What the Islamic Republic of Iran Inherited from the Shah and the CIA

How the Islamic Republic Inherited the Shah's Secret Police, the CIA's Listening Posts and a Cold War Electronic Shield 

Zaki Khalid 

 

 

Two mountaintops in northern Iran are still there. You can look at them. The first sits above Behshahr [on the south-eastern shoulder of the Caspian] at approximately 36.6841° N, 53.5278° E. The second stands in the highlands of northern Khorasan [near the Turkmen frontier] at approximately 37.2963° N, 58.9131° E. These coordinates were published in 2024 by Dwayne Day of The Space Review, working from a declassified official history of American telemetry collection.

For roughly two decades, these were the most productive intelligence installations that the CIA operated anywhere on earth. They were codenamed TACKSMAN I and TACKSMAN II. The nomenclature was a joke, of sorts; a tacksman, in the old Scottish Highland system, was the middleman who paid rent to the clan chief for land he then worked on. The US paid the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to use his land for hunting Soviet missiles.

In early 1979, the Americans walked off both mountains and never came back, leaving most of everything behind. That fact, repeated across a dozen other programmes, aircraft, archives and cadres is the subject of this piece. The Iranian Revolution is conventionally narrated as rupture. In the intelligence domain, it was very substantially continuity which was certainly not incidental. It was the mechanism through which the Islamic Republic survived its first 5 years.

Accounts of the time are quite complicated and considerably more uncomfortable for all parties. Some of what ‘everyone knows’ about it turns out to rest on a single newspaper article from 1980 whereas some of the most consequential transfers of Western intelligence to Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iran were not seizures but clearly gifts.

What the Shah built

Contrary to popular perception, Iran’s security state did not begin with the Sâzmân-e Ettelâ’ât va Amniyyat-e Kešvar/ Bureau for Intelligence and Security of the State (SAVAK); therefore, its intellectual pedigree warrants closer examination.

Under the Shah, the Nazmiyeh (”national police”), mentored by Swedish advisers inherited from the Qajar period, was reinforced by a Political Police under Mohammad Hosayn Âyrom; he was a Cossack-trained officer who is reported to have admired the Gestapo sufficiently to travel to Germany to study its methods. Farsi language accounts, including Hossein Fardoust’s own memoir, describe French instructors arriving in the late period of Reza Pahlavi’s reign to train Iranian officers from French-language manuals. Fardoust credits these officers with founding Iranian military intelligence. The lineage is legible in the naming: the intelligence branch of Imperial Iranian Army was Rokn-e Do (”the Second Bureau”), a straight calque of the French Deuxième Bureau.

However, the modern apparatus is a Cold War artefact. After the 1953 removal of Mohammad Mossadegh [a CIA- and SIS-supported operation], the restored Shah wanted a permanent instrument against both domestic dissent and Soviet penetration. In 1957, SAVAK was formally established. Declassified American material and later Senate reporting establish that the CIA, with Israeli assistance, provided funding, structural design and tradecraft training.

Two things are commonly asserted about SAVAK at its peak that deserve to be handled tactfully:-

• Size: The Shah publicly claimed less than 2,000 employees. Credible estimates of the full-time core cluster around 4,000 to 6,000 personnel. Revolutionary-era leaflets, on their part, claimed 15,000. There is also an astounding figure of 3 million informants circulating widely in open source literature; the last one should be treated as propaganda since it implies roughly 1 informant for every 11 Iranians alive at the time [it appears to have entered discourse through revolutionary polemic and credulous Western journalism]. There is no doubt that SAVAK’s informant network was extensive and genuinely feared but the whopping figure quoted by certain people appears farfetched.

• The Nine Directorates: The familiar table [Department I (Administration), II (Foreign Collection), III (Internal Security and Repression), IV (Internal Security of SAVAK), V (Technical), VI (Finance), VII (Foreign Liaison), VIII (Counter Espionage), IX (Archives & Biometrics)] is reproduced in almost every account. Its sourcing runs back through a small number of tertiary works, ultimately to a Library of Congress country study and exile testimony. It is plausible and probably broadly correct though not archivally established.

What matters for our purposes is the division of labour it describes. Department III was the instrument of terror [surveillance, arrest, torture (including the notorious ‘Apollo’ device), execution and so on]. It is what made SAVAK widely feared and despised. Department VIII was something else entirely, a professional counter espionage service that spent two decades studying KGB and Iraqi tradecraft and [by most accounts] did so competently. Department IX held the ‘database’ of mainframe records and millions of cross-referenced index cards mapping the affiliations, associations and vulnerabilities of the politically-active population.

These contours need to be noted because the revolution would go on to exploit it.

The purge that wasn’t

By late 1978, SAVAK was the revolution’s lightning rod. The Shah, belatedly, ordered the arrest of senior officers including his long-serving Director, General Nematollah Nassiri. He fled Iran on 16 January 1979. Khomeini returned on 1 February and SAVAK was formally dissolved that month.

The retribution was exact. All 4 men who had directed SAVAK died violently: Teymur Bakhtiar had been assassinated in 1970 by SAVAK itself [on the Shah’s orders], Hassan Pakravan, Nassiri and the final Director, Nasser Moghadam, were tried by revolutionary tribunals and shot dead.

Pakravan’s case is the sort of thing that makes historians uneasy. In 1963, as SAVAK chief, he had reportedly argued the Shah out of executing a troublesome cleric from Qom, urging exile instead. That cleric was Ruhollah Khomeini. Pakravan was executed in April 1979.

Beyond the Directors, the figure frequently cited is that Amnesty International documented at least 83 deaths of former SAVAK personnel at the hands of revolutionary committees. In the existing open source literature, that number is traceable to a small number of secondary intelligence analysis blogs while other reputable accounts give substantially lower figures [61 is common] for judicially-executed SAVAK officials in 1979. The two figures may be measuring different things i.e. killings-by-committees versus executions-after-trial. Thus, the figure of ‘83’ should for now be treated as simply indicative.

The purge stopped where the state’s needs began. The new government faced immediate armed threats; leftist militias turning on their erstwhile clerical allies, separatist risings in the Kurdish, Baloch and Arab peripheries and hostile services [the KGB and the Iraqi Mukhabarat] probing the wreckage. The komitehs and the newly raised Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) may have had tremendous zeal but no tradecraft. Somebody in the building had to know how to mount a surveillance operation, read a cipher etc. And so, the technicians [bulk of the doers in the middle layer] stayed. The documentable mechanism is the general amnesty that Khomeini proclaimed at Nowruz of 1980, which extended to SAVAK personnel not implicated in serious crimes i.e. to the foreign intelligence, counter espionage and technical cadres and not to the Department III interrogators.

Ali Akbar Tabatabaei, a former Iranian diplomat in Washington turned opposition figure, gave the transition its epitaph in contemporary reporting...only the bureau chiefs were sacked. Tabatabai did not live to develop the thought. In July 1980, he was shot dead at his home in Bethesda, Maryland by an American convert acting for the Khomeini regime, one of the new intelligence apparatus’s first operations on US soil.

The SAVAMA problem

The standard account is that SAVAK was resurrected as SAVAMA under General Hossein Fardoust [the Shah’s boyhood classmate from Le Rosey], former deputy chief of SAVAK and head of the Imperial Inspectorate, the ‘SAVAK within SAVAK’ through which raw intelligence reached the throne. Fardoust, on this telling, defected, handed over the files and rebuilt the service for its enemies.

This account, however, is weak. It entered Western circulation through a Washington Post report by Michael Getler dated 7 June 1980 and titled, “Khomeini Is Reported to Have a SAVAK of His Own”; it was sourced to unnamed US officials and Iranian exiles in Washington and Paris. Ervand Abrahamian discusses it in Tortured Confessions and nearly every subsequent retelling [including the encyclopaedic entries] is derived from that report. Only a handful of reliable sources claim such a body ever existed and information about it is quite limited.

What can be said with more confidence is that a transitional intelligence function existed, that it drew on retained SAVAK personnel and that Fardoust was somewhere near it. Whether ‘SAVAMA’ was ever a formally constituted organisation with that name or whether it is largely an artefact of exile reporting applied retrospectively to a messy set of overlapping bodies, is genuinely unresolved.

In December 1985, Fardoust was stripped of his positions and imprisoned on accusations of being a KGB agent. He appeared on Iranian television in April 1987, denounced the Shah and the court he had served for half a century and died the following month in custody [purportedly on account of cardiac arrest]. Whatever he may have handed over to the new regime evidently bought him nothing.

The fragmentation was resolved by statute. In August 1983, the Majlis established the Vezarat-e Ettela’at va Amniyat-e Keshvar (VEVAK) which is today’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Mohammad Reyshahri, a hardline cleric and former head of the military revolutionary courts, took office as its first Minister in 1984. The bureaucratic skeleton was SAVAK’s but the ideological flesh was Khomeini’s.

Consequently, SAVAK’s database was now pointed at the people who had made the revolution. When the clerical regime turned on the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and the Marxist left, it hunted them with the Shah’s own files.

Project IBEX

Iran’s geography made it the most valuable real estate in the US intelligence community. A long northern border with the USSR, unobstructed electronic sightlines into the Soviet aerospace testing corridor and a monarch flush with petro-dollars and eager to buy his way deeper into Washington’s confidence.

Project IBEX, initiated around 1974-75, was the flagship. It was an electronic-surveillance architecture jointly run by the CIA, NSA, the Imperial Iranian Air Force (IIAF) and SAVAK with an unusual financial structure: Iran paid and America supplied. Rockwell International was the prime systems-engineering contractor supported by E-Systems, Sylvania Technical Systems, Watkins-Johnson and Questech.

The reported figure of ‘USD 1 billion’ is widely repeated but the actual Rockwell contract is frequently given at around half that, with the billion representing projected total programme value.

IBEX had two limbs:-

• Terrestrial: A set of ground stations along the Soviet frontier and the Gulf littoral monitoring regional radio traffic and categorising radar emitters [especially Iraq’s].

• Airborne: To beat the line-of-sight limits of fixed antennas, Iran bought airframes directly [outside normal military procurement channels] and sent them to E-Systems at Greenville, Texas: Lockheed C-130H Hercules transports and Boeing 707s. They came back as SIGINT and ELINT platforms functionally comparable to the RC-135 fleet of the United States Air Force (USAF); they had operator consoles in the cargo bay, radar-emitter classification suites, a retractable direction-finding array and long-focal-length oblique cameras for photographing Soviet installations from a stand-off altitude.

However, information around Project IBEX leaked damagingly before the revolution could even touch it. On 28 August 1976, Marxist militants [the MEK, then under the control of its Marxist faction] ambushed and killed three American Rockwell employees working on the programme in Tehran. This incident put a top secret project into the world’s newspapers. When Perkin-Elmer engineers were sent to Iran the following year, their handlers briefed them on the murders and moved them through safe houses.

By early 1979, the contractors were gone while the aircraft stayed on Iranian tarmacs.

The Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF) therefore acquired, at no cost, a modern airborne ELINT fleet. Under a total US arms embargo, it kept them flying through the 1980s by cannibalisation [stripping grounded airframes to sustain a serviceable core] and by reverse-engineering what it could not steal from itself.

TACKSMAN, Lazy Cat and a geolocation problem

Some aspects of historical research here need correction to put things in the right frame.

TACKSMAN was not part of IBEX. The two are routinely conflated. TACKSMAN long predates the latter. The CIA established a clandestine site codenamed EGGSHELL in the late 1950s at the Shah’s hunting palace outside Behshahr/ Caspian, initially aimed at Kapustin Yar and later at the range the Agency called Tyuratam-Baikonur. A second permanent site was built in 1964.

IBEX, on the other hand, was an Iranian-funded and Iranian-operated programme initiated in the mid-1970s. TACKSMAN was an American programme, on Iranian soil, manned exclusively by CIA and NSA personnel serving American strategic requirements. Both had a different customer, operated in a different decade and served a different purpose.

TACKSMAN I was at Behshahr, not Bushehr. This error is endemic and has been corrected in print in a peer-reviewed article in the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence which flags “Beshahr (not Busheir)” explicitly. Behshahr is a modest Caspian town in Mazandaran whereas Bushehr is approximately 900 kilometres away on the Persian Gulf and is famous for a nuclear reactor.

The second site is conventionally identified as Kabkan. Three sources give 3 irreconcilable locations:-

• Jeffrey Richelson via the National Security Archive places it almost 65 kilometres east of Mashhad.

• The International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence article [cited above] places it roughly 8 kilometres from Mashhad.

• Dwayne Day’s published coordinates are 37.2963° N, 58.9131° E.

If we run the third against Mashhad [36.2605° N, 59.6168° E], we get approximately 131 kilometres on a bearing of ~332, well over a 100 kilometres north-north-west of the city and roughly 40 kilometres east-north-east of Quchan in the Kopet Dag near the Turkmen border [this estimation is mine and may be corrected if I have erred].

Those 3 claims cannot all be true. One of them is falsifiable from open sources, as I have just shown. Readers of my blog with imagery access are welcome to adjudicate it and correct me if necessary, please.

The TACKSMAN sites collected telemetry viz the diagnostic data streams that Soviet ICBMs broadcast to their controllers during launch and first-stage flight. From that, American analysts derived missile dimensions, thrust, throw-weight and MIRV capability and [more importantly] the empirical basis for verifying Soviet compliance with SALT.

Richelson’s assessment of their value is the number to give due consideration; at their peak, the Iranian stations furnished roughly 85% of the hard intelligence that the US possessed on the Soviet ICBM programme. That figure explains something both the Shah’s apologists and critics tend to miss. President Jimmy Carter told William H. Sullivan, his Ambassador to Tehran, that CIA-Iranian intelligence cooperation was to continue despite the Shah’s human rights record.

By 1977, the Agency wanted more. Alarmed by Soviet anti-satellite laser development at Sary Shagan, it commissioned Perkin-Elmer [with Itek fabricating the mirror] to build a 1.2 metre/ 48-inch aperture telescope with sensors tuned to 3.7, 4.3 and 1.06 microns plus a visible channel, capable of detecting and characterising a laser fired at a satellite in low orbit. It was codenamed Lazy Cat. It was tested against an American HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite illuminated by a ground laser, shipped to Iran in September 1977 and hauled up the mountain [at one point swung around a hairpin bend by crane].

It never worked. The tracking system was incomplete and the mount burned out its drive controllers. Before the faults could be fixed, the country went to the new regime’s hands. Day’s article appears to date the collapse to the onset of unrest and places the evacuation in January 1978.

This assertion is factually incorrect.

The Shah left Iran in January 1979. The TACKSMAN sites were lost in the first months of 1979. Stansfield Turner, then Director CIA, stated on 16 April 1979 that restoring the lost capability would take 5 years; Robert Gates later recalled that the intelligence leadership and Congress spent the spring of 1979 consumed by the problem and a Turner memorandum of October 1979 records the fix: modifying NRO’s SIGINT satellites, the constellation known first as CHALET and later as VORTEX and MERCURY. The loss detonated inside the SALT II ratification debate at precisely the moment when the treaty was before the Senate.

We do not know if the retreating technicians destroyed the equipment. Phil Pressel, the Perkin-Elmer engineer whose account informs most of what we know, heard that the Lazy Cat mirror was hammered. That rumour is all that we have. The infrastructure [dishes, domes, hardened mountaintop plant etc] was not destroyed and passed intact to the Islamic Republic.

Dwayne Day notes that both sites are visible today and that the Iranians have used them since 1979 for undisclosed purposes; observers have described equipment being added and the sites improved over the past 15 years, consistent with an active SIGINT role and plausibly including interception from US/ Allied satellites. This is an inference from imagery and not a confirmation. It needs to be emphasised that Iran itself has never displayed the captured American facilities for propaganda, which is itself interesting.

TACKSMAN belonged to a family of covert American collection sites that included STONEHOUSE in Ethiopia and BANKHEAD in Pakistan [Pakistan’s own chapter in this history is intriguing and might be covered by me in a future piece].

Project Dark Gene

If IBEX and TACKSMAN were passive collection, Project Dark Gene was provocation.

Through the late 1960s and 1970s, the CIA and the IIAF flew reconnaissance aircraft deliberately into Soviet airspace, exploiting radar gaps created by the mountain valleys along the frontier. The intruder was bait. As Soviet air defence radars lit up and batteries/ interceptors began talking to each other to prosecute the track, American ELINT aircraft and the listening posts inside Iran harvested the emissions viz locations, frequencies and procedures. Essentially, the Soviet defensive grid was mapped by being made to react.

The programme began with subsonic Northrop RF-5As, usually flown by American crews. The Shah then funded a move to the RF-4C and RF-4E Phantom II. With RF-4E deliveries delayed by Vietnam-era production backlogs, the US ‘loaned’ USAF RF-4Cs to the IIAF under a training cover. Missions were routinely flown by mixed crews involving an Iranian pilot up front and a US systems officer behind.

On 28 November 1973, an RF-4C crewed by IIAF Major Mohammad Shokouhnia and USAF Colonel John Saunders was intercepted deep inside Soviet airspace by Captain Gennadiy Yeliseyev in a MiG-21SM. Yeliseyev fired 2 missiles and both missed. His cannon jammed. Ordered to stop the intruder at any cost, he rammed the Phantom’s tail with his nose and was killed on impact [commonly described as the first air-to-air ram of the supersonic era] and posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union.

Shokouhnia and Saunders ejected and were taken by the KGB. They were released after 16 days, reportedly in exchange for a film cartridge from a Soviet reconnaissance satellite that had come down in Iranian territory. The ramming is well attested in Soviet and Western sources. The film-cartridge exchange rests on aviation history literature, particularly the Cooper-Bishop school which draws heavily on Iranian veteran testimony.

The RF-4E fleet passed to the IRIAF and became indispensable during the Iran-Iraq War as it facilitated tactical reconnaissance, deep-penetration photography and target acquisition.

The pilots did not fare as well as the aircraft. Men who had flown for the CIA were, by definition, suspect. Shokouhnia is reported to have fled, returned out of duty when Iraq invaded and executed in 1980. The most likely context for that is the Nojeh coup plot which consumed a great many air force officers that summer.

October 1979

After the Shah’s fall, the Carter administration was terrified of a Soviet vacuum. Bruce Laingen, Chargé d’Affaires in Tehran, judged that Mehdi Bazargan’s interim government was hungry for US intelligence on Iraq and persuaded Assistant Secretary Harold H. Saunders to authorise a liaison. It began in May 1979, when Bazargan’s people asked for help against the ethnic risings. It culminated in two briefings in mid-October by the veteran CIA officer George W. Cave [fluent in Farsi] to Deputy Prime Minister Abbas Amir-Entezam and Foreign Minister Ebrahim Yazdi, the principal meeting on 15 October 1979.

Cave’s material [reconstructed by Mark Gasiorowski from embassy documents and interviews with all 4 participants] was as follows: Iraq was pre-positioning materiel along the border, undertaking engineering works consistent with ‘invasion preparation’ and had stood up a front organisation to foment unrest among Khuzestan’s Arab population [these assertions echoed a warning from the Pentagon analyst Howard J. Teicher earlier in March]. And Cave also urged the Iranians to monitor Iraqi troop movements using the CIA-built IBEX systems they had inherited from the Shah.

Have a look at that suggestion again. A serving CIA officer, in Tehran, 8 months after the revolution, advised the Islamic Republic to turn the American electronic-surveillance architecture it had seized against a neighbouring state.

That warning was conditional. Cave said an invasion was ‘possible’ and that no final Iraqi decision had been taken; he stressed that war could still be ‘averted’ if Iran arrested the decay of its armed forces. The draft’s framing [that the CIA possessed ‘firm foreknowledge’ of the September 1980 invasion and Tehran ignored it] overstates a genuinely contested episode. Henry Precht, then running the US State Department’s Iran desk, has said nobody at the time believed Iraq was planning a major attack. Wayne White of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research/ INR judged the Iraqi army to be doing little beyond its normal business. The CIA itself assessed in November 1979 [a month after Cave spoke] that Baghdad wanted a diplomatic settlement. Gasiorowski’s contention that heeding Cave might have ‘averted’ the war is his argument and remains disputed.

Iraqi archival material indicates Saddam Hussein was contemplating an invasion as early as February 1979 but was deterred until roughly July 1980, by which point Iran’s post-revolutionary purges had hollowed out its military to the point of invitation. He invaded Iran not because the latter ignored a warning but because the purges had already made Iran weak enough. Therefore, Cave’s warning and the new Iranian regime’s weakness were two faces of the same revolution.

The liaison ended on 4 November 1979 when students took the embassy. Bazargan subsequently resigned and his government never passed the American warning to its successors. Amir-Entezam [carried on CIA books under the cryptonym SDPLOD/1] was arrested in December 1979, convicted of espionage on the strength of the reconstructed embassy documents the students published as Documents from the US Espionage Den and became the longest-held political prisoner in the history of the Islamic Republic.

That corpus, 70+ volumes painstakingly reassembled from shredded American paper, is itself the largest single piece of Western intelligence the revolution ever acquired. Ironically, it is also [in a way] the principal primary source on which our reconstruction of the 1979 liaison now depends. Gasiorowski built his article on it.

The Tudeh

It is said that the MOIS destroyed the Iranian communist movement, such as the Tudeh Party, using SAVAK’s Department VIII expertise and Department IX’s files. This is partially correct.

SAVAK’s archives and its counter espionage cadre were real assets and they were used but the decisive input came from London.

Vladimir Kuzichkin, a KGB Line N officer at the Tehran residency [the man handling contact with the Tudeh], defected to the British in June 1982 by walking into the British Interests Section that operated out of the Swedish embassy. He reached the UK in October. MI6 debriefed him and the material in his possession was shared with the CIA; it was further forwarded to Iran.

The Foreign & Commonwealth Office files, released to the National Archives and worked through by Declassified UK and the Daily Maverick, show British officials in Tehran [chiefly Nicholas Barrington] tracking the ensuing destruction of the Tudeh with something closer to satisfaction than dismay and calculating how Britain might profit from a rapprochement with the new rulers. The approval to pass the material appears to have run to the highest level.

The consequences were as significant: mass arrests from February 1983; the televised ‘confession’ of Tudeh General Secretary Noureddin Kianouri, the banning of the party, the expulsion of 18 Soviet diplomats in May 1983 and [by many accounts], around 200 executions. Thus, the Islamic Republic’s greatest counter intelligence triumph [the annihilation of Soviet influence inside Iran] was substantially a Western gift, delivered in the middle of a war in which the West was arming the other side.

The Islamic Republic’s security did not didn’t solely rely on what it seized from the West in 1979. The latter kept contributing: intelligence liaison in 1979 and the KGB’s ORBAT in 1982–83. The relationship of hostility that both sides proclaimed and the relationship of covert utility that both sides quietly maintained ran in parallel for years [it is worth sharing that Nicholas Barrington was subsequently knighted and served as Britain’s High Commissioner to Pakistan].

The counter lesson at Nojeh

An inheritance of machines is not an inheritance of capability and 1980 proved it brutally. On the night of 9-10 July 1980, several hundred serving and retired officers [paratroopers and airmen] converged on Nojeh air base near Hamadan to overthrow the regime. The plot had been penetrated and they were arrested as they arrived. Hundreds more followed. Many were executed and the armed forces were purged again, more comprehensively, in the months that followed.

Between February 1979 and July 1980, the manpower of the renamed IRIAF is generally believed to have been roughly halved. The men who understood the RC-135-like consoles in the back of a converted Hercules, who could read a Soviet radar ORBAT, who knew what the black boxes at Behshahr and Kabkan actually did were disproportionately the men in the cells.

Hardware degrades without operators. The Islamic Republic inherited an extraordinary technical estate and simultaneously destroyed a large fraction of the human capital required to exploit it. That it managed as well as it did is a story of improvisation under duress, not of seamless absorption as some may like to overstate.

And, as noted above, the purges were the proximate cause of the invasion because they told Baghdad that the door was open.

The Iran-Iraq War

Iraq attacked on 22 September 1980 by striking Iranian airfields. The strikes by and large failed because the Shah, having studied the Six-Day War, had built hardened aircraft shelters. Iraq cratered runways that were quickly repaired and destroyed relatively few aircraft. The first thing the inheritance bought was concrete.

The following morning, the IRIAF launched Operation Kaman 99 [’Bow 99’, after Arash the Archer; the ‘99’ is said to refer to the plan’s page count]. Accounts [mostly in Farsi and of Iranian-origin] put roughly 140-148 fighter-bombers over Iraq out of a total force approaching 200 aircraft, including interceptors and tankers.

Some claim that Kaman 99 crippled Baghdad’s oil infrastructure but it didn’t. It was a counter air operation against airbases in al-Rashid, Habbaniyah, Kut, Mosul, Nasiriyah, Shaiba, Kirkuk, Umm Qasr, Baghdad International and al-Muthanna. Other accounts add oil and infrastructure targets at the margins but the object was Iraqi air power on the ground and the effect was to buy Iran breathing room in the opening weeks. Nonetheless, Iranian losses were also heavy.

While the strike package was away, some 60 or so F-14 Tomcats stood guard over Iranian airspace [a reminder that the inheritance included the AWG-9 radar] which gave the IRIAF an airborne surveillance and battle management capability no other regional air force at the time possessed.

The intelligence-specific assets earned their keep:-

• RF-4Es from the Dark Gene fleet flew low-level tactical reconnaissance over Iraqi armoured columns.

• The IBEX C-130Hs and Boeing 707s orbited outside Iraqi SAM envelopes, mapping the Iraqi electronic ORBAT, intercepting communications and vectoring strike packages [exactly the use Cave had recommended 11 months earlier to a government that no longer existed].

As discussed earlier, sustaining any of this under embargo forced systematic cannibalisation and [eventually, to this day] an indigenous capacity to reverse-engineer American components. The service ‘self-sufficiency’ organisations that grew out of that necessity are a real institutional lineage running into Iran’s contemporary defence-industrial base.

The Hague

The revolution left billions of dollars of classified hardware stranded on both sides of the Atlantic and produce the most detailed public record of what was actually built.

After the Algiers Accords of 1981 resolved the hostage crisis, the Iran-US Claims Tribunal convened at The Hague. IBEX ran through it repeatedly:-

• Case No. 388 - Claimant E-Systems, Inc.: A 1976 contract to convert 2 Boeing 707s into IBEX ELINT platforms. The 1983 interim award is a landmark in international arbitration for the Tribunal’s assertion of authority to restrain parallel Iranian proceedings.

• Case No. 430 - Rockwell International Systems: Prime systems-engineering contractor with unpaid invoices. Iran counter claimed aggressively, moving on standby letters of credit and bank guarantees. Award 438-430-1, 1989.

• Case No. 59 - Questech, Inc.: Evaluation and administration of IBEX training. Questech invoked force majeure; mutual breach claims. Award 191-59-1, 1985.

• Case No. 370 - Watkins-Johnson Co.: Manufacture of interception equipment for both IBEX segments. Award 429-370-1, 1989.

Conclusion

The Islamic Republic executed SAVAK’s public face and kept its brain. Revolutionary regimes consolidate against their own former allies and they do it with the previous regime’s index cards. This is not an Iranian peculiarity but close to a law.

The same revolution that seized an RC-135-equivalent fleet imprisoned and shot the men who could fly it. Nojeh and the wider purges halved the air force and supplied Saddam with his opportunity. The technical estate was extraordinary; the exploitation of it was improvised, degraded and bought at enormous cost. Any account that presents 1979–80 as some sort of ‘smooth absorption’ indicates shallow research and does injustice to the pilots at Nojeh.

The loss of TACKSMAN blinded the US on Soviet ICBM development at the height of the SALT II fight and forced a costly pivot to satellite collection. But the deeper pattern is stranger than ‘the-West-armed-its-enemy-and-lost-the-toys’ framing. The West kept giving. Cave told Tehran to use IBEX against Iraq in October 1979 and separately, London and Washington handed Tehran the KGB’s Iranian network in 1982–83.

The rhetoric of total enmity and the practice of selective/ covert utility ran side by side for years and each side found the arrangement useful enough to sustain.

References

Dwayne A. Day, ‘Lazy Cat on a mountaintop’, The Space Review, 29 April 2024, https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4784/1

Richard L. Bernard, ‘The Foreign Missile and Space Telemetry Collection Story — The First 50 Years’, declassified by the US National Archives

Jeffrey T. Richelson, ‘The CIA and Signals Intelligence’, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book, 20 March 2015, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cyber-vault-intelligence/2015-03-20/cia-and-signals-intelligence

Mark J. Gasiorowski, ‘US Intelligence Assistance to Iran, May–October 1979’, The Middle East Journal, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Autumn 2012), https://www.jstor.org/stable/23361620

Mark J. Gasiorowski, ‘US Covert Operations toward Iran, February–November 1979: Was the CIA Trying to Overthrow the Islamic Regime?’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 51, Issue 1 (2015), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00263206.2014.938643

Ervand Abrahamian, ‘Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran’, originally published University of California Press (1999)

Pierre Razoux, ‘The Iran-Iraq War’, translated by Nicholas Elliott and originally published by Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press (2015)

Vladimir Kuzichkin, ‘Inside the KGB: Myth and Reality’, translated by Thomas B. Beattie and originally published by André Deutsch (1990)

Mark Curtis and Phil Miller, ‘How Britain helped Iran’s Islamic regime destroy the left-wing opposition’, Declassified UK, 21 January 2020, https://www.declassifieduk.org/how-britain-helped-irans-islamic-regime-destroy-the-left-wing-opposition/