From Many Strands, a Tangled Web

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Two years later and a continent away, another event happened that would set the present crisis in motion. In the spring of 1984 Congress voted to cut off military aid to the contra rebels fighting Nicaragua's Sandinista regime. The Administration tapped a Marine lieutenant colonel at the National Security Council, Oliver North, to keep the contra war alive. Carefully and quietly North began supporting a network of private donors to finance the insurgents. He reportedly called on old allies like retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord to help with the rebel supply network, and he traveled to the contras' camps in Central America to promise them personally that he would not abandon them. "I've got a commitment to those guys," North would say later. "I told them I'd come through for them." Meanwhile, some Iranian leaders began to feel that their nation, exhausted by its four-year war with Iraq and by years of Islamic revolutionary fever at home, needed to end its diplomatic isolation. According to the Repatriation Front, a nationalist anti- Khomeini group operating in Europe and the Middle East that has closely monitored events during the Khomeini reign, the leader of Iran's parliament, Hashemi Rafsanjani, decided to modify his government's anti-West stance. The Iranians might also have hoped that better relations with the U.S. would encourage the Reagan Administration to release at least part of the $1 billion in Iranian assets that the American Government froze in 1980.

The first move occurred in late 1984, when Iran appointed a new, more moderate representative to the International Court of Justice at the Hague. For years Iran had argued in the court that the U.S. should turn over hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons that had been ordered and paid for by the Shah before the 1979 revolution. As the Iranians softened their harsh words against Washington, the U.S. allegedly hinted that it would consider delivering the arms if Iran would agree to end its sponsorship of terrorism against American interests in the Middle East and Europe. According to dissident Iranian sources, Rafsanjani discussed these developments with his mentor Khomeini, who cautioned him against letting Iranian officials negotiate directly with the U.S. By this account, the Ayatullah also offered a finger- shaking warning: "Never trust Americans."

In the summer of 1985, Billionaire Adnan Khashoggi,* a Saudi arms dealer, was instrumental in arranging a London meeting with three other influential arms merchants: Yaacov Nimrodi, a former Israeli army colonel and military attache in Tehran during the Shah's reign; Al Schwimmer, the founder of Israel Aircraft Industries, who is a good friend of then Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres; and Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian who has close ties to his country's Prime Minister, Hussein Mousavi. Ghorbanifar told the Israelis that the leaders of his country's armed forces belonged to a moderate faction that would be vying for control of Iran after Khomeini died. By helping the Iranian army obtain U.S. weapons, Ghorbanifar said, Israel could open a line of communication with the moderates and help them win the battle for succession.