Arming Iran

6-28-25

Excerpted from my book, Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf, Chapter 10: The Iran/Iraq War.

While Brzezinski gave Saddam the green light to invade Iran, Casey met Hashemi in Madrid, ostensibly to plan a new round of “energy domination” and “economic inductance”. The US would now arm both Iran and Iraq then send them to war, hoping to decimate both oil price-hawk nations.

In 1981 while Cyrus Hashemi was panhandling Princess Ashraf, the Shah of Iran’s sister, for $20 million to launch Hardy Boy John Shaheen’s Hong Kong mujahadeen fronts, brother Jamshid bought a Greek freighter and made four trips between the Israeli Port of Eilat and the Port of Bandar Abbas on Iran’s Arabian Sea coast. His cargo was $150 million in weapons and ammunition produced by Israeli Defense Industries under US license.

Arif Durrani, a Pakistani arms dealer, ran another Enterprise cell that delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry to the Iranians. Durrani was a close friend of BCCI-founder Aga Hasan Abedi, whose bank financed the operation. He was also tight with the Saudi Gokal brothers, who shipped the weapons from Israel to Iran. [408] While the Iranian port at Bandar Abbas was humming with activity, other shipments of TOW missiles were entering Iran from the north at Tabriz.

Overseeing the arming of Iran was Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage, the Far East Trading Company godfather and Valerie Plame leaker. Armitage was assured a steady supply of weapons by Chief White House Liaison to Saudi Arabia Richard Secord. In 1985 Ted Shackley met with Cyrus Hashemi in Hamburg, where Hashemi introduced him to Manucher Ghorbanifar, another former SAVAK agent who now worked for Israeli Mossad. Ghorbanifar was a friend of Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose family owned pistachio groves in Iran. He worked with BCCI’s Black Network and often procured financing for his weapons deals from Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi. Ghorbanifar became the key Iranian contact to Secord’s Enterprise.

BCCI paid Southern Air Transport pilots like Eugene Hasenfus to fly Enterprise weapons to both the Nicaraguan contras and the Iranian mullahs. In 1978 42% of Southern Air’s CIA contracts were for flights to Iran. In 1997 the Mobile Register reported an incident in that Alabama city involving a Southern Air Transport plane. The aircraft landed at Mobile Aerospace Technologies. Mechanics working on the plane popped off a fiberglass panel and found hundreds of kilos of cocaine. The Southern Air flight had originated in Latin America and was en route to Miami, but had taken a rather circuitous detour to Germany along the way. [409]

The US sent Hawk and Phoenix missiles to protect Iran’s oil installations, especially the vast Kharg Island facility which includes the massive Abadan refinery at the strategic mouth of the Shatt al-Arab waterway on the Persian Gulf. Mansur Rafizadeh, former SAVAK intelligence officer and CIA liaison, said the US had thrown its support behind Ayatollah Khomeini, thinking Islamic fundamentalism the best defense against communism in the Middle East. This strategy was certainly playing out in Afghanistan, where the CIA was funding the most fanatical faction of mujahadeen Assassins.

Despite releasing the US hostages the day Reagan was inaugurated, the Iranians had saved a powerful trump card. Iran is the main supporter of Hezbollah, the militia group battling Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. The Israelis continually thumb their noses at UN Resolution 3236, which calls for a Palestinian state. They have seized additional Arab lands in Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon through invasions in 1956, 1967 and 1973. In 1978 Israeli troops marched into southern Lebanon where they remained until 2001. In 1984 the US vetoed a unanimous UN resolution calling on Israel to respect international law and pull out of Lebanon. In June 2006 Israel bombed Beirut and sent troops into Lebanon after two of its soldiers were allegedly kidnapped. Over 500 Lebanese civilians were killed.

Lebanon was for decades an offshore banking haven utilized by the CIA via Edmund Safra’s Republic Bank and a web of Beirut drug and gold smugglers. Henry Kissinger is a friend of Safra. Both sat on the board of American Express. When Syrian-backed Arab nationalists took control of Lebanon they cracked down on drug money laundering. Republic moved its headquarters to New York where it continued to be a major player in the gold market. In 1999 Republic was bought by a bigger goldfish- HSBC.

British, Israeli and American bankers were forced to move their operations to Dubai and Bahrain, while their MI6, Mossad and CIA goons harassed the new Lebanese government. In 1982 the USS New Jersey shelled Beirut in its backing of pro-Israeli Lebanese militia leader Amin Gemayel. That same year Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, now the country’s prime minister, oversaw the massacre of hundreds of Lebanese at Sabra and Shatila. In January 2002 Gemayel, who took part in the massacre under Sharon’s command, was gunned down as he was about to testify on the ordeal before a Belgian court. [410] The court indicted Sharon for war crimes anyway.

Hezbollah retaliated to the massacres by kidnapping CIA Chief of Middle East Operations William Buckley. Buckley had been the CIA contact to the mid-1970’s Argentine fascists, who tossed 30,000 suspected leftists into the Atlantic Ocean. [411] Buckley was tortured and left for dead, but not until Hezbollah made videotapes of Buckley singing about CIA black operations in the region. Hezbollah was still holding five other CIA agents as hostages. In 1983 Hezbollah bombed a US Marine barracks in Beirut killing 283 American soldiers and precipitating a US withdrawal from Lebanon. The CIA countered with a March 1985 car bomb in a crowded Shi’ite suburb of Beirut, killing 80 civilians and injuring 200. Few people will ever know what Buckley confessed to his Hezbollah interrogators, but apparently the CIA thought the tapes embarrassing enough to cut a deal with Hezbollah’s Iranian backers.

Former SAVAK agent and CIA liaison Mansur Rafizadeh said the CIA was pursuing a two-track strategy in Iran. On the one hand they were arming the Ayatollah and helping him crush the Iranian left. On the other hand they were working to destabilize the Khomeini regime in a variety of ways. The CIA was funding Iranian exile groups like the Paris-based Front for the Liberation of Iran and the Cairo-based Radio Nejat.

In 1986 the CIA recruited the Shah’s exiled son to deliver an 11-minute derision of the mullahs which was piped into Iran with CIA help and shown on the nation’s television networks. Robert Sensi, a CIA agent who worked with BCCI money launderer Faisal Saud al Fulaij’s Kuwait Airways, set up CIA front companies in Iran with the help of Habib Moallem. Through these fronts, they recruited Iranian agents who would spy on the mullahs and help destabilize the government.

Footnotes can be found in my book, Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf.

Dean Henderson is the author of seven books, including, Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf, Illuminati Agenda 21, Nephilim Crown 5G Apocalypse and Royal Bloodline Wetiko & The Great Remembering. Subscribe free to his Left Hook column at deanhenderson.substack.com