by David Crist
In October 1979, one month before Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy, CIA officer George Cave flew back to Tehran carrying with him some highly sensitive intelligence that he hoped would impress the new Iranian government as to American sincerity. He met with the minister of foreign affairs, Ebrahim Yazdi, a pragmatic moderate whom Cave had known for a number of years.
“The Iraqis are planning to invade Iran,” Cave said simply. U.S. intelligence had strong evidence, including communications intercepts, and before leaving Washington Cave had seen satellite imagery of the Iraqi army rehearsing crossing the Shatt al-Arab. While he did not mention this visual evidence to Yazdi, he relayed the CIA’s anticipation of an Iraqi attack the following year.
Cave told Yazdi about a CIA-operated signals intelligence collection station located at Ilam, near the Iraq border and parallel to Baghdad. Beginning in 1973 and using the code word Ibex, the agency built this base at the request of the shah; its sole purpose had been to eavesdrop on Iraq. Four specially configured Iranian C-130 airplanes collected Iraqi communications, downloading the intercepts to the ground station, where they would be translated and analyzed. “The general who ran it is still in Iran,” Cave urged. “You need to reactivate it to find out what Iraq is up to.”4
But with a wave of the hand, Yazdi dismissed Cave’s advice. He replied in Farsi, “They wouldn’t dare!” Iran’s dismissal of the CIA’s warning could have proven fatal for the fledgling Islamic Republic—had their antagonist not been Saddam Hussein.
During a news conference at the end of the first American war with Iraq, in 1991, the brusque, imposing General H. Norman Schwarzkopf famously said of Saddam Hussein’s military acumen: “He is neither a strategist nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that he’s a great military man.” Nothing reveals the truth of this statement more than Iraq’s dysfunctional attack on Iran.
On September 22, 1980, Iraq tried to duplicate the successful Israeli attack during the 1967 war by leading its ground invasion in its opening gambit with a massive air attack on Iran’s airfields and destroying Iran’s air force. But Iraq’s effort proved a poor imitation, and only three planes were destroyed on the ground. The Iranian pilots responded with surprising vigor. In a series of dogfights in the opening week of the war, their American training and equipment proved superior in the blue skies over southern Mesopotamia. Had it not been for the shortage of spare parts and pilots that soon curtailed the number of Iranian sorties, the Iraqi invasion might have ended before it began. A delusional Saddam Hussein suspected that Israeli pilots had really been conducting these effective attacks.
Nine Iraqi divisions lumbered across the border into central and southern Iran. It was an anti-blitzkrieg. Despite only sporadic Iranian resistance, the Iraqi army moved glacially. Frequently orders came from the high command in Baghdad straight down to division commanders, bypassing the intermediary corps headquarters. Operating in the dark, with no planned military objectives, and not wishing to question Saddam Hussein’s methods, senior Iraqi commanders did nothing. Units advanced a few kilometers and stopped; they dug in and awaited further orders from Baghdad.
Saddam’s timid attack permitted Iran to send reinforcements unhindered to the front and forced Iraq to fight in a wide-open, coverless wasteland. While it required weeks for the disorganized Iranian military to muster enough forces to blunt the Iraqi armor divisions, the halting pace of Baghdad’s invasion gave Tehran the luxury of time. The Iraqis succeeded in capturing only one important city in Khuzestan: the port city of Khorramshahr—now called Arabistan by Saddam Hussein—which fell after four weeks of house-to-house fighting at the cost of six thousand Iraqi casualties.
Iran saw the hand of the United States behind Iraq’s aggression. Just as Iranians believed that the shah had been admitted into the United States to plot a countercoup rather than for humanitarian reasons, the prevailing view on the streets of Tehran was that Iraq would not have attacked without the permission of the American superpower. The two nations had colluded to overturn the revolution. Iranian leaders believed their suspicions were confirmed when news leaked that the last prime minister under the shah, Shapour Bakhtiar, had joined the Iraqis and entered the occupied part of Iran. “It was believed that Bakhtiar would seek to establish a separate government in the region, which would be recognized by the United States and others, igniting a civil war inside Iran.”5
While the United States frequently receives the credit or the blame for much of what transpires in the Middle East, Washington’s hidden hand was not behind the Iraqi attack. “The U.S. government was taken by surprise when the attack occurred in the magnitude that it did,” said Gary Sick, who worked the Persian Gulf desk for Brzezinski at the White House.6 Carter steadfastly refused Brzezinski’s urgings to consider more serious military options to pressure Khomeini to release the hostages.7 The last thing the White House wanted was a massive regional war and another crisis in the Middle East instigated by the paranoid megalomaniac ruler in Baghdad.8
Ayatollah Khomeini also saw an opportunity in the onset of war. Steven Ward, a senior Iranian analyst at the CIA, observed that Iraq’s invasion of Iran proved to be a “godsend” to the new Islamic Republic. “The Iraqi aggression ensured the clerical regime’s survival by reviving the public’s nationalism and diverting attention from the country’s slide into tyranny.”9 Ayatollah Khomeini frequently said this too, boasting that the Iraqi threat afforded the Islamic Republic the chance to rally the public behind the regime and the excuse needed to purge domestic opponents, such as the powerful communist Tudeh Party. Just as the takeover of the American embassy allowed Khomeini to purge the liberal opposition from the government, Saddam Hussein’s overt aggression provided a similar excuse to expunge the communists and consolidate power around the mullahs. While it plunged Iran into a virtual civil war, by 1983 Khomeini had succeeded in breaking the Tudeh Party, with the death toll tallying into the thousands.
The Iranian army struggled to roll back the Iraqi assault. Perhaps half the entire Iranian military had deserted or been purged since the revolution, including many of the skilled officers. In January 1981 clerical leaders, who knew much more about the Koran than about Clausewitz, goaded a reluctant army into conducting its first major counterattack. Iran committed most of its armor reserve—some three hundred tanks—in a massive attack during the winter rainy season. The Iranian tanks became bogged down in the muck and mire and tried to slug it out at close range against dug-in Iraqi T-62 tanks. Despite generally outfighting their Iraqi opponents, nearly two-thirds of Iran’s irreplaceable tanks were left as smoking hulks in front of Iraqi trenches.10 The failure of the attack by the armored forces left the professional soldiers discredited. So the same amateurs who’d ordered the army’s failed attack turned to their own newly created organization, the Revolutionary Guard.
Mohsen Sazegara had been an early supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini. Short with bright blue eyes that expressed a keen intellect, Mohsen attended school in Tehran and the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He was studying to be an electrical engineer when he decided to travel to Iraq to work for the ayatollah in his bid to overthrow the shah. Although he was Shiite, the draw of Khomeini had been less religious and more youthful idealism. Like many other well-educated Iranian students, Sazegara had been swept up in the Persian equivalent of the student rebellions that had gripped Western campuses during the 1960s. “It was a blend of newfound religious identity and Marxism,” he noted.
Sazegara proved to be a good analyst and accompanied Khomeini to Paris, where he helped translate Western stories and coordinate the sophisticated public relations campaign in the Western media that demonized the shah and moderated Khomeini’s image. When Khomeini returned triumphantly to Tehran, Sazegara accompanied him, descending from the jet just ahead of the ayatollah.
Security became a major preoccupation in the early months of the new Islamic Republic.
The new government felt under siege. Weapons looted from the military armories during the chaotic death throes of the shah’s rule were everywhere and had found their way into the hands of communists and Kurdish separatists, the latter using the newly acquired hardware to increase attacks against the weakened central government in Tehran. The loyalty of the military remained questionable. Sunni rebels in Turkmenistan along the border with the Soviet Union had approached Moscow about supporting an independence movement and were given its promise of aid if they showed the military capacity to hold a sizable area. The new regime obsessed about an American-led coup to reinstall the shah, even an invasion by the United States, perhaps using a trumped-up border conflict with Turkey as an excuse for a NATO attack. “Everyone believed that the United States wanted to overthrow the revolution and reinstall the shah,” said Sazegara. “It was a universal truth as far as we were concerned.”11
Sazegara and others began working on the idea of a people’s army to defend the revolution. Stealing a page from the Marxist playbook, they wanted to build a military organization filled by volunteers from the masses to combat their plethora of foreign and domestic enemies. Sazegara wrote the first draft charter for the people’s army, an idealistic organization that had no officers and whose directives stemmed from popular consensus, under the supervision of a five-member board chaired by an ayatollah reporting to Khomeini. On April 4, 1979, a group of students, including Sazegara, met with Ayatollah Khomeini at his home in Qom to brief him on the proposed military organization. Khomeini did not look at them, but sat quietly with his hands folded, listening intently. When they finished, Khomeini looked up and flashed a very rare smile. “Yes. This is a very good idea. I have worried about an American coup.”
Sazegara soon discovered that two other similar Revolutionary Guard units had sprung up. One was headed by the son of the powerful liberal-leaning Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri and was located in an old military barracks. The other group was in the west of Tehran, formed by former political prisoners, a major in the shah’s Immortals guard, and several members of the shah’s household who had secretly spied for Khomeini. After several meetings, both of these fledgling military groups merged with Sazegara’s group.
In May 1979 the people’s army became a reality. Officially it became known as the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, or Sepah-e Pasdaran in Farsi. In English it has been simply labeled the Revolutionary Guard. The guard established its headquarters in a brand-new building in Tehran, which had been recently built to allow the shah’s secret police, Savak, to monitor domestic phone conversations. The building was empty and its only damage during the revolution had been some broken windows.
With furniture and telephones installed, Sazegara invited Mostafa Chamran over to the new headquarters to brief him on the new group. A brilliant professor of engineering, Chamran had taught at Berkeley and worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was widely respected in Iranian academic circles as the only student at the University of Tehran to get a 100 percent on his thermodynamics test under Mehdi Bazargan, the school’s toughest instructor who would also become the first prime minister of the revolutionary government. But in the 1970s, Chamran had found religion. He’d turned his back on science, grew his beard, and replaced his slide rule with a Kalashnikov. He traveled to Lebanon—then in the midst of its sectarian civil war—where he established the military wing of the main Shia militia. Sazegara believed Chamran was a logical choice to lead this new people’s army.
“That’s fantastic!” Chamran replied when he saw what was being conceived. “But you need military-trained leadership.” As the idea of an officerless corps quickly fell away as unworkable, Chamran brought a small group of Iranians back from Lebanon to begin training the first cadre of two hundred officers, all of whom were chosen for their ideological commitment to Khomeini. These combatants were joined by others with military experience, including the future head of the Revolutionary Guard, Mohsen Rezai, who had fought with the MEK before falling out over its emphasis of Marx over Muhammad.12 In a strange twist, a number of former intelligence officers from the shah’s military offered their tradecraft to aid the Revolutionary Guard in rooting out state enemies. Reporting only to Khomeini, the guard quickly grew into the thousands.
Over the next year both Chamran and Sazegara moved on to other jobs in the new government, but the organization they’d helped create continued to evolve. As the defense minister, Chamran streamlined command of the guard and ensured clerical supervision at every level of command. The Revolutionary Guard cut its teeth fighting the various separatist movements and as a gendarmerie for internal security. It became the key tool for consolidating power in the hands of the Islamic Republic, with many of the country’s future leaders emerging from its ranks.
The Iraqi war forced a transformation in the Revolutionary Guard. Rather than counterinsurgency, the Revolutionary Guard found itself embroiled in a major conventional war. Drawing recruits from the large, poor Shia population through the strong appeal of religious fervor, not to mention better pay and benefits, their ranks swelled to more than a quarter million frontline soldiers. Disdain for the regular Iranian army prevented any merger, and the Revolutionary Guard emerged as a separate, parallel army that soon surpassed the army if not in numbers, then certainly in clout. It was backed by the popular pro-Khomeini militia force called the Basij, Farsi for “mobilization.” More than six hundred thousand strong, Basij provided a steady stream of replacements for the Revolutionary Guard.
In April 1981 the Revolutionary Guard spearheaded an attack using human wave assaults led by young, often unarmed Basij men who unwittingly cleared the Iraqi minefields with their own bodies. Despite horrific losses, these untrained conscripts of the Revolutionary Guard overran the Iraqi defenders, capturing frontline trenches before their attack stalled due to shortages in supply and mechanized forces to exploit the breakthrough. Chamran himself died a martyr’s death in these early attacks, killed by an Iraqi mortar round while leading a group of Basij militia.
The Iranians touted this victory as a new way of Islamic warfare. Revolutionary zeal supplanted traditional military competency as the key to victory. Faith in God and a commitment to spread the revolution would overcome Western weapons, tactics, and training. The human cost was immaterial, even encouraged in a society that prized martyrdom. The sprawling Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in southwest Tehran soon filled with graves—adorned with photos and personal mementos—of thousands of young men.
But these human wave assaults proved effective. One Iraqi officer who witnessed them has never forgotten the image of nearly a dozen Revolutionary Guardsmen riding atop a tank firing rocket-propelled grenades as they headed toward his position. Even after their tank had been knocked out, the survivors, some on fire, jumped off and continued to run toward the Iraqi troops until they were finally cut down in a hail of machine-gun fire at the foot of the Iraqi trench. “It unnerved our troops and many ran,” he dryly commented, before adding that he wished he had such dedicated soldiers. Over time, the Revolutionary Guard operations became more sophisticated as military necessity forced amateurism to give way to a modicum of professionalism. The Revolutionary Guard grew adept at probing the Iraqi lines, finding weakly defended positions and gaps between Iraqi units. Then, under the cover of darkness, massed Basij and Revolutionary Guard forces infiltrated behind the Iraqi lines, repeatedly opening gaping holes in the Iraqi defenses.
With Ayatollah Khomeini’s approval, the army began promoting officers favored by the Revolutionary Guard. As these like-minded men assumed leadership positions in the army, it fostered a better working relationship between the two separate forces. Now army tanks and infantry backed by artillery began exploiting the guard’s nocturnal infiltration operations. While Iran struggled to sustain its offensives—each attack required weeks of amassing ammunition and supplies—over months it chipped away at Saddam’s army, slowly driving them out of Iran and, by the summer of 1982, back
into the outskirts of Iraq’s second-largest city, Basra.
A divided Iranian leadership debated its next steps in the war. No one advocated accepting the cease-fire suddenly offered by Saddam Hussein. Ayatollah Khomeini’s son Ahmed Khomeini, as well as the chief of staff of the army, pressed for an aggressive offensive to take Basra, overthrow Saddam Hussein, and establish an Islamic state within Iraq. But president and future supreme leader Seyed Ali Khamenei, foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati, and the pragmatic speaker of the parliament and head of the armed forces, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, were less sanguine about invading Iraq proper. They argued for seeking punitive reparations and ending Saddam Hussein’s ability to threaten the revolution. The chief of the general staff, General Zahir Nejad, opposed the invasion because he feared that the international community would see Iran as the antagonist and not the victim of aggression. Ayatollah Khomeini lay somewhere in between the two views. He deeply wanted to overthrow the Baathist regime and spread the Islamic Revolution, but he shared General Nejad’s concerns about Iran being perceived as the aggressor. The supreme leader preferred to achieve Saddam Hussein’s ouster without an invasion of Iraq.
The debate came to a head in a pivotal meeting of the powerful Supreme Defense Council, Iran’s equivalent of the National Security Council, in June 1982. Both Velayati and Khamenei remained opposed to invading Iraq, but Rafsanjani had come around to support the idea, and he and other hawks argued that Basra could be taken. That spring, Iranian intelligence agents had fanned out throughout southern Iraq and Kuwait; they reported back that the Shia population was receptive to Iran’s revolutionary message and ripe for revolt. This would cause a chain reaction and lead to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and perhaps even of the pro-Western emir in Kuwait. The final decision fell to Ayatollah Khomeini. Despite his own personal reservations, he sided with the hawks and agreed to a robust attack to take Basra and end the Baath regime. Once the supreme leader had made his decision, he never looked back. In the coming years he consistently called for a war until victory. It would take another six years of slaughter before he changed his mind.