Word: tehran
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Rafizadeh worked solely for the CIA after the Shah fell from power in 1979. According to Rafizadeh, Ghorbanifar first came to the CIA's attention in late 1980 when the Carter Administration was desperate to win the release of U.S. hostages from the seized American embassy in Tehran. George Cave, a retired CIA agent then working under a contract with the agency, asked Rafizadeh if Ghorbanifar could help. The former SAVAK agent advised Cave that Ghorbanifar was "one of the cleverest businessmen I have known. He has the habit of coming in as a partner and then taking over...
...sources contend that it was mainly the operatives at the Iran desk who transformed the idea of an arms-hostage exchange, originally ^ conceived as a test of mutual goodwill, into a principal objective of the dialogue with Tehran. This mistake eventually left the initiative mired in Iranscam. Says a recently retired senior CIA official: "Covert operatives despise grand strategy. They prefer tangible results that make them look good." The arms swap was sharply opposed by both Clarridge and Allen...
...Tehran, Iranian television showed pictures of slaughtered Iraqi soldiers lying face down in the muddy trenches. In Baghdad, Iraqi TV offered the same macabre programming, except that the corpses piled along barbed-wire fences were those of young Iranian soldiers. Once again the battlefront was, in the words of an Iraqi journalist, a "horrible massacre zone...
...made 76 trips between Europe, the U.S. and the Middle East to keep the negotiations on track. When McFarlane, North and other American negotiators flew to Iran last May with a planeload of weapons, Ghorbanifar says, he chartered the jet and paid for the group's stay in Tehran. McFarlane says he does not know who paid but assumes the bill was split by the U.S. and Iranian governments. Ghorbanifar also charges that Khashoggi was cut out of several of the deals on orders from McFarlane. The former National Security Adviser replies that he never had anything to do with...
...trouble (who) were trying to deflect the heat off themselves and onto me." He insists that he has been caught in a dispute betwen two CIA factions vying for influence in Iran. One faction, he says, botched the diplomatic initiative by trying to make its own deal in Tehran, and is now trying to cover its tracks by launching a smear campaign against...