for spying for Langley. This proved one of the most effective means employed by the CIA to obtain cooperation.12
One of those recruited by Giraldi in September 1986 was a prominent air force colonel, Masoud Babaii, who’d flown to Istanbul with his family to request a visa for the United States. Babaii spoke good English, having graduated from pilot training in Texas. He openly cooperated with Giraldi during his interview and volunteered detailed information about the status of the Iranian air force and the war with Iraq. “He was one of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet,” Giraldi recalled. The CIA brought in a Farsi speaker to make the pitch to work for the Americans. Babaii agreed to go back to Iran for several years in return for a guaranteed visa for him and his family.13
One of the naval officers who accepted the American pitch was Captain Touradj Riahi. Highly regarded by fellow Iranian officers, Riahi rose rapidly to command a squadron of American-made minesweeping helicopters. Fluent in English, fair skinned with light brown hair and a matching mustache, Captain Riahi, like many secular officers, felt no affinity for the new religious government. He was fond of the United States and had relatives in Hawaii. Aspects of the Western lifestyle embraced by Riahi were not acceptable under Ayatollah Khomeini’s rule. The captain made wine in his basement. He and his wife entertained and played cards as the alcohol flowed freely, with even his daughter allowed to sample occasionally.14
In the winter of 1985, Captain Riahi traveled to Ankara, Turkey, seeking a U.S. visa for his son to live with an aunt in Hawaii. This was not an easy proposition for an Iranian military officer. But his son was two years away from mandatory military service, and Captain Riahi wished to save him from becoming one more martyr in the war with Iraq. Five years of war and revolution had brought only ruin, he believed. While he remained an ardent nationalist, he felt growing disdain for the governing clergy, whom he thought were intent on taking Iran back from modernity. While it was painful to send his son away, Riahi believed the United States offered him and his family the best future.
Captain Riahi made his way to the sprawling American embassy off a bustling divided highway named Ataturk Boulevard. He submitted passport photos and filled out a detailed visa application. A few days later, he interviewed with an American Foreign Service officer and at one point met with an embassy employee who introduced himself only as “Parker.” Pleasant and nondescript, Parker offered to cut through the red tape and speedily stamp his son’s visa request. It could be done quickly enough through the West German embassy, he told the Iranian captain. In return, though, Parker wanted information on the Iranian military.
Captain Riahi agreed to Parker’s terms out of both pragmatism and idealism. “He was a good man but naive when it came to the harsh reality of espionage,” a close friend, Commander Said Zanganeh, recalled later. “He thought they [CIA] would take care of him.”15
Using a false passport, Riahi flew with a CIA officer to Frankfurt, Germany, where he underwent a standard lie detector test to ensure he was not a double agent for Iranian intelligence. While his son’s visa was being arranged, the CIA trained him on how to communicate with his handlers. Thus Captain Riahi officially became a U.S. intelligence agent, or, as an Iranian commentator later put it, one of those “who had sold their faith and honor for the CIA’s deceptive glamour.”16
The CIA recruited at least five naval officers.17 One of the agency’s most valuable trophies was a close friend of Riahi’s, Commodore Kanoush Hakimi, who’d played a key role in negotiating many of Iran’s sensitive arms agreements. His major success had been the purchase of powerful Chinese Silkworm antiship missiles that would enable Ira
n to control the Strait of Hormuz by threatening ships navigating this choke point for the world’s oil.18
In addition to the military officers, the CIA recruited a diverse group of civilians. This included a lawyer in the Iranian foreign ministry, local government officials, an engineer employed at a chemical factory—all with access to the broad range of information needed by American intelligence.19 The CIA even managed to penetrate Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard. Among those recruited from the Revolutionary Guard, divisions existed, despite their overt loyalty to the state. Some were young idealists who’d joined the revolution and then rebelled against the oppressive republic that emerged. Others simply wanted a better life in America.
One of those recruited was a Revolutionary Guard official known by his pseudonym, Reza Kahlili. From an upper-middle-class family, he had attended school in California, where an aunt lived. He’d joined the guard with some friends out of youthful enthusiasm. While one friend went on to a senior position in the guard’s intelligence unit, Kahlili served in a propaganda unit, which prized his English-language skills.
His disillusionment had occurred after a visit to Evin Prison. While he witnessed repeated beatings of political prisoners or their family members, the most repugnant act he viewed was the deliberate rape of two women before their execution. Their crimes were little more than being related to the wrong person. But according to religious belief, virgins could go to heaven despite their crimes. The head of the Revolutionary Court, Ayatollah Mohammad Gilani, ordered the guards to rape the two women to deprive them of any chance of salvation.20 Repulsed, Kahlili flew back to California to visit his aunt. After briefly contemplating defecting, he decided to contact the FBI and offer his services and information. They passed him on to the CIA, which after the usual polygraph and background checks formally brought him into the agency’s stable of agents.
Analysts back in Washington generated a laundry list of questions for these agents: How was the Revolutionary Guard Corps organized, and what were its military tactics? Who were the rising religious leaders? What were people worried about domestically? What was the political situation in Kurdistan and other provinces?21
In Frankfurt, Tehfran employed several means of communicating with its agents inside Iran. A few agents received specialized equipment that allowed for encrypted burst transmissions to be sent over regular phone lines back to Tehfran. For Kahlili and others, they purchased standard shortwave radios on the black market and, at predetermined times, listened for Morse-coded messages that came across the airwaves as blocks of numbers. A separately provided paper cipher translated those numbers into individual letters.22
The CIA’s prime means of communicating with agents was an old trick, dating back a century: invisible ink. Its various formulas remained some of the oldest secrets held at the National Archives, with some not declassified until 2011.23 The Iranian spies would respond using more-or-less-invisible (MLI) writing tools—plastic pens and other items coated with a special chemical that left a hidden residue that could be retrieved by applying the proper solution. Kahlili used specially treated writing paper. On the front, he would write innocuous letters to fictitious friends in Frankfurt. On the back, using a special MLI pencil, he wrote his message, which remained invisible until the CIA officer in Tehran washed the paper with a special solution.24 Hundreds of these letters traveled between Iran and Germany—one air force officer admitted to sending 110 letters himself back to Tehfran.25
The spy network produced a mixed bag of rumor and fact. None of the recruited spies was senior enough to influence the regime or shed much light on Iran’s position toward the superpowers, as Casey had hoped. They frequently reported erroneous information.26 One agent told his American handlers that Iran had provided helicopters to Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, and intended to arm it with missiles. To confirm the report, the CIA consulted all its Iranian sources, including debriefing an Iranian pilot who had recently defected to Iraq. In the end, intelligence officials concluded that the report was false, based on little more than barroom gossip picked up in the Iranian officers’ club.
But the agents did provide useful information that helped Washington undermine Iran’s military adventures. One agent tipped off the CIA to an attempt by Iran to purchase French-made Exocet antiship missiles, allowing the State Department to intervene and scuttle the sale. An aircraft mechanic for the Iranian air force provided important diagrams of the large Iranian air base near Bushehr. Others helped identify key Iranian naval and air force targets for the U.S. military, including the location of important command and control facilities used by the Revolutionary Guard.
In addition to recruiting spies, the Iranian Covert Action Plan authorized the CIA to cultivate Iranian exile groups. The anti-Khomeini movement began shortly after the shah’s overthrow. As early as August 1979, CIA sources had begun reporting efforts by former Iranian military officers to organize an external opposition to the clerics in Tehran. One of the first gatherings had occurred in London, led by former Iranian air force general Hassan Toufanian, an impressive man whom General Huyser referred to as “a human dynamo, running on 110 percent.” He’d brought together in a London hotel former Imperial Iranian officers from across Europe and the United States to plot and discuss ways to overthrow the Khomeini regime. The Iranian government learned of this meeting following the U.S. embassy takeover, when students pieced the strips of the shredded message that described Toufanian’s gathering in London back together.27
The CIA paid millions of dollars each year to several expatriate organizations believed to have access into the Iranian leadership. A favorite of Casey’s was the group headed by Rear Admiral Ahmad Madani, based in Germany. The son of a prominent clerical Shiite family, Madani had been a strong supporter of the revolution and was its first defense minister before falling out of favor with the Islamists. He still maintained strong contacts within the Iranian military.28
According to an account by author Kenneth Timmerman, in January 1983 Casey and White House deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver met with the shah’s oldest son, Cyrus Reza Pahlavi, at the Chevy Chase Club outside of Washington, D.C. The twenty-two-year-old Reza launched into a monologue about the weakness of the Islamic government, its growing economic crisis, and the opportunity this presented to reestablish the monarchy. “The people of Iran will carry His Majesty to Tehran on their shoulders!” an aide added.
The shah’s son proposed that the agency help him fund a network of former Iranian intelligence agents to gather information inside Iran as part of a scheme to return him to power. It was pure fantasy; the young shah had no support within Iran. But it offered what Casey and the administration wanted to hear. Despite the widespread disdain for the Pahlavi family within Iran, Casey agreed to pay a monthly stipend to support the junior shah’s efforts.29
As part of the campaign against the Iranian regime, the CIA secretly financed an Egyptian radio station that broadcast four hours of anti-Khomeini propaganda daily into Iran. The station ran stories designed to highlight the problems of Khomeini’s rule, from food shortages to the brutal excesses of the Revolutionary Guard.30 The agency supported a television broadcast into Iran by Reza that managed to disrupt two channels for precisely eleven minutes on September 5, 1986—an amount of time, said one cynical retired CIA operative, that was synonymous with the young man’s abilities.
The exiles proved to have limited utility, and CIA officials viewed them with considerable suspicion. “Exiles operate on rumint,” said retired operative Jack Devine, using an unofficial acronym for rumor and intelligence. “They’re often penetrated by double agents, or working their own agenda, which does not necessarily meet the U.S. objectives. They are never the pathway back to power. But they are always out there and can usually find an audience.”
The longtime Iran operative George Cave became disenchanted early with the opposition groups. In July 1980, a cadre of high-ranking air force officers had hatched a plan to decapitate the e
ntire revolutionary government by bombing key government and military sites in Tehran, starting with Khomeini’s home. The commander of the Iranian air force, Major General Saeed Mahdiyoun, was to spearhead the effort inside Iran. The son of a wealthy Tabriz merchant and reputedly one of the air force’s best pilots, he quietly assembled several dozen F-4 aircraft at a large fighter base, Nojeh, near Tehran. Under the cover of darkness, three aircraft would bomb Khomeini’s home, hitting every building in the compound with a massive ordnance of 750-pound bombs, cluster bombs, and precision-guided weapons. In quick succession other jets would strike the prime minister’s and the president’s residences, army barracks, and the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guard. With Khomeini dead, Shapour Bakhtiar would enter the country from Iraq at the head of a force of exiles. He would join forces with disaffected elements within the army to overthrow the Islamic Republic. The Nojeh coup, as it became known, involved much of the expatriate community. Admiral Madani in Germany provided funding.
Yet neither Bakhtiar nor any other coup leaders disclosed the plan’s details to the CIA, perhaps to avoid revealing Saddam Hussein’s complicity. During a meeting with Cave in Paris, Bakhtiar asked the CIA to provide helicopters to move his operatives “inside of and around Iran.” When Cave pressed for specifics—when, where, why, how many men—Bakhtiar remained evasive. Shortly before the attack was to begin, someone inside the expatriate community tipped off the Iranian embassy in Paris. The Iranian government moved quickly, rounding up hundreds of people. General Mahdiyoun, the air force commander, was forced to confess before a videotaped kangaroo court. He was found guilty, and his executioners gouged out one eye before riddling his body with bullets.