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

by David Crist

  Initially this clandestine arrangement worked well. “I believe our initial understanding with representatives of Iraq has significantly reduced the risk of engagement of our forces,” Crowe told Weinberger.45 The two nations refined these procedures over the coming months, improving the coordination between Iraqi planes and the navy ships.46 When Iraqi pilots made the Farsi hook, they were to relay this information and their new course to the Americans. Then, using a series of brevity codes agreed to by both countries, the Iraqis would pass information on their intended Iranian target and whether all the planes were going to hit the same or multiple sites. The communications between the United States and Iraq became sophisticated enough that U.S. controllers could steer Iraqi planes around navy warships.47 Over the course of the next three months, further talks in Baghdad between the two nations refined their cooperative procedures. Middle East Force provided advance details of American ship movements to Iraq. During talks with the chief of operations for the Iraqi air force, Major General Salim Sultan, the United States helped Iraq refine its flight patterns to enable the Americans to better monitor the Iraqis’ positions and still allow them to attack Iranian shipping. The only disagreement came when a U.S. Air Force colonel tried to get Iraq to refrain from attacking ships too far south in the Gulf. Salim responded, “If Saddam Hussein dictated the target, they must fly it.” Since the Iraqi leader liked to pick targets, self-preservation prevented him from agreeing to avoid any part of the Gulf to attack.

  The United States considered developing a similar arrangement with the Iranians, but it never went past a few discussions around a conference table in the Pentagon. Admiral Crowe had no interest in talking with Iran. As he told Weinberger in his endorsement of the Sharp Report on the Stark, “There has been no indication that the Government of Iran has any interest in the rational discussion of any relevant matters, including deconfliction procedures.”48

  Instead, the Iranians listened in on this steady stream of radio communications between the Americans and the Iraqis. Already aware of the ongoing intelligence sharing, this only reconfirmed their view of military collusion between their enemies. If the U.S. Navy and the Iraqi air force were cooperating, that made Bernsen’s ships legitimate targets in the eyes of the Iranian leadership. The Stark had unintentionally served as a wake-up call for the Revolutionary Guard too.

  If secret deals had brought the Arabs on board with the American reflagging scheme, serious cracks emerged within the military branch most responsible for executing the plan, the U.S. Navy. The real problem for the men wearing uniforms of dark blue and gold braid was that the times were a-changing and the conservative sea service was clinging to the past. Both modern warfare and the Goldwater-Nichols Act forced interoperability among the four services. The navy had largely worked alone, without paying too much attention to the army or air force. But Congress had tipped the balance of power to the four-star joint unified commanders with passage of Goldwater-Nichols, and the days of army- or navy-only military operations were over. The green and blue uniforms had been morphed into purple, as joint command billets are informally called.

  In the coming years, the United States forged a far more effective military by merging the sum of its parts, but the reflagging operation occurred during the middle of these growing pains. It required a generational change in the officer corps, with the old officers replaced by those who had grown up in the new system. But in 1987, “the prospect of a Marine commanding an almost exclusively navy mission was deeply disturbing to many in the naval community,” Crowe wrote in his memoirs. And Crist’s military plans for Iran, which included air force AWACS and combat jets supporting navy ships, had ruffled the admirals’ feathers.49

  The one thing the two men agreed on was that Iran would not risk war by challenging the escort operations. Iran had no reason, it seemed, to fight the United States too. A CENTCOM intelligence paper reflected the prevailing view within the American intelligence community: “The primary threat to the U.S. convoys is another accidental attack like the Stark. It appears unlikely that Iran will intentionally attack a U.S. combatant or a Kuwait owned tanker under U.S. escort.”50 CENTCOM did not consider the Iranian navy or aircraft a major threat, but the Silkworm missiles purchased from China were a different story. One site was active and another eight were near completion around the Strait of Hormuz. Intelligence sources indicated that the control of these missiles was highly centralized and that any decision to attack would have been made at the highest levels of the Iranian government: Ayatollah Khomeini.51

  In June 1987, the U.S. State Department relayed a stern warning to Tehran via the Swiss embassy against using Silkworm missiles. The United States would view their use as a serious matter, and Washington would respond with massive force against military and economic sites. Iran never responded to the U.S. démarche, but despite all the hostility between the two nations over the coming year, Iran never fired a single Silkworm missile from its sites around the Strait of Hormuz.

  Iran did have some mines, but no one in Tampa or Washington gave it too much thought. On Friday, June 26, less than a month before the first convoy, a DIA analyst briefed a group of senior three-stars in the Tank about the Iranian mine threat. The intelligence officer concluded his thirty-minute presentation: “We do not believe that Iran poses a major mine threat to the Gulf shipping at this time. Although the Iranians are capable of small scale mine laying…we estimate that they do not have the capability to lay and maintain systematic minefields. The threat is primarily psychological.”

  The analyst added that the Iranians lacked the training and expertise to lay mines and did not possess any proper minelayer. “Although small combatants or merchant ships could be modified for mine laying operations, no modification efforts have been noted.” As far as the use of small dhows was concerned: “The unsophisticated nature of these platforms wholly limit[s] them to small scale, imprecise mine operations.”52

  Unfortunately, leaders in Tehran did not read the American intelligence assessments. Iranian ingenuity and resourcefulness had an ugly surprise awaiting both CENTCOM and the U.S. Navy.

  Thirteen

  THE INVISIBLE HAND OF GOD

  On the morning of July 6, 1984, the small cargo ship Ghat left Libya on its way to the Eritrean port of Assab. The round-trip journey through the Suez Canal normally took eight days, but nothing about this trip was routine. Instead of the usual cargo of foodstuffs and crated goods, Ghat carried advanced Soviet-made naval mines designed to detonate in response to the mere sound of a passing ship. Rather than her normal civilian crew, Libyan sailors, including the commander of Moammar Gaddafi’s mine force, manned the pilothouse. Once in the Red Sea, the sailors lowered the stern ramp and hastily rolled the mines off into the water, where they settled on the silted seafloor. The improvised minelayer sowed its destructive seeds around two important choke points at either end of the Red Sea: first at the north end of the Gulf of Suez, just before the Suez Canal, and then at the south end around the narrow strait of Bab el Mandeb, where one of the busiest shipping routes in the world narrowed to a mere twenty miles.

  It did not take long for the Libyans’ handiwork to bring results. On the evening of July 9, an explosion rocked the Soviet-flagged cargo ship Knud Jespersen just outside the Suez Canal. The Egyptian government kept the news of this incident quiet, not wishing to alarm the merchants who used the canal and provided a main source of revenue for Cairo. This proved impossible when there was a spate of ships hitting mines outside the canal and at the far end of the Red Sea around Bab el Mandeb.1

  The August Red Sea mining became an international whodunit as newspapers speculated about whose hand was behind this terrorist attack against the world’s commerce. Egypt blamed Iran. Officials in Tehran had publicly boasted about using mines to close down the Strait of Hormuz as a means of punishing Gulf nations supporting Iraq. Egyptian warships began boarding Iranian ships transiting the Suez Canal, looking for the culprit.2 The Saudi government agreed. W
ith the annual hajj about to begin, Riyadh thought Iran intended to embarrass the kingdom by mining the two Red Sea ports of Jeddah and Yanbu, where tens of thousands of white-clad pilgrims arrived. If one of those liners were to strike a mine, the loss of life would be horrific. American intelligence organizations remained skeptical, however, and an Office of Naval Intelligence report doubted Iran’s involvement. Its navy had few mines and no ships to drop those it did possess. Communications intercepts soon revealed Moammar Gaddafi’s culpability.

  The U.S. Navy joined an international naval flotilla to clear the mines.3 At nine p.m. on August 6, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger signed a deployment order, and by midnight, transport aircraft were taking off from Norfolk, Virginia, carrying large RH-53D minesweeping helicopters plus two hundred personnel, all headed for Egypt.4 Once there, the crew assembled the helicopter rotors and flew them out to the amphibious ship USS Shreveport and the flagship of Middle East Force, USS La Salle, to begin sweeping for the remaining presents left by the Libyan leader.5 Bitter memories remained from the recent debacle in Beirut, and the Italians and French refused to participate in any military arrangement with the United States. Paris had no desire to work with the American navy, publicly stating that it wanted no part of any American “crusade” in the Red Sea.6

  Looking for mines was painstakingly slow. Sonar scanned along the ocean floor, with divers or remote-operation vehicles investigating suspicious objects. The Red Sea was littered with years of discarded items—old oil drums, pipes, coffee cans, automobiles, and mines left over from both the Second World War and the more recent Arab-Israeli wars. The American helicopters had the additional unpopular task of sweeping in front of the Saudi king’s yacht when King Fahd took an ill-timed fourteen-mile day cruise from Jeddah.

  The mines of August eventually claimed sixteen ships. Only one mine was ever found; an explosives diver defused its charge, and the serial number 99501 indicated it was one of hundreds of similar coastal mines sold to Libya by the Soviet Union. During a seminar on the operation at the Naval Institute in Annapolis, Maryland, naval expert Scott Truver observed, “The threat of terrorist mining of important sea areas is real, rather easily carried out, and should be expected to increase.”7 One country took this lesson to heart: Iran.

  The shah’s navy had never paid much attention to naval mines. It had one plan on its books, written in 1970, that called for laying V-shaped minefields near the Strait of Hormuz, arrayed to halt shipping through the strait while still permitting its own tankers to get through. But before the revolution, the Iranian navy had carried out only one mine-laying exercise. The war with Iraq spurred interest in naval mines by the new Islamic Republic of Iran. In 1981, Iran purchased a small number of unsophisticated moored contact mines from North Korea: the small Myam mine, with only a 44-pound explosive charge, and the much larger M-08. Both were based upon ancient technology. The latter had been patterned after a 1908—that is, pre–First World War—Russian-designed mine. Shaped like a large black ball attached to a cradle that served as its anchor, it packed a potent 250-pound explosive charge, but required a ship to physically hit one of its pronounced horns, which ignited a chemical charge to set off the mine. Neither mine could be used in deep water, such as the Strait of Hormuz, but both could easily be laid throughout much of the shallower Arab side of the Persian Gulf.

  The Revolutionary Guard paid close attention to the Red Sea mining. Tehran and Tripoli had friendly military relations and, on at least one occasion, the Iranian embassy arranged for a Revolutionary Guard officer to travel to Tripoli to talk with the Libyan commander who’d carried out the mining operation. The plausible deniability afforded by naval mines appealed to the Iranian leadership. Libya had suffered no consequences for its flagrant mining of international waters. Libyan involvement remained murky; unless they were caught in the act, it was difficult to prove who had laid the mines. Naval mines seemed the perfect, low-risk means of striking back at the Gulf Arabs.

  The Revolutionary Guard commander, Mohsen Rezai, formed a small group of eight officers to look into developing this capability for Iran. In late 1984, the team met at the National Defense Industries Organization in Tehran to try to reverse engineer some North Korean mines in order to produce an Iranian variant, while Libya provided a newer Soviet variant for comparison. The team constructed a large water tank filled with salt water near Tehran to test drop their mine and work out the many challenges of dropping the anchor correctly to get the mine to deploy at the correct depth. Over the next year, engineers conducted four tests, which included an explosives test of the mine’s charge in the Iranian desert. Poor engineering plagued the design team. The detonation horns proved unreliable, the anchors repeatedly failed, and the designers could not get the mines to set for a specific depth. Mines failed to deploy or went too high, leaving them bobbing on the surface. By mid-1985, however, the design team had sufficiently overcome most of these problems to begin production. In July, the first Iranian-designated SADAF-01 (Myam) and SADAF-02 (M-08) mines began rolling out of an ammunition plant north of Tehran. At least twenty-two mines were produced each week. The Iranians hoped to produce three thousand such mines, and started stockpiling them near Bandar Abbas and 155 miles north at the large Saidabad naval ammunition depot at Sirjan. Meanwhile, regular Iranian naval forces confiscated four fishing vessels at Bushehr and modified each with a stern ramp. While dressed as fishermen to disguise their mission, they repeatedly practiced rolling dummy mines off the dhows.

  In March 1986, the elite Special Boat Service of the Iranian marines, a holdover from the shah’s military, carried out Iran’s first mining operations in the shallow waters off Iraq in support of the country’s various offensives to take Basra. Joined by Revolutionary Guards in small boats, they repeatedly slipped in close to the main Iraqi port of Umm Qasr to mine its channel and effectively shut down shipping to Iraq’s major Persian Gulf port.8

  Iran developed a military plan called the Ghadir, named for an early Shia battle, to fight the American navy. Approved in 1984, it became Iran’s main plan to retaliate against an American attack. The Revolutionary Guard and the regular navy would form four surface groups, each comprising a destroyer or frigate supported by a number of guard small boats and logistics vessels converted into minelayers, and move quickly under the cover of air and artillery to lay three large minefields west of the Strait of Hormuz. The objective was to deny any tanker traffic from passing through the strait, except those headed to Iran, which would safely use several routes deliberately left open through the minefields. Once this mission had been completed, the four task forces would attack U.S. Navy ships within reach.

  On paper, the Ghadir plan looked impressive and indicated significant cooperation between the regular military and the guard. In reality, the Iranian military never displayed any semblance of such coordinated efforts, due largely to animosity between the Revolutionary Guard and the regular Iranian navy. Any joint command to control naval forces never evolved beyond paper. However, when American special operations forces uncovered the Ghadir plan in 1987, the audacity of Iran’s mining ambitions impressed the U.S. military. In two short years, it had gone from a saltwater tank in the desert to the conceivable ability to lay hundreds of mines and halt Gulf oil exports.

  In May, Iran decided to try out some of its newly minted mines on Kuwait in hopes of intimidating the emir into reversing his decision to reflag his tankers with the Americans.9 Two large Iranian dhows left Bushehr, mingling with the normal fishing and smuggling trade. They dropped fourteen mines in two parallel lines radiating off one of the channel’s navigation buoys.10 The mines were carefully spaced thirty meters apart. So as not to interfere with their own fishing and smuggling trade, the Iranians made sure to set the mines’ depth to at least ten feet, well below the depth of a dhow but shallow enough to damage a large oil tanker.

  On the same day the Stark met misfortune, the sixty-eight-thousand-ton Soviet tanker Marshal Chuykov entered the main d
eep-water entrance to Kuwait, Mina al-Ahmadi, to take on a load of Kuwaiti crude. Two miles east of the two navigation buoys that marked the channel’s entrance, a massive explosion rocked the tanker, blowing an eight-by-six-meter hole in her starboard side, which required extensive repairs at the dry-dock facilities in Dubai. Over the next month, three more ships hit mines, all within three-quarters of a mile of where the Chuykov had met misfortune. “We have potentially a serious situation here,” CENTCOM commander George Crist told Joint Chiefs chairman William Crowe.11

  The American ambassador to Kuwait, Anthony Quainton, asked the Kuwaitis to undertake a more assertive military surveillance to prevent additional mines from being laid. But the Kuwaitis lacked both the hardware and the fortitude to counter this challenge from Iran, and their initial reaction was to try to hire someone to do the job for them. They also looked into leasing Dutch minesweepers. As the Iranian mines threatened the entire forthcoming convoy operation, Washington offered to remove them, which pleased the emir, so long as it did not bring too many Americans into his country.

  The United States quietly dispatched an eighteen-man team with twenty tons of equipment to take care of the mines.12 Arriving on June 22, they quickly set to work operating from a Kuwaiti tug at the entrance to the Mina al-Ahmadi channel. Three days later, their sonar picked up a mine on a shallow reef in a hundred feet of water—its round explosive case was floating just ten feet below the surface. Divers defused it and flew it back to the United States for analysis. The United Kingdom had its own sources and had acquired a list of serial numbers of mines manufactured in Iran. When the British compared their list with the number stenciled in white lettering on the side of the mine found by the Americans, the number matched up perfectly in the correct sequence.