Word: tehran
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Does it make sense for the U.S. to seek moderate, as opposed to radical elements in Tehran? To be sure, on some domestic issues, such as land reform, the ruling class may have its moderate and extremist factions. But on such fundamental issues of life and death, war and foreign relations, there are no moderate groups or individuals in the government...
...could be argued that this tale begins as early as 1980, when Robert McFarlane, then on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, reportedly approached the campaign staff of Presidential Candidate Ronald - Reagan with a plan to spring the American hostages held in Tehran. McFarlane proposed to rely on the services of an Iranian exile. The plan went nowhere, but McFarlane apparently never forgot...
...late August, Israel sent a planeload of arms to Iran. The cargo consisted mostly of Soviet-made weapons that the Israelis had captured in Lebanon. Though the plane landed safely at Tehran's Mehrabad airport, the arms never got to the Iranian army. They were seized by members of the vehemently anti- Western Revolutionary Guards...
Joining the fray from Iran, the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini appeared to squelch one of Reagan's last chances to salvage something from the wreckage of his secret initiative to Tehran. Though Reagan announced at his news conference that there would be no more arms deliveries, he expressed a rather wan hope that the U.S. could stay in sympathetic touch with so-called moderates in Khomeini's government. That, the 86-year-old Ayatullah quickly & made clear, would happen only over his dead body. Speaking with his old-time pungency, Khomeini implied that those Iranians who had been dealing with...
Shultz's return to the fold, however, was balanced by a highly damaging defection. As National Security Adviser, Robert ("Bud") McFarlane had begun the secret diplomatic contacts with Iran, and pursued them on the President's behalf even after his resignation last December. In May he flew into Tehran on a secret mission -- nestling, he now admits, among crates of weapons. Yet McFarlane told the Washington Post in an interview published Thursday, "I think it was a mistake to introduce any element of arms transfers into it." Indeed, the Post account had him advising Reagan in a bedside conference...