Failing to Hide Israel-Iran-Iraq Secrets

Exclusive: Many Americans think secret U.S. documents become public after, say, 30 years, but many are hidden indefinitely to conceal inconvenient truths that could enlighten public debate, as Robert Parry discovered in getting a redacted version of a “top secret” paper from 1981 that he had already found in unredacted form.

By Robert Parry

By recently releasing a redacted version of top secret “talking points” that Secretary of State Alexander Haig used to brief President Ronald Reagan about Mideast developments in spring 1981, the U.S. government has inadvertently revealed what it still wants to hide from the public some 34 years later because I found the full version in congressional files in late 1994 and first wrote about it in early 1996.

The key points that the U.S. government still doesn’t want you to know include that in early 1981 Israel already was supplying U.S. military equipment to Iran for its war with Iraq; that the Saudis had conveyed a “green light” supposedly from President Jimmy Carter to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in 1980; and that the Saudis agreed to finance arms sales to Pakistan and other states in the region.

President Ronald Reagan with Secretary of State Alexander Haig and National Security Advisor Richard Allen during a meeting with Interagency Working Committee on Terrorism in the Cabinet Room on Jan. 26, 1981. (Photo from Reagan Library archives)

President Ronald Reagan with Secretary of State Alexander Haig and National Security Advisor Richard Allen during a meeting with Interagency Working Committee on Terrorism in the Cabinet Room on Jan. 26, 1981. (Photo from Reagan Library archives)

All three points have relevance today because they reveal the early seeds of policies that have grown over the past three decades into the twisted vines of today’s bloody conflicts. The still-hidden sections of Haig’s “talking points” also could cause some embarrassment to the nations mentioned.

For instance, the Israelis like to present their current hostility toward Iran as derived from a principled opposition to the supposed extremism of the Islamic state, so the revelation that they were supplying U.S. military hardware to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s government, which had held 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days, suggests that less noble motivations were driving Israel’s decisions.

Though ex-President Carter has denied encouraging Iraq to invade Iran in September 1980 at the height of the hostage crisis which was destroying his reelection bid the Saudis’ “green light” assertion at least indicates that they led Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to believe that his invasion had U.S. backing.

Whether the Saudis deceived Hussein about the “green light” or not, their instigation of the war exposes the origins of the modern Sunni-Shiite conflict, though now the Saudis are accusing the Iranians of regional aggression. The Haig “talking points” reveal that the first blow in the revival of this ancient fight was thrown not by the Shiites of Iran but by the Sunnis of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime with Saudi backing and encouragement.

The Saudi agreement to pay for arms purchases by Pakistan and other regional government sheds light on another aspect of today’s Mideast crisis. Saudi financial help to Pakistan in the 1980s became a key element in the expansion of a radical Sunni jihadist movement that coalesced along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border to carry on the CIA-backed war against the Soviet army and secular Afghan forces.

That war with the United States and Saudi Arabia each eventually pouring in $500 million a year led to the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the collapse of the modernist, leftist regime in Kabul to be replaced by the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban which, in turn, gave sanctuary to Al-Qaeda led by a wealthy Saudi, Osama bin Laden.

Thus, the outlines of today’s violent chaos across the Middle East were sketched in those years, albeit with many subsequent twists and turns.

The Persian Gulf War

After the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988 with both countries financially drained Saddam Hussein turned on his suddenly stingy Sunni benefactors who began refusing further credit and demanding repayment of wartime loans. In reaction, Hussein after consulting with U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie and thinking he had another “green light” invaded Kuwait. That, in turn, prompted a U.S.-led deployment to both defend Saudi Arabia and drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.

Although Hussein soon signaled a readiness to withdraw his troops, President George H.W. Bush rebuffed those overtures and insisted on a bloody ground war both to demonstrate the qualitative superiority of the modern U.S. military and to excite the American people about a military victory and thus to “kick the Vietnam Syndrome.” [See Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Bush’s military offensive succeeded in those goals but also provoked bin Laden’s outrage over the placement of U.S. troops near Islamic holy sites. The United States became the new target of Al-Qaeda’s terrorist revenge. And, for Official Washington’s emerging neoconservatives, the need to finally and completely destroy Saddam Hussein then Israel’s bête noire became an article of faith.

The Persian Gulf War’s demonstration of U.S. military prowess combined with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 also encouraged the neocons to envision a strategy of “regime changes” for any government that showed hostility toward Israel. Iraq was listed as target number one, but Syria also was high on the hit list.

By the early 1990s, Israel had grown alienated from cash-strapped Iran, which had withdrawn from the lucrative arms bazaar that Israel had been running for that Shiite government through the 1980s. Gradually, Israel began to realign itself with the Sunnis bankrolled by Saudi Arabia.

The 9/11 attacks in 2001 were an expression of the anti-U.S. outrage among Sunni fundamentalists, who were funded by the Saudis and other Persian Gulf oil states, but the intricate realities of the Middle East were then little known to the American people who didn’t much know the difference between Sunni and Shiite and who lacked knowledge about the hostilities between secularists like Hussein and fundamentalists like bin Laden.

President George W. Bush and his administration exploited that ignorance to rally the public behind an invasion of Iraq in 2003 out of unrealistic fears that Saddam Hussein would share weapons of mass destruction with Osama bin Laden. Beyond the false claims about Iraq having WMDs and about a connection between Hussein and bin Laden, there was little appreciation even within the higher levels of the Bush administration about how the ouster and killing of Hussein would shatter the fragile equilibrium between Sunnis and Shiites.

With Hussein removed, the Shiite majority gained control of Iraq, distressing the Saudis who had, in many ways, launched the modern Sunni-Shiite war by pushing Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980 but who now saw Iran’s allies gaining control of Iraq. The Saudis and other Gulf sheiks began financing Sunni extremists who flooded into Iraq to fight the Shiites and their enablers, the U.S. military.

The Saudis also built a behind-the-scenes alliance with Israel, which saw its financial and geopolitical interests advanced by this secret collaboration. Soon, the Israelis were identifying their old arms-trading partners, the Iranians, as an “existential threat” to Israel and pushing the United States into a more direct confrontation with Iran. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Did Money Seal Israel-Saudi Alliance?”]

Expanding Conflicts

The battlefront in the Sunni-Shiite conflict moved to Syria, where Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other Sunni states joined in supporting a rebellion to oust the government of President Bashar al-Assad, an Alawite, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. As that conflict grew bloodier and bloodier, Assad’s relatively secular regime became the protector of Christians, Shiites, Alawites and other minorities against the Sunni forces led by al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the hyper-brutal Islamic State.

In 2014, pressed by President Barack Obama, the Saudis joined an alliance against the Islamic State, although Saudi participation was tepid at best. Saudi Arabia’s true enthusiasm was to push a series of regional proxy wars against Iran and any Shiite-related movements, such as the Houthis in Yemen and the Alawites in Syria. If that helped Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, so be it, was the Saudi view.

Though the two redacted paragraphs from Haig’s “talking points” from 34 years ago might seem to be ancient history no longer worthy of the secrecy stamp, the U.S. government still insists on shielding that information from the American people, not letting them know too much about how these entangling alliances took shape and who was responsible for them.

The primary sources for Haig were Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Saudi Prince Fahd (later King Fahd), both of whom are dead, as are several other principals in these events, including Reagan, Hussein and Haig. The two redacted paragraphs that Haig used in his presentation to Reagan read as follows, with underlined sections in the original “talking points”:

Fahd was also very enthusiastic toward your policies. As a measure of his good faith, he intends to insist on a common oil policy at a forthcoming meeting of his Arab colleagues which will include a single price and a commitment to no drop in production. Also of importance was Fahd’s agreement in principle to fund arms sales to the Pakistanis and other states in the area.

“Both Sadat and Fahd provided other bits of useful intelligence (e.g. Iran is receiving military spares for U.S. equipment from Israel). It was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran through Fahd.”

The redacted version with those two paragraphs blacked out was released by the George H.W. Bush presidential library after the “talking points” went through a declassification process. The release was in response to a Freedom of Information Act request that I had filed in connection with the so-called October Surprise affair, in which the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 was alleged to have conspired with Iranian officials and Israeli intelligence officers to delay the release of the 52 American hostages held in Iran to ensure President Carter’s reelection defeat.

In 1991, Congress began an investigation into the 1980 issue, suspecting that it may have been a prequel to the Iran-Contra scandal which had involved Reagan’s secret arms-for-hostage deals with Iran in 1985-86 (also with Israeli help). The George H.W. Bush administration collected documents possibly related to the 1980 events and shared some with the congressional investigation, including the Haig “talking points.”

But Bush’s operatives trying to protect his reelection chances in 1991-92 engaged in delays and obstructions of the congressional inquiry, which finally agreed after Bush’s defeat by Bill Clinton in November 1992 to say that it could find “no credible evidence” that Reagan and Bush had orchestrated a delay in Iran’s release of the hostages. The hostages were finally freed on Jan. 20, 1981, immediately after Reagan was sworn in as president.

Subsequent disclosures of evidence, however, buttressed the long-held suspicions of a Republican-Iranian deal, including documents that the Bush-41 White House had withheld from Congress as well as other documents that the congressional investigation possessed but ignored. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Second Thoughts on October Surprise” or, for more details, Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

12 comments for “Failing to Hide Israel-Iran-Iraq Secrets

  1. dave
    May 12, 2015 at 21:33

    “although saddam soon signaled a readiness to withdrawl his troops” oh really?
    you want to document that accusation?

    • Joe L.
      May 12, 2015 at 21:55

      New York Times: “Hussein Wanted Soviets to Head Off U.S. in 1991” (January 19, 2011):

      “WASHINGTON — As the American-led ground offensive in the first war with Iraq got under way on Feb. 24, 1991, Saddam Hussein directed his frustration at an unlikely target: the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Mr. Hussein had dispatched his foreign minister to Moscow in an 11th-hour bid to head off a ground war.

      After prodding by Mr. Gorbachev, Mr. Hussein had offered to withdraw Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 21 days. But the United States appeared to be moving ahead with its land campaign.”

      http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/world/middleeast/20archive.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

  2. Jose Rodriguez
    May 12, 2015 at 06:44

    your article was nice, but we need to declassify the 9/11 28 pages. You SHOULD publish the JFK assassination investigation which has been declassified which proves Israel killed JFK because he wanted to ‘Register as a Foreign Agent’ the Zionist Council of America which changed their name after the killing and is now AIPAC which hides behind Koch and the GOP to maintain Corporatism greed for kickbacks

  3. Peter Loeb
    May 12, 2015 at 05:41

    HOW THE “GARDEN” OF MIDEAST HORRORS HAS GROWN…

    As US novelist William Faulkner once wrote: “The past is not past.” To this
    one can add that nothings seems to be what we thought it is. And to those
    who still flounder, one may add the ironic words of writer Lewis Carrol:
    “Do you say what you mean , or mean what you say?”

    The role Saudi Arabia seems to be central but it appears on closer inspection
    that the policies of the US and Israel are of even deeper meaning. They have undoubtedly purposely been “redacted” from the fabricated history which both
    the public and politician have been fed.. (For an in-depth analysis of many of
    the issues prior to Barack Obama see Naseer H. Aruri perceptive DISHONEST BROKER: THE US ROLE IN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE, South End Press,2003.)

    Bob Parry’s contribution above makes significant contributions to our
    understanding of what has previously been oblique.

    An analysis of the role of oil as suggested by several commenters could indeed
    add greatly. As has often been pointed out, the pricing, marketing,
    of oil is an area with particular relevance and can unlock keys as to the reasons/
    motives for policy decisions (See the works of Gabriel Kolko.) I have read
    that the price of oil especially as far as the Saudi’s current decision are concerned
    may be of great importance at this moment.This requires a more indepth analysis.
    Would it explain more than the sunni-shiite division? Without further information this
    is not a certainty..

    Bob Parry’s contribution should be read many times.

    —-Peter Loeb

    • Peter Loeb
      May 13, 2015 at 06:18

      COMPANION ARTICLE….

      All readers should carefully study Rob Parry companion article,
      “SADDAM’S GREEN LIGHT”, Consortium, also dated May 11, 2015.

      —Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA

  4. Brewer
    May 12, 2015 at 03:16

    This doco from the BBC journalist/film-maker Adam Curtis provides some interesting Historical background to the FDR-Saudi deals and subsequent events. It is long (2 hours) but very worthwhile.
    You can read about it here:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Lake_%28film%29

    …..and view it or download it here:
    http://www.iwannawatch.to/2015/01/adam-curtis-bitter-lake-2015/

  5. isdivc
    May 12, 2015 at 00:03

    It is difficult to discern political cause and effect especially in the Middle East because of the variety of interests that are being served (or attacked). I would like more analysis of the role of oil in how all the current events are playing out. The need for a reliable oil source drove a lot of foreign policy post WWII. My belief is they still do. However, the overlay of religious and regional interests makes it hard to see the oil politics playing out. I would appreciate more of that perspective incorporated into the excellent analysis above.

    • paul wichmann
      May 12, 2015 at 02:03

      The funny thing about oil is that our fracking, and the consequent oil-independence we now enjoy in the form of lower gas prices, ought rationally to have diminished our interest in the Middle East. Not so.

      • Stefan
        May 12, 2015 at 09:27

        It is not the oil exports that count (the oil from the MidEast to USA is only around ~10% or so I believe).

        It is the energy pricing, which in turn is ties up with commodity pricing.

        The above, if not priced in US dollar, the USD as a reserve currency is no more.

        If the USD is done as a reserve currency, the US “Superpower” is done.

      • Joe L.
        May 12, 2015 at 14:31

        I think what is happening in the Middle East is about oil but on a much more complicated scale. The US Dollar itself is tied implicitly to oil. I believe that when the US Dollar first became the major reserve of the world, I believe replacing the Pound Sterling, it was backed by gold. In the 1970’s after the Vietnam War, I believe Charles de Gaulle, the President of France, wanted to convert their US Dollars back into gold. It was after this that Nixon closed the gold window. Then the US made a deal with the Saudis that if they exclusively sold their oil in US Dollars that the US would provide them with arms and protection – this gave birth to the US Petrodollar. OPEC basically followed suit. Due to the sale of oil in US Dollars then it creates great demand for US treasuries, US debt, in order to purchase oil. This keeps the US Dollar as the reserve currency of the world and allows the US a competitive advantage over other countries – hegemony.

        So when Iraq went off the dollar standard in, I believe, December 2001 and instead sold its’ oil for food and Euros this rather angered the US. Then you have Libya which was trying to get all of Africa to switch over to a gold dinar to sell their oil instead of US Dollars, again I think this was a threat to US hegemony. Then we have Iran which, I believe, stopped selling their oil in US Dollars back in 2007 (or 2009). Granted also major oil companies that were not allowed in Iraq since 1973 now have access to Iraqi oil fields and I believe at one point I read that they wanted to triple Iraq’s oil output.

        Overall, I think that this is much bigger than simply oil to fill one’s gas tank but rather about highly indebted US trying to maintain hegemony over the world by maintaining the reserve currency and control of other countries resources (oil, natural gas, lithium, gold etc. – the Pentagon finding $1 Trillion worth of natural resources in Afghanistan etc.).

  6. Walter
    May 11, 2015 at 19:27

    Thanks Robert, you illuminate the vital threads of history in this period.

    “The 9/11 attacks in 2001 were an expression of the anti-U.S. outrage among Sunni fundamentalists, who were funded by the Saudis and other Persian Gulf oil states….”

    I know that, yes, there was an element of that on 9/11 but we keep avoiding the elephant in the room when ignore false flag state terrorism. That day along with the anthrax attacks will never add up the above. If left unchecked more deadly provocations will follow.

    • Thomas Howard
      May 12, 2015 at 07:36

      BINGO Walter!

      The sad truth is that there’s no rule of law, the criminals are in control. The vast majority people are either corrupt, cowards, or brainwashed.

      One generation of children entirely WITHOUT public education would be an ember of hope, but that’s not gonna happen.

Comments are closed.