The dramatic secret history of our
undeclared thirty-year conflict with Iran, revealing newsbreaking
episodes of covert and deadly operations that brought the two nations to
the brink of open war
For three decades, the United States and
Iran have engaged in a secret war. It is a conflict that has never been
acknowledged and a story that has never been told.
This
surreptitious war began with the Iranian revolution and simmers today
inside Iraq and in the Persian Gulf. Fights rage in the shadows, between
the CIA and its network of spies and Iran’s intelligence agency.
Battles are fought at sea with Iranians in small speedboats attacking
Western oil tankers. This conflict has frustrated five American
presidents, divided administrations, and repeatedly threatened to bring
the two nations into open warfare. It is a story of shocking
miscalculations, bitter debates, hidden casualties, boldness, and
betrayal.
A senior historian for the federal government with
unparalleled access to senior officials and key documents of several
U.S. administrations, Crist has spent more than ten years researching
and writing The Twilight War, and he breaks new ground on
virtually every page. Crist describes the series of secret negotiations
between Iran and the United States after 9/11, culminating in Iran’s
proposal for a grand bargain for peace-which the Bush administration
turned down. He documents the clandestine counterattack Iran launched
after America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, in which thousands of soldiers
disguised as reporters, tourists, pilgrims, and aid workers toiled to
change the government in Baghdad and undercut American attempts to
pacify the Iraqi insurgency. And he reveals in vivid detail for the
first time a number of important stories of military and intelligence
operations by both sides, both successes and failures, and their
typically unexpected consequences.
Much has changed in the world since 1979, but Iran and America remain each other’s biggest national security nightmares. “The Iran problem” is a razor-sharp briar patch that has claimed its sixth presidential victim in Barack Obama and his administration. The Twilight War adds vital new depth to our understanding of this acute dilemma it is also a thrillingly engrossing read, animated by a healthy irony about human failings in the fog of not-quite war.
In 2012, relations between the United States and Iran had
reached another nadir. The United States was now bent on more sanctions to bend
Iran to the UN Security Council’s and Washington’s will. Rebuffed and wiser,
President Obama ratcheted up the pressure, with the Treasury Department finding
new, creative ways to close loopholes in sanctions and strangle Iranian
commerce. Just before the new year, President Obama signed tough new sanctions
against Iran. Imposed by a near unanimous Congress as a rider to the defense
budget, for the first time, the United States targeted Iran’s central bank, the
means by which the country received payment for its oil exports. The
twenty-seven nations of the European Union followed suit with a pronouncement
that they intended to phase out all oil imports from Iran. Europe was the
second leading importer after China of Iranian crude, taking 450,000 barrels of
Iran’s 2.6 million daily output.8 Iran responded with bellicosity. The chief of
Iran’s regular navy, Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, warned that his country could
easily close the Strait of Hormuz, through which one sixth of the world’s oil
flows. Sayyari, who came through the ranks of the Iranian naval special
operations forces, was an aggressive combat veteran of the Iran-Iraq war and
more akin to the Revolutionary Guard than his own naval service. In December
2011 and January 2012, both the regular navy and the Revolutionary Guard held
large-scale and very public military exercises around the strait to demonstrate
Iran’s resolve. Iranian authorities warned the U.S. Navy not to send another
aircraft carrier through the gulf. “The Islamic Republic of Iran will not
repeat its warning,” said the head of Iran’s army, General Ataollah Salehi.
President Obama and his national security adviser Tom
Donilon were in no mood to back down from this blatant threat against the
world’s economy. Mattis was called back to Washington on a Sunday for two days
of lengthy meetings at the White House, and the president publicly stated he
would use force to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. In the end, Iran’s threat
proved hollow as American air craft carriers continued transiting without
incident.
The crisis over Iran’s nuclear program grew evermore
ominous. In February 2012, the IAEA issued a scathing report about Iranian
obfuscation. Inspectors were denied access to both scientists and Iran’s
secretive Parchin weapons facility. Israel continued to beat the war drums.
That same month both the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Martin Dempsey,
and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon led successive teams to Tel Aviv to
try to talk Israel out of taking any immediate military action. They met with
somber Israeli officials. Rather than spouting the usual talking points about
Iran, the Americans found their counterparts far more serious and circumspect.
Donilon’s team returned to Washington convinced that Israel intended to strike
Iran’s nuclear facilities sooner rather than later.
On March 5, 2012, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu met with
President Obama in the Oval Office.9 The two men already had a strained
relationship, and the meeting did little to overcome their divisions, including
those over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Obama stressed that there was no immediate
need to attack Iran’s facilities because all the intelligence pointed to the
fact that the supreme leader had not even decided to produce a nuclear weapon.
The tough Israeli pushed back, saying that they could not wait until Iran
entered into a “zone of immunity.” They had to strike now in order to prevent
Iran from having the capability to develop nuclear bombs. Publicly, Obama tried
to placate Israel’s concerns. “My policy here is not going to be one of
containment. My policy is prevention of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons,” the
president said before the meeting. He added, “When I say all options are on the
table, I mean it.”10 Both sides agreed on tougher sanctions against Iran’s
central bank, aimed at curtailing their oil exports.
This growing international isolation and economic pressure
only heightened Iran’s paranoia that the real goal behind U.S. actions was the
over-throw of the Islamic Republic. Anti-Americanism remained a pillar of the
government’s policies, and no real change in this regard was likely to occur
while the revolutionary generation remained in power. The young men who took to
the streets, overthrew the shah, and fought eight years of a bloody war with an
Iraqi government backed by Washington now had gray in their beards, but their
attitudes remained the same. Like the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, who
wrote about the rise and fall of the great empires as repeated cycles in
history, the supreme leader and his inner circle remained convinced that the
West was declining and the next empire, Iran, was on the rise. The United
States and its regional lackey, Israel, like the Soviets and communism before
them, were going to collapse. The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan
showed that the United States was in retreat in the Middle East. While more
realistic Iranian leaders like Javad Zarif understood that the reality was
quite different, and Iran was never going to rival the United States in power,
the fallout from the 2009 elections had marginalized many of these voices of reason.
While the 1979 revolution changed Iran’s government, the
Islamic Republic maintained the age-old Iranian goal of being recognized as a
regional power. “We should be the greatest power in the region and play a role
accordingly,” said Hadi Nesanjani, who served in President Rafsanjani’s
cabinet. While the new government was loath to put it in these terms, deeper
even than the Shia religious motivations is an ingrained sense of Persian
historical entitlement. As a nation, the Iranians predate all others in the
region, with a lineage tracing back to the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the
Great. A seat at the Middle East table is their natural right; it is the United
States that stands in their path. Building this historical precedent, the
Iranian Revolution had added a mission as the new defender of the downtrodden
Shia across the Middle East and, by extension, all Muslims resisting the West
and Israel. Starting in Lebanon, facilitated by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and
most recently in Yemen and Bahrain, Iran provided a steady stream of military
and economic support to these movements. This puts Iran squarely at odds with
both Israel and the Sunni governments backed by the United States.
The Iran problem is an enduring constant in American foreign
policy. Over the decades, every administration has had its moments with Iran.
The country has been too strategically important to ignore. Various
administrations have tried to woo it back into the Western fold, or talk of
replacing the Islamic Republic with one more to Washington’s liking, but the
results have been uniformly miserable. In the final analysis, Iran simply
rejects any vision of the Middle East as imposed by the will of the United
States. A famous quote by Ayatollah Khomeini puts it succinctly: “We will
resist America until our last breath.” Unfortunately, Washington has helped
perpetuate the animosity. The United States has displayed a callous disregard
for Iranian grievances and security concerns. Giving a medal to a ship’s
captain who just inadvertently killed 290 civilians and then wondering why Iran
might harbor resentment is just the most obvious example of American
obtuseness. An ill-conceived intervention in the Lebanese Civil War against the
Shia, while at the same time backing Iraq, threatened the new Iranian
government. Tehran’s response, to level a building full of marines and to take
American hostages, still colors American thinking, equally understandably.
Washington invariably took the wrong course with Iran. When diplomatic openings
appeared, hardliners refused to talk and advocated overthrowing the Islamic
Republic. When Iran killed U.S. soldiers and marines in Lebanon and Iraq,
successive administrations showed timidity when hard-liners called for
retribution.
Glimmers of optimism invariably give way to the smell of
cordite and talk of war. In 2012, the prospects for conflict peaked again.
Seasoned, pragmatic Iran watchers called for tougher sanctions to punish
Iranian intransigence regarding its nuclear program. But punishing Iran for its
intransigence also hardens Iranian leaders and justifies in their minds the
need for a nuclear program, both for increased self-sufficiency and as a
deterrent against Western aggression. Within the U.S. administration, discussions
in the White House Situation Room turned to the possibility of pressing for
sanctions against Iran’s central bank. As this is the means by which Iran
receives payment for its oil exports, this would be a radical act, tantamount
to an embargo of Iranian oil. “Iran could see it as a de facto act of war,”
said one senior Obama administration representative.
Unfortunately, now neither side has much desire to work to
bridge their differences. Distrust permeates the relationship. Three decades of
twilight war have hardened both sides. When someone within the fractured
governing class in Tehran reached out to the American president, the United
States was unwilling to accept anything but capitulation. When President Obama
made a heartfelt opening, a smug Iranian leadership viewed it as a ruse or the
gesture of a weak leader. Iran spurned him. Obama fell back on sanctions and
CENTCOM; Iran fell back into its comfortable bed of terrorism and warmongering.
Soon it may no longer be twilight; the light is dimming, and night may well be
approaching at long last.
The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with
Iran
DAVID CRIST published 2012
