U.S. Had Options to Let Bosnia Get Arms, Avoid Iran

Richard C. Holbrooke was angry.

The Clinton administration’s chief negotiator for Bosnia-Herzegovina had spent weeks pushing for an initiative that he thought might be the key to ending the terrible war in the Balkans. With customary passion, Holbrooke had buttonholed top officials to argue that the United States could shift the balance of power in favor of Bosnia’s embattled government and against the Bosnian Serbs simply by encouraging a few friendly governments to send military aid to Sarajevo.

He even had the State Department’s lawyers draw up guidelines showing that U.S. diplomats could give gentle encouragement to foreign allies without running afoul of the law.

But when the Holbrooke plan reached the ear of Anthony Lake, President Clinton’s national security advisor, Lake shot it down immediately. “Too risky,” Lake complained, according to officials.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher did not like Holbrooke’s idea either. He feared that it would provoke a crisis with U.S. allies Britain and France.

Holbrooke, a proud man, accepted the rebuff without public complaint--but he was acid in his private response. “This administration is not given to boldness,” he said later, according to an associate.

Thus it was ironic this spring when Holbrooke was asked to defend Clinton’s 1994 decision agreeing to secret arms shipments to Bosnia--not from the friendly countries Holbrooke had suggested but from Iran, a country the United States regularly condemns as “a constant source of international terrorism.”

In defense of its action, the administration has said there was no real alternative to giving Iran a green light to ship weapons into Bosnia; rejecting the idea might have meant ignoring the Bosnian army’s plight.

But interviews with key officials involved in the decision show that alternative courses like the Holbrooke plan were available and that they prompted a secret debate within the administration. The interviews also show that the choice Clinton made--while it solved the immediate problem of bolstering the Bosnian army--also helped worsen a longer-term problem, the presence of Iranian advisors and militants in Bosnia, that persists today.

Over the course of two years, Clinton and his aides made a series of decisions that had a painfully unintended outcome: The United States found no way to help Bosnia defend itself, except by relying on the Iranian regime.

The decisions included actions that closed off other alternatives, and that are just now coming to light:

* At least three times from 1993 through 1995, State Department officials suggested that the administration could ask U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia to provide weapons for Bosnia, but Lake and Christopher rejected the suggestion.

* One reason Lake objected to that “third-country” option was that he believed it was illegal--but he was wrong. The national security advisor later found that he had misunderstood U.S. law on the issue, aides said. (He said subsequently that he would have rejected the idea anyway, however.)

* The government of Croatia was deeply divided over the Iranian pipeline idea, and Croatia’s foreign minister and chief of intelligence both urged the United States to say no to the arrangement. But their views apparently were never presented to Clinton.

* Then-CIA chief R. James Woolsey offered in 1994 to carry out a covert operation to get weapons to Bosnia, if Clinton wanted. But Lake rejected the idea, in part because he feared that the plan would become public knowledge.

* Despite its later claim that Congress knew Iranian weapons were arriving in Bosnia, the administration undertook a deliberate effort to conceal its “green light” decision, even ordering diplomats to avoid mentioning the issue in writing.

* After agreeing that the Iranians could supply weapons to Bosnia, the administration mounted a major effort to expel Iranian military and intelligence advisors from the country after the Dayton, Ohio, peace agreement was signed in 1995.

Republicans in Congress, sensing an election year issue that might tarnish Clinton’s recent successes in foreign policy, have launched a major investigation of the president’s actions in Bosnia, but they have found nothing illegal or improper.

Indeed, in a strict sense, Clinton’s decision to accede to Iran’s arms pipeline worked. It helped the Bosnian army hold its own until the United States and its allies finally intervened with airstrikes that forced the Serbs to negotiate.

But it was not a course that Clinton aides ever intended to follow. And as an unwanted side effect, Bosnia’s government is now more pro-Iranian than before, in part because of Iran’s military aid during the war. U.S. officials worry that Bosnia’s leaders--beginning with President Alija Izetbegovic--intend to maintain their alliance with the Tehran regime, no matter what the United States says.

Clinton and Bosnia

Even before he became president, Bill Clinton wanted to arm the Bosnians. In his 1992 campaign for the White House, Clinton lambasted then-President Bush for agreeing to a United Nations arms embargo that prevented the Bosnians from getting weapons, and he said the United States should do more--including airstrikes--to protect the Bosnians from attack.

But once in office, Clinton soon found himself hamstrung by the same diplomatic and domestic limits that had stayed Bush’s hand. The new president did not want to send U.S. troops to Bosnia. Polls showed that would be wildly unpopular. But he concluded that he could not lift the arms embargo either, because Britain, France and other U.S. allies--which had troops in U.N. peacekeeping units on the ground--believed that would touch off Serb reprisals against their soldiers.

In the spring of 1994, Clinton’s frustration with the dilemmas of Bosnia was at a peak. He had prodded the United Nations to set up “safe areas” where the presence of peacekeepers would deter Serb offensives, but the Serbs attacked anyway. He proposed that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization defend the safe areas with airstrikes, and he pushed the Serbs to withdraw artillery from the mountains around Sarajevo. He nudged Bosnia’s Muslim-led government and Croatia’s Roman Catholic leaders into an uneasy federation so that they could present a stronger front against the Eastern Orthodox Serbs. He launched a diplomatic effort to negotiate an end to the 2-year-old war.

But the Bosnian Serbs refused to halt their march of conquest. In April, they turned their guns on Gorazde, a farm-market city of 65,000 people. The United Nations demanded that the Serbs stop their attack. Serb leader Radovan Karadzic ignored the request. U.S. and allied jets bombed Serb artillery positions around the town, but that stopped the Serbs for only a few days.

By April 18, Serb tanks had broken through the Bosnian army’s defense perimeter and Serb artillery was pouring shells into the town from close range. European doctors and nurses in the town telephoned radio stations with blow-by-blow accounts of the siege. Their emotional story, warning that a massacre was all but certain, was broadcast around the world. Bosnian leaders said their troops were “running out of bullets.” U.N. Gen. Michael Rose, a normally laconic man, said Gorazde was “on the edge of a humanitarian catastrophe.”

In Washington, Clinton frantically pushed the United Nations, U.S. allies and pro-Serbian Russia to allow him to use the West’s only remaining weapon: additional airstrikes. “We must make the Serbs pay a higher price for continued violence,” he said. The Serbs, recognizing the West’s new seriousness, grudgingly withdrew their troops.

The Iranians

It was at this point that the militant Islamic government of Iran proposed an unexpected solution: Iranian weapons for Bosnia.

Iran had sent modest shipments of arms to the Muslim-led (but largely secular) government of Bosnia beginning in 1991, shipping them via neighboring Croatia. But in 1993, fighting erupted between Croats and Muslims, blocking the pipeline.

In early 1994, with U.S. prodding, Bosnia and Croatia agreed to form a federation.

This provided an opportunity to restart the arms pipeline, not only from Iran but other countries as well, and was a major factor that drove the mutually suspicious Bosnians and Croatians into each other’s embrace. Even before the federation was formally inaugurated, U.S. officials heard rumblings that the Bosnians were pressuring their new Croatian partners to cooperate in a new, enlarged Iranian smuggling operation. Iranian diplomats were becoming more visible in both Zagreb and Sarajevo, prompting U.S. diplomats to conclude that Tehran was pushing to reopen the closed pipeline as well.

Iran’s government, politically isolated from most of the world, knew what it wanted: influence. Tehran had campaigned for years to cast itself as the Bosnians’ main champion in the Muslim world.

Bosnia, surrounded by enemies, knew what it wanted: a reliable source of weapons. And Izetbegovic, leader of the most Islamic-oriented of Bosnia’s major political parties, saw an alliance with Iran as a way of cementing his own faction’s power.

But the third party in the deal, Croatia, was not sure what it wanted. The Croatian defense ministry liked the idea of running an arms pipeline that could spin off a significant supply of Iranian arms--including antitank weapons and even surface-to-surface missiles--for Croatia. But other Croatian officials disliked the idea of helping the Bosnians acquire relatively sophisticated weapons--it was still possible that the two countries might end up fighting each other over Croat-populated lands inside Bosnia.

By mid-April, the U.S. Embassy in Zagreb began filing reports to Washington that warned of Iran’s efforts to smuggle arms and detailed the split within the Croatian government over the initiative.

Miroslav Tudjman, the chief of Croatian intelligence and the son of Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, was voicing the strongest objections.

Apparently hoping that he could persuade his father to block the Iranian shipments, Miroslav Tudjman, a staunch anti-Muslim, asked the CIA station chief if the United States still objected to arms smuggling. The station chief told him what he believed to be U.S. policy: The United States was abiding by the U.N. arms embargo and expected other countries to do the same.

Croatia’s foreign minister, Mate Granic, also opposed the shipments. A pro-Western academic, he told U.S. officials that he worried about entangling his young government with Islamic Iran.

But Granic and Miroslav Tudjman were minority voices in Croatia’s government. Defense Minister Gojko Susak was strongly in favor of the arms initiative and, as Franjo Tudjman’s right-hand man, he had the influence to make it happen. A former Canadian pizza magnate, Susak had built Croatia’s military from almost nothing in two years, buying surplus weapons from the nations of the former Soviet bloc. Zagreb was rapidly building up its forces to compete with the Serbs, who had inherited most of the heavy weapons of the Yugoslav army.

But Susak had been unable to get his hands on strategic weapons capable of altering the balance of power in the Balkans--and fulfilling Tudjman’s dream of a greater Croatia. Tudjman wanted to retake the Krajina, a Serb-populated region of Croatia that was seized by Serb rebels early in the war. But the attack he was planning on the Krajina could be derailed if Serbia responded with a counteroffensive somewhere else.

To make Serbia hesitate, Susak wanted intermediate-range, Scud-type missiles that could hit Belgrade from Croatia. None of his usual suppliers would give Susak that kind of weaponry--but the Iranians might. So Susak saw cooperation with the Iran-Bosnia pipeline as part of a quid pro quo that would transform Croatia into a regional power. And that was the argument that carried the day inside Tudjman’s government.

The Proposal

On the morning of April 27, 1994, Foreign Minister Granic walked into the U.S. Embassy in Zagreb with an urgent message: Croatia was thinking about opening the Iranian arms pipeline. The next day, Granic said, President Tudjman planned to formally ask U.S. Ambassador Peter Galbraith how the Clinton administration would respond to new Iranian arms shipments through Croatia. Granic himself still thought it was a bad idea and said so. He even urged Galbraith to say no when Tudjman made his request.

Granic had good reason to believe that Tudjman would accede to U.S. wishes on the matter. The Croatians had bowed to the Bush administration in 1992 when the United States demanded that they stop an Iranian arms shipment at Zagreb airport. And Tudjman’s top diplomatic priority had long been to win and keep the goodwill of the United States and other Western governments.

But Galbraith, frustrated that the Clinton administration had not done more for the Bosnians, disagreed with the Croatian foreign minister. He believed that the United States should give its blessing to Iranian arms. A former staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Galbraith had a reputation in Washington as an activist, a maverick and a liberal supporter of the international underdog. While on the Senate committee staff, he made his mark by crusading on behalf of Kurdish refugees in Iraq. The son of famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith, Peter Galbraith had been appointed America’s first ambassador to Croatia in 1993, and with his good looks and media savvy he quickly won over the Croatian public. Within the U.S. government, though, he sometimes rankled career officials with his willingness to test the outer limits of his role.

The Decision

Some questions from ambassadors take days to wend their way through the State Department bureaucracy. This one flew up the chain of command to Clinton in a matter of hours. Galbraith’s cable went first to Alexander Vershbow, then a deputy assistant secretary of state who coordinated U.S. policy in the Balkans. With Christopher traveling in the Middle East, Vershbow passed the question on to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and Lake, who were traveling to President Nixon’s funeral in California.

Talbott and Lake talked over the dilemma: How could the United States approve an action that would expand the influence of Iran--which Clinton himself officially had designated as a terrorist nation and punished with a trade embargo? Yet how could the United States object, because it wanted the Bosnians to get weapons from somewhere?

They settled on what seemed a perfect solution: Do nothing. More precisely, they would tell Galbraith to say that he had “no instructions” about the Iranian scheme--a deft way of saying that the United States would not actively object.

On the evening of April 27, 1994, as Air Force One flew the administration entourage back to Washington from the funeral, Lake asked for 20 minutes of Clinton’s time and made his way up to the president’s airborne office in the big forward cabin of the Boeing 747. As Clinton sat behind his desk in a high-backed captain’s seat, Lake went through a list of foreign policy issues meriting his attention, including the Iran proposition.

Lake “ran him through the pros and cons and said, ‘This is our recommendation. . . .’ And he said, ‘Yes,’ ” a senior official recounted.

There was little discussion and no serious debate. It seemed like “an obvious choice,” the official said.

Because of the haste of the decision, Christopher was informed of it only as it was already being made. (But, aides said, Christopher would have agreed.) Top defense officials were not informed until later. CIA chief Woolsey was not informed at all. Administration officials have said the quick action, with relatively little deliberation about the implications, was dictated by the need to respond to Tudjman overnight and that, in any case, it was not a particularly momentous decision.

They said they saw little alternative.

“There was a dilemma here, and to impale ourselves on either horn of that dilemma, we thought, was a bad policy choice,” the senior official said. “I would have made the same choice again in a second.”

“And it did work,” he added. The antitank missiles and the ammunition sent by Iran helped the beleaguered Bosnian army fight the Serbs to a standstill, opening the way to a peace agreement in 1995.

‘Third Country’

But there had been other alternatives.

At least three times from 1993 through 1995, State Department officials discussed the idea of encouraging other countries--friendly Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan--to step in and help the Bosnians.

The United States had done this before. In the 1980s, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Saudi Arabia helped bankroll the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan with an estimated $500 million in aid that was largely administered by the CIA.

Indeed, some Saudi officials half-expected to get a similar pitch from Clinton, who had been so vocal on behalf of the Bosnian cause.

In June 1993, Clinton met privately in the White House with Prince Turki al Faisal, chief of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service and a close advisor to King Fahd, his uncle. Turki had been Saudi Arabia’s point man in funding the Afghan war. He was the only chief of a foreign espionage agency given a private White House audience with Clinton, a courtesy that the heads of Britain’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad have never enjoyed.

Turki brought a pointed message from his uncle, who, like other longtime U.S. allies, was uneasy with Clinton’s early uncertain management of foreign policy. The king’s message, according to a source familiar with the meeting: You should lead. If you lead, we will follow.

The conversation quickly turned to Bosnia. The Islamic world, including Saudi Arabia, was angry that the West seemed to be abandoning Bosnia’s beleaguered Muslim government. Clinton wanted Turki to know that he agreed. He explained his problem with his Western allies.

The Saudi prince waited for some kind of pitch to his own pocketbook--but it never came, U.S. and Saudi sources said. “We never really considered it,” a White House official said.

Later, the Saudis did provide some financial aid to the Bosnians on their own, but it was relatively modest--and intended largely to counteract Iran’s bid for the allegiance of the Muslim world with its much larger shipments.

Within months, though, other U.S. officials were trying to stir some interest in what became known as the “third-country” option.

Galbraith, the U.S. ambassador in Croatia, was intrigued by the idea. He had worked on the Afghanistan issue when he was an aide on the Foreign Relations Committee.

In December 1993, Galbraith asked the CIA station chief in his embassy what it would take to launch a covert operation to arm the Bosnians. Would $250 million, he asked, be enough? The startled station chief told the ambassador that what he was talking about would be illegal without formal authorization from the president--and promptly warned his superiors at CIA headquarters that the idea was afoot.

Galbraith raised the idea of encouraging third countries to arm Bosnia with his superiors at the State Department in the spring of 1994, when the reconciliation between Croatia and Bosnia made it possible to ship weapons overland to Sarajevo. The idea found no allies in Washington, senior officials said.

But in the fall of 1994, the dynamics of U.S. policymaking on Bosnia changed because of Holbrooke’s arrival in Washington as assistant secretary of state for European affairs. Holbrooke had a well-deserved reputation as being egotistical, abrasive--and effective. He immediately began to look for new approaches that might break the Bosnian deadlock.

On a visit to Zagreb, he met with Galbraith and learned about both the secret Iranian arms pipeline and the stillborn idea of encouraging friendly countries to do more. A few weeks later, Holbrooke met with Bosnia’s prime minister, Haris Silajdzic, who was traveling the world asking other countries for help. Silajdzic asked if the United States could not just put in a private good word for the idea. “He said if we got involved, more would happen,” a senior official said.

Holbrooke liked the idea. He believed that the key to getting a negotiated settlement in Bosnia was “changing the situation on the ground,” a former aide said. He said the idea would bring a political benefit: The Bosnians would stop lobbying in Congress for a formal end to the arms embargo if the United States helped quietly with third countries. And the administration did not like relying on Iran as Bosnia’s main supplier.

Holbrooke began talking with U.S., Bosnian and Croatian officials about how the “third-country” plan might work. And he asked State Department attorneys to research the intelligence laws to determine how much he could do without violating the laws that govern U.S. covert action.

The lawyers’ report was encouraging. It said that “suggesting to a foreign country through diplomatic channels that it might consider a covert action” appeared perfectly legal; going one step further and “encouraging a foreign country” appeared legal but “potentially risky” from a political standpoint. “Actually supporting the foreign action” through direct participation, the report said, “crosses the line into covert action.”

Holbrooke wanted to go ahead. But both Lake and Christopher turned the idea down.

Christopher feared that any U.S. approach to third countries, no matter how soft, would soon be leaked--and would risk an angry reaction from Britain and France, perhaps including a sudden withdrawal of their peacekeeping troops from Bosnia. And that was an event the administration desperately wanted to avoid because it would plunge Bosnia into chaos.

“Dick [Holbrooke] felt the allies would put up with this,” a former aide said. “Christopher felt it would put us in the position of confronting our allies.”

Lake agreed with Christopher, and had an added objection. The national security advisor thought that encouraging third countries to aid Bosnia probably did cross the line into the category of “covert action.” That would require the president to privately notify Congress of what his diplomats were doing; the news would almost certainly become known, making the chances of success slimmer.

After the issue surfaced publicly this year, Lake discovered that he apparently had misunderstood the law on covert action, officials said. But the national security advisor still believed that the Holbrooke plan would have put the administration “on a slippery slope,” they said.

Word came down in November 1994 that Holbrooke’s “third-country” plan would not be implemented. Holbrooke and his aides were upset; they felt a chance was being lost to help the Bosnians, officials said.

Later on, in 1995, they would return to the idea time and again, whenever the Bosnians suffered reverses on the battlefield.

“We’d look at each other and say: ‘We all know what might be useful here, but they’re not going to do it,’ ” a former aide said. “It was more out of sorrow than anything else.”

Consequences

Clinton’s 1994 decision not to object to Iran’s arms shipments caused considerable confusion inside the U.S. government. In Zagreb, Galbraith wasn’t sure at first what “no instructions” was supposed to mean. Was he giving the Croatians a green light? He telephoned the National Security Council’s chief European expert, Jenonne Walker, and asked her to clear up the mystery. “No instructions” was what Lake said, she told him--but she added: “Tony was smiling when he said it.”

Nobody told the CIA or the Pentagon about the decision. When Galbraith asked the CIA’s station chief in Zagreb to explain the new U.S. policy to Croatia’s intelligence chief, the CIA man balked; he thought U.S. policy was still to oppose Iranian arms shipments. CIA Director Woolsey asked Deputy Secretary of State Talbott what was going on. Talbott told him simply that Galbraith had received “no instructions,” and Woolsey assumed that he meant the policy was unchanged.

For months, the CIA would stumble across bits and pieces of evidence that State Department officials were either acceding to Iranian arms shipments or promoting the idea of shipments from other countries. But whenever Woolsey raised questions, he was told that there had been no change. Eventually, he concluded that he was being deliberately kept in the dark. In December 1994, he resigned.

From May 1994 until January 1996, the Iranians shipped more than 5,000 tons of arms to Bosnia through the Croatian pipeline. They provided the largest portion by far of Bosnia’s military hardware--two-thirds, by official U.S. estimates. The Iranians delivered mostly small arms and equipment, including rifles, ammunition and uniforms but also antitank weapons and shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles--weapons that could threaten aircraft, including U.S. aircraft.

Other countries did supply weapons to Bosnia without U.S. encouragement. Turkey and Pakistan sent modest shipments of small arms, U.S. officials said. The Sultan of Brunei, who once donated $10 million to the Reagan administration for use by Nicaragua’s contra rebels, paid for a shipment of antitank missiles from Malaysia. And the Bosnian government used donated money from Saudi Arabia and other sources to buy weapons from Hungary and Argentina.

But Iran was the largest supplier by far. By early 1995 the Iranian flights were landing as often as three times a week. The arms pipeline was managed largely by the Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s militant Islamic shock corps, operating out of the Iranian Embassy in Zagreb. Other Revolutionary Guard officers moved into Bosnia to serve as military advisors and trainers. The Bosnian government’s intelligence service and internal security force soon had Iranian advisors too. To both secular Bosnians and U.S. intelligence analysts, this was a worrisome trend: creeping Iranian influence in what once had been a multiethnic, secular state.

In Zagreb, U.S. Embassy officials detected suspected members of Hezbollah, the pro-Iranian Arab terrorist organization, videotaping the movements of American diplomats and their families, and they worried that the growing Iranian Embassy might be involved. By late 1995, even the Croatians seemed alarmed that they were losing control over the pipeline. A shipment of Iranian-made Nazeat missiles arrived, bound for Bosnia, and nervous Croatian officials asked the United States to make sure they did not carry chemical warheads. (U.S. military experts flew in, inspected the Iranian missiles and let the shipment go on.)

It was increasingly clear to Holbrooke and other administration officials that they must curb the Iranian influence. At the Dayton peace talks, Holbrooke insisted on the withdrawal of all “foreign” forces from Bosnia--which, in large part, meant Islamic militant soldiers, terrorists and spies. As soon as U.S. troops entered the region at the beginning of the year, rooting out the estimated 2,000 Iranian-backed foreign fighters became one of their priorities. The Clinton administration also pressed Bosnia’s Izetbegovic to send home the Iranian advisors in his intelligence service and other government agencies.

Iran’s growing military relationship with Croatia was a problem too. In December 1995, the administration discovered that Croatia was negotiating with Iran to buy intermediate-range missiles that could reach the capitals of Serbia and other neighboring countries. The United States demanded that the deal be canceled, and the Croats reluctantly backed out.

Izetbegovic’s government repeatedly promised to send the Iranian guerrillas and advisors home, but U.S. officials reported that some were still there. The administration warned that Bosnia would get no U.S. military aid until the Iranians were out. Finally, on June 26, Clinton officially notified Congress that all organized Iranian military units were out of the country.

“The Bosnian government has moved to end the operational military and intelligence relationship with Iran,” a White House statement said. But officials acknowledge that some Iranians and other foreign militants have remained, some as part of a paramilitary force run by Izetbegovic’s Islamic political party.

“The Iranians have done their best to burrow into Bosnia’s military and intelligence services,” a U.S. official said last week. “That probably would have happened anyway, without the arms pipeline. The arms pipeline didn’t establish an Iranian beachhead in Bosnia. The beachhead was already there. But the arms pipeline certainly helped cement Iran’s position.”