The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (9 page)

After months of debate, the Joint Chiefs forged a convoluted compromise. The new rapid deployment force would be a separate joint, or all-service, organization, under the command of a three-star general. The force would report to the Readiness Command and be colocated with it in Tampa. However, the command would maintain a separate liaison office in Washington to allow direct access for the command to the Joint Staff and the senior leadership at the Pentagon. While not perfect, this was good enough for Secretary Brown. Two weeks before the embassy takeover in Iran, he issued a memo to General Jones ordering the new command’s founding by March 1, 1980. While primarily intended for the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, the new rapid deployment force would be called upon for “contingencies threatening American interests anywhere in the world.”
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T
all, broad shouldered, and square jawed, Paul Xavier Kelley looked like a marine. His demeanor exuded an intense confidence. Born on Armistice Day in 1928, the fair-skinned redhead was both proud and defensive about his Irish heritage. Critics and supporters both agreed that P.X. could be emotional, and he frequently took professional criticism personally, especially
if it implicated his beloved marine corps. He was a devoted family man; the only priority in his life higher than the marine corps was his wife and children. After a command in Vietnam, he served as military liaison to the Paris peace talks that ended American participation in the Vietnam War. This assignment gave Kelley his first strong dose of Washington politics and American diplomacy. The latter, at least, left him less than impressed, as he observed the shenanigans of President Nixon’s secretary of state and national security adviser Henry Kissinger.
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On a Friday afternoon in the fall of 1979, P.X. Kelley received a phone call from General Jones’s secretary asking if Kelley would meet with the chairman the next day at ten a.m. to interview as the first commander of the rapid deployment force.
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The commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps had been lobbying hard to give the command to his service, and while Jones viewed this as a purely parochial move, the marine’s argument resonated throughout the defense secretary’s office.
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On Saturday morning, as Kelley prepared to drive over to the Pentagon, the chairman’s secretary called again to relay that Jones had been called to a meeting at the White House. She was not sure how long that meeting would last, but could Kelley please just stand by, and she would notify him when Jones returned?

“Well,” Kelley answered, “that all depends. You see, I’ve promised my granddaughter that I would take her to see
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
this afternoon, and that is one appointment I can’t miss.”

Fortunately for both the granddaughter and Kelley’s career, General Jones returned to his office at the Pentagon, and P.X. arrived around noon for an informal and affable meeting with the air force chairman. Dressed in his dark green service uniform with a panoply of ribbons on his left breast, Kelley looked as if he had come from central casting, and Jones quickly discovered that his mind matched his appearance. The chairman liked what he saw and offered command of the new rapid deployment force to the marine. As Kelley left the office, Jones said slyly, “General, enjoy
Snow White
.” The chairman’s secretary just grinned.

On March 1, 1980, the new command became a reality, now formally called the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF) and located at MacDill Air Force Base, a sprawling air base in Tampa, Florida. The base sits on a wide peninsula about five miles south from the tall buildings that dominate downtown Tampa. The sprawling air base of pine trees and palmettos is typical U.S. Air Force, replete with an eighteen-hole golf course, a marina, and a
small but quaint beach, which looks out onto the placid Tampa Bay and affords a pleasant view of the cruise ships and merchants going in and out of Tampa. Established during World War II to train new bomber pilots, the base was featured in the 1955 film
Strategic Air Command
, an overt piece of air force propaganda starring Jimmy Stewart.

P.X. Kelley established his headquarters in a large, square, half-buried structure next to the runway on a remote corner of the base. Numbered Building 5201, it was better known as the “molehole.” Accessible by a single mile-long road, the molehole had been built in the 1950s to serve as a ready room and command center for nuclear-armed bombers waiting for Armageddon. As of this writing, it houses the Special Operations Command that runs the secret wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

The new command took shape, despite the lethargy with the four services in filling its 250-man staff. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan fostered a crisis atmosphere in the molehole, with officers routinely working sixteen-hour days. Less than two months after the command’s formal commissioning, Kelley held the unit’s first full-scale exercise in the mountains of Idaho. A modest effort compared to those that would follow, it involved flying in a single army battalion in a simulated defense of Pakistan against a Soviet invasion. This was the first of a demanding schedule of exercises across the Middle East, the largest of which would be Bright Star in November 1980, which involved sending some sixty-five hundred American troops for twenty days to the Egyptian desert in a biennial exercise that continues to this day.
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K
elley’s staff quickly began planning for World War III in Iran. They saw two possible Russian invasion plans. One would be a quick incursion designed to seize Iranian Azerbaijan, either to support a communist coup in Tehran or to forestall the Islamic Revolution from spreading to Moscow’s own Muslim population. The second, more serious threat involved a full-scale invasion of Iran by fifteen to twenty-four divisions, with the objective of quickly seizing the Khuzestan oil fields in southwestern Iran as well as the vital choke point, the Strait of Hormuz, to cut off the oil flow to the West.
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With Iran subjugated, as one U.S. war planner surmised, “The Soviets could undertake a subsequent offense operation against the Arab nations in the region.” Soviet aircraft could destroy Saudi Arabian oil facilities and cut the
flow of crude to the West. Red Army tanks would be poised to threaten Turkey and the southern flank of NATO. U.S. military planners worried that the Soviets might try a lightning attack, using airborne troops to seize the Strait of Hormuz, perhaps even parachuting down on the Saudi oil fields and conquering the kingdom in a coup de main.

These American fears had an air of absurdity. Even if Moscow committed all its army coupled with extensive support from regional surrogates such as Iraq and Syria, Moscow would face a monumental task in conquering Iran, let alone the entire Middle East. The idea that the Red Army could sustain hundreds of thousands of soldiers with bullets, beans, and benzene over a thousand-mile-long supply route that ran over Iran’s formidable Zagros Mountains seems ridiculous in hindsight, especially in light of its military’s poor performance in Afghanistan. But in the panic that gripped Washington following the Soviet invasion into Afghanistan, no one in either political party questioned the reality of their anxiety, especially in an election year and in an administration already lambasted for being soft on defense.

Kelley’s war plans for Iran hinged on support from the Gulf Arabs.
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American troops and airplanes would muster in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Bahrain, both to safeguard their oil facilities and to serve as a staging base for a subsequent move directly into Iran. The U.S. Marines, backed up by naval carrier airplanes, would storm the beaches around Bandar Abbas, seizing the port and airfield and securing the Strait of Hormuz and Kharg Island, the latter location from which 96 percent of Iran’s oil exports flowed.
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Once the sea-lanes into the Persian Gulf were secure, three U.S. Army divisions would seize the northern Gulf port of Bushehr and then move inland to take the strategically positioned Iranian city of Shiraz at the foothills of the Zagros, and block Soviet forces moving south through the mountains, safeguarding both the Khuzestan oil fields and the Persian Gulf.
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Depending on what happened in Europe at the same time, as many as two hundred thousand servicemen and -women were allocated to the Iran invasion.
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Time became the critical watchword for American planners. The Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, estimated that it could provide only seven days’ advance notice of a limited incursion, and perhaps three weeks’ warning for a full-scale invasion. But the United States could muster only about thirty-five thousand army airborne soldiers and marines to the Gulf within the first three weeks, and planners both in Tampa and at the Pentagon predicted it would take thirty days to move any sizable number of combat forces to the
Gulf. Under the best of conditions, time was not on Kelley’s side in the race for Iran.
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However, Kelley had an ace in his deck of cards to buy time and halt the Soviet advance into Iran: nuclear weapons. The United States never shied away from planning to use nuclear weapons to defend Persian Gulf oil. Washington did hesitate to nuke the Soviet Union proper out of concern that such a move would lead to a full-scale nuclear war, one U.S. planners in 1982 surmised would kill 50 to 75 percent of the U.S. population. But Soviet troops inside Iran were seen as fair game. If the Red Army were poised to win the race for the Strait of Hormuz, tactical nuclear weapons would be the force of choice to stop them.
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The United States started from a distinct disadvantage in the nuclear balance in the Middle East. The Soviets arrayed a massive arsenal of strategic weapons toward the Persian Gulf, capable of devastating the area’s military bases, ports, and refineries and oil fields. Embedded within their armor and mechanized divisions were 152 tactical mobile rockets designed to carry nuclear warheads, as well as nearly 300 nuclear artillery shells. Larger ballistic missiles based in the southern Soviet Caucasus could easily reach any corner of the Middle East. Backing this arsenal were 283 aircraft capable of dropping nuclear bombs with a destructive power that dwarfed Hiroshima. U.S. intelligence detected nuclear storage bunkers at four Soviet airfields alone just to support an invasion of Iran.

In December 1980, Undersecretary Komer released a study on the potential use of nuclear weapons to defend the Persian Gulf. The first objective remained, Komer said, to deter Soviet aggression in Iran. But if deterrence failed, the use of nuclear weapons would signal to Moscow the American resolve to defend the Gulf. Komer approved three options for employing nuclear weapons against the Soviets in Iran. The first two options used nuclear weapons only within Iran, with the objective to block Soviet forces by destroying the mountain passes on the Iran-Soviet border and the Zagros Mountains, which would impede Moscow’s movements southward toward the Gulf. If Soviet troops were already in Iran, American bombers would hit Soviet rear echelon units entering Iran, while the U.S. Army’s tactical artillery nukes would devastate frontline ground forces attacking U.S. forces. The third option expanded American nuclear attacks to bases and nuclear missile sites in the southern Soviet Union, striking Soviet nuclear headquarters, logistics bases, and conventional forces. The goal, a Pentagon plan
summarized, would be to destroy Moscow’s ability to “sustain military operations in Iran.”

Komer’s preference for nuclear weapons in Iran was, in the best Dr. Strangeloveian speak, known as the “passive option.” U.S. Special Forces would detonate nuclear devices in key mountain passes, tunnels, and roads into western Iran from the Soviet Union. The resulting nuclear detonation would collapse mountains and spawn avalanches, and thus prevent Soviet tanks from moving into Iran. Because time was the Achilles’ heel of the U.S. rapid deployment force, Komer’s study noted, “Closing the passes in front of the initial invasion would significantly impede a Red Army advance, and, if the Soviets did not respond in kind, could provide additional time for the U.S. to deploy forces.” Furthermore, it had the added advantage of not directly targeting Soviet troops, which otherwise might lead to rapid escalation in a nuclear war. The Pentagon allocated over twenty atomic demolition munitions for this task in Iran. Popularly referred to as “manpack nukes,” they had been in the U.S. inventory since the 1950s. Each device weighed less than 163 pounds and easily could be parachuted or clandestinely smuggled in by a small special forces team. The small nukes were to be buried and set with a variable yield, which could create either a relatively small explosion to destroy a large tunnel or a massive detonation to collapse an entire mountain pass.
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The one downside, Komer noted, was that this strategy necessitated the first use of nuclear weapons. This preemptive use of nuclear weapons “bears the risk of uncontrolled escalation,” he wrote. Even with the “passive option,” the Soviets might respond in kind and obliterate the ports of Bushehr and Bandar Abbas to deny them to arriving American forces. But neither the Joint Chiefs nor Komer viewed this response as particularly bad. In the harsh calculations of the Cold War, Komer wrote, “the net effect could be, at least in the short-term, to produce a militarily neutral situation with respect to U.S.-USSR ground forces.” If neither side could get into Iran, the United States would still achieve its goal of safeguarding the oil fields. No one reflected on how the Iranians might view such a scenario.

T
he political winds did not blow in President Jimmy Carter’s favor in November 1980. The voters tossed the Democrats out in a hurricane that came in the form of Ronald Reagan, who won forty-four of the fifty states in an electoral landslide. Implementing the Carter Doctrine would fall to his
successor. But Carter’s State of the Union speech on that cold January night had put into motion an important new American strategy for the Middle East. After floundering through one Middle East crisis after another, in his final year in office President Carter’s fractured foreign policy team finally coalesced around a new plan to defend Middle East oil.