No year is more important to understanding current U.S.-Iranian relations than 1983. Differing perceptions of the causes and consequences of that year’s events delineate, more than the events of any other year, those today who are willing to accept a nuclear Iran from those who are not.

The year 1983 is also of special relevance to the contemporary United States, because the year’s events brought about an American troop withdrawal (or redeployment, as it was then called) from Lebanon, an unraveling Arab country whose long-suppressed and Iranian-backed Shi’a plurality was on the rise. The U.S. withdrawal resulted from three primary factors, all of which exist in 2007. First, as America’s adversaries knew too well, domestic support for the American military presence was dwindling and would only shrink further as the upcoming presidential election approached. Second, Iran possessed the power to create conditions that would alter U.S. public opinion and effectively force America’s expulsion. Third, America failed to perceive, in the tangled web of Middle Eastern politics, how its actions and interests throughout the region were intertwined; only after considerable and repeated injury did America discover that it could be punished in the Mediterranean for its actions in the Gulf.

For all the change in U.S.-Iranian relations that 1983 brought about, the year began with relative constancy. The United States was still viewed by Iran as the Great Satan, the source of all the world’s ills, the national embodiment of what the Koran’s final sura (chapter) calls “the insidious whisperer who whispers in the hearts of men.” Iran’s leadership was still consolidating its power, prosecuting its domestic policy of Islamization, and pursuing its two primary foreign policy objectives of defeating Iraq and exporting the Islamic Revolution. The United States, by leading the multinational force in Lebanon, providing aid to Iraq, and attempting to broker an Arab-Israeli peace, continued to stand in the way of, and on the most fertile soil for, the Islamic Revolution’s export.[5]

The changes that were taking place at the beginning of the year were largely positive. A sense of relative normalcy had returned to Lebanon. In those first, optimistic months of the year, many Lebanese who had fled their bloodstained country were returning. The multinational force, despite a March grenade attack that wounded five Marines, was encountering few problems. Israel had withdrawn from most of the country, and a peace agreement that would assure its complete withdrawal appeared near.

These developments came to an abrupt end on the afternoon of April 18, 1983. A dented, late-model GMC pickup truck, laden with hundreds of pounds of explosives, slammed into the main entrance of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. It was the first large-scale attack against a U.S. embassy anywhere in the world. Seven stories of the building collapsed and 63 people died, 17 of them Americans. The wedding ring of Robert Ames, CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East, was found floating a mile off the coast of Lebanon, still affixed to his severed hand.

The Shi’a group al-Jihad al-Islami, Islamic Jihad, claimed responsibility. The name was one of several used by a wing of Hizballah, the Party of God, in the organization’s early years. Islamic Jihad also claimed responsibility for a number of kidnappings of Americans that took place in Lebanon at the time. Several of the abducted, including the CIA’s station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, were held by the Pasdaran, or Iranian Revolutionary Guards, in eastern Lebanon’s Shaykh Abdallah Barracks. Located in Shi’a-populated Ba’albak, the barracks had been seized from the Lebanese Army, on Lebanon’s Independence Day in November of 1982, by several hundred Pasdaran and a group of Khomeinist Lebanese Shi’a led by Hussein Mussawi, a future commander of Hizballah. Algeria informed the United States that Hizballah’s chief of operations, Imad Mugniyah (who is said to go by the nickname “the Fox”), had kidnapped Buckley and others. To its everlasting discredit, the United States later sold arms to Iran in exchange for the release of some of those hostages; but in the case of Buckley, who had been severely beaten and died in captivity, the representatives of Iran could trade only a 400-page transcript of his interrogation.

For all its boldness, the embassy bombing had little impact on U.S. foreign policy. The United States effectively ignored what turned out to be a warning and remained focused instead on its primary regional objective of achieving an Israeli-Lebanese agreement that could serve as a foundation for a broader Arab-Israeli peace. When Secretary of State George Shultz flew to the region for that purpose only days after the attack, the first stop on his itinerary was not changed to Beirut. Reagan’s response was nothing more than perfunctory. “This criminal attack on a diplomatic establishment will not deter us from our goals of peace in the region,” he said. “We also remain committed to the recovery by the Lebanese Government of full sovereignty throughout all of its territory,” and will “continue to press in negotiations for the earliest possible total withdrawal of all external forces.” [6]

The administration hoped that a negotiated Israeli withdrawal would encourage Syrian, Pasdaran, and Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) forces operating from Syrian-occupied territory to follow suit. Though Shultz succeeded in brokering a Lebanese-Israeli agreement in May, hopes for a broader Arab-Israeli peace, national reconciliation in Lebanon, and foreign troop withdrawal all proved illusory. As a result, the United States was forced to change tactics: Weeks after negotiating Israel’s withdrawal, the Reagan Administration began pressing it to stay, now hoping that its presence in Lebanon would force the departure of other foreign fighters.

Yet Israel’s presence brought only mounting casualties and overwhelming domestic opposition. In July 1983, the Israeli government approved plans for a unilateral redeployment to a position south of Lebanon’s Awali River. Meanwhile, the Reagan Administration began facing growing internal opposition of its own: While Reagan and Shultz remained committed to obtaining their objectives in Lebanon and had, in addition, concerns about the effects of appearing to have been driven out, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who had opposed the deployment from the start, was strengthening his case. “We shouldn’t be the Beirut police department,” Weinberger said. [7]

THREATS OF SUICIDE

By the end of August 1983, the United States appeared unlikely to remain in Lebanon. Israel was packing its bags, and its beleaguered prime minister, Menachem Begin, announced his intention to resign. The Marines in the multinational force took their first casualties the following day. Iran, Syria, and the PLO knew then that they would only have to bide their time. For the first time since it was adopted ten years before, Congress invoked the War Powers Resolution, which requires the president to either withdraw troops within 60 to 90 days or gain Congressional approval for their use in combat; but Shultz then helped to turn the tide with an effective testimony before the House and Senate, arguing that a withdrawal from Lebanon would have disastrous consequences.[8] On October 12, 1983, Congress approved the extension of the Marine deployment for an additional 18 months.

The blindsiding of the Marines that would propel their premature and ignominious departure came less than two weeks later. It was caused by three developments which conspired in the fall of 1983 to cause Iran to drastically escalate its actions in Lebanon. The first was the congressionally approved extension of the Marine deployment. The second was America’s inaction in the face of attack. The third (which stemmed, ironically, from Iran’s successes in fighting Iraq), was the aid provided to Iraq by France, another member of the multinational force in Lebanon.

The promise of French aid came amid reports that Iraq might soon lose the war. America’s primary concern was that neither side would become so desperate that it would threaten oil flows in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. Defense Guidance report, the Pentagon’s statement of strategy and policy for the 1984-1988 period stated that “Whatever the circumstances, we should be prepared to introduce American forces directly into the region should it appear that the security of access to Persian Gulf oil is threatened.” [9] As its financial ability to continue fighting was almost entirely dependent on its export of petroleum, and because it was then winning the war, Iran lacked the incentive (but not the aptitude) to threaten that access. Yet as a desperate Iraq appeared poised to receive from France an October delivery of five Super Etendard planes–with which it could use French Exocet anti-ship missiles to attack Iranian petroleum shipments–Iran had newfound cause for alarm; so much so that what it promised in return–to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately two-fifths of globally traded oil, as well as Iran’s own petroleum, passes–brought to mind Bismarck’s characterization of preventive war: “Suicide from fear of death.”

It was not only the economies of Western and Gulf countries that were menaced, however. In the weeks before the French plane delivery, Iranian officials made a series of escalating public threats. Iran closed both the French consulate and the Society for French Culture in Isfahan. Iran’s then-President and future supreme leader, Ali Khamene’i, said that delivery of the aircraft would not go unanswered.[10] Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, speaker of the Iranian Majlis, or parliament, and later president of Iran, delivered a Friday sermon warning that if France went through with the delivery it would be regarded as “Iran’s enemy,” and that Iranians would “take revenge.”[11] On another occasion, he said that those who supply Iran’s enemies would not escape punishment. Muhammad Bakir al-Hakim, the head of the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for the Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), promised that after deposing Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi people would also avenge the French delivery.[12] In October 1983, there were large anti-French demonstrations in Tehran and in front of the French embassy in London. The demonstrators warned France that the delivery would “seriously endanger its interests throughout the world.”[13] Iran’s prime minister, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, said that the arms delivery was “an act of suicide” and that neither France nor the United States would have “a minute of rest.”

Over U.S. objections and complaints to France, Iraq received the planes in October. Seeking to deter the possible consequences of France’s actions, the United States met Iran’s threats to close the Strait with a mid-October increase in its presence in the Gulf. America’s willingness to defend its access to Gulf oil and to appear to be France’s protector came as no surprise to Iran, however; indeed, this was likely to have been among the reasons that Iran had already decided, weeks before, to use an alternative theater–one of less vital interest to the United States and less danger to itself–to compel Western powers to rethink their presence in the Middle East.

In the final week of September, 1983, U.S. naval intelligence intercepted a message sent to the Iranian ambassador in Syria from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, which operationally controlled Hizballah.[14] The message directed the Iranian ambassador to contact Hussein Mussawi (the Hizballah commander who had previously seized the Shaykh Abdallah Barracks together with the Pasdaran). Mussawi, the message said, was to be instructed to lead attacks against the multinational force in Lebanon and to “take a spectacular action against the United States Marines.” The ambassador proceeded to contact the leader of the Pasdaran’s Lebanese headquarters. The Pasdaran leader then met in Ba’albak with three future secretary generals of Hizballah–Shaykh Subhi Tufayli, Shaykh Abbas Mussawi, and Shaykh Hassan Nasrallah–where, according to deposition testimony by a Hizballah member (whose reliability was avowed by an expert witness from U.S. intelligence), they planned simultaneous suicide attacks on the Marines and the French paratroopers.

The Marine compound was cased and a Mercedes stakebed truck acquired.[15] The truck was taken to an underground warehouse near a gas station, fitted with explosives, and painted to resemble the yellow water delivery truck that regularly stopped near the barracks. In the early dawn of Sunday, October 23, 1983, Hussein Mussawi’s group ambushed the real water delivery truck and sent its replacement on its way. The fake water truck, driven by an Iranian named Ismalal Ascari, sped toward the compound, broke through the protective barrier of sandbags and concertina wire, and detonated in the center of the barracks at approximately 6:22 a.m. Like the political leaders who had sent them, most of the Marines were sleeping.

“The resulting explosion,” as described in Peterson v. Islamic Republic of Iran, the U.S. District Court case that found Iran responsible for the bombing, “was the largest non-nuclear explosion that had ever been detonated on the face of the Earth.”[16] While the official inquiry of the Department of Defense–the Long Commission–found only that the bomb was “laden with the explosive equivalent of over 12,000 pounds of TNT,” and was “the largest conventional blast ever seen by the FBI’s forensic explosive experts,” the Memorandum Opinion of the Peterson case states that the force of the explosion was equal to 15-21,000 pounds of TNT. “The force of its impact,” the Memorandum Opinion states:

The sad tale of the Reagan Administration’s further descent begins on the morning of Monday, December 12, 1983. Several weeks after the truck bombings of the French Paratrooper and U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, two vehicles exploded in short succession at the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait. Over the next two hours, four car bombs would explode at separate locations throughout the country: at the control tower of the Kuwait airport, at Kuwait’s main oil refinery, at a government-owned power station, and at the residential area for the employees of the American corporation Raytheon. A seventh bomb was defused. Including the suicide truck bomber of the U.S. embassy, the coordinated explosions resulted in six deaths and more than 80 injuries. Once again, responsibility was claimed by Islamic Jihad–the Iranian-backed perpetrators of the barracks and embassy bombings in Beirut.

The Kuwaiti authorities apprehended the organizer of the attacks, Mustafa Yusuf Badreddin. His co-conspirator was his brother-in-law (some reports say brother-in-law and cousin), the alleged architect of the Beirut embassy and barracks bombings, Hizballah chief of operations Imad “the Fox” Mugniyah. Yet the majority of those arrested and tried for the Kuwait bombings were not members of Hizballah. They belonged to a different Iranian-backed Shi’a group, al-Da’wa, or the Call, an Iraqi opposition party that trained in Iran and fought alongside it against Saddam Hussein.[39] Da’wa members in Iran issued repeated threats to the Kuwaiti government while their associates stood trial for the bombings. Kuwait nevertheless sentenced several of the apprehended to death.[40] Five others were acquitted. The remaining group, though it included Lebanese members of Hizballah (including Mugniyah’s brother-in-law), was primarily Iraqi. It became known as the Da’wa 17, the Kuwait 17, or simply the Da’wa prisoners.

Seeking the release of the Da’wa 17 would be central to the subsequent anti-American violence initiated by Iran and Hizballah. It was as the sentencing of the Da’wa prisoners approached that the Islamic Republic, perhaps encouraged by the little cost incurred from its previous experience in taking Americans hostage, began acquiring collateral: prisoners of its own.[41] Over the coming years–on some occasions directly through representatives of the Iranian government and on others through hijackers whom Iran claimed not to control–Iran and Hizballah would make a priority of attempting to negotiate the release of these and other American hostages in exchange for the Reagan Administration’s guarantee that the Kuwait-held Da’wa prisoners would be freed.[42]

After the Da’wa sentencing, events quickly escalated. The string of March 1984 Beirut kidnappings was followed by an April Hizballah bombing of a restaurant near a U.S. Air Force base in Spain. Eighteen servicemen died, and more than 80 people were injured. Several months later, and more than half a year after the last Marines had departed from Lebanon, a Hizballah truck bomb killed 24 people outside the relocated U.S. embassy in East Beirut.[43] The next demand for the release of the Da’wa prisoners came ten weeks later.

On the day after another Islamic Jihad/Hizballah-abducted American was declared missing–a librarian at the American University of Beirut–Kuwait Airways Flight 221 was hijacked and diverted to Mehrabad Airport in Tehran. An American employee of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was forced out of the plane and handed a bullhorn. Appearing in a white t-shirt before Iranian television cameras, he nervously pleaded for the hijackers’ demands to be met–primary among them, the release of their “innocent brothers,” the Da’wa 17–and warned that the hijackers were “serious about their threats.” Five minutes later, the American appeared again, screaming. With the cameras still rolling, he was shot six times and thrown onto the tarmac. Another USAID employee was also killed by the hijackers. The director of the state department’s office of counterterrorism at the time, Robert Oakley, said of the hijacking, “we feel there is a great deal of sympathy, if not support and active collusion, on the part of the Iranian government.”[44] Reagan was milder. The Iranians, he said, “have not been as helpful as they could be in this situation, or as I think they should have been.”[45]

The next months saw more Americans kidnapped in Beirut. In May 1985, an alleged Da’wa member took a suicide car bomb to the emir of Kuwait, Shaykh Jabir al-Ahmad al-Sabah, but failed to assassinate him. On June 11, members of the popular Lebanese Shi’a Amal party–which is led by Nabih Berri, then Lebanon’s Minister of Justice and in 2007 its speaker of parliament–hijacked a Royal Jordanian Airlines flight at the Amal-controlled Beirut Airport. The plane flew to Cyprus, Sicily, and back to Beirut, where the hijackers released the passengers, blew up the plane, and escaped into the Shi’a neighborhoods that surround the airport. The lead hijacker, Fawaz Yunis, soon returned to help with another operation. This one–organized by the Pasdaran and Mugniyah–sought the release of the Da’wa 17. Reagan’s response would lay the foundation for the final, fateful year and a half of his administration’s dealings with Iran.

Three days after the Royal Jordanian’s detonation, Hizballah hijacked TWA 847, a daily flight from Athens to Rome that regularly carried many Americans traveling westward from the Middle East. On June 14, 1985, it contained eight crew members and 145 passengers, 135 of them American. Wielding grenades and guns, which had been encased in glass to pass through airport x-ray machines, the hijackers’ first demand was the release of the Da’wa prisoners.

Their second demand, which proved to be the more realistic, was the release of 766 detainees held by Israel, most of them Lebanese Shi’a who had been captured in attacks against Israeli forces in Southern Lebanon. Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin told the U.S. embassy in Israel that if asked to release its prisoners in exchange for the American TWA hostages, “it would be hard for Israel to refuse.”[46] The United States, however, was displeased with Israel’s offer, because it effectively forced America to take public responsibility for any capitulation. The objection of the United States wasn’t so much to the idea of an exchange as it was the appearance of one; throughout the crisis, the Reagan Administration tried to make it seem as though it hadn’t requested anything of Israel and that Israel had in fact been planning to release its prisoners all along.

The plane was diverted to the Beirut airport, where it refueled, released several passengers, picked up two more gunmen, and flew to Algiers. There it refueled again, released several more passengers, and again took off for Beirut. Without naming Mugniyah, Nabih Berri, who was negotiating on behalf of the hijackers, explained to the U.S. ambassador in Lebanon that he had little leverage over an “inner group” of the terrorists because some of them were related to members of the Da’wa 17. In Beirut, the hijackers beat a U.S. Navy diver, shot him in the head, and threw his body on the tarmac. When the air traffic controller censured the shooter for the killing, the shooter replied, “Did you forget the Bir al Abed massacre?”–a reference to the March 1985 car bombing that failed to kill Sayyid Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, a Shi’a leader in Lebanon with close ties to Da’wa, Hizballah, and Iran. [47]

Fadlallah is sometimes described as the spiritual leader of Hizballah. The car bomb left him unscathed but killed 80 civilians and injured more than 200. Lebanese Shi’a held the CIA responsible. At the bombing site, a banner that read “Made in USA” was placed in front of a building blown out by the bomb. Bob Woodward’s Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987 asserts that the failed assassination had been a joint U.S.-Saudi effort formalized when CIA Director Bill Casey gave Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, a handwritten note with the number to a Geneva bank account that contained three million dollars.[48]

The U.S. role in the attempted assassination of Fadlallah was corroborated by Counterterrorism Director Robert Oakley, who, when asked in a 2001 interview whether the United States had supported the failed attempt, said, “we never actually provided any support to the group. They got frustrated and went off on their own.” When pressed further on whether the Reagan Administration had considered using its own forces against terrorists in Lebanon, he revealed more. “There were differences of opinion within the executive branch, but in the final analysis the president decided, ‘No, we’re not going to go that route.’ So we did try to organize the Lebanese hit squad that might have been able to do this for us, but they failed to do the job.”[49] Thus even in its attempt at retaliation, the Reagan Administration, by hoping to attack anonymously, and through calamitously unreliable proxies, sent Iran and Hizballah yet another signal of American impotence.

With little reason to believe the United States would risk another failure in Lebanon, the hijackers, having demonstrated their resolve through the dead American on the tarmac, brought several more gunmen on the plane and raised their demands. One of their associates had been caught at the Athens airport. They said that if he was not immediately flown to meet them in Algiers, several Greek passengers would be executed. They soon picked up their co-conspirator, released several dozen passengers, and returned to the safety of Beirut. The remaining 40 passengers, all of them Americans, were dispersed to secret locations in West Beirut, leaving only a few hijackers and crew members on the plane. The passengers with Jewish-sounding last names were controlled by Hizballah; Amal and the remaining hijackers jointly controlled the rest.

Neither Weinberger nor Vice President Bush had any intention of returning to Beirut. They had pushed for withdrawal the year before and now argued that the United States should simply ask Israel to release the 766 prisoners. Shultz disagreed and succeeded in persuading an initially reluctant Reagan of his position. On June 18, 1985, Reagan declared: “America will never make concessions to terrorists–to do so would only invite more terrorism–nor will we ask nor pressure any other government to do so.” Berri called Reagan’s bluff. Although he maintained that the hijackers were not Amal members but “pious Shi’is who followed the line of Hizballah,” Berri added a demand for the release of two Amal members jailed on terrorist charges in Spain. Shultz, meanwhile, persisted in requesting that a final deal include the release of the seven American hostages that had been previously abducted in Beirut. In a speech on June 26, 1985, when 39 TWA passengers remained captive, Shultz declared, “We insist on release of our hostages, all 46 of them, immediately.”[50]

U.S. intelligence would later discover that several of the original seven, as well as other Americans who were later abducted in Lebanon, were held by Hizballah and the Pasdaran at the latter’s headquarters in Ba’albak. Yet knowledge of the hostages’ whereabouts would not have been enough to impel action on the part of Weinberger’s Department of Defense, which was still reeling from the Marine barracks bombings and wary of returning to Lebanon in even the most limited capacity. According to the memoir of then CIA case officer Robert Baer, whose station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, was among the abducted, the Pentagon “wouldn’t even agree to send a Delta Force team, the army’s elite counterterrorism unit, unless a Delta member had ‘eyes on’ the hostages at least twenty-four hours in advance–a condition that could never be met.”[51]

During the TWA hijacking, there was a Delta Force team in the area and rumors swirled of its possible use. “But,” as Reagan put it in his memoir, “it couldn’t be used in the hostile atmosphere of Beirut.”[52] Memories of the Delta Force’s previous attempt to rescue hostages held by Iran–those in the seized U.S. embassy in Tehran–may have contributed to the Pentagon’s reluctance: In April 1980 Carter had belatedly aborted Operation Eagle Claw, a Delta Force mission that left a transport plane, seven helicopters, and eight dead servicemen behind in the Iranian desert.

When ten days into the TWA crisis Israel released 31 prisoners, Berri held fast, announcing that it meant nothing until all 766 were released. Berri was continuing to hold up a final deal in part because he feared, it turned out unnecessarily, that Reagan might have meant it when he said “terrorists, and those who support them, must, and will, be held to account.” Once he received assurances that this was no more true than Reagan’s vow not to make concessions to terrorists, Berri publicly announced both America’s promise not to retaliate and Israel’s pledge to release the remaining 735 detainees. The half month-long crisis finally ended. Israel released 300 prisoners a few days later, and the last of the 766 was freed by mid-September.

Neither the Da’wa prisoners nor the seven previously abducted Americans were released. Reagan’s public approval ratings had soared during the crisis, and he appears to have deemed his handling of it a success. He claims in his memoir to believe that Israel’s release of 766 hostages didn’t constitute an exchange. “Although one American lost his life during the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, thirty-nine others went home safely,” Reagan wrote. “After seventeen days, we had gotten them back without making any deals with the terrorists.”[53] Reagan gave a televised address to the nation and headed off with Nancy to a jubilant dinner hosted by Shultz. “We all felt a sense of relief that the TWA 847 hostage crisis had been resolved successfully,” Shultz wrote in his memoir. “Nancy, departing from her usual practice, had a hard drink ‘just to celebrate with you boys.’” [54]

Mugniyah, who was seen planeside with a Pasdaran officer at the height of the crisis, was indicted for the hijacking but never caught. CIA Director Bill Casey and National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane emphasized to Reagan that the deal could not have been made without Iran’s consent. They told Reagan that the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, had played a critical role; and since Iran had been gracious enough to allow the ordeal to end without killing more than the single American navy diver, President Reagan sent Rafsanjani a message of thanks.[55]

It is hard to know which effect of the TWA crisis has been the most damaging. The experience taught Reagan that he could capitulate to Iran and Hizballah, go back on his word, and publicly deny that he had done so, all while enjoying extraordinarily high public approval. Iran learned that it could send its speaker of parliament to secure Hizballah’s release of the TWA hostages–hostages held in order to free the bombers of the U.S. embassy in Kuwait–without paying a political price. Rafsanjani’s display of direction over Hizballah removed any reasonable doubt about whether control of the organization lay in some unwieldy faction of the Pasdaran or in Iran’s very centers of power; and when Reagan sent Rafsanjani his thanks, he, too, removed doubt–that held by Iran about whether the preceding two years of American inaction had been driven by ignorance or cowardice; Reagan’s message made clear that his administration had been driven by both.

Yet the most damaging aspect of the ordeal, more damaging, even, than the myopic encouragement provided to Iran and Hizballah or the lies to the American public about the exchange that had taken place, was the self-deception that the crisis had initiated. The twin fictions that America was negotiating with moderates and that moderates could control Hizballah opened the United States to the further extortion that finally culminated in the largest blight on the Reagan Administration’s legacy. Once Reagan could believe that no exchange was made with Israel’s release of several hundred Shi’a prisoners, or that Rafsanjani could be thanked for having the hostages released but not blamed for having them taken, it was but a small, casuistic step to believe what Reagan wrote in his memoir: that heavy arms could be sold to “the moderate Iranians” because they would “use their influence with the Hizballah and try to get our hostages freed.”[56]

Not only did the TWA crisis form the moral and strategic foundation for the series of arms-for-hostages deals that would become known as Irangate, but it was on the very day that the TWA hostages were transferred to Hizballah safe houses in West Beirut that the NSC circulated the first National Security Decision Directive that proposed the United States break with its policy by encouraging its allies to provide arms to Iran. The slippery slope that started with the exchange of American TWA hostages for prisoners held by Israel, at a ratio of nearly one to 20, descended into American hostages exchanged for Israeli-owned, American-replenished arms, and, finally, the direct exchange of American hostages for America’s arms.

The first deal was to consist of an August 1985 delivery of 100 TOW (tube-launched, optically-tracked, wire-guided) anti-tank missiles exchanged for the release of a single American hostage. When the missiles arrived in late August, they were picked up at Iran’s Tabriz airport by the Pasdaran–another clear indication that it was the vanguards of the revolution, not some moderate Iranian faction, whom the United States was strengthening. Even though Israel was in the midst of releasing the last of the 766 Lebanese prisoners, as had been demanded by the TWA hijackers, Iran reneged on the promise of its prime minister, Mir Hussein Moussavi, to release one of the seven kidnapped Americans.

Moussavi, having gauged the nearly boundless credulity of his adversaries, then proposed another deal: the release of all seven hostages in exchange for Iran’s receipt of 400 more TOW missiles. America agreed. On September 14, 1985, Israel delivered to Iran, with the U.S.’s authorization and promise of replenishment, 408 TOW missiles. Again Iran reneged on its promise. Instead of receiving all seven hostages, the Americans were told they could select one. They chose William Buckley, the CIA Beirut station chief whose abduction was a source of embarrassment and guilt for the administration. Buckley was believed to have been tortured. He had known Vice President Bush when they were both at the CIA and had been quite reluctant, in spite of CIA Director Bill Casey’s pressure, to take the Beirut assignment–in part because his identity had been outed some years before. The Iranian response came that Buckley was too ill to travel. In fact, he had been dead for three months. A different hostage, Reverend Benjamin Weir, was released within hours of the second TOW delivery. Accompanying Weir was a note from his captors conveying a familiar message: a demand for the release of the Da’wa 17.

“We were disappointed, yes,” Reagan wrote in his memoir, “but we had succeeded in bringing home one of the hostages, and I felt pretty good.”[57] So the negotiations continued, facilitated in part by the Iranians’ ability to tell the Americans exactly what they wanted to hear–that receiving additional weapons would strengthen the moderate forces in Iran and serve as a bulwark against an inflated threat of Soviet encroachment. The Americans, now practiced in self-deception, were only too happy to believe in notions that might help to justify their continuing betrayal of a repeated promise to “never make concessions to terrorists.”

The next deal was to consist of 120 HAWK (Homing All The Way Killer) anti-aircraft missiles, at a price of nearly $25 million, exchanged for Iran’s promise that no more hostages would be abducted and that those remaining would be freed. With Weir released and Buckley presumed dead, there were thought to be five hostages left.[58]

The first attempted HAWK delivery failed; the second–18 HAWK missiles that belatedly arrived in Tabriz on November 25, 1985–was a disaster. The 18 HAWKs were to compose the first of five shipments; but the missiles were old and, worse, bore Israeli markings, including, on nine of them, stars of David. The Iranians were outraged. They test-fired one at an Iraqi plane, then insisted that the remaining 17 be returned. No hostages were released. Prime Minister Moussavi relayed a message to Reagan through Manucher Ghorbanifar, Iran’s broker: “We have fulfilled our every promise, and now you have cheated us. You must immediately remedy this terrible situation or else dire consequences will follow.”[59]

Within a week and a half, Reagan convened a National Security Planning Group meeting to discuss an even larger arms deal in exchange for the release of the five remaining living hostages. In one of their rare moments of agreement, Shultz and Weinberger expressed strong disapproval of continuing any such barter. Reagan was undeterred. He sent Bud McFarlane, who had resigned as National Advisor several days before, to meet Ghorbanifar in London the next day. By all accounts, the meeting went horribly. Reagan’s diary entry from December 9, 1985, records McFarlane’s report: