Strike Force

The northern reaches of the Zagros Mountain range in west-central Iran is a rugged, windswept region, pleasant most of the year but dreadfully cold and snowy in winter. The Qezel-Owzan River originates in the steep mountains near the provincial capital of Hamadan and cuts steep cliffs, caves, and rock spires as it flows north toward the Caspian Sea. Some of the tallest peaks in this area rise to over ten thousand feet above sea level.

During the Iran-Iraq War, hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled Saddam Hussein’s Iraq into western Iran, and the Revolutionary Guards were sent in to try to keep them out. The lucky ones escaped into the Zagros Mountains — the others were slaughtered and left in the ravines and streams to rot. The families that survived the winters in the mountains remained, grew, and eventually prospered, out of reach of Pasdaran persecution. It was not a comfortable or idyllic environment, but living mostly unmolested in the harsh mountains was better than being slaughtered like dogs by Saddam’s Republican Guards or Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. As John Milton wrote, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n.”

Despite being known for its bountiful raisin harvests and the spectacular Ali-Sadr Caves north of Hamadan, the inhospitable terrain, heavy Pasdaran presence, and the suspicious, mostly secretive Kurdish population keeps visitors and tourists to a minimum — exactly what the Kurds, and eventually the Pasdaran, desired.

The Ali-Sadr Caves, one of western Iran’s few popular natural attractions, were first discovered in the sixth century and used as a source of drinking water, but when the water ran low the caves were abandoned. But they were rediscovered in the mid-1960s quite by accident by a young boy looking for a lost goat. Although the caves and the surrounding area were developed by the Shah Pahlavi into a well-known tourist destination, it was not until after the Iran-Iraq War that more exploration in the area was undertaken. It was quickly determined that the Ali-Sadr Caves were not the only long, soaring caverns in the area. While the Ali-Sadr Caves were being developed and built by the government, secretly the Pasdaran began rebuilding many of the other caves to their own specifications.

The result was the Gav-Sandoq Khameini, or Khameini Strongbox, named after the Supreme Leader who commissioned the construction of the military complex in the early twenty-first century. The Strongbox ran for almost four miles through the east and northeast side of the Zagros Mountains near the town of Gol Tappeh, about ten miles southwest of the Ali-Sadr Caves, with six entrances and dozens of tunnels connecting forty-three caverns strewn throughout the mountain. While most of the caverns were just house-sized, several were building-sized, and a few of them were massive warehouse-sized halls that took thousands of lights, massive generators, and a ventilation system large enough to air-condition a fifty-story skyscraper to keep it habitable.

Originally built as a weapons of mass destruction shelter and military weapon and equipment stockpile to protect and then retaliate against another invasion by Iraq, the Strongbox was situated perfectly to strike at Iraq by Iran’s medium-range ballistic missile fleet. Most of the three hundred missiles stored in the Strongbox were the Shahab-2 (“Meteor” in English) series of road-mobile ballistic missiles, which were locally modified versions of the Russian SCUD-C missile, with a range of about three hundred miles.

The missile’s accuracy was not very good — perhaps a quarter-mile circular error — but with a fifteen-hundred-pound nuclear, chemical, or biological warhead, accuracy wasn’t that important. The missiles could be brought out of the Strongbox, driven just a few miles away to pre-surveyed launch points, fueled, erected, aligned, programmed, and launched in just a matter of hours. They had plenty of range to hit Baghdad and most large cities in Iraq east of the Euphrates River. Launched from the Strongbox, the rockets could devastate Iraqi targets with ease, almost without warning.

But as Iran’s missile fleet got more sophisticated and the targets changed from Iraq to Israel and Western military forces stationed in the Middle East and Central Asia, the mix of missiles garrisoned at the Strongbox changed. The new weapon of choice was the Shahab-3. Built in North Korea with Iranian financial assistance, and known to the world as the Nodong-1 medium-range ballistic missile, approximately a dozen Shahab-3 missiles were shipped to Iran beginning in 1996, and three successful test launches were conducted.