I am, and always have been, strongly pro-Israel. As a moral and historic imperative, I believe in a secure, viable Jewish state with the right to defend itself. But our interests are not always identical, as I said earlier, and I’m not prepared to risk vital American strategic interests to accommodate the views of hard-line Israeli politicians. The president said that he was impressed with Olmert’s “steadfastness” and that he was unwilling to preempt the prime minister through a diplomatic initiative or even to put much pressure on him. Rice called me late that afternoon to express her deep unease over the situation. I said I might talk to the president again, and she said, “Use my name and count me in.”
Hadley, Rice, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Cartwright, McConnell, Hayden, Bolten, and I met on Monday, the sixteenth. Bolten asked if the president was in the “right place” on the reactor issue and Israel. I was emphatic in saying no. I said he was putting U.S. strategic interests in Iraq, in the Middle East, and with our other allies in the hands of the Israelis and that he must insist to Olmert that he let the U.S. handle the Syrian problem. Olmert should be told that vital American interests were at stake, as I had argued earlier, and if necessary, the problem would be dealt with, one way or another, before Bush left office. I repeated what I had said about Olmert boxing us in. Notwithstanding, it was clear that the vice president, Elliott Abrams of the NSC staff, my own colleague Eric Edelman, Condi’s counselor Eliot Cohen, and others were all for letting Israel do whatever it wanted. I’m inclined to think that the president himself was sympathetic to that view, perhaps mainly because he was sympathetic to Olmert’s view of the reactor as an existential threat to Israel, though I never heard him say so. By not confronting Olmert, Bush effectively came down on Cheney’s side. By not giving the Israelis a red light, he gave them a green one.
On September 6, the Israelis attacked the reactor and destroyed it. They insisted on keeping the existence of the reactor secret, believing—correctly, as it turned out—that the lack of public exposure of the reactor and embarrassment over its destruction might persuade Assad not to retaliate militarily. But Condi and I were frustrated that Syria and North Korea had undertaken a bold and risky venture in violation of multiple Security Council resolutions and international treaties to create a covert nuclear capability in Syria, probably including other sites and labs, and had paid no political price for it. Nor could we use their gambit to our advantage in detaching Syria from Iran or in seeking harsher sanctions on Iran.
Within a week, the Syrians began a massive effort to destroy the ruined reactor building and to remove all incriminating nuclear-related equipment and structures. They worked at night or under the cover of tarpaulins to mask what they were doing. As the Israelis insisted, we kept silent as we watched the Syrians work. Finally, in April 2008, when the Israelis decided the risk of Syrian military retaliation had greatly diminished, we went public with the photographs and intelligence information on the Syrian reactor. By then, any real opportunity to leverage what the Syrians and North Koreans had done for broader political and nonproliferation purposes had largely been lost. The absence of any Syrian reaction to the Israeli attack—after the absence of Iraqi reaction to the bombing of their Osirak reactor by Israel in 1981—reinforced the views of those in Israel who were confident that any attack on Iranian nuclear sites would provoke, at most, only a very limited response.
On our side, a very sensitive and difficult security challenge had been debated openly with no pulled punches. The president heard directly from his senior advisers on a number of occasions and had made a tough decision based on what he heard and on his own instincts. And there had been no leaks. Although I was unhappy with the path we had taken, I told Hadley the episode had been a model of national security decision making. In the end, a big problem was solved and none of my fears were realized. It is hard to criticize success. But we had condoned reaching for a gun before diplomacy could be brought to bear, and we had condoned another preventive act of war. This made me all the more nervous about an even bigger looming national security problem.
IRAN
The Islamic Republic of Iran has bedeviled every American president since the overthrow of the shah in February 1979. Events in Iran contributed to Jimmy Carter losing his reelection bid in 1980 and nearly got Ronald Reagan impeached in 1987. Every president since Carter has tried in one way or another to reach out to the leadership in Tehran to improve relations, and every one of them has failed to elicit any meaningful response.
I was a participant in the first of those efforts. In October 1979, Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, represented the United States in Algiers at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Algerian revolution. I accompanied him as his special assistant. He received word that the Iranian delegation—the prime minister, defense minister, and foreign minister—wanted to meet with him. Brzezinski received approval from Washington and met in a hotel suite with the Iranians. I was the notetaker. He offered recognition of the revolutionary regime, offered to work with them, and even offered to sell them weapons we had contracted to sell to the shah; we had a common enemy to the north of Iran, the Soviet Union. The Iranians brushed all that aside and demanded that the United States return the shah, who was then receiving medical treatment here, to Tehran. Both sides went back and forth with the same talking points until Brzezinski stood up and told the Iranians that to return the shah to them would be “incompatible with our national honor.” That ended the meeting. Three days later our embassy in Tehran was overrun and more than fifty Americans taken hostage. Within a few weeks, the three Iranian officials with whom we had met had been purged from their jobs.
On April 24, 1980, the United States attempted a daring military operation to rescue those hostages. As executive assistant to the head of CIA, Admiral Stansfield Turner, I was aware of the planning and was with him in the White House the night of the mission. The operation ended in a fiery disaster in the desert sands of eastern Iran, with eight Americans killed when a helicopter collided with a C-130 transport plane on the ground. It was a humiliating failure. The only good to come out of it was that this tragedy soon led to the creation of the Joint Special Operations Command and the superb military capabilities—both in people and in equipment—that would kill Osama bin Laden thirty-one years later.
Nineteen-eighty also saw the beginning of an eight-year war between Iraq and Iran, which began in September with an attack by the Iraqis. The U.S. approach during the Reagan administration was ruthlessly realistic—we did not want either side to win an outright victory; at one time or another we provided modest covert support to both sides. This effort went off the rails with the clandestine sale of antitank missiles to the Iranians, with the profits secretly being funneled to help the anti-Communist Contra movement in Nicaragua. This was the essence of the Iran-Contra scandal, which broke publicly in November 1986, nearly wrecked the Reagan administration, and derailed my nomination to be director of central intelligence early in 1987. I had learned to be very cautious in dealing with Iran.
During the last two years of the Reagan administration, the United States would actually confront the Iranians militarily in the Persian Gulf, when we provided naval protection to Kuwaiti oil tankers. Several of our ships struck Iranian mines, we responded with retaliatory strikes, and in one tragic incident, a U.S. Navy ship accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger airplane.