The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (56 page)

On November 19, Frank DeMasi’s ship was operating around a dozen miles south from where the
Bridgeton
had hit its mine. It was late in the day and getting dark, and DeMasi was about to halt the search for the day. Suddenly, the sonar search radar operator announced, “Minelike contact bearing 020 range 450 yards.” Slowing, the ship inched forward. As they closed to within eighty yards, the crew could clearly see a circular object with a chain going down to the ocean floor. “Jesus Christ, Captain,” the seaman yelled, “this is a mine!”

As the minesweepers lacked a remotely operated vehicle, standard on the more sophisticated European minesweepers, which would have allowed them to view the mine with a camera and even place a countercharge on it, an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) diver had to be sent to physically view the object and verify it was a mine. It was one of the smaller Iranian-made Myams laid specifically to catch the American minesweepers. As it was getting late, they decided to throw a buoy attached to a two-hundred-pound concrete block nearby to mark the location and come back the next morning.

At first light, the three-man explosives team puttered out to the marker in a Zodiac. One diver went over the side and, to his horror, saw a scrape mark down the side of the mine. The current had carried the weight and it had actually hit the mine. Had it struck one of the horns, there would have been nothing left of any of the men to send home for a funeral. The diver
carefully placed a block of C-4 with a delayed timer on the side of the cylinder and returned to the boat, and the three men hastened back to the
Inflict
.

As DeMasi backed his ship away, his sonar discovered another mine just four hundred yards from the first. After the first mine detonated in a massive geyser of white water, the diver destroyed the other mine. DeMasi drew a line of bearing down the two mines and proceeded to search along the azimuth. In a few days DeMasi’s crew had rolled up the entire mine line. Each time they blew up a mine, the elated crew painted a small mine on the bridge wing. In short order, the
Inflict
was adorned with ten such characters.

Meanwhile, the
Fearless
, searching the area to the north, discovered one of the larger M-08 mines dropped to catch the
Bridgeton
back in July. Following DeMasi’s playbook, Captain Jack Ross rolled up and destroyed three neatly laid in a straight line.
⁴⁴
DeMasi joined him and discovered five more mines. The Iranians aided their task by laying mines with sequential serial numbers. When the American divers noticed that they had skipped a number, they knew they had missed a mine in between.
⁴⁵
By the end of the month, the aging MSOs had finished a remarkable operation and accounted for all twenty mines dropped by the Revolutionary Guard.

In addition to those planted on the Gulf floor, dozens of drifting mines presented a hazard to Gulf shipping. Many originated from the Iraqi and Iranian fields in the north and had broken away from their moorings, while the Iranians set others adrift hoping the currents would carry them to the waters of the Gulf Arabs. Around Christmas, one floater was spotted just outside Bahrain’s main harbor. In the middle of a Bob Hope show, Middle East Force ordered Robert McCabe’s ship out to sea to get rid of the mine. They found it just at sunset and decided to detonate it by shooting it with a rifle. Instead of exploding, the hollow case just filled with water and the mine sank to the bottom of the harbor, where it still remains, much to the considerable annoyance of the emir’s government.
⁴⁶

O
ver the next several months, the hodgepodge of forces effectively cleared the mines and shut down Iran’s Revolutionary Guard operation in the northern Persian Gulf. In December, the
Wimbrown
finally joined the
Hercules
as the SEALs and army pilots continued to refine their tactics. Operating in pairs and at night, except when investigating a specific contact, the patrols ranged from four to twelve hours. Occasionally, in an attempt to confuse the
Iranians, all four were sent out in a close diamond formation so as to appear as a large target to the Iranians on Farsi Island. When just outside the twelve-mile exclusion zone around the island, the boats would split apart at high speed, appearing to a thoroughly baffled Iranian radar operator as though the object had multiplied before his eyes. On one occasion, a Little Bird flew around the far side of Farsi and flew over the island just above the buildings. If the Iranians tried to pursue, Wikul sat waiting in an ambush with patrol boats and more Little Birds. After Middle Shoals, the Iranians showed little stomach to tangle with the Americans.

As a new year dawned, it appeared that the United States finally had the upper hand. A new American commander, Rear Admiral Tony Less, was headed to take charge in the Gulf, and the convoys went back and forth unmolested. Iran had not tried another mining since the loss of the
Iran Ajr
. The war with Iraq was turning against Iran, and leaders in Tehran grew increasingly desperate to try to curtail the Arab support for Saddam Hussein. But rather than calming down, the quasi-war between Iran and the United States was actually reaching its climax.

O
n a bright sunny late February day, General Crist joined Hal Bernsen for a ceremony on the fantail of the USS
La Salle
, tied up pier-side in Bahrain. A strong wind blew the flags and flapped the awning covering the dignitaries from the Middle East sun. This was apropos, for a new American commander had arrived in the Gulf, Rear Admiral Tony Less. Less had a quick smile, a quicker wit, and a sharp temper. He had an effusive, sanguine personality that melded with common sense to make him a popular leader. He was a respected pilot with the navy and the former commander of the elite Blue Angels aerobatic flight team. The new commander knew a lot about what had transpired in the Gulf over the past few months. He’d commanded one of the carrier battle groups in August when Ace Lyons flew out with his Window of Opportunity plan. Crist, dressed in a high-collared white uniform, took to the podium: “Napoléon once said, ‘Nothing is so important in war as undivided command.’ One hundred fifty years later we are participating in a ceremony which bears witness to the truth of these words.”

Admiral Less had arrived to relieve both Dennis Brooks and Harold Bernsen, consolidating both the joint task force and Middle East Force under one commander. Since the formation of the joint task force in September 1987,
relations between Bernsen’s and Brooks’s staffs had become estranged, with the problem lying both in personalities and, more important, philosophical differences between the two navy commanders. Brooks had the difficult assignment of running an operation whose subordinate command was far more versed with the intricacies of the political and military concept of Earnest Will. Brooks disliked the idea of the mobile sea bases and delayed deploying the second barge
Wimbrown VII
.
¹
He opposed the decentralized nature of the intelligence collection and viewed the use of the special operations forces as an overly aggressive posture toward Iran.
²
He believed that the best way to avoid clashes with Iran was to stay out of the Gulf, running heavily armed convoys when necessary. Otherwise, avoid confrontations. Unfortunately, this ran counter to the entire operational scheme. The end of Brooks came when Crowe grew irate following a phone call to Bernsen in which he learned that Brooks had refused to send a tanker to pick up free fuel offered by Kuwait as compensation to the Americans, apparently worried about the safety of sending a military tanker into the Gulf.
³
This decision by Brooks cost the U.S. government nearly five million dollars.
⁴

While Brooks, having been fired, left the Gulf without fanfare, Bernsen received a proper send-off. In his address at the change of command, the CENTCOM commander lavished praise upon Bernsen: “I am sure that often in the privacy of his cabin, this calm, unflappable commander must have echoed the thoughts of General Joffre, the French hero of the first world war, who said: ‘I don’t know who won the Battle of the Marne, but if it had been lost, I know who would have lost it.’”
⁵

By early 1988 the United States was firmly established in the Gulf. By the end of January, a total of thirty major convoys had made the three- to five-day transit from the Gulf of Oman to just south of Kuwaiti waters, or vice versa. While tension remained high, Iranian activity appeared to have tapered off. There still seemed no end in sight for the U.S. commitment, as critics of the reflagging operation continued to point out, but by the spring of 1988 events were finally coming to a head.
⁶

O
n the afternoon of April 14, 1988, the American frigate USS
Samuel B. Roberts
steamed south toward the Strait of Hormuz, having just escorted two reflagged tankers—
Gas King
and
Rover
—to Kuwait, the twenty-fifth successful convoy of Earnest Will.
⁷
With a cloudless blue sky overhead and a
light wind, the
Roberts
cruised at a brisk twenty-five knots as it headed to rendezvous with an oiler for some fuel before taking another Earnest Will convoy back north. She passed by the Shah Allum Shoal approximately fifty-five miles northeast of Qatar, an area of shallow water that forced the deep-draft tankers into a more constricted sea-lane. A mere two hours earlier, the French frigate
Dupleix
had passed through the area, reporting nothing of interest. The two navies exchanged officers, and occasionally food, back and forth for a pleasant change in the daily staple of the two ships patrolling the Gulf. Recently the
Roberts
and the
Dupleix
had held a combined mess night in the
Roberts
’s wardroom, complete with some smuggled French wine, a welcome treat on board a dry U.S. Navy warship. More important, the two combatants looked out for each other; when an Iranian vessel loomed nearby, the
Roberts
noticed the French destroyer lying in the vicinity ready to provide assistance.
⁸

The
Sammy B
, as her crew affectionately called her, was a newly commissioned
Oliver Hazard Perry
–class frigate, of the same class as the ill-fated USS
Stark
. It was the third ship to bear the name; the original
Samuel B. Roberts
had been sunk off Samar in the Battle of Leyte Gulf on October 25, 1944, with a loss of ninety crew. In his after-action report, the surviving captain, Robert Copeland, wrote: “In the face of this knowledge, the men zealously manned their stations wherever they might be, and fought and worked with such calmness, courage, and efficiency that no higher honor could be conceived than to command such a group of men.” “No higher honor” stuck and became the motto of the next two ships. With a slender, 450-foot-long knife-shaped hull and boxy superstructure, the
Roberts
displaced more than four thousand tons and held a crew of 215 men. The navy had designed the frigate as an inexpensive solution to complete such unglamorous tasks as antisubmarine and convoy duties.

Commander Paul X. Rinn, forty-two, commanded the
Roberts
. Born in the Bronx, he had a rough-and-tumble upbringing, with a .22-caliber bullet hole in his leg to show for his youthful indiscretions. But he eventually turned himself around, graduated from a small Catholic college, Marist, in Poughkeepsie, New York, and in 1968 was commissioned as an ensign in the U.S. Navy. In 1972, during the waning days of the Vietnam War, Rinn found himself in a very unusual billet for a surface warfare naval officer. He worked as an adviser as part of the secret CIA war in Cambodia. Operating near the Laotian border building patrol bases along the Mekong River, he spent over
two hundred days in combat areas being mortared and fired at along with a polyglot force of Navy SEALs and native levies. He ended up being the last U.S. naval officer out of Phnom Penh as the Khmer Rouge closed in and Cambodia became a killing field. The experience forever changed Rinn. Unlike many of his contemporaries who had never heard a shot fired, in anger or otherwise, Rinn learned what it took to lead men in combat and strove to instill in his subordinates the importance of training for the realities of modern war, anticipating the eventuality of going into harm’s way.

Captain Rinn had the deserved reputation as an aggressive, cocky, in-your-face skipper. He spoke loudly and with confidence and had a temper dampened by a good-natured, sardonic sense of humor. In a service whose officers were largely engineers who acted more as technicians, Rinn was a bit of a novelty—he had charisma. It was contagious and engendered loyalty among his officers and crew.

The
Samuel B. Roberts
arrived in the Gulf on February 2, 1988, as part of Destroyer Squadron 22, commanded by a Red Man tobacco–chewing Captain Don Dyer. Over the next two months, the
Roberts
escorted five convoys entering the bizarre world of the Persian Gulf and the tanker war. On his first inbound transit through the Strait of Hormuz, Rinn nearly fired on two Iranian F-4 Phantoms coming from Bandar Abbas. At the last minute, both turned away, seconds before Rinn, standing over the shoulder of a seaman with his finger hovering above the launch button, intended to give the go-ahead. That night, he had another close encounter with the CIA’s Eager Glacier aircraft flying out of Dhahran on its nightly patrol off the Iranian coast. Less’s command informed him it was a friendly aircraft, but only a minute before the
Roberts
would have sent a missile skyward.