The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran

by David Crist

  The U.S. government immediately pressed Kuwait to renege on its deal with the Soviets. But now Sheik Salem and the Kuwaitis had the upper hand. After berating the Americans for their foot-dragging and their overly complicated bureaucracy, Salem added that he resented their request for the Kuwaitis to alter their policy decisions. After all, he said, “Kuwait is a sovereign country.”

  As far as reneging on their deal with the Soviets, he said, “Where there is a will, there is a way.” But Sheik Salem then cautioned, “In England, once a man had proposed to a woman, he could not back out, and this was the situation between Kuwait and Moscow.”

  The American deputy consul, James Hooper, deftly countered, “It was not official until the man put a ring on the woman’s finger. Had Kuwait put a ring on the Russian finger?”44

  “Let us say that our hand is reaching toward their hand,” Sheik Salem slyly replied, “but the ring has not yet been placed on the Russian finger.”

  On March 9, Ali Khalifa telephoned Crist in Tampa after a meeting with Crown Prince Saad. The Kuwaiti government had agreed not to take the Russian bride. It accepted the U.S. offer to protect all eleven Kuwaiti tankers. Kuwait had slipped the ring onto the American finger.45

  Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff William Crowe arrived in Bahrain for scheduled meetings with the emir and the commander of Middle East Force, Rear Admiral Harold Bernsen, prior to going to Kuwait to consummate the agreement. After landing, Crowe learned that Khalifa had not been entirely honest. Kuwait still intended to charter three Soviet tankers to carry some of its crude oil. The revelation blindsided Crowe.46

  “Should we just rescind the offer and let Kuwait fend for itself against Iran? Let Kuwait make the best deal it can with the Soviets?” Crowe asked Bernsen. The chairman generally supported the reflagging idea, but privately shared many of Shultz’s concerns. He was also not an admirer of Kuwait’s aloof stance toward the United States and had little sympathy for its straddling the fence between the superpowers.

  “I think it’s too late, sir,” said Bernsen. “Backtracking now would seriously undermine American credibility with the other GCC countries.”47 When an angry Crowe finally calmed down, he agreed with Bernsen. There was little the United States could do except move forward and try to mitigate the Soviet’s newfound prominence in the Persian Gulf.48

  Kuwait had deftly manipulated both superpowers into providing protection against Iran. Kuwait had agreed to put the ring on the American finger, while leaving the door open for its Russian mistress.

  With the political decision made, CENTCOM ramped up its plans to protect the eleven Kuwaiti tankers. Around six p.m. on Friday, March 6, Crist called his operations officer, Air Force Major General Samuel Swart, to get the “board of directors together,” as the commander called his key staff officers.49 At their meeting two hours later, Crist informed them of the proposed reflagging operation, which had been given the randomly selected name “Private Jewels.” Washington’s guidance to Crist had been to “minimize the risk to American lives” but still be prepared to launch retaliatory strikes on Iran within ninety-six hours.

  Several shortfalls plagued CENTCOM for the upcoming convoy operation. Not only did it have no off-the-shelf plan, but Crist had no senior navy subordinate command to run what would certainly be a naval mission.50 Lieutenant General Robert Kingston tried and failed to get the navy to stand up a Fifth Fleet for CENTCOM, and now Crist’s sea service component consisted of a frocked rear admiral in Hawaii who handled budgets and paperwork. The heavy lifting of the operation fell to the small Persian Gulf flotilla, Middle East Force. Established in 1949, it consisted of a flagship and a few destroyers based out of Bahrain in an old British naval facility.51 The navy never intended this to be anything more than a small show-the-flag naval force. In the event of a Middle East conflict, the four-star commander in Hawaii’s Pacific Fleet would roll in and take over. The establishment of a joint military command legally responsible for the Middle East had not changed the U.S. Navy’s scheme. CENTCOM could fight the land battle in Iran, but the Pacific Fleet would control the warships, perhaps in support of CENTCOM, but ultimately unilaterally and irrespective of the wishes of the commander in Tampa.

  The commander of Middle East Force was not the type of admiral the institution would have chosen for such an important operation. Rear Admiral Harold Bernsen had graduated from Dartmouth, not the Naval Academy; an aviator but no “Top Gun” fighter jock, he had flown decidedly unglamorous airborne warning surveillance prop planes. Still, Bernsen knew the Persian Gulf. He had commanded the Middle East flagship, USS La Salle, at the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, and had recently served as Crist’s senior planning officer at CENTCOM, where he’d earned Crist’s respect. What Bernsen lacked in naval career gravitas, he made up for with political acumen. With a calm, measured persona that appealed to Gulf leaders, Bernsen understood the Arabs as few other military officers did. He was a smart and unorthodox thinker in the most conservative of the services. A skilled envoy, he forged a strong bond with the emirs and kings of the Gulf. This was a mission that would be political as much as military. While he never enjoyed the confidence of the navy hierarchy, especially the chief of naval operations, Admiral Carlisle Trost, Bernsen proved to be a perfect choice. Bernsen’s operations officer, Captain David Grieve, arrived in Tampa to assist CENTCOM’s planning. Working late into the night over the next few days, they hashed out a concept for the upcoming escort operation.

  On March 13, General Crist briefed the chiefs in the Tank on their plan. Crist envisioned an expansion of the basic regime already under way since the boarding of the President Taylor. One or two U.S. warships would accompany the tankers along a six-hundred-mile route running from Khor Fakkan just outside the Gulf to Kuwait Harbor. CENTCOM requested two additional ships (bringing the Middle East Force total to eight) to protect the tankers and maintain communications links with air force AWACS in Saudi Arabia and the carrier well out in the Gulf of Oman.52

  On Sunday, March 22, Bernsen’s staff met for the first time with Kuwaiti oil officials and embassy representatives to talk about the escort plan. Bernsen did not have the ships to run a continual shuttle, but two or three ships could be gathered together at either end and then escorted the entire six-hundred-mile route. This slowed oil deliveries, al-Bader said, but he had little choice but to agree to the American plan. They quickly agreed on several southern Gulf routes for the convoys that avoided the Iranian exclusion zone, and Kuwait agreed to allow an American naval officer to be stationed in the Kuwait Oil Tanker Company headquarters to serve as a liaison officer. Armed with a satellite telephone, he would coordinate the tankers’ schedules with Middle East Force. Additionally, al-Bader agreed to allow an officer to be stationed on board each tanker during the convoy. Kuwait agreed to purchase short-range walkie-talkies for these officers to communicate with the escorting warships. Their job would be to advise the tanker captains on military matters and to serve as coordinators between the civilian masters and the convoy commander.

  Tehran greeted news of the Kuwaiti escort arrangement with characteristic vitriol. President Khamenei said Kuwait’s request for U.S. protection “dishonored the region” and warned that Kuwait City and its oil facilities lay within range of Iranian forces. “Iran has not yet used its capabilities to bring pressure on Kuwait,” said the Iranian president and future supreme leader on April 27.53

  In addition to its diminutive navy, Iran had other military options. In August 1986, an Iranian naval officer, Commodore Kanoush Hakimi, traveled to China to negotiate a secret deal to purchase the powerful Chinese-built Silkworm antiship cruise missiles. While guided by a relatively unsophisticated radar, these potato-shaped missiles packed a thousand-pound warhead capable of seriously damaging any supertanker or sinking any American warship. The Chinese agreed to sell twelve launchers and as many as one hundred missiles, and soon more Iranians arrived for training on the new weapon.54

  American intelligence learned im
mediately of the sale. Hakimi happened to be on the CIA’s payroll. Additionally, the British spy service, MI6, may have had an agent working the case. An Iranian arms merchant, Jamshid Hashemi, claimed to have negotiated the $452 million deal during ten chaotic rounds of haggling in China in 1985–1986. During that period, he worked for British intelligence, meeting with his Persian-speaking handler, “Michael,” once a week in London.55 The British government passed his information along to the CIA.

  In a Pentagon meeting, Weinberger confronted his Chinese counterpart, who simply denied sending the missiles to Iran. “We’ve got satellites photographing the first shipment leaving China and off-loading at Bandar Abbas,” replied the incredulous defense secretary.56

  By January 1987, Iran had one Silkworm battery active and had announced the fact by sending a missile in the direction of Kuwait Harbor just before the meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Iran began construction of a series of ten concrete Silkworm missile launchers ringing the Strait of Hormuz. The CIA and CENTCOM viewed this as a major new threat to Gulf shipping and to U.S. warships. Iran now had the means to seriously impede oil exports, as one Silkworm—with a range of fifty nautical miles—could turn a four-hundred-thousand-ton supertanker into so much scrap metal. Iran now had the means to control the Strait of Hormuz and to attack any ship entering or leaving.57

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs made obtaining one of the missiles for dissection a top priority for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which it succeeded in doing in the spring of 1987 with the aid of another intelligence service.

  Regardless of Khamenei’s bluster and his new Silkworm missiles, neither Bernsen nor Crist believed Iran would force a fight. “It appears unlikely that Iran will intentionally attack a U.S. combatant or a Kuwaiti flag tanker under U.S. escort,” Crist’s lengthy operational estimate stated. The CENTCOM plan emphasized deterrence over fighting. The Iranians would not risk U.S. retaliation. The carrier in the Arabian Sea provided the necessary muscle for a credible deterrence, and the Iranian military knew full well the capabilities of the U.S. military.58 The risks posed in the upcoming operation seemed minimal. However, in the month after the Khamenei threat the hazards of the tanker war suddenly became very real. Once again, Saddam Hussein provided a wake-up call.

  Twelve

  THE WAKE-UP CALL

  At eight a.m. on May 17, 1987, the USS Stark steamed out of Manama, Bahrain, and gradually disappeared over the horizon, heading north out into the opaque blue of the Persian Gulf. Commanded by a forty-three-year-old Pennsylvanian with twenty years of commissioned service, Captain Glenn R. Brindel, the Stark was in a class of ships originally conceived as an inexpensive escort ship for Atlantic convoys during World War III. With a sleek hull and a boxy superstructure, she was armed with a little bit of everything, from antiship and surface-to-air missiles to a 20-mm chain gun; the latter, resembling a white R2-D2 from Star Wars, was called a close-in weapons system, or CIWS (pronounced “sea-whiz”), capable of firing three thousand rounds per minute and designed to shoot down incoming missiles. With a crew of 221 men, the Stark and her sister ships would provide the shield to protect Kuwait from Iran.

  The Stark’s assigned station sat on the edge of the tanker war’s killing zone. Serving as a radar picket for Middle East Force, the frigate headed for the north-central Persian Gulf, some fifty miles off the Iranian coast and a mere twenty miles outside the Iranian exclusion zone. The area just north of there had seen some 340 Iraqi air and missile attacks on Iranian shipping, sinking or damaging forty ships.1 Recently, Iraq had begun striking Iran-bound ships farther south, flying directly over the areas where American ships operated.2 Three days before the Stark sailed, an Exocet hit a Panamanian tanker just sixty miles from the Stark’s intended position. That same day the American destroyer Coontz nearly opened fire on an Iraqi pilot who failed to heed warnings and closed to within ten miles of the warship before abruptly turning away when he detected an audible buzz in his headset from the Coontz’s weapons control radar.3 That evening, Middle East Force sent out an intelligence advisory to its ships stating that the Iraqis had conducted ship attack profiles in the central Gulf and that they expected this trend to continue for the next two weeks.

  Brindel was well aware of the Iraqi threat. The day after the Coontz incident, Harold Bernsen went pleasure sailing with the Stark’s commander.4 Bernsen mentioned the previous day’s incident near where the Stark would be operating, and he asked Brindel to attend an intelligence briefing the following day that would go over the recent Iraqi attack profiles in the central Gulf as well as the rules for using force. The Iraqis flew fast and low along the west coast of the Gulf near Saudi Arabia, then quickly did the Farsi hook and turned east into the Gulf, at which point they would turn on their search radar and look for a target in the Iranian exclusion zone.5 Frequently they fired at the first target they illuminated, with no attempt to visually identify the vessel. Bernsen instructed Brindel to make this information known to his officers so that there would be no uncertainty of the danger posed by the reckless Iraqi pilots.6

  This was not the first time Captain Brindel heard the rules of engagement for the Persian Gulf. When his ship arrived in the Middle East, Captain David Grieve and Bernsen’s intelligence officer, Commander Robert Brown, met the ship in Djibouti.7 Brown emphasized that “the probability of deliberate attack on U.S. warships was low, but that indiscriminate attack in the Persian Gulf was a significant danger.”8 Grieve went through two formal documents governing the use of force and stressed that it was the responsibility of each captain to “take all possible measures and precautions to protect his unit.”9 The rules of engagement allowed any ship to engage an aircraft displaying hostile intent. This included such overt acts as locking on to the U.S. vessel with fire control radar or flying toward them in an attack profile. Iraqi aircraft were unpredictable and should always be regarded as potentially hostile.10 Grieve left the Stark’s officers with a final thought: “We do not want, nor intend to absorb, a first attack.”

  As the Stark headed out into the danger zone, the atmosphere on board remained strangely lax. Bernsen’s sagacity failed to alter Brindel’s attitude, and the ship continued to operate as if it were cruising off the home port of Mayport, Florida, and not in the middle of a shooting war.11

  The ship’s executive officer was focused on an upcoming administrative inspection of the ship’s propulsion plant. Inside the heart of the Stark, in the close spaces of the combat information center, where the glow from an array of screens and combat sensors illuminated the darkened confined space, none of the officers knew what defense state the ship should be in, nor did they seem to appreciate the threat posed by either Iran or Iraq.12 Just that morning, Iraqi jets had conducted separate Exocet missile attacks on two large Iranian shuttle tankers, the Aquamarine and Zeus. Brindel had combined two billets—those of the watch officer and the weapons control officer. This effectively meant that no one was manning the critical weapons control officer station. None of the weapons were manned; the .50-caliber machine guns had no ammo loaded, and their crew was lying on the deck, perhaps asleep. The ship’s defenses, designed to detect and defeat incoming missiles, were turned off.

  At 7:55 p.m., the American AWACS flying out of Saudi Arabia picked up an Iraqi Mirage taking off from an air base near Basra flying south in the classic profile to attack Iranian shipping. This track was downloaded in real time to the U.S. warships—including the Stark—providing a continuous update on the Mirage’s whereabouts, which due to interoperability problems between the navy and air force systems showed up on the navy radar screens as a “friendly” symbol aircraft.13 Additionally, the destroyer Coontz, now pier-side at Manama, updated the Iraqi aircraft’s position every five minutes over a secure radio telephone transmission to all warships, including the Stark.14

  Captain Brindel walked into the combat information center fifteen minutes after the first sighting. The senior watch officer, Lieutenant Basil Moncrief, t
old his skipper about the Iraqi aircraft, noting that it had just gone “feet wet” and crossed out over the waters of the Persian Gulf. Brindel directed Moncrief to keep a close watch on the Iraqi aircraft and departed, apparently giving it little more thought as he worried about the upcoming engine inspection. It had become routine for U.S. warships north of Bahrain to go to general quarters as a precaution when an Iraqi aircraft was over the Gulf, but there was no thought of this on the Stark that night.15

  Despite Brindel’s instructions at the outset to keep a close eye on the Iraqi Mirage, none of the nine men in the combat center seemed very concerned. Even as the AWACS reported that the Iraqi jet had made the Farsi hook and was now headed east on a course that would come within eleven miles of the Stark’s position, one of the two fire control technicians who manned the radar and CIWS left to make an extended “head” call and was absent for the next twenty minutes.

  The Stark’s own radar picked up the Mirage at seventy nautical miles and closing at the quick rate of six miles a minute. The radar operator told Moncrief that the Iraqi’s projected path would take it to within four nautical miles of the Stark. Moncrief remained unconcerned, even when the ship’s sensors detected the search radar emissions from the Mirage. A minute later, with the Iraqi aircraft now only forty-three miles away, one of the watch standers, Petty Officer Bobby Duncan, asked Moncrief if they should broadcast the standard warning as prescribed in the rules of engagement. “No, wait,” the lieutenant replied, believing the Iraqi either would turn away or was too far out to hear the U.S. voice warning. Instead, Moncrief had them fill out a required administrative report on the incident.

  Back in Bahrain, an officer on the flagship monitoring the situation grew concerned and called the Stark to make sure that they were aware of the fast-approaching Mirage.