by David Crist
Crowe opened with a quick update. It was clear the Bridgeton had struck a mine. While the intelligence community had yet to conclusively prove Iranian culpability, the admiral had no doubt about who’d laid the mines. The chairman then gave a rundown on American countermine capabilities. The helicopters of Helicopter Mine Countermeasures Squadron 14 (HM-14), which had been on seventy-two-hour standby, would be the most immediate solution, but they were expensive and needed an air base to operate from; otherwise, a ship would have to be brought up into the Gulf to serve as a platform for the helicopters.33 To address the long-term requirement, Crowe said, we would need minesweeping ships in the Gulf.
The first course would be to ask the Saudis for help in clearing the mines. The kingdom had four American-made minesweepers built during the 1970s, although they operated more as patrol boats than as mine hunters. Crowe offered to work with Prince Bandar, although he had little regard for the Saudis’ training and little faith in any real cooperation.34
The next day, Crowe called Bandar. Despite their differing backgrounds, the admiral from Oklahoma and the wealthy Saudi fighter pilot had developed a close relationship. The two men spoke several times a week, and soon every day. Both were politically savvy, and they shared hawkish views on Iran. Bandar often dropped by Crowe’s office unannounced, and the chairman frequently cleared his calendar to make way for the young prince, who had a deserved reputation as the consummate Washington insider.
“We really need your help. We need your minesweepers to clear the convoy route,” Crowe said, his serious inflection revealing the gravity of the crisis.
“We are looking at the best way forward,” Bandar answered. “The problem is people around here don’t know how to keep their mouths shut. We don’t want our assistance advertised in the papers. Could you send someone to my home to talk about this?” Crowe immediately dispatched a general to Bandar’s home to go over the requirements.
Three days later Bandar called back and said his father, Prince Sultan, who served as the defense minister, had agreed to sweep the main Kuwaiti channel down to where the Bridgeton had met misfortune. Bandar’s optimism failed to imprint on the Saudi lethargy, however. Crist soon called Crowe to report that no one had seen a Saudi sweeper, and in fact the Saudi navy had just let all its captains go on three weeks’ leave.
Frustrated, Crowe called Bandar and asked about recalling the captains. Another day passed before Bandar responded with the news that his father had ordered the captains back and that they would sweep for mines every day. True to his word, that afternoon the first Saudi sweeper appeared in the Gulf. In what became a familiar pattern over the coming days, the ship steamed around for a few hours and stayed well away from Farsi Island and any Iranian mines.
The Europeans proved even more unaccommodating. At the request of Weinberger, Secretary of State Shultz sent letters to the governments of Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Germany requesting mine-clearing vessels, hoping to “portray a multinational commitment against the illegal mining of international waters.”35 In less than a week, all the European allies had turned down the secretary of state’s request for assistance in what they viewed as a unilateral American military action to support Iraq. Only the French offered a counterproposal. Paris proposed selling the Americans two of its own mine hunters, manned by nonuniformed French sailors until American crews could be trained to take their place. The U.S. Navy had little interest in buying French ships, so Crowe tried to get the Kuwaitis to lease the two vessels for their navy. Neither Kuwait nor France showed any interest in that arrangement.
At ten a.m. on July 27, Crowe met in his office with Admiral Carlisle Trost, the chief of naval operations, and operations officer Vice Admiral Hank Mustin. Sitting around a small round table, they discussed their options for dealing with Iranian mines. Neither man had much enthusiasm for the convoy mission, especially Mustin, who vocally opposed both the operation and CENTCOM’s control over navy ships.
“Why haven’t the Saudis or the Europeans taken the mine-clearing mission?” Trost asked.
“The secretary is pushing forward on that,” Crowe answered, “but we need to get our own assets over there now. The political pressure is growing to get the convoys restarted ASAP, and Secretary Weinberger is growing impatient.”
Everyone agreed that the quickest response would be to fly the HM-14 helicopters over and marry them up with a ship, and the best candidate was the eight-hundred-man amphibious ship USS Guadalcanal. Essentially a small aircraft carrier, she was currently off the coast of Kenya loaded with marines headed for an exercise in Somalia. Long term, the United States needed to send its own minesweeping ships, all currently based on the East and West Coasts and manned by reservists.
Crowe then updated Weinberger. Anything in the American inventory that could sweep a mine and could be loaded on a plane or ship was headed for the Gulf: eight helicopters from HM-14 could be in the Gulf in early August and would operate from the Guadalcanal; four small eighty-ton minesweeping boats located in Charleston, South Carolina, and designed to sweep mines around U.S. harbors would be loaded onto the amphibious ship USS Raleigh and arrive in early September. Six larger minesweepers could be readied, but they would not arrive until November.
The timing of the Gulf fiasco could not have been worse for the Reagan administration. The Iran-Contra congressional hearings playing live on television reached their zenith. Oliver North and John Poindexter had testified, with Weinberger next on the docket. Even as he admitted to shredding documents, lying, and breaking the law, North emerged as something of a folk hero, a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” marine. As Newsweek reported, “North took the Hill with a mixture of straight-arrow toughness, flag-wrapped piety and macho swagger.”36 After his testimony, Reagan sent him a message: “Good Job.”
Poindexter took the fall. The navy admiral never strayed from his Buddha-like composure. During questioning, he frequently pulled out his Zippo lighter to reignite his pipe, a technique that allowed him a few extra seconds to compose his thoughts.
Poindexter remained unshakable in his testimony that he believed Reagan would have supported the initiative, but that he’d deliberately kept him in the dark in order to shield the president from such a controversial policy.37
Meanwhile, the clamor opposing the convoy mission grew not only within Congress but inside the administration. The chief cheerleader for the opposition was the newly installed secretary of the navy, James Webb. The youthful new secretary was a Naval Academy classmate of Ollie North’s, and the two forceful personalities had engaged in an intramural boxing match that grew famous as the two men rose in prominence. Webb had received the Navy Cross—the second highest award—as a junior officer before turning his talent to writing and penning a popular novel about Vietnam, Fields of Fire. He frequently offered up his opinion as an armchair general, although his expertise was that of a company-grade officer. He served three years as an assistant secretary, and Weinberger liked him. In 1987, when the current head of the navy, John Lehman, stepped down, the defense secretary recommended to Reagan that Webb replace him. Weinberger soon regretted the decision and repeatedly clashed with headstrong Webb over defense budgets and American policy.
“How will we know when we’ve won?” Webb asked Weinberger skeptically during one meeting in May. “What is victory? Why are we getting involved in the middle of a war in the Persian Gulf?”
“Every time we successfully sail a convoy through the Gulf we have asserted our right to freedom of navigation and that is a victory,” Weinberger answered.
Webb’s comments irritated the secretary. “We have the most powerful navy in the world and we can’t keep oil flowing against an enemy armed only with Boston Whalers and a few ancient mines?” he asked in disbelief one afternoon. Publicly, Webb came around to support the convoy operation, but privately, he compared the open-ended operation to another Vietnam.
Instead, Bernsen proposed putting together a makeshift minesweeper. He told C
rist they could outfit a civilian tug with minesweeping gear. It would travel ahead of the convoys, streaming V-shaped paravanes with serrated cables that would cut loose any Iranian mines. The mines would float to the surface and be easily destroyed by gunfire. He just needed to find a vessel with a large open space at its stern.
The day after the Bridgeton mining, Bernsen picked up the phone and called Fattah al-Bader, the head of the Kuwait Oil Tanker Company. As they were on an unsecured commercial phone, Bernsen talked around the issue, explaining that he was looking for an oil service craft with a large aft deck on which to “rig some things.”38 Al-Bader replied that he had two vessels that might work, two oceangoing tugs named Hunter and Striker, currently at Khor Fakkan. The next day, Bernsen flew to Kuwait to discuss the idea.39 Al-Bader questioned Bernsen about the safety of the two tugs. While they were registered in Liberia, the crew worked for him. “What if they hit a mine?”
“That would be unlikely,” Bernsen replied. “The Iranian mines are all set below the two tugs’ twelve-foot draft.”
The idea that the U.S. Navy had to depend on two tugs seemed laughable inside the Pentagon, had it not been for the seriousness of the problem. Experts viewed it as a political stunt, a deterrent at best, designed to look as though we had done something to address Iran’s mining. Even if the two tugs cut a mine, it would still be impossible for one of the massive tankers following behind to either stop or turn fast enough to avoid the now floating mine. Even more alarming, as evidence soon showed, due either to incompetence or to poor design, the Iranian mines laid off Farsi Island sat anywhere from the surface to the bottom of the ocean. The two tugs had as much chance of striking a mine as had the Bridgeton.40 Nevertheless, Crowe decided there was no real alternative in the short run.
On July 28, the chairman ordered the deployment of minesweeping kits from a warehouse in Norfolk along with the eight sailors needed to operate the equipment. The two tugs arrived at the small Basrec shipyard in Bahrain, where, under the direction of British expatriate managers, crews worked around the clock welding additional deck plates and adding a crane that would be needed for Hunter’s and Striker’s unusual new mission. A quick shakedown followed, and the system worked satisfactorily. Moving side by side, the two tugs could clear a lane 270 yards wide—more than wide enough to allow the safe passage of the largest of the reflagged tankers with some safety margin on each side. Those operating these two tugs knew the hazardous nature of their new duty. In addition to the four-man American augmentees, each tug had a small polyglot crew from Sri Lanka and Pakistan, all under the command of a British expatriate. Their sole job would be to sweep before the convoys. Should any mine be laid at less than the ship’s twelve-foot draft, they would become human minesweepers. Shortly before the first convoy, Bernsen recalled being asked by a rather nervous tug captain, “Do you think this is very safe?” Bernsen’s reply did little to reassure him: “I hope the Kuwait Oil Tanker Company is paying you double for this, because I think you deserve it.”41
Lieutenant Commander Frank DeMasi had been watching the television news of the Bridgeton. “You know, XO,” he said to his number two, Ken Merrick, one afternoon while the two sat drinking coffee in the small captain’s cabin of the minesweeper Inflict, “we are going to the Persian Gulf.” Like other skippers in the minesweeping force, the fifteen-year navy veteran and Pennsylvania native had an aura of self-assurance.
“Sir, we’re thirty-five-year-olds; we’ve got a reserve crew,” Merrick replied. “No way are they ever going to send us to war!” Most in the navy would have agreed with him.42
In the massive buildup to a six-hundred-ship navy, minesweepers—or mine countermeasures, as they’re more properly called—remained stagnant, left to the Europeans for defense of NATO. The United States had nineteen aged wooden-hulled ships in two squadrons based in Charleston, South Carolina, and Seattle, Washington. Designated Aggressive-class ocean minesweepers or MSOs (minesweeper ocean), most of these belonged to the reserves, with fully one-third of their seventy-five-man crews weekend warriors. Their training for the last twenty years had consisted of sailing around one weekend a month and two weeks a year. The West Coast–based vessels avoided operating at night as the massive Douglas firs loggers left drifting in the water of Puget Sound would leave a large hole in the waterline of their small wooden-plank hulls.43
It had been thirty-six years since the navy last faced an enemy using naval mines on the open sea, when North Korea (with Soviet advisers) had embarrassingly thwarted a U.S. landing off Wonsan Harbor in 1951.44 The fleet commander at the time, Rear Admiral Allan Smith, summed up his frustrations in a letter to the chief of naval operations that remained apropos four decades later: “We have lost control of the seas to a nation without a navy, using pre–World War I weapons, laid by vessels utilized at the time of the birth of Christ.”45
Despite their pugnacious names—Conquest, Fearless, Inflict—they were awkward little vessels at the end of their useful lives. With a high octagonal superstructure, they looked more like large fishing lure as they bobbed like corks to and fro in the large swells of the open seas. About half the fleet still had engines manufactured by the defunct Packard Company, which made finding spare parts more of a challenge with each passing year. None had been outfitted with new remotely operated vehicles—common in the European navies—that allowed them to examine a suspected mine from a safe distance. Instead, with the Americans, a diver had to physically swim up and examine every suspicious contact, a slow and potentially lethal undertaking.46 In an otherwise steel-hull fleet, to reduce the magnetic signature that could set off advanced electromagnetic-influence mines, naval engineers had constructed the MSOs out of wood. Other than the two-hundred-year-old frigate USS Constitution, these were the last wooden ships in the American navy.
But DeMasi’s hunch proved correct. The idea of sending these small, aging man-of-wars to the far-off Persian Gulf came up just after the Bridgeton incident. On July 25, Crowe called the Pacific Fleet commander Ace Lyons: “We are looking at possibly sending some MSOs,” Crowe told the admiral. Lyons had already anticipated this. “We are getting them ready now, but we need to lean on the Saudis and the French.” When the Saudis proved unable and the Europeans unwilling, the news spread quickly that some of the MSOs were headed for war.47
The navy settled on sending six MSO minesweepers, with three coming from each coast.48 The main problem would be how to get them the nine thousand miles to the Gulf. The navy brass decided to tow them. A larger ship on each coast was detailed to pull them along by running a cable to each minesweeper. This enhanced tow allowed the minesweepers to use just half of their engines, while still maintaining a respectable speed of thirty knots. Departing in the first week of September, like a mother duck with three ducklings following behind, they would make a six-week trip to the far side of the world, where the East and West Coast ships would finally meet up in Bahrain.49
A nineteenth-century adage refers to seafarers as “wooden ships and iron men.” The journey across the two oceans in cramped 170-foot ships conjured up that saying in the minds of twentieth-century sailors. The old MSOs produced enough freshwater for just two daily twenty-minute sets. Showers became an assembly line. One man jumped into one of the three stalls, wetted down, and then stepped out to lather himself while the next man in the queue hopped in. Fresh food ran scarce, and the daily meal often consisted of Spam or canned ravioli. The ships rolled in such an unorthodox manner in the ocean swells that many sailors took to carrying “barf bags.” Both flotillas had close calls. Across the Atlantic, the Illusive’s rudder stuck hard left and crossed the towline of the Fearless, dragging them together before the line could be thrown off. In the Pacific, two MSOs collided while being towed, and one had to be sent back to Subic Bay for repairs.50
With every resource in the limited American minesweeping arsenal on its way to the Gulf, Bernsen remained optimistic that the conflict would not expand. Iran had not laid any more mines, and that
appeared promising. Bernsen suspected Iran would confine its mining campaign to the northern Gulf, where shipping would be destined only for Kuwait. “The fact that the central and southern Gulf have not been mined probably reflects Iran’s conscious unwillingness to expose ships not in trade with Kuwait to this type of threat,” he wrote in a message in early August.51
The Iranian leadership saw the situation quite differently. Khomeini’s gamble with the “invisible hand” had worked. An emboldened Revolutionary Guard now clamored to lay more mines against the Great Satan. And unlike Bernsen’s prediction, anywhere they saw an American ship would be fair game. While the United States rushed to send helicopters and ships to the Gulf, on August 1 the Iranian ambassador in Tripoli met with Gaddafi. Their collaboration on naval mines had been a tremendous success, and now the Iranian government accepted an offer for even more military aid.
“There is a strong likelihood of a direct confrontation with the U.S. because of the American president’s intentions and our firm resolve to respond,” Iran’s ambassador in Tripoli told the Libyan leader. “We have put the first stage behind us with sea mining, and as you saw, the first oil tanker did strike a mine.”
Looking on from his headquarters in Honolulu, Ace Lyons fumed. Iran had deliberately targeted the United States and mined international waters in a clear breach of international law. Yet Washington had done nothing in response to this naked aggression. Although Crist and CENTCOM ran the operation, Lyons, as the Pacific Fleet commander, still controlled all the ships outside the Gulf, including the aircraft carrier when its planes were not protecting Crist’s convoys. And Ace Lyons had been working on his own secret plan to deal with the Iranians. His boss, Ron Hays, would never support it, but Lyons had the chairman’s ear. All that was needed was a window of opportunity.
Fourteen
A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY