The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran

This was one of the most informative books I have read on a regional issue. In this case, the clash between a country, Iran, which was once a major empire with the same superpower proportions as present day America. Originally known as Persia this land over the centuries has seen invasion by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Mongols, to name a few. It is historically noted that Iran has the distinction of being the home to one of the worlds oldest continuous major civilizations dating back to 4000 BCE. Over these many centuries the land has undergone many foreign occupations and dynasties. This book guides you through the more recent history of Iran and it's state religion, Shi'a Islam. The 1979 Iranian Revolution when Iran became known as an Islamic Republic.By the 17th century Europeans were encroaching on this Empire and than in 1908 the British discovered oil. During WWI the country was occupied by Britain and Russia who withdrew in 1919 after their revolution. In WWII the country was again occupied by British,Indian forces and Soviet forces in the north part of Iran. By 1945 the Soviets had withdrawn with the promise of oil concessions, the British continued to hold sway of the country.By 1953 America enters the picture through political actions controlled by the CIA with support from British MI6 who assist in a coup. At this point with the aid of the USA Iran is ruled as autocracy under the shah which reinforces an international consortium of foreign oil facilities for the next 25 years splitting the profits among themselves and Iran. By 1963 civil unrest fostered by Islamic elements begin to be felt and this is when the shah's secret service becomes really active in assassinations and torture. By the 1970's Iran had imported arms from the west and had become the regions most powerful military force. By 1973 the shah nationalizes his oil industry. By 1979 things really begin to change with the return Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the shah flees to the USA. In November 1979 Iranian mobs seize the American embassy, America becomes the great Satan and all of the USA's prior dealing and policies have the "Blow-Back effect and the two countries become antagonistic, America placing international sanctions on Iran. In 1980 Iraq invades Iran, and America aides and supplies Iraq with arms and intelligence, sometimes for it's own benefit, aid is given to both sides at different times. Author David Crist has obviously gone to great lengths to research the mostly unknown (Luke-warm) war that the two countries engage in for 30 years. He covers the history of events, political climate, espionage, sinking military naval vessels, aiding in the killing of American soldiers both in Iraq and Afghanistan. The on and off game of diplomacy, the Israeli factor, control of the Persian gulf, international gamesmanship, assassinations of Iranian scientists, drone attacks, killing of Iranian forces engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, Americas sorry history of missed opportunities and bad choices. This book has it all and is easy reading. By the time you finish, you will fully understand this Twilight War that most American's know little of other than to mistrust Iranian motives, rightfully so. The author points out the animosity of the Arab world against "the haughty" Iranians and the difficulty in dealing with their regime. The author illuminates America's participation in this 30 year long war and it's not pretty. I highly recommend this book which is quite timely considering that the American public had spent the last 5 years hearing about Iran's quest for a nuclear weapon and threats to destroy the very existence of the State of Israel which would touch of a regional war of horrific consequences, Basically the book points out that Iran wants the U.S. out of the region and the U.S. Navy out of the Persian Gulf.

Ask just about anyone why the US/Iranian relationship is strained and you’ll discover a myriad of shrugs and ill informed responses. They’re terrorists, or they’re going to nuke Israel are the most common responses. Many people are aware of the instability but vary rarely can anyone tell you why. This book “The Twilight War,” by David Crist, gives an extremely thorough and well researched history of the Iranian US conflict from the revolution to today. David Crist, is the son of CENTCOM Commander George Crist who oversaw middle eastern forces throughout the 1980’s. This gives Crist a unique and rare perspective and access to information not typically available to the average citizen. It is evident that his research was extremely vast and painstakingly detailed. My anticipation for this book was to gain insight from a completely American perspective, I was not disappointed. Crist provided a play by play of nearly every event that occurred post revolution and the perception of events from an American military standpoint. His work shed light on many different examples of Iranian instigation and disruption throughout the middle east and how those antagonisms effected the US military. Including an assassination attempt in Washington of a Saudi Ambassador. Although Crist did not hold back in his work and offered many examples of times when America was at fault in the political antagonism, this book is indeed written from a skewed perspective. Crist began his historical account primarily at the time of the revolution and went into great detail as to what happened, but he failed in explaining why the events occurred. To truly understand the American/Iranian conflict you must have a thorough grasp on Iranian culture and history and why the revolution had as much to do about America and Europe than it did about Islam and Anti-zionism. Although the perspective is one sided, the author reports facts accurately, descriptively, and leaves out personal bias and opinion. This did not read like a propaganda piece, but more of a dry recitation of information. If you are looking to get a detailed and honest record of the history between Iran and the US for the passed 30 years, this is a great resource. To fully understand why the Iranian and US relations are in their current state, I would encourage you to find more resources.

I just finished reading Crist's history and was impressed, primarily at Crist's obviously earnest effort at "objectivity." He chronicles clearly the US and Iran, taking turns, one after the other, in missing opportunities for a reconciliation, with the resultant impenetrable distrust at the end of 30 years. His work, published in 2012, is not optimistic; he sees the future as most likely a transition from twilight to darkness, by which he clearly means a massively destructive war. I was surprised at the intensity of the criticism of Crist's work for supposedly shoddy sourcing, to the point of challenging endnotes. The one thing that seems clear is that Crist had extraordinary access to resources, both human and archival. The lead criticism, based on endnotes, focuses on Crist "detailed" description of the 1983 bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut, which supposedly fails to mention the doubt about the bombers' identity. But Crist's own rendition of the events at p. 135 merely describes as "likely" the man identified as the attacker; Crist's endnote expands on the uncertainty by reciting the alternative theories put forth by American intelligence reports in 1984, Hezbollah sources in 2003, and CIA sources, all of which he describes as underscoring the unclear identity of the perpetrator. Again, the criticism of Crist's discussion of Iranian penetration of Iraqi militias, is it's "complete certitude" and purported attribution to a 2008 West Point study, which the reviewer states "does not support" Crist's account. However, endnote 7 to Chap 26 at p. 620 does not, as the critic suggests, attribute the narrative to the West Point study; it merely cites the study as "an accurate and comprehensive overview of Iranians activities in Iraq." As to certitude, maybe Crist's narrative is more confident for having access to Wikileaks' 2011 release of internal US communications, obviously not available to the West Point authors at the time of their 2008 publication. After all, no one ever criticized Wikileaks for inaccuracy. Finally, if the book ended at p. 415, as suggested, we'd miss the entire George W. Bush and partial Obama era histories through 2012. They are critical to the broad narrative that Crist portrays of administrations, both Republican and Democrat, missing opportunities for reconciliation at critical moments....and the Iranians copying the errors of their American counterparts. Nothing in the endnote attacks undermines the utility of those chapters for that purpose.

Great read on the history of Iran us relations. Easy to read. A bit superficial but excellent none the less.

This book is jammed back with descriptive detail of people, places and plans on both sides of the U.S. Iran conflict generally starting with the collapse of the Shaw and the taking of the U.S. Embassy and continues virtually to the present. The author amazed me with the names of everyone involved in the conflicts from Preidents down to front line commanders on both sides. The telling and the analysis of what the U.S. was trying to do in the middle east starts with a preoccupation with Soviets totally missing the emergence and threat of Iran. The author covers our sad role in Lebanon and the Beruit Barrcks bombing, thr Iraq-Iran War, the depressing Iran Contra gun dealing even while the CIA chief was actually dead, the war of the Straits, Desert Storm, the weapons of mass destruction invasion of Iraq after Afghanistan. Major parts of the book for me was the Iran Contra affair that was pursued by Reagan long after it was apparent that the Iranians were playing the U.S. while undermining our allies and the very tense war over the Strait of Hormuz that put tremendous stress on the U.S. Navy requiring innovation and numerous strained confrontations that eventually result in violent eruptions, the saddest being the downing of a Iranian civilian airliner. Some of the mistakes made by the U.S. spy system is just astonishing such as the same simple repetetive method to contact very useful spies in Iran resulting in the complete capture of virtually every single one As one reviewer noted earlier, the detail on characters might be tedious for some but I found it fascinating that the author found so much information from the to the modest participant. The writing is quite good thst I found the battles over the straits during the Iraq-Iran conflict riveting.

The Twilight War is an incredibly well researched and detailed book that covers the history of Iranian and United States conflicts along with covert military conflicts. The section that covers the George W. Bush and Barak Obama administrations were the most interesting given their direct relationship to today's state of affairs. For anyone interested in military history and the complex dynamics between Iran and the United States, this is a must read. This book along with All the Shah's Men and A Time to Betray give great insight, knowledge, and analysis that every American should understand before subscribing to any political assessment of Iran.

I know the history of this country pretty well from many sources, and based on that, this book is clear, accurate and engagingly written, as far as I've gotten (first 50 pages). The book is hard to put down. I've read others in the same field, such as Trita Parsi's "Treacherous Alliance", which are not as reader-friendly. Some reviewers here have dismissed it as having a neocon bias but what I've read so far is refreshingly impartial, pragmatic and uncolored in presenting the participants in this history. So either I'm a huge neocon, which I don't perceive myself to be, or this is the real deal. One should understand that the participants in the history will have various biases and sets of terms for viewing the world. What I've read so far of the book reads as a unbiased rendering of those possibly biased and categorical points of view. Some people may find this disturbing in the sense of being confronted with thought processes and reasons for acting that seem callous, uninvolved, biased or ignorant in one way or another. For example, Jimmy Carter is portrayed as being a supporter of the Shah through one of the worst periods of SAVAK abuse. This may be shocking to people such as myself who generally view Jimmy Carter positively. However I buy the presentation, in the sense that I buy that people who are very distanced from and unschooled in a culture may find themselves making decisions which are callous or ignorant in proportion to their distance. This can be seen today in another president I otherwise admire, Barack Obama, in his support of drone strikes which kill uninvolved civilians. In my opinion, if you are not willing to call such a strike on a neighborhood in Cincinatti, then only extreme cultural distance would permit you to order one on civilians in Yemen or Waziristan.

Before I talk about David Crist's work, I want to say something about the Kindle edition. For an eBook that costs more than the print edition I feel let down, The illustrations were not integrated with the text, and the captions often on different pages than the illustrations: indeed: unless you go to the very end of the book, you have no idea they are there, because they are not listed in the table of contents. Those who read these books know that if you browse them looking for pictures, you lose your "last page read," There are no videos, and all the pictures are in black and white. My point is that if Amazon or Penguin is going to charge this much for an eBook they should give you some added value, or at least make it as easy to read as the print version. Just know that when you get the Kindle edition, as opposed to the print version, you get less than you paid for. Despite the book's length and depth, this is an easy and quick read. Crist can tell a story, and he is equally comfortable writing both the viewpoints of a SEAL or pilot or grunt as he is about admirals, generals, and cabinet secretaries. He is equally facile narrating battles and internecine warfare in the United States' national security apparatus. He has a point of view too. It comes through, not so subtly, in his references to one president as the "decider" (who, thanks to a protective NSC director who later became a cabinet secretary, was hardly given anything important to decide on Iran until it was too late to make any decisions that made a difference) and his descriptions of American officials for whom not talking to Iran when Iran might be ready to talk is a matter of faith, and not reason. No doubt due to the opacity of its government, he has a harder time describing internal deliberations in post-Pahlevi Iran, but he nevertheless shows time after time the difficulties of judging whether overtures from Iran have the support of those who count in its government, and thus whether such engagement in the end might be a waste of time. Crist avoids I wish there were more books like this on the breadth of issues that face the United States today, and that voters, and opinion makers, read them. I doubt however that there will be more than ten senators, forty House members, or one presidential candidate who will read this book this year. Not more than a handful of the billionaires who are spending so much treasure to influence this year's election read this book, which is vital to understanding the most formidable national security issue facing us this year, will even know of this book's existence, or even care. Instead, our politics are hostage to a public who, thanks to the choices available on cable TV and the internet, need only listen to those they know will agree with them. For all that, I do hope this book gains a wide audience, as it needs to be read by anyone who wants to know where the greatest overseas threat facing us today came from, and want to have educated opinion on how that threat might morph in the near future.

I'd give this work six stars if I could !! David Crist has laboured hard to re-create an account of the secret, low-level conflict which has been conducted in the shadows by both the United States and Iran since the fall of the Shah. There's still much animosity and bad blood between both nations. Starting with the fall of the Shah, Crist narrates and analyses the growing conflict between the Ayatollahs and the United States. Iran played a huge role in the Lebanese violence of the 1980s which consumed a lot of the United States time whilst in the country. Soon prominent Americans in the region were being taken as hostages, later to be ransomed for weapons to be used against the Iraqi invasion. The Iranian authorities were making it clear that they had no time for America. The United States was not slow to respond. Major efforts were made to supply Hussein's Iraq during the war with Iran; weapons, intelligence and logistical supplies flowed into Iraq from the United States with little objection being made against the use of chemical weapons by the Iraq military. A large portion of Crist's work centres on the 'Tanker War' in the Persian Gulf during the 1980s. The US and Iran sparred and clashed on numerous occasions. Crist also documents the lengths the Arab states went to in order to protect their shipping, usually with significant assistance form the United States. The Iraq War of 2003 represents another level of the conflict. Iran demanded a role in the creation of a post-Hussein government but were rebuffed by the West, particularly the United States. This was to lead to a major surge in Iranian sponsored terrorism in Iraq and also led to the deaths of US soldiers and marines. Crist documents the events which were to lead to the instability in Iraq and also where the US military directly engaged the Iranian Revolutionary Guards along the border regions. Above all though, the author analyses just how short sighted both the US and Iran have been over the past three decades in making headway towards a form of peace. Suspicion, animosity, fear, anger, pride, ignorance... you name it, they have all clouded the judgements of successive Presidents in both governments. Huge headway could have been made by President Bush after 9/11 when the Iranian leaders all but begged for dialogue. He ignored it, setting back relations another ten years. Crist's conclusion does come across as stating that both nations are as bad as one another !! And he's dead right in this summation !! Referred to as the 'Twilight War' because of the darkness in which it has taken place, the author concludes with a stark warning that real conflict between the two is only a matter of time, although this is less of a danger given the current climate. The development of the Islamic State terrorist group has occurred since the publication of this book and in my opinion it presents an excellent opportunity for accommodation to be reached between the US and Iran. This is a marvellous book and I cannot recommend it enough.

Crist writes well but lacks the historical research a book of this scope requires, unless it was directed solely at Pentagon/White House audience. He briefly mentions the US involvement in the overthrow of the popularly elected Mossadegh which, in view of later events, should rightly have been the commencement for a history of the relationships between the US and Iran. That intervention led to the installation of the Shah and, more importantly, SAVAK, the Shah's much feared secret police. Mossadegh's removal, at the behest of the British government saw the US join France and Britain in carving up much of Iran's oil wealth, and fed into the later deposing of the Shah and his replacement by the Ayotallah Khomeni, followed by the US embassy siege and hostage taking. Instead, Crist elects to use this point as the anchor for his history. He refers to a "myopic Cold War" view of the US with fears of Soviet involvement in the area, noting briefly that up until the installation of the Shah the Soviet Union had been extracting oil in northern Iran under licences granted by the then government. It may have been worthwhile including that the area, including Azerbaijan had been settled by Russians fleeing the Bolshevik revolution, and no mention is made of whether those licences were revoked by the Shah. This raises the question of whether the installation of the Shah was intended to revoke those licences and perhaps lead to a military response by the Soviet Union, an aspect which should be important in any history of the region. It should be noted, too, that Khomeni was renowned for his anathema towards the Soviets due to their atheism, a theme which, if explored, is very under explored. He touches briefly on Iranian involvement in the Lebanese civil war (which saw US intervention on behalf of the Phalangists) but fails to explore the historical relationship which contributed to that involvement, concentrating instead on Iranian involvement in the bombing of the marine barracks which tragically resulted in many deaths and woundings.. At a later point Crist cites his father, head of CENTCOM as claiming four previous Soviet incursions into Syria, but gives no reference/s relating to them. Much of the tensions currently in existence in the Middle East can be traced to competing ideologies between Sunni and Shia'a, and exploited by the US in its determination to install and maintain military bases there. I found this book as a commencement into the study of a region with troubles exacerbated by

As an Iranian and somebody who has read a lot about Iran, this is one the best book you can find. The author has done a thorough research for the book.

It has been awhile since I read this, so the details have faded a bit, however, the impact remains. Crist has a special perspective as (I think) the son of the US general in command of military effort in the area over the period AND an active serving military man. The complex relationship between the US and Iran, especially considering the assistance the US provided to Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war and their possible role prior to the overthrow of the Shah, is examined in detail. My wife found the book depressing and had to put it down because it is almost too much to take. While I agree to an extent, it is an important view on how the US, and consistently their Presidents, from Carter to Obama, seem to under estimate the power, influence and intentions of Iran. Crist clearly sees Iran as a major enemy of the US, but not simply for the usual jingoistic reasons - he documents many compelling events and ties them together. Did he foresee the quagmire in Syria, Iran's role, and the Russians laughing up their sleeves? Maybe not, but he comes VERY close.

Although I have not read all of this volume, what I have read is very detailed and goes behind beyond headlines of this secret history between the United States and Iran. The author knows his subject and helps opening door on key periods in relationship such as the deployment of US Navy vessels in the Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. I look forward to continuing reading this book especially as issues concerning the Persian Gulf are back in the news with blockade of Qatar and more