The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (46 page)

“I will work out the details and only you will know,” an enthusiastic Lyons answered. “We can’t tell anyone or it will leak.”

“Okay,” said the chairman. That same day Lyons formulated a scheme to disguise the nineteen-thousand-ton ship as a freighter by rigging lights to mimic that of a commercial ship rather than a warship carrying navy and marine helicopters.

Lyons worried about press leaks, believing many stemmed from inside the Pentagon, so he devised another ruse to fool the U.S. military. He issued a false message that the
Guadalcanal
had electrical problems and would be delayed four days before heading to the Persian Gulf. Lyons called the scheme Operation Slipper, and the only men privy to the fact that the message was false were Crowe and the Seventh Fleet commander, Vice Admiral Paul David Miller. Two days later, Lyons updated Crowe on Slipper. “It will transit the straits on the night of the fourteenth. It will look like a container ship going through,” he told Crowe’s assistant, a colorless toady, Vice Admiral Jonathan Howe. “Keep this information with the chairman and yourself,” Lyons added. “Don’t let anyone else know—don’t need a lot of questions out of Tampa.”
¹⁰

Operation Slipper fooled the American generals and admirals. The
Guadalcanal
sailed under strict radio silence with its lights and camouflage netting configured to make it appear to be a large cargo ship. All the while CENTCOM, the Joint Staff, and Crowe’s own operations deputy briefed both the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Weinberger every morning that the electrical problems were delaying the
Guadalcanal
’s departure. The two four-stars in charge of the Middle East and the Indian Ocean remained oblivious too. Unaware of Crowe and Lyons’s machinations, Crist and his counterpart at PACOM, Ron Hays, worked on their own protection scheme for the
Guadalcanal.
Crist suspected something was amiss when he learned that the
Guadalcanal
had left Diego Garcia, and he queried Crowe. The night before the
Guadalcanal
was due to transit the Strait of Hormuz, Crowe had his assistant call Lyons asking to let the CENTCOM commander in on the deception plan.

“Okay,” Lyons answered. “He can tell Crist only. You know, no one at CINCPAC [i.e., Admiral Hays] knows. Make sure the chairman understands.”

“Okay—he knows,” Howe responded.

The
Guadalcanal
passed through the Strait of Hormuz on the night of August 14 without incident. As they normally did, the Iranian navy hailed the unidentified ship (the
Guadalcanal
’s bridge watch refused to respond), but the Iranian military showed little interest in the oddly configured container ship. While there is no evidence that Iran ever considered attacking such a high-visibility ship, Lyons remained pleased. “We slipped it right past them!”

The ramifications of the self-deceit reverberated around the most senior levels of the Pentagon. Unwitting to the chairman’s role, Crist viewed it as more of Ace Lyons’s meddling in his command. When Ron Hays learned of the
Guadalcanal
’s unexpected arrival in Bahrain, the normally composed admiral was livid. He immediately called Lyons.

“Don’t talk to me. Crowe was the one who ordered it,” Lyons dismissively told Hays.

Hays could not believe that Crowe would have gone behind his back; he called the chairman and complained about Lyons’s “cutting him out.” Crowe sympathized but never let on that he had directed Ace’s machinations.
¹¹

As the Americans engaged in tomfoolery, the vitriolic warnings from Tehran increased. “They had better leave the region; otherwise we shall strike them so hard they will regret what they have done,” said Iranian president Ali Khamenei. The United States took the rhetoric seriously.
¹²
The Central Intelligence Agency issued an intelligence alert warning that Iran would likely conduct more mine attacks to stop the Kuwaiti convoy operation.

Sheik Abdul Fattah al-Bader, the chairman of the Kuwait Oil Tanker Company, pressed Bernsen to get the reflagged ship
Gas Prince
and its load of liquid petroleum gas to sail due to important contractual obligations. Bernsen cautioned against this move. While he did not share this with al-Bader, American intelligence had solid evidence of an Iranian spy inside al-Bader’s company. This agent had tipped off the Revolutionary Guard to the
Bridgeton
convoy and would do the same again. Until they had some minesweeping capability, another convoy seemed too risky.

Reluctantly, Bernsen bowed to al-Bader’s needs and hastened a convoy out of Kuwait—the same day as Khamenei’s threat. Two U.S. warships rendezvoused with the
Gas Prince
and escorted the ship south, hugging the Saudi coastline as they passed Farsi Island and with the Saudi military both sweeping ahead for mines and providing two F-15 fighters for cover. To throw off the Iranians, the navy liaison officer in Kuwait passed a false convoy route to
the Kuwait Oil Tanker Company, with the convoy commander telling the master of the
Gas Prince
the real route only after they had set sail from Kuwait. To avoid Iranian mines, the convoy cut across the Iranian exclusion zone, with Iraq notified beforehand to avoid another attack like that on the
Stark
.

The United States saw threats everywhere. An Iranian four-engine P-3 approached to within twenty-five miles before the USS
Klakring
, on picket duty in the central Gulf, locked on to the aircraft with its fire control radar, sending the P-3 heading off swiftly in the opposite direction.
¹³
An Iranian frigate shadowed the Americans. As the weather cleared, Iranian small boats appeared on the horizon and approached to within a few miles of the convoy, close enough to conduct suicide or surprise attacks, one admiral later wrote. Eight Iranian warships were under way—the bulk of Iran’s operational fleet.

U.S. fears seemed justified when the USS
Kidd
detected a Silkworm targeting radar, perhaps a precursor to launching one of its thousand-pound missiles. A U.S. electronics jet from the carrier
Constellation
immediately jammed the Iranian radar. The phones lit up between Washington, Tampa, and Middle East Force as the United States braced for a possible Iranian attack. The carrier strike group commander, a gruff, aggressive, decorated combat veteran aptly named Lyle Bull, ordered additional aircraft launched, ready for a strike against the Iranian missile sites. As tense minutes passed, however, Iran launched no missiles and the radar emissions ended. The U.S. convoy steamed safely without incident into the open waters of the Indian Ocean.

To Lyons and his simpatico strike group commander, Rear Admiral Bull, the Iranian actions demonstrated hostile intent and the United States should respond with force if they tried it again. Bernsen viewed it as far less menacing, more akin to Tehran tweaking the American nose.
¹⁴

On August 4, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard began a weeklong exercise under the dour name “Martyrdom” in the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran radio repeatedly warned ships and aircraft to “avoid approaching the area of the maneuvers,” adding, “The Islamic Republic of Iran will not be held responsible for the danger to these planes and ships that approach, due to the use of missiles and shells.”

Even more alarming had been Iran’s instigation of an uprising during the annual hajj. As punishment for Saudi Arabia’s support to the United States and Iraq, Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the Revolutionary Guard to start an uprising in Mecca during the July 1987 hajj. Hundreds of guardsmen began quietly flying into Saudi Arabia disguised as pilgrims. They carried guns
and knives stashed on board the Iran Air jets. The plan called for a massive, choreographed demonstration against Saudi Arabia and the United States, designed both to embarrass the king and to create turmoil inside his kingdom.
¹⁵

Reza Kahlili was still working as part of William Casey’s spies run out of the CIA station in Frankfurt. One of Kahlili’s friends came up to him excited at having been picked to participate in an operation of such importance. “Everything is in place and the Saudi monarch is going down,” he told Kahlili, adding, “These Arabs are the servants of America, and they will pay big this time.” Writing on the back of his specially treated paper, Kahlili wrote a hidden message back to the CIA: “Thousands of Guards have been sent as pilgrims and flown by Iran Air. The plan is to incite the Muslims for a demonstration condemning American and Israeli policies. They intend to escalate the demonstration to an uprising against the Saudi kingdom.”
¹⁶

The CIA tipped off Saudi authorities, who interdicted most of the guardsmen and their weapons. When the orchestrated uprising occurred on August 1, the Saudi security forces were poised and ready. When the first Iranian pulled out a weapon, the Saudis opened fire with automatic weapons, cutting down 275 Iranians, both Revolutionary Guards and innocent pilgrims. That afternoon the ever bellicose Prince Bandar called Crowe: “They call us wimps yet we shot down their plane [the F-4 downed in 1984] and now killed about three hundred Iranians! The Iranian problem,” Bandar added, “is going to get worse.”
¹⁷

Crowe and Crist conversed on the afternoon of August 7. A number of intelligence reports had raised concern about Iranian intentions. The Office of Naval Intelligence had just issued a dire threat alert predicting that within the next seven to ten days Iran would take “combat action against U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf.”
¹⁸
Crowe emphasized to Crist the growing concern in Washington about neither starting a war nor repeating the
Stark
incident. It was a political tightrope, he said, which fell to individual ship commanders to straddle.
¹⁹

Both Bandar and the intelligence predictions proved correct. Iran’s real purpose behind the Martyrdom exercise soon showed itself. Amid all the publicity surrounding their swaggering exercise, the Iranian ship
Charak
, normally used for resupply operations, sailed from Bandar Abbas, broke away from the exercise, and headed for the anchorage at Khor Fakkan, the major port supporting all the shipping entering the Gulf and the assembly location
for the
Bridgeton
convoy. On either August 8 or 9, the
Charak
laid a string of sixteen large M-08 mines in the middle of the tanker anchorage and then scurried back to Iran.

This time Iran would not catch either Bernsen or American intelligence off guard. As Bernsen prepared to restart the convoys, his intelligence officer, Commander Ziegler, came in with an NSA intercept, a tantalizing snippet of a Revolutionary Guard conversation that indicated that the next mining operation would be at “a place where things gather.” Where this referred to, Ziegler added, remained unclear and had caused considerable consternation within the intelligence community. The DIA and the CIA believed the Iranians intended to mine Kuwait Harbor. Bernsen sat down and pored over a chart with Ziegler and his operations boss, David Grieve. Everyone but Bernsen focused only on targets inside the Gulf, but Bernsen came to a different conclusion: “It could only mean the anchorage of Khor Fakkan.
²⁰

Bernsen immediately called Crist. “I think Khor Fakkan is their target, and I want to delay the next convoy for twenty-four hours and form it up well to the south of where we planned.”
²¹

Crist remained skeptical. His own J-2 intelligence section agreed with the DIA and CIA. But the CENTCOM commander was not going to overrule Bernsen. “Hal, if you believe it is best to alter the convoy’s schedule, then do it.”
²²

On August 10, Bernsen’s actions were vindicated. The tanker
Texaco Caribbean
had just pulled into Khor Fakkan to anchor overnight before heading to Amsterdam with a load of Iranian crude. Suddenly, a powerful explosion rocked the tanker, as a mine ripped a four-meter hole in the ship, spilling some 2.5 million barrels of crude.
²³
The irony of this was not lost on the Americans: the victim of Iran’s mines had been a ship carrying its own oil. But the laughing stopped five days later when the mining turned deadly. The small UAE supply vessel
Anita
was making her rounds servicing anchored ships when she hit another mine. The 250-pound charge reduced the
Anita
to splinters, instantly killing six men, including the British master.
²⁴

That mining incident, off Fujairah, UAE, backfired on Iran. Instead of intimidating the West, this blatant mining of international waters galvanized European support for mine-clearing operations in the Gulf. Less than two weeks after rejecting an American request to send minesweepers, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands all dispatched countermine
vessels to the Persian Gulf. The UK sent four minesweepers plus support ships and began conducting its own escort operations for British-registered vessels. Belgium and the Netherlands sent a combined force that included a support ship and two minesweepers, commanded by a grizzled old commodore who had been in the Red Sea clearing Libyan mines. The following month, the Italians joined the U.S. effort by sending three frigates and three minesweepers to assist in keeping the Gulf open. France went even further, dispatching three minesweepers and one of its two carriers, the
Clemenceau
, to the Persian Gulf.
²⁵

While this transformed the mine clearing into a multinational effort, it did not translate into a coalition against Iran. While direct military-to-military cooperation was quite close with sharing of intelligence on Iran, the governments remained careful not to publicly ally themselves with the U.S. effort. There was no joint command, and the coordination of the mine-clearing effort was done on an ad hoc basis by weekly meetings in the Gulf between naval officers. Despite DOD and State Department efforts for a unified approach to countering Iranian mines, the other countries had their own specific economic interests in the region, which did not always coincide with Washington’s. The British and French arrived first in October. They quickly cleared fourteen mines off Fujairah and found two anchors—all that remained of the mines that had hit the
Anita
and the
Texaco Caribbean
.
²⁶