Iran

The Shah

In August 1953 the CIA under Allen Dulles, working with British intelligence, carried out Operation AJAX, the coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to full power; according to Ari Ben-Menashe, Miles Copeland helped Kermit Roosevelt and the Iranian military restore the Shah.¹² The Shah's internal security service, SAVAK, was established in March 1957 with organizational help from the CIA and the Mossad, which kept a close liaison with it from the mid-1950s; SAVAK watched Iranian students and dissidents abroad, including in the United States.³ Yaacov Nimrodi was Israel's military attaché in Tehran from 1955 to 1968, and Richard Helms was sent there as American ambassador in February 1973 after leaving the CIA.⁴⁵ With the intelligence services of France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Morocco, SAVAK belonged to the Safari Club of the 1970s.⁶

Revolution and Hostages

The Shah left Iran on January 16, 1979, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned on February 1; the Islamic Republic was declared on April 1. According to Ben-Menashe, the CIA and SAVAK had asked for Israeli help in December 1978 with a plan to assassinate Khomeini, which the Shah rejected.²⁷ On November 4, 1979, students seized the American embassy in Tehran; fifty-two Americans were held for 444 days. During the crisis the CIA and the Pentagon tasked remote viewers hundreds of times on the hostages' whereabouts.⁸⁹ In April 1980 the rescue attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, which Richard Secord helped plan, ended at the Desert One staging area with eight Americans dead.¹⁰

October Surprise

Gary Sick, the National Security Council's Iran officer under Ford, Carter and Reagan, alleged in 1991 that the Reagan campaign had negotiated with Iranian representatives to hold the hostages until after the election of November 4, 1980, in exchange for the release of frozen assets and arms through Israel. In his account the brothers Cyrus and Jamshid Hashemi arranged meetings in Madrid in late July 1980 between William Casey, the campaign manager, and the cleric Mehdi Karrubi; former French intelligence chief Alexandre de Marenches, through his biographer's sworn testimony, said he arranged meetings between Casey and Iranians in Paris in October 1980. The hostages were freed on January 20, 1981, the day of Reagan's inauguration, and Nimrodi sold Iran's defense ministry Hawk missiles worth 135.8 million dollars that year.⁸ The House October Surprise Task Force rejected the allegation in January 1993; a Russian intelligence report stating that "William Casey, in 1980, met three times with representatives of the Iranian leadership" reached the task force after it had closed its inquiry, and was later found by Robert Parry in its files. A Senate inquiry found that Casey had run "potentially dangerous" efforts to collect intelligence on Carter's negotiations.¹¹¹² In 2023 the former Texas House speaker Ben Barnes said he had accompanied John Connally on a Middle East tour in the summer of 1980 on which Connally told Arab leaders to advise Iran to wait for Reagan.¹³

The War with Iraq

Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Iran on September 22, 1980; the war ended with Iran's acceptance of Security Council Resolution 598 on July 20, 1988. From about 1982 the Reagan administration tilted toward Iraq, and the CIA supplied it with satellite imagery of Iranian positions while American intelligence tracked Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops.¹⁴ Israel supplied Iran throughout: according to Ben-Menashe, Prime Minister Menachem Begin formed the Iran-Israel Joint Committee in the fall of 1980 to run the trade, and the defense minister, Colonel Mohammed Jalali, met Robert Gates in Kansas City in July 1987 for assurances that supply would continue.⁷

Iran-Contra

The arms-for-hostages channel of the Iran-Contra Affair opened in August 1985 with 96 TOW missiles shipped from Israeli stocks through Nimrodi, David Kimche and Al Schwimmer, with Manucher Ghorbanifar as the Iranian intermediary and Adnan Khashoggi providing bridge loans. Oliver North brought in Secord and Albert Hakim, an Iranian-born dealer who had sold defense goods to the Shah's government, to run the Enterprise, which marked up the weapons and took about 48 million dollars from the sales; about 2,000 TOW missiles reached Iran in all. In October 1986 Hakim negotiated in Geneva with a relative of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, speaker of the parliament, a nine-point plan that went beyond anything the White House had authorized.¹⁰¹⁵ On November 3, 1986, the Lebanese magazine Al-Shiraa published the arms sales, and the next day Rafsanjani described to parliament the visit of Robert McFarlane and North to Tehran that May with a Bible signed by Reagan.¹⁰

The Hashemi Sting of 1985 and 1986, a U.S. Customs and FBI operation run with the office of Rudolph Giuliani, used Cyrus Hashemi, himself indicted in 1984 for arms sales to Iran, as its informant against dealers selling to Iran while the government's own sales were under way. He died suddenly after his role became known to those he had helped entrap; no inquiry concluded that there was foul play.¹²⁷