Before the bombing began, Crocker sensed that the Iranians were growing impatient with the Bush Administration, thinking that it was taking too long to attack the Taliban. At a meeting in early October, 2001, the lead Iranian negotiator stood up and slammed a sheaf of papers on the table. \u201cIf you guys don\u2019t stop building these fairy-tale governments in the sky, and actually start doing some shooting on the ground, none of this is ever going to happen!\u201d he shouted. \u201cWhen you\u2019re ready to talk about serious fighting, you know where to find me.\u201d He stomped out of the room. \u201cIt was a great moment,\u201d Crocker said.<\/p>\n
The co\u00f6peration between the two countries lasted through the initial phase of the war. At one point, the lead negotiator handed Crocker a map detailing the disposition of Taliban forces. \u201cHere\u2019s our advice: hit them here first, and then hit them over here. And here\u2019s the logic.\u201d Stunned, Crocker asked, \u201cCan I take notes?\u201d The negotiator replied, \u201cYou can keep the map.\u201d The flow of information went both ways. On one occasion, Crocker said, he gave his counterparts the location of an Al Qaeda facilitator living in the eastern city of Mashhad. The Iranians detained him and brought him to Afghanistan\u2019s new leaders, who, Crocker believes, turned him over to the U.S. The negotiator told Crocker, \u201cHaji Qassem is very pleased with our co\u00f6peration.\u201d<\/p>\n
The good will didn\u2019t last. In January, 2002, Crocker, who was by then the deputy chief of the American Embassy in Kabul, was awakened one night by aides, who told him that President George W. Bush, in his State of the Union Address, had named Iran as part of an \u201cAxis of Evil.\u201d Like many senior diplomats, Crocker was caught off guard. He saw the negotiator the next day at the U.N. compound in Kabul, and he was furious. \u201cYou completely damaged me,\u201d Crocker recalled him saying. \u201cSuleimani is in a tearing rage. He feels compromised.\u201d The negotiator told Crocker that, at great political risk, Suleimani had been contemplating a complete re\u00ebvaluation of the United States, saying, \u201cMaybe it\u2019s time to rethink our relationship with the Americans.\u201d The Axis of Evil speech brought the meetings to an end. Reformers inside the government, who had advocated a rapprochement with the United States, were put on the defensive. Recalling that time, Crocker shook his head. \u201cWe were just that close,\u201d he said. \u201cOne word in one speech changed history.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before the meetings fell apart, Crocker talked with the lead negotiator about the possibility of war in Iraq. \u201cLook,\u201d Crocker said, \u201cI don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen, but I do have some responsibility for Iraq\u2014it\u2019s my portfolio\u2014and I can read the signs, and I think we\u2019re going to go in.\u201d He saw an enormous opportunity. The Iranians despised Saddam, and Crocker figured that they would be willing to work with the U.S. \u201cI was not a fan of the invasion,\u201d he told me. \u201cBut I was thinking, If we\u2019re going to do it, let\u2019s see if we can flip an enemy into a friend\u2014at least tactically for this, and then let\u2019s see where we can take it.\u201d The negotiator indicated that the Iranians were willing to talk, and that Iraq, like Afghanistan, was part of Suleimani\u2019s brief: \u201cIt\u2019s one guy running both shows.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the invasion began, in March, 2003, Iranian officials were frantic to let the Americans know that they wanted peace. Many of them watched the regimes topple in Afghanistan and Iraq and were convinced that they were next. \u201cThey were scared shitless,\u201d Maguire, the former C.I.A. officer in Baghdad, told me. \u201cThey were sending runners across the border to our \u00e9lite elements saying, \u2018Look, we don\u2019t want any trouble with you.\u2019 We had an enormous upper hand.\u201d That same year, American officials determined that Iran had reconfigured its plans to develop a nuclear weapon to proceed more slowly and covertly, lest it invite a Western attack.<\/p>\n
After Saddam\u2019s regime collapsed, Crocker was dispatched to Baghdad to organize a fledgling government, called the Iraqi Governing Council. He realized that many Iraqi politicians were flying to Tehran for consultations, and he jumped at the chance to negotiate indirectly with Suleimani. In the course of the summer, Crocker passed him the names of prospective Shiite candidates, and the two men vetted each one. Crocker did not offer veto power, but he abandoned candidates whom Suleimani found especially objectionable. \u201cThe formation of the governing council was in its essence a negotiation between Tehran and Washington,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
That exchange was the high point of Iranian-American co\u00f6peration. \u201cAfter we formed the governing council, everything collapsed,\u201d Crocker said. As the American occupation faltered, Suleimani began an aggressive campaign of sabotage. Many Americans and Iraqis I interviewed thought that the change of strategy was the result of opportunism: the Iranians became aggressive when the fear of an American invasion began to recede.<\/p>\n
For years, Suleimani had sent operatives into Iraq to cultivate Shiite militias, so, when Saddam fell, he already had a fighting force in place: the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of a Shiite political party called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The Party\u2019s leaders so thoroughly identified with the Iranian revolution that Badr\u2019s militiamen had fought alongside Iranian forces in the Iran-Iraq War.<\/p>\n
The Badr Brigade spent much of its time carrying out revenge killings against Baathists, and largely held its fire against the Americans. But another Iranian-backed militia\u2014the Mahdi Army, headed by the populist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr\u2014began confronting the Americans early. In August, 2004, after the Americans launched a particularly bloody counteroffensive, I walked through a makeshift graveyard in the holy city of Najaf, south of Baghdad, and found dozens of shallow graves, each marked by a tiny glass jar containing a slip of paper with the fallen fighter\u2019s name and address. Many of them were marked \u201cTehran.\u201d<\/p>\n
Suleimani found Sadr unpredictable and difficult to manage, so the Quds Force began to organize other militias that were willing to attack the Americans. Its operatives trained fighters in Iran, sometimes helped by their comrades in Hezbollah. Suleimani\u2019s control over some of the Iraqi militias at times appeared to be total. At one point, a senior Iraqi official, on a trip to Washington, publicly blamed the Supreme Leader for escalating the violence in Iraq. Soon after returning to Baghdad, he told me, he received messages from the leaders of two Iraqi Shiite militias. Both posed the same question: Do you want to die?<\/p>\n
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