Longtime CIA officer George Cave met with the Iranian Deputy Prime Minister Abbas Amir-Entezam and Foreign Minister Ebrahim Yazdi on October 15, 1979 as part of an intelligence-sharing liaison approved by Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Harold H. Saunders; this preceded the initiation of the Iran hostage crisis on November 4. Cave told Mark J. Gasiorowski that he "warned Iran's leaders of Iraqi invasion preparations and told them how they could monitor these preparations and thus take steps to counter them." However, while Entezam and Yazdi corroborated Cave's account of the briefing, neither man seems to have shared this information with other Iranian officials, perhaps out of fear that their relationship with a CIA officer would be misconstrued. Owing largely to extensive post–revolutionary purges of its armed forces, Iran was in fact grossly unprepared for Iraq's invasion of Iran in September 1980. The veracity of the underlying intelligence supporting Cave's warning, and its implications with regard to allegations that the U.S. gave Saddam a "green-light" to invade Iran, have been debated. Gasiorowski contended that "If Iran's leaders had acted on the information provided in Cave's briefings ... the brutal eight–year [Iran–Iraq War] might never have occurred."