On the hazy morning of May 17, 1987, three weeks after Saddam’s fiftieth birthday, the U.S.S. Stark, a Navy missile frigate, sailed from Manama, Bahrain, on a routine patrol mission in the Persian Gulf to monitor the shipping lane that slaked the world’s thirst for oil. Through the Strait of Hormuz flowed millions of barrels, daily pumped by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The United States had declared protection of free shipping there of vital national interest. The Iran-Iraq War had lately given this mission a dangerous edge, as Iranian and Iraqi aircraft and fast boats battled in the northern Gulf. The Stark and other U.S. ships policed the region to protect commercial vessels, tracking and warning off any aircraft or ship that looked threatening.
At about 8:00 p.m., the Stark detected an Iraqi warplane flying a “ship attack profile.” Iraqi jets often flew south over the Gulf, sometimes into international waters, to search for Iranian maritime targets. The Stark had watched two similar flights that morning, without incident. The Iraqis had never attacked an American vessel. The U.S. Navy did not operate as if Iraqi Air Force planes were presumed to be hostile. An American AWACS surveillance plane marked this latest Iraqi jet as “track 2202.”
At 8:30 p.m., the Stark’s commanding officer, Captain Glenn Brindel, a youthful-looking Penn State graduate who was then forty-three, stepped onto the bridge. For the next half hour, “2202”—identified as an Iraqi French-made Mirage F1, typically armed with Exocet air-to-ship missiles—flew in the Stark’s general direction. Brindel ordered no warnings or defensive measures. At 9:05 p.m., the Mirage was just over thirty nautical miles away. It suddenly turned directly toward the U.S. Navy frigate. No one on the ship initially noticed.
“Missile inbound! Missile inbound!” lookouts soon called out over the ship’s JL communications circuit.
“We have been locked on twice—”
The transmission of the Stark’s urgent broadcast broke as one Exocet slammed into the frigate’s port side, followed by a second missile that detonated and ripped a hole the size of a garage door in the ship’s skin. Fires erupted, and the Stark listed portside. A heavy plume of smoke rose into the darkened sky as sailors fell or leapt into the sea.[1]
When news of the Stark attack reached Washington, Reagan’s military and diplomatic advisers assumed the strike had been an accident. On May 18, as the American death toll rose toward thirty-seven, President Reagan made a statement that included no criticism of Iraq. Saddam hastily signed a letter to Reagan: “I would like to express to you my deepest regret for the painful incident,” he wrote. Iraqi warplanes “had no intention whatsoever to strike against a target belonging to your country or any country other than Iran.” The incident was a “tragic accident.” Saddam asked Reagan to “kindly convey to the families of the victims my personal condolences and sympathy.”[2]
Tariq Aziz soon issued a public apology and pledged to pay compensation to the families of the victims. On May 21, Saddam sent a second, even more emotive letter to Reagan, expressing his “heartfelt condolences to the families of the victims. . . . Rest assured that the grief which you feel as a result of the loss of your sons is our grief too.”[3]
Saddam also agreed to receive American investigators to jointly review the cause of the incident and to prevent such confusion in the future. A Pentagon team met Iraqi counterparts in Baghdad in late May. The Iraqis insisted that the Stark had drifted into Iraqi territorial waters—an assertion contradicted by America’s radar and surveillance evidence. Still, Richard Murphy reported to Secretary of State George Shultz that “the Iraqis were reasonably forthcoming.” The U.S. side concluded that the “only plausible explanation” was “a navigational error by the pilot” that had led him to misidentify his target, Murphy wrote.[4]
The Iraqi side refused to allow the Americans to interview the pilot, however. They asked pointedly if the Americans would allow such an interview if the circumstances were reversed. The Americans accepted Iraq’s refusal. They focused on strengthening protections for neutral shipping in the Gulf, looking ahead.
The attack was probably an accident, yet the eagerness of the Reagan administration to absolve Saddam reflected a certain desperation in Washington about restoring ties with Baghdad after Iran-Contra. And not everything about the Stark incident was as it had first seemed. It turned out that the attacking plane was not a Mirage fighter jet, as the U.S. Navy reported in a published investigation later that year. It was a French-made Dassault Falcon 50 business jet modified to fire anti-ship Exocet missiles. Saddam had purchased a pair of these executive jets from France. He used one for presidential trips and modified the other as a warplane that could fly stealthily with civilian markings on reconnaissance missions.[5]
W. Patrick “Pat” Lang, a U.S. Army colonel and the chief Middle East analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, was part of the U.S. investigative team that traveled to Baghdad that May. He was a sergeant’s son who had earned an English degree from the Virginia Military Institute before taking a commission. Lang had landed in Saigon as an intelligence officer and commanded a clandestine defense spying unit on the Cambodian border. After a second tour in Vietnam, he studied Arabic and took up postings as a defense attaché in Saudi Arabia and what was then North Yemen before rotating to D.I.A. headquarters. By the mid-1980s, he had grown into a balding, square-jawed man—irascible and sharp-tongued but well-informed.
In 1986, before Iran-Contra broke, Leonard Perroots, the three-star U.S. Air Force general who led the D.I.A., had asked Lang to draw up a plan to provide even more battlefield intelligence to the Iraqis than the C.I.A. was already providing. There were times when the D.I.A. and the C.I.A. each found it difficult to concede that the other might be doing something constructive. In this case, Perroots, as an Air Force man, concluded that the C.I.A. intelligence could be improved upon by providing more precise target packages to the Iraqis—including flight paths to and from Iranian targets, suggestions about what bombs to drop, and after-action damage assessments. Later that year, the National Security Council discussed the plan, code-named Elephant Grass, but it was not adopted.[6]
In mid-1987, after Lang returned from Baghdad, Perroots suggested they revisit the proposal. The context had shifted. Iran-Contra had all but destroyed the fragile relationship between the C.I.A. and Saddam Hussein’s regime. There was an opportunity for the D.I.A. to step in. The Pentagon already maintained a small defense attaché’s office, led by a colonel, in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. That summer, Perroots gave permission to provide intelligence to the Iraqis.
For his part, Pat Lang, taking note of the many C.I.A. officers forced to lawyer up as Iran-Contra investigations went on, sought written instruction to proceed. Perroots eventually delivered a one-page authority letter on a blank piece of paper bearing “what purported to be” the signature of then defense secretary Frank Carlucci, as Lang recalled it. He decided the letter was good enough.[7]
By late 1987, Rick Francona, a U.S. Air Force captain and intelligence officer, had joined the incipient Iraq operation at the D.I.A. Then in his midthirties, Francona had served as a Vietnamese-language interpreter before he also shifted to study Arabic. He was a smooth briefer, dashing in a dress uniform, and comfortable on the D.C. embassy cocktail circuit—a presentable deputy to the less diplomatic Lang.
Sometime before Christmas 1987, the D.I.A. circulated an intelligence report about the Iran-Iraq War. It presented a worrying forecast about the year ahead, predicting that if Iranian troops broke Iraqi lines during a spring offensive, they could yet roll into Baghdad, overthrow Saddam, and win the war. Once more, “an Iraqi defeat seemed all too possible,” recalled Haywood Rankin, then a State Department political officer in the Baghdad embassy. And, once again, the Reagan administration concluded “that Iraq must not be defeated, must not be overrun by Khomeini.”[8]
The White House directed the D.I.A. to move forward. Francona and Lang soon had a new code name for their project: Druid Leader.
America’s Arab allies smoothed the D.I.A.’s way with Saddam and Iraqi military intelligence. After Lang and Francona briefed King Hussein in Amman, the king called Saddam and urged him to take the D.I.A.’s intelligence seriously. The D.I.A. officers also traipsed over to the Virginia home of Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, the Saudi ambassador and an inveterate operator. They unpacked a display of satellite photographs on the living-room floor. The goal, Francona recalled, was for Bandar and other Arab allies “to tell the Iraqis” that they needed to accept the Pentagon’s assistance. Iran-Contra had only deepened Saddam’s distrust of American intentions, but he seems to have decided that if the D.I.A. satellite photographs depicting Iranian positions were accurate (which his generals could determine for themselves), then even if Washington’s game was to provide help to both sides of the war, he should take advantage of the stratagem as best he could.[9]
In February 1988, Lang and Francona traveled to Baghdad. The Iraqis chauffeured them in Mercedes sedans and lodged them at the Rashid, a new hotel built by India’s Oberoi chain to four-star standards. The hotel housed a bar frequented by Saddam Hussein’s louche young adult sons, as well as sports facilities, a helipad, and an underground bomb shelter. Francona assumed the guest rooms were wired for video and audio surveillance.
The D.I.A. men rode out to the sprawling General Military Intelligence Directorate headquarters complex in Khadimiya, along the Tigris, where C.I.A. officers had taken many meetings after 1982. Francona met his Iraqi liaison, a major who had studied English at Baghdad University.
“Is your counterpart in Tehran right now?” the major asked. He and his colleagues assumed that for every D.I.A. delegation bringing intelligence to Baghdad, there was probably another on the same mission in Tehran.
“No, he’s not,” Francona sputtered.[10]
The D.I.A. officers’ instructions were to provide battlefield information on Iranian forces that would help the Iraqi Air Force bomb Iranian military formations and infrastructure behind the front lines. The targets would include large-scale troop concentrations, groups of ships moored near one another, railroad trestles, and important bridges. The goal was to disrupt Iranian preparations for the presumed spring offensive. Yet the Americans were instructed not to provide any intelligence of “direct, immediate tactical value” to Iraq.[11]
It was a prohibition that could be difficult to interpret. Francona’s take was that if U.S. satellite imagery showed an Iranian logistics buildup underway to support an upcoming military offensive, they could share intelligence to encourage the Iraqi Air Force to strike. Yet if the U.S. imagery showed an Iranian tank battalion moving down a particular road to mount an imminent attack against an Iraqi brigade headquarters, the Americans could not share that information. These rules—and their dubious logic—reflected the Reagan administration’s continuing ambivalence. The White House did not want to be seen as joining Saddam Hussein’s generals in fighting day-to-day—taking on an advisory role so close to the action that America would effectively be a combatant in the war. It was a fine line, if it existed at all.
At the initial meeting at General Military Intelligence Directorate headquarters, Lang explained why the Pentagon had concluded that Iraq was potentially vulnerable to an Iranian breakthrough.
General Wafiq al-Samarrai, the deputy director of General Military Intelligence, led the Iraqi delegation. He was a full-faced man with a thick head of black hair and the look of a Baath Party loyalist. He reacted defensively: “We’re very capable of assessing the threat.”
This was not just pride speaking. By the war’s seventh year, General Military Intelligence ran an all-source operation to support its fighting generals. The department received war intelligence from the Soviets, Yugoslavs, and French, among others, and it ran its own eavesdropping and reconnaissance flight operations against the Iranians—to good effect, Lang would come to believe. Yet the latest American satellite maps from the D.I.A. provided over-the-horizon insights about Iranian logistics that the Iraqis did not possess.
“What do we have to give you to get this?” Samarrai asked the Americans. “What do you want from us?”
“We don’t want anything,” Lang answered. “We do not want the Iranians to win.”[12]
From Washington that winter and spring, Francona and D.I.A. colleagues sent textual analytical reports about Iranian activity to the defense attaché’s office in Baghdad to be passed on to General Military Intelligence. During periods of intense fighting, the D.I.A. might transmit a report to the Iraqis once a day or every other day. In quieter periods, the frequency might be once a month. By Lang’s count, in addition to this flow of updates, the D.I.A. supplied about two dozen fully developed descriptions of potential targets. The Americans conducted bomb-damage assessments after Iraqi strikes and sometimes counseled the Iraqis to hit certain targets again. In addition, Francona made five trips to Baghdad during 1988, often with Lang, carrying satellite photos and line drawings that could not be easily transmitted over the embassy’s secure communications link.
When the D.I.A. teams traveled to Iraq, they typically flew to Kuwait, where the Baghdad-based U.S. defense attaché, along with an Iraqi minder, would meet them. At a time when city-busting missiles rocketed in both directions between Baghdad and Tehran, it was safer to drive into Baghdad than to fly, and the ride up from Kuwait City allowed Lang and Francona to see the battlefield up close. On a typical visit, they might spend five or so nights at the Rashid. As they got to know their military intelligence counterparts, they went out in the evenings to Baghdad’s thriving nightclubs, such as the Khan Marjan, a former rest stop on ancient caravan routes converted to a domed nitery that could seat at least five hundred people, serving up meals, alcohol, and dancers. To amuse themselves, the D.I.A. and Iraqi officers revisited a century-old shaggy-dog story based on the idea that William Shakespeare was in fact a stranded-in-England Yemeni sailor known as Sheikh Zubair. After enough rounds, it seemed very funny.[13]
It was hard to judge the strategic importance of the satellite-derived imagery and photographs that Druid Leader delivered. Francona’s assessment was that they enabled the Iraqis to go on the offensive during 1988. There were other factors in the Iraqi successes of that year—their use of chemical arms and the intimidating effects on Iran’s leadership of Iraq’s newly modified Scud missile, al-Hussein, which smashed into Tehran indiscriminately. Iraqi broadcasts aimed at Iran claimed that al-Hussein missiles could carry chemical arms (they did not), and the propaganda exacerbated panic in the Iranian capital, where the authorities carried out partial evacuations. “The combination of having chemical weapons, the ability to incite terror in the population of Tehran, and the intelligence provided by the United States—those three things” influenced Iran’s calculations about continuing the war, Francona believed. The C.I.A.’s assessment that year was similar; by its judgment, the Iraqis were starting to win notable victories but remained “chemically dependent,” as an agency analyst put it. The Iraqi Army had rebounded from its initial problems of recruitment and retention, and it had grown from 190,000 soldiers in 1980 to nearly a million men under arms by 1988, almost twice the size of Iran’s ground forces.[14]
That spring, Iraqi forces retook the Faw peninsula and other territories lost the previous year. For the first time, it seemed possible to imagine that Iraqi victories could force Iran to accept the war’s end—not an outright Iranian defeat but an armistice that restored prewar borders and left both Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini in power. For Saddam, battlefield momentum seemed to breed greater aggression. More than ever before, he now embraced gas as a winning weapon. According to Iraq’s accounting, its military fired 54,000 chemically armed artillery shells, launched 27,000 short-range rockets, and dropped 19,500 aerial gas bombs during the war. Nearly two-thirds of these chemical weapons were used during 1987 and 1988, when the D.I.A.’s intelligence sharing under Druid Leader was taking place.[15]
There was certainly no confusion inside the D.I.A. about the extent to which Iraqis gassed Iranian soldiers and volunteers. At one point, Francona flew by helicopter to Faw to see the front firsthand. He met the intelligence director of Iraq’s Seventh Corps and walked across the battlefield for a day. At abandoned Iranian positions, Francona noticed scores of atropine injectors lying around—the detritus of Dutch-made injectable antidotes to nerve gas, similar to what NATO issued in preparation for chemical warfare.
“Oh, this is atropine,” Francona noted to his Iraqi host.
“We used a lot of smoke rounds. They must have thought it was gas,” the Iraqi officer explained.
“I don’t know,” Francona replied. “I’ve been in this situation. Unless I know there’s gas, I’m not sticking that thing in my thigh.” Surreptitiously, he and a colleague traveling with him collected a few empty injectors. They smuggled them back to Washington and sent them to the F.B.I. for analysis.[16]
There was no practical way to prevent the Iraqis from using Druid Leader intelligence to plan chemical attacks against Iranian forces. (The same could be said of C.I.A. intelligence provided to Iraq earlier in the 1980s.) “We didn’t know when the Iraqis would use chemical weapons,” Lang said. “Plus, we didn’t really want to know.”
“The D.I.A. was not telling the Iraqis, ‘Put sarin here,’ ” recalled Bruce Riedel, a C.I.A. analyst who traveled to Baghdad as part of his agency’s intelligence liaison during the 1980s. “But did they know that that’s what the Iraqis would do? Of course.”[17]