The US-Israel-Iran Triangle’s Tangled History
Exclusive: Iran and world powers have gone into double-overtime in negotiations
to ensure that Iran doesn’t build a nuclear bomb, but the shadow over the talks
is darkened by decades of distrust and double-dealing, a dimly understood
history of the U.S.-Israeli-Iranian triangle, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
April 03, 2015 "ICH"
- "Consortium
News" - As Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues
to accuse Iran’s Islamic State of seeking
Israel’s destruction – and U.S. neocons
talk openly about bombing Iran – the
history of Israel’s cooperative dealings
with Iran, including after the ouster of the
Shah and the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini in 1979, seems to have been
forgotten.
Yet, this background is
important when evaluating some of Iran’s
current political players and their
attitudes regarding a possible deal with
world powers to limit Iran’s nuclear program
to peaceful purposes only. In the United
States and Israel – for their
own politically sensitive reasons – much of
this history remains “lost” or little known.
The division inside Iran
between leading figures who collaborated
with the U.S. and Israel behind the scenes
and those who resisted those secret dealings
took shape in the early 1980s but remains in
place, to some degree, to this day.
For instance, Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei, the country’s current Supreme
Leader, was more the ideological purist in
1980, apparently opposing any unorthodox
strategy involving Israeli and Republican
emissaries that went behind President Jimmy
Carter’s back to gain promises of weapons
from Israel and the future Reagan
administration.
Khamenei appears to have
favored a more straightforward arrangement
with the Carter administration for settling
the dispute over the 52 American hostages
who were seized from the U.S. Embassy in
Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979, by Iranian radicals.
However, other key
political figures – including Ali Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mehdi Karoubi –
participated in the secret contacts with the
Republicans and Israel to get the military
supplies needed to fight the war with Iraq,
which began in September 1980. They were
later joined by Prime Minister Mir Hossein
Mousavi.
In 1980, these internal
Iranian differences played out against a
dramatic backdrop. Iranian radicals still
held the 52 hostages; President Carter had
imposed an arms embargo while negotiating
for the hostages’ release; and he was
struggling to fend off a strong campaign
challenge from Republican Ronald Reagan.
Meanwhile, Israel’s Likud
Prime Minister Menachem Begin was furious at
Carter for pushing him into the Camp David
peace deal with Egyptian President Anwar
Sadat that required Israel returning the
Sinai to Egypt in exchange for normalized
relations.
Begin also was upset at
Carter’s perceived failure to protect the
Shah of Iran, who had been an Israeli
strategic ally. Begin was worried, too,
about the growing influence of Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq as it massed troops along the
Iranian border.
At that time, Saudi Arabia
was encouraging Sunni-ruled Iraq to attack
Shiite-ruled Iran in a revival of the
Sunni-Shiite conflict which dated back to
the Seventh Century succession struggle
after the death of the Prophet Mohammad. The
Saudi prince-playboys were worried about the
possible spread of the ascetic revolutionary
movement pushed by Iran’s new ruler,
Ayatollah Khomeini.
Upsetting Carter
Determined to help Iran
counter Iraq – and hopeful about rebuilding
at least covert ties to Tehran – Begin’s
government cleared the first small shipments
of U.S. military supplies to Iran in spring
1980, including 300 tires for Iran’s
U.S.-manufactured jet fighters. Soon, Carter
learned about the covert shipments and
lodged an angry complaint.
“There had been a rather
tense discussion between President Carter
and Prime Minister Begin in the spring of
1980 in which the President made clear that
the Israelis had to stop that, and that we
knew that they were doing it, and that we
would not allow it to continue, at least not
allow it to continue privately and without
the knowledge of the American people,”
Carter’s press secretary Jody Powell told me
in an interview for a PBS documentary.
“And it stopped,” Powell
said — at least, it stopped temporarily.
Questioned by
congressional investigators a dozen years
later, Carter said he felt that by April
1980, “Israel cast their lot with Reagan,”
according to notes I found among the
unpublished documents in the files of a
congressional investigation conducted in
1992. Carter traced the Israeli opposition
to his possible reelection in 1980 to a
“lingering concern [among] Jewish leaders
that I was too friendly with Arabs.”
Carter’s National Security
Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski also recognized
the Israeli hostility. Brzezinski said the
Carter White House was well aware that the
Begin government had “an obvious preference
for a Reagan victory.”
Begin’s alarm about a
possible Carter second term was described,
too, by Israeli intelligence and foreign
affairs official David Kimche in his 1991
book, The Last Option. Kimche wrote
that Begin’s government believed that Carter
was overly sympathetic to the Palestinian
cause and was conspiring with Arabs to force
Israel to withdraw from the West Bank.
“Begin was being set up
for diplomatic slaughter by the master
butchers in Washington,” Kimche wrote. “They
had, moreover, the apparent blessing of the
two presidents, Carter and [Egyptian
President Anwar] Sadat, for this bizarre and
clumsy attempt at collusion designed to
force Israel to abandon her refusal to
withdraw from territories occupied in 1967,
including Jerusalem, and to agree to the
establishment of a Palestinian state.”
Extensive evidence now
exists that Begin’s preference for a Reagan
victory led Israelis to join in a covert
operation with Republicans to contact
Iranian leaders behind Carter’s back and
delay release of the 52 American hostages
until after Reagan defeated Carter in
November 1980.
That controversy, known as
the “October Surprise” case, and its sequel,
the Iran-Contra scandal in the mid-1980s,
involved clandestine ties between leading
figures in Iran and U.S. and Israeli
officials who supplied Iran with missiles
and other weaponry for its war with Iraq.
The Iran-Iraq conflict began simmering in
spring 1980 and broke into full-scale war in
September.
More
Straightforward
Khamenei, who was then an
influential aide to Ayatollah Khomeini,
appears to have been part of a contingent
exploring ways to resolve the hostage
dispute with Carter.
According to Army Col.
Charles Wesley Scott, who was one of the 52
hostages, Khamenei visited him on May 1,
1980, at the old U.S. consulate in Tabriz to
ask whether milder demands from Iran to the
Carter administration might lead to a
resolution of the hostage impasse and allow
the resumption of U.S. military supplies,
former National Security Council aide Gary
Sick reported in his book October
Surprise.
“You’re asking the wrong
man,” Scott replied, noting that he had been
out of touch with his government during his
five months of captivity before adding that
he doubted the Carter administration would
be eager to resume military shipments
quickly.
“Frankly, my guess is that
it will be a long time before you’ll get any
cooperation on spare parts from America,
after what you’ve done and continue to do to
us,” Scott said he told Khamenei.
But Khamenei’s outreach to
a captive U.S. military officer – outlining
terms that then became the basis of a near
settlement of the crisis with the Carter
administration in September 1980 – suggests
that Khamenei favored a more traditional
approach toward resolving the hostage crisis
rather than the parallel channel that soon
involved the Israelis and the Republicans.
In that narrow sense,
Khamenei was allied with Abolhassan
Bani-Sadr, the sitting Iranian president in
1980 who also has said he opposed dealing
with Israel and the Republicans behind
President Carter’s back. In a little-noticed
letter to the U.S. Congress, dated Dec. 17,
1992, Bani-Sadr said he first learned of the
Republican hostage initiative in July 1980.
Bani-Sadr said a nephew of
Ayatollah Khomeini returned from a meeting
with an Iranian banker, Cyrus Hashemi, who
had led the Carter administration to believe
he was helping broker a hostage release but
who had close ties to Reagan’s campaign
chief William Casey and to Casey’s business
associate, John Shaheen.
Bani-Sadr said the message
from the Khomeini emissary was clear: the
Reagan campaign was in league with some of
the Central Intelligence
Agency’s pro-Republican elements in an
effort to undermine Carter and wanted Iran’s
help. Bani-Sadr said the emissary “told me
that if I do not accept this proposal they
[the Republicans] would make the same offer
to my rivals.”
The emissary added that
the Republicans “have enormous influence in
the CIA,” Bani-Sadr wrote. “Lastly, he told
me my refusal of their offer would result in
my elimination.”
Bani-Sadr said he resisted
the GOP scheme, but the plan ultimately was
accepted by Ayatollah Khomeini, who appears
to have made up his mind around the time of
Iraq’s invasion in mid-September 1980.
Clearing the Way
Khomeini’s approval meant
the end of the initiative that Khamenei had
outlined to Col. Scott, which was being
pursued with Carter’s representatives in
West Germany before Iraq launched its
attack. Khomeini’s blessing allowed
Rafsanjani, Karoubi and later Mousavi to
proceed with secret contacts that involved
emissaries from the Reagan camp and the
Israeli government.
The
Republican-Israeli-Iranian agreement appears
to have been sealed through a series of
meetings that culminated in discussions in
Paris arranged by the right-wing chief of
French intelligence Alexandre deMarenches
and allegedly involving Casey, vice
presidential nominee (and former CIA
Director) George H.W. Bush, CIA officer
Robert Gates and other U.S. and Israeli
representatives on one side and cleric Mehdi
Karoubi and a team of Iranian
representatives on the other.
Bush, Gates and Karoubi
all have denied participating in the meeting
(Karoubi did so in an interview with me in
Tehran in 1990). But deMarenches admitted
arranging the Paris conclave to his
biographer, former New York Times
correspondent David Andelman.
Andelman said deMarenches
ordered that the secret meeting be kept out
of his memoir because the story could
otherwise damage the reputation of his
friends, William Casey and George H.W. Bush.
At the time of Andelman’s work on the memoir
in 1991, Bush was running for re-election as
President of the United States.
Andelman’s sworn testimony
in December 1992 to a House task force
assigned to examine the October Surprise
controversy buttressed longstanding claims
from international intelligence operatives
about a Paris meeting involving Casey and
Bush.
Besides the testimony from
intelligence operatives, including Israeli
military intelligence officer Ari
Ben-Menashe, there was contemporaneous
knowledge of the alleged Bush-to-Paris trip
by Chicago Tribune reporter John Maclean,
son of author Norman Maclean who wrote
A River Runs
Through It.
Maclean said a well-placed
Republican source told him in mid-October
1980 about Bush’s secret trip to Paris to
meet with Iranians on the U.S. hostage
issue. Maclean passed on that information to
State Department official David Henderson,
who recalled the date as Oct. 18, 1980.
Since Maclean had never
written a story about the leak and Henderson
didn’t mentioned it until Congress started
its cursory October Surprise investigation
in 1991, the Maclean-Henderson conversation
had been locked in a kind of time capsule.
One could not accuse
Maclean of concocting the Bush-to-Paris
allegation for some ulterior motive, since
he hadn’t used it in 1980, nor had he
volunteered it a decade later. He only
confirmed it, grudgingly, when approached by
a researcher working with me on a PBS
Frontline documentary and in a subsequent
videotaped interview with me.
Also, alibis that were
later concocted for Casey and Bush –
supposedly to prove they could not have
traveled to the alleged overseas meetings –
either collapsed under close scrutiny or had
serious holes. [For details on the October
Surprise case, see Robert Parry’s
Secrecy & Privilege and
America’s Stolen Narrative.]
Military Shipments
Though the precise details
of the October Surprise case remain murky,
it is a historic fact that Carter failed to
resolve the hostage crisis before losing in
a surprising landslide to Reagan and that
the hostages were not released until Reagan
and Bush were sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.
It also is clear that U.S.
military supplies were soon moving to Iran
via Israeli middlemen with the approval of
the new Reagan administration.
In a PBS interview,
Nicholas Veliotes, Reagan’s assistant
secretary of state for the Middle East, said
he first discovered the secret arms pipeline
to Iran when an Israeli weapons flight was
shot down over the Soviet Union on July 18,
1981, after straying off course on its third
mission to deliver U.S. military supplies
from Israel to Iran via Larnaca, Cyprus.
“It was clear to me after
my conversations with people on high that
indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could
transship to Iran some American-origin
military equipment,” Veliotes said.
In checking out the
Israeli flight, Veliotes came to believe
that the Reagan-Bush camp’s dealings with
Iran dated back to before the 1980 election.
“It seems to have started
in earnest in the period probably prior to
the election of 1980, as the Israelis had
identified who would become the new players
in the national security area in the Reagan
administration,” Veliotes said. “And I
understand some contacts were made at that
time.”
In the early 1980s, the
players in Iran also experienced a shakeup.
Bani-Sadr was ousted in 1981 and fled for
his life; he was replaced as president by
Khamenei; Mousavi was named prime minister;
Rafsanjani consolidated his financial and
political power as speaker of the Majlis;
and Karoubi became a powerful figure in
Iran’s military-and-foreign-policy
establishment.
Besides tapping into
stockpiles of U.S.-made weaponry, the
Israelis arranged shipments from third
countries, including Poland, according to
Israeli intelligence officer Ben-Menashe,
who described his work on the arms pipeline
in his 1992 book, Profits of War.
Since representatives of
Likud had initiated the arms-middleman role
for Iran, the profits flowed into coffers
that the right-wing party controlled, a
situation that allowed Likud to invest in
Jewish settlements in the West Bank and
created envy inside the rival Labor Party
especially after it gained a share of power
in the 1984 elections, said Ben-Menashe, who
worked with Likud.
The Iran-Contra
Case
According to this
analysis, Labor’s desire to open its own
arms channel to Iran laid the groundwork for
the Iran-Contra scandal, as the government
of Prime Minister Shimon Peres tapped into
the emerging neoconservative network inside
the Reagan administration on one hand and
began making his own contacts to Iran’s
leadership on the other.
Reagan’s National Security
Adviser Robert McFarlane, who had close ties
to the Israeli leadership, collaborated with
Peres’s aide Amiram Nir and with neocon
intellectual (and National Security Council
consultant) Michael Ledeen in spring 1985 to
make contact with the Iranians.
Ledeen’s chief
intermediary to Iran was a businessman named
Manucher Ghorbanifar, who was held in
disdain by the CIA as a fabricator but
claimed he represented high-ranking Iranians
who favored improved relations with the
United States and were eager for American
weapons.
Ghorbanifar’s chief
contact, as identified in official
Iran-Contra records, was Mohsen Kangarlu,
who worked as an aide to Prime Minister
Mousavi, according to Israeli journalist
Ronen Bergman in his 2008 book,
The Secret War with Iran.
However, Ghorbanifar’s
real backer inside Iran appears to have been
Mousavi himself. According to a Time
magazine article from January 1987,
Ghorbanifar “became a trusted friend and
kitchen adviser to Mir Hussein Mousavi,
Prime Minister in the Khomeini government.”
In November 1985, at a key
moment in the Iran-Contra scandal as one of
the early missile shipments via Israel went
awry, Ghorbanifar conveyed Mousavi’s anger
to the White House.
“On or about November 25,
1985, Ledeen received a frantic phone call
from Ghorbanifar, asking him to relay a
message from the prime minister of Iran to
President Reagan regarding the shipment of
the wrong type of HAWKs,” according to
Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence
Walsh’s
Final Report.
“Ledeen said the message
essentially was ‘we’ve been holding up our
part of the bargain, and here you people are
now cheating us and tricking us and
deceiving us and you had better correct this
situation right away.’”
Earlier in the process,
Ghorbanifar had dangled the possibility of
McFarlane meeting with high-level Iranian
officials, including Mousavi and Rafsanjani.
Another one of Ghorbanifar’s Iranian
contacts was Hassan Karoubi, the brother of
Mehdi Karoubi. Hassan Karoubi met with
Ghorbanifar and Ledeen in Geneva in late
October 1985 regarding missile shipments in
exchange for Iranian help in getting a group
of U.S. hostages freed in Lebanon, according
to
Walsh’s report.
A Split Leadership
As Ben-Menashe describes
the maneuvering in Tehran, the basic split
in the Iranian leadership put then-President
Khamenei on the ideologically purist side of
rejecting U.S.-Israeli military help and
Rafsanjani, Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi in
favor of exploiting those openings in a
pragmatic way to better fight the war with
Iraq.
The key decider during
this period – as in the October Surprise
phase – was Ayatollah Khomeini, who agreed
with the pragmatists on the need to get as
much materiel from the Americans and the
Israelis as possible, Ben-Menashe told me in
a 2009 interview from his home in Canada.
Ben-Menashe said
Rafsanjani and most other senior Iranian
officials were satisfied dealing with the
original (Likud) Israeli channel and were
offended by the Reagan administration’s
double game of tilting toward Iraq with
military and intelligence support while also
offering weapons deals to Iran via the
second (Labor) channel.
The ex-Israeli
intelligence officer said the Iranians were
especially thankful in 1985-86 when the
Likud channel secured SCUD missiles from
Poland so Iran could respond to SCUD attacks
that Iraq had launched against Iranian
cities.
“After that (transaction),
I got access to the highest authorities” in
Iran, Ben-Menashe said, including a personal
meeting with Mousavi at which Ben-Menashe
said he learned that Mousavi knew the
history of the Israeli-arranged shipments in
the October Surprise deal of 1980.
Ben-Menashe quoted Mousavi
as saying, “we did everything you guys
wanted. We got rid of the Democrats. We did
everything we could, but the Americans
aren’t delivering [and] they are dealing
with the Iraqis.”
In that account, the
Iranian leadership in 1980 viewed its
agreement to delay the release of the U.S.
Embassy hostages not primarily as a favor to
the Republicans, but to the Israelis who
were considered the key for Iran to get the
necessary military supplies for its war with
Iraq.
Israeli attitudes toward
Iran soured when the lucrative arms
pipelines of the Iran-Iraq War dried up
after the conflict finally ended in 1988.
Iran’s treasury was depleted as was the
treasury of Iraq, where Saddam Hussein
lashed out at one of his oil-rich creditors,
the Kuwaiti royal family, in 1990, invading
the country and setting the stage for a
U.S.-led Persian Gulf War that drove the
Iraqis out of Kuwait.
With Iraq burdened by
post-war sanctions and its military might
restricted by weapons inspectors, Israel
began to view Iran as its principal regional
threat, a view shared by the wealthy Saudis.
That common viewpoint gradually created the
basis for a de facto Israeli-Saudi alliance
which has begun to come out of the shadows
in recent years. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Deciphering
the Mideast Chaos.”]
Meanwhile, in Iran, this
half-hidden history of double-dealing and
back-stabbing remains part of the narrative
of distrust that continues to
afflict U.S.-Iranian relations. Even 35
years later, some of the same Iranian
players are still around.
Though Mousavi and Karoubi
fell out of favor when they were associated
with the Western-backed Green Movement in
2009, Rafsanjani has remained an influential
political figure and Khameini replaced the
late Ayatollah Khomeini as Iran’s Supreme
Leader. That makes him the most important
figure in Iran regarding whether to accept a
U.S.-brokered deal limiting Iran’s nuclear
program — or not.
Investigative reporter Robert
Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories
for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the
1980s. You can buy his latest book,
America’s Stolen
Narrative, either in print
here or
as an e-book (from
Amazon
and
barnesandnoble.com).
You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on
the Bush Family and its connections to
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The trilogy includes America’s
Stolen Narrative. For details on
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