Even as the C.I.A. continually shared Top Secret satellite-derived intelligence about Iranian military vulnerabilities after 1982, Saddam persisted in his belief that the spy agency was playing a dirty game. He continued to believe the C.I.A. had a hidden hand in geopolitical conspiracies against him—conspiracies in which the United States cooperated with Iran and Israel. Yes, American diplomats repeatedly assured Iraq that the U.S. was trying hard to block Iran from obtaining weapons. Yet Saddam still suspected that Washington was allowing Israel to supply arms to Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime. The evidence about this remained fragmentary, but Saddam mainly seemed to think that the Americans were congenital double-dealers and that, in this case, they were parceling out secret aid to both Baghdad and Tehran as part of a scheme to keep the war going. Saddam’s thinking reflected a common belief in salons, coffee shops, and ministries across the Arab world: that America must have installed Ayatollah Khomeini in power to gain leverage over oil kingdoms such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait or to sow instability in a region that the U.S. could exploit.
Saddam was right to sense a secret conspiracy—far more so than he could have possibly known. In early November 1986, a Lebanese magazine published a jaw-dropping story reporting that the Reagan administration had been secretly selling weapons to Khomeini’s Iran, in collaboration with Israel, apparently to secure the release of American hostages held by Iranian proxies in Lebanon. Then, on the evening of November 25, in Washington, D.C., Attorney General Edwin Meese delivered the shocking admission that not only was the magazine story essentially true, but in a bizarre twist, the White House had also used profits from arms sales to Khomeini’s regime to funnel money to anti-government Nicaraguan rebels known as the Contras, in apparent violation of U.S. law.
Speaking at a press conference in the White House briefing room, Meese gripped the podium with both hands and narrated a summary of the matter in the passive voice, as if the misdeeds had been orchestrated by spectral beings. “Certain monies . . . were taken and made available to the forces in Central America, which are opposing the Sandinista government there,” Meese said.
“How much money, sir?”
“We don’t know the exact amount yet. Our estimate is that it is somewhere between ten and thirty million dollars.”
“How did it come to your attention?”
“In the course of a thorough review of a number of intercepts and other materials . . . the hint of a possibility that there was some monies being made available for some other purpose . . . came to our attention.”
The scandal soon to be known as Iran-Contra—a covert initiative run from the Reagan White House that would result in criminal convictions of eleven administration officials—had been born. The two-line banner across the top of The New York Times’ front page on the morning after Meese’s announcement—“Iran Payment Found Diverted to Contras; Reagan Security Adviser and Aide Are Out”—reflected the political thunderbolt that had just hit Washington. Iran-Contra would consume journalists and congressional investigators for years. In Baghdad, as he absorbed the early headlines about America’s secret partnership with Israel to deliver weapons to Tehran, Saddam Hussein was perhaps the world’s least surprised leader.[1]
The decision to provide arms to Khomeini had originated around 1984, when some of Reagan’s National Security Council aides began to think that the U.S. could not afford to be entirely estranged from Iran, a key ally prior to Khomeini’s revolution. In late 1984, two years into the C.I.A.’s secret intelligence-sharing relationship with Saddam, an interagency review concluded that the Reagan administration had “no influential contacts” in Iran whatsoever. The review’s authors worried this might create an opening for Soviet influence. This was arguably an irrational anxiety, but it was typical of the Cold War’s zero-sum calculations. Moreover, during 1984 and 1985, Iranian allies in Lebanon had kidnapped C.I.A. station chief William Buckley, Presbyterian minister Benjamin Weir, and Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson, among others; the White House had no credible channel to negotiate with Tehran to pursue their release.
Israel, meanwhile, for its own reasons, supplied arms to Iran and maintained contacts in Tehran. Iran was hostile to some of Israel’s Arab enemies, including Iraq. Iran also had a sizable Jewish population that Israel sought to protect. Jews had settled in what was now Isfahan at least fifteen centuries before. By the time of the 1979 revolution, about eighty thousand to one hundred thousand Jews remained in the country. Khomeini’s hostility ignited an exodus of about two-thirds of that population—between thirty thousand and forty thousand to the U.S., twenty thousand to Israel, and another ten thousand to, mostly, Europe. Tel Aviv sought to ease the plight of those fleeing by buying favor with Khomeini’s regime. At the same time, some in the Israeli establishment hoped that pragmatists in Tehran might yet see the benefits of renewed collaboration, as the last shah of Iran had.
In August 1985, David Kimche, a longtime Mossad officer then at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, proposed that the Reagan administration bless Israel’s transfer of one hundred American-made TOW anti-tank missiles to Iran, a gesture that “would establish good faith and result in the release of all the hostages” held by Iranian allies in Lebanon. TOW—short for “tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided”—missiles were high-quality weapons that could accurately strike Iraqi tanks on the battlefield.
Reagan agreed, telling an aide that he would take “all the heat for that.” The initial transfer was followed by a second air shipment of 408 TOWs to Iran on September 14, 1985. The next day, Benjamin Weir’s captors in Lebanon released him. The seductive idea that the Reagan administration could free American kidnapping victims by secretly supplying arms to Khomeini had now been established.[2]
Tom Twetten was by now head of the C.I.A.’s Near East Division, supervising espionage and covert-action operations across the Middle East. In January 1986, he accompanied Clair George, the C.I.A.’s deputy director of operations, to the White House to meet Reagan’s national security adviser, John Poindexter, and an aide, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. The president’s men showed the C.I.A. men a draft “finding,” the legal document that presidents must sign to authorize the agency to carry out a covert action, such as arming guerrillas or trying to fix an overseas election. This finding would instruct the C.I.A. to locate and transfer to Iran four thousand more TOW missiles, with Israel’s help. Twetten and his colleagues were not to tell anyone in Congress or in other parts of the administration about the arms deal.
“This is not going to end well,” Twetten told George when he returned to Langley. It got worse. Some months later, the White House instructed the C.I.A. to provide Iran with a package of intelligence about Iraqi battlefield positions. North asked for “a map depicting the order of battle on the Iran/Iraq border” and showing the “units, troops, tanks, electronic installations” of Saddam Hussein’s forces, according to a contemporaneous memo. This would fulfill Saddam’s worst suspicions—that the C.I.A. also supplied to Tehran the kind of “exclusive” intelligence it provided to Baghdad. Twetten was not sentimental about Saddam, and no professional spy could afford to be too squeamish about such a rank betrayal, since C.I.A. officers routinely asked the foreign agents they recruited to commit treason. Still, it seemed to Twetten and his colleagues that this was a terrible proposal.
“Everyone here at headquarters advises against this operation,” John McMahon, the deputy director of the entire C.I.A., wrote to William Casey, Reagan’s spy chief, on January 25. “We would be aiding and abetting the wrong people,” he argued, meaning the Iranians. But the C.I.A. director was largely impervious to the cautions of career intelligence officers. At seventy-two, jowly and prone to mumbling, William Casey was an Irish saloonkeeper’s son and a devout Catholic who had made a fortune on Wall Street and then helped elect Ronald Reagan. He was an ardent anti-communist who had never paid much attention to rulebooks. Twetten and McMahon were especially exercised in providing satellite intelligence to Ayatollah Khomeini’s military, which “could cause the Iranians to have a successful offense against the Iraqis with cataclysmic results. . . . We are giving the Iranians the wherewithal for offensive action.” The C.I.A. had shared intelligence with Saddam precisely to prevent Ayatollah Khomeini from deposing him. Now they were risking that very outcome.
McMahon told Casey that he had raised these objections directly with the White House but had been overruled. “In spite of our counsel to the contrary, we are proceeding to follow out orders,” McMahon wrote forlornly.[3]
Twetten continued to work with Iraq during 1986 as if the betrayal were not taking place. In February, Casey established the DCI Counterterrorist Center at the C.I.A. and put Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, a legendary adventurer in the clandestine service, in charge. Clarridge thought the C.I.A. should be getting more out of Iraq in return for the satellite intelligence the agency provided. On March 30, 1986, a Palestinian splinter group detonated a bomb on a Trans World Airlines flight as it approached Athens, killing four Americans. A week later, a bomb planted by Libyan agents exploded in a Berlin nightclub, killing two U.S. soldiers and wounding more than six dozen others. What was the point of propping up Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran if Saddam’s spy services—deeply connected with Palestinian extremist networks—would not help the U.S. solve and prevent such heinous crimes? Twetten flew back to Baghdad to accompany Clarridge on a secret mission to persuade the Iraqis to do more to crack down on terrorists with ties to Baghdad, and to provide better information to the C.I.A. The visit didn’t yield much, but Twetten kept the channel open.[4]
The TOW missiles that the C.I.A. supplied to Iran under White House orders were valuable to Iran, but they did not have a decisive impact on the war. In February, Iranian forces invaded and occupied the Faw peninsula, a sliver of muddy tidal flats southeast of Basra that provided Iraq with its only direct access to international waters. The TOW missiles helped Iran defeat Iraqi tanks and achieve a major victory. Yet the Iranians received many more anti-tank missiles from suppliers such as China and North Korea. And the TOWs did not change the fact that Iran could still only field a quarter of the number of tanks that Iraq possessed, or that its air force remained inferior.[5]
C.I.A. satellite intelligence showing Iraqi positions, by comparison, could be of greater importance. It could help Iranian forces map the best way to break out of Faw and drive on Baghdad to win the war. In fact, the Iraqis came to believe, after the Iran-Contra scandal broke, that C.I.A.-supplied intelligence—doctored intelligence given to Iraq, to confuse Saddam’s generals, and accurate intelligence given to Iran—had allowed Iran to win the battle for Faw.[6]
How much intelligence about Iraq’s battlefield positions and vulnerabilities did the United States actually provide to Iran? The documentary evidence remains classified more than three decades after the events. There appear to have been three separate transfers to Tehran during 1986. Twetten recalled that C.I.A. leaders made sure to provide only the most basic topographical maps covering unimportant areas of the battlefield, undermining the White House orders and giving the Iranians little of value. The C.I.A.’s leading specialist on Iran, George Cave, who participated in some of the secret contacts with Tehran, has made similar statements, as have other senior C.I.A. officers aware of the intelligence sharing with Iran at the time. But according to W. Patrick “Pat” Lang, then the chief Middle East analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, North’s team at the White House worked around the C.I.A. by independently accessing classified computers. Lang said that, according to C.I.A. inspector general reports he read, the take North shared with Iran included all of the records of the C.I.A.’s four-year liaison with Baghdad after Twetten’s initial visit, plus all of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s “order of battle” material on Iraq, meaning files describing Iraqi military organization, command, weaponry, bases, doctrines, and logistics. The intelligence was “extensive and encyclopedic,” according to Lang.[7]
One glimpse of the operation is available in a message North wrote on October 2, 1986. North inventoried the “intelligence assistance” Iran sought from the United States. Tehran’s wish list included one-to-fifty-thousand-scale maps of Iraqi battlefield positions—maps of the precision sometimes used by the U.S. military. Khomeini’s regime also sought the locations of Iraqi division and corps headquarters; locations of logistics depots and supply routes; and information “on Iraqi troop movements, reserve units and tank concentrations.”
North noted in his message, as if it really needed spelling out by now: “We DO NOT have to tell the truth about all of this.”[8]
After the scandal broke, Ronald Reagan hoped to quell the “irresponsible press bilge” about his dealings with Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime. The president told the American people that his main motives had been to renew relations with Iran, help end the Iran-Iraq War, “eliminate state-sponsored terrorism,” and “effect the safe return of all hostages.” He admitted that he had “authorized the transfer of small amounts of defensive weapons and spare parts for defensive systems to Iran.” Yet the president insisted: “The United States has not swapped boatloads or planeloads of American weapons for the return of American hostages.”
Except that no boats were involved, this last declaration was false, and the entirety of his initial speech on the matter that November was incomplete and misleading. Reagan’s advisers had certainly discussed the potential benefits of discovering and engaging with Iranian moderates to better manage the geopolitical earthquake of the Iranian Revolution. Still, the record would eventually make clear that the release of American hostages in exchange for weapons shipments had been Reagan’s own prime motivation. The arms transfers were, at their heart, a harebrained ransom operation, even if Reagan and his advisers persuaded themselves that it was something else.
Reagan made no mention in public of the C.I.A. intelligence about Iraqi military positions provided to Iran. As the White House moved into cover-up mode, aides circulated a Top Secret inventory of “information that must remain classified.” The list included “intelligence support to the operation.”[9]
In Baghdad, Saddam Hussein, Tariq Aziz, and members of the Revolutionary Command Council met to discuss a response to the revelations. Saddam asked “Comrade Tariq” to take notes and help craft a letter to Ronald Reagan in Saddam’s name.
Taha Yassin Ramadan, an old Baath Party warhorse, noted that from what they now understood, America’s secret contact with Iran had started soon after the Reagan administration restored diplomatic relations with Iraq in late 1984, which, he said, “indicates this is an intentional goal for this conspiracy,” to lull Iraq into complacency and then bolster Iran.
Saddam thought “the weapons issue” was the key to America’s devious plan to get “close to the new regime” in Tehran. “We have the right to be suspicious of the U.S. call to stop the war,” he said, now that the United States had been exposed arming Iran.
“You want this in the statement?” Aziz asked.
“Well, I want these details in the message—that now, we are suspicious of the U.S. calls” for peace. He continued, “Reagan said that we are getting closer to Iran through weapons. A nation like Iran needs weapons more when it is at war. So therefore, how many more years does Reagan need the war to continue?”
The Americans had been telling Saddam for years that Operation Staunch, their public initiative to stop arms sales to Iran, was intended to increase Iraq’s military advantage and hasten the conflict’s end. Operation Staunch had just been revealed as a fraud. How could this be explained? Saddam tutored his comrades: Staunch was designed all along “to isolate Iran” from the international arms market so that the Iranians would become desperate and then “agree upon an American deal” for weapons—a deal that would, in turn, advance Washington’s conniving schemes for controlling the Middle East.[10]
It was a pattern that would recur between Washington and Baghdad: what many Americans understood as staggering incompetence in their nation’s foreign policy, Saddam interpreted as manipulative genius.
“I swear, I am not surprised” by Iran-Contra, Saddam told his advisers at another meeting soon after Reagan’s initial speech. Even so, “this level of bad and immoral behavior is a new thing.” The scandal affirmed Saddam’s bedrock convictions: Israel and Iran were in cahoots, and the C.I.A. was their silent partner. “Zionism is taking the Iranians by the hand and introducing them to each party, one by one, channel by channel,” Saddam declared. “I mean, Zionism—come on, comrades—do I have to repeat that every time?”
For Saddam, the disclosures merely surfaced what had always been there to understand: “the real American conspiracy—the real American-Israeli-Iranian conspiracy . . . a conspiracy against us.” He could “not imagine” that the U.S. would ever stop, “even if the Democrats won” in the next elections.[11]
Saddam Hussein was hardly the only Arab leader taken aback by Iran-Contra. King Hussein of Jordan headed a list of Arab allies of the United States angered by the revelations. “I had, out of conviction, done much to remove Iraqi suspicions” that the C.I.A. was deliberately supplying false intelligence to Saddam in order to prolong the war, the king wrote to Reagan. “Will not the Iraqis now feel that they were misled, not only by the United States but also by anyone who tries to explain, justify or defend American actions,” such as the king himself?[12]
National Security Council aides drafted letters from Reagan to bruised Arab friends, essentially repeating the misleading points in the president’s speech to the American people. David George Newton, the American ambassador in Baghdad, received a letter from Reagan intended for Saddam.
Newton had succeeded William Eagleton at the ramshackle American embassy compound. He was a talented Arabic speaker who had joined the diplomatic service after graduating from Harvard and serving in the U.S. Army. Before Baghdad, he had put in tours in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. During 1985 and 1986, Newton had become devoted to the improvement of U.S.-Iraqi understanding. Like other State Department diplomats who had been kept in the dark about the weapons sales to Iran, Newton was shocked and disappointed.
He carried Reagan’s bland letter to Aziz, who read it and dismissed it as nothing new. Newton found Aziz “very quiet, very reasoned and very angry.” Iraq judged the Reagan administration’s explanations to be “absolutely unconvincing.” American actions had “rendered unreliable” three years of assurances by Washington.
Aziz added that “he personally feels betrayed,” Newton cabled to Washington. Aziz “commented bitterly” that high-ranking American officials, including C.I.A. director William Casey, had “knowingly deceived him” by encouraging Iraqi air attacks against Iran “while aware that their own government was providing Iran with the means to shoot down Iraqi aircraft.”[13]
The exposure of American double-dealing damaged Aziz’s standing in Saddam’s inner circle. But the scandal was particularly crushing for Nizar Hamdoon. He was the face of Saddam’s campaign to win favor with America, down to his portrait on the cover of The Washington Post’s Sunday magazine. For two years, Hamdoon had been speaking to think tanks, reporters—anyone who would listen—about the opportunity to construct a U.S.-Iraqi alliance. Iran-Contra hit him as if “somebody took my only son,” he told a colleague. In Baghdad, old-school Baathists close to Saddam discovered that their views “about the U.S. being an imperialist pro-Israeli power now were reconfirmed,” as Newton recalled. They came after Hamdoon and blamed him for getting too close to Israel while cavorting around Washington. “People were out to get him,” Odeh Aburdene, Hamdoon’s friend, remembered.[14]
Aziz shepherded a nearly two-thousand-word reply from Saddam to Reagan’s letter. It calmly enumerated Iraqi grievances. It also drifted into Saddam’s hypotheses about Zionism’s grip on America. Reagan had not even mentioned an “important issue” during his speech to the American people or in his letter, Saddam wrote. The Israelis saw it in their interests to prolong the Iran-Iraq War indefinitely, and so “this has naturally deepened our suspicions about the entire issue.”[15]
Aziz avoided attacking President Reagan directly or publicly. He argued nonetheless that America’s actions would prolong the war; that its example would encourage other countries to sell arms to Iran; and that the Reagan administration’s search for moderates to talk to in Iran was delusional, since there were no moderates in Tehran with any power. As to the future of U.S.-Iraqi relations, the recent revelations constituted a stab in the back and the burden now fell to Washington to repair the damage.
In the spring of 1987, as Saddam’s fiftieth birthday approached, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti sent his estranged half brother a letter. He noted the significance of a golden jubilee birthday. The president was getting to his “second half of life,” a time when “one would have special thoughts and feelings. This comes from being at the summit of his wisdom.”
That was certainly how Saddam viewed his station. His publishing machine would soon bring out The Political Dictionary of Saddam Hussein, containing five hundred examples of his sayings, each interpreted by an Iraqi poet. The Complete Writings of Saddam Hussein would require eighteen volumes. Newspapers carried his maxims across the tops of their front pages.
Barzan had in mind a family reconciliation. He hoped that Saddam would “turn this ugly page of our relationship and start a new one.” He was rewarded, to an extent. On April 27, 1987, the day before Saddam’s birthday, Barzan received a message that Saddam had invited all three of his half brothers—Barzan, Sabawi, and Watban—to his party the next day. “We will meet, but we have nothing in common but honor,” Saddam wrote. He warned his half brothers not to “bother my relatives,” meaning Hussein Kamel and his kin.
When Barzan arrived, he found the atmosphere “very heavy and strained,” but after about two hours, Saddam turned up, and “we greeted him and hugged him.”
Saddam wore a tailored suit and beamed as children chanted “Father Saddam.” Some guests were in military uniform, others in tuxedos. Smiling widely, the patriarch lit candles and cut a large cake.[16]
As the initial shock of the Iran-Contra revelations wore off, Saddam groped again for a sustainable relationship with Washington. The fact that he had suspected all along that the Americans were double-dealing liars actually made it easier for him to reconnect—he had been proved right. And Iraqi interests hadn’t changed: Saddam wanted balanced relationships with both Cold War superpowers; he wanted his war with Iran to end as soon as possible; and he was willing to accept American aid and exports to bolster his cash-strapped war economy. Nor had American goals changed. The Reagan administration did not want Ayatollah Khomeini to conquer Baghdad.
Reagan’s aides worked assiduously during the winter and spring of 1987 to bring Saddam back onside. They revived Operation Staunch as well as economic aid and bank credits for Iraq. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs Richard Murphy, a gaunt-faced Arabic speaker and seasoned Middle East hand, traveled to Baghdad. He delivered a letter to Saddam noting the administration had been “very active” in seeking to deny Iran weapons and force Khomeini to withdraw his troops from Iraqi territory and enter negotiations.[17]
Saddam received Murphy in person, signaling his openness to a restored if more cold-eyed relationship. Just over three years earlier, when he met Donald Rumsfeld, Saddam had walked his guest to a window to look out at the Baghdad skyline, suggesting the expansive business opportunities available in a new American-Iraqi partnership. His attitude with Murphy was more acerbic.
“Your relationships with the Third World are like an Iraqi peasant’s relationship with his new wife,” Saddam told the diplomat.
“Oh?”
“Yes, absolutely—three days of tea and honey, and then off to the fields for life.”[18]