The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (53 page)

“How good is your source for this?” Crowe asked the CIA officer.

“He is a recent recruit, a navy captain well placed within the Iranian military. He has proven reliable in the past,” the officer replied.

After quickly checking with the deputy national security adviser, Colin Powell, at the White House, Crowe dismissed the CIA officer and swiveled around in his chair, picked up the secure telephone on the credenza behind
his imposing wooden desk, and punched the autodial for the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Their relationship remained strong with Bandar helping to arrange financial support for the CIA’s secret wars in Afghanistan and Central America, and he had recently hosted a meeting at his Potomac River home between the CIA and Iraqi officials about sharing satellite intelligence of Iran.
²

That afternoon the two men met in Crowe’s office. “We have a tip-off from a source of an impending attack on your oil facilities,” Crowe began. “The Iranians are deliberately flooding their radios with false information, so we don’t know the exact day, but likely October second. You need to give them a warm welcome.”
³

“I told you the Iranians were building up for something,” Bandar replied, referring to a conversation between the two men earlier. “If pushed, we will respond forcefully.” He grew visibly angry as he continued. “We will bomb their oil facilities! Our military plans are doable; we will hit Iranian oil facilities on Kharg Island and their port of Bushehr with ten Tornado aircraft! I just need to know,” Bandar added, “will you support us?”

In July 1987, Iran had tried to instigate an uprising in Mecca during the annual hajj. Dozens of Revolutionary Guard soldiers had secretly arrived in the holy city armed with rifles and explosives. One of William Casey’s CIA recruits in the Revolutionary Guard, Reza Kahlili, had tipped off the agency to the Iranian scheme. The CIA passed it to Saudi security, which moved forcefully against the Iranians, killing 275 Iranian demonstrators, including some hapless civilians. The commander of the Revolutionary Guard, Major General Mohsen Rezai, advocated retaliation. The truculent former electrical engineer had long advocated an attack on Saudi Arabia or American forces in the Gulf, and he had nearly succeeded in doing so on the night of the first convoy, until he was reined in by the supreme leader. This time, Ayatollah Khomeini agreed with Rezai. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia needed to be taught a lesson.

Captain Touradj Riahi served in a plum billet as head of the navy plans division in Tehran. He worked closely with a Revolutionary Guard officer and former colleague in the old shah’s navy to write a plan to strike back at Saudi Arabia, fittingly named Operation Hajj. The plan showed a rare level of cooperation between the Revolutionary Guard and the Iranian navy. The Iranians would amass dozens of guard small boats at Bushehr and Kharg Island in the northern Gulf. With a Revolutionary Guard officer in charge, embarked on
one of the smaller navy missile boats serving as his flagship, this mosquito swarm of a fleet would be split into three flotillas. Under the cover of darkness, they would move en masse across the Gulf and then attack different Saudi and Kuwaiti oil facilities around al-Khafji with rockets and machine guns. One group would land commandos in Saudi Arabia to destroy a vital oil pumping station, perhaps even one of the Saudi desalination plants, which provided much of the desert kingdom’s freshwater.

On September 30, 1987, General Rezai arrived at the Persian Gulf port of Bushehr. To control Operation Hajj, the Iranians had established a makeshift headquarters in an old dormitory building next to the jetty at Bushehr. Captain Riahi came down from Tehran to serve as the senior naval officer, with the head of the Revolutionary Guard, General Rezai himself, supervising the operation. Using the diversion of their well-publicized “Martyrdom” military exercise around the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians quietly began pulling a number of the small Boston Whaler–type gunboats out of the water and loading them on flatbed trucks. They covered the boats with tarps to conceal their nature from prying eyes and passing American satellites. Over a period of several weeks, the Revolutionary Guard drove an untold number of boats up to Bushehr and quietly amassed at least four dozen small boats and one missile patrol boat in the northern Gulf.

After the
Iran Ajr
sinking, the Iranian commander decided to also establish a blocking force to interdict any American reinforcements moving up from Bahrain. He would park a few boats astride the shipping channel, and they would carry a nasty surprise. In case the army Little Birds helicopters showed again, the Revolutionary Guard brought along a Stinger missile, the most sophisticated American handheld antiaircraft system. Only recently the U.S. government had decided to allow the CIA to provide these to the Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviets, and the Stingers had helped turn the tide of the war against Moscow. Without the agency’s knowledge, Ismail Khan, a powerful Afghan warlord friendly to Iran, had spirited ten of these missiles to the Iranian military. Now Iran gleefully intended to turn America’s own weapons back on the Great Satan. As the day of the attack approached, senior officials from Tehran arrived to witness the operation, joining a cadre of army and navy officers.

Within the CIA, Captain Riahi was a prized agent. He had repeatedly proven his worth by a steady stream of timely and accurate information about the Iranian military. He now found himself as the senior naval officer in the
most significant Iranian military operation of the entire war. At considerable risk, Riahi managed to quickly get the details of the Iranian attack back to his handler at Tehfran. How he passed this is not clear. He may have relayed it through a German-speaking man in Tehran simply known as “the Austrian.” While the CIA had a spy effort against Iran in Vienna (Austria was one of the other countries where Iranians could obtain a visa to the United States), his true nationality remains ambiguous. This mystery man emerged from the shadows on one occasion: he turned up one evening for a party at Captain Riahi’s home and was introduced as the man who’d helped obtain his son’s visa.
⁴

Alerted to the threat, CENTCOM started monitoring the massing of small boats near Bushehr. On September 26, the DIA reported up to thirty-three small boats alone at the port. Four days later, U.S. intelligence detected as many as seventy Revolutionary Guard boats arrayed along a forty-five-mile-long front.
⁵
This alert brought Bandar into Crowe’s office that afternoon.

On October 1, General George Crist, who was in the region, called Crowe to update him about a conversation with senior Saudi military officials. If Iran attacked, the Saudis would allow U.S. attack helicopters and surveillance aircraft into the kingdom. Crist wanted to send three U.S. Navy P-3 turboprop planes immediately to Saudi Arabia, as their excellent surface search radar would be invaluable for detecting the Iranian boats. Crowe contacted Bandar and relayed the request, adding that these were “nonoffensive” planes. Prince Bandar immediately called his father, the defense minister, in Riyadh and obtained his permission for the deployment of the P-3s to the King Abdul Aziz Air Base at Dhahran. Crist assigned his chief of staff, Don Penzler, to coordinate the details with the Saudi military.
⁶
The next day, Crowe, Crist, Armitage, and Bandar (accompanied by a Saudi major general) gathered for a hastily arranged conference in the chairman’s office. Bandar appeared nervous and agitated but struck a defiant tone. His government, however, was clearly worried and wanted reassurances of American support if Iran attacked. The P-3s were on the way, Crowe said, due in Dhahran in three days, and Crist offered to deploy attack helicopters or fighter jets if the Saudis asked.

That evening, October 2, an American AWACS radar plane out of Saudi Arabia patrolled the northern Gulf. Designed to detect airborne targets, on that night it used its radar to look for any movement on the surface of the
water. Suddenly, it picked up forty-five small blips moving rapidly toward the Saudi-Kuwait border and the al-Khafji oil facility. The expected attack appeared under way, and the pilot sounded the general alarm. Saudi Arabia scrambled F-15 fighters. Harold Bernsen at Middle East Force ordered the two frigates carrying the army Little Birds plus the helicopter carrier
Guadalcanal
with the marine attack helicopters north at maximum speed to intercept the Iranian horde.
⁷

When the host of American and Saudi ships and planes arrived, they found no Iranian fleet, just a few odd fishing dhows plying the waters. The next day the American P-3s began flying, and they too saw nothing unusual. After a week of intelligence warnings, the Iranian forces had simply disappeared.

Saudi generals then accused the Americans of making up the entire attack story. Penzler received an earful from the skeptical commander of the Saudi land forces, General Yusef Rasid, who accused him of being part of an elaborate hoax to get U.S. military forces inside his country. Others pointed out that it had been a stormy night; perhaps the AWACS had picked up nothing more than wavelets?
⁸

In truth, Mohsen Rezai had had every intention of attacking Saudi Arabia that night. The dark moonless night and rough seas had combined to turn his attack into a fiasco. The missile boat serving as the command ship became disoriented. She veered well off course, heading in the wrong direction. The high seas swamped one of the small boats and tossed and scattered the others all over the northern Gulf.
⁹
Undaunted, the Revolutionary Guard commander ordered another attempt for the following week. This time, Captain Riahi could not get the message out to his American handlers at Tehfran.

I
nto this environment, the barge
Hercules
deployed for her first operation in the northern Gulf. Paul Evancoe was assigned as the commander, and since his arrival in early September, the SEAL had worked tirelessly to outfit this first mobile sea base. His men filled twenty thousand sandbags and installed metal ballistic shields around the gun emplacements in the four corners. He had old crew quarters and drilling equipment removed and replaced by steel ammunition bunkers, an aircraft hangar, and a communications van. At one point forty welders worked twenty-four hours a day to transform the
Hercules
into an armed firebase bristling with weapons manned by 177 marines and special operators and a few intelligence linguists.
¹⁰
Meanwhile, work continued on the
Wimbrown
. Unfortunately, it would not be ready for operation until December.

The
Hercules
had a civilian crew of about thirty serving in such capacities as welders, cooks, and crane operators. Despite the secret nature of the sea bases, the civilian crew hired by Brown and Root were a motley group from Pakistan and the Philippines. Their background checks appeared sketchy to American counterintelligence officers, who worried that some might be Iranian spies or saboteurs.
¹¹
Over the next year of the mobile sea bases’ existence, however, other than to serve overly spicy curry to American special operators, all behaved properly and kept quiet.

Incredibly, as tugs towed the
Hercules
up to its station near Farsi Island on October 6, neither Evancoe nor Wikul knew anything about the near war between Iran and Saudi Arabia the preceding week.
¹²
For the first two days, they sent out their patrol boats looking for suspicious vessels. They found one, an Iranian dhow with an antenna sticking out of its cockpit, which appeared to be collecting intelligence on the barge. Both Wikul and Evancoe felt a growing sense of unease. With the nearest American ship, the frigate USS
Thach
, which provided air defense for the
Hercules
, twenty miles to the south, “we had the distinct feeling of being hung out to dry,” Wikul said.
¹³

On the evening of October 8, Wikul and Evancoe talked about their situation. Each had a strong suspicion that the Iranians intended to attack. Rather than just sit back and wait for the Iranians, they decided to put out a listening post to try to find out what the Iranians on Farsi Island were doing. After nightfall, they would send two patrol boats out with a small radar-absorbing Seafox. It would carry a couple of marine Farsi linguists with sophisticated eavesdropping equipment. As the patrol boats passed close to the Middle Shoals buoy marking shallow water, approximately fifteen miles west of Farsi, the Seafox would be dropped off, its radar signature blending into that of the buoy’s.
¹⁴
From there, the marine linguists could listen in on the Iranian island and the Revolutionary Guard small boats. Similar tactics had proved successful with marine helicopters in other parts of the Gulf.
¹⁵

After dark the operation got under way. Two blacked-out patrol boats left
Hercules
at nine p.m. with the small Seafox in tow and headed for the buoy only eight miles away. As insurance, Evancoe had three of the Little Birds fly ahead to scout out the buoy in front of the slower-moving patrol
boats.
¹⁶
The lead helicopter, looking through its black-and-white infrared camera, noticed three boats already at the buoy. “That’s strange,” the pilot thought. “Our boats shouldn’t be here yet.” As he closed to within one hundred yards, he saw someone lean up in a small bass boat and man a heavy machine gun mounted on a tripod at the bow. As the American helicopter banked hard to the left, a string of tracker bullets whizzed past his canopy, missing the helicopter by mere feet.

U
nbeknownst to the Americans, that very same night Mohsen Rezai decided to retry the Operation Hajj attack plan that had been thwarted by bad weather the week before. While the main flotilla assembled around some Iranian platforms in the northern Fereidoon oil field, that morning one of the larger cabin cruiser–type boats called a Boghammer and two smaller boats had departed Bushehr for Farsi Island. The group was commanded by a very forceful and competent young Revolutionary Guard officer named Mahdavi, who told his men, “You are headed on a great mission!”
¹⁷
Not all of the ten-man crew shared their commander’s enthusiasm. They were a motley collection of conscripted landlubbers: one was a hulking illiterate farm boy, and another had deserted the army and traveled to Bushehr to visit a friend. The guards swept him off the street and threw him on the Boghammer to serve as their cook.
¹⁸