[Peace-discuss] Israeli aid to Iran

[David Green]

>From Democracy Now:

ROBERT DREYFUSS: Well, you know, in researching my
book, I found myself sitting at lunch one day next to
an old gentleman. I asked him -- this was at an old
retired C.I.A. officers' conference. And it turned out
his name was John Waller. And John Waller, who died
last year, was then in his eighties. And I spent
several hours interviewing him later on. He was the
first C.I.A. station chief in Iran, beginning in 1947,
and he served there six years until he returned to
Washington in 1953 to coordinate the coup d'etat
against Mohammed Mosedeq, an Iranian nationalist, who
had just nationalized Iran's oil industry. And, of
course, that was the coup that restored the Shah of
Iran to his throne after he had fled Iran. 

And Waller described to me how the United States
reached out to a man named Ahmed Kashani, an ayatollah
in Iran and the mentor of Ayatollah Khomeini, in fact.
Kashani was then really the king of all Islam in Iran.
He worked with an organization, an underground
movement called the Devotees of Islam, which was an
unofficial branch, again, of the Muslim Brotherhood,
even though it was a Shiite organization and the
Brotherhood is mostly Sunni. And so, in the 1953 coup
d'etat, the United States paid money to Kashani and
his religious forces, and they provided the
demonstrators, who in turn went out into the streets,
saying, "Down with Mosadeq! Bring back the Shah!" 

And ironically, one of the great ironies of this story
was that Ayatollah Khomeini, himself, who later became
the undisputed dictator of Iran in 1979, ‘81, well,
Khomeini himself was in the street with his mentor,
Kashani, saying, “Down with Mosedeq! Bring back the
Shah!” And so, while the Iranian Shiite religious
fundamentalist movement was always suspicious of the
Shah and certainly clashed with him repeatedly over
the next 25 years, its prime enemy was communism and
nationalism. And you even found, after Ayatollah
Khomeini came to power in 1979, people like Zbigniew
Brzezinski and our ambassador in Iraq now, Zalmay
Khalilzad, both argued that Khomeini was a greater
threat to the Soviet Union than to the United States
and that Islam would destabilize Central Asia, would
rouse the Muslims of the Central Asian Muslim
republics. 

Now, that did not happen. But what did happen was that
the United States supported the jihad in Afghanistan,
and precisely on that theory that this jihad would not
only get the Soviets out of Afghanistan, but would
then spread across the border into the Soviet
republics. Ironically, I guess, during all of this
period, one little-known fact is that the
neoconservatives in the 1980s, who were a minority
force, not quite the dominant power they are now under
the Bush administration, argued vociferously that the
United States was wrong in tilting toward Iraq during
the Iran-Iraq War. They argued for a tilt in favor of
Iran. And that's what led exactly to the Iran-Contra
Affair, which had its roots in the neoconservative
belief that the United States’ true partner in the
Gulf was Iran, even though it was led by Khomeini.
They felt that there were people there, Rafsanjani and
others, that they could deal with. 

One of the things I report quite extensively in my
book is that throughout the entire Iran-Iraq War,
Israel provided significant and steady supply of
weapons to Iran. From 1979, and especially after the
war with Iraq began, in 1980, the Israelis would meet
once a month in Geneva with an Iranian air force team,
and the Iranians would give Israel a shopping list.
And the Israelis then provided a steady supply of
weapons to Iran during its war with Iraq. This is
somewhat acknowledged, but basically an unknown
footnote to history. Yet it shows, I think, part of
the underhanded way in which the Islamists have been
seen from time to time as convenient partners,
especially during the Cold War, of both the United
States, the British and the Israelis, all of whom had
their hand in supporting Islamists of one branch or
another. 

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Dreyfuss, we're going to have to
leave it there. We thank you very much for being with
us and for writing the book. It's called Devil's Game:
How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist
Islam. 



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