Gates returns to his Tehran hard line
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - When United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates accused Iran of
"subversive activity" in Latin America on Tuesday, it raised the question of
whether he is trying to discourage President Barack Obama from abandoning the
hardline policy of coercive diplomacy toward Iran he has favored for nearly
three decades.
In making a new accusation against Iran, just as Obama is still considering his
diplomatic options, Gates appears to be reprising his role in undermining a
plan by president George H W Bush in early 1992 to announce goodwill gestures
to Iran as reciprocity for Iranian help in freeing US hostages from Lebanon.
Bush ultimately abandoned the plan, which had been three years
in the making, after Gates, as director of the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA), claimed before US Congress that new intelligence showed Iran was seeking
weapons of mass destruction and planning terrorist attacks.
In his Senate Armed Services Committee testimony on Tuesday, Gates said Iran
was "opening a lot of offices and a lot of fronts behind which they interfere
in what is going on". Gates offered no further explanation for what sounded
like a Cold War-era propaganda charge against the Soviet Union.
It was not clear why Gates would make such an accusation on a non-military
issue unless he was hoping to throw sand in the diplomatic gears on Iran.
Gates has made no secret of his skepticism about any softening of US policy
toward Iran. In response to a question at the National Defense University last
September on how he would advise the next president to improve relations with
Iran, Gates implicitly rejected what he called "outreach" to Iran as useless.
"[W]e have to look at the history of outreach [to Iran] that was very real,
under successive presidents, and did not yield any results," he said.
In the 1980s, Gates was known at the CIA as a hardliner not only on the Soviet
Union but on Iran as well. Former CIA official Graham Fuller recalled in an
interview that Gates often repeated in staff meetings, "The only moderate
Iranian is one who has run out of bullets."
Gates' 1992 sabotage of the Bush plan for reciprocating Iran's goodwill relied
in part on making public charges against Iran which created a more unfavorable
political climate in Washington for such a policy.
Bush had referred in his inaugural address on January 20, 1989, to US hostages
being held by militant groups in Lebanon and suggested that "assistance" on the
issue would be "long remembered", adding, "Goodwill begets goodwill." That was
a clear signal to Iran of a willingness to respond positively to Iranian
assistance in freeing the hostages.
After Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a pragmatic conservative, was elected
Iranian president in July 1989, Bush asked UN secretary general Perez de
Cuellar to convey a message to Rafsanjani: Bush was ready to improve US-Iran
relations if Iran used its influence in Lebanon to free the US hostages.
Giandomenico Picco, the UN negotiator sent to meet with Rafsanjani, recalled in
an interview with Inter Press Service (IPS) that he repeated Bush's inaugural
pledge to the Iranian president.
In 1991, Rafsanjani used both secret intermediaries and shuttle diplomacy by
Iranian foreign minister Ali Akhbar Velayati to ensure the release of hostages
held by anti-Western groups in Lebanon. Rafsanjani later told Picco that he had
to use considerable Iranian political capital in Lebanon to get the hostages
released in the expectation that it would bring a US reciprocal gesture,
according to the UN negotiator.
In a meeting with Picco six weeks after the last US hostage was released in
early December 1991, Bush's national security adviser Brent Scowcroft said "it
might be possible" to take Iran off the terrorist list, reduce economic
sanctions and further compensate Iranians for the July 1988 shoot-down of an
Iranian civilian Airbus by the US Navy, which had killed all 290 Iranian
passengers and crew. Scowcroft believed a decision might be made in early
March.
Picco took personal notes of the meeting, from which he quoted in the interview
with IPS.
On February 25, 1992, Scowcroft again met Picco and told him that the
administration was considering allowing the sale of some airplanes and parts
and easing other economic sanctions, according to Picco's notes.
But at a meeting in Washington on April 10, Scowcroft informed Picco that there
would be "no goodwill to beget goodwill".
Scowcroft explained the sudden scuttling of the initiative by citing new
intelligence on Iran. He referred to an alleged assassination of an Iranian
national in Connecticut by Iranian agents and intelligence reports that Iran
would use "Hezbollah types" in Europe and elsewhere to respond to Israel's
assassination of Hezbollah leader Abbas Mussawi in southern Lebanon.
Scowcroft also cited intelligence that Iran had made a policy decision to
follow "a different road" from one that would have allowed improved relations
with Washington. He said there was intelligence related to Iranian
"re-armament" and to its nuclear program, according to Picco's notes.
But the alleged new intelligence on Iran cited by Scowcroft reflected the
personal views of Gates, who had become CIA director for the second time in
November 1991.
Gates was assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor from
1989 to 1991, and was well aware of the plan to make a gesture to Iran. His
response after returning as CIA director was to launch a series of new
accusations about the threat from Iran.
In Congressional testimony in January 1992, Gates said Iran's re-armament
effort included "programs in weapons of mass destruction not only to prepare
for the potential re-emergence of the Iraqi special weapons threat but to
solidify Iran's pre-eminent position in the Gulf and Southeast [sic] Asia".
Gates testified in February 1992 that Iran was "building up its special weapons
capabilities" and the following month, he told Congress that Iran was seeking
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons "capabilities" and was "probably"
going to "promote terrorism".
But Gates was not accurately reflecting a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)
on Iran which had been completed on October 17, 1991, just before he became
director. New York Times reporter Elaine Sciolino wrote just two weeks after
the NIE was completed that it concluded only that "some" Iranian leaders were
calling for a nuclear weapons program, and that the nuclear program was still
in its infancy.
Sciolino reported that "some administration officials" believed the NIE
"underestimates the scope of Iranian intentions", suggesting that it had not
supported Gates' personal views on the issue.
The current intelligence reports sent to the White House to strengthen the
argument against any gesture to Iran also turned out to be misleading. No
allegation of an Iranian role in a murder in Connecticut has ever surfaced. And
no terrorist attack by "Hezbollah types" in retaliation for the Israeli
assassination is known to have occurred.
That was not even the first time Gates had sought to use intelligence to
torpedo an effort to achieve an opening with an adversary. During the Ronald
Reagan administration, Gates, as CIA deputy director and then director, had
discouraged any warming toward Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, asserting that
he would not be able to alter Soviet policy toward the United States. Former
secretary of state George Shultz decried Gates' politicized intelligence to
bolster the case against policy change in his 1993 memoirs.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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