The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (57 page)

Rinn and the
Roberts
increasingly found themselves executing a new, more aggressive strategy against Iran. The new secretary of defense, Frank Carlucci, came to the Pentagon intent on making some changes to the U.S. operations in the Gulf. He was appalled at the specter of Iranians attacking unarmed merchant ships in plain sight of U.S. warships. He agreed with Joint Chiefs chairman Crowe that it was unseemly to have U.S. captains—bound by strict rules of engagement—unable to come to the aid of helpless seamen being gunned down by Iranian frigates and small boats. Admiral Crowe phoned General George Crist in Tampa late that January to direct him to up the ante on the Iranians. “Don’t start a war,” he said. “But, George, be aggressive and use radar, or this ship’s presence—whatever you can do to
break up their attacks.” U.S. warships could not enter Iranian waters, but if they needed to push up into the Iranian exclusion zone, so be it.

It fell to Tony Less to implement the new strategy. “The Iranians are chicken shits,” Less said. “When they see a ship coming over the horizon, they run for home.” Less briefed the newly arrived ship skippers, including Rinn: “Guys, we’re at war. Don’t lose your ship, but you’ve got radars…. Stymie them, don’t let them lay mines, don’t let them attack ships.” What followed was a series of intensifying confrontations between the two fleets, with the
Roberts
leading the charge.

The first encounter occurred near the Iranian island of Sirri. The
Roberts
detected the Iranian frigate
Sabalan
closing in for an attack on the unsuspecting Greek tanker
Tandis
. Rinn ordered “all ahead flank” as the
Roberts
rapidly closed on the Iranian ship. The British-built
Sabalan
was smaller than her American counterpart, only 311 feet in length and less than half the tonnage. But she represented the most formidable ship in the Iranian navy and was armed by a rapid-fire 114-mm turreted gun forward and three relatively small Sea Killer antiship missiles aft. The
Sabalan
was commanded by Abdollah Manavi, a regular navy officer with the dubious reputation of being one of the most cruel Iranian captains in the war. This odious skipper had earned the nickname “Captain Nasty” due to the ship’s infamous reputation for deliberately attacking the crew quarters of neutral shipping. Even when his command in Bandar Abbas directed Captain Nasty not to attack a tanker, he often disregarded the order or openly lied to his superiors, seemingly delighting in aiming the ship’s gunfire at the crewmen and their lifeboats. Then the
Sabalan
would transmit to the helpless tanker, “Have a nice day.”
⁹

Rinn brought his ship up on the
Sabalan
’s stern, closing to within one mile. The crew of the Iranian vessel stared nervously back, pointing deck-mounted machine guns at the American ship. With the U.S. frigate on his stern, the Iranian captain turned hard to port and hit the accelerator. What followed was a strange minuet, with the
Sabalan
resembling a hare trying to elude a pursuing fox, turning rapidly to the left and right trying to throw off the pursuing U.S. ship and get into a position to bring her forward gun to bear while the
Roberts
matched her turn for turn. After several hours, the
Sabalan
had enough and headed north toward Iran. The
Roberts
did not pursue. That night an elated Rinn wrote his brother, “Crew on a high—captain’s got balls!”
¹⁰

The next few encounters between the two ships near Abu Musa Island
nearly ended in bloodshed. While the
Sabalan
continued to back down from a confrontation, her sister ship, the
Sahand
, was not so docile. On one occasion, the
Roberts
and the
Sahand
spied each other on radar; each turned immediately and headed directly for the other. Closing at a combined speed of nearly sixty knots an hour in a deadly game of chicken, each locked on to the other with its fire control radar, as Rinn put a missile up on his forward mount, ready to send it screaming toward the
Sahand
should the Iranian open fire. Just before the two collided, the
Sahand
turned away.

Rinn continued to harass the Iranian ships near Abu Musa. On one occasion, he shadowed an Iranian ship all night despite some of the worst weather in the Gulf, with waves higher than the
Roberts
’s bridges, following the Iranian warship into the Iranian exclusion zone and breaking off pursuit only after daybreak. Less was pleased. While he admonished Rinn about being “too provocative,” he admired the skipper of the
Samuel B. Roberts
. “He was one of the best captains I’d seen,” Admiral Less later commented. The aggressive new strategy seemed to be working; Iranian attacks dropped off as the U.S. ships had the desired intimidating influence. U.S. intelligence monitoring Iranian communication at the 1st Naval District headquarters in Bandar Abbas noted the Iranians’ growing concern at an inability to attack ships in the southern Gulf, one report remarking that the United States seemed intent on doing everything to “protect” Saddam Hussein’s war machine.

One person who saw this cat-and-mouse game firsthand was an Associated Press reporter named Richard Pyle. Short, with black hair and a bit of a hangdog face, he possessed a quick wit and an attentive mind. Few reporters had as much combat experience as Pyle. He served briefly in the army before becoming a reporter, rising to become the AP bureau chief in Saigon for much of the Vietnam War. Here he learned firsthand the idiosyncrasies of the U.S. military, as well as the tragedy of war, brought home by the loss of four reporters and close friends in Laos, including famed reporter Larry Burrows. Pyle was the only American reporter continuously covering the ongoing Iran-Iraq War and the U.S. intervention, Earnest Will. He lived in Bahrain, where his wife attended the same small Catholic church as Tony Less and his wife. Pyle threw himself into the tanker reflagging story; he rode nearly every ship in the Gulf and served in virtually every press pool, including the very first with the
Bridgeton
.

Pyle watched the increased harassment with great interest, fully aware that the United States had escalated the operation and of the likelihood of
more military confrontation. He rode on the
Roberts
with Rinn during his long night tracking the Iranian frigate. “I could not believe what this guy Rinn was doing. He must have scared the hell out of that Iranian ship!” In an interview with him in his stateroom, Rinn said, “We are going to follow him. He’ll know we are there and we are going to make him think that we know where he is and what he is doing all the time. It’s a psychological operation.” Whether the Iranians were intimidated, however, was a different story.

A
s the United States tracked Iran’s boats, the Iranian military was doing the same to the U.S. Navy. The Revolutionary Guard noticed a seam in the American surveillance scheme: the area in the south-central Gulf. In the summer of 1987, Bernsen had recommended stationing the
Guadalcanal
there to provide surveillance, but this had been denied. Less had tried to cover it by stationing warships and overflights of the P-3s operating from Saudi Arabia, but they could not be maintained continuously. Iran noticed an opening as the U.S. ships were pulled to the north and south on various duties, leaving a momentary window of opportunity. When Iranian forces on Rostam and Sassan confirmed the dearth of U.S. forces, they decided to act. For the first time in five months, Iran gambled with the invisible hand.

Following a meeting with senior military leaders in Tehran, on April 12 the Iranian ship
Charak
sailed from Bandar Abbas without fanfare. A small vessel at thirteen hundred tons and two hundred feet long, she had been designed as a lighter or support ship, with a wide, flat open area running from the bow back to the bridge and superstructure near the stern. She had a complement of around twenty, not counting a small fanatical Revolutionary Guard detachment. After a brief stop at Abu Musa Island for some last-minute instructions,
Charak
headed off west past the Iranian oil platforms manned by other Iranian guards: Sirri, Sassan, and Rostam. A four-engine, American-made Iranian P-3 flew the route that afternoon, providing some intelligence on U.S. ship positions, relaying it back to Abu Musa. On the night of April 13, the
Charak
discharged her duties. In a location where shoals forced the tanker route into a channel, the Iranian ship aligned herself with a navigation light on the horizon. Extinguishing her navigation lights, she sailed in the blackness. One officer had a stopwatch in his hand, while others methodically fused the black spherical objects arranged on top of the flat open deck hatch and carefully rolled them to the edge of a plank protruding
off the side. Twelve mines fell over the side; unlike the
Iran Ajr
, the mines were arrayed in a circular pattern, designed to saturate the area and increase the chances of finding a target. Either that night or the next, the
Charak
or her sister, the
Souru
, undertook a similar mission some sixty miles to the southeast along an old Earnest Will tanker track that had not been used for several convoys.

O
n the afternoon of April 14, Captain Rinn was down in his cabin and, in a good-natured way, berating his cook, Chief Petty Officer Kevin Ford, for having too much spinach on the menu. Ford was planning a steak and lobster dinner the next night, complete with a side dish of spinach. This vegetable choice had become a matter of some debate on the ship, and Rinn had been reading the numerous complaints dropped in the ship’s suggestion box about an overabundance of spinach. “No more spinach, Ford!” Rinn exclaimed.

Suddenly, a pronounced shudder ran through the ship. The
Roberts
slowed down precipitously. Immediately the phone rang in his cabin. It was the officer of the day, Lieutenant Robert Firehammer, Jr.: “Sir, I think we’re coming into a minefield.”

The forward lookout was a young boatswain’s mate named Bobby Gibson. He had been on the bow watch for about an hour, sitting in the bolted metal chair watching dolphins repeatedly dive before the
Roberts
’s wake, anticipating a beautiful sunset on a warm afternoon with a calm sea and light breeze. At 4:39 p.m., he saw what at first he thought were three dolphins—only these “weren’t going back under water.” Grabbing his binoculars, he could clearly see spikes sticking out from the black cylindrical objects, the sun glinting off their freshly painted metal skins. He immediately sounded the alarm.
¹¹

Rinn remained skeptical. The
Roberts
, as every other ship in the Gulf, had had its run-ins with a host of minelike objects: garbage bags, empty oil drums, dead sheep. This, he thought, would be one more piece of Persian Gulf trash. But as it warranted his presence on the bridge and was clearly a higher priority than spinach, he replied, “Okay, I’ll be right up.”

As Rinn arrived on the bridge, Firehammer explained that the forward lookout had spotted mines. Rinn grabbed some binoculars and took a look for himself, immediately spotting three dark objects floating on the surface,
two directly in front of the ship and one only three hundred to four hundred yards off the starboard side of the ship. “Shit!” he exclaimed. “Those are mines!”

Rather than proceed, Rinn thought, perhaps the ship could simply retrace her steps, so to speak, and reverse engines and back out along the ship’s wake, which remained clearly visible off to the horizon in the blue Gulf waters. “Having just sailed along that track,” Rinn thought, “it should be free of mines.” The captain got on the ship’s intercom and said, “We’ve got mines in front of us. We are going to general quarters, but be quiet; I don’t want all the noise. Check to see that condition zebra is set and then I want everyone who can be spared up above the main deck.” This would ensure that all the doors and hatches below were secure, and if they did hit a mine, he wanted no unnecessary crewmen below deck. He then ordered the
Roberts
’s Lamps helicopter to get airborne immediately to serve as a spotter. With his executive officer, Lieutenant Commander John Eckelberry, looking on from the port bridge wing, Rinn posted lookouts on the four corners of the ship.

The
Roberts
slowly began retracing its path in a straight line, with Captain Rinn on the starboard bridge wing carefully monitoring the proceedings.
¹²
Ten, then fifteen minutes passed. “So far so good,” Rinn thought to himself. But maneuvering a 4,000-ton, 450-foot-long ship backward along a straight line is easier said than done. She veered just slightly off her wake.

Suddenly the air was ripped by the loudest explosion Rinn or anyone else aboard had ever heard. The force of the explosion lifted the entire aft end of the ship out of the water some ten feet, forcing the bow nearly underwater. As the bow jerked back up, it catapulted Bobby Gibson, who did a complete somersault, landing in a sitting position all the way back at the missile launcher. The force of the blast sent Rinn and most of the crew sprawling on the deck, breaking Rinn’s foot from the impact.

A mine had detonated on the ship’s aft end, just between the 76-mm gun magazine and the torpedo magazine, blowing a twenty-two-foot hole into the port side and immediately sending two thousand tons of water pouring into the
Roberts
.
¹³
The force of the blast knocked the ship’s two gas turbine engines from their mountings and hurled machinery upward with crushing force into the deck above. Two ten-thousand-gallon fuel oil tanks ruptured, sending fuel into one of the engines, which immediately ignited, shooting a huge fireball up through the smokestack, mushrooming some 150 feet in the air. The main engine room flooded immediately, and in minutes so
did the space just aft.
¹⁴
Within minutes enough water to fill a tennis court some sixteen feet high had poured into the ship. Power began to fail as smoke and fire spread rapidly.
¹⁵