The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (54 page)

After a brief stop at Farsi, where they waited for darkness and said their prayers, the three boats headed out shortly after sunset. The flotilla comprised the Boghammer with five men, including the officer in charge, and two small fiberglass fishing boats, each with a crew of three. All three men were armed with the traditional weapons of the Revolutionary Guard navy—a 107-mm multiple rocket launcher, heavy machine guns, and smaller-caliber weapons. But one Iranian on the Boghammer carried one of the American Stinger missiles, with orders to shoot any American helicopter he saw.
¹⁹
Mahdavi’s mission was to prevent the Americans from interfering in the big attack on Saudi Arabia.

The three boats pulled up near the buoy and clustered together, the Iranian crews talking, relaxing, and smoking cigarettes as they prepared to bed down for the night. A man on one of the smaller boats heard the low whirl of a helicopter. He sprang to his gun and opened fire into the darkness in the general direction of the noise.

The lead Little Bird pulled out and vectored in the two attack variants trailing just behind. One unleashed two deadly fléchette rounds filled with tiny darts into the cluster of Revolutionary Guard boats. The American helo followed it up with a burst of machine-gun fire and explosive rockets. One of the fiberglass boats erupted in a massive fireball, blowing it in half and spreading burning gasoline across the water. The American pilot’s wingman came in and unleashed on the remaining small boat and the Boghammer, leaving the former on fire. One crewman pushed the throttle full forward, and the Boghammer tried to pick up speed and maneuver to avoid being hit. The guard commander ordered it to circle back around and then slow to try to pick up survivors from the other two boats. The Little Birds closed in again and were greeted by the flash of a missile or rocket coming up from the Boghammer, which passed harmlessly by the helicopter. The Boghammer got up speed and tried to flee, maneuvering erratically. One of the Iranians grasped an Iranian flag and kneeled down on the cabin floor, praying for deliverance. A Little Bird launched his last rocket, which skipped off the water and hit the cabin cruiser squarely in the port side, igniting a fuel tank. The boat erupted in a massive fireball, instantly killing the man praying in the cabin as well as Mahdavi. The boat sank in less than thirty seconds.

Evancoe had immediately ordered general quarters at the first sight of tracer fire, clearly visible in the darkness eight miles away. As the marine security platoon manned their positions, the remaining patrol boat was lowered into the water, joining the other already serving as a local protection and reaction force. Marines and SEALs tossed grenades over the side in case Iranian frogmen might be lurking, ready to storm the
Hercules
. The commander launched the other two patrol boats, which took a position just north of the barge. Three additional Little Birds arrived as reinforcements.

The two U.S. patrol boats went to full speed and quickly arrived at the scene. Fire and debris littered the water. They pulled five Iranians out and discovered a sixth man terribly burned, clinging to the buoy. As they slowly searched for more survivors, Petty Officer James Kelz noticed a Styrofoam case floating in the water that looked like one that housed a battery for a Stinger missile. He dove over the side of the boat and swam out to retrieve the case. It proved to be electrifying evidence. Word quickly made it to the president that Iran had the most advanced surface-to-air missile in the American inventory.

With only one corpsman, Wikul established a makeshift aid station in
the small office, its floor appropriately painted red. The medic frantically worked to save the six Iranians. One badly burned Iranian died shortly after arriving. Another more truculent Revolutionary Guard sailor muttered insults in Farsi at the Americans. He kept wiggling and seemingly trying to get up from his stretcher and kill them. One of the unsmiling SEALs leaned over and said, “How does it feel to be shot by the Great Satan?” Wikul realized that something more than hatred plagued the disgruntled Iranian. With a pistol trained on the patient, Wikul ordered the corpsman to turn him over, and when they removed his bunched-up shirt, a fountain of blood spurted out of a gaping bullet hole in the man’s back. The corpsman tried to plug the wound, and they carried him up the ladder to the flight deck to an awaiting medical evacuation helicopter. Halfway up the ladder, the wounded sailor let out a gurgled gasp of air and “suddenly got very heavy,” as one litter bearer recalled. Although this second Iranian died, the other four survived, and a marine helicopter flew them to a hospital on an awaiting warship.

Captain Frank Lugo immediately summoned Bernsen, who was in town having dinner with some Bahraini officials. Well to the south, an Iranian fired a missile from Rostam platform at a U.S. Navy helicopter operating from one of the frigates. The Middle East Force commander ordered the entire fleet to high alert.

While Evancoe tried to answer insistent questions from a nervous Middle East Force about the firefight at Middle Shoals buoy, the radar on the
Hercules
picked up forty small craft that appeared to be headed south toward the mobile sea base. To Wikul, it appeared to be part of a coordinated attack with the small boats at the buoy.
²⁰

Evancoe picked up the radio and called the commander of the two patrol boats, Lieutenant John Roark, standing in the path of the Iranian onslaught. “John, do you have the high-speed contacts?”

“Roger, Skipper. What are your orders?”

Evancoe calmly replied: “Turn and engage.” And Roark did.
²¹

Twenty miles to the south on the USS
Thach
, Captain Jerry O’Donnell was working out in the ship’s weight room when a call came from the watch officer: “Captain, your presence is required in the CIC [combat information center].” He ran to the darkened room filled with radios and the glow of various radars. His own helicopter was aloft, using its radar to guide the Little Birds. O’Donnell had it return to his ship to pick up his corpsman and take him to the
Hercules
to help treat the wounded prisoners.
²²

His radar then detected the Iranian flotilla, only they were west, toward Saudi Arabia, and not coming from Iran. After relaying this back to Lugo on the
La Salle
, and without waiting for permission, O’Donnell ordered general quarters and then flank speed. As men ran to their battle stations and manned and loaded the automatic grenade launchers and machine guns, the frigate kicked up a rooster tail of white foam as it made thirty knots north to position the ship between the
Hercules
and the Iranian small boats. There they joined four patrol boats and six army Little Birds, all arrayed to do battle with Mohsen Rezai’s Revolutionary Guard fleet.

Suddenly, the radar images started breaking up. Then they just disappeared. Although the images had been solid contacts, unlike any weather effect commonly witnessed, O’Donnell concluded they had all been a false echo, in part because they appeared right off the Saudi coast. While Evancoe and Wikul remained convinced of the Iranian presence, the captain of the
Thach
reported back to Bernsen that it had been a false echo.

But the two SEALs had been right. Operation Hajj was in full force, and the three Iranian flotillas off the Saudi coast were about to open fire. The boats had just landed Iranian commandos onto the Saudi beach when news of the disaster at Middle Shoals reached their makeshift headquarters in Bushehr. The ferocity and precision of the American attack stunned the Revolutionary Guard. With three boats sunk and seven sailors killed, and now faced with American helicopters and patrol boats headed toward them from the south, either Rezai or his deputy immediately concluded they had walked into an ambush. The Saudis and the Americans had been waiting for them. He recalled the entire force, which hastened back to Bushehr.

“No one realized how close a call we had that night,” both Evancoe and Lugo recounted. By sheer serendipity for the United States, the unwitting commander of the
Hercules
had arrived just in time to thwart the largest Revolutionary Guard naval operation of the war. In war it is sometimes better to be lucky than good. On October 8, 1987, the American special operations forces were both. Unbeknownst to the anxious servicemen on board the
Hercules
, this marked the first and only time the Iranians would seriously challenge the barges for control over the northern Gulf.

In Bushehr, Mohsen Rezai and other senior officers immediately suspected that someone had tipped off the Americans. They had a traitor in their midst. Iranian counterintelligence agents looked to the handful of senior officers with access to the details of the Hajj plan. Already wise to the CIA’s
Tehfran operation, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security focused on those who still harbored sympathy for the Americans. This included Captain Riahi.

S
tung by two successive defeats, Iran decided to strike back at the chief culprit who had invited the Americans in: Kuwait. A week after the Middle Shoals shoot-out, the Liberian-registered tanker
Sungari
sat taking on a load of crude at Kuwait’s main oil terminal just south of Kuwait City. A bright light, almost like a flare, appeared in the distance. It grew closer and larger. A massive Silkworm missile streaked in just above the waves. Its massive thousand-pound warhead slammed into the side of the
Sungari
, causing a fire but no casualties.

The next day, the reflagged tanker
Sea Isle City
approached the terminal to fill its own holds with Kuwaiti oil before the next convoy. The tanker’s master did a slight deviation to look at the damage to the
Sungari
from the day before. He chose the wrong time to be a tourist. Another Silkworm missile lumbered in. Locking on to the
Sea Isle City
’s white superstructure, the missile plowed into the pilothouse and crew quarters. The blast permanently blinded the American captain and the Filipino lookout and wounded sixteen other crewmen.

Although Iranian president Ali Khamenei said that “Almighty God alone knew best where the missile came from,” American intelligence quickly backtracked the missiles’ paths and found that both originated from the Iranian-captured peninsula of al-Faw, Iraq.
²³
Both Silkworms had actually been captured from the Iraqi military.

Rear Admiral Dennis Brooks commanded a newly established joint task force of all forces involved in the convoy operations. He decided to run this operation with little input from Bernsen. He hated the mobile sea base idea and disliked much of the surveillance scheme, including deploying the NSA assets down to the smaller ships. But Brooks knew what his boss, General Crist, wanted in the plan. With Washington unwilling to take stronger measures, the United States would move only to destroy the oil platforms that enabled the Revolutionary Guard to operate in the Gulf. Prime on Crist’s mind was the one at Rostam. Rostam was actually three platforms—two only about a hundred yards apart and one to the north about two miles away, each resembling a square building and a three-level parking garage on stilts. They had facilitated the
Iran Ajr
’s mission and served as a major forward
command post for the Iranian small boats. Strategically situated in the south-central Gulf along the convoy route, they provided the Iranian military with a steady stream of reports about U.S. ship movements in the Gulf.
²⁴
While Crist ordered Brooks to give warning to the Iranians in order to avoid loss of life, any display of hostility would be met with American firepower, and he authorized Brooks to go into Iranian waters and airspace if necessary.
²⁵

At midafternoon on October 19, Brooks amassed four destroyers and two frigates off Rostam, set to begin the American answer to the Silkworm attack, code-named Operation Nimble Archer. Stationed off to the side was Jerry O’Donnell’s USS
Thach
with Marc Thomas’s SEALs embarked. Over the standard maritime radio channel the Iranians heard in English and Farsi: “Rashadt [Rostam] oil platform, this is U.S. Navy. You have twenty minutes to evacuate the platform.”

The Iranians heeded the warning. Looking on from the bridge of the
Thach
, Thomas could clearly see Iranians scrabbling down the ladder from one platform and into a tethered tugboat. Forming a tight line of battle, separated by only one thousand yards, the five U.S. warships slowly steamed in a lazy racetrack, their guns lowered.
²⁶

“Commence fire.” For the next hour, the American ships rained shell upon shell down on the platform proper and its nearby drilling rig. Most missed, falling over or under or simply passing harmlessly through the Erector Set–like construction of the oil platforms, but enough found their mark to obscure the target in smoke, blowing off the helicopter deck and severing one of the main support legs.
²⁷

From the bridge of the
Thach
, Marc Thomas watched the fireworks. In walked a slightly overweight chief with glasses, wearing his khaki uniform and a green steel-pot helmet. The chief was an avid reader of
Soldier of Fortune
magazine and had become friendly with Thomas, asking his opinion about fighting knives and guns described in the magazine. “We are really kicking their ass!” the chief said, pumping both fists into the air. After more than a thousand rounds had been fired, a cease-fire finally was ordered and the
Thach
with the SEALs closed in.

Thomas and his SEALs approached the two abject platforms just at sunset. One was completely engulfed in a tower of flames. A shell had ignited the gas coming up from beneath the ocean floor, and as it turned out, the safety valve to prevent such a blowout had been installed backward. Even two hundred yards away the heat was intense. As it was too dangerous to board,
Thomas’s SEALs were directed to occupy the northern platform, which had not been shelled, to see if there was any useful intelligence.