The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (64 page)

R
obocruiser had arrived. The USS
Vincennes
was the most sophisticated ship in the U.S. Navy. The
Ticonderoga
-class cruiser had been commissioned just three years earlier at a cost of more than $1 billion. With a crew of about four hundred, she bristled with modern weapons, including two 5-inch guns and an array of antiair and antiship missiles. But the
Vincennes
’s real worth lay in her radar. Outfitted with the latest Aegis combat system and combined with the ship’s radar, weapons, and command suite, the warship could track and engage dozens of surface or air targets simultaneously. As early as September 1987, the Pentagon pushed to station such an advanced cruiser in the Persian Gulf to monitor Iranian activity in the congested Strait of Hormuz. The chief of naval operations, Admiral Carl Trost, had balked at sending such a ship to the Gulf, telling Colin Powell, “Why would you want to put a diamond in a pigsty?”
⁵
But Weinberger had countered, “What other war do you have going on?” He and his successor, Frank Carlucci, finally ordered the deployment, and USS
Vincennes
arrived in the Gulf a month after the April clash of Operation Praying Mantis.

The commanding officer of the cruiser
Vincennes
, Captain William Rogers, was not afraid to sail into harm’s way. When his draft deferment ended in the mid-1960s, he joined the navy, attending officer candidate school in Newport, Rhode Island. He had two great loves: his wife and the navy. Self-confident and aggressive, he wanted to prove the mettle of his ship and its advanced Aegis system in combat. When the outgoing officers of the
Wainwright
offered to brief his crew on the air picture in the Gulf, “Aegis will sort it out” was the dismissive refrain from the
Vincennes
’s officers. In keeping with its role to control the surveillance of the Strait of Hormuz, Rogers’s ship took station inside the Gulf but well away from the Revolutionary Guard attacks. Disrupting their attacks and escorting the convoys fell to the smaller frigates and destroyers. This role did not sit well with Rogers. He wanted to take a more active role in the aggressive shadowing operations that Admiral Tony Less had initiated. Rogers wrote numerous messages to Less urging him to aggressively use the
Vincennes
against the Iranians—to “go into harm’s way
for which she was intended,” as he said in one message.
⁶
Commander David Carlson, captain of the USS
Sides
, which was frequently located near the
Vincennes
, commented of the ship’s behavior: “My impression was clearly that an atmosphere of restraint was not her long suit.”
⁷
Soon, sailors around the Gulf took to calling the
Vincennes
“Robocruiser” for her similarity to the popular futuristic movie
Robocop
, in which a half man, half machine cleaned up the streets of a crime-plagued city.

On April 29, 1988, President Reagan ordered U.S. forces to broaden the protection of vessels in the Gulf. This marked a major change in the rules of engagement in the Gulf and muddled the clear distinction about belligerency. U.S. warships were now free to take any action necessary to end an Iranian attack in progress, including using deadly force, but they could not retaliate for an attack that had previously occurred. The Iranians had to be caught in the act. Anticipating reporters’ questions about whether this constituted an expansion of the mission or a tilt in U.S. neutrality, during a press conference announcing the change Carlucci responded in his prepared statement: “We are not the policemen of the Gulf, nor do we wish to be.” The truth was somewhat different.
⁸

In June, Iranian military activity increased again in the Gulf. The Iraqis continued to press the land offensive and intensified their air attacks on Iranian oil facilities and shipping in the northern Persian Gulf.
⁹
As expected, the Iranians retaliated by attacking shipping around the Strait of Hormuz. Even the Iranian air force came back to life. It shifted two or three F-14s from Bushehr to a joint military-civilian airfield at Bandar Abbas.
¹⁰
While the F-14 had been designed as a fighter jet, Iran had shown a proclivity to improvise, and Less’s intelligence section worried that Iran might have been able to outfit the fighters to drop bombs.
¹¹
On July 2, the USS
Halsey
warned away two potentially hostile Iranian aircraft near the Strait of Hormuz.
¹²

On July 2, the USS
Elmer Montgomery
received a distress message from the Danish ship
Karama Maersk
, outbound from Saudi Arabia. In accordance with the new rules laid out by Washington, the
Montgomery
moved to intervene and observed at least three Revolutionary Guard boats shooting at the Danish ship.
¹³
The U.S. vessel fired several warning shots at the Iranian speedboats, which promptly broke off their attack.

The next morning, several more Revolutionary Guards challenged a Pakistani merchant ship. Less agreed to allow the
Vincennes
helicopter to
investigate, but on his own volition Rogers moved his ship nearly fifty miles north of his assigned station to join the
Montgomery
. When the destroyer flotilla commander learned about this, he ordered Rogers to return to his designated station south of Abu Musa Island. But the helicopter remained, shadowing a group of Revolutionary Guard boats loitering off Qeshm Island and well within Iran’s territorial waters. With the
Vincennes
’s helicopter buzzing overhead, one of the guard boats fired off about ten rounds in front of the helicopter—a not uncommon way for the Iranians to warn away military or civilian helicopters when they approached too close.

“We are taking fire!” the pilot radioed back to the ship.

With this pretext, Rogers immediately turned his ship about and, along with the
Montgomery
, headed back north at more than thirty knots to where the Iranian boats lay. In doing so, and in violation of the standing rules of avoiding Iran’s war exclusion zone, he crossed into Iranian waters, a fact dutifully recorded by a military combat camera team that happened to be on the
Vincennes
’s bridge.
¹⁴

As the two ships closed on the Iranian small boats, two of them turned toward the approaching American warships; the others, according to Rogers, acted erratically and appeared to be maneuvering to attack him. Rogers requested permission to open fire. He described the Iranians as in attack profile and having fired on his helicopter. Neither Less nor his command had any idea that
Vincennes
was in Iranian waters, but approved the request, believing the ship was under attack.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander at Bandar Abbas was a young firebrand named Ali Fadavi. Bright and circumspect, like many guard officers he had been a student transformed by war into a military commander, and he’d moved quickly up through the ranks. An avid supporter of the revolution, he believed the new Iranian fleet of small boats and mining vessels was a more effective strategy to deal with the Americans than the large ships of the regular navy. As the senior Revolutionary Guard commander in Bandar Abbas, Fadavi had orchestrated a number of attacks from there on shipping headed to and from the Gulf Arabs who supported Iraq. Following the drubbing the regular navy had taken in April following the attack on the
Roberts
, Fadavi’s mosquito fleet remained the only force capable of continuing the tanker war. The new aggressive American posture complicated his operations, so the guards lurked just across the exclusion zone border and quickly
struck passing tankers before the Americans arrived. But now the Americans had taken their cat-and-mouse game to a new level and entered Iranian waters intent on a fight.

As the American ships closed in, one Revolutionary Guard boat moved down to reconnoiter the
Vincennes
; it passed along the side of the large cruiser, its small crew crouched low as the two sides stared at each other. When the other Iranian boats maneuvered to spread out, two boats headed toward the U.S. warships. Rogers characterized this as a hostile act to Less’s command, and he received permission to defend his ship from an attack entirely of the American captain’s own making.

At 9:43 a.m., the two American ships opened fire. Shells splashed down around the Iranian boats, which maneuvered to and fro firing their machine guns wildly in the direction of the Americans.
¹⁵
Nearly one hundred shells were fired, and several hit home. Two Revolutionary Guard speedboats caught fire and sank, while a third was damaged by a near miss.

At 9:47, Iran Air Flight 655 took off from Bandar Abbas destined for Dubai. Mohsen Rezaian held the yoke of the Airbus A300, painted in the blue and white livery of Iran Air. An experienced pilot, he had flown this short, thirty-minute route many times, a regularly scheduled flight every Sunday and Tuesday.
¹⁶
On this day, a passenger with a visa problem had delayed the flight, and Iran Air 655 took off twenty-seven minutes late. After being cleared by the tower in Bandar Abbas and being advised to make sure his civilian transponder was set to mode 3, which broadcast his plane as a civilian airliner, Rezaian lifted off and headed southwest on a straight line to Dubai. Rezaian began his steady ascent up to fourteen thousand feet approximately three to four miles off the center line, but well within the twenty-mile-wide air corridor. Neither he nor the air traffic control tower knew that the flight path would take his Airbus directly over the
Vincennes
and the skirmish under way in the Gulf.

The
Vincennes
radar detected the jet taking off from Bandar Abbas. A sailor manning the radar initially received a military aircraft reading (mode 2) on his sensors, likely from an Iranian F-14 sitting on the tarmac at Bandar Abbas. As the Iranian Airbus took off, he mistakenly kept the cursor on the plane at Bandar Abbas and not on the one taking off. This confirmed in his mind that the two were synonymous. Even when the ship’s system started tracking the Airbus’s civilian transponder, the ship’s anti–air warfare coordinator, Lieutenant Commander Scott Lustig, took the initial signal at face
value, since Iranian military jets often transmitted using both military and civilian modes. Lustig was an affable man, liked by Rogers and the reporters who came on board with the media pools, but he had never seen the stress of combat, and his reaction to the stress of the ongoing surface fight in the Gulf was noticeable. A petty officer working for Lustig consulted the scheduled flights; he found none for that time and apparently never considered that planes do not always take off as scheduled.
¹⁷

In moving north into Iranian waters, Rogers had placed his ship directly in the flight path of the Iranian jet. Lustig passed along to Captain Rogers, now engaged in a fight of his making, that an F-14 had taken off from Bandar Abbas headed in their direction.

At that moment, a shell casing jammed the forward gun on the
Vincennes
. Rogers ordered the ship’s rudder hard over to spin the ship around so his aft gun could be brought to bear on one of Fadavi’s boats. The
Vincennes
heeled over. Books, coffee mugs, and papers went flying across the darkened room of the combat center where Rogers sat controlling the fight. In the chaos and tension of their windowless environment, men grappled with their first experience of combat. Not all performed well. With an ongoing surface engagement and a possible Iranian aircraft closing in, an increasingly hysterical Lustig became convinced that the Iranians were conducting a coordinated air-sea attack.

David Carlson on the USS
Sides
watched the same aircraft take off from Bandar Abbas. Stationed to the northeast of the
Vincennes
, he saw the designation of the aircraft as an F-14. When it failed to heed any verbal warnings, Carlson ordered it painted with his missile’s radar, a signal any combat jet would immediately recognize as a threat. When the jet did not alter its course or speed but continued its straight, gradual ascent without emitting any characteristic electronic signatures of an F-14, Carlson concluded it had to be a civilian airliner. Unfortunately, he never passed this along to Rogers, falsely concluding that the
Vincennes
’s much more sophisticated systems had to show something his didn’t. Carlson would regret his hesitancy.

As the Iranian Airbus continued to close on the
Vincennes
at 360 knots, more warnings were broadcast, but no response came from the aircraft. Rogers asked again about the unidentified plane, using its computer-generated target number, 4474.

“TN 4474 is descending. Speed 450 knots!” said a petty officer monitoring the screen. This proved yet another blunder by the
Vincennes
crew. During
an update of the radar picture by the Aegis system, the computer had renamed the Airbus TN 4131, from the radar track of the USS
Sides
. Unknown to Rogers, the old number had been reassigned by the Aegis computer to a U.S. jet descending to an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Gulf of Oman. When Rogers asked the question, the petty officer gave the right answer, but for the wrong plane. A quick look at the radar by anyone in the information center would have immediately shown that the plane in question continued to ascend, had not accelerated, and had emitted no weapons radars. But no one bothered. Groupthink took hold in the darkened command center. It all fit: an F-14 from Bandar Abbas had taken off to support the Revolutionary Guard and was now diving down to attack the
Vincennes
.

On the Airbus, Rezaian was busy talking to the tower at Bandar Abbas and preparing to report passing a waypoint, and he coped with demands of the cockpit during a short flight. Even if his radio
had
been set to monitor the
Vincennes
’s warning over the distress frequency, there was no way he could have known that the warnings were intended for him.