#32
View attachment 436152
Summer 1983
CIA station, Istanbul.
“So. The new photos.”
The agent lays the photos out on the station chief's desk.
“Tell me again?”
“This is Trabzon. A passenger ship, embarking for Crimea.”
“And the gentlemen boarding this boat, they’re Iranians?”
“Tudeh Party officials. These four, anyway. Gentleman number five is chief of procurement for the Air Force. Out of uniform, of course.”
“And greeting them?”
“Personal Secretary to the Soviet Foreign Minister. Who happens to have a very nice dacha on the Crimean coast, by the way.”
“Huh. Fancy that.”
“You know, this plus the other stuff we’ve gathered...it could make a lot of Iranian clerics lose their shit. If we were to...you know, let it slip…”
“That’s a no-go. Langley says we’re sitting this one out.”
“We’ve got so much. Names. Payments. Meetings all over Iran, in Turkey, in Russia, the Eastern Bloc.”
“We don’t say a word.”
“But the evidence is right here, the Soviets are worming their way into Iran.”
“Even so. We don’t get involved right now. That’s our directive. Saddam's a lunatic, the Ayatollahs are barbarians...the mood in Washington calls for zero cooperation with either.”
“And if that benefits the Soviets?”
“You don’t think I’ve had this conversation already? Here’s the deal: Syria and Lebanon are powder kegs right now. The Soviets are practically bodily sitting on Assad to keep him from doing something stupid. There’s also the possibility we might need the Soviets in a few months if things keep going the way they're going in Israel. Anderson wants any Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to have the blessings of the UN, so there’s just no upsetting the apple cart right now. Iran’s considered a secondary front for the time being, so we back off.
“So the commies get a free hand in Iran?”
“Commies. Listen to you.”
“Well, what do you call em?”
“Opportunists, maybe about as ideological as your average...I dunno, Angolan. Besides. If you gave me a choice between Moscow and the Ayatollahs...well. With the Soviets...eh, at least they know how to keep a Cold War cold, most of the time.”
“Still seems a shame not to meddle.”
“You want more reasons? Fine. There’s also Afghanistan to think of.”
“Afghanistan?”
“Right now the Iranians are supporting their own rebel groups against the Soviets. But they also keep scrapping with our guys. The thought is that if Iran and the Soviets start to cozy up, Iran will be forced to cut off their support. Then we can try to unify opposition under people we can trust.”
“That’s all fine, up to a point. But wouldn’t it be worse to have Iran become a Soviet client?”
“Okay, sure. Doesn’t seem likely right now. But if the war keeps going on and by necessity the Iranians get deeper and deeper in bed with the Soviets, sure, you could be right. But there are still up-sides. Think of the Gulf States. They may hate communists and Arab nationalists and...I don’t have to tell you it’s a long list. But oddly what they seem most afraid of right now is the Ayatollahs. Come to that, the American public has a special place in its most hateful heart for those bastards. If the clerics get bum-rushed the way the Shah did in '79? Don’t underestimate the political upside of schadenfreude, my friend.”
----
2019
American University (Go Eagles), Washington DC, 2019. In session is “The Soviet Sphere,” a class on Soviet foreign policy.
“There are several historians who believe the Soviet Leadership Crisis of 1981 ultimately had a positive effect on the Union. Most agree that the USSR had been on a path of precipitous decline since at least the time of Brezhnev, and that collapse had become inevitable by the 1980s. The only question was the exact timing.
“By providing a sort of ‘dress rehearsal’ for the end (so the theory goes), the Leadership Crisis caused the Soviet bureaucracy to perk up; to realize what was coming, and to do all it could to pull out of the nosedive- or at least make the landing as soft as possible.
“It’s certainly true that the strategy ultimately adopted by Mikhail Gorbachev, whose accession ended the crisis in early 1982, did a lot to ease domestic tensions both within Russia, the other Republics, and to a lesser extent in the Eastern Bloc. Anti-corruption initiatives seem to have had a real effect on production outputs by 1985, particularly in the agricultural sector. They also sponsored negotiations (albeit dramatically slow-pedaled) with Solidarnosc in Poland, and even held meetings with prominent Euro-communists on strategies for reform and possible future normalization (though these sessions would remain a state secret until quite recently).
“So we can certainly point to actions taken by Gorbachev, prompted by the Leadership Crisis, which may have had an effect on the ultimate trajectory of the Union.
“But of course there is a simple counter-argument to all this: it failed anyway.
“The responses to that stand on less solid ground, and often involve detailed counterfactuals that are impossible to prove. Could the collapse of the Eastern Bloc have gone any worse? Some scenarios posit a complete collapse of the Union; perhaps even the disintegration of the Russian state itself, with successor governments centered on Novosibirsk, Vladivostok, and other regional cities where dissent was expressed the loudest. Some even go so far as to posit global nuclear war.
“These arguments are, of course, unprovable. But they raise intriguing questions.
“As intriguing as they are and as interesting as Soviet domestic policy is- and I urge you all to take professor Solomon’s Domestic Politics in the USSR class this spring- we won’t be covering much of that here. Today we’re going to be focusing on how the Leadership Crisis affected Soviet foreign policy, particularly in Western Asia and the Middle East.
“These brief months of uncertainty for the Soviets were monumental in the modern history of the world, for they caused one of the two great powers on the globe to almost totally second-guess their Cold War strategy. Worried about having to quash a rebellion at home, the Soviets retrenched.
“They cut back on international aid to a number of organizations, pushed Cuba to take a less provocative stance in Africa and Central America, and used American defense cuts as an excuse to trim their own military budgets.
“Their most notable policy change came in the Middle East, where they had been juggling a handful of often diametrically opposed allies for more than 20 years. A great deal of effort had been expended throughout the 1970s to keep both Iraq and Syria on-side and away from each other’s throats.
“Though initially supported by the Andropov government, Iraq’s invasion of Iran was starting to cause headaches for the Russians even as early as 1981. Gorbachev in particular saw Hussein as a loose cannon with a sense of entitlement, who brought little to the table as an ally.
“Meanwhile, Syria was going a long way to bring Iran around to a favorable view of the Soviets, something the Soviets were desperately keen on from day one of the revolution in Tehran. While the religious leadership of Iran would never consent to join the Soviet sphere outright, they were willing to make a number of concessions for Soviet support in light of their current war with Iraq.
“As the Syrians grew their influence in Lebanon and Soviet fortunes rose in Iran, Moscow began to more-or-less ghost Hussein, who was left with precious few allies. US intelligence-sharing and aid had dried up almost as soon as president Anderson took office. The Gulf States were willing to support Saddam financially, but hardly anyone was willing to sell him weapons. And without Soviet advisers, the Iraqi army’s ability to use the weapons it had quickly degraded in the face of mounting casualties.
“By 1984, the Iraqis were falling back across the border with the Iranians in hot pursuit. Hussein was executed by his own generals, who quickly sued for peace. The resulting military government Iraq was weak, and remained in the outer echelons of the Soviet orbit. They were forced by necessity to make several political concessions. These included a UN-approved referendum on a border adjustment with Syria and autonomy for the northern Kurds.
“Iraq would remain an unstable member of the Soviet sphere for the foreseeable future. In at least one respect, this nominal Soviet ally would prove useful. After the realignment of the Iranians became clear, Iraq served as a tertiary front in the late Cold War, with the US and the Gulf petrol states spending undue time, effort, and money to try to lure the country away from the Soviets, with very little to show for it.
“Meanwhile, the necessary military ramp-up in Iran led to a dramatic increase in the number of Soviet advisers in the country. The Tudeh Party went from ‘tolerated’ to ‘favored,’ and saw significant expansion during this time, and the Sovietization of the officer class in both the Iranian Army and (particularly) the Air Force became inevitable.
“The Iranians also dropped their own nascent efforts at projecting power around the region, withdrawing support for Farsi-speaking rebels in Afghanistan, and merging their Shia fighting cadres in Lebanon with the pro-Syrian Amal Movement.
“For the moment the Iranians maintained a significant degree of independence of action beyond these fronts. But as we’ll see, the complacency of the religious leadership would cause them problems in the future.
“The Syrians gained a significant amount of prestige as the midwives of this realignment, but that didn’t translate to the same level of independence experienced by Iran. The Soviets successfully reigned Assad in on several occasions, including nixing his attempts to annex Lebanon, and most notably through Soviet participation in the Athens Conference. Athens was a moment of prestige the Soviets simply couldn’t pass up, even if the results meant undermining a key ally in the region.”