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After transferring to another, smaller helicopter, used to find targets for Iraqi artillery, I got a closer view of how poison gas and every other lethal tool available to Saddam Hussein – all with American approval – were being employed. Hussein’s U.S.-provided arms supplier, Sarkis Soghanalian, had done his job well. As I landed in an abandoned schoolyard at the front a few miles from al-Qurna, where the Garden of Eden supposedly once existed, and crossed by flatboat in the canals Saddam’s army had dug to flood the marshes, I witnessed the endless line of corpses of very old men and adolescents, some children, in tattered Iranian uniforms. The Iranian Mullahs’ defense of the 1979 Revolution and Saddam’s invasion ended festering in Iraqi mud. A million people died in the Iran Iraq War. Almost no one in the United States paid any attention.
More than two decades and two Gulf Wars later, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel face the same Hobson’s choice – this time with an insular and defensive Iran. By removing Saddam Hussein, we created a more powerful and ambitious Iran. The 1979 Revolution has turned into a military dictatorship. Internal opposition and other pressures have forced the Mullahs to play the nuclear card to survive domestically. Last month’s International Atomic Energy Commission report on Iran’s nuclear weapons program has American and Israeli defense planners trying to figure out how the Iranian nuclear program can be stopped if Iran does not succumb to international pressure and continues to reprocess uranium until it reaches weapons-grade levels.
While the Obama administration prepares for a military conflict with Iran, it is important for us to understand some of the secret history between Iran and the United States that complicates the planning and unnecessarily puts our soldiers and sailors in harm’s way. What follows is one story about how that happened.
Iran has been preparing for an attack since 1988, after a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Vincennes, illegally operating inside Iran’s territorial waters, accidentally shot down Iran Air Flight 655. (See DCBureau’s 10-part series on the United States and Iran’s secret history) After the shoot down, the Iranian leadership began a weapons buying spree to counter the threat posed by the powerful American fleet in the Persian Gulf that threatened them and could attack at will.
Sometimes reporters end up in the middle of a story. That is what happened to me. I was in France in June 1997 to attend the Paris Air Show. One of my sources, arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian, had shifted his operations to Paris after being sent to jail by the George H.W. Bush administration for doing the United States’ bidding in Iraq and serving as the Reagan administration’s arms dealer of choice to Saddam Hussein. He was released after helping the Clinton administration combat Hezbollah’s counterfeiting operations in Lebanon.
During my visit to Paris, a representative of the China Precision Machinery Import and Export Corporation (CPMEIC), the Chinese Army-owned company and the manufacturer of the C-802, an anti-ship missile, showed up at Soghanalian’s luxurious apartment at Rond-point. Soghanalian introduced me to M. Ping, the CPMEIC representative, who was, in fact, a Chinese intelligence official. Soghanalian told Ping that I was a Canadian who was repairing his assistant, Veronique Paquier’s, computer. As Veronique and I pretended to repair an antiquated electric typewriter, Ping ignored his host’s awkward lie and, instead, talked business with Soghanalian. I grabbed a nearby, small video camera and turned it on, hoping to capture Ping’s pitch to the arms dealer.
Ping enthusiastically described the new missiles he wanted Soghanalian to peddle. The missiles were cheap ($60,000) and so were the launch and support equipment. The missiles were as good as any in the U.S. arsenal and could be equipped with nuclear, chemical, biological or conventional warheads. Ping told Soghanalian that components for hundreds of the missiles had been shipped to Iran and, within weeks, would be operational against all shipping in the Gulf. The Chinese wanted Soghanalian to sell the systems throughout the world. (This meeting took place after China had promised the Clinton administration that it would cease construction of these systems.)
Understanding that these missiles represented a real threat to our own Navy—and seeing the potential for a great story—I quickly grabbed Ping’s files and missile brochures when Soghanalian and Ping left the apartment for lunch. I then urged Veronique to help me copy the material. Reluctantly, she agreed. While we were in a back office making copies, we heard the front door open down the hall. The arms dealer and Ping had returned because Soghanalian had forgotten his wallet. I quickly went to the kitchen and reached for a bottled water. I followed Soghanalian and Ping out, raced to my hotel the Mermoz, and called a U.S. weapons expert who was a longtime source. I asked him, “How many C-802s does the U.S. think Iran has?” The source called back a few minutes later with the answer: “Less than a dozen.” I told him that the Chinese had told Soghanalian, in my presence, that China had shipped key parts for just under 200 missiles. There was silence at the other end of the phone. My source asked: “Can you leave Paris for Washington?” I said that I had another few days of work.
Late that night I received a call from the front desk with a message to meet Veronique at a café around the corner from the Israeli Embassy in Paris. Over a drink, she handed me Ping’s file and said: “The French are involved in this missile deal. You need to be very careful. They are China’s hidden partner.”
My Pentagon weapons-expert source had suggested that I have no more conversations about this matter on French telephones. The source said the missiles represented a very serious situation that was “previously unknown to us.”
I did not open the envelope from Veronique until I was on the plane for Washington. It was the C-802 file and more. The file contained the information I needed to uncover a vortex of lies going back to the Reagan/Bush era.
In Washington, I set up a place for a secure meeting with my Pentagon source and began calling several longtime CIA sources. All the sources had spent years on Persian and Middle Eastern issues and were shaken by what I had learned. I asked one CIA official what the United States knew about the C-802. The answer was not reassuring: “The U.S. doesn’t have one. We don’t know how to defend [against] it.”
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