Iran Arms Buyers Included ‘Radical,’ CIA Aide Says

The Iranian government put together a coalition of officials from the three political factions inside the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to handle the secret 1986 arms purchases from the United States, according to George Cave, the CIA employee who worked most closely on the project.

The participants included a “radical,” a “very conservative” supporter of Khomeini and supporters of Parliament Speaker Hashemi Rafsanjani, Cave said. He said a representative of Rafsanjani told him that “everyone had to be involved in this so that they couldn’t come out and criticize it.”

Cave’s description of the Iranian negotiators, given in secret testimony last year to the congressional committees investigating the Iran-Contra affair and contained in recently released transcripts, provides the newest and most authoritative contradiction of the Reagan Administration’s repeated claim that it was dealing with Iranian “moderates” during the arms-sales negotiations.

Vice President George Bush, in defending the Administration’s sale of arms to Iran during an appearance on ABC’s “Nightline” program on Thursday, again used that argument. He said: “We reached out to the so-called moderates . . . not to Khomeini, but to this element, those elements in Iran.”

The political structure established by the Iranian leadership to handle the arms sales worked to keep criticism to a minimum in late 1986, when the first stories about the secret arms sales appeared.

Cave testified that the “radical” was an intelligence officer in the Revolutionary Guards, the military unit formed by the Islamic fundamentalist leadership of the country that was out to spread the revolution beyond Iran.

The “conservatives” in this context were those less taken with the revolution, often businessmen of the bazaar or military officers, some of whom remained from the days of the shah.

Rafsanjani’s group, which the Americans considered the most pragmatic, was the balancer between those two, Cave said.