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

by David Crist

  While Bush never mentioned Iran in his inaugural address, the Islamic Republic would be the target of the new freedom campaign. The United States would throw its support behind democratic reformers inside Iran and those external activists advocating for the same reforms. Bush raised this directly the following month during the State of the Union address, on February 2, 2005. “And to the Iranian people, I say tonight: As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you.”2

  President Bush’s freedom agenda was grounded in both idealism and realism. His idealism sprang from his religious beliefs. “Freedom is a universal gift from the Almighty,” Bush wrote in his memoirs.3 But building on a widely accepted American political science theory that democracies don’t fight each other, he believed that spreading freedom would strengthen American security. Bush frequently cited Japan to defend his view. Sixty years earlier, the current prime minister’s father served in the imperial government while Bush’s own father had been a navy pilot fighting that very regime. Now Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was a friend of the American president’s and the Japanese government a staunch ally of the United States.

  Neoconservatives both inside and outside the government embraced the president’s words, especially at the influential conservative Washington think tank the American Enterprise Institute. Just after Bush’s reelection, on November 10, 2004, Israeli minister and former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky spoke there, along with conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer. The gathering highlighted Sharansky’s new book, The Case for Democracy, in which the Israeli outlined America’s new manifest destiny. The free world’s—and especially America’s—policy should be the expansion of democracy, he argued. As during the Cold War, individual liberty provided the best means to combat tyranny. Not surprisingly, Sharansky believed the main effort in the push for democracy should be in the Middle East, where authoritarian regimes predominated. Sharansky’s thesis got him an invitation to the Oval Office, where Bush affirmed that the book encapsulated his views on foreign policy regarding the war in Iraq and the larger Middle East. “In The Case for Democracy,” reported Time, “Bush found validation for his central theory about Iraq: give people liberty, and they will thrive.”4

  Implementing the new freedom agenda fell to a reshuffled foreign policy team as appointees great and small headed back to the private sector, replaced by new hires. While Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld remained among the president’s chief triumvirate, the third, Colin Powell (as well as his deputy, Richard Armitage), left the Department of State, replaced there by Condoleezza Rice. Stephen Hadley fleeted up to be national security adviser, with a new cast of more junior officials on the National Security Council. Two of the principal officials in the Defense Department, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, headed to positions at the World Bank and academe, respectively, with the latter replaced by the conservative diplomat Eric Edelman, who had recently served as ambassador to Turkey and the vice president’s national security adviser. William Luti headed over to the White House to run defense policy for Hadley; he was replaced at Defense by an abrasive retired army brigadier general, Mark Kimmitt, who had recently retired after a contentious tour at CENTCOM as a deputy to the chief planner.

  The new secretary of state, Condi Rice, instantly became the most important person in American foreign policy. Overshadowed in the first term by bureaucratic heavyweights, like the president she had grown in both experience and self-confidence. With her close, personal rapport with Bush, Rice had the ear of the Oval Office, and everyone in Washington knew it or assumed it. “There was only one voice in American foreign policy in the second term,” John Bolton said: “Secretary Rice.”5

  She too embraced Bush’s freedom vision. In one of her first major speeches on the Middle East, before an audience at the American University in Cairo, Rice stated, “For sixty years, the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East—and we achieved neither.” In a haughty tone, she dismissed the foreign policies of nine previous presidents. She placed longtime authoritarian allies such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt on notice that a new wind of freedom was about to blow through the Middle East. “We should all look to a future when every government respects the will of its citizens—because the ideal of democracy is universal.”6 As for Iran, which had an electoral process far more vibrant than the stalwart American ally in whose country she delivered her lecture, the secretary dismissed its democratic process: “The appearance of elections does not mask the organized cruelty of Iran’s theocratic state. The Iranian people are capable of liberty. They desire liberty. And they deserve liberty. The time has come for the unelected few to release their grip on the aspirations of the proud people of Iran.”

  The new team under Rice at Foggy Bottom grasped how woefully unprepared the Foreign Service had become regarding Iran. There had been no embassy in the country for nearly thirty years, and so no incentive or career track for the Foreign Service to focus on Iran. Few bothered studying Farsi, and the diplomats with any firsthand experience in Iran had grown gray and all but disappeared. The State Department had one Foreign Service officer, Henry Wooster, working part-time on Iran under the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. There was a handful of old-timers who had served in Iran, but the department had grown devoid of Iranian experts. “We have a problem,” the new number three man at the State Department, Nicholas Burns, told Rice.

  Nicholas Burns headed the Iran effort for Rice at the State Department. Thin, articulate, and polished, the career Foreign Service officer had recently served as the ambassador to NATO in Brussels, where he secured European support for the mission in Afghanistan. In one of her first assignments to Burns, Rice directed him to make Iran his priority, both developing a new policy and improving the department’s expertise.

  With Rice’s support, Burns pressed to develop a career track for Iranian experts with the Foreign Service. To do this, he took a page from history. During the 1920s, when the United States did not have diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, the State Department established Riga Station, where Russian-speaking officers sat and monitored events in the Soviet Union. When the United States finally opened a mission in the 1930s, these men formed the nucleus of the new diplomats in Moscow. Rice and Burns decided to take a similar action with Iran by establishing an Iranian regional presence office in the American consulate in Dubai, where Iranians could obtain visas and Farsi-speaking diplomats could be stationed and interact with the many Iranians who traveled to the relatively open and unrestrained emirate city. State officials built a supporting website to mimic similar ones by real embassies that provided information on the United States for Iranian citizens. Under the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, a new Office of Iranian Affairs was formed. If the U.S. government ever reopened an embassy in Iran, the Foreign Service officers manning this office would provide the vanguard of new American diplomats.7

  Iran came to the forefront on Rice’s first trip overseas as secretary of state in early February 2005. In his second term, President Bush was eager to repair the damage to American-European relations caused by the invasion of Iraq and Donald Rumsfeld’s deriding referrals to Germany and France as “Old Europe.” He traveled to Europe in what became known as the “olive branch” trip and met with both French and German leaders in Brussels and Mainz. Traveling with the president, Rice expected to hear about Iraq, as most of the Europeans, especially German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, had stridently opposed the U.S. invasion. Instead, Iran’s nuclear program topped the Europeans’ agenda. The Europeans wanted American backing for the ongoing “EU-3” (Germany, France, and the United Kingdom) talks about halting Iranian uranium enrichment.

  The United States had not participated in the talks. Colin Powell had kept in close contact with the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and helped guide the discussions in ways acceptable to Washington, but the administration remained opposed to talking with Iran. “Iran is aggressively pursuing nuclear weapo
ns under cover of an openly declared peaceful nuclear energy program,” one 2003 NSC paper concluded. But the Bush White House offered no other avenue to redress the Iranian nuclear program. Now, with a new era of rapport across the Atlantic, the president agreed to support the European diplomatic effort to resolve the Iranian nuclear program peacefully. For the Germans, this new rhetoric by the U.S. government supporting their talks with the Iranians went a long way in repairing the damage over the Iraq invasion.

  At the request of the Europeans, Rice extended a goodwill gesture to the Iranians. She agreed to drop the U.S. objections to Iran’s application to the World Trade Organization and to allow the export of spare parts for American-made Iranian civilian airliners. While the secretary of state refused to take regime change off the public table, military action “is simply not on the agenda at this point,” she said during a press conference.8

  “I want you to lead this effort and work with the Europeans,” Rice said to Burns in a meeting in her seventh-floor office. Burns remained skeptical about negotiating with Iran, but he threw his energy behind the public diplomacy drive envisioned by Rice to work to resolve the nuclear impasse. Just three weeks after his confirmation, Burns traveled to Europe and met with his German, French, and British counterparts actually negotiating with the Iranians. While there remained limits on what the United States would accept, Iran had to stop enrichment as the precondition. Burns offered additional carrots should Iran decide to cooperate, while pressing the European Union to curtail the transfer of technology needed by Tehran to build its nuclear program.

  Iran’s nuclear program had worried Washington for the past decade. U.S. intelligence had suspected Iran’s nuclear aspirations since the early 1990s. In General John Shalikashvili’s 1993 confirmation hearings for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he told the Senate that Iran would likely be able to produce a nuclear weapon in eight to ten years. This number kept shifting, so as late as 2004, the United States still predicted it would take eight to ten years.9 In 2002, Iranian dissidents publicly exposed two unreported Iranian nuclear facilities: a heavy-water facility at Arak and a deep underground uranium enrichment complex at Natanz. While Iran had not been required to report these under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, subsequent investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency showed a pattern of obfuscation by the Iranians regarding their program. While Iran continued to maintain the peaceful purposes of its nuclear efforts, a contrite President Khatami agreed to suspend uranium enrichment in October 2003 and to allow more stringent inspections.

  The nuclear program remained popular with the Iranian people. Clandestine polling by the State Department revealed that over 80 percent of the population agreed with the government’s pursuit of peaceful nuclear power. And while the populace did not believe the government intended to produce a nuclear weapon, even on that there remained strong support. Many Iranians mouthed a common refrain: if Israel and Pakistan could have the bomb, then why not Iran?

  After the Iran-Iraq War, Iran embarked on a “self-sufficiency jihad” to achieve energy independence. Ayatollah Khamenei added a vision of Iran as a leader in technology, which the nuclear program supported. Nuclear power would allow for great diversification of Iran’s energy needs, especially as declining output from some of its oil fields fueled concern within the government about Iran’s long-term export capacity. The new nuclear power plants would allow the country to keep up with electricity demand that grew at 8 to 9 percent each year. Iran relies on natural gas and oil for 85 percent of its power generation, and reducing this dependency would allow greater self-sufficiency. Lessons from the Iran-Iraq War heightened concerns about Iranian dependency on the West. Iranian officials wanted domestic enrichment capabilities so they would not have to rely on uranium sources from outside countries, which could conceivably withhold it from Iran in the event of a dispute.

  However, the supreme leader never allowed the nuclear program to be publicly debated. Average Iranians cared more about jobs and improving their economic lot. If the nuclear program helped, they supported it. But if the cost imposed for pursuing nuclear enrichment through sanctions and isolation exceeded the benefit, there was far less certainty in Tehran of popular backing. Newspapers were quietly told the subject should be treated as a national security issue, with the press supporting the government’s view that the West only wanted to keep Iran backward and dependent, depriving the country of its rights to the benefits of nuclear products.10

  No one in the Bush administration had any doubt about the nature of Iran’s program. U.S. intelligence concluded that Iran intended to have at least the technical expertise to produce nuclear weapons. The heavy-water reactor being built at Arak was similar to those used by other countries in their nuclear programs, and Iran’s refusal to consider a European proposal for a light-water research reactor for medical and industrial material alarmed many. In mid-2004, a longtime CIA source passed along a laptop computer obtained from an Iranian; it contained reams of information from a team of Iranian engineers on designs for a compact nuclear warhead for an Iranian Shahab long-range missile. This included a compact sphere and detonators designed to trigger at two thousand feet above a target, viewed as a perfect altitude for a nuclear detonation.11 Another intelligence report on Iran’s long-range missile program indicated that Iran seemed bent on having the means to deploy such a nuclear warhead. But there remained differing views within the intelligence community about whether the supreme leader would actually decide to build the weapon or be content with the capability.

  Events in Iran added to the heightened concerns in Washington. In February 2004, conservative candidates swept to power in Iranian parliamentary elections, chiefly due to the Guardian Council’s disqualifying twenty-five hundred reformist candidates, including eighty sitting members. The supreme leader used his clerical influence with the vetting process to rule out the suitability of many liberal candidates. Khatami had only a year to go before term limits ushered in a new president, and the conservatives were determined not to repeat the mistake of 1997. This ended what little debate existed within the administration about Khatami’s ability to make the real changes desired by Washington and provided further justification for those who had always opposed talking to Iran.

  National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley tasked his deputy, Jack Dyer “J. D.” Crouch, to supervise the new Iran strategy across the government. The balding longtime defense policy expert on nuclear weapons came over to the White House as the number two man at the National Security Council, having served since 2001 in the Defense Department and as ambassador to Romania. On May 31, 2005, the NSC deputy’s committee, chaired by Crouch, summed up the importance Iran now took in the administration: “The implementation of a robust Iran strategy should be a core foreign policy objective.”

  Putting flesh on the bones of President Bush’s new vision inside the U.S. government fell to Elliott Abrams. Implicated in the Contra portion of the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, Abrams remained unassuming, polite, and secretive. Politically, he came from the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party. A hawk, especially on Syria, he operated behind the scenes, where his experience in the White House made him a skilled operator in moving decisions through the labyrinth of government agencies. Hadley expanded Abrams’s portfolio beyond just the Middle East, creating a new position for him as the deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy. This entailed, according to the White House press statement, assisting “Mr. Hadley in work on the promotion of democracy and human rights, and will provide oversight to the NSC’s directorate of Democracy, Human Rights, and International Organization Affairs.” Now under Abrams’s purview, the Middle East and the new democracy program were formally fused into a cohesive plan.

  Before heading across the Potomac River to his new job at the White House, one of William Luti’s last tasks was to oversee the drafting of a strategy paper designed to begin shaping the debate for the second term
on Iran. A strident, occasionally fictional document, it accused Iran of cooperating with al-Qaeda in twenty separate acts of terrorism.12 Although Luti never believed in talking to the Iranians, the first step, he argued, was to recognize that rapprochement had failed and negotiations with Iran served no purpose other than to provide Iran a method to talk and delay the will of the international community. The United States needed to highlight Tehran’s ties to al-Qaeda and forcefully counter Iranian intelligence operations. Luti suggested repeating the Iraqi schemes by bringing together Iranian exiles into a collective opposition movement: an Iranian National Congress.

  Abrams liked the paper. He massaged the ideas into an interagency plan to force Iran to end its support for terrorism as well as its ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction programs. Abrams agreed that the United States should also move forcefully against the Quds Force in the region. The United States should declare it a terrorist organization and close down its operations in Iraq. He proposed more robust economic sanctions, combined with aggressive psychological operations to support opposition groups in Iran and to discredit the regime in the eyes of the world: “The failure and discrediting of this regime—a fount of modern Islamism—would help deflate and discredit extremist Islamist ideology and operational capability more broadly in the region. This should be one of the core objectives of the GWOT [global war on terrorism],” Abrams wrote.

  Much of the rhetoric looked remarkably like the hawkish stands from earlier in the administration. “Recent Iranian elections have shown that Iran’s leaders do not represent the Iranian people, and thus the regime has lost its legitimacy,” one interagency paper from February 2005 stated. The United States intended to publicly discredit both Khatami and the clerical rule as being illegitimate, despite previous American statements and the worldwide recognition of the Islamic Republic as the rightful government of Iran.