The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (42 page)

Looking for mines was painstakingly slow. Sonar scanned along the ocean floor, with divers or remote-operation vehicles investigating suspicious objects. The Red Sea was littered with years of discarded items—old oil drums, pipes, coffee cans, automobiles, and mines left over from both the Second World War and the more recent Arab-Israeli wars. The American helicopters had the additional unpopular task of sweeping in front of the Saudi king’s yacht when King Fahd took an ill-timed fourteen-mile day cruise from Jeddah.

The mines of August eventually claimed sixteen ships. Only one mine
was ever found; an explosives diver defused its charge, and the serial number 99501 indicated it was one of hundreds of similar coastal mines sold to Libya by the Soviet Union. During a seminar on the operation at the Naval Institute in Annapolis, Maryland, naval expert Scott Truver observed, “The threat of terrorist mining of important sea areas is real, rather easily carried out, and should be expected to increase.”
⁷
One country took this lesson to heart: Iran.

T
he shah’s navy had never paid much attention to naval mines. It had one plan on its books, written in 1970, that called for laying V-shaped minefields near the Strait of Hormuz, arrayed to halt shipping through the strait while still permitting its own tankers to get through. But before the revolution, the Iranian navy had carried out only one mine-laying exercise. The war with Iraq spurred interest in naval mines by the new Islamic Republic of Iran. In 1981, Iran purchased a small number of unsophisticated moored contact mines from North Korea: the small Myam mine, with only a 44-pound explosive charge, and the much larger M-08. Both were based upon ancient technology. The latter had been patterned after a 1908—that is, pre–First World War—Russian-designed mine. Shaped like a large black ball attached to a cradle that served as its anchor, it packed a potent 250-pound explosive charge, but required a ship to physically hit one of its pronounced horns, which ignited a chemical charge to set off the mine. Neither mine could be used in deep water, such as the Strait of Hormuz, but both could easily be laid throughout much of the shallower Arab side of the Persian Gulf.

The Revolutionary Guard paid close attention to the Red Sea mining. Tehran and Tripoli had friendly military relations and, on at least one occasion, the Iranian embassy arranged for a Revolutionary Guard officer to travel to Tripoli to talk with the Libyan commander who’d carried out the mining operation. The plausible deniability afforded by naval mines appealed to the Iranian leadership. Libya had suffered no consequences for its flagrant mining of international waters. Libyan involvement remained murky; unless they were caught in the act, it was difficult to prove who had laid the mines. Naval mines seemed the perfect, low-risk means of striking back at the Gulf Arabs.

The Revolutionary Guard commander, Mohsen Rezai, formed a small group of eight officers to look into developing this capability for Iran. In late
1984, the team met at the National Defense Industries Organization in Tehran to try to reverse engineer some North Korean mines in order to produce an Iranian variant, while Libya provided a newer Soviet variant for comparison. The team constructed a large water tank filled with salt water near Tehran to test drop their mine and work out the many challenges of dropping the anchor correctly to get the mine to deploy at the correct depth. Over the next year, engineers conducted four tests, which included an explosives test of the mine’s charge in the Iranian desert. Poor engineering plagued the design team. The detonation horns proved unreliable, the anchors repeatedly failed, and the designers could not get the mines to set for a specific depth. Mines failed to deploy or went too high, leaving them bobbing on the surface. By mid-1985, however, the design team had sufficiently overcome most of these problems to begin production. In July, the first Iranian-designated SADAF-01 (Myam) and SADAF-02 (M-08) mines began rolling out of an ammunition plant north of Tehran. At least twenty-two mines were produced each week. The Iranians hoped to produce three thousand such mines, and started stockpiling them near Bandar Abbas and 155 miles north at the large Saidabad naval ammunition depot at Sirjan. Meanwhile, regular Iranian naval forces confiscated four fishing vessels at Bushehr and modified each with a stern ramp. While dressed as fishermen to disguise their mission, they repeatedly practiced rolling dummy mines off the dhows.

In March 1986, the elite Special Boat Service of the Iranian marines, a holdover from the shah’s military, carried out Iran’s first mining operations in the shallow waters off Iraq in support of the country’s various offensives to take Basra. Joined by Revolutionary Guards in small boats, they repeatedly slipped in close to the main Iraqi port of Umm Qasr to mine its channel and effectively shut down shipping to Iraq’s major Persian Gulf port.
⁸

Iran developed a military plan called the Ghadir, named for an early Shia battle, to fight the American navy. Approved in 1984, it became Iran’s main plan to retaliate against an American attack. The Revolutionary Guard and the regular navy would form four surface groups, each comprising a destroyer or frigate supported by a number of guard small boats and logistics vessels converted into minelayers, and move quickly under the cover of air and artillery to lay three large minefields west of the Strait of Hormuz. The objective was to deny any tanker traffic from passing through the strait, except those headed to Iran, which would safely use several routes deliberately left open
through the minefields. Once this mission had been completed, the four task forces would attack U.S. Navy ships within reach.

On paper, the Ghadir plan looked impressive and indicated significant cooperation between the regular military and the guard. In reality, the Iranian military never displayed any semblance of such coordinated efforts, due largely to animosity between the Revolutionary Guard and the regular Iranian navy. Any joint command to control naval forces never evolved beyond paper. However, when American special operations forces uncovered the Ghadir plan in 1987, the audacity of Iran’s mining ambitions impressed the U.S. military. In two short years, it had gone from a saltwater tank in the desert to the conceivable ability to lay hundreds of mines and halt Gulf oil exports.

I
n May, Iran decided to try out some of its newly minted mines on Kuwait in hopes of intimidating the emir into reversing his decision to reflag his tankers with the Americans.
⁹
Two large Iranian dhows left Bushehr, mingling with the normal fishing and smuggling trade. They dropped fourteen mines in two parallel lines radiating off one of the channel’s navigation buoys.
¹⁰
The mines were carefully spaced thirty meters apart. So as not to interfere with their own fishing and smuggling trade, the Iranians made sure to set the mines’ depth to at least ten feet, well below the depth of a dhow but shallow enough to damage a large oil tanker.

On the same day the
Stark
met misfortune, the sixty-eight-thousand-ton Soviet tanker
Marshal Chuykov
entered the main deep-water entrance to Kuwait, Mina al-Ahmadi, to take on a load of Kuwaiti crude. Two miles east of the two navigation buoys that marked the channel’s entrance, a massive explosion rocked the tanker, blowing an eight-by-six-meter hole in her starboard side, which required extensive repairs at the dry-dock facilities in Dubai. Over the next month, three more ships hit mines, all within three-quarters of a mile of where the
Chuykov
had met misfortune. “We have potentially a serious situation here,” CENTCOM commander George Crist told Joint Chiefs chairman William Crowe.
¹¹

The American ambassador to Kuwait, Anthony Quainton, asked the Kuwaitis to undertake a more assertive military surveillance to prevent additional mines from being laid. But the Kuwaitis lacked both the hardware and
the fortitude to counter this challenge from Iran, and their initial reaction was to try to hire someone to do the job for them. They also looked into leasing Dutch minesweepers. As the Iranian mines threatened the entire forthcoming convoy operation, Washington offered to remove them, which pleased the emir, so long as it did not bring too many Americans into his country.

The United States quietly dispatched an eighteen-man team with twenty tons of equipment to take care of the mines.
¹²
Arriving on June 22, they quickly set to work operating from a Kuwaiti tug at the entrance to the Mina al-Ahmadi channel. Three days later, their sonar picked up a mine on a shallow reef in a hundred feet of water—its round explosive case was floating just ten feet below the surface. Divers defused it and flew it back to the United States for analysis. The United Kingdom had its own sources and had acquired a list of serial numbers of mines manufactured in Iran. When the British compared their list with the number stenciled in white lettering on the side of the mine found by the Americans, the number matched up perfectly in the correct sequence.

Over the next month, nine more mines were discovered and destroyed by navy divers.
¹³
Carefully laid to cover the channel, they were clearly not the result of haphazard mining by a few dhows, but a carefully planned attack on Kuwaiti shipping. Remarkably, when faced with an obvious Iranian military attack against Kuwait using naval mines, no one in either Tampa or Washington bothered to change the assumptions guiding the American convoy operations. Bernsen, Crist, and Crowe continued to believe that Iran would never dare to take such an overt action against the United States. Faith in the deterrent effect of the carrier and American firepower clouded every level of American thinking. CENTCOM took the modest step of requesting that a helicopter minesweeping squadron in Norfolk be placed on standby for the Persian Gulf. Some officers speculated that Iran might attack the convoys with suicide boats or conduct terrorist attacks against the Middle East Force, and additional marine security forces arrived to protect the Middle East Force headquarters in Bahrain. But no one wanted to believe that Tehran would mine beyond Kuwait Harbor, despite a growing body of intelligence that warned of more mining in the Gulf. The navy leadership pressured both Crowe and Weinberger to minimize the forces for Earnest Will, and this contributed to the complacency that gripped U.S. military leadership regarding Iran’s reaction to the United States protecting one of Iraq’s chief supporters. Saudi minesweepers arrived on scene, and as the date for the first convoy
approached, the combined presence of Saudi and Kuwaiti vessels backed by U.S. expertise seemed adequate to deal with any further Iranian actions against shipping. Satisfied, Bernsen even recommended sending home some of the eighteen men, so as not to aggravate Kuwaiti sensitivities.

T
he Iranian leadership worried about attacking the Americans directly. With their mining of Kuwait Harbor having failed to change the Kuwaiti emir’s mind about working with the Americans, a heated debate emerged within the Supreme Defense Council, Iran’s national security decision-making body. Senior officers in the regular Iranian military urged caution. They had spent much of their careers working with Americans and knew firsthand the destructive power the United States could bring down on Iran. But Revolutionary Guard commander Major General Mohsen Rezai dismissed their concerns. He believed the navy and air force officers still harbored an affinity for the Americans and were too enamored of technology. He pressed for a direct confrontation with the Americans and urged attacking U.S. warships.

“The Americans cannot take casualties. Vietnam and Beirut showed that,” he told his colleagues during one meeting in Tehran in June. “Any losses and the Americans will flee the Gulf!” Rezai and other guard generals—whose military experience was limited to fighting against the anemic Iraqi army—largely dismissed the importance of American airpower. We have been able to contend with the Western-backed Iraqi air force for seven years; we can contend with the American bombers too, they argued.

The ever pragmatic Hashemi Rafsanjani came down in the middle. Pressuring Kuwait into withdrawing support for Iraq was a necessity for an Iranian victory, and the American convoys only propped up Saddam Hussein, he stated. But American pilots were far better than Iraqi pilots; he pointed out that the Americans had been able to drop a bomb right down on Gaddafi’s house during the air attack against Libya in April 1986. The Americans could do the same to the supreme leader’s home. Naval mines, however, appealed to Rafsanjani. Covert mining against the Americans could inflict the losses needed to drive them out of the Gulf, but still lessened the likelihood of a massive American reprisal. Rather than attack them directly as Rezai advocated, how about surreptitiously mining the paths of the American ships? The final decision rested with Ayatollah Khomeini. In early July,
the supreme leader sided with Rafsanjani, over the vocal objections of Rezai. He ordered a secret mining campaign against the forthcoming American convoys, but no overt attack on any U.S. warship.

American intelligence knew nothing of the debate going on in Tehran. Instead, the chatter warned of an Iranian terrorist attack against Bernsen’s headquarters in Bahrain. Weinberger ordered U.S. personnel to avoid public venues and restrict themselves to their homes or work, and he detached additional marines to guard the base.
¹⁴

T
he U.S. military made preparations for the first Kuwaiti convoy. In order to meet the legal requirement of American ownership, the Kuwait Oil Tanker Company established a dummy company in Dover, Delaware—Chesapeake Shipping Inc.—and intended to reregister all eleven ships between mid-June and the end of August. Coast guard inspectors arrived in Kuwait to ensure the ships met U.S. safety regulations; many of the requirements were waived.
¹⁵
Although most of the crew remained foreign nationals, Kuwait hired new American masters from the Gleneagle Ship Management Company in Houston. One of the first to report was a retired navy captain, Frank Seitz, Jr. He took over the largest ship and the first to be reflagged, the sixth-largest tanker in the world, the four-hundred-thousand-ton
al-Rekkah
, now renamed the
Bridgeton
.
¹⁶