by David Crist
Crouch shared both Abrams’s and Luti’s views that the government of Iran lacked legitimacy due to its support for terrorism and its failure to satisfy the desires of the Iranian people. Any official contact with the Islamic Republic only strengthened its claim to legitimacy and undercut the morale of dissidents and democrats within Iran. Within Crouch’s staff, some argued that the Iranian government had become so unpopular that it appeared ripe for overthrow.
Over at the Defense Department, Abe Shulsky agreed with the tone. At the worker level, he continued playing his active role in shaping policy toward Iran and the war on terrorism. Shulsky wanted to support the reform movement within Iran and believed a window of opportunity presented itself in July 2004. Iran approached the fifth anniversary of the massive student protests that had rocked Tehran University in 1999. Following a small protest against shutting down a reformist newspaper, the Revolutionary Guard’s thug force, the Basij, ran amok across the campus, dragging students by the hair from their dorm rooms and savagely beating them, killing one. This sparked the largest demonstrations in the country since the 1979 revolution and shook the confidence of the government. Shulsky proposed establishing a covert program to help support the students on the anniversary, anticipating widespread protests as Iranians were wont to do on such occasions. “The regime looked nervous,” he said later. But this had conflicted with Colin Powell’s views that the United States should remain open to working with the Iranian government of President Khatami and not subvert his position by providing aid to antigovernment forces. At loggerheads, the anniversary passed without protest or American support. Now with Powell gone and with new support in the White House for aiding Middle East democrats, Shulsky actively championed providing aid to Iranian opposition movements.
To support the White House deliberations, the CIA produced several different studies examining Iran’s political strength. None expressed the optimism of those within the administration who advocated delegitimizing the Iranian government. The CIA concluded that the Iranian regime had grown more confident since the nervous days just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The hard-liners appeared ascendant, rolling back freedoms begun under President Khatami. The analysts saw no prodemocracy leader either inside or outside Iran capable of rallying the disaffected. A September 2005 report for Hadley concluded that the United States could sway the elite in Tehran University, but had little chance of influencing the average, largely conservative, citizen. The CIA remained skeptical that the supporters of American democracy—students, intellectuals, and old monarchists—had real influence with the average Iranian. The old shah supporters dominated the exile groups, and they appeared out of touch with current life inside Iran, having little influence with most citizens. Further, any taint of the foreign hand behind opposition groups could actually undercut support for those groups.
Unlike North Korea or the old Soviet Union, however, Iran was not a closed society. Its citizens traveled to the West. The Iranian diaspora, especially in the United States, maintained ties with family and friends inside the country. One State Department study found that many younger, better-educated Iranians had access to the Internet. Iranians loved blogs. A Harvard report found more than 700,000 Farsi blogs, mostly inside Iran, making Farsi the second-most-popular language to English in the “blogosphere.”13 According to one senior Bush official, the CIA did believe that the United States could aid human rights groups and Iranian democrats and help build a viable freedom movement; however, it would have to be carefully done in order to avoid the taint of being seen as interfering inside Iran, a long-standing concern of Iran’s that could provide a rallying cry by the Islamic Republic to unite the populace. Polling of Iranian citizens consistently showed dissatisfaction with the government. Even under the popular reformist president Khatami, some six in ten described the economy as poor. A majority favored better relations with the West, including the United States.14While the data of the State Department study also showed a nationalistic streak and widespread support for Islam, the disaffection within the younger population seemed ripe to exploit.
But the Bush administration had no appetite for attacking Iran. With the United States bogged down in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the president had little interest in embarking on another military adventure. While the president never took the military option to halt Iran’s nuclear program off the table, he never seriously considered it. Condi Rice said as much during a 2007 trip to the Persian Gulf during which she met with the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet admiral. But the ambiguity about American intentions helped keep Iran guessing and aided the diplomatic efforts in Geneva, she said. While Newt Gingrich and others close to the administration continued advocating regime change, by force if necessary, Hadley wanted a new approach for Iran. His Middle East team at the NSC included a number of fresh faces, including a newly arrived academic from Princeton University, Michael Doran, as the director for near east and north Africa. “I always understood our goal as giving the president a third option, Doran said. “If the only two were war or a nuclear-armed Iran, then we had failed at our job.15
By mid-2005, Crouch had an outline of the new policy goals for Iran. Iran was critical to central tenets of the president’s new foreign policy. “American security is advanced by the expansion of democracy and by the ending of support, active or passive, for terrorism.” The United States sought “an Iran that does not possess or seek nuclear weapons, is a stable, democratic government, and fosters an environment inhospitable to terrorism.”
Elliott Abrams cochaired a new interagency group with Elizabeth Cheney, the blond firebrand daughter of the vice president who worked as deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. Cheney had no background on Iran or the Middle East, but that did not stop her from lecturing about the nature of Iranian society and its government to Foreign Service officers, including those few fluent in Farsi and those who had spent years studying the country. The Iran-Syria Working Group, as it was called, coordinated Iranian and Syrian policy across the U.S. government. Abrams wanted the State Department to lead the working group. He had personal experience from Iran-Contra in the pitfalls of running operations from the White House, and to avoid the perception of this as a planned invasion of Iran, the Pentagon willingly took a less overt role. The working group formed five separate subgroups with representatives from various agencies meeting regularly in a shabby conference room in the Old Executive Office Building or in a better-apportioned one at the State Department.
In late 2005, the president signed off on the Iran Action Plan, developed by the Cheney and Abrams group. It outlined a series of actions across the government to counter Iran and focused on sanctions, diplomacy, and a common message to highlight Iran’s malign activities across the Middle East. A key goal of the Iran Action Plan would be to try to drive a wedge between the Iranian population and its government. On Halloween in 2005, Hadley laid out for the other principal officials a number of these actions to begin immediately. While the Treasury and State Departments moved to limit Iran’s access to money and dual-use technology, the U.S. government would conduct a broad information operation campaign designed to promote freedom in Iran. This included welcoming dissidents to Washington, academic exchanges, supporting Iranian bloggers, and establishing Internet chat rooms to increase exchanges between Iranian and American students. “Expanding our contacts with/inside Iran would (1) enhance our ability to pursue prodemocracy programs in Iran; (2) help prevent misunderstandings and potential conflicts with Iran,” Hadley wrote. President Bush liked the ideas. He hoped it would encourage a more open society and basic freedoms, which would eventually undermine the totalitarian character of the government. Five years into the administration, the Bush administration finally appeared to have a consensus on an Iranian strategy.
The State Department and Elizabeth Cheney led other efforts to support the freedom agenda. Elizabeth Cheney shepherded one of the important American efforts called the Democracy Project. It promoted Ame
rican values with a strong dose of propaganda. One of its initial efforts was a media project that included a video teleconference with Iranian students and a speaker program to appeal to the Iranian diaspora, both of which highlighted the ills of the Islamic Republic. In 2005, the State Department spent $10 million to promote democracy and access to “unbiased” information.16 This included $4 million in six different grants for Iran, the first such grants to promote democracy since 1979.17 The following year the amount increased nearly twentyfold, to a whopping $75 million.
Deciding who would get this money fell to an affable man with a bearlike stature named David Denehy. He had served in the State Department before being detailed to the Defense Department, serving briefly in Iraq working for Paul Bremer.18 He returned to the State Department and served as Liz Cheney’s deputy, running the day-to-day meetings and the operations of the Iran-Syria Working Group. With so much money available, Iranian groups deluged Denehy with proposals, more than one hundred the first year. Some advocated parachuting arms to supposed resistance fighters and rehashed old schemes from the early 1980s to overthrow the regime. The old royalist exiles were the worst, and Denehy steered clear of them. These aging supporters of the shah amassed in Los Angeles and all wanted the State Department’s largesse. None, however, really endorsed democracy, but favored a return to the monarch. As Denehy recalled, all wanted to be in charge of the effort and none wanted to cooperate with the others.19
Instead, the State Department concentrated on supporting groups inside Iran that advocated labor and human rights, freedom of speech, and more open and free participation in the political process. Denehy linked with private groups, especially in Europe, with established ties and lines of communication into civil society and the reform movements inside Iran. He developed relationships with nongovernmental organizations that could potentially partner or coordinate on reform efforts outside official U.S. government channels.20 Some of these had standing ties with the U.S. State Department, including the conservative U.S. Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. The U.S. government provided grants to help start up such organizations as the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center at Yale University, which received $1.6 million to promote freedom, build alternative political organizations inside Iran, and campaign for human rights. As a supporting effort, Liz Cheney greatly expanded the State Department’s International Information Program. U.S. consulates and embassies distributed e-journals, webcasts, CDs, and books in hopes of reaching Iranian citizens traveling to other Gulf countries.
Another effort centered on expanding the broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Farsi station, Radio Farda, into Iran. Officials worked with academics and Iranians in Los Angeles to develop better messages that would resonate with Iranians.21 Despite the Voice of America charter’s mandate to provide “accurate” and “objective” news, Liz Cheney and others within the administration wanted it to be more of a propaganda instrument, and took offense when the broadcasts seemed too sympathetic to Iran.
A low-level appointee and former student of Wolfowitz’s working in Mark Kimmitt’s Middle East office at the Defense Department wrote a report that was subsequently leaked. It was highly critical of Voice of America, saying that it “often invites guests who defend the Islamic Republic (of Iran)’s version of issues, [and] it consistently fails to maintain a balance by inviting informed guests who represent another perspective on the same issue.”22 As a counterweight, the shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, began appearing frequently. While certainly touting the proper anticlerical views, he remained popular only in the small circle of hard-core critics of the Islamic government around Washington, D.C. Inside Iran, the shah’s son had no standing or support among the Iranian population. His appearances only undermined the American message.
The Iran freedom initiative did not sit well with everyone at the Department of State. Denehy steered the program between the two departmental organizations with a claim to the program: the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Each had its own view about how to run the programs. The fallout from the Iraq War left bitter feelings by some diplomats against the neocons, and Denehy fell into that category. Other Foreign Service officers believed the effort would have little impact on the Iranian populace, who by and large still supported the Islamic Republic. Others agreed with former Bush official and now administration critic Hillary Mann: the Bush administration still wanted regime change, only now it was trying to achieve it through the guise of promoting democracy.
Iran correctly viewed all this as an attempt to overthrow the regime using “soft power.” Iranian newspapers referred to this American scheme as a “spider’s nest,” a large web of subversion bankrolled by the United States that extended to anyone from the West who seemed intent on spreading liberal ideas. The government responded by clamping down and revamping its internal security plans. The Basij developed new military plans to deal with internal opposition and threw four Iranian Americans into prison, accusing them of spying. One, Haleh Esfandiari, a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother with dual citizenship and a scholar at Rand’s Wilson Center for Middle East Public Policy, was arrested at the Tehran airport when she arrived for a family funeral. She spent 110 days in Evin Prison before posting over $300,000 in bail.23
In the end, whether any of this influenced the regime remained unclear. Nearly three-quarters of the Iranian population obtained their news on state-run media, and outside of the cities, few had Internet access. Both the BBC and Radio Farda remained popular, especially with students under thirty, but Iran regularly jammed both broadcasts. The State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs had success with its Persian-language website. Launched under Powell in May 2003, it became a widely quoted source for information inside Iran, frequently used by the Iranian media.24 The State Department continued to expand on its success during the second term. In 2004–2005, the Iranian government shut down more than fifty Internet service providers for not complying with orders to install Internet filters as it tried to block these foreign sources of disinformation. But Iranian censors showed an inattentiveness, and the U.S. efforts to circumvent their firewalls and the remarkable creativity of prodemocrats in circumventing government controls allowed for an exchange of information and ideas, at least among those few Iranians with regular access to computers.
In August 2005, with term limits preventing Khatami from running, the Iranians elected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the sixth president of the Islamic Republic. Born in northern Iran as the middle child in a large brood to a sometime blacksmith and grocer, Ahmadinejad passed the demanding entrance exam for university and entered school just in time for the revolution. Like many students, he became an active supporter in overthrowing the shah, and then shared his generation’s experience in war, serving in the Revolutionary Guard during the eight-year slugfest with Iraq. Ahmadinejad maintained his ties with the Revolutionary Guard. With this powerful base, he rose in the political ranks, eventually becoming mayor of Tehran before his elevation to the presidency.
The new president was a political secularist by Islamic Republic standards: his power base rested with conservatives in the guard rather than with the clergy or the supreme leader. Ahmadinejad was a populist. His unpolished rhetoric mixed social justice and revolutionary dogma in a manner that appealed to the poor and arcadian. He could be urbane. He understood the importance of pushing Iran’s message in the West, and frequently traveled to Europe and even the United States, making himself available to the American press corps.
His election immediately added fodder for those calling for a hard line on Iran. Liz Cheney dismissed the entire election process, saying during one meeting that the regime simply picked and chose its presidents. Rumsfeld asked a similar question: had the election been rigged? Peter Rodman responded with reports about widespread voter fraud, but his examples supporting this looked minor, including a few women who were not allowed to vote based upo
n their inappropriate dress. More experienced Iran watchers found the process flawed but fair, other than the restrictions placed upon who could run for office by the Guardian Council.25
One of the new Iranian president’s first actions was to restart the uranium enrichment program. While Iran had every right to enrich under the nonproliferation treaty, its track record of sleight of hand with its program caused alarm in Washington and the EU-3 to briefly break off talks with Iran. The new Iranian president’s seemingly inane questioning of the Holocaust and his intentionally provocative statements about wiping Israel off the map worried many, and detractors cast the Iranian government as apocalyptical, intent on bringing about the Hidden Imam or Mahdi as a precursor to the day of judgment and the end of days.
“Mr. Ahmadinejad and the Iranian regime are genocidal,” former CIA director James Woolsey said during a friendly Senate hearing in November 2005.26 While more sober Iran experts countered that Ahmadinejad’s religious beliefs had no more impact on his policies than Bush’s as a born-again Christian waiting for the Second Coming, the hawkish, self-confident tone coming out of Tehran aroused the passions of those who had long called for overthrowing the regime. Newt Gingrich continued his decadelong mantra of removing the regime, now couched in the specter of Armageddon: “I think anything short of replacing the current government is basically irrelevant, and I think you should expect at some point in your lifetime to see a major war, and probably a nuclear war, if this government is not replaced.” He advocated a mixture of sanctions, open support for Iranian dissidents, and veiled support for aiding Iranian ethnic groups opposed to the central Persian government.27