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With President Reagan's approval, a few top American officials began a series of hush-hush meetings with Iranians that as of last week had gone on for 14 months. The American representatives apparently were guided, if not led, by Robert McFarlane, then National Security Adviser. Just which officials participated on the Iranian side is not known, but they are believed to be allies of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, who is less bitterly anti-American than many of his colleagues. The sessions were initially conducted in European cities, but they eventually included three secret American missions to Tehran. One in August that included McFarlane, who left the Administration last December and is now on the staff of Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Oliver North, a Marine colonel on the staff of the National Security Council, was reported around the world last week. There was an earlier meeting of U.S. and Iranian officials in Geneva in October 1985. That mission was headed by John Poindexter, then McFarlane's deputy and now his successor as National Security Adviser.
The Administration claims that its primary motives were to open some kind of back channel into the fierce factional struggles now raging in Tehran and to gain the attention of some of the politicians jockeying for position in the post-Khomeini era. In itself that motive was shrewd, even laudable. The U.S. has little hope of moderating Iran's behavior while Khomeini rules. The aged Ayatullah may be too weak to provide much direct leadership anymore, but no one dares do anything of which he disapproves. Yet not all the men around him are as dedicated as he is to pursuing the seven-year-old war with Iraq until that country is crushed, or to exporting anti-Western revolution throughout the Muslim world. If politicians in contact with the U.S. were to gain major influence in a successor regime, Washington might be in a position to urge them to wind down the war with Iraq, call off troublemaking in neighboring states and ease support of terrorism.
The U.S. cannot afford to ignore Iran, because the country is a glittering geopolitical prize. One of the world's biggest oil producers, it is strategically situated on the Persian Gulf, through which most Middle East oil flows into world markets. The U.S. dares not take a chance that Iran might fall into the Soviet orbit. Moscow has been maneuvering for influence in a post-Khomeini Iran; it resumed buying Iranian oil and gas. If Soviet blandishments do not work, bullying might. Over the past year and a half, the U.S.S.R. has nearly doubled, to more than 50 divisions, the military forces stationed near its border with Iran.