The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (8 page)

Brown backed Brzezinski’s vision. He ordered Robert Komer, undersecretary of defense for policy and the third most senior civilian in the Pentagon, to conduct a complete review of the military plans for Iran and the Persian Gulf. A seasoned hand in Washington, Komer had nearly four decades of foreign policy experience. During the 1960s, simpatico with President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policies, Komer had headed the political side of the South Vietnamese pacification effort. The bespectacled Komer had a booming voice and a personality to match. During the Vietnam War, Komer had earned the apt nickname “Blowtorch Bob,” bestowed by an exasperated Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who said that “arguing with Mr. Komer was like having a flamethrower aimed at the seat of one’s pants.” Komer reported back to the secretary that the Joint Chiefs’ planning was less than satisfactory; in fact, he told Brown privately, “it was very poor.”
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It was not that the generals and admiral failed to grasp the importance of the Persian Gulf. However, the military was not eager to commit resources to the Middle East, and each service had its own rationale. As far as the army was concerned, the region diverted badly needed reserves from the Cold War’s main game against the Soviets in Central Europe. In the aftermath of Vietnam, the U.S. Army had committed itself intellectually and fiscally to building conventional forces poised for a massive clash of tanks and artillery in Germany. With the large disparity in numbers between the U.S. and Soviet forces in Europe, the army’s leadership deemed it imprudent to pull troops away from the Cold War’s principal front. “U.S. forces engaged in defense of the Persian Gulf area will not be available for Europe, thus adding to the considerable risks entailed,” the Joint Chiefs collectively wrote to Brown.
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While the admirals shared some of their army brethren’s concerns about diverting ships away from the main effort against the Soviets—in their case, in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans—the Persian Gulf presented considerable challenges for the U.S. Navy. Although since 1949 the United States had maintained a small show-the-flag flotilla based in Bahrain called Middle East Force, the navy had little experience operating in this remote, torrid region. The Persian Gulf lay three thousand miles from the nearest naval base. The United
States had no port facilities or logistical infrastructure to support large-scale naval operations in the area.
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Additionally, and not to be underestimated, the Islamic prohibition on alcohol and its tenet to separate the sexes made most ports of call in the region rather uninviting to American sailors.
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On January 9, 1979, Secretary Brown met with the five members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—the chairman plus the head of each of the four services—in the “Tank,” their conference room in the Pentagon’s outer E ring. The room was just down the hall from the chairman’s executive suite, along a long corridor lined with offices occupied by senior military leadership and the chairman’s dining room. The name of the room dates back to the early days of the Joint Chiefs during World War II, when the newly formed body met in a basement room of the Public Health Service’s building on Constitution Avenue. Participants entered the Tank by stepping down a set of stairs and then passing through a narrow archway, giving the impression that one was descending into a steel-hulled tank, rather than a government conference room.

Pressured by their political masters, the Joint Chiefs presented the defense secretary with a plan developed hastily by Alexander Haig’s European Command. The idea was to dispatch U.S. troops to protect Saudi oil fields in the event of a Soviet move toward the Persian Gulf in the aftermath of the upheavals in Iran. Called Operational Plan 4230, it consisted of moving up to seven thousand men from the United States, with the first airborne troops arriving in as little as three days from their base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The plan was rudimentary at best. It required twenty days of preparation before they could even fly the first troops to Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon lacked both the aircraft and the ships to move quickly to the Gulf, and Washington had failed to lay the diplomatic groundwork with Arab countries that would be necessary to deploy American soldiers, even if Washington wanted to send them.

Brown traveled to the Middle East to assess the situation for himself. He found governments in the region on edge, nervous about the events transpiring in Iran and uncertain about the American commitment to their security. To try to assuage their fears, the Pentagon had recently deployed a squadron of F-15 aircraft to Saudi Arabia, in response to a Saudi request.
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Nevertheless, an anxious Saudi government privately pressed Brown for more concrete defense assurances.
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Brown ordered the military to take some immediate steps to strengthen the U.S. military in the Gulf.
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The Joint Chiefs answered with an
imaginative scheme to conduct fifty-four separate military exercises. While many of these amounted to little more than sending a squadron of aircraft to Saudi Arabia or Oman to fly with their air forces for a week, or training on search and rescue techniques, or increasing routine naval deployments to the Gulf, it represented a significant increase in the U.S. military presence in the Gulf states. When staggered over the course of a year, these exercises were tantamount to a permanent presence of U.S. military forces within the Gulf’s Arab countries, under the guise of exercises.
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As the administration struggled to develop a new strategy, once again serious fissures developed within Carter’s foreign policy team. On March 1, 1979, the secretaries of defense and state met with the national security adviser for their weekly lunch date. The topic of the day was the Persian Gulf. Both Brzezinski and Brown favored an expansion of American bases in the area, which would serve to support a military force that could deploy rapidly to the Persian Gulf in the event of a Soviet move on Iran. But Secretary of State Cyrus Vance rejected this view. A more visible American military presence, he argued, would simply fuel anti-American sentiment, not just in Iran, but also throughout the Arab nations. The United States needed to demonstrate an interest in the welfare of the Gulf states, while at the same time keeping a low profile to avoid the perception of neocolonialism.

Two days later and one month to the day after Ayatollah Khomeini’s return, Brzezinski tried to force a decision in a top secret paper to the president. The crisis in Iran presented the West with a grave challenge, one that could spin “dangerously out of control.” When combined with the Soviet forces in Afghanistan that seemed poised to invade Pakistan or Iran, Brzezinski wrote, pro-Western Gulf Arabs lacked confidence in Washington’s ability and willingness to protect them. Brzezinski proposed a complete strategic reorientation toward the Middle East. He called for a massive expansion of military bases in the region, with forces dedicated to intervene to counter Soviet aggression, and a permanent naval presence in the Persian Gulf.
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By the end of June 1979, the chief architects of Carter’s foreign policy had sketched the outline of a new defense scheme for the Persian Gulf, called the Persian Gulf Security Framework. The strategy struck a balance between Brzezinski’s and Vance’s positions. The United States would strengthen its ties by means of bilateral agreements with pro-Western Gulf states. The agreements would provide the United States with access to military bases in and around the Gulf, and the United States would sell more weapons to Gulf
Arabs to enable them to shoulder a larger burden of the defense of their oil fields. The U.S. military would position itself around the periphery of the Persian Gulf, poised to intercede directly into either the Gulf or Iran in the event of a Soviet attack. This approach respected the sensitivities of the Arabs, who wanted to work with the United States but did not necessarily want large numbers of infidels in the midst of the Arab heartland. The United States agreed to keep this strategy “low-key” and squarely out of the press while working quietly with the Gulf states to build closer military ties.
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The Defense Department focused on Oman, Somalia, Kenya, and Diego Garcia to establish their first bases. Saudi Arabia refused to allow any U.S. bases on its territory, but with a nod and a wink it secretly agreed to overbuild its airfields and military infrastructure with the tacit understanding that in the event of a real threat to the kingdom from Iran or the Soviets, the American military could use these facilities. After three years of haggling, the Pentagon would forge ahead to establish a rapid deployment force to serve as the principal intervention force for the Middle East.
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Great Britain gave permission for the use of its airfield on the tiny Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. The Pentagon spent nearly $600 million over the next four years to upgrade the airfield. The State Department reached an agreement with Oman for the use of four airfields and over the next three years spent well over $200 million to upgrade these bases for the U.S. Air Force and Navy.
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One on the island of Masirah—a British Royal Air Force base since the 1930s—was particularly well situated for American requirements. The isolated island lay fifteen miles off the Omani coast in the Gulf of Oman, but sat near the Strait of Hormuz. Following the signing of a ten-year lease agreement between Washington and Muscat in 1979, the United States expanded the small runway and built a second one to accommodate combat aircraft. In addition, the Americans upgraded facilities and buildings, pre-positioning sites to accommodate twenty-six thousand troops. This base would serve as a staging base for the failed rescue operation in Iran in April 1980, and would remain a key American facility for the next two decades, including providing a base for yet another group of American special operations forces, those that went into Afghanistan in October 2001.

Egyptian president Anwar Sadat quietly consented to allow U.S. forces to use his military bases. Egypt would serve as the logistics rear for U.S. forces defending the Persian Gulf and would be an important transit point in deploying troops to the Persian Gulf. Komer dispatched his deputy
undersecretary of defense for policy planning, Walter Slocombe, to look at the Egyptian facilities. At age forty, Slocombe already was an experienced hand in the Democratic defense establishment, and in the coming years he would go on to serve as the number three man in President Bill Clinton’s Pentagon and would play a key role in the decision to disband the Iraqi army in May 2003 following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

After touring an airfield near Cairo, Slocombe headed down to a large, abandoned Egyptian military cantonment at Ras Banas, a peninsula jutting out into the Red Sea about three-quarters of the way down the Egyptian coast. Built before the 1973 Yom Kippur War with Israel, the facility included both a large runway and a port.
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The base was perfect, Slocombe thought. It sat astride the Saudi Red Sea ports of Jeddah and Yanbu, and would easily serve as another means to get U.S. forces into Saudi Arabia should the Soviets seize the Strait of Hormuz. It sat out of range of Soviet aircraft, and it provided an excellent base for massive U.S. B-52 bombers as well as a mustering area for a U.S. Army headed to Iran. With improvements, it could serve as a staging base for an entire American division. More important, it lay nearly two hundred miles from the nearest city, permitting the base to be built in secret. Both Secretary Brown and General Jones liked Slocombe’s idea. With congressional approval, the United States pumped more than $200 million over the next few years to upgrade the facilities, turning Ras Banas into a major hub for the U.S. military.
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T
he decision to establish a rapid deployment force touched off a contentious interservice squabble inside the Pentagon. No senior officer really wanted the new command, but if it was going to exist, every general or admiral wanted to control it as well as the money inevitably linked to the new mission. The army and air force proposed a three-star army general to command the rapid deployment force under the Tampa-based Readiness Command, the successor to Strike Command, whose responsibilities encompassed wartime deployment planning for army and air force units based in the United States. The army further added that it should be only a wartime headquarters, with the army-dominated European Command controlling operations in the Middle East during peacetime. Not surprisingly, the chief of naval operations, Admiral Thomas Hayward, took a different view. The rapid deployment force should be an independent force, he said, perhaps under the nominal control of
Readiness Command, but with direct access to the Joint Chiefs, who would oversee military planning for the Middle East. This, the naval services hoped, would take the rapid deployment force out from under the army’s thumb and position it under the Pentagon, where the navy would have greater say in running the command. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs David Jones came down somewhere in the middle, generally supporting the air force and army, but with his penchant for micromanagement, he liked the idea of greater control over the rapid deployment force by him and the Joint Chiefs.

As the summer of 1979 waned and with the military still at loggerheads, President Carter grew exacerbated at the impasse. “Who is in charge? PACOM [Pacific Command]? EUCOM [European Command]? Or who?” the president asked Brown. The defense secretary tried to assure the president that they had made progress, but Carter would have none of it. The president scribbled in the margins of one of Brown’s memos, “I don’t see that any progress has actually been made.”
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Brown too grew weary of the endless haggling between the generals and admirals. “The rapid deployment force was to be an extension of military power,” Brown wrote to Jones, “not an excuse to justify more forces or larger budgets.”
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