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

by David Crist

  Around eleven a.m. on January 12, 1986, the six-hundred-foot-long American Lines ship President Taylor steamed twenty-four miles off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. Bound for the port of Fujairah with a small load of cotton, the ship was intended to pick up a load of bagged food for CARE and Catholic Relief Services before heading off for India. A small Iranian patrol boat came alongside the U.S.-flagged ship and, over the radio, demanded, “Heave to.”

  The President Taylor’s captain, Robert Reimann, tried to protest. “We are in international waters. You have no right to stop us,” he replied.

  The Iranian boat trained its main gun on the defenseless merchant, and an Iranian voice over the radio politely insisted that the ship “stop her engines.” Reimann had little choice but to comply.

  The Iranians dropped a small rubber Zodiac boat into the undulating seas and, in short order, seven Iranians, including two officers, boarded the President Taylor, taking control of the ship’s radio and its forty-three crewmen. They asked Captain Reimann to produce his manifest. He did so, and after examining it and looking into a couple of containers, the Iranians expressed their satisfaction, telling the American master they only wanted to verify that the ship was not carrying contraband bound for Iraq. In less than an hour, the seven Iranians had departed, leaving the President Taylor to make her way on to Fujairah.26

  The problem for the United States, as a Pentagon spokesman acknowledged the day after the incident, was that Iran had every right under international law to search ships suspected of carrying war matériel to Iraq. The United States faced the age-old problem of a neutral’s ability to engage in commerce and the right of a belligerent to maintain a naval blockade. But with Weinberger’s utter disdain for Iran and this incident occurring only three months after the Palestinian hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, in which an elderly American, Leon Klinghoffer, had been shot in his wheelchair and dumped over the side, the Reagan administration was in no mood to risk another such hostage crisis from a country with a track record of taking Americans hostage.

  On February 1, the State Department sent a tersely worded cautionary message to the Iranian government through the Swiss embassy in Tehran: “Irrespective of the legal issues involved, the visit and search of U.S. flag vessels by armed Iranian forces during a period of heightened tension and regional conflict could lead to a confrontation between U.S. and Iranian military units, which neither nation desires.”27

  “If this continues,” wrote General Vessey to Secretary Weinberger, “escalation of the current conflict appears inevitable.”28

  Weinberger ordered the navy to prevent any further boardings of an American merchant.29 U.S. warships would now position themselves within visual range of any U.S.-flagged merchant ship transiting the Gulf, poised to interdict any approaching Iranian vessel. Should an Iranian warship try to stop a U.S. merchant, an American naval officer would go over to the merchant and check for any military equipment for Iraq. Assuming the ship carried no contraband, the U.S. naval officer would inform the Iranian captain of this fact. Since the United States did not provide Iraq directly with arms, it was inconceivable that any ship flying the Stars and Stripes would be guilty of carrying war matériel, but if they were, the U.S. Navy on-scene commander would divert the merchant to a neutral port and then allow the Iranians on board to remove any prohibited items under the supervision of the U.S. Navy.30 Under no circumstances, however, would any U.S. merchant be diverted to an Iranian port.31 If the Iranians persisted in trying to board after the U.S. Navy had certified the absence of contraband, Poindexter wrote to Weinberger, the “on-scene commander will use whatever means may be appropriate, including measured military force, to forestall any such attempt.”

  Shortly after the President Taylor incident, Crist formulated a plan to attack Iran should the country try to interfere with neutral shipping. CENTCOM planners drew up a top secret operation called Invoke Resolve that entailed massive air strikes on Iranian naval forces at Bandar Abbas. On February 7, 1986, Crist provided an overview of it in the Tank before the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense. U.S. Navy aircraft from the carrier in the Gulf of Oman would strike an important air defense headquarters outside the Persian Gulf near the small port town of Jask just before dawn, before flying at a low level to the Persian Gulf to destroy the Iranian surface-to-air Hawk missiles that ringed Bandar Abbas, as well as the Bandar Abbas International Airport, which, in addition to being a commercial airport, was the main southern airfield for the Iranian air force. Simultaneously, fourteen B-52s from Guam, supported by nearly fifty air-refueling tankers and an array of sophisticated reconnaissance planes and electronic warfare aircraft, would launch precision-guided cruise missiles that would lead, knocking out hard-to-reach targets such as the 1st Naval District headquarters building, which sat uncomfortably close to a hospital. Then nine of the massive four-engine aircraft—each capable of carrying sixty thousand pounds of bombs—would pummel the Bandar Abbas Naval Base. Operating in groups of three, each could saturate an area one and a half miles long by a mile wide with hot shrapnel and raw explosive power.32 Should Iran try to retaliate and escalate the conflict, the United States was prepared to conduct further air strikes and drop air-delivered mines in Bandar Abbas Harbor, which would effectively close it down for all military or civilian vessels.33

  Over the long term, General Crist thought that the only way for his Sleepy Hollow headquarters to counter either the Russians or the Iranians lay in building military ties with the Gulf Arabs. In the spring of 1986, just four months into command, General Crist wrote a lengthy letter to Secretary Weinberger laying out his thinking: “A premium has to be placed on coalition warfare. Our friends and allies have to assume a share of the responsibility for the defense of the region.”34 With Egypt, this already existed, but the Persian Gulf remained the key shortfall and the Gulf Cooperation Council was hardly a credible military alliance.

  Crist proposed developing separate bilateral military-to-military defense arrangements with each of the Gulf countries, with Crist’s staff synchronizing them into one combined force that could augment the U.S. military. “At a minimum,” he wrote to Chairman Crowe, “it offers the opportunity to open doors in countries that have largely been off-limits to the U.S. military.”

  Crist and Penzler flew to Washington to brief Weinberger on the idea, intending to concentrate on the three countries that offered the most promise: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait. The Pentagon leadership liked the idea and authorized Crist to go forward. Crist then ran it by Richard Murphy, who headed the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs Bureau. He too thought it had merit, and with Secretary Shultz’s concurrence, instructions went out to the embassies in the Gulf to assist in the CENTCOM planning effort.

  At first glance, Jeremiah Pearson belied the appearance of a warrior-diplomat. With a large round head and dowdy appearance, “he looked like a big sack,” one senior officer remarked. A pilot, he took on the persona of dumb fighter jock. But his bright blue eyes revealed a considerable intellect. With a degree in aeronautical engineering, he joined the marine corps in 1960, earning his wings as a marine corps pilot and distinguishing himself in Vietnam. Later he became a test pilot and was selected for the astronaut program. Four months after being promoted to brigadier general, in April 1986 he and his wife drove down in the stifling summer heat to Tampa, Florida, where Pearson assumed the job of CENTCOM’s forward headquarters commander and inspector general. Pearson arrived somewhat unsure of his duties and of his new boss, the CENTCOM commander. He had never served in a joint billet, and General Crist had a reputation within the marine corps for not liking aviators. But the marine corps commandant, General Paul Kelley, had called to give Pearson a strong recommendation, and after meeting with Pearson in his office at MacDill Air Force Base, Crist liked what he saw in the quiet, self-confident young brigadier general enough to give him the chance to test his mettle.

  Pearson spearhea
ded CENTCOM’s bilateral military planning with the Gulf Arabs, code-named New Splendor. He established a small planning cell within the headquarters that reported directly to General Crist. By both coincidence and design it was largely composed of marines. Pearson flew out nearly every week to the Gulf, traveling to each country, building trust through hours of sitting around talking and sipping cups of hypersweet tea. To pass the time on the nineteen-hour flights from Tampa to the Gulf, Pearson checked out Arab-language tapes from the Defense Language Institute and discovered he had an aptitude for the difficult language. Pearson soon commanded a conversational knowledge of Arabic—a novelty for military officers at CENTCOM—which greatly enhanced his standing with his Arab counterparts. “At least,” Pearson chuckled, “it kept me from getting ripped off in the souk.”35

  The Gulf Arabs had a healthy distrust of the United States. All questioned Washington’s ability to keep their cooperation confidential and out of the New York Times. Some leaders viewed CENTCOM as an American interventionist force, whose mission was only to advance U.S. goals in the area.36 All repeatedly asked Pearson, “Can we rely on Washington if Iran attacks us?”

  To help Pearson, Crist shared classified intelligence briefings about the Iran-Iraq War with the Gulf states. “It was one of the tools we used to build trust and cooperation and to get them thinking about their security,” said the CENTCOM intelligence director, Brigadier General Cloyd Pfister of the army.37 Not surprisingly, this proved very popular with regional leaders, and military intelligence officers, and the CIA traveled with Pearson to provide regular sanitized updates on Iran based upon sources that only a superpower had access to.

  Pearson’s meetings gradually moved from government buildings to the private homes of senior leaders. With the consultation of Murphy’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department, with whom Pearson spoke regularly, the conversations turned from the mundane to the substantive.38 Privately, the Gulf leaders all conveyed their concerns about Iranian intentions and the calamity that would befall their regimes if Tehran defeated Iraq. They accused Iran of trying to establish a Shia crescent across the Arab world, stretching from Lebanon, across Iraq, and down through the “Arabian” Gulf, as they preferred to call the body of water. Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, with their sizable Shia populations, voiced these concerns the loudest. Bahrain’s ruler, Sheik Isa, loathed the Iranians, whom he viewed as arrogant and intent on stirring up discontent among his Shia subjects. The powerful Saudi defense minister, Prince Sultan, echoed similar warnings to Pearson. The United States and Saudi Arabia, he stressed, needed to support Saddam Hussein because he provided a buffer against Iran, and they needed to be ready to use military force. “They were all scared shitless of the Iranians,” Pearson succinctly summarized.

  In June 1987, New Splendor achieved its first success with an agreement with Bahrain to defend the tiny emirate against Iranian attack. After lengthy meetings at the Bahrain Defense Force headquarters in Manama with defense minister Sheik Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa and chief of staff of the armed forces Major General Abdullah bin Salman al-Khalifa, the United States agreed to provide F-16s and other aircraft to jam Iranian communications and weapons systems in the event of an Iranian attack. To support the U.S. military, Sheik Khalifa promised to build a hardened command bunker near Manama (with the United States installing the communications suite) and a new airfield in the southern tip of the country especially for the U.S. military.39

  Pearson obtained a similar agreement with Kuwait. Unlike Bahrain, Kuwait’s border sat astride the key front of the Iran-Iraq War, and with the capture of al-Faw, the rumble of artillery fire rattled the windows of the American ambassador’s residence in Kuwait City. With the government’s open support of Baghdad, the emir worried that the Iranian military might try to outflank the Iraqi defenders by simply going through Kuwait. Pearson agreed that the U.S. government would enhance the Kuwait air defense system by selling them Hawk air defense missiles to be stationed around Kuwait City.

  Saudi Arabia proved the most difficult. A steady stream of diplomats and generals held labored negotiations with the Saudi delegation, headed by the strong-willed chief of staff of the Saudi Arabian air force, Lieutenant General Ahmad al-Buhairi, under the oversight of the powerful defense minister, Prince Sultan. They explored possible Iranian threats to the kingdom, including a large-scale ground attack by Iran and an Iranian air attack on Saudi oil facilities and oil tankers.40 At Weinberger’s urging, Crist repeatedly tried to get the Saudis to agree to permit pre-positioned American equipment and to allow access to Saudi air bases for U.S. combat aircraft. Each time, the Saudis politely changed the subject. While they made headway in solidifying the American AWACS integration into the Saudi air defense scheme and defense of the Fahd Line, the Saudis had little enthusiasm for anything formal. As Penzler recalled, they wanted to keep talking just in case Iran did attack and they needed American help, but otherwise preferred to keep CENTCOM at a distance. “It was just too much to ask of the Saudis before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait,” said General Russell Violett, who enjoyed a close relationship with the Saudi royal family.41

  In October 1985, Admiral William Crowe replaced Vessey as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the nation’s top military man. A balding, bulbous Oklahoman, Crowe had risen through the ranks through his political acumen, not because he was a warrior. With a doctorate in political science from Princeton, Crowe held a series of strategy and policy positions inside the Beltway, beginning with an early posting as an assistant to President Eisenhower’s naval aide. The one notable exception was in 1970, when he volunteered to serve as a senior adviser to the South Vietnamese riverine forces. His experience fighting the Vietcong in small patrol boats in the brown-water tributaries of the Mekong Delta left a significant impact on Crowe’s views of war. “I did not have a traditional naval officer’s view, but one more akin to the army or marines, shaped by fighting a guerrilla war,” Crowe would later reflect.42 In the 1970s, Crowe also served as commander of the small show-the-flag Middle East Force based in Bahrain. A purely diplomatic assignment, it had afforded Crowe insight into the political dynamics of the Persian Gulf and the Arab governments.

  As the United States discussed Iran strategy, in 1986 Congress forced sweeping legislation down on a hidebound Pentagon. Officially called the Defense Reorganization Act, it was widely referred to by the names of its two sponsors, Barry Goldwater and William Nichols. Sam Nunn and Les Aspin, among others, looked into how best to integrate the separate services into a more effective joint war-fighting force. The need was real. Interservice rivalry plagued the Pentagon. Each branch independently procured and developed its own hardware. Key systems, such as air force and navy air defense radars, could not share data; radios were not compatible. Even such common items as wrenches differed from service to service. Over the objections of Secretary Weinberger and the service chiefs, Goldwater-Nichols passed, marking the first major restructuring of the Department of Defense since 1947. The legislation elevated the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the principal military adviser to the president, rather than the corporate body composed of the chairman and the four service chiefs. It clearly delineated the military chain of command as running from the president to the secretary of defense to the unified four-star commanders in chief, or CINCs (pronounced “sinks”), such as Crist at CENTCOM, and provided the CINCs wide latitude to organize and employ the forces of all four services in their theaters. This effectively cut out all the service heads from any operational decisions and limited them to training and equipping their forces. The days of the chief of naval operations actually controlling the fleet had ended.43

  Crowe’s first response to this new law was to issue a personal message to the unified commanders that he advocated a go-slow approach to this new policy. Crowe chose not to exercise his new authorities, but continued to defer to the other Joint Chiefs for their input and worked at building consensus decisions.44

  It would take
time and a necessity for the new law to gain acceptance. Change comes painfully to conservative institutions like the U.S. military. Unfortunately for the generals and admirals inside the Pentagon, Iran would force this change. War was on the horizon and the Revolutionary Guard provided the test case for this new way of joint warfare.

  Ten

  ARMS FOR THE AYATOLLAH

  On the morning of June 18, 1985, Major General Colin Powell, the senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, sat at his desk in the plush, expansive defense secretary’s suite on the outside ring of the third floor of the Pentagon. A number of classified documents were stacked in Powell’s in-box for Weinberger, the most sensitive delivered by couriers using locked pouches. One document immediately caught Powell’s eye—a top secret “eyes only” draft National Security Decision Directive from the White House. These directives were some of the most important documents produced by the government. Intended for the president’s signature, they laid out U.S. foreign policy and served as principal guides to focus the entire U.S. government. The cover letter was signed by National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane and entitled “U.S. Policy Toward Iran.”

  What McFarlane proposed was a drastic change in American policy toward Iran. “Dynamic political evolution is taking place inside Iran,” McFarlane began. “Instability caused by the pressures of the Iran-Iraq War, economic deterioration and regime infighting create the potential for major changes in Iran. The Soviet Union is better positioned than the United States to exploit and benefit from any power struggle that results in changes in the Iranian regime.” The future presented a picture of growing unrest that gave Moscow a golden opportunity to exploit the turbulence. The strategic buffer provided by Iran protecting Persian Gulf oil would be gone, effectively opening up the entire region to Soviet control. It was a dire prediction and a grave strategic threat to the West if the United States did not develop a new strategy.