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

by David Crist

  Iran denied any involvement. The two nations had been secretly working to mend relations. The Iranian president tasked his trusted adviser Hossein Mousavian to head the Iranian delegation to talk with the Saudis. The first meeting occurred at the Saudi prince’s oceanside villa near Casablanca. Three more meetings followed in Jeddah, successfully concluding a large framework, including security guarantees, just three months before the attack. “This was a major strategic initiative,” recalled Mousavian. “Why would Iran risk it by attacking Khobar?”21 It would not be the first time, however, the left and right hands of the Iranian government were not in sync.

  Two months later, contract security guards noticed individuals conducting surveillance on the large American logistics base west of Kuwait City called Camp Doha. It looked eerily similar to what had preceded the Khobar Towers attack, with the suspicious men especially interested in the location of living quarters of American service personnel. U.S. Army counterintelligence officers suspected they were Iranian agents, scoping out the base for a reprisal attack should the United States retaliate for Khobar Towers.

  In September, a stocky, dark-haired marine arrived as the deputy chief in Tampa: Anthony “Tony” Zinni. A year later he moved up to take over as the new CENTCOM commander, in charge of all U.S. military forces in the Middle East.

  Known by the call sign “the Godfather,” he was a graduate of Villanova University and the jungles of Vietnam. Politically a moderate Democrat, in his youth Zinni had campaigned for Jack Kennedy. He was charismatic and possessed an innate gift for public speaking, mixing humor with thoughtful analysis. He proved equally popular at CENTCOM. The long-serving command historian observed that “Zinni was the only commander the staff was actually sorry to see retire.”22

  Iran kept Tony Zinni awake at night. Following the imposition of American trade restrictions in the spring of 1995, Iranian Revolutionary Guard small boats stepped up their harassment of American warships transiting the Persian Gulf. They repeatedly approached at high speeds, conducting mock attacks on American warships. “It was clearly orchestrated and planned,” said Zinni.23

  One incident was typical. On May 1, 1997, the American destroyer USS Paul F. Foster was steaming in the northern Gulf enforcing UN sanctions against Iraq by interdicting oil smuggling. An Iranian fast boat suddenly appeared in the distance. The boat headed straight for the American warship, turning away at the last minute, speeding past the alarmed American sailors at less than fifty yards. While the ship’s captain did not open fire, Zinni worried that other skippers would show less restraint.

  “This outward hostility by the Revolutionary Guard might cause a spark and ignite a conflict,” Zinni wrote in a message after the incident. “Eventually some captain would open fire on an Iranian boat—who might have intended to bump him—but the ship’s skipper doesn’t know that the Iranian boat isn’t packed with explosives. Then we have a serious problem.”24 The State Department sent a warning through the Swiss to Tehran to rein in the guard, but it had no effect.

  The Revolutionary Guard actions came from zealotry as much as national policies. Guard officers were expected to act with both initiative and aggressiveness. Those who showed these characteristics received promotions, and officers frequently pushed the envelope with the Americans. In the case of the Paul F. Foster, the likely cause was mammon. An irate Revolutionary Guard officer profiting from the illicit Iraqi trade objected to the U.S. warship interfering with his side business. However, the Iranian government encouraged these provocative actions, determined to maintain pressure on the U.S. military through harassment and terrorism.

  Defense Secretary William Cohen ordered Zinni to develop a new military plan. “The goal of any military strike should be to impose such a steep cost that the Iranian regime will be loath to contemplate an attack on American personnel ever again,” Ken Pollack said in a talk before a Washington think tank, reflecting the administration’s views.25 CENTCOM came back in the late summer with a hasty plan code-named Iron Lightning. American aircraft and cruise missiles would knock out key Revolutionary Guard bases, including their naval bases at Bandar Abbas and their headquarters in downtown Tehran. Zinni offered other options, including bombing Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. Iron Lightning would be quick and punishing, he told the secretary.

  In late 1997, Zinni began a new war plan for Iran. Unlike Iron Lightning, which had been hastily conceived in response to Iranian terrorism, this new Iranian plan required two years of intensive work to complete. Zinni’s plan would take the conflict with Iran to its logical conclusion: overthrowing the Islamic Republic.

  “Gentlemen, we are going to assume that Iran responds with all of its capabilities,” he told the small, close-hold staff charged with the Iranian war plan. “I want you to take it full circle—from the start of a conflict to what it would take for regime change.”

  Several months later, Zinni flew up to Washington to brief his preliminary findings in the Tank. “There was sticker shock,” he said, recalling the reactions of Secretary Cohen and the Joint Chiefs. “They thought it would be like Iraq, where we could take down the regime in nineteen days. This was far from the case with Iran.”26

  Ironically, the United States faced many of the same natural obstacles that CENTCOM had hoped to use a decade earlier to thwart a Soviet invasion. U.S. forces would have to advance across the formidable Zagros Mountains along the same narrow roads, tunnels, and bridges that General Robert Kingston had intended to use to beat the Red Army.

  Zinni predicted the Persian population would unite behind their government, making a protracted military campaign unavoidable. The war would spread throughout the Persian Gulf. Iran would strike at the Gulf Arabs providing bases for Americans. There would be massive protests in the Arab streets, destabilizing these same pro-American countries. “You can’t underestimate the propaganda value of another attack on an Islamic country,” Zinni said in a 2010 interview.

  Zinni’s plan involved several army and marine divisions pushing north from the Gulf with the aim of taking Tehran. NSC counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke privately referred to this scheme as “the Eisenhower option.”27 To remove the regime, Zinni told the secretary of defense, would require at least half a million American troops and three years of combat. The military option for regime change in Iran was not realistic.

  Instead, Zinni recommended that the United States forge a military coalition against Iran. “It would never rise to the level of NATO,” Zinni said. “Complete integration was a bridge too far, but the U.S. could serve behind the scenes in a supporting role as the glue that tied the disparate militaries together.” Secretary of Defense Cohen liked the idea.

  Zinni began with baby steps. He got the Gulf Arabs to agree to use their military forces to clean up hazardous material left over from Desert Storm and to search for naval mines still lingering in the northern Persian Gulf. CENTCOM then spearheaded a planning conference that ended in an agreement to combine efforts to contain an oil spill.

  Zinni next set his sights on building a Gulf-wide air defense system. The idea, pushed by CENTCOM a decade earlier, had languished with the end of the Iran-Iraq War. With the upsurge in Iranian truculence, the Gulf states agreed to buy new antiair defenses and to cooperate in a loose early-warning system that would allow American aircraft to respond to an air attack on any one of the six Gulf countries. CENTCOM organized some exercises to respond to an Iranian attack. The enemy in the scenarios was never mentioned, “but everyone knew the enemy was Iran,” said Zinni.

  While the White House weighed military options for responding to the Khobar Towers bombing, Clinton approved a CIA counterattack. Iran’s MOIS had been complicit in the bombing in Saudi Arabia, so the CIA set out to disrupt the spy service’s worldwide operations. In Operation Sapphire, CIA officers began openly approaching known MOIS agents and asking if they would work for American intelligence. They spoke to the agents at parties and in cafés, publicly soliciting them without concern for who might
overhear the conversation. Just being seen talking with a known CIA officer created suspicion in the minds of the MOIS leadership. On several occasions in European capitals, the CIA officers simply walked up to the Iranian spies’ homes and knocked on their doors, telling the startled occupants that the Americans knew where they lived.28 These “cold pitches” created havoc within the Iranian spy operations. If the MOIS agent reported the contact, he immediately came under scrutiny on why a CIA officer had been to his house. If he did not report it and his superiors learned of it, his fate would be worse. Unsure of who might be working with the Americans, the Iranians simply sacked their agents. Some MOIS officers retired, but others found themselves in the hangman’s noose, falsely charged with cavorting with the CIA. As George Tenet, the director of the CIA, later wrote, “It couldn’t happen to a nastier bunch of people.”29

  Just as the two nations appeared headed to war, however, the brewing conflict terminated. The catalyst was the election of a new Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami. On May 23, 1997, Khatami stunned the Iranian hierarchy by garnering 70 percent of the vote in the presidential elections. He easily trounced the candidate backed by the supreme leader and the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, performing well even in the Tehran neighborhoods populated by the guard’s officers.

  A mild, bookish man, Khatami had been an early supporter of the revolution. Although a respected cleric, he had not served in any significant positions; at the time of the election, he ran Iran’s national library. But Khatami tapped the growing discontent in Iranian society. With 30 percent unemployment and an even higher inflation rate, the Iranian people clamored for change.30

  Khatami pushed for economic reform and political liberalization. Independent proreform newspapers sprang up across the country. He advocated that there could be more than a single interpretation of Islam, with a more contemporary reading of the Koran. This made the conservatives within the Iranian government nervous. “Whoever said I have a new reading of Islam should be slapped in the mouth,” said one mullah to his congregation.31

  President Khatami’s reforms extended to foreign policy. His goal was to break Iran’s isolation with the West. He called for a “dialogue of nations” as a remedy to the divide between the West and Islam. He reestablished good relations with Europe by vowing not to carry out Khomeini’s fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. In January 1998, Khatami moved to improve relations with the United States, and he granted an interview to Iranian-born CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour.

  The Iranian president expressed regret for the takeover of the U.S. embassy, adding that “the events of those days must be viewed within the context of the revolutionary fervor.” While listing the American affronts to his nation, including the downing of the Iran Air flight and the recent CIA funding, he said Iran harbored no malice toward the United States. Khatami rejected terrorism as incompatible with the Koran. “Terrorism should be condemned in all its forms and manifestations,” Khatami told the American reporter.32

  Khatami went beyond words. He halted the MOIS’s extrajudicial killings of dissidents. When several of his liberal supporters were killed in Tehran, he opened an investigation that uncovered a secret committee under the auspices of the MOIS and the Revolutionary Guard charged by the supreme leader’s office to eliminate potential enemies of the revolution. As these killings had been done without the supreme leader’s knowledge, Khatami sacked the head of the MOIS.33

  While he wanted reform, President Khatami was not a revolutionary. He was a part of the political elite and had no interest in overthrowing the Islamic Republic. In July 1999, students from Tehran University took to the streets following the killing of several students in their dormitories by security forces during protests against legislation passed to curb the burgeoning open press. Khatami refused to back the protestors, accusing them of undermining his reforms. He sat by as the Revolutionary Guard moved in, arresting a thousand protestors.

  The election of Khatami created a buzz inside the Beltway. A month after the election, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy—the same venue where Martin Indyk had argued for dual containment—hosted a discussion with two prominent foreign policy officials about the election’s implications. Zalmay Khalilzad expressed caution; he was not convinced that Khatami could overcome hard-liners’ opposition to implementing any dramatic shift. But former Reagan assistant secretary of state Richard Murphy urged the U.S. government to engage in a new “critical dialogue” with Iran. He recommended opening direct talks on Iran’s nuclear program, holding out the prospect of returning billions of dollars of frozen assets remaining from the days of the shah.34 The United States refused to take these steps until Iran renounced terrorism and its weapons of mass destruction program.35

  On a Saturday morning in October 1997, Indyk received a phone call from Deputy Secretary of State Strobridge Talbott. Indyk had recently returned to Washington from a few years as the American ambassador to Israel and had the Iran portfolio as the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. The two men went for a walk, along a dirt path of Washington’s Rock Creek Park, as Indyk recalled. Talbott wanted Indyk’s opinion of Khatami and whether he marked an opening for better relations. Indyk remained skeptical: he cited Iran’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons and its role in the Khobar Towers bombing. But Talbott showed more optimism: “If Khatami is able to moderate Iran’s behavior,” he told Indyk, “it will change everything.”36

  But the political landscape was littered with those trying for a rapprochement with Tehran, so despite the apparent opening, President Clinton proceeded with caution. The new secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, sent a message to Khatami via the Swiss embassy in Tehran proposing a meeting between senior officials.37 Although Iran never responded, the United States decided to include the Mujahideen-e Khalq, the Iraq-based, anti-Iranian government terrorist organization, on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. Clinton relaxed visa restrictions, allowing more Iranians to travel to the United States, and refused to impose sanctions on the French oil company Total for developing the Iranian Sirri oil field originally awarded to Conoco.

  The election of President Khatami changed the discussion regarding military retaliation for the Khobar Towers bombing. With the renouncement of terrorism and the replacement of one of the instigators of the terrorist attack—the head of MOIS—by the new Iranian president, the wisdom of retaliating for Khatami’s predecessor’s crime was called into question. Attacking Iran at this point would simply have undercut Khatami and the reform movement and ended any chance for improved relations between the two nations. Clinton shelved the military response.38 Once again, Iran had killed American service personnel and the U.S. government chose not to respond.

  The election of Mohammad Khatami changed the dynamics in the waters of the Persian Gulf too. The harassment of U.S. warships transiting the Persian Gulf ceased. Late on the morning of September 19, 1999, the American cruiser USS Lake Erie intercepted a Belize-flagged merchant ship suspected of smuggling Iraqi crude. The U.S. warship stopped the ship just three miles from Iranian waters, but in an area claimed by Tehran.39 It was just the sort of incident that would have threatened to escalate in the past. But this time Tehran simply lodged a complaint with the United Nations. The Revolutionary Guard never displayed the professional attitude of the Iranian navy, but it was clear that Khatami had reined in the bellicose excesses of the guard commanders. The tension in the Gulf decreased precipitously.

  Clinton continued to feel out the Iranians. At the 1998 U.S.-Iranian World Cup game in France, a prerecorded message by the president aired just before kickoff. “As we cheer today’s game between American and Iranian athletes, I hope it can be another step toward ending the estrangement between our two nations,” Clinton said to the worldwide audience.40

  The next spring Clinton took a gamble by offering another olive branch to Iran. In April, during a Millennium Evening dinner at the White House, Pre
sident Clinton gave a lengthy off-the-cuff response directed squarely at Khatami during questions and answers. “Iran, because of its enormous geopolitical importance over time, has been the subject of quite a lot of abuse from various Western nations. And I think sometimes it’s quite important to tell people, ‘Look, you have the right to be angry at something my country or my culture did.’”41

  “It was not quite an apology,” wrote Ken Pollack, “but it was closer than any American president had ever come…just what the hard-liners had been demanding since 1979.”42

  At the same time, Indyk and Bruce Riedel, a senior CIA official working on the NSC, approached Oman requesting that the country deliver a message to President Khatami regarding the Khobar Towers attack. Their goal was to put Iran on notice in hopes that the new regime would take action that would allow both sides to move beyond the incident.

  The United States had conclusive evidence of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard’s involvement in the bombing, they said. The United States sought better relations with Iran, but Iran must end its terrorist activities and provide assurances that those responsible for the killing of the nineteen Americans would be brought to justice.

  Oman’s foreign minister delivered the message, and Khatami read the démarche carefully. After he accused the United States of even bigger terrorist actions, the Iranian president promised to look into the accusation. Weeks went by before Iran responded to the U.S. démarche via the Omani foreign ministry. The response was typically Persian. While the Iranian government denied any involvement, the message added that no such action would happen again, and the Islamic Republic harbored no ill will to the United States. According to Indyk, the United States took this to mean that nothing would be done to those who carried out the attack, but no further attacks would be forthcoming.

  In 2000, liberals and reformers backing Khatami won another whopping 73 percent in parliamentary elections. Thus far, American overtures toward Iran had yielded nothing. Iranian response remained muted. Concern grew that the hard-liners in Tehran, including the supreme leader, were maneuvering to rein in Khatami and squelch any rapprochement. Back-channel talks with Iranians and intelligence confirmed both Khatami’s and the reform movement’s strength; perhaps a more overt offer from Washington would strengthen Khatami’s hand.