The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (41 page)

O
n May 27, Central Command forwarded its revived escort plan. While simple, it had a number of moving parts. The Middle East Force would herd together one to three tankers off either Kuwait or Oman and then proceed along a southern Gulf route with each convoy guarded by two or three U.S. warships staying within four thousand yards of the tankers. Additional navy vessels would be stationed at both entrances to the Strait of Hormuz, just outside the range of the Iranian Silkworm missiles. Another warship would be stationed in the northern Gulf to maintain the communications link with the Saudi-based AWACS. At twenty knots, it would take two days to transit, either inbound to Kuwait or outbound loaded with oil.
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If Iran tried to interfere, the carrier in the Gulf of Oman would be poised to strike. As a precaution, Crist ordered air force fighters to be ready to fly to Saudi Arabia and Oman. CENTCOM updated the Iran strike plans to include ten different targets for cruise missiles hitting naval and air defense sites around Iranian bases at Bandar Abbas, Jask, and Bushehr.
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The U.S. Navy had recently pulled four battleships out of mothballs. The chief of naval operations wanted to send one, the USS
Missouri
, to the Gulf to replace the aircraft carrier. The power of these World War II dreadnoughts captivated military planners in Tampa. Armed with nine 16-inch guns that each fired a shell weighing as much as a Volkswagen Beetle. They were now augmented with advanced Tomahawk cruise missiles but remained the quintessential symbol of American gunboat diplomacy. The battleship could single-handedly destroy every Iranian military facility in the southern Persian Gulf. While its cruise missiles destroyed naval air force headquarters at Bandar Abbas, the “Mighty Mo,” protected by a fourteen-inch-thick belt of armor, would steam up into the strait and its guns would pound the Silkworm missile batteries into oblivion. A study produced by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory concluded that the battleship could take eleven Silkworm missiles before being put out of action, and there were not enough missiles in the entire Iranian inventory to sink the forty-five-thousand-ton battlewagon. Suicide planes were even less of a problem. The
Missouri
had absorbed two off Okinawa in 1945 and escaped with little more than its paint scraped.
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On June 12, the Joint Chiefs met in the Tank and agreed to send the battleship, supported by two cruisers and three destroyers,
to the Gulf. Although the convoy operation would already be under way, this lethal task group would arrive in the Gulf by the end of August.

A
nother group of officers under CENTCOM arrived in Baghdad to hash out a secret arrangement between the U.S. Navy and the Iraqi air force. The two countries came to a formal agreement that amounted to a series of electronic nods and winks that permitted Iraqi planes to continue to pound Iran’s tankers and avoid running into the U.S. Navy. When Iraqi aircraft went “feet wet,” as aviators term flying over water, the pilot announced his presence to any U.S. warship by turning on his radar for a couple of minutes. The American AWACS plane flying out of Saudi Arabia would contact the Iraqi over a certain radio frequency provided every month to Iraqis by the U.S. military attaché in Baghdad.
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The Iraqi pilot would reply using a predetermined call sign, again provided by the U.S. military, and the AWACS would pass on the location of all the U.S. ships in the northern Gulf.
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There were draconian measures if the Iraqi pilot failed to adhere to this protocol, including being shot down if he came within thirty nautical miles of a U.S. ship without contacting the Americans.
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Initially this clandestine arrangement worked well. “I believe our initial understanding with representatives of Iraq has significantly reduced the risk of engagement of our forces,” Crowe told Weinberger.
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The two nations refined these procedures over the coming months, improving the coordination between Iraqi planes and the navy ships.
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When Iraqi pilots made the Farsi hook, they were to relay this information and their new course to the Americans. Then, using a series of brevity codes agreed to by both countries, the Iraqis would pass information on their intended Iranian target and whether all the planes were going to hit the same or multiple sites. The communications between the United States and Iraq became sophisticated enough that U.S. controllers could steer Iraqi planes around navy warships.
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Over the course of the next three months, further talks in Baghdad between the two nations refined their cooperative procedures. Middle East Force provided advance details of American ship movements to Iraq. During talks with the chief of operations for the Iraqi air force, Major General Salim Sultan, the United States helped Iraq refine its flight patterns to enable the Americans to better monitor the Iraqis’ positions and still allow them to attack Iranian
shipping. The only disagreement came when a U.S. Air Force colonel tried to get Iraq to refrain from attacking ships too far south in the Gulf. Salim responded, “If Saddam Hussein dictated the target, they must fly it.” Since the Iraqi leader liked to pick targets, self-preservation prevented him from agreeing to avoid any part of the Gulf to attack.

The United States considered developing a similar arrangement with the Iranians, but it never went past a few discussions around a conference table in the Pentagon. Admiral Crowe had no interest in talking with Iran. As he told Weinberger in his endorsement of the Sharp Report on the
Stark
, “There has been no indication that the Government of Iran has any interest in the rational discussion of any relevant matters, including deconfliction procedures.”
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Instead, the Iranians listened in on this steady stream of radio communications between the Americans and the Iraqis. Already aware of the ongoing intelligence sharing, this only reconfirmed their view of military collusion between their enemies. If the U.S. Navy and the Iraqi air force were cooperating, that made Bernsen’s ships legitimate targets in the eyes of the Iranian leadership. The
Stark
had unintentionally served as a wake-up call for the Revolutionary Guard too.

I
f secret deals had brought the Arabs on board with the American reflagging scheme, serious cracks emerged within the military branch most responsible for executing the plan, the U.S. Navy. The real problem for the men wearing uniforms of dark blue and gold braid was that the times were a-changing and the conservative sea service was clinging to the past. Both modern warfare and the Goldwater-Nichols Act forced interoperability among the four services. The navy had largely worked alone, without paying too much attention to the army or air force. But Congress had tipped the balance of power to the four-star joint unified commanders with passage of Goldwater-Nichols, and the days of army- or navy-only military operations were over. The green and blue uniforms had been morphed into purple, as joint command billets are informally called.

In the coming years, the United States forged a far more effective military by merging the sum of its parts, but the reflagging operation occurred during the middle of these growing pains. It required a generational change in the officer corps, with the old officers replaced by those who had grown up
in the new system. But in 1987, “the prospect of a Marine commanding an almost exclusively navy mission was deeply disturbing to many in the naval community,” Crowe wrote in his memoirs. And Crist’s military plans for Iran, which included air force AWACS and combat jets supporting navy ships, had ruffled the admirals’ feathers.
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The one thing the two men agreed on was that Iran would not risk war by challenging the escort operations. Iran had no reason, it seemed, to fight the United States too. A CENTCOM intelligence paper reflected the prevailing view within the American intelligence community: “The primary threat to the U.S. convoys is another accidental attack like the
Stark
. It appears unlikely that Iran will intentionally attack a U.S. combatant or a Kuwait owned tanker under U.S. escort.”
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CENTCOM did not consider the Iranian navy or aircraft a major threat, but the Silkworm missiles purchased from China were a different story. One site was active and another eight were near completion around the Strait of Hormuz. Intelligence sources indicated that the control of these missiles was highly centralized and that any decision to attack would have been made at the highest levels of the Iranian government: Ayatollah Khomeini.
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In June 1987, the U.S. State Department relayed a stern warning to Tehran via the Swiss embassy against using Silkworm missiles. The United States would view their use as a serious matter, and Washington would respond with massive force against military and economic sites. Iran never responded to the U.S. démarche, but despite all the hostility between the two nations over the coming year, Iran never fired a single Silkworm missile from its sites around the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran did have some mines, but no one in Tampa or Washington gave it too much thought. On Friday, June 26, less than a month before the first convoy, a DIA analyst briefed a group of senior three-stars in the Tank about the Iranian mine threat. The intelligence officer concluded his thirty-minute presentation: “We do not believe that Iran poses a major mine threat to the Gulf shipping at this time. Although the Iranians are capable of small scale mine laying…we estimate that they do not have the capability to lay and maintain systematic minefields. The threat is primarily psychological.”

The analyst added that the Iranians lacked the training and expertise to lay mines and did not possess any proper minelayer. “Although small combatants or merchant ships could be modified for mine laying operations, no modification efforts have been noted.” As far as the use of small dhows was
concerned: “The unsophisticated nature of these platforms wholly limit[s] them to small scale, imprecise mine operations.”
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Unfortunately, leaders in Tehran did not read the American intelligence assessments. Iranian ingenuity and resourcefulness had an ugly surprise awaiting both CENTCOM and the U.S. Navy.

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n the morning of July 6, 1984, the small cargo ship
Ghat
left Libya on its way to the Eritrean port of Assab. The round-trip journey through the Suez Canal normally took eight days, but nothing about this trip was routine. Instead of the usual cargo of foodstuffs and crated goods,
Ghat
carried advanced Soviet-made naval mines designed to detonate in response to the mere sound of a passing ship. Rather than her normal civilian crew, Libyan sailors, including the commander of Moammar Gaddafi’s mine force, manned the pilothouse. Once in the Red Sea, the sailors lowered the stern ramp and hastily rolled the mines off into the water, where they settled on the silted seafloor. The improvised minelayer sowed its destructive seeds around two important choke points at either end of the Red Sea: first at the north end of the Gulf of Suez, just before the Suez Canal, and then at the south end around the narrow strait of Bab el Mandeb, where one of the busiest shipping routes in the world narrowed to a mere twenty miles.

It did not take long for the Libyans’ handiwork to bring results. On the evening of July 9, an explosion rocked the Soviet-flagged cargo ship
Knud Jespersen
just outside the Suez Canal. The Egyptian government kept the news of this incident quiet, not wishing to alarm the merchants who used the canal and provided a main source of revenue for Cairo. This proved impossible
when there was a spate of ships hitting mines outside the canal and at the far end of the Red Sea around Bab el Mandeb.
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The August Red Sea mining became an international whodunit as newspapers speculated about whose hand was behind this terrorist attack against the world’s commerce. Egypt blamed Iran. Officials in Tehran had publicly boasted about using mines to close down the Strait of Hormuz as a means of punishing Gulf nations supporting Iraq. Egyptian warships began boarding Iranian ships transiting the Suez Canal, looking for the culprit.
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The Saudi government agreed. With the annual hajj about to begin, Riyadh thought Iran intended to embarrass the kingdom by mining the two Red Sea ports of Jeddah and Yanbu, where tens of thousands of white-clad pilgrims arrived. If one of those liners were to strike a mine, the loss of life would be horrific. American intelligence organizations remained skeptical, however, and an Office of Naval Intelligence report doubted Iran’s involvement. Its navy had few mines and no ships to drop those it did possess. Communications intercepts soon revealed Moammar Gaddafi’s culpability.

The U.S. Navy joined an international naval flotilla to clear the mines.
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At nine p.m. on August 6, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger signed a deployment order, and by midnight, transport aircraft were taking off from Norfolk, Virginia, carrying large RH-53D minesweeping helicopters plus two hundred personnel, all headed for Egypt.
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Once there, the crew assembled the helicopter rotors and flew them out to the amphibious ship USS
Shreveport
and the flagship of Middle East Force, USS
La Salle
, to begin sweeping for the remaining presents left by the Libyan leader.
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Bitter memories remained from the recent debacle in Beirut, and the Italians and French refused to participate in any military arrangement with the United States. Paris had no desire to work with the American navy, publicly stating that it wanted no part of any American “crusade” in the Red Sea.
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