by David Crist
The United States obtained South Korea’s consent to refrain from selling aircraft parts and intervened with Italy to halt the transfer of Boeing Chinook helicopters. Great Britain agreed to clamp down on its companies selling equipment that had military applications. This constant anti-Iranian drumbeat by U.S. diplomats eventually forged widespread consensus in both Europe and the Middle East as to the culpability of Iran in perpetuating the Gulf conflict. Tehran found itself increasingly isolated and on the diplomatic defense for its unwillingness to accept a cease-fire. In late 1981 Reagan signed a secret finding that allowed the Central Intelligence Agency to pass Iraq intelligence by way of third countries. CIA officers began giving their Jordanian counterparts at the General Intelligence Department low-level intelligence on Iranian troop dispositions intending for it to be passed on to Iraq. Saddam Hussein took interest in this information ostensibly coming from Jordan. He reviewed it personally before giving it to his own military intelligence personnel. Whether Hussein knew the information had come directly from the United States is not clear, but a senior Iraqi army intelligence general, Wafiq al-Samarrai, later explained, “I was sure Jordan was not capable of getting such information.”38 Saudi Arabia provided another venue for the CIA to pass nonattributable information to Saddam Hussein. Like Jordan, the CIA had a long-standing relationship with the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, al-Mukhabarat Al-A’amah. Saudi Arabia was only too willing to pass on similar information, sharing a view of Iran similar to that of its Sunni allies in Baghdad.
With the Iranian victories in 1982, Reagan authorized the CIA to increase its intelligence support for Iraq. In June 1982 a three-man team, headed by a fifty-year-old American who introduced himself as “Thomson,” arrived in Baghdad for several days of lengthy meetings with the head of Iraqi military intelligence and the Iraqi intelligence service, known as the Mukhabarat. “We are here to help you and are willing to provide you with more information which will help you in your war against Iran,” said Thomson in his opening remarks with the Iraqis.
The two sides exchanged views on the Iranian military, and both sides agreed on the need for better intelligence to counter the Iranian attacks around Basra. Thomson said that the CIA was willing to provide regular information on Iranian troop movements in order to prevent further Iranian advances. At the close of the conference, Thomson gave the Iraqis detailed drawings based on American overhead images of Iranian military troop locations arrayed east of Basra in southwestern Iran. At the end, Saddam Hussein thanked the Americans and gave his approval for the expanded intelligence cooperation.
As the United States had no embassy in or formal diplomatic relations with Iraq until 1984, both sides agreed to establish an unofficial station in Baghdad headed by a senior CIA officer who would serve as a liaison between the two countries.39 To support this, the CIA established a small Iraqi intelligence cell within the Near East Division of the operations directorate, which comprised a mixture of veterans and brand-new officers, many of whom went on to form the next generation of American Middle East spies. Here they compiled satellite images of the battlefront and intercepts of Iranian communications and distilled these into sanitized documents that would neither compromise the sources nor divulge capabilities. Langley passed on to the Iraqis this distilled information in documents outlining Iranian unit locations and depots and summaries of where American intelligence believed Iran intended to attack next. The CIA passed on selected information regarding the capabilities of the U.S.-manufactured equipment operated by Tehran, especially on the F-14 and F-4 aircraft that made up the heart of the Iranian air force.
Clair George, who headed the agency’s clandestine arm, closely supervised the intelligence sharing. To this consummate professional spy, the true importance of maintaining these intelligence exchanges with Iraq was to recruit new Iraqi agents from among the senior ranks of its military and intelligence services. Except when Basra appeared threatened, George ordered a steady dribble of relatively insignificant information passed on to Baghdad—enough to keep his intelligence officers talking and coercing Iraqi officers, but not enough to really impact the fighting. “The CIA gave them chickenfeed,” observed the head of the DIA’s Middle East operations, Walter Patrick Lang.40
In general, however, the CIA remained lukewarm about the policy tilt toward Iraq. “It was a horrible mistake,” said Kenneth Pollack, an influential Middle East expert who was a rising star within the CIA’s analytical directorate in the 1980s. “My fellow analysts and I were warning at the time that Hussein was a very nasty character.”41 Pollack was not alone in rejecting the view that Hussein was the lesser of two evils.
Despite Saddam Hussein’s outward pleasure with the CIA information, the Iraqis were very suspicious about the intelligence passed by the Americans. “They thought maybe we were trying to mislead them in some way,” said the CIA’s George Cave. However, the Iraqis became converts in February 1984. Having spent two years conducting futile human frontal assaults on the Iraqi defenses around Basra, Iran secretly amassed more than a quarter of a million men for a surprise attack north of the city in the seemingly impregnable seven-hundred-square-mile Hawizeh marshes. Using a flotilla of improvised boats and barges, the Iranians made their way through waist-deep stagnant black water, establishing fighting postings on the natural islets of grass and marsh reeds as well as on several man-made islands that supported oil drilling. The terrain played to Iran’s advantage in light infantry, and its audacity caught the Iraqis completely by surprise. Iranian troops nearly seized a narrow causeway over which the major road between Basra and Baghdad traversed. If Iran cut this vital roadway, Basra and its one million inhabitants would have been severed from Baghdad’s control.
Alarmed, the CIA rushed new imagery of these Iranian forces to Baghdad. The agency strongly advised the Iraqis to seal this breach before the Iranians could exploit their breakthrough. The Iraqis mustered superior armor and artillery and counterattacked in one of the largest and most savage battles of the war. Iraqi shells rained deadly nerve gas while electric power lines were diverted into the swamp, electrocuting many of the Iranian defenders. After two months of fighting, Iran held on to a few toeholds of mosquito-infested swamp islets, but more than twenty thousand Iranians died in their failed bid to cut the road.42
When full diplomatic relations were established in 1984, the CIA opened a full-scale station in Baghdad supervised by a station chief under the direct supervision of the operations directorate.43 On paper the CIA station chief met formally on fourteen separate occasions with senior Iraqi officials over the next few years, but in reality it was much more a continuous ongoing relationship. The CIA relayed classified data obtained from Saudi and ELF-One AWACS on Iranian aircraft operations and passed the latest imagery of Iranian units directly to Baghdad, where the station chief was authorized to show a slightly altered version to the Iraqis. The Iraqi generals were free to study the imagery, taking notes and keeping drawings provided by CIA analysts. While the Iraqis would check the CIA’s photographs with satellite imagery they received from the French too, nevertheless this presented the Iraqi generals with an unprecedented view into the lay of the Iranian military, as well as American intelligence capabilities.
Six
SHARON’S GRAND DESIGN
Modern Lebanon sprang from a touch of European colonialism and a dash of Middle Eastern haggling. After the First World War, the French carved out the country from the old Ottoman Empire and granted the rump state independence in 1943. However, they structured Lebanon’s government into a Gordian knot. Maronite Christians, Sunnis, Shias, Druzes, and more than a dozen other confessions shared power in an arrangement that allocated every significant job in the government based upon the populace’s religious affiliation as determined by a 1932 census—the last ever taken in the country. In this antediluvian text, the Christians made up the majority population, and thus were permanently allotted the powerful presidency and head of the armed forces. The next largest gro
up, the Sunnis, were given the less powerful prime minister’s slot, while the Shia received the weak speakership of the parliament. This arrangement stumbled along for the next three decades, and Lebanon prospered. The business acumen of the population transcended their political divisions. According to one tale, when a Lebanese schoolboy was asked by his teacher, “How much is two and two?” he replied, “Am I buying or selling?”1
Beneath this veneer of harmony, however, Lebanon was held together with chewing gum and baling wire. As the population demographics changed, the power-sharing arrangement reflected less and less the realities within the country. The establishment of Israel strained this delicate balance as two hundred thousand disenfranchised Palestinian refugees arrived in southern Lebanon. The Shia community of southern Lebanon, viewed as backward hicks by their Christian and Sunni countrymen, had been relegated to minor cabinet posts devoid of real power, but they were the fastest-growing sect within the country, soon making up a third of the population. The facade of unity finally shattered in the 1970s. Several thousand Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) fighters led by the charismatic Palestinian nationalist Yasser Arafat arrived in Lebanon after being forcefully expelled from Jordan. In Lebanon, Arafat established a de facto state with a separate army and parallel government in the Palestinian refugee camps in West Beirut and southern Lebanon. They repeatedly launched attacks into northern Israel, with the poor Shia of south Lebanon bearing much of the brunt of the massive and sometimes indiscriminate Israeli reprisals. The Shia populace bitterly resented Arafat and the PLO, as did the ruling Maronite Christians, who viewed them as a threat to their hold on power.
The powder keg finally exploded in April 1976, following a failed assassination attempt by the PLO on Pierre Gemayel, the leader of the right-wing Christian Phalange, as he left church. Gemayel’s brutish foot soldiers retaliated by ambushing a bus, killing twenty-seven Palestinian civilians. Lebanon soon split apart along confessional seams in an orgy of slaughters and reprisals. Syria moved troops into Lebanon as peacekeepers, with the scheming Syrian president Hafez al-Assad obtaining a mandate from the Arab League that enabled him to occupy two-thirds of the country. By the time Ronald Reagan took the oath of office, Lebanon was a country in name only. Perhaps one hundred thousand people had died in the six-year civil war. Warring factions divided the country: West Beirut and southern Lebanon were governed by the PLO, left-wing Sunni, and the Shia Amal Party; East Beirut was run by competing Christians; the hills surrounding the city were occupied by Christians and Druze; and the Syrian army controlled the north and west Lebanon with troops entrenched in West Beirut.
In July 1981, an especially bloody exchange between the PLO and Israel left more than five hundred dead and threatened to expand into a wider war with Syria. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger feared this would erode Arab support for the newly announced CENTCOM, so Reagan dispatched the skilled American negotiator Philip Habib to broker a cease-fire. Habib, a Lebanese American who grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, succeeded in getting both the PLO and Israel to agree to a cease-fire in Lebanon. Yet it remained an uneasy peace, and was not popular with many in the right-wing Likud government of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, especially his defense minister, Ariel Sharon.
In a 2002 statement to reporters, President George W. Bush famously described Ariel Sharon as “a man of peace,” a description at odds with the Israeli leader’s actions over fifty years.2 In fact, Ariel Sharon was a warrior. He’d joined a paramilitary unit as a teenager, and he eventually rose to senior command, launching Israel’s daring attack across to the west bank of the Suez Canal during the October 1973 war. At times ruthless, he earned the nickname “The Bulldozer” due to his girth and style. Like a hussar of an earlier era, Sharon showed a flare for both brilliance and recklessness.
Sharon and Begin longed for an opportunity to destroy the PLO. “Begin viewed Arafat as little more than Hitler,” said retired senior DIA analyst Jeff White, who worked Lebanon for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Sharon unilaterally expanded the Lebanon cease-fire to include any attack against a Jew worldwide, arguing that the PLO and Beirut remained the nexus of all terrorism and so it all ultimately went back to their culpability.
Ariel Sharon formulated a plan to solve the Lebanese problem in one great sweep of Israeli armor. Since 1975, Israel had been developing a close military relationship with the Maronite Christians, providing them with arms and equipment. Sharon proposed a combined attack to destroy both the PLO and the Syrians. The vaunted Israeli Defense Forces would drive to Beirut, destroying Arafat’s meager force and, along the way, smashing the Syrian army too. With these two troublemakers out of the way, Bashir Gemayel would assume the presidency and then recognize Israel. In one stroke, Lebanon would move from an Israeli liability to an asset.3 In January 1982, Sharon secretly flew to Beirut to meet with Gemayel and his father, Pierre, to consummate the deal.
The Phalange leader embraced Sharon’s scheme. The Israelis would conduct the major combat operations against the PLO and the Syrians, but the Christians would do the dirty work of cleaning the PLO remnants off the streets and out of the buildings of West Beirut, a mission Sharon was not eager for the casualty-averse Israeli army to undertake.
Both Begin and Sharon worked to garner U.S. support for their plan. Appreciating the Cold War myopia of the American superpower, they repeatedly stressed to Reagan and other senior officials the Soviet hand behind Syria and the PLO and the important role Israel could play in defeating these clients of Moscow. In February 1982, Israel provided Weinberger with an overview of the proposed operation, which called for occupation of almost half of Lebanon.
An Israeli invasion of Lebanon alarmed most of official Washington. The CIA feared it could trigger a Soviet intervention. Bing West at Defense argued that military action would not solve Israel’s long-term problem. “Palestinian nationalism to say nothing of Arab nationalism or Islamic fundamentalism will not die with the PLO infrastructure,” he wrote Weinberger. The defense secretary was even more strident, recommending to Reagan that the United States dissuade the Israelis by threatening to withhold further weapons sales.4
The professional diplomats at the State Department shared this view. “The primary effort should be directed toward deterring the Israeli action, but concurrently we must cut our losses by clearly dissociating the United States before the fact from any action Israel may take in Lebanon,” wrote L. Paul Bremer, then a senior official in the secretary of state’s office.5
But Bremer’s boss, Alexander Haig, who’d graduated from senior general in Europe to secretary of state, did not agree. A staunch supporter of the Jewish state, he viewed the Arab-Israeli crisis in Cold War terms, pitting the American proxy against the Soviet-backed Arabs. Neither the historic roots of the conflict nor the sectarian milieu that fostered the Lebanese Civil War entered into Haig’s calculations. Lebanon was a Cold War battleground, and he saw Israeli victory entirely in that light. Critics later accused Haig of privately giving the Israelis a green light for their attack. But Haig always denied the charge, and the documentary evidence supports his view. During a meeting with Israeli general Uri Sagi, Haig repeatedly cautioned that an unprovoked Israeli attack would have “grave” implications for U.S.-Israeli relations.6 Nonetheless, Haig clearly favored a robust Israeli attack on the PLO, if based on a legitimate provocation.
Following one meeting between Sharon and Haig, the American secretary of state enthusiastically pointed to a map of Lebanon and said, “You see, if they have to go in, their plan would be to link up the group here in the south with the Christians up here.”
The normally reticent diplomat Morris Draper blurted out, “For Christ’s sake, Mr. Secretary, there’s a million and a half Muslims between them, and at least a million of them are Shia!” This fact came as a surprise to Al Haig.7
Sharon got his casus belli on June 4, 1982, when the Israeli ambassador in London was shot and seriously wounded. The fact
that the culprits were from Abu Nidal’s splinter organization and bitterly opposed to Arafat made no difference. Two days later, on Sunday morning, June 6, Israeli troops poured into Lebanon in three giant columns swiftly moving north.
Israeli officials reassured the United States that they had no intention of advancing to Beirut or starting a war with Syria. Prime Minister Begin personally assured President Reagan that his army would not move more than forty kilometers into Lebanon—just far enough to drive the PLO away from rocket range of northern Israel. Israel’s ambassador told Weinberger a similar story.8 On June 9, after meeting with Begin, Philip Habib flew to Damascus to assure President al-Assad that Israel had no interest in a war with Syria. But the Israelis’ words failed to match their army’s actions. While Habib was still talking with al-Assad, Sharon ordered an attack on Syrian air-to-air missile sites in the Bekaa Valley. The unprepared and outclassed Syrian air force rose to challenge the Israeli jets. In a massive daylong dogfight the Jewish pilots decimated the Syrians, knocking eighty-two jets out of the sky without a single loss of their own. A dismayed Habib cabled back to Haig, “I am astounded and dismayed by what happened today. The prime minister of Israel really sent me off on a wild goose chase.”9
The Soviet premier sent Reagan a message via the hotline between Washington and Moscow warning that the Israeli attack created an “extremely dangerous situation.” He warned that it risked a wider war between the superpowers. Alarmed, Reagan called for a cease-fire to take effect the next day at six a.m. local (Lebanese) time. The president then sent a warning to the Israeli prime minister: “Menachem, Israel’s refusal to agree to this cease-fire would aggravate what is already a great threat to world peace and place a permanent stain on a relationship I truly treasure. Sincerely, Ron.”10