Dancing with the Devil. Michael Rubin
Italian soldiers in the capital to shore up the government. It was a fateful decision. On October 23, 1983, an Iranian-sponsored suicide bomber drove a truck bomb into the U.S. Marine barracks, killing 241 American servicemen.
For Americans, it was the beginning of a Lebanese nightmare. Between 1984 and 1992, Iranian-backed terrorists in Lebanon kidnapped twenty-four Americans. They killed several, including William Francis Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, and William R. Higgins, a Marine colonel snatched while on a UN peacekeeping mission. Most of the captives languished, while Reagan obsessively peppered his staff with questions about their condition and the possibilities for their release.66
It was déjà vu all over again as a hostage crisis brought relations with Iran front and center. On January 20, 1984, Secretary of State George P. Shultz designated Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism and lobbied allies to embargo arms sales to Iran, a measure designed to bite the Islamic Republic as its war with Iraq dragged on.67
Reagan wanted to punish Iran for its terror sponsorship, but his aides, like Carter, aimed to engage moderate regime officials. On August 31, 1984, the national security advisor, Robert McFarlane, initiated a review of U.S. policy toward Iran and asked how Washington might influence succession in Iran once the eighty-two-year-old Khomeini died. Broad strategic concerns motivated McFarlane. The original hostage crisis may have sent U.S.-Iran relations to their nadir, but the two countries’ interests remained intertwined. Both Tehran and Washington wanted to support the Afghan resistance in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The shah’s death had rendered many Iranian demands moot, while the Algiers Accord had established an arbitration process to address other disputes.
Both the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency informed McFarlane that they lacked influence inside Iran, so McFarlane proposed a plan to rectify this. He suggested that the United States use its allies to sell arms to Iran. The process would create relationships and, given Iran’s war needs, might also develop leverage. Both the Pentagon and the State Department objected to the proposal even before Oliver North, a National Security Council aide, amended it to link the arms to the release of American hostages held by Iranian-backed groups. The proposal gained new life toward the end of 1985, soon after John Poindexter became the national security advisor. Today, the Iran-Contra affair might be remembered for the illegalities arising from its circumvention of congressional prohibitions on funding anticommunist insurgents in Nicaragua, but at its inception the initiative was about reaching out to a rogue regime.
The Reagan administration may have criticized Carter for negotiating under fire, but Reagan’s team learned the difficulty of maintaining a Manichaean approach to terrorism when it faced its own hostage crisis. Whereas Reagan had faulted Carter for offering inducements to the Iranians,68 his administration now did just that. On January 17, 1986, Reagan signed an order authorizing the sale of guided missiles to Iran through Israeli middlemen. Once Iran received the missiles, it would order Hezbollah and other proxy groups to release American hostages.
On May 15, 1986, Reagan authorized McFarlane, who had since retired, to travel to Iran for further dialogue. Ten days later, McFarlane arrived in Tehran with a few aides, carrying a Bible and a cake shaped like a key.
McFarlane’s good intentions fell flat. In an intentional slight, no senior Iranian official met his plane. Years later, Hashemi Rafsanjani gloated, “Have you forgotten that Irishman McFarlane came here and our authorities were not willing to talk to him; he was stuck with our second and third rate authorities?”69 Not only did Iranian-backed groups refuse to release any hostages, but Iranian officials piled on additional demands.70 McFarlane’s Iranian intermediaries had reverted to the same strategy they had earlier employed with Carter: they shunted responsibility to midlevel officials and then augmented their demands.
Even so, the outreach to Iran appeared successful at first glance. For fifteen months beginning in June 1985, no Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon.71 After the release of Father Lawrence Jenco, who had been in captivity for 564 days, the Reagan administration delivered additional spare parts to Iran; but no sooner had American officials offloaded the last shipment of military equipment than kidnappers seized three more Americans.72 The arms trade gave Iran an incentive to seize hostages.73
Meanwhile, neither Washington nor Tehran wanted their discussions to become public. To the Americans, ransoming hostages was anathema; to the Islamic Republic, the United States remained the Great Satan.74
Politics in Tehran doomed the diplomacy. Rafsanjani wanted to retain plausible deniability about his involvement in the talks so as not to fall victim to hardliners who opposed any outreach to Washington.75 The internal Iranian debate between ideologues and pragmatists remained unresolved. The ideologues believed that export of the revolution should be Iran’s key goal regardless of the international antagonism it caused and the isolation it created. Pragmatists wanted to scale back Iranian terror sponsorship in order to break Iran’s isolation. Mehdi Hashemi, the head of the Office of Liberation Movements—the precursor to the Qods Force—clashed repeatedly with Rafsanjani. A week after McFarlane’s secret 1986 trip to Tehran, Hashemi, the son-in-law of Khomeini’s deputy Hossein Ali Montazeri, leaked word of secret talks in pamphlets distributed at the University of Tehran. Six months later, Hashemi or his immediate aides leaked word of McFarlane’s meetings to a Lebanese magazine.76 On November 4, 1986, the seventh anniversary of the embassy seizure, Rafsanjani confirmed the secret talks to the international press.77
Regardless of the wisdom of the arms-for-hostages scheme, the accompanying talks represented a serious attempt to reach out to Tehran. U.S. authorities trusted the Iranians to keep their silence, but Iranian officials broke their word. The resulting crisis paralyzed Reagan’s second term. Whereas Reagan had a 62 percent approval rating at the start of the term, it dropped to just 46 percent with the disclosure of the Iran-Contra affair.78 Outreach to Tehran when Iranian politics remains in flux is costly.
U.S.-Iran Engagement under George H. W. Bush
When Reagan’s vice president began his own presidency, pro-Iranian terrorists held nine Americans hostage in Lebanon and tensions remained high. George H. W. Bush, a former diplomat and a realist, offered Iran an olive branch. “There are today Americans who are held against their will,” he noted in his inaugural speech. “Assistance can be shown here, and will be long remembered. Goodwill begets goodwill. Good faith can be a spiral that endlessly moves on.”79 Over subsequent days, he reaffirmed his desire to improve relations. “I don’t want to . . . think that the status quo has to go on forever,” he said. “There was a period of time when we had excellent relations with Iran.”80
Khomeini was blunt in response. “Iran does not need America,” he declared.81 Unlike Carter or Reagan, Bush took no for an answer and did not rush engagement; rather, he waited for the Iranian leadership to change its mind.
Change came in an unexpected way just six months into Bush’s term, on June 3, 1989, when Khomeini died. The ayatollah had always seen himself as the deputy of the messiah on earth. The messiah was not yet ready to return, however, and so he needed a new deputy. Ali Khamenei, the titular president, filled the role of Supreme Leader. Journalists and diplomats saw Khamenei as a moderate, at least in comparison with Khomeini.82 Then, on August 3, Rafsanjani became president. Speaking the next day, he suggested that “reasonable, prudent solutions” could free the hostages, and privately he told Pakistani intermediaries that U.S. gestures might grease the process.83 Bush felt that Rafsanjani’s statement “offers hope,” and State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler voiced her belief that “Iran is genuinely engaged” and that there was no reason not to expect positive results.
Bush’s willingness to engage was real. He issued a national security directive saying that the United States should prepare for “a normal relationship with Iran on the basis of strict reciprocity,”84 and he asked UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar to serve as an intermediary between the national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, and Rafsanjani.85 Pérez de Cuéllar used Giandomenico Picco, an Italian career UN bureaucrat, as his representative.
Picco