The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran

by David Crist

  As Martin predicted, as U.S. support increased for the Lebanese army against the Druze and Shia, marine casualties mounted. In just a little more than a month, from August 4 to September 7, 1983, four marines died and twenty-eight were wounded, more than three times the casualties suffered during the entire previous ten months of the marines’ deployment to Lebanon.38

  The situation came to a head in September 1983. With casualties mounting, the Israelis unilaterally pulled their tanks out of the Chouf Mountains to a more defensible line to the south. This created a power vacuum in the strategic hills overlooking Beirut. Militias of all stripes—Christian, Druze, and Shia—moved into the void. A three-thousand-man force of Gemayel’s Phalange won the footrace, only to be clobbered by Walid Jumblatt’s Druze forces, backed by Syrian artillery. General Tannous ordered the Lebanese army into the fray to reassert Lebanese government control and also to protect the routed Phalange.39 He committed his best unit, the 8th Brigade, a multiconfessional unit (although its officers were majority Christian) trained by American special forces and under the command of an indecisive and panicky Francophile general named Michel Aoun. Fighting raged around the strategic hamlet of Suq al-Gharb. Before the war, this had been a pleasant vacation spot, nestled in pine trees with bucolic vistas of the city and harbor below. Now it was a strategic locale, and whoever controlled it threatened Christian East Beirut.

  Increasingly hysterical reports from Aoun alarmed both McFarlane and his senior military adviser, a cool, slow-talking Tennessean, Brigadier General Carl Stiner of the special forces, who had been sent by the chairman as his representative to the Lebanese army. McFarlane sent a cable back to the White House urging a prompt American military response and expanding the marines’ mission to combat. There are “enormous strategic stakes for the U.S. and the western world in the eastern Mediterranean…that would certainly justify the possible use of military power,” wrote McFarlane.

  The next night, Druze forces hit the 8th Brigade from the south and east. Tannous turned to Stiner for help. The special forces general liked the Lebanese general.40 Stiner approached McFarlane about providing military support for Aoun’s hard-pressed brigade.

  On Sunday morning, from the library of the U.S. ambassador’s residence, McFarlane wrote a cable that has become famous in the chronicles of American foreign policy. It is known as “the sky is falling” memo: “This is an action message. A second attack against the same Lebanese Armed Forces unit is expected this evening. Ammunition and morale are low and raise the serious possibility that the enemy brigade, which enjoys greater strength and unlimited fire support and resupply, will break through and penetrate the Beirut perimeter.” McFarlane continued in dramatic fashion: “Tonight we could be in enemy lines.”

  McFarlane laid the blame on Syrian and now Iranian mischief. He couched the issue as an epic struggle of the Cold War. If Suq al-Gharb fell, then Lebanon would succumb to the Soviet client in Damascus. The United States needed to commit its airpower immediately or risk losing a major battle against the communists. As veteran CBS News Pentagon correspondent David Martin astutely noted in his 1988 book on the Reagan administration and terrorism: “It was a message perfectly tuned to the ear of a President who boasted that not one inch of territory had been lost to the communists on his watch.”41

  Weinberger remained dubious of McFarlane and his dire predictions. After reading the cable, he called down to the National Military Command Center (NMCC) to get his own intelligence update. The brigadier general on watch told the secretary that DIA’s own assessment did not “read it as badly as McFarlane.” The 8th Brigade had actually repulsed the attack.42

  At six p.m., senior officials gathered in the White House Situation Room to discuss what to do about the remote town of Suq al-Gharb, upon which American prestige now rested. With Shultz backing McFarlane’s view and at loggerheads with Weinberger, the two men decided on a compromise. They shifted the entire decision of using force down to Colonel Geraghty. They would leave it up to the marine commander to decide if they should support the Lebanese army. Later that evening, President Reagan signed an order to that effect: “The dominant terrain in the vicinity of Suq al Gharb is vital to the safety of U.S. personnel. As a consequence, if the U.S. ground commander determines it is in danger of falling as a result of attack involving non-Lebanese forces and if requested by host government, appropriate U.S. military assistance is authorized.”43

  Initially, Geraghty resisted McFarlane’s plan. The colonel knew that his marines would pay the price for America directly intervening at Suq al-Gharb. As tempers flared, the hard-nosed marine exchanged heated words with Stiner over the wisdom of a direct American involvement in the war. When Stiner proposed embedding a small team of marines with the 8th Brigade to direct American air and naval fire, Geraghty fired back: “I firmly believe that this is in direct violation of my mission.”44 During one of these passionate exchanges with Stiner, Geraghty yelled, “General, don’t you realize we’ll pay the price down here? We’ll get slaughtered!”45

  Amid this crisis, Geraghty received a phone call from Washington. He was on his way to a meeting with General Tannous when his staff called him back to headquarters. Someone using an unknown call sign—Silver Screen Six—wanted to speak to the marine. On the other end of the line was Ronald Reagan.

  “Tell the marines that the entire nation is proud of you and the outstanding job you are doing against difficult odds,” the president said in his usual upbeat manner.

  Geraghty, who liked the Republican president, thanked Reagan and ended the call with the U.S. Marines’ motto: “Semper fi, Mr. President.”46

  While it was a typically kind gesture by Reagan, he might have better served the marines had he bothered to correct his administration’s feeble, drifting Lebanon policy. While the United States rushed spare parts and ammunition to support the 8th Brigade’s fight in the hills around Beirut, the administration continued to deny active involvement in the civil war. Uncertain about using force, Reagan had passed the buck to a hard-pressed colonel to decide the wisdom of escalation.

  On September 19, a massive artillery bombardment hit Suq al-Gharb and Phalange militia targets around Beirut. Druze infantry and armor then struck the venerable 8th Brigade, with some Palestinians joining in the fighting for good measure. With General Tannous pleading for help and signals intelligence detecting Syrian and Iranian support for the attackers, Geraghty finally relented to McFarlane and Stiner. Four U.S. warships lobbed about three hundred seventy-pound explosive shells down on the Druze artillery and a column of tanks. This firepower blunted the attack.

  “The firing we did in support of the Lebanese army up at Suq al-Gharb clearly changed our role in my opinion,” Geraghty said. “That moved us across the neutrality line.” The toll to Geraghty’s marines for straying across the line and becoming embroiled in the civil war would be much higher than anyone had predicted.47

  Seven

  A SPECTACULAR ACTION

  In the dark hours of a summer day in 1982, a four-engine Iran Air 707 landed in Damascus. About two dozen Revolutionary Guards walked down the metal stairs and were greeted by the Iranian ambassador, Hojjat ol-Eslam Ali Akbar Mohtashemi. Operating on specific instructions from Iran’s foreign ministry, Mohtashemi spirited the guardsmen across the border into Lebanon, where they established a headquarters in some vacant houses and a hotel just outside of the magnificent Roman ruins at Baalbek, home to three of the largest surviving temples to Jupiter, Venus, and Bacchus.

  The approval for this clandestine effort had been worked out during an earlier meeting between senior officials in Damascus. The Iranian delegation included not only Mohtashemi but the minister of defense and the head of the Revolutionary Guard, Mohsen Rezai. The twenty-eight-year-old guard commander was a pragmatic zealot. An economics student and doctoral candidate, he had never attended school in the West. He was ruthless and powerful, a trusted servant for both Khomeini and his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei. It was Rezai
who transformed the Revolutionary Guard from a ragtag military into a sword for the Islamic Republic.1

  The meeting came at a critical juncture in Iran’s war with Iraq. Ayatollah Khomeini had just made the fateful decision to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein. In carrying forward the war to spread his religious revolution, the Israeli invasion afforded a new opportunity to spread his message among a sympatric Shia populace and to strike directly at the hated Jewish occupier of Jerusalem.

  Initially, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad refused to allow many Revolutionary Guardsmen to transit his country. Khomeini’s revolution held little appeal to the secularist-socialist despot. After the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, al-Assad did permit some Iranian military into Damascus in order to make his hated Baathist rival Saddam Hussein’s life uncomfortable with the possibility of an Iranian military threat on Iraq’s western border. But when Sharon instigated the fight with the Syrian army during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, a bitter and revengeful al-Assad decided to open the floodgates for Khomeini’s bearded foot soldiers to strike back at Sharon.

  These two dozen men became the vanguard of eight hundred Iranian Revolutionary Guards sent to this base in the fertile eastern Lebanese valley.2 Under the protective umbrella of the Syrian army, they soon moved into more permanent billeting at Baalbek, taking over a Lebanese army base, the Sheik Abdullah Barracks. With a mission not unlike that of the American Green Berets, they came bearing military, political, and humanitarian assistance to the downtrodden Lebanese Shia, all the while spreading Iran’s revolutionary message in the Levant. Within three years, this Iranian delegation united several disparate Shia fighters into the Islamic Republic’s biggest foreign policy success: Hezbollah, or the Party of God. Over the next coming years, these fighters morphed from a small guerrilla band into a major political party in Lebanon, one whose military wing eclipsed that of the Lebanese army. They staved off the region’s most powerful military—Israel—in two wars, and in one precise bombing inflicted the largest tactical defeat on the U.S. military since the Korean War.

  As it did many young Shia boys growing up in southern Beirut, the Lebanese Civil War shaped Sayeed Ali’s future occupation.3 The son of a poor father who worked at the airport for an Eastern European airline, he was only seven when the war began. As a young teenager, Sayeed Ali longed to fight as he and his friends played army with real AK-47 assault rifles. He wanted the adventure of combat as he saw older kids joining the Amal militia commanded by a secularist named Nabih Berri. He too joined Amal, playing trumpet in their marching band until he was old enough to exchange his horn for a rifle. He and his friends would gather together, but rather than kicking a football around the sandlot, they drove to the daily firefight and took potshots at either the Phalange or the Palestinians. Sayeed Ali then worked as a bodyguard for the prominent cleric Sheik Mohammad Mehdi Shamseddine. Shamseddine was moderate by Lebanese Civil War standards. While he shared al-Sadr’s views of Israel, he preached civil disobedience against the Israelis, as well as Christian-Muslim reconciliation. “There is no Lebanon without its Christians, and there is no Lebanon without its Muslims,” he once said.

  An Iranian-born Lebanese cleric, Musa al-Sadr influenced his political environment. He pressed for increased Shia power in Lebanon as well as waging war on Israel to free the occupied lands. “Israel is an utter evil” was a frequent al-Sadr slogan.4 The cleric’s disappearance in 1978 during a trip to Libya galvanized large swaths of the Shia population into backing his Amal movement.

  The Shia communities of Iran and Lebanon had a long, entwined history, with ties going back some four hundred years. Families intermarried. Lebanese imams attended the same seminaries in Qom or Najaf. The Iranian Revolution excited many Lebanese Shia. Khomeini provided a beacon, a new way forward for the downtrodden masses in southern Lebanon. A few Iranians had fought in Lebanon during the civil war, most prominently Mostafa Chamran, one of the founders of the Revolutionary Guard. A steady trickle of religiously motivated Iranians attended the mosques in Beirut to proselytize, trying to plant the seeds of Khomeini’s revolution. “There were always Iranians around, praying in the mosques and offering support to us,” Sayeed Ali recalled.

  In Sharon’s zeal to destroy the PLO, he remained wholly ignorant of the Lebanese Shia population that stood in his army’s path. Happy to be rid of the PLO, many Shia greeted the Israeli soldiers warmly, showering them with fistfuls of perfumed rice and flowers. This hospitality quickly changed, however. The Israeli army’s liberal use of firepower and its frequent tactic of recon by fire in which tanks fired at anything that might remotely be a threat—a parked car or a house that overlooked its positions—killed many civilians. Operating in an alien culture, the ill-prepared Israelis adopted a heavy hand in their occupation, angering many Shia and opening the door even wider for Iran’s message of resistance.5 Had Sharon and Begin not blundered into invading Lebanon, “I don’t know whether something called Hezbollah would have been born. I doubt it,” said the organization’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah.6

  As more Revolutionary Guardsmen arrived, they began making their way into the Shia slums of southern Beirut. They served as both social welfare agents and military advisers. They funded schools and organized basic services such as trash collection and sewage systems. The Iranians attended local mosques and after Friday prayers gave speeches extolling Ayatollah Khomeini and the natural ties between the Shia of Iran and Lebanon. The Iranian agents repeatedly linked the Israeli transgressions with Israel’s chief benefactor, the United States, arguing that the two worked in consort against both Muslims and the Iranian Revolution.

  Many of the future leaders of the Iranian military earned their spurs as part of the initial vanguard of guardsmen in Lebanon. This included the future Iranian defense minister, Ahmad Vahidi, who served as a military adviser and later formed an intelligence unit that eventually morphed into the Revolutionary Guard’s elite clandestine paramilitary special forces unit, the Quds Force.

  Iran established a formal chain of command for its operatives in Lebanon. Orders were relayed from the Iranian foreign minister in Tehran to the embassy in Syria, where Ambassador Mohtashemi would relay it by radio or courier to the Revolutionary Guards in the Bekaa. Iranian cargo jets regularly landed at the Damascus airport, off-loading pallets of arms and munitions that were trucked to Lebanon.

  Iran’s embassy in Lebanon served as another link in the guards’ operations. One of the chargés d’affaires, Kamal Majid, had been one of the student instigators who took over the U.S. embassy in 1979. A lifelong Revolutionary Guard officer, he later served as the Iranian ambassador to Sudan, where he oversaw a similar paramilitary effort designed to expand Iran’s influence along the Red Sea.7 The military attaché, Colonel Ahmad Motevaselian, gave tactical direction to the early guard operations in Beirut. The Tehran native operated under diplomatic cover and served as a key conduit between the Shia community in West Beirut and the Revolutionary Guard at Baalbek. A popular, charismatic commander, he played an important role in cultivating disenchanted Lebanese Amal fighters.

  The Israeli invasion divided the main Shia Amal militia, headed by Nabih Berri. Members disagreed sharply over how much they should oppose or cooperate with the Israelis as well as over the role of Iran in the Shia organization. Berri rejected the Iranian overtures. He continued to see his movement as Lebanese and would not countenance taking directives from Tehran. But many of the young fighters embraced a more politically active Islam. Even if Israel had not invaded, these young devotees of Khomeini would likely have broken away from Berri, but Israel’s actions galvanized those calling for jihad and advocating the establishment of an Islamic state in Lebanon.8 The Revolutionary Guard helped sow this discontent by criticizing Amal’s military prowess and offering both training and equipment to improve Shia fighting abilities.9

  These emerging cracks finally split Amal apart during a tense meeting one evening at Shamseddine’s house south of the airport. Nabih Berr
i had participated in an American-led effort to end the Israeli siege of West Beirut. He justified this decision as an effort to spare further injury to the Shia population that found itself caught in the crossfire between the Israelis and the PLO. When Berri arrived at Shamseddine’s home, a heated argument ensued over the future of the Amal movement. Young hotheads accused Berri of compromising the Shia cause by striking a bargain with the American and Israeli foe. At the end of the night, many young fighters walked away from Berri’s leadership. This included Sayeed Ali, who had been guarding Shamseddine’s house.

  Disenchanted, Sayeed Ali moved back into his parents’ house in south Beirut and idled away in search of excitement. A friend of his, Mohammed Khodor, whose brother drove for a rising young cleric named Hassan Nasrallah, invited him over to his house along with about thirty other neighborhood friends. The Iranians had assigned Khodor to recruit and build a cell in his neighborhood. He told them about the Iranian plans and how they were going to spearhead the resistance against the Israeli occupiers. He explained Imam Khomeini’s teachings and stressed both the importance of Islam in one’s life and resistance to the beguiling Great Satan. While some rejected his pitch, the majority liked what they heard. This included Sayeed Ali. “It sounded interesting, and I was young and dumb,” he said later.

  By 1984, American intelligence estimated that eight hundred Iranian guardsmen operated in Lebanon. Despite the numbers, Iran remained cautious about having the Revolutionary Guard engage in actually fighting, leaving that chore to their Lebanese allies. Instead, they brought Shia fighters to their camps in the Bekaa Valley, where the Revolutionary Guard ran an organized boot camp at which they supervised the training curriculum. While Sheik Abdullah Barracks served as Iran’s headquarters, they established three other military training camps. There Lebanese were taught the basic skills of marksmanship and explosives. In subsequent courses, the soldiers received more sophisticated training on how to destroy enemy tanks.