The Iran Deception : REAGAN’S GREATEST CRISIS : CHAPTER 2 : Mocking Reagan’s Pledges of Strength

After six years of magic, President Reagan broke the spell. By deceiving the nation, he and those around him badly damaged his presidency. This traumatic tale is still unfolding, with no end in sight. This is how it developed.

The Oval Office, in the West Wing of the White House, is the official workplace of the President of the United States and thus symbolically the most important office in the Western World. In practice, it is used for ceremonial purposes and meetings; when President Ronald Reagan must grapple alone with a specific task, he often retreats to a small study nearby.

As the winter of 1985 gave way to spring, Reagan carried two enormous problems with him into his West Wing hideaway, one a personal obsession and the other a daring but dangerous policy proposal. And gradually, as the apparatus of White House decision-making ground forward, the two problems became linked.

First, there was the fate of his intelligence agent, William Buckley, and the torment of six other Americans who by this time were prisoners of Muslim fundamentalists in Beirut.

American hostages were a particularly sensitive subject for Reagan; in no small part, he owed his own election in 1980 to public revulsion against President Jimmy Carter’s apparent weakness in the Iran hostage crisis. The continued existence of hostages in Lebanon mocked Reagan’s own pledges of strength.

Moreover, these hostages seem to have exerted a profound emotional pressure on the President. He talked continually, longingly about bringing them home, aides remember. And as time went on, the pressure mounted because the prisoners’ plight grew more desperate.

Buckley had been in the habit of sending post cards to friends at the library in Lexington, Mass., where he had worked years before as assistant director between stints with the CIA and then Army intelligence. The post cards had been from “shoot ‘em up places,” a library employee recalls. Now, none of his friends heard anything from this dark-haired, handsome man.

Sometime in 1984, however, Washington had somehow received word that Buckley was being brutally tortured by his captors. In the secret corridors of CIA headquarters, the impact of the report was powerful.

Beneath his quiet facade, William Buckley was tough. In Korea, he had lost two of his toes to frostbite. During Army training, he had made a night parachute drop, landed on a rock and broken his back. Doctors said he would never walk; within a year, he had proven them wrong.

But the reports--the CIA still refuses to describe them or say how they were received--brought a message of horror. And that summer, when the terrorists in Beirut released a videotape of Buckley, its 56 seconds reinforced the CIA’s sense of desperation.

“I am well,” Buckley said into the camera. But it was a lie. He was hollow-cheeked. He looked defeated, weak. “My friends Benjamin Weir and Jeremy Levin also are well,” he said.

Then, in words that must have been freighted with meaning for the fellow professionals who knew him, Buckley pleaded with his government: “Take action for our release quickly.”

At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., the mute evidence of Buckley’s suffering brought hardened men to tears.

The days of captivity were piling up on the others too.

Terry Anderson, bureau chief for the Associated Press, kidnaped a year after Buckley, was being beaten too. He prayed, using a rosary he fashioned from fuzz balls and string. He argued, he balked. He suffered, he later told Newsweek, depression and distraction.

His wife, Madeleine, had been pregnant. He knew nothing about whether he had a child until one of his Shia guards suffered the death of his own wife and was moved to play for Anderson a videotape showing Madeleine on television--with their new daughter.

David P. Jacobsen, hospital administrator at the American University of Beirut, kidnaped after Anderson, was blindfolded and chained hand and foot to the floor of a room a dozen feet square. He was stripped to his underwear. After six weeks, the blindfold came off. He and Anderson and Thomas Sutherland, dean of agriculture at American University, and the Rev. Benjamin F. Weir and Father Lawrence M. Jenco, who ran the Catholic Relief Services in Beirut, paced the tiny prison, around and around, back and forth. Softly, Jacobsen sang the songs from every musical he could recall. Once, he took a painful beating on the soles of both feet.

He and the others formed “The Church of the Locked Door” and prayed together twice a day.

When hostages aboard hijacked TWA Flight 847 were freed in Beirut in the summer of 1985, Jacobsen wrote a three-page letter that found its way to the West. “If President Reagan could authorize negotiations for the TWA hostages, why not for us?” he demanded angrily. “America and Russia exchange spies all the time. Why can’t we be exchanged?”

The exchange Jacobsen’s keepers had in mind was his freedom for the freedom of fellow terrorists being held in Kuwait, but both the Reagan Administration and the Emir of Kuwait had firmly ruled out that kind of naked swap. Still, Jacobsen’s captors were clearly pro-Iranian and attentive to Islamic leaders in Tehran. And Ronald Reagan had been aware since before he was President that the Ayatollah needed guns.

Indeed, five years earlier, during the 1980 campaign, candidate Reagan had spoken out in favor of providing military equipment to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in return for the American Embassy hostages; at an Oct. 15, 1980, news conference in Los Angeles, Reagan had made it clear in this exchange with a reporter that he was ready to trade war materiel, if not guns, for men:

Q: Governor, would you agree to sell (military) spare parts, I mean to allow other nations to sell spare parts, to Iran if it will help get the hostages back?

A: I would have no objection to that.

Yet important as the fate of the hostages was for Reagan, this alone was not enough to set the Iranian arms-and-hostages affair in motion. What gave it critical mass was the other great problem on the President’s mind as he worked in the Oval Office during the early months of 1985:

A highly secret proposal from some of his top national security advisers to begin making behind-the-scenes overtures to elements inside the Khomeini government.

What some analysts in the U.S. intelligence community began to press for was a secret effort by Washington to open a dialogue with what was described as “moderate” elements in Iran. Urgent action was needed now, these analysts said, as preparation against the day when Khomeini will pass from the scene and control of his strategically vital country may go up for grabs.

This idea exerted a strong pull on then-National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane and others at the National Security Council who saw the world in grand geopolitical terms and yearned to follow in the footsteps of their towering predecessor, Henry A. Kissinger. Indeed, McFarlane was to describe the attempted opening to Iran as Ronald Reagan’s equivalent of the historic Nixon-Kissinger opening to China.

Yet the idea was fraught with potential problems. Not only had Iranians, including many of those now portrayed as moderates, held and abused the U.S. Embassy staff in Tehran, they also had been linked to terrorist attacks against Americans and others in Lebanon and elsewhere.

In response to the Tehran hostage taking, the Carter Administration had placed an embargo on arms shipments to Iran. When neighboring Iraq invaded Iran in September, 1980, Khomeini’s need for military equipment drove him into the black market for guns and ammunition, tanks, parts, missiles--whatever it took to maintain the made-in-U.S.A. arsenal he had inherited from the Shah.

After Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 and the 52 hostages returned home, the new Administration quietly relaxed Carter’s embargo and tolerated Israeli arms shipments to Iran for several years, senior American and Israeli officials say.

But later, stung by a resurgence of Iranian-sponsored terrorism, Secretary of State George P. Shultz led a successful move to change that attitude: The Administration renewed its effort to cut off Iran’s arms pipeline, even giving the embargo a new name--Operation Staunch. Shultz’s diplomats seized every opportunity to preach the importance of choking off all munitions to Tehran.

Now, in early 1985, some of the President’s advisers were arguing that there was more to Iran than the Ayatollah. Donald R. Fortier, the executive secretary at the National Security Council, was a leader in this reassessment, arguing that Iran’s potential instability after Khomeini would offer a dangerous opportunity for Moscow to expand into the region--thereby endangering vital oil routes and upsetting the Mideast balance in ways highly threatening to this country.

By June of 1985, the CIA had produced a Special National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, designed to encourage consideration of a policy shift. Titled “Iran: Prospects for Near Term Instability,” it cited evidence suggesting that Khomeini’s government might be in trouble. Among the signs cited were street demonstrations and protests at a steel plant, where until then Khomeini’s support had been strong. The estimate pleased Fortier and Howard Teicher, director of the National Security Council’s office of political-military affairs, who seized upon it to draft a six-page proposal for a National Security Decision Directive. It said that “moderates” in Tehran would prefer talking to the United States to dealing with the Soviets.

Two things would soon happen to lend credence to this view:

First, in the summer of 1985, Iranian officials helped gain freedom for some of the hostages aboard hijacked TWA Flight 847 in Beirut. This suggested “moderates” in Tehran held some sway with their radical Islamic brethren in Lebanon. The help from Iranians caused what an Administration official called “a great stirring of interest” in the prospects of improving relations with Tehran.

Second, the Ayatollah himself, in a speech that July, seemed to soften his “great Satan” invective against the United States. He hinted that contacts with Washington might, after all, be possible. The speaker of Tehran’s Parliament, Hashemi Rafsanjani, reinforced the signal with several public statements--extraordinary in the context of Iran’s rabidly anti-American politics--that “normal relations” with the United States would be to Iran’s benefit.

In Washington, the “great stirring of interest” all this caused was hardly unanimous. When the National Security Council sent a draft of its directive to Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, he scrawled in a margin: “This is almost too absurd for comment. It is based on the assumption there’s about to be a major change in Iran and that we can deal with that rationally.

“It’s like inviting Kadafi over for a cozy lunch,” the secretary scornfully concluded.

The prospect of doing business with the Ayatollah might have rung alarms among Reagan’s political advisers in the White House. But the sharpest political minds of his first term, Chief of Staff James A. Baker III and political adviser Edward Rollins, were gone, Baker to Treasury secretary and Rollins to the private sector. Their more ideological replacements were more inclined to “let Reagan be Reagan.”

So the idea of a secret opening to Iran--in the form of ill-defined “aid”--did not die. If the plight of the hostages was the preeminent factor for Reagan, the possibility of altering the flow of future events in Iran was the prize that lured his senior national security advisers on.

Neither factor alone, it appears, would have been enough to launch Reagan and his men into seeking secret deals with Khomeini’s regime. Together, they drove the Administration--and the country--forward into crisis.

The first step was an appeal for help. Struggling with the two-problems-that-became-one, the White House turned to Israel. And, concerned about the sensitivity of the move and the chance for grief if anything went wrong, the Administration did not make its approach to Israel in person. Like a Fortune 500 company, it used a consultant.

Michael Ledeen, 45, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a conservative think tank in Washington, was doing some consulting for the National Security Council. And on a day in early spring of 1985, he flew from Washington to Jerusalem. Bearded, intense, known for the quality of his Israeli connections, Ledeen had an appointment with then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

Unlike the Oval Office, the office of the prime minister of Israel is small: about seven paces by six. It is on the floor above a VIP entrance to one of three stone office buildings called the Ben-Gurion Government Compound, seven minutes west of downtown Jerusalem.

Peres sat in a chair under a large painting of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father. By Peres’ dark wooden desk at the opposite end of the office were three black telephones, a red telephone and a military field communication telephone. Israeli flags stood at both ends of the office, so that any photo would include at least one.

On a sofa to Peres’ right sat Ledeen. By the account of a senior official in the Israeli government, Ledeen told Peres that the United States had four things in mind:

--To gain the release of the hostages; Ledeen mentioned William Buckley specifically.

--To persuade Iran to drop its support for international terrorism.

--To end the Iran-Iraqi War.

--To lay the groundwork for a better post-Khomeini relationship.

“Ledeen asked,” according to the senior Israeli official, “whether Israel had anything to offer.”

To Peres, Ledeen’s message seemed to be a White House call for help.

At about the same time, the senior Israeli official recalls, Peres heard something interesting from a friend and adviser named Al Schwimmer, the American-born founder of Israel Aircraft Industries who had become an independent arms dealer. Schwimmer said another Israeli arms dealer, Jacob Nimrodi, a longtime agent of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, who had spent more than two decades in Iran, had told him that he had been getting encouraging signals from Tehran.

Was this an opportunity to improve relations with Tehran and at the same time open up a lucrative arms trade?

Perhaps. The previous October, during his first trip to Washington to meet with Reagan as prime minister, Peres had had what one senior Israeli official described as “a general discussion of Iran” in which the issue of hostages was raised. The source said the two leaders expressed “mutual frustration” over the problem but concluded no “operational” agreement.

Peres was one of the architects of a longstanding Israeli strategic doctrine calling for improved relations with an “outer tier” of nations--Turkey, Ethiopia and Iran--that could provide a counterbalance to its hostile Arab neighbors. Moreover, there was still a large Jewish community in Iran that Israel wanted to protect. And it had its own possible hostages to think about--four Israeli soldiers missing since the Lebanon war and five Lebanese Jews believed kidnaped by pro-Iranian elements in south Lebanon.

But whether Peres would accept what seemed to be a chance to help the hostages and the President of the United States in the bargain, it already was too late for the intelligence officer named William Buckley.

Six days after his own abduction, David Jacobsen figured out, despite his blindfold, that he was in a room with Buckley. “He was delirious. He was regurgitating. He obviously was running a very high fever,” Jacobsen told NBC News after his own eventual release. “The guards came to me because I was a hospital director and said, ‘What can we do?’

“And I said, ‘You better take him to see--get him to a hospital or get a doctor to him.’

“They said, ‘We can’t do that.’

“I could not see him. . . . We were not permitted at that time to see one another. We were blindfolded. . . .”

Finally, Jacobsen could not hear anything either.

“There was just a long, long silence. When you’re in a small room--and there are certain noises that are associated with death. . . . I firmly believe that William died the evening of June 3.”

Despite claims by his kidnapers, the Islamic Jihad, that they executed William Buckley four months later, it is Jacobsen’s educated guess that by the time the first U.S-Israeli arms shipment arrived in Tehran bearing the profound hope that it would win his release, the soft-spoken spy with the memorable smile was dead.