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

by David Crist

  In 1987, Stephen Richter became alarmed and immediately ordered Reza Kahlili and the other agents to use different return addresses in other countries. But the damage had already been done. When combined with the letters to Frankfurt and the merging of the BQ Tug operation, these gross errors handed Iranian intelligence America’s entire spy network within the country.

  Captain Touradj Riahi’s own actions had raised suspicions as well. The man who compromised Iran’s attack on Saudia Arabia took an enormous risk in 1987 by traveling with his wife and daughter to visit his son in Honolulu. During that vacation, he apparently met with his CIA handlers for a debriefing. Captain Riahi also made a memorable visit to Pearl Harbor. In a photograph from that day, a smiling Touradj Riahi holds his beloved daughter with blue skies and the stark white USS Arizona memorial in the background. The fact that Pearl Harbor also housed the American fleet, then aggressively confronting Captain Riahi’s own Iranian navy in a quasi-war for control over the Persian Gulf, did not escape the notice of his minders back in Tehran.

  The MOIS had been prepared to take action a year earlier, but delayed in hopes of catching an even bigger prize: a particular American CIA officer operating in nonofficial cover, or NOC. In late 1987, Iran intelligence read a letter communiqué from Tehfran to one of the Iranian agents saying there would be a “new communication system for Iran.” Although the message was ambiguous, the Iranians concluded it referenced an undercover CIA operative, and they hoped to capture this very valuable American spy. Iranian counterintelligence officers believed the NOC was due to arrive under the guise of a foreign businessman. Without any public ties to the U.S. government, many NOCs spend their entire CIA careers pretending to be private citizens and never even visit CIA headquarters. It is hazardous duty. Without embassy cover, NOCs lack diplomatic immunity and, if caught, could face a death sentence.34 The NOC, however, never arrived. Whether the Iranian conclusion was correct is not clear, but after the first BQ Tug arrests, Langley may have concluded the risk was too great to travel to Tehran.35

  In 1988, an Iranian hit team targeted the CIA officers doing the recruitment in Istanbul. To flush them out, Philip Giraldi, outfitted with a bulletproof vest, went out the front door of the consulate, past the usual crowd of Iranians clustered around its entrance waiting for visas, and walked down the street, trailed by three Turkish surveillance teams. Two Iranian men emerged out of the crowd and followed him. After walking about a block, the Turks descended on them with guns drawn. They threw the two Iranians to the ground, removing a concealed pistol from one of the MOIS agents.36

  In September 1988, the Iranian intelligence service struck. Former BQ Tug agents were the easiest to track down. Many were simple peasants, and a visit to a dark holding cell with menacing interrogators proved sufficient to get them to talk. When one talked, the MOIS would quickly roll up his entire team. When coercion failed, they would be pinned to a cot and beaten on the soles of their feet with a wire rod. Months of solitary confinement in dark cells, the monotony broken only by beatings, waterboarding, and electric shocks, loosened the tongues of those who continued to withhold information.37

  In February 1989, Captain Riahi’s eight-year-old daughter bounded home from school. She put in her favorite video, Cinderella, only to discover that the VCR was broken, prompting an emotional outburst when her mother arrived home from shopping. Just then, four men arrived at the front door. Serious and unsmiling, they demanded entry and began methodically searching the house while the captain’s wife and daughter waited nervously in the living room.

  A couple of hours later, Captain Riahi arrived home, tired after an hour-long bus commute from his office. Two security officers greeted him and coolly ordered him to accompany them. As his wife began to cry, he gave his daughter a kiss and said a quick good-bye before being placed in the backseat of an unmarked car and whisked away.

  Iran finally went public about the spy network on April 21, 1989, when Hashemi Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament and future president, announced at Friday prayers that “several dens of espionage” had been uncovered. He was repeatedly interrupted by a large crowd chanting, “American spies must be executed!”

  “God’s decree will be carried out!” Rafsanjani responded.38

  On April 26, the information minister held a press conference and released the names of sixteen men in custody, including Captain Riahi and air force colonel Masoud Babaii. Noting that the CIA recruited its “hirelings” mainly from those seeking visas to America, he described this tactic as Satan-like, exploiting the weak elements in a man to force a betrayal.39 Over the next few months, Iranian news reported forty men arrested. A few were paraded before the cameras in daily news conferences to confess their crimes. When questioned about the allegations, the White House press secretary denied any knowledge.

  Iran’s public pronouncement was the first Langley knew of the spy network’s compromise. Philip Giraldi, who had just left Iran operations to work counterterrorism, recalled first reading of it in the International Herald Tribune. He stormed into Richter’s office demanding to know what had happened, but Richter never answered him. Then widows, or soon to be widows, of the spies suddenly began arriving at the American consulate in Istanbul and the embassy in Ankara pleading for help. The new deputy chief at Tehfran, Gary Schroen (who would be instrumental in the CIA’s paramilitary operations in Afghanistan after 9/11), and Reuel Gerecht scrambled to obtain American visas for the women and their children. Captain Riahi’s wife and daughter were flown out of Tehran to Istanbul, and then on to Vienna and the United States, where the CIA settled them in the United States.

  A month later, in May 1989, Iranian state television began a four-part miniseries about the CIA spy ring entitled Top Secret. Part documentary and part propaganda, the docudrama included tantalizing details about the long history of the CIA’s meddling in the country and of America’s desire to oust the Islamic regime. Attracting large audiences, the show included interviews with the men arrested, describing their training and even the use of invisible ink to communicate with their American handlers. One episode included confessions of a British businessman, Roger Cooper, who had been arrested in 1985 and accused of spying for the British government. He had been given the unusual sentence of death plus ten years.40 The series repeatedly warned Iranians not to fall for the CIA’s lies: “The only promises of the spies and the intelligence organizations to their agents and contacts which are realized are betrayal of self, treachery against the homeland, regret, and sorrow,” cautioned the announcer.41

  For Touradj Riahi’s wife and family, this was not a TV show but a very real unfolding tragedy. His captors kept Captain Riahi in an isolated cell in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran. Once a small facility managed by Savak under the shah, the prison now swelled with several thousand political prisoners—leftists, separatists, and pro-Iraqis. Many would be killed in an orgy of executions ordered by Ayatollah Khomeini that July. Using sleep deprivation and occasional fists to the face and body, Riahi’s interrogators repeatedly questioned him to learn what information he had passed on to the Americans and to get him to confess his crimes publicly.

  He proved a tough man to break. While admitting to having passed war plans to the Americans, he refused to admit to treason. He was tried before a military special war tribunal, a proceeding videotaped by the authorities. Standing in the docket, he repeatedly denied being unfaithful to his country. “I remain loyal to Iran,” he said, implying that the current Islamist government was not. Not surprisingly, the testimony never aired on Iranian television.

  The guards allowed his family to visit a few times. On one occasion, his wife and other relatives hoped to get the authorities to release him for just one day, on March 21, the Iranian new year. Arriving at the prison, the captain’s wife prompted her young daughter to ask that her father be freed for the day. The request was denied, but they were granted a brief visit in a basement room.

  Captain Riahi looked thin and
haggard. He did not discuss his plight, but complained that he spent most of his days in a dark, windowless cell. Occasionally, a guard would take pity on him and allowed some light to read either the Koran or a religious and social treatise written by Ayatollah Khomeini, both common items in Iranian jails.

  In early November 1990, Iran prepared to mark the tenth anniversary of the November 4 seizure of the U.S. embassy—now a holiday called the National Day of Confronting Global Arrogance. The government planned a massive demonstration in front of the former American embassy. Inside the old chancellery building, the intelligence ministry opened an exhibit displaying sixty-eight volumes of classified American documents, painstakingly pieced together after having been shredded by the embassy staff before the takeover, as well as pictures and models of the helicopters used in the abortive American rescue raid, and pieces from the Iran Air plane shot down by the U.S. cruiser Vincennes the year before. Loudspeakers serenaded visitors with the confessions of the recently captured American spies.

  On the evening before the official anniversary, Iranian television began another series with more of the spies on display. They included the air force colonel who had agreed to work for the CIA for two years in return for asylum. Appearing weary and gaunt, he began sobbing as he warned Iranians “not to become entrapped in the spider’s web of espionage services, because their golden dreams will become a hellish nightmare.” That evening, Captain Riahi was allowed to briefly speak to his wife, explaining that he was being moved to another cell. This was an ominous indication for those in Iranian jails.

  The next morning, hundreds of thousands of Iranians gathered in front of the old American embassy celebrating the takeover a decade earlier, carrying signs of the Ayatollah Khomeini while the streets echoed with the roar of “Death to America!” Prominent government officials spoke, lashing out against the Islamic Republic’s enemies.42

  Riahi’s jailors had allowed him one last call to his family. He spoke with a younger cousin, but neither his wife nor his daughter was at home. It would be the last anyone heard from Touradj Riahi.43

  The Iranian government used the anniversary of the seizure of the embassy to send a clear message to Washington about the fate of its spies. Riahi and three other naval officers were escorted to the gallows at Evin Prison. The executioners first placed the noose around Commodore Kanoush Hakimi, who had revealed Iran’s sensitive arms purchases from China. Riahi was next to drop through the trapdoor, then, finally, two other junior officers who had also spied for the CIA.44 The next day, the captain’s family learned his fate when Tehran television announced the executions of four traitors.45

  Over the next year, Iranian authorities executed more than fifty men, including some convicted of spying for Iraq and Israel.46 A number of the BQ Tug agents who had more menial roles in the CIA paramilitary scheme were given minimal prison terms or allowed to serve their sentences in internal exile—they were not imprisoned but forbidden to leave their hometowns without permission.47

  The CIA never held any officials accountable for the deaths of twenty agents in one of the worst blunders in the agency’s history. Despite procedural weaknesses at Tehfran detailed in the CIA’s internal investigation, the senior leadership at Langley decided not to reprimand anyone or so much as derail a single career. Langley viewed BQ Tug as a sideshow. The investigation, as one CIA case officer remembered, had little consequence. “One moment you could find copies of this counterintelligence report and the next moment they were all gone,” he said.

  Giraldi never got over the debacle and the needless deaths of the men he’d recruited. “We eat people alive, spit them out, and then don’t give a shit about them afterwards,” he recalled bitterly. “At the end of the day, what did we accomplish? Twenty guys got killed, and some people got promoted.” He decided to put in his retirement papers.

  As the decade ended, Cold War concerns gave way to new challenges. The CIA found itself in much the same position as ten years earlier, with an intelligence network in tatters and with William Casey’s ambition of bringing Iran back into the Western fold frustrated. Looking forward, it would be local potentates—rather than the Red Army—that threatened American interests. Saddam Hussein’s Pyrrhic victory left Iraq devastated but with the largest Arab army. Iran was bloodied but unbowed. After Iran-Contra, Washington politicians remained skittish about trying to thaw relations with Tehran; however, the Islamic Republic remained a natural balance to Iraq. There remained one important outstanding issue: the American hostages in Lebanon. But with a new, pragmatic Iranian president, there was hope that the two nations could leave their animosity back in the 1980s.

  Twenty

  GOODWILL BEGETS GOODWILL

  On Sunday, February 4, 1990, President George H. W. Bush returned from a weekend at the presidential retreat at Camp David in the mountains of western Maryland. After changing into more formal clothes, he attended a concert in the White House and then retired for the evening. Around nine forty p.m., a call came through the White House switchboard. On the other end reportedly was an aide to Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani calling Bush from Tehran. Bush’s close friend and national security adviser General Brent Scowcroft took the call. The man on the other end sounded believable, so Scowcroft agreed to another call the next evening between the two presidents.

  For the past year, President Bush had been working to get the remaining hostages in Lebanon released. Bush wanted a rapprochement with Iran. He believed it served as a buffer against Iraq and the Soviet Union, and the hostages remained the major stumbling block between the two countries.1 In his inaugural address the previous January, he extended a major olive branch to the Iranians to try to get them released. “Assistance can be shown here, and will be long remembered. Goodwill begets goodwill. Good faith can be a spiral that endlessly moves on.” He continued on, hoping to modify Iranian worries about working with America. “Great nations like great men must keep their word. When America says something, America means it, whether a treaty or an agreement or a vow made on marble steps.”

  A lot had changed in Iran over the past couple of years. The Iran-Iraq War had ended. Ayatollah Khomeini had passed on to the house not made with hands, replaced by Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, a cleric of no particular renown. Rafsanjani now served as the new president. A pragmatist who had supported the arms-for-hostages exchange earlier, Rafsanjani ran construction companies in Iran and had a good head for business. Quick and clever, he appreciated mammon as much as the imam. He understood the importance of the private sector and wanted to limit the size of the government in the economy. Rafsanjani had an open mind regarding relations with other countries, including the United States. He worried that the constant mantra of “Down with America” was both naive and counterproductive. “What does this mean?” he once said mockingly to an adviser. He worried that the Americans would misunderstand the meaning—it meant a rejection of American policies, not the nation, its culture, or its people.2 Rafsanjani sent out feelers to the State Department indicating the Iranian president wanted better relations with the West and to get past the animosity of the last decade.

  The next evening, Bush picked up the phone in his second-floor office. While long-serving policy officials Richard Haass and Sandy Charles listened in from the Situation Room, through a State Department interpreter the American president spoke for twenty-nine minutes with a man in Tehran claiming to be Rafsanjani.3 The caller said Iran wanted to improve relations and was prepared to release the American hostages in Lebanon. He supported the effort by United Nations secretary general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar to achieve that end. Before hanging up, he added that he, Rafsanjani, wanted to make a public announcement about the release so the world would know that Iran had taken the first step to improve relations.

  Unfortunately, President Bush had not spoken to President Rafsanjani. After hanging up, Bush spoke with a CIA officer in Falls Church about the origin of the call, and after a flurry of talks with his advisers and with de Cué
llar in New York, Bush learned he had been duped. The caller had been an Iranian opposed to any rapprochement with the United States. He apparently intended to publicly embarrass Rafsanjani.

  The incident served as a disturbing indicator of the state of relations between the United States and Iran. Not only were the two sides not talking, but they struggled to even figure out how. Both sides preferred to talk through intermediaries, which provided a level of deniability. Despite the rhetoric, neither country wanted to be the first to publicly extend the hand. The United States remained ignorant of Iran, so much so that the president of the United States could not even differentiate between an official call from a head of state and a prank caller.

  The American hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon colored the new president’s thinking regarding Iran. The arms-for-hostages fiasco continued to reverberate. The issue had been a major political club used by the Democrats during the 1988 election. It culminated in a testy exchange in January 1988 when CBS News anchor Dan Rather badgered Bush about his support for Reagan’s arms transfers to Iran. “You made us hypocrites before the world,” Rather said.

  Bush responded vigorously, citing the details of the capture and torture of the CIA station chief, William Buckley. “If I erred, it was on the side of getting those hostages out!”

  Hostage taking remained a lucrative practice in Lebanon. In 1987, ABC reporter Charles Glass had arrived to do research for a book. An Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer who’d learned of his planned visit to Sidon drove to a Hezbollah agent’s house in the southern suburbs of Beirut. The Lebanese moved quickly and snatched Glass near the airport. For once, the CIA had good information, including the license plate of one of the cars to be used, but simply could not get to Glass in time.4 That same year, Marine Colonel Richard Higgins, a member of the UN security mission in Lebanon, was captured while driving along the coast to meet with a Shia Amal leader. His captor, Mustafa Dirani, headed a small group called Believers’ Resistance, which sympathized with Hezbollah.