Against All Enemies (10 page)

It was against this backdrop of hostile relations with Iran that the Reagan administration began to look anew at the war between Iran and Iraq, which had erupted when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, hoping to take advantage of the weakness of the new revolutionary government and its inability to get American spare parts for the weapons the shah had bought. There has been speculation that the United States gave Saddam a green light to attack Iran, perhaps in the hopes that if he seized the oil-rich province of Khuzistan, we would continue to have access to Iranian crude, and perhaps because Washington hoped that the new Iranian regime would collapse without its major source of revenue. I tried to find evidence of such a U.S. strategy then, from inside the State Department and from my sources in the Pentagon and the White House. As far as I could tell, Saddam's attack on Iran was a surprise to Washington just as his attack on Kuwait would be almost a decade later.

Shortly after it began, the Iran-Iraq War became a stalemate, with very high casualties on both sides. Our little politico-military team at State was asked to draft options to prevent an Iranian victory or, as we entitled one paper, “Options for Preventing Iraqi Defeat.” As time passed and the war continued, many of those options were employed. Although not an ally of Iraq, the Reagan administration had decided that Saddam Hussein should not be allowed to be defeated by a radical Islamist, anti-American regime in Tehran.

In 1982, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the list of nations that sponsored terrorism. Iraq was thus able to apply for certain types of U.S. government–backed export promotion loans. Then in 1983, a presidential envoy was sent to Baghdad as a sign of support for Saddam Hussein. A man who had been the Defense Secretary seven years earlier in a previous Republican administration was sent carrying a presidential letter. The man was Donald Rumsfeld. He went to Baghdad not to overthrow Saddam Hussein, but to save him from probable defeat by the Iranian onslaught. Shortly thereafter, I saw American intelligence data begin to flow to Baghdad. When Iran was preparing an offensive in a sector, the Iraqis would know from what U.S. satellites saw and Saddam would counter with beefed-up defenses.

In 1984, the United States resumed full diplomatic relations with Iraq. Although the U.S. never sold arms to Iraq, the Saudis and Egyptians did, including U.S. arms. Some of the bombs that the Saudis had bought as part of overstocking now went to Saddam, in violation of U.S. law. I doubt that the Saudis ever asked Washington's permission, but I also doubt that anyone in the Reagan administration wanted to be asked.

After the intelligence flow to Saddam was opened up, our State Department team was then asked to implement the next option in the plan to prevent Iraqi defeat, identifying the foreign sources of Iranian military supplies and pressuring countries to halt the flow. We dubbed the diplomatic-intelligence effort Operation Staunch. I spent long days tracing arms shipment to Iran and firing off instructions to American embassies around the world to threaten governments with sanctions if they did not crack down on the gray market arms shipments to Tehran. The effort was surprisingly successful, raising the price and reducing the supply of what arms Iran could get.

By 1986, the Iran-Iraq War expanded into attacks on oil tankers. To insure its oil made it to market, Iraq shifted its product to neutral Kuwaiti tankers. Undeterred by attacking a “neutral” state's shipping, Iran bombed the Kuwaiti tankers. The Soviet Union then offered to send the Red Navy to the Persian Gulf to protect the Iraqi oil shipments. Horrified at the prospect of the Soviet fleet in the oil lanes, the White House asked our State Department team to come up with an alternative that would satisfy Iraq and Kuwait. We proposed that the Kuwaiti tankers be “reflagged,” their registration and names changed so that they became American ships subject to protection by the United States Navy. To defend the American ships carrying Saddam's oil, the U.S. Navy placed large convoys of U.S. warships into the Persian Gulf. On my wall in the State Department, we mapped mine-fields and locations of ship attacks. For the first time, we examined what to do if things escalated into a U.S.-Iranian war. They didn't, although shots were fired by both sides as the convoys made their way through the Gulf. (Ten years later, terrorism would force me to look again at options for a war with Iran.)

Simultaneously, Ronald Reagan's administration was responding to the threat of the Soviet Union's military involvement in the Middle East by bringing the United States closer militarily to Israel. Prior to this period, it was a given in the State Department that the United States could not expand military relations with Arab states and at the same time do so with Israel. U.S. military relations with Israel were minimal in the 1960s and 1970s. We had greatly expanded arms supplies after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, but our two militaries hardly knew each other. Looking at the threat the Soviet Union posed to the eastern Mediterranean, the Reagan administration sought to change that. The Administration proposed “Strategic Cooperation” with Israel. It was just short of a military alliance. To operationalize the concept, in 1983 we created something called the Joint Politico-Military Group or JPMG, a U.S.-Israeli planning group. First as a staff member and later as the U.S. head of the JPMG, I sought to find roles for the Israeli military in joint operations with American forces in the event of a war with the Soviet Union. My partner in this effort would be a heroic Israeli fighter pilot turned defense bureaucrat and strategist, David Ivry.

When in 1981 Israeli intelligence had developed irrefutable information that Saddam Hussein was building the Osiraq nuclear reactor to develop a bomb, the Israeli cabinet asked Ivry's reaction to the idea of preemptively bombing the plant. He recommended against it, although he said his air force could do it at considerable risk to the pilots. When the cabinet decided to order the attack anyway, Ivry planned the raid personally. Ivry went on to serve successive Israeli governments of all parties as the permanent civilian head of the Ministry of Defense, national security advisor, and ambassador to Washington.

I met Ivry after the Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1987. Although the law was aimed at South Africa, it had a little noticed provision that required the Reagan administration to investigate what nations were sending arms to South Africa in violation of the U.N. embargo. The provision also required that the results of the investigation be sent to the Congress and held open the possibility that the United States would ban military cooperation with any state found in violation of the embargo. No one in the State Department wanted to be involved in implementing that provision, because it was widely assumed the investigation would find that the biggest gunrunner to the apartheid regime would be Israel. Being the youngest Deputy Assistant Secretary of State at the time and having responsibility for intelligence analysis, I was given the hot potato and asked to run the investigation. I booked a flight to Tel Aviv.

Sitting in Ivry's office in the heart of the Kiriat, the walled-off complex in Tel Aviv that serves as Israel's Pentagon, I laid out to the Director General of the Israeli Ministry of Defense what I knew and what I suspected about Israeli–South African cooperation. I omitted any reference to rumors of their cooperation on nuclear weapons, but mentioned joint development of long-range ballistic missiles and fighter aircraft. David was clearly uncomfortable, but I began to think that it was not just because some young American was sitting there accusing him and his government.

“I am not saying we are doing these things, these rumors that you mention,” David began. “But we must have a defense industry; we cannot depend on other countries for our defense. A defense industry in a small country like ours has to export to stay alive, to keep costs in check. We do not sell to the Soviets or their allies, never. We have developed our own advanced weapons technologies. We have very smart, very capable engineers. America, however, will not buy our weapons. American defense contractors prevent the Pentagon from buying from us, they spread lies that what we have developed we stole from them. If we stole it from them, how is it they haven't been able to develop some of these technologies that we have working, unmanned aerial vehicles, air-to-ground guided smart bombs, other things.”

I had just met General Ivry, but I thought I saw a side to him that was not hinted at in the CIA profile of him as a hard-ass fighter pilot. “General, I have been to South Africa. Have you?”

He hesitated. “Yes, yes I have.” Then he added a justification that did not admit to the weapons programs. “We have a very large Jewish community there that we have to insure is protected from the anti-Semitism.”

“Anti-Semitism is a terrible, ugly thing, General. I saw a small piece of it growing up. My house was the only non-Jewish family in the neighborhood. I saw what people would do to the temple, I saw the harassment, heard the epithets. But, General, apartheid is the same thing. It's racism. Don't you think a government based on apartheid is a sin?”

Ivry had been looking at his hands. Now he looked up and into my eyes. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

The next week Ivry asked to appear before the Israeli cabinet. After the meeting the government of Israel announced that it was terminating any and all defense relations with South Africa and banning the import and export of defense items between the two countries, in keeping with the U.N. embargo.

The U.S.-Israeli Strategic Cooperation had a slow start. The Israeli Defense Forces had been the ultimate loner all of its life, never having operated with another nation's forces.

The talks went slowly at first. Perhaps we could do an anti–submarine warfare exercise, I suggested. “Why would we want you to find our submarine?” came the bemused reply.

Well, perhaps we could do an air-to-air exercise similar to Top Gun. “No, we will beat you and then your pilots will be mad at us.” I suggested that the U.S. be allowed to position military supplies in Israel for our forces to use in a crisis with the Soviets. “Certainly. And we will use them when we have a crisis too.” Eventually, however, we reached agreements.

My counterpart in the U.S. military was a Navy admiral who, at first, did not seem schooled in diplomacy. When asked at our first social dinner in Tel Aviv whether he had ever been to Israel before, Admiral Jack Darby thought a moment and then replied in a slow Southern drawl, “Well, that would depend on whether you count when I was in my submarine. You know, you can see a lot through a periscope.”

Eventually, we agreed on a series of exercises, which became larger with time. We also agreed on the development of war plans in the event the Soviet Union acted militarily in the region. Darby completely ingratiated himself with the Israeli military and built bonds of personal trust. When, later, Jack Darby became head of U.S. Submarine Force Pacific, he collapsed and died while jogging around Pearl Harbor. The Israel Defense Forces flew the Darby family to Israel for the dedication of the Jack Darby Memorial Grove in the desert.

David Ivry had grown concerned at the prospect of Soviet, Syrian, or Iraqi missiles attacking Israel. Together, we successfully proposed the U.S. fund the Israeli development of a missile defense system, as well as the interim deployment of U.S. Patriot missiles. We also managed to get the Pentagon to evaluate the Israeli unmanned aerial vehicle and air-to-ground smart bomb. The Marines bought the former, the Air Force the latter. (A few years later on the Iraqi border with the Marines, I got to “fly” one of the Israeli-made unmanned aerial vehicles over Iraqi troops.) Ivry also became my advocate in the Israeli cabinet, arguing successfully for my personal requests that they agree to international standards on nonproliferation of missiles and chemical and biological weapons.

(At the outset of the first Gulf War, Ivry and I conspired to get our governments to agree to deploy a U.S. Army Patriot unit in Israel. No foreign troops had ever been stationed before in Israel. We also worked together to sell Patriots to Israel, and to tie in the Kiriat with American satellites that detected Iraqi Scud missile launches toward Israel. After the war, CIA circulated unfounded rumors that Israel had sold some of the Patriots to China. Many in the State Department who thought that I was “too close to the Israelis” sought to blame me. Ivry called. “I hear you are in trouble. What can I do?” I jokingly suggested that he invite the U.S. to send an inspection team to Israel to do “anywhere, anytime” checking to see if any of the Patriots were missing or had been tampered with. I knew it was a silly idea. Israel would never give another country that kind of unfettered access. Ivry did not think the idea was silly. Again he went to the Cabinet for me. The ensuing U.S. Army inspection concluded that there was no reason to believe that Israel had tampered with or transferred any Patriot missile, software, designs, or associated material. I was cleared, but not without making enemies at CIA and State.)

Our stronger military relationship with Israel came about only by the Reagan White House imposing it on the Pentagon and State Department. The decision was the right thing to do militarily and morally, but the closer relationship with Tel Aviv did over time inflame some Arab radicals and give them propaganda to help recruit terrorists to their anti-American cause. Thus, between our buildup in the Gulf and our programs with Israel, by the mid-1980s, the United States had a growing military presence in the Middle East. Marines were regularly staging landings in Israel, Air Force and Navy fighters were flying into Israel air bases. Patriot radars scanned the skies. In Egypt, Oman, and Bahrain, the United States had bombs and other war matériel in warehouses and bunkers. A large U.S. Navy squadron plied the Persian Gulf. Reagan had checkmated the Iranians by strengthening Saddam Hussein. He had built new relations with both Israel and key Arab states to allow the U.S. military to operate against any Soviet threat into the Mediterranean or Persian Gulf.