Teicher described a highly classified National Security Decision Directive that called for providing intelligence assistance to Iraq and directing the CIA to help Saddam Hussein's army secure third-country military supplies, a project that fell largely to CIA Director William Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates.
Though the tilt toward Iraq represented a blow to the neocons, who shared the Israeli position of viewing Iraq as the greater of Israel's two enemies, the Reagan administration's favoritism toward Iraq didn't put an end to the McFarlane-Wolfowitz initiatives.
The Israelis also never stopped scouring the world for weapons to sell to Iran. When McFarlane was promoted to become Reagan's third National Security Advisor in October 1983, he was in even a stronger position to push the Israel-favored position regarding openings toward Iran. McFarlane finally succeeded in persuading Reagan to sign on to the strategic cooperation agreement that he had hammered out with Kimche.
"I was able to get the President to approve it in writing and to get it translated into a formal memorandum of understanding between the Pentagon and the Israeli defense ministry, which would form a joint political-military group to serve as the instrument for developing a broader agenda of cooperation," McFarlane wrote in his memoir [p. 187].
In a now-declassified top-secret cable dated Dec. 20, 1983, McFarlane responded to a complaint from U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain Charles H. Price, who believed that the agreement was a last-minute scheme to "give the store" to Israel.
McFarlane insisted the strategic arrangement was the culmination of a thorough review process. McFarlane described the U.S.-Israeli security agreement as encouraging cooperation with third countries, "with special reference to Turkey," as well as setting aside resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict in favor of pursuing other strategic collaboration with Israel.
"The President acknowledges that our ability to defend vital interests in Near East and South Asia would be enhanced by the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict," McFarlane said in the cable. "Nevertheless, in recognition of Israel's strategic location, its developed base infrastructure and the quality and inter-operability of the Israeli military forces, it was decided to resume cooperative paramilitary planning with Israel, expanding on the work begun earlier."
An International Arms Bazaar
Besides tapping into stockpiles of U.S.-made weaponry, the Israelis arranged shipments from third countries, including Poland, according to Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, who described his work on the arms pipeline in his 1992 book, Profits of War.
Ex-Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe.
(Image by (Photo from his memoir, Profits of War.)) Details DMCA
According to this analysis, Labor's desire to open its own arms channel to Iran laid the groundwork for the Iran-Contra scandal, as the government of Prime Minister Shimon Peres tapped into the emerging neoconservative network inside the Reagan administration on one hand and began making his own contacts to Iran's leadership on the other.
Reagan's National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane collaborated with Peres's aide Amiram Nir and with neocon intellectual (and National Security Council consultant) Michael Ledeen in spring 1985 to make contact with the Iranians. Ledeen's chief intermediary to Iran was a businessman named Manucher Ghorbanifar, who was held in disdain by the CIA as a fabricator but claimed he represented high-ranking Iranians who favored improved relations with the United States and were eager for American weapons.
Ghorbanifar's chief contact, as identified in official Iran-Contra records, was Mohsen Kangarlu, who worked as an aide to Prime Minister Mir Hussein Mousavi, according to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman in his 2008 book, The Secret War with Iran. However, Ghorbanifar's real backer inside Iran appears to have been Mousavi himself. According to a Time magazine article from January 1987, Ghorbanifar "became a trusted friend and kitchen adviser to Mir Hussein Mousavi, Prime Minister in the Khomeini government."
As Ben-Menashe described the maneuvering in Tehran, the basic split in the Iranian leadership put then-President Ali Khamenei on the ideologically purist side of rejecting U.S.-Israeli military help and senior political figures Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mehdi Karoubi and Mousavi in favor of exploiting those openings in a pragmatic way to better fight the war with Iraq.
The key decider during this period was Ayatollah Khomeini, who agreed with the pragmatists on the need to get as much materiel from the Americans and the Israelis as possible, Ben-Menashe told me in a 2009 interview from his home in Canada.
The stage was set for the next phase of this tighter U.S.-Israeli collaboration, the Iran-Contra Affair. Again, McFarlane's Israeli friend, David Kimche, was a chief collaborator. As McFarlane describes the Iran-Contra origins in Special Trust, Kimche visited him at the White House on July 3, 1985, to ask whether a National Security Council consultant (and neocon activist) Michael Ledeen was speaking for the administration when he approached Israeli officials with questions about internal Iranian divisions.
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