by David Crist
Rather than containing Iran as Weinberger advocated, the national security adviser proposed détente. McFarlane recommended using allies to sell Iran weapons as a means of undercutting Soviet leverage and in the process currying favor with “moderate” elements within the regime. This could pull Iran back into the Western fold and array it against the Soviet Union.
Since this was well above Powell’s pay grade, he dutifully sent the document in to Weinberger, writing on a small white buck slip with his letterhead, “SECDEF, This came in ‘Eyes Only’ for you. After you have seen recommend I pass to Rich Armitage for his analysis.”
Cap Weinberger was appalled. He had never forgiven the current regime in Tehran for seizing the U.S. embassy and holding the hostages for 444 days—an event he viewed as a national humiliation. “The only moderates are in the grave,” he thought. Now this man in the White House is trying to say we approach them in the spirit of forgiveness and based on the assumption there were some sort of fanciful pragmatists around Khomeini? “It was nonsense.”1 Weinberger sent the document back to Powell, scrawling across his military assistant’s white paper, “This is almost too absurd to comment on. By all means pass it on to Rich, but the assumption here is: 1) Iran is about to fall, and 2) we can deal with them on a rational basis. It’s like asking Gaddafi to Washington for a cozy chat.”
Armitage had the same reaction to the draft directive as his boss. “Bullshit,” he said, cutting to the quick.
What no one realized in June 1985 was that McFarlane’s proposal would embark the United States on a foreign policy path that would lead to the biggest scandal of the Reagan administration, Iran-Contra. Profits from secret arms sales to Iran were siphoned off to fund pro-American guerrillas fighting the leftist government of Nicaragua. Three government investigations with multiple indictments followed before the independent counsel finally wrapped up the last one in 1993, after a last-minute string of pardons by outgoing president George H. W. Bush ended the affair. In reality, Iran-Contra was actually two separate issues: one the attempt by the Reagan administration to resupply anticommunist guerrillas in Nicaragua, and the other the sale of weapons to Iran in the vain hope of releasing seven American hostages being held by Hezbollah as a precursor to renewed diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic. The two efforts merged in the White House under a self-righteous marine lieutenant colonel named Oliver North.
On the afternoon of July 3, 1985, David Kimche, the director general of the Israeli foreign ministry and a close friend to Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, stopped by Bud McFarlane’s office in the West Wing just down the hall from the Oval Office. After the usual pleasantries about the hot, humid Washington weather, Kimche asked to talk to McFarlane alone. McFarlane respected the Oxford-educated Kimche, who had a distinguished career with the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. The two men had worked together two years before during the U.S. intervention in Beirut, and McFarlane found him highly intelligent and a kindred spirit on their views of the Middle East.2 When the other staff left the room, Kimche said, “You know, Mike Ledeen came and asked us whether we had any judgments about an Iranian opposition movement. We told them we do.”
Michael Ledeen was a loquacious, self-appointed Middle East expert whom the National Security Council kept on retainer. He frequently vacationed in Israel and had developed good contacts with senior government officials there. In early May 1985, Ledeen flew to Israel and met for nearly an hour with Peres. The Israeli prime minister expressed some displeasure with Israel’s intelligence on Iran and advocated that the two nations work together to improve both countries’ knowledge of Iran. Ledeen enthusiastically relayed this back to McFarlane.
“A year or so ago,” Kimche said, “we began talking with Iranians who are disaffected. We believe we have made contact with people who are both willing and able, over time and with support, to change the government.”
Kimche described an Iran close to collapse, with internal dissent rising. But the pro-Western moderates inside the government needed outside support, especially from the United States. To show their bona fides, they offered to release the American hostages in Lebanon, likely in exchange for some military equipment. “They are confident they can do this,” Kimche ended. It seemed almost too good to be true—a potential opening with Iranian moderates who could possibly steer Iran back toward the United States, in addition to the release of the Lebanon hostages.
McFarlane mentioned Kimche’s proposal to President Reagan a few days later. “Gosh, that’s great news!” Reagan responded. He instructed McFarlane to explore the matter further.
Kimche’s proposal was nothing new. The Israeli ambassador to Washington, Moshe Arens, had suggested a similar plan to use weapons to influence the Iranian government in October 1982. The Iran-Iraq War had put the two allies on opposite sides of the conflict. Despite Iran’s support for Hezbollah, Israel viewed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as the greater of the two enemies. The Israeli government strongly opposed the Reagan administration’s effort to secretly support Iraq and allow third-party countries to provide weapons. During the days of the shah, Israel and Iran had good relations, and many senior Israelis still harbored ideas of Iran’s being a natural ally against their common Arab foe. Israel repeatedly lobbied Reagan administration officials to endorse its arms-selling scheme as a means to improve relations with Iran.3
In the summer of 1985, agents working on behalf of the United States surreptitiously shipping arms to the Nicaraguan resistance stumbled on a warehouse in Lisbon, Portugal, with Israeli weapons headed for Iran. When confronted, a senior Israeli replied that they had not technically violated the ban on weapons to Iran because the arms were being shipped by a private company, with each aircraft dropping off arms also returning with Iranian Jews. The Israeli government permitted this because it would build credibility with moderate elements in the Iranian military that might grow strong enough to establish a more reasonable Iranian government.4 Now Kimche approached McFarlane to propose this same idea.5
Israel’s contact within the Iranian regime was Manucher Ghorbanifar. Born in Iran in the early 1940s, this self-described export-import businessman made a comfortable living by peddling his services to various intelligence agencies, including the shah’s Savak and Israel’s Mossad. Short, stocky, with thinning hair and a round face, he had a forceful personality and the manner of a polished used-car salesman.
In 1984, he approached a U.S. Army intelligence officer working in the Middle East, who in turn passed him off to the CIA’s Tehfran operation in Frankfurt. Ghorbanifar claimed he had information about the recent kidnapping of William Buckley, the Beirut CIA station chief, and even more important, knowledge of a plot to assassinate candidates in the upcoming American presidential election. The CIA administered a polygraph to Ghorbanifar. He failed on every significant question. In June, the CIA station in Frankfurt administered another lie detector test to Ghorbanifar, but he failed that one too. Langley concluded he could not be trusted and issued a “burn notice,” which notified all U.S. intelligence agencies to avoid using Ghorbanifar as an intelligence asset.6
On Thursday, July 11, Ledeen met for lunch with Adolph “Al” Schwimmer, an Israeli arms merchant and adviser to Prime Minister Peres. Schwimmer told Ledeen that Ghorbanifar had access to the highest levels of government in Tehran, including senior cleric and reputed moderate Ayatollah Hassan Karoubi. In exchange for the seven hostages in Lebanon, Ghorbanifar proposed that the United States allow Israel to sell Iran around a hundred TOW antitank missiles. The swap of armaments for hostages would lead to improved relations with Khomeini’s regime. Ledeen liked the idea, writing McFarlane that the TOW missiles were part of that process, “a demonstration of good faith and a sample of what would happen if Iran agreed to a rapprochement with us.”7 As the proposal came from the most senior level of the Israeli government, McFarlane did not look at the recommendations with too critical an eye. One hundred antitank missiles, he thought, certainly would not change the
balance of power in the Iran-Iraq War, and if it secured the Lebanese hostages and provided an opening with moderates in the regime, McFarlane believed the gains outweighed any risks.8
President Reagan was supine in a bed at Bethesda Naval Hospital, just outside Washington in suburban Maryland, recovering from the removal of a cancerous polyp in his colon. McFarlane went up to the president’s room. Reagan sat up in his bed, tired but in good spirits. After discussing some new issues on arms control with the Soviets, McFarlane laid out the Israeli proposal. Reagan brightened at the prospect of releasing the hostages and said he understood why Iranians would want to overthrow Khomeini. Reagan encouraged his national security adviser to continue pursuing the Israeli opening.9
Next, Kimche flew to Washington and met with McFarlane. Was the United States going to sell Iran the weapons? If not, Kimche pressed, “What if we [the Israelis] provide the weapons?” This passed the cost off to Washington but avoided placing the Americans in the awkward position of directly providing weapons to Iran. If Israel did this, Kimche wanted assurances that the United States would backfill their stock of TOW missiles.
With Reagan back in the White House recuperating from his surgery, on the morning of August 6 he met with his senior advisers in the second-floor residence. The assemblage sat at the far west end of the long main hallway in a comfortable, yellow-painted sitting room, beneath a large half-moon window overlooking the press office and the long white portico leading to the West Wing and Oval Office. Reagan, dressed in his bathrobe, presided over the meeting, sitting on a red flowery-patterned chair. McFarlane opened with a rundown on his meeting with Kimche and the Israeli offer to ship the TOWs in lieu of the United States, provided “we” backfill their missiles.
Weinberger immediately opposed the idea. “I don’t think it’s legal.” He went on, “Even if a third party shipped the missiles, it still requires notification of Congress.” As far as an opening for Iran, he said, “Nothing indicates that there has been any slight change in the virulently anti-Western, anti-American attitude of those in charge of Iran.” He added ominously, “It would open us up to blackmail by any one of those who knew.”10
Shultz and Weinberger detested each other and were often at loggerheads over policy, but in this instance they found common cause. Shultz agreed with Weinberger’s conclusions. After carefully examining the idea, he concluded it would seriously undermine our public diplomacy to isolate Iran, and despite the pronouncements of this being a precursor to an opening with Iran, it looked to Shultz like a straight-out arms-for-hostages deal.
While Bill Casey did not attend that meeting, he was the one man who supported McFarlane. The CIA director shared similar concerns about Soviet influence in Iran and the prospects for wooing Iran with weapons. On May 17, 1985, CIA national intelligence officer Graham Fuller reinforced this view in a memo to Casey suggesting that the Iranian arms embargo might work against U.S. interests by moving the Iranians, who were desperately seeking arms on the world market to carry on their war with Iraq, toward a closer relationship with the Soviet Union.
To Casey, what the national security adviser proposed simply rehashed the CIA’s current tasking from the 1981 presidential finding, which required him to build conduits inside Iran to influence the regime. After four years, access still plagued his agency. While they had developed their spy network in the country, it remained primarily composed of midgrade military officers and bureaucrats. They did not penetrate the veil of secrecy that surrounded the Islamic Republic. The true decision makers around Khomeini remained elusive. If the Israelis thought they had some new contacts that might help the CIA fulfill this mission, Casey supported them. Casey also worried about the fate of William Buckley, the CIA station chief held hostage by Hezbollah, whom he had encouraged to go to Lebanon in the wake of the 1983 embassy bombing. That spring, reports began filtering back to the agency that the Iranians were torturing Buckley.11 If the Israelis thought that Ghorbanifar might succeed in freeing Buckley, why not give it a try?
President Reagan did not make a decision that morning but called McFarlane into the Oval Office several days later. As McFarlane later described it, “The President brooded quietly for a few moments. He pressed his fingertips tighter reflexively and stared at the carpet. Finally he looked up: ‘Well, I’ve thought about it, and I want to go ahead with it. I think that’s the right thing to do.’”12
The idea of an opening to Iran had long appealed to the perennially optimistic president. During his first term, Reagan signed three letters on White House stationery, each delivered by a different country’s foreign minister, to the Iranian government, urging them to improve relations with the United States.13 While he had received no response, he believed the two religious countries remained natural allies against the Soviets, with a common cause in Afghanistan. The plight of the seven American hostages bothered Reagan. A naturally compassionate man, Reagan frequently let his heart, rather than his brain, govern his decisions.
“The president always talked about the hostages, and at times it seemed that it was his greatest priority,” Poindexter said later. “But the two dovetailed together. We would have tried reaching out to the Iranians even if we did not have the hostages.”14
On August 20, 1985, an Israeli-chartered 707 aircraft landed in Tehran with a pallet load of ninety-six U.S.-made TOW missiles. No hostages emerged from Lebanon. Ghorbanifar, who accompanied the shipment to Iran, claimed that Revolutionary Guards had seized the missiles on the tarmac and absconded with them; the weapons had failed to reach the desired moderates. During a contentious meeting in Europe, Ghorbanifar explained that the United States needed to send the second batch of four hundred TOWs in order to gain the release of one hostage. After a phone call between Reagan and McFarlane, Reagan agreed to ship the second batch of missiles.
Early on the morning of September 15, another Israeli-chartered aircraft landed in the northwestern Iranian city of Tabriz loaded with 408 missiles. This time, Ghorbanifar came through. The Iranians offered to release one hostage, and the United States could decide which one. McFarlane and Casey wanted Buckley, but through Ghorbanifar the Iranians relayed that Buckley was “too ill” to be released. Buckley had, in fact, been dead for nearly three months. McFarlane then requested Reverend Benjamin Weir, in part because his family had been outspoken critics of the administration’s attempts to free the hostages. Thus far, 504 TOW missiles had yielded one hostage.
In anticipation of the possible hostage release, the Joint Staff began working on a contingency plan to secure the released Americans in Beirut and safely transport them out to Cyprus and back to the States. The nuts and bolts of working out the details within the National Security Council fell to forty-two-year-old Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. Charismatic and energetic, North was a decorated and respected Vietnam veteran. He arrived at the White House in 1981 as one of several military officers assigned to an unadorned room on the third floor of the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the West Wing. North would likely have gone on to a successful military career, but the excitement and power of his NSC position seduced him, and he extended his tour at the White House, now in its fifth year. North, as the CIA’s Robert Gates noted, had the deserved reputation as the “go-to guy to get things done.”
Ghorbanifar lied about a great many things, but the Israelis knew he had real access to senior officials in the Iranian government who desperately wanted American weapons. All of Iran’s military equipment had come from the United States. After six years of war and an American-led arms embargo, chronic shortages existed in the stocks of munitions and spare parts needed to keep its war machine operating. With Iraq’s superiority in airplanes and tanks, missiles to counter these were especially important. While the Iranian government remained committed to winning the war and spreading the revolution, splits developed within the government between pragmatists and purists over approaching the West, including the United States, for the needed military hardware. A confidant of Ay
atollah Khomeini’s, speaker of the Iranian parliament Hashemi Rafsanjani, led the realist camp. A corrupt but skilled political survivor who would later enrich himself by cornering Iran’s pistachio exports, he had commanded the army earlier in the war. He had no qualms about trading with the Great Satan in order to win the war. If that led to improved relations, so be it. Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi supported Rafsanjani. An architect before the revolution, the stern Mousavi came more from the leftist body of the Islamist movement. He shared Rafsanjani’s views and advocated working with the Israelis, although he seemed guided more by the pressing needs of war than any opening with the West.
On the other side of the divide sat the appointed successor to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri. A liberal by Iranian standards, the learned theologian from Qom staunchly supported the revolution, but he believed in a more liberal government, one in which an Islamist jurist presided in a multiparty limited democracy. He later clashed with Khomeini over the heavy-handed tactics used to suppress opponents, especially the mass executions ordered by Khomeini in 1988. But in spite of his democratic persona, he had no interest in any rapprochement with the United States. He maintained his own armed militia, headed by the brother of his son-in-law, Mehdi Hashemi. A thuggish dogmatist, Hashemi had served time in jail during the shah’s rule for killing prostitutes and homosexuals. He remained totally dedicated to Montazeri and worked to export the revolution to Lebanon through Hezbollah.