The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (47 page)

The French aircraft carrier did help the Americans. After the Khor Fakkan mining, the French minister of defense privately told Weinberger that his country would consider a joint air strike on Iran should the mining continue. Paris still wanted to settle the score from the Beirut bombings four years earlier. Crist dispatched Bernsen to talk to the French admiral when the
Clemenceau
stopped in Djibouti. The two nations agreed to joint training between their carriers, and the Americans shared some of their Invoke Resolve Iranian war plans with the French. Commander Ziegler came away convinced that in the event of a war, France would stand with Middle East Force.
²⁷

Rafsanjani became the public face for Iran’s response to the mining of Fujairah. He blamed the United States for backing Iraq and creating the crisis. “Iran has announced time and again that its operations in the Persian Gulf are retaliatory. If those responsible for creating the insecurity were prevented from doing so, all problems would now have been solved.”
²⁸
In a revealing speech at Friday prayers at Tehran University on August 21, Rafsanjani offered Iranian minesweepers to aid the international effort while
casting the blame for the mining on the United States. “It is the situation in the United States that forces Americans to embark on adventurism in far corners of the world,” he said. The Iranian laid the blame on the need to shore up the administration’s popularity in the aftermath of the Iranian arms-sales scandal, which Rafsanjani called “McFarlane’s disgrace.” Rafsanjani failed to mention his own significant involvement in that incident, which he said revealed America’s “rotten nature.”

While laying the blame for the mines on Iraq or the United States, Rafsanjani bragged, “If we intended to plant mines, well, oh God, it is quite a different story…this is fully within our means. You can send twenty-seven or twenty-eight ships to the Gulf,” he continued. “Each one of these vessels is a target for us. There used to be four targets, now there are twenty-seven.”
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In response to the mining, the United States sent a tame démarche to Iran via the Swiss embassy. It reassured the Iranians of American neutrality while asserting the right to freedom of navigation and to protect U.S.-flagged vessels. The United States called on Iran to accept a cease-fire with Iraq and to refrain from laying additional mines as the “U.S. government would consider this an extremely dangerous escalation and a direct military threat.” Iran never responded to the U.S. letter and took it as more hollow words.
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They had laid three strings of mines aimed squarely at the United States and the superpower had replied with a tepid warning.

Iran answered the démarche by laying more mines. Another Revolutionary Guard vessel operating from Farsi Island dropped a string of smaller Myam mines about twelve miles south of the
Bridgeton
field, where the convoy route took a turn to wind around the Iranian exclusion zone. The Iranian vessel set its stern on the light at the small Saudi island of Karan and simply headed back toward Farsi, dropping one off the stern every three hundred yards. The targets of these mines were not the convoys but the American minesweepers that would have to move through this stretch on their way north to clear the
Bridgeton
field. The Iranians set the mines for a much shallower depth.
³¹

W
ith
Hunter
and
Striker
ready and having dodged the Khor Fakkan mining, on August 8 the United States began its first major convoy since the
Bridgeton
attack. Tensions remained high in Washington as Crowe phoned Crist for hourly updates, and the CENTCOM commander spent the
better part of three days in his own command center monitoring the convoy’s progress, sleeping occasionally on a cot in his office. When the convoy entered the Strait of Hormuz and into the range of the Silkworm missiles, Crowe entered the maze of the National Military Command Center, taking a seat in a small conference room where a brigadier general sat twenty-four hours a day as the senior watch officer, just off a large open area where action officers tracked events from around the globe. Crowe monitored the ships’ movement, poised to immediately contact either Weinberger or Carlucci in the White House Situation Room should the Iranians decide to attack the convoy.
³²

A 107-foot-long black SR-71 flew a sweep along the length of the Gulf photographing the Silkworm sites, then up north to photograph Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats at Farsi, Bushehr, and Kharg Island. To turn around, the high-flying jet flew over both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, with Prince Bandar getting the king’s permission to cut over the northeast section of the kingdom. As the SR-71 passed Bandar Abbas, the State Department sent out a flash message warning the American embassies in Baghdad, Riyadh, and Kuwait of the flight. The aircraft cut across Iranian waters before heading west over Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, then turned with a loud sonic boom that rattled the Kuwait capital.
³³

Lyons looked to provoke a fight with Iran. He had Rear Admiral Lyle Bull on the carrier USS
Constellation
aggressively push his F-14 fighters in toward Bandar Abbas. Several times they intentionally flew into Iranian airspace, either to intimidate Iran or to provoke the war Lyons wanted.
³⁴
About two hours before the convoy entered the strait, a U.S. Navy P-3 prop aircraft took off from the air base on the Omani island of Masirah. With their exceptional electro-optical surveillance systems, CENTCOM viewed the P-3 flights as a key component in monitoring Iranian Silkworm sites. As the plane headed around the strait just outside Iranian airspace and flew into the Gulf, what appeared to be an Iranian F-4 took off from Bandar Abbas and closed in on the tail of the P-3. Fearing the F-4 would fire on the helpless P-3, two F-14s were vectored in to engage the Iranian jet. The two large swing-wing American fighters dove down onto the Iranian aircraft. The lead American fired off one air-to-air missile that promptly malfunctioned. So the F-14s launched another missile each, both of which sailed wide when the pilots hastily pulled the trigger without a proper fix on the Iranian boogie. The F-4 banked hard and headed back to the air base at Bandar Abbas. The U.S. aircraft decided not to pursue.
³⁵

Instead of inciting Iran, the air engagement brought the simmering Crist-Lyons feud to a full boil. The following day, after a closer examination of the Hawkeye’s tapes and signals information collected by the NSA, Bernsen and Crist concluded the Iranian aircraft was not an F-4, but a much larger and slower four-engine C-130 used by the Iranians for maritime surveillance. After going over the evidence, both agreed that the Iranian aircraft had not been headed toward the P-3 and likely never even knew the U.S. plane was there. In a “personal for” message for senior military leaders, without mentioning Lyons by name, Crist cautioned on the need “to guard against” starting an unintentional war with the Iranians. He viewed Lyons’s actions as reckless and risking escalation of the low-grade conflict into a full-scale war that neither side wanted.
³⁶

When Crist called Lyle Bull asking for clarification on the incident, he was met with insolence. Bull’s carrier had just left the designated station to support Earnest Will and CENTCOM, so he technically fell back under PACOM and Lyons’s control. The gruff rear admiral and supporter of Lyons cheerfully told the marine four-star general, “I don’t have to answer your questions. I don’t work for you now.”
³⁷

General Crist turned bright red with anger. “Who does that son of a bitch think he is!” He called Crowe to complain, and the chairman promised to look into it. Meanwhile, Crowe continued his sidebar dealings with Lyons. When news inevitably leaked out and CNN reported the incident two days later, Lyons suggested to Crowe, “Tell them we fired a warning shot at the Iranians.” Crowe liked the idea and reported it as such.
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General Crist had had enough of Lyons, Bull, and the navy. Few senior officers had his joint expertise, and he even kept a copy of the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in his top desk drawer as a reference. The act had been designed to fix just this sort of service parochialism. It gave him the legal authority to run military operations in his area, and if Crowe would not enforce the law, he would bring the issue to a culmination.

As the operation expanded to include a battleship, an aircraft carrier, and nearly thirty warships, and the prospect grew of a military action against Iran, Earnest Will surpassed the realm of a single one-star admiral in Bahrain to control. On August 10, Crowe met privately with Trost in his office to discuss command and control for the Persian Gulf. The chairman did not invite Crist, even though it directly impacted his forces. The chief of naval
operations agreed to get back quickly with a recommendation for Crowe, which he did the next day. Drafted by his operations officer, Vice Admiral Hank Mustin, it largely concurred with Lyons’s views and recommended giving the mission to an existing navy command.

General Crist challenged the process with his own recommendation. He proposed forming a new headquarters: a joint task force to command all the military forces involved in Earnest Will. The aircraft carrier or battleship outside the Gulf, as well as air force AWACS planes in Saudi Arabia and Bernsen’s Middle East Force, would all belong to this one commander, who in turn would report back only to General Crist in Tampa. “The entire command structure was based upon nod of the head and handshake deals,” Crist said in an interview in 1988. “It violated everything I knew about unity of command.” If Iran decided to escalate, Crist added, there needed to be a way to coordinate the individual services. “What I wanted was to create one command for the whole force and integrate all our resources under one commander served by a staff composed of members from all services.” There would not be another incident where a carrier commander supporting the convoys would say he did not work for the CENTCOM commander.
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While technically Crist had the authority to establish this command himself, the idea would be too contentious to implement unilaterally. He ran the idea past Armitage to make sure he had Weinberger’s support, and on August 13, the day Crowe told Crist about Lyons’s deception with the
Guadalcanal
, the CENTCOM commander sent a formal message proposing the task force idea to Crowe. Based upon the provisions of the newly enacted Goldwater-Nichols Act, the joint task force would control all forces taking part in Earnest Will regardless of service and location inside or outside the Gulf. Crist proposed a navy admiral as the commander, since the navy had the preponderance of the forces assigned, but his deputy would be an air force brigadier general, as that service’s planes would be crucial for any larger attacks against Iran.
⁴⁰
While forming this type of command is routine today—in fact the norm for military operations—in 1987 it challenged conventions, and the thought of an air force general riding around on a navy ship seemed surreal.

The next day Weinberger and the Joint Chiefs met in the Tank to discuss Crist’s proposal. With Weinberger already behind the idea, the chiefs and Crowe swiftly agreed to Crist’s recommendation.
⁴¹
Their only input was to downgrade the rank of the commander from three stars to two.

But Lyons still held out hope that Crowe would give him the go-ahead to conduct his Window of Opportunity plan. On August 17, he flew out to the
Constellation
. Lyons carried the latest version of his Iran war plan to personally pass to Lyle Bull. When the
Constellation
and
Ranger
turned over on August 28, the former would steam southeast into the Indian Ocean as if headed back to her home port in the Pacific. A few days later, on September 3, the
Missouri
would arrive, at which time Lyons would secretly order Bull’s carrier battle group back to the north Arabian Sea. Lyons’s forces would be in place for a major military action, with Iran being none the wiser. No doubt it was a clever means to clandestinely build forces under the noses of the Iranian military, but in doing so, Lyons never consulted either of the two unified commanders sanctioned by law to make such decisions—Hays and Crist. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs had encouraged Lyons, but he’d kept that to himself and never informed the defense secretary, who had more than passing interest in whether the United States attacked another country.

That evening, Lyons met with Bull and a cocksure redhead named Anthony Less, the incoming
Ranger
battle group commander. They were joined by Rear Admiral Dennis Brooks, who had been selected as the new joint task force commander, a man Lyons held in disdain.
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Brooks had just returned from Bahrain and his first meeting with Bernsen and Crist, and Lyons ordered him to back-brief him on what Crist had said to Brooks. Everything Denny said irritated Lyons. Crist had given Brooks specific instructions that he would work only for Crist and was not to have any contact with Lyons. Brooks opined that he might get a third star out of the assignment and suggested he needed a staff of 120 people. “You are lucky to have one star,” Lyons thought as he heard Brooks talk about cutting him out of the operation.

But what really set off Lyons was a passing reference by Brooks to the Window of Opportunity plan. Lyons immediately halted the discussion and threw both Bull and Less out of the stateroom to chew out Brooks in private for divulging his top secret plan.

Less had no idea what Brooks was talking about, so he met privately with one of Lyons’s aides, whom he’d known for many years.