"Iran remains the only truly independent power in the region. If you fall, Russia will find itself with an American hegemony in the Gulf."
Baba-Janzadeh gave a grim smile. "I thought you and the Americans were such great friends now. Your old enemies, become allies."
He shrugged. "Alliances come and go. The Commonwealth of Independent States still has strategic interests in the Gulf region, best served by a strong and independent Iran. It wouldn't do to let the Americans win the upper hand here."
"No… what you fear, General, is that the Shi'ite populations within your own borders will one day rise up and destroy you. You know that so long as you have us as an active trading partner, so long as we are willing to pay you hard currency for weapons, we have a certain amount of influence over those Islamic populations. Is that not true?"
"I… cannot address that issue, Admiral."
"Indeed. Your bosses in Moscow, no doubt, ordered you not to discuss religious matters with me. It is of no importance. I simply want you to know that we know the true picture. You fear having an American hegemony in the region, because without our guidance, your Shi'a population will become restive. You hope that their focus will be on the Americans — on driving the Americans out of our lands once and for all — but are afraid that without our leadership, they will act independently and chaotically.
"And to that, General, all I can say is that your best hope is that we win in our confrontation with the Americans. Continue to supply us with arms and military equipment, with supplies, and with technology… especially with the technology for the new uranium enrichment plants. Tell your superiors that the Americans will back down, because they know they cannot beat us without suffering intolerable casualties. If we win, we will be grateful to those of our allies who helped us, and you will have a powerful friend here on the shores of the Gulf." He smiled, a dangerous showing of teeth with no humor behind it. "Can I make this any clearer?"
"No, Admiral. I understand you perfectly."
"Good."
"Just so long as you understand, Admiral, that a miscalculation could have devastating consequences for you. As you say, in you we have a useful and active trading partner. We have no wish to lose you as such."
The audience, unsatisfactory as it was, ended moments later. General Sergeyev thanked his host for his time and, following the Pasdaran officer who was both his guide and guard in the building, made his way out of the warren of offices and passageways that was Tehran's Ministry of Defense.
His destination now was the Russian embassy. He had much to discuss with his superiors in Moscow — a cable, first, but then, he thought, a flight back home. He needed to speak with the Defense minister, his Defense minister, and with others, in person.
Did the Iranians know the deadliness of the game they were playing?
He'd seen the outlines of their plan, and he had to admit that it had been carefully and meticulously worked out. Baba-Janzadeh hadn't told him everything, of course, but he'd also seen details from secret documents acquired by the SVR, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki — Russia's foreign intelligence service, operating out of the local Russian embassy. According to the military operation the Iranians were calling "Azar Bahadur," they intended to use a virtual armada of small craft of various types armed with antiship missiles, as well as their fleet of submarines, all backed up by missile batteries along the Hormuz coast. Their goal was nothing less than the destruction of the American Fifth Fleet, currently headquartered across the Gulf from the Iranian west coast, while at the same time closing the Straits of Hormuz to all shipping.
Sergeyev was forced to admit that if the Iranians pulled off even a partial success — if they could sink three or four capital ships, and especially if they could sink an American aircraft carrier — the Americans might well decide they had no stomach for further losses and withdraw. Further, world opinion would swiftly gravitate to support for Iran, if they controlled the keys to the world's oil supply, and not the Americans.
But Sergeyev had been an officer in the Red Army before the collapse of the Communist state. As a young lieutenant, he'd served in the GRU, the Soviet Army's bureau of intelligence. He'd been stationed in America— in New York City and in Washington — for a total of three years, and he felt that he knew them as well as any Russian could. During those years he'd dealt with the Americans as enemies — as enemies in all but fact, at any rate — on an almost daily basis, getting to know them, how they thought, how they reacted to threats.
He believed that their chief weakness as a foe lay in their government, which surrendered focus, order, and will in order to entertain their curious interpretation of what a "democracy" truly was.
Oddly, paradoxically, their military's greatest strength, in his opinion, lay in that same interpretation of democracy, which gave it tremendous flexibility. American field commanders, ship captains, even regimental commanders exercised far greater freedom in interpreting and carrying out their orders than their Russian counterparts had ever known. Had things ever come to an actual war between the United States and the old Soviet Union, Sergeyev feared the Americans would have won. By the time a developing situation on the battlefield could be identified, the proper request for orders routed up the chain of command, and a reply be routed back down and received, an American field commander would have recognized the problem and taken action.
In many ways, Iran's military enjoyed the same shackles as had the Red Army. Instead of political control, the mullahs exerted religious control, but the result was much the same. A Russian colonel who made a fatal strategic mistake would have found himself replaced; a Pasdaran colonel who blundered might well find himself dead.
The effect, in terms of squelching any real initiative among field officers, was very much the same.
The imbalance in forces didn't concern Sergeyev much. America's conflict in Vietnam had demonstrated to the world that a nation did not need to match the Americans tank for tank, ship for ship, man for man in order to win. What was necessary was will. Mehdi Baba-Janzadeh was absolutely right. Faced with high casualty rates and falling numbers in the polls, the American Congress lacked will.
But the American people… ah, that was another thing entirely. America's citizens were much like ordinary Russians — strong, proud, resilient, determined, and willing to sacrifice for the greater good.
Would the loss of a nuclear aircraft carrier or a few thousand of their Marines convince Washington to withdraw from the Gulf? Or would the American people roll up their sleeves and settle in for a long and brutal war, determined to carry it through to the end? Sergeyev honestly didn't know the answer to that, so finely balanced was it on the sword's edge of history. During the Great Patriotic War, the Americans had fought through to final and decisive victory both in Europe and in the Pacific. In Vietnam, the American public had been weakened and divided by dissent; their military had won the victories, but their politicians had lost the war.
Baba-Janzadeh's problem was that he assumed that the majority of the American public, because they were not devotees of Islam, were weak and dissolute, lacking in will and determination. During the Cold War, Moscow had underestimated them in a similar way because they were capitalists rather than Communists. Sergeyev's deployment in the United States with the GRU had convinced him that ordinary Americans should never be underestimated.