Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988 by Jane Mayer & Doyle McManus

Author:Jane Mayer & Doyle McManus [Mayer, Jane & McManus, Doyle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graymalkin Media, LLC
Published: 2018-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

11

Into Tehran

TEHRAN HAS ALWAYS BEEN an unlovely city. It spills chaotically down a sloping plain in a vast brown jumble, the invention of twentieth-century kings who turned their backs on Persian tradition to ape the industrial centers of the West. Automobiles choke its dusty streets, and a pall of smog often obscures the only relief on the landscape, the long, sere shoulder of the Elburz Mountains rising from the city’s northern suburbs. The minarets of Tehran’s mosques are outnumbered by the rusting spikes of paralyzed construction cranes, relics of a dynasty that ran out of money, time, and fear. Instead, the city’s new landmarks are a grisly fountain of blood, which spouts crimson dye in praise of Muslim martyrs, and ubiquitous posters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolutionary who made Tehran the capital of “the world’s first government of God”—and, to some, the capital of world terrorism as well.

Into that unwelcoming landscape on Sunday morning, May 25, flew Bud McFarlane and Oliver North. They bore false Irish passports, a brace of gift-wrapped .357 pistols, a chocolate layer cake decorated with a brass key—and suicide pills in case the gifts were ill received. As their unmarked Israeli 707 approached Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport, McFarlane and North believed they might be on the verge of a diplomatic master stroke. For seven years the United States and Iran had been bitterly estranged; there had been almost no communication between Washington and the most powerful government on the strategically important Persian Gulf. In McFarlane’s mind, at least, this mission to Tehran had more ambitious goals than winning the release of American hostages in Beirut. If the Iranians agreed to even a modest cooperative relationship with the United States, the Reagan administration could virtually redraw the political map of the Middle East. An Iranian-American entente would be a major vexation for the Soviet Union, which was already worried about Iran’s support for Muslim rebels in neighboring Afghanistan.

There had been months of preparation. The airplane carried HAWK missile spare parts, secure communications equipment, maps for an eight-hour intelligence briefing for the Iranians, and an outline of the terms of a new U.S.-Iranian relationship. The HAWK parts were lashed to a pallet behind the passenger seats. “You had to trip over it to go to the head,” Oliver North noted. Eleven more pallets—also loaded with missile parts—were on a second plane under Richard Secord’s command, waiting on the ground in Israel. None of the parts was to be released until the hostages were freed.

The delegation itself was ready for serious negotiations. In addition to McFarlane and North, as personal envoys of the president of the United States, the plane carried Howard Teicher, the NSC’s senior director of political-military affairs; George Cave of the CIA, who spoke fluent Persian and who grew a mustache to disguise himself for the mission; a CIA radioman, who set up a temporary coded satellite link to Washington; and, riskiest of all, Israel’s Amiram Nir, posing as an American because of the Iranians’ hatred of the Jewish state.

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