What do a clandestine fiber-optic communications network in Beirut, Najaf’s Shamsah Travel and Tourism Agency, and a railway line in western Afghanistan all share? According to the diplomatic cables compiled by US diplomats and released by the WikiLeaks website, they are all methods by which Iran pursues its shadow struggle for regional influence.
The US “war on terror” has provided virgin proxy battlegrounds and a backdrop of greater instability for the silent chess game playing out across the Middle East. The opponents’ often invisible moves have been as lethal as the diplomatic jockeying in Vienna, Istanbul and New York remains antiseptic. It is only when the pregnant silence is interrupted by an arms convoy’s violent interdiction in Sudan, the assassination in Tehran of Iranian nuclear scientists, or a statement made by an official that attributes some seemingly random incident to the other side that the clandestine struggle briefly surfaces.
Last Wednesday, two suicide bombers detonated themselves mid-ceremony in a Shi’ite mosque in Iran’s mixed sectarian border province of Sistan-Balochestan. Within hours, Iranian officials had blamed Western intelligence services for the attacks. But for the most part, this Great Game plays out in underground military tunnels in southern Lebanon, luxury hotel rooms in Dubai, the mist-swathed mountains of northern Yemen, African embassies and the corridors of Istanbul’s baroque Dolmabahce Palace.
I had been aware of this struggle’s low throbbing tempo since moving to Iran in 2004. At the time, it was debated in public whenever Seymour Hersh would write a piece on covert operations inside Iran, or if an anonymous Pentagon official would be quoted describing how drones were being flown from bases in Iraq over its eastern neighbor in the hope of prompting the Iranians to expose their radar systems to mapping by switching them on. One day in 2004, I came across the book, Know Thine Enemy, in a library in Tehran, written by a former CIA agent, describing the multiple ways in which he had—while a US consulate officer in 90s Istanbul—schemed to destabilize Iran by exploiting its rich ethnic diversity.
A year later, former US President George W. Bush created a democracy promotion budget for Iran, widely viewed as a “coup fund.” A few months later, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice created the Iran Affairs Office, a bureau belonging to the State Department based out of cities with high Iranian immigrant populations that could be tapped for intelligence on the state of the Islamic Republic and its leadership. Immediately accused by the Iranians of being a front for the CIA, the WikiLeaks haul proved that it wasn’t by containing so many of its reports (CIA reports are filed through more secure channels), some of which are the most interesting documents about the strategies utilized to pressure Iran.
These documents can also be read as a demonstration of US power: a whole host of world leaders criticize the US in public but privately line up to divulge intimacies about Washington’s strategic foes. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates captured it when he said, “the fact is governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets.”
Accordingly, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a strong Iranian ally since the Islamic regime used him as a beachhead both to the Saddam regime and Turkey in the 80s, is quoted a few months after the discovery of the secret Qom nuclear facility, opining that the regime is making “quick progress” towards developing a nuclear weapons capability, and he thinks there are more hidden nuclear sites in Iran. The Revolutionary Guard leadership, Talabani continues, are “afraid in their hearts” as they experience internal purges to weed out pro-reform officers.
Other cables from Kabul describe intimate meetings between US diplomats and high government officials. Umar Daudzai, a former Afghan ambassador to Tehran, painted by a recent New York Times exposé as pushing a relentlessly anti-Western agenda and controlling an Iranian-provided presidential slush-fund, turns out to have had very cordial meetings with US diplomats—during which he advised them to start “preparing the ground” for the post-revolutionary period in Iran and recounted anecdotes about his wife’s Tehrani doctor asking her to “please tell the Americans to bring their soldiers to our country next.”
Referring in the leaked cable to Iranian funding of President Hamid Karzai and other members of the Afghan government, Daudzai counters that these were “limited amounts” paid out “episodically and unpredictably,” quite clearly implying a contrast between them and the regular and predictable US subsidies. What is a matter for concern, he avers, are the “support packages” provided by the Iranian government to some of the “thousands” of Afghan mullahs who study in Shi’ite seminaries. A man named Ibrahim at the supreme leader’s office in Tehran is identified as the program’s main coordinator. As for Iranian support to the Taliban, Daudzai claims that Iranian diplomats in Kabul “no longer deny this assertion—now they remain silent,” fearing that the Afghans have evidence of their collusion.
President Karzai himself is quoted as early as 2007, telling US Ambassador Eric Edelman that Iran is “busy” causing disruptions, especially in its strategic backyard of western Afghanistan. Edelman rejoins that Tehran appears to be funneling sophisticated explosively-formed projectiles and MANPADs (shoulder-fired missiles similar to the Stingers donated by the CIA to the mujahideen in the 80s to down Soviet helicopters) that could have a “strategic effect” if deployed even in small numbers against a smaller NATO member.
Most extraordinarily, we get glimpses of well-connected Iranians and US diplomats candidly discussing reciprocal attacks, whether directly or by proxy, on each other’s assets. In one 2007 cable, the brother of Iran’s then chief of the Revolutionary Guards (possibly the London-based Salman Rahim Safavi), sits across US diplomats in a track II meeting in London, and acknowledges Iran’s presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, describing Shi’ite Iraqi militias as “our allies whom we created against Saddam,” and making “near gloating” remarks about Hezbollah’s 2006 conflict with Israel.
Safavi admits that an Iranian-controlled Shi’ite militia in Iraq had attacked US troops but dismissed it as a mistake based on a “standing ‘general order’ to launch such attacks which had not yet been rescinded … similar organizational snafus lie behind the current continuing attacks on US forces in Iraq.” The 2007 attack, apparently, was the Iraqi Shi’ite militia’s way of exacting payback for an earlier UK raid on the Iranian consulate in Basra but they had not been informed that revenge had already been exacted through a “hostage episode” when the guards seized several British naval officers. Clearly, Shi’ite Iraqi militias were not reading the news at the time. Meanwhile, US diplomats had seized control of the process for granting Iraqi diplomatic visas, revealing that 20 percent of all applicants had an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) or intelligence background.
Safavi goes on to warn the Americans that, unlike “a few years ago under (former reformist Iranian President Mohammad) Khatami, the IRGC plays a central and pre-eminent role in the Iranian government,” and that its designation as a terrorist organization will leave the US with “no Iranian partner with which to engage on security or other issues of mutual concern.”
“The reality was more complex, especially in 2009,” said a US diplomat who worked on the Iran file. “There was real interest on Washington’s part in looking for outreach opportunities and issues of mutual interest that we and Iran could theoretically cooperate on, and real debate about how to handle the June 2009 election result and violent aftermath. Much less so now when there is no support almost anywhere in the bureaucracy for anything other than more pressure.”
It was while these then-classified missives were whizzing around the ether that I was living in Iran and wondering about the exact scale of this covert war. But suggesting that the US and Iran were involved in proxy warfare in the early summer of 2006 was still enough to get one branded a conspiracist. So I visited the lush grounds of the Institute of Political and International Studies (IPIS) in northern Tehran to interview a former Iranian ambassador about the new Great Game. White-bearded and urbane, he more than made up for not offering me tea (it was Ramadan) by providing a penetrating off-the-record glimpse into how Tehran views the region.
Admitting that Iran’s behavior was modified by it being surrounded on all sides by countries that were either pro-US or under US military occupation, he described Iran’s posture as being directed by “this idea that there should be some modicum of order in Afghanistan but not so much that Iranian influence there could not remain strong. Things should be relatively calm.”
Wise words, which became prophetic this year when Iran indirectly participated in US-sponsored electoral processes in Afghanistan and Iraq, by promoting its own candidates. Dozens of the Afghan parliamentarians elected under murky conditions this September are informally known on the streets of Kabul as “Iranian candidates.”
WikiLeaks documents are hardly necessary to establish the fact of ample Iranian influence visible everywhere across the region. A taste of Tehran’s soft power is given by any number of atmospherics visible on the ground, from the Iranian-sponsored reconstruction projects across Kabul, Basra or Beirut to the Iranian diplomats or swarthy Revolutionary Guard types in ill-fitting suits swarming across regional meetings, the ample front companies in Baku, Dubai, Baghdad and Quetta, and Iranian television and radio stations broadcasting in a multiplicity of regional languages.
Though the last cable on Iran is from February this year, the covert war continues. Two nuclear scientists were targeted for assassination in December, a day after the WikiLeaks were revealed. Top Israeli intelligence commentator Yossi Melman said that it was “obvious… that Israel was behind it.” Another more effective strategy has been to target the computer systems responsible for maintaining the nuclear program. In November, Iran finally confirmed that an unprecedentedly powerful computer virus discovered over the summer had affected its computer systems. One leading German security expert estimated that it had set back its program by two years.
“Blowing up scientists definitely constitutes ops but whether the US or Israel is behind it I don’t think we’ll ever know,” said Iranian analyst Cyrus Safdari. “The bottom line is that killing scientists isn’t going to do much to the nuclear program unless you’ve been watching too many James Bond movies. All it will do is inflame Iranian nationalism which is already pretty high around the nuclear issue across the political spectrum.”
None of this is discussed in the WikiLeaks. Even assuming that the US has been involved in destabilizing operations, their covert nature would make them the preserve of the intelligence agencies, not US diplomats who present America’s accessible face to the world. But what the WikiLeaks do add to our knowledge about the faceoff between Iran and the US are unique insights into the shape taken by the shadow struggle on the ground in over a dozen cities in the region. In Najaf, Tyre, Herat, Saada, Lattakia and Baku, this struggle continues day in, day out.
Iason Athanasiadis – Journalist based in Istanbul, who covers Turkey, the Middle East and Central Asia. Since 1999, he has lived in Cairo, Damascus, Doha, Sana’a and Tehran.
