by David Crist
Lyons knew he would have to get Crowe’s authority to do this, but the timing for the sub’s arrival would be perfect as an added weapon for Window of Opportunity.
Satisfied that all was progressing, Lyons flew back to Hawaii. He stopped in Guam for the night—long enough to phone Trost to voice his concerns about Brooks. “This cabal between Hays and Crist is essentially cutting me from the pattern,” Lyons complained, before lambasting the decision to select Brooks. “I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to put Brooks into this job. We need to watch this very carefully. We don’t want the navy and this country embarrassed,” he told the naval operations chief.
Trost did not disagree with everything Lyons said. He too thought it was unwise to cut out the expertise of the Pacific Fleet. But he found it strange to refer to two theater commanders doing their job as a cabal. He also held a higher opinion of Brooks.
Lyons continued to wait for the word from Crowe. As time ticked down, he began to think that once again the United States did not have the balls to deal with Iran. On August 27, he called Crowe, who was at Fort Leavenworth attending a meeting of the theater commanders. Lyons spoke to Captain Strasser, Crowe’s executive officer. Lyons inquired, “Do I need to talk to the chairman about the Window of Opportunity plan?”
Although Crowe had encouraged Lyons’s plan, he’d never told Lyons it was going to happen. Instead, Strasser spoke for the chairman: “Absent another provocation, no one here has the stomach for that.”
With Crowe’s unwillingness to press for attacking Iran, the window of opportunity envisioned by Lyons closed. The carriers rotated out and Lyle Bull headed back to the West Coast. “We blew a golden opportunity to clobber the Iranians while the threat was manageable, perhaps even bring down the regime,” Lyons lamented years later.
But Ace Lyons’s anomalistic behavior had finally reached the breaking point with his boss, Ron Hays. Ace had repeatedly kept Hays in the dark about his actions and plans—the Guadalcanal, using a sub to sink Iranian ships, or pushing to execute the Window of Opportunity plan—frustrating the genial admiral in Honolulu.
Hays wrote a letter to Weinberger: it was either Ace or him, and if Lyons did not go, then Hays would retire. The letter arrived in Armitage’s box; he quickly pulled it and called Hays. “You better not send that letter in,” Armitage said. “First, we don’t want this all over the building, and second, if the secretary does not agree to fire Ace, then you have to retire.”
The two men agreed to shred Hays’s letter and quietly approach Weinberger in private. Armitage arranged a phone call between the two men. After explaining all of Lyons’s maneuverings, Weinberger agreed with Hays. Lyons needed to be fired, and the secretary wanted him retired as a two-star, not as a customary four-star rank.
After talking with Webb, Weinberger called Trost, who was on vacation at his home in Virginia Beach. “I want Lyons to retire immediately, and he can go as a two-star.” Trost agreed—he had no love for Lyons—but he suggested they offer to retire him as a four-star if Lyons would go quietly.
Trost also knew of another hammer to use against Ace. A chief petty officer on Lyons’s plane had lodged a complaint on the waste and fraud hotline. While Ace was out on the Constellation, he had allowed his marine fleet force commander, Lieutenant General Dwayne Gray, to use his aircraft to fly back to the mainland for a speech. Lyons had included a piece of furniture for his daughter in Norfolk to be loaded onto the plane. The plan was for his daughter to pick it up where the plane landed with Gray, but Gray, trying to help out his boss, asked the pilot if he had a reason to go on to Norfolk. When the pilot said, “Sure,” Gray sent the plane along and the pilot dropped the furniture off with Lyons’s daughter—all without Lyons’s knowledge. The complaint alleged Lyons had misused government aircraft.
At eight forty on the morning of September 4, Lyons was sitting at his large desk in Hawaii, the same one used by Admiral Nimitz during the Second World War. Trost called and requested a clear line. Lyons’s executive officer, Kevin Healy, dutifully hung up his phone.
“I don’t know anything about this,” Trost dishonestly began, “but I’ve been told to tell you that you have violated the chain of command and they want your retirement by October first. We need your answer by tomorrow.” There would be no further discussions.
A few hours later, Lyons finally got ahold of Crowe. “Bill, what the hell is all this crap?” Crowe, who had just spoken to Ron Hays, responded, “Hays thinks you went around him. I never told you not to keep your superiors informed. Besides, you’re in trouble with the secretary of the navy for misuse of your aircraft.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? I’ve never misused my airplane.”
“You sent an aircraft on to Norfolk on personal business,” Crowe responded.
“I don’t even know what you are talking about,” Lyons answered incredulously. “And you told me not to send any messages or tell anyone about what we were doing.”
“I never said not to keep the chain of command informed,” the chairman said disingenuously. “But you still have got a lot of friends back here in Washington.”
Lyons was stunned. He could not believe that Crowe had knifed him in the back by not defending him in Washington. “Well, from where I sit, that is pretty hard to see. How come I was not given my day in court to come back and defend myself?”
“We thought it was best to handle it this way. But when this all blows over, I want you to come and see me and we can talk, because there are a lot of things we can do,” Crowe added, as if this were a minor change of assignments. Crowe could not afford to have Lyons come forward and expose his private dealings with the chairman, especially since Crowe had deliberately avoided the chain of command that Lyons now stood accused of circumventing. Crowe remained silent. For political expediency, Lyons would take the fall. The chairman never mentioned any of his private conversations with Lyons to either Weinberger or Trost. Ace Lyons never spoke to Crowe again.
Lyons agreed to submit his retirement papers. But he refused to expose Crowe’s duplicity. When asked why, Lyons answered, “I spent forty years serving in the navy. I was not going to be a part of tearing it down.”43
On October 1, Lyons thanked his staff in a brief retirement ceremony on the deck of the cruiser Antietam. “The old surface warrior is gone…that’s all I can say now,” Lyons said shortly before leaving.44
Amazingly, Crowe had the chutzpah to send Lyons a flattering personal message that praised his skill and creativity: “I greatly value your friendship and the wise counsel you have provided me during our frequent association. You leave a void that will be difficult to fill. Warmest regards, Bill.”45
“Fuck you,” Lyons muttered when he read it.
Lyons retired to his home in McLean, Virginia, but his troubles only grew. The long knives were out for the maverick admiral, with Trost leading the way. Agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service hounded Lyons. For the next year, they staked out his house, watching who came and went, and launched a series of investigations. While agents tried to get other officers to swear that Lyons had used his government plane to fly his dogs around to exclusive dog shows, others confiscated classified papers he’d sent back to the Naval Historical Center’s archives in Washington. He and his wife collected antiques, and rumors spread that Lyons had used his aircraft to ferry them for his wife’s business. Although his wife never sold antiques, investigators spent hours digging into that unsupported accusation. Lyons was then accused of spiriting away from Pacific Command highly classified papers that should not have left the command safes. Trost wanted to press charges, but he could not get the navy secretary to agree. “What they confiscated,” Lyons said later, “were papers that were embarrassing to them—that’s what they wanted.” The vice chief of naval operations, Huntington Hardisty, offered quarters during his transition. Lyons refused, but asked for his two stewards to remain to help him with his move. No one could recall this, and Lyons had to reimb
urse the government for the cost of the airfare for the two enlisted men. “It was purely vindictive,” Lyons’s lawyer, Morris Sinor, said. After more than a year, the new secretary of the navy, William Ball, finally ordered the harassment to cease.
While Lyons was out of the way, CENTCOM’s troubles with the navy remained. News articles appeared in the San Diego Union, a paper with a strong source within the navy hierarchy, that the mining of the Bridgeton had resulted from a lack of proper naval planning at the Tampa headquarters. Anonymous admirals warned that “more mistakes could cost American lives.”
Not only had Crist finally cut out Lyons and the Pacific Fleet, but navy brass was aghast at his plan for dealing with the Iranians. Rather than view the conflict as a traditional naval fight, Crist approached it as an insurgency, a guerrilla war at sea. His approach was more akin to Vietnam or Iraq after 2007. It would be a low-tech fight where small boats and helicopters had more impact than multibillion-dollar cruisers.
Crowe publicly supported Crist. “These criticisms [of Crist] are just plain wrong,” he said during a trip to California. But behind the walls of the Pentagon, a duplicitous chairman had the long knives after Crist too.
Fifteen
THE NIGHT STALKERS
While the military brass feuded, the onus for defeating Iran bore down squarely on the shoulders of Hal Bernsen and his tiny thirteen-man staff on board their aging white-painted command ship. Staying up late into the evening talking with a few key officers, Bernsen rethought his plan. Clearly the Iranian leadership had not been awed by the power of the U.S. Navy and had risked war by targeting the first U.S. convoy.1 With the horse out of the barn, military intelligence analysts now fed him a steady stream of possible future Iranian Revolutionary Guard attacks.2
One of Bernsen’s principal discussants was his controversial intelligence officer, Commander Howell Conway Ziegler. One retired officer described him as “a mad genius—true on both accounts,” while others called him a “whirling dervish.” His mind worked fast and ginned up unorthodox solutions to equally unusual problems. A common refrain said about him by many of those interviewed was: “He would come up with ten solutions to a problem; nine would be bullshit, but that tenth would be brilliant.” Ziegler’s role in Middle East Force went beyond his intelligence duties. Shortly after the Bridgeton mining, Bernsen dispatched him to Djibouti to negotiate with the French about increasing their support for the escort operation. Ziegler inserted himself into operational decisions, perturbing many who believed he was in over his head and earning him the unflattering nickname “Conway Twitty.”3 But it would be his analysis that unraveled the Revolutionary Guard operations. More important, Bernsen and his operations staff respected and trusted him, convinced that his out-of-the-box thinking was what was required to address the Iranian threat.
“So what is the threat, then?” Bernsen asked Ziegler reflectively one evening. The “threat is essentially an unconventional one.” The Iranians were unlike any adversary the U.S. Navy had fought. They posed a low-tech threat of mines and hit-and-run attacks with speedboats outfitted with recoilless rifles and inaccurate but lethal rocket launchers. They operated more akin to the Vietcong than to the Japanese. Their Silkworm missiles did pose a risk, but Iran was not likely to cross that line, he surmised, knowing full well that it would mean a massive U.S. retaliation that would destroy Iran’s navy and air force.4 “They already had their hands full with Iraq,” Bernsen remarked.
Over the next couple of days Bernsen, Ziegler, and his operations officer brainstormed how to deal with the Iranian threat in late night staff meetings on board the La Salle and in lengthy phone calls with General George Crist, who was eight hours behind at CENTCOM in Tampa. Bernsen developed a robust surveillance regime to watch the Iranians. It seemed unrealistic to have a presence over the entire five-hundred-mile length of the Gulf, so he targeted the shallow choke points near Farsi or Abu Musa that presented the best locations to lay mines targeted against the American convoys, based largely on a picture of the Iranian operations being painted by Ziegler. He divided the five-hundred-mile Persian Gulf into roughly eight patrol zones in which U.S. warships would be more or less permanently stationed.5 In the unlikely event the few Iranian aircraft decided to venture out, one cruiser was stationed in the middle and one outside the Gulf linked to the air force AWACS in Saudi Arabia. But defeating the Iranian mines or hit-and-run attacks would not be done by large warships or bombers. In Bernsen’s mind, helicopters and some sort of smaller patrol boats would be needed to control the vast space of the Persian Gulf.6
The northern part of the Gulf near Farsi Island presented the greatest obstacle. Here, the shallow water forced shipping into a narrow corridor of deep water that passed too close for comfort to the Iranian stronghold of Farsi Island; the Revolutionary Guard dominated the hundred-mile stretch from Kuwait to the island. The Iranian air force did not pose a serious risk, contenting itself with fending off its Iraqi counterpart and protecting Iranian oil tankers. Iranian mines or spillover from the Iran-Iraq War raging just to the north made CENTCOM very reluctant to risk sending two hundred sailors and a billion-dollar ship into an area that many in Tampa and out in the Gulf began referring to as “Indian Country.”7 But unless the United States maintained some sort of permanent presence to prevent the Iranians from mining at their leisure, Earnest Will would be short-lived. Bernsen had to find a way to check the Comanches.
Ziegler passed Bernsen a report that profoundly affected the admiral’s thinking. A quick analysis of the damage to the Bridgeton by American naval engineers and the Office of Naval Intelligence indicated that the mine had been set to float about twenty feet below the surface of the water. While this reinforced the threat to a U.S. Navy warship (a frigate draws some twenty-six feet), it did not preclude using a smaller draft vessel such as a patrol boat. “Those boats,” Bernsen surmised, “could maneuver with fair confidence throughout the area, without the danger of striking a submerged, tethered mine.”
Bernsen had no idea what kind of patrol boats the U.S. military possessed, so he and his operations officer, Captain David Grieve, simply opened the ship’s copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships to see what types of patrol boats the navy had in its inventory. As they flipped through the pages, the options available looked slim; only three boats appeared to have any applicability. One was the small thirty-two-foot fiberglass patrol boat riverine (PBR), designed originally for the rivers of Vietnam. Its recent claim to fame had been serving as the centerpiece in the movie Apocalypse Now. Relegated to the reserves, with a crew of five, the PBR was air transportable, but wholly incapable of operating in anything but the calmest of seas. Also in the inventory was the small, sleek Naval Special Warfare boat called Seafox. Made of radar-absorbent material, it might be useful for clandestine operations against the Iranians. Slightly more promising was the sixty-five-foot fiberglass Mark III patrol boat. Built in the early 1970s based on Vietnam requirements and experiences, it had a range of 450 miles and could achieve speeds of up to thirty knots. It included an enclosed cockpit and cabin to shelter its ten-man crew from the weather. The Mark III had never been designed to operate in the open seas, and lacked such creature comforts as showers, but it did pack a punch with a 40-mm cannon forward and a 20-mm machine gun aft, not counting heavy machine guns and automatic grenade launchers. These just might work, Bernsen thought.
All this led to the next logical question: “Where do you base them?” Small boats are not self-sufficient; they require a base for refueling, crew rest, and shelter in the event of foul weather. The Persian Gulf infamously kicks up some surprisingly large waves. Kuwait or Saudi Arabia might be willing to allow a small U.S. base, but both lay too far from the shipping channel to adequately support a round-the-clock operation. “What we needed,” Bernsen thought, “was some kind of sea-based platform from which the small boats, helicopters, or whatever else we wanted could operate.”8
As Bernsen mulled over the barge idea, he called the head of the
Kuwait Oil Tanker Company, Fattah al-Bader. Talking around the issue over the open phone line, he asked al-Bader if he had some ships that could accommodate a helicopter. The Kuwaiti mentioned that Bernsen could use two self-propelled barges owned by the Kuwaiti coast guard, which resembled ferry boats without any passenger areas and were topped with a large flight deck for helicopters. As neither was being used and, more important for the bottom line–minded Kuwaitis, both had already been paid for, Kuwait was more than happy to let the Americans use them. Bernsen flew up to Kuwait and toured the two vessels. Unfortunately, they could accommodate only about forty people and perhaps one or two helicopters—not nearly large enough. “What I need is something that we can move, holds two hundred people, can support helicopters, and we could tie boats alongside.”
“Well,” al-Bader answered, “you go find it and we’ll pay for it.”9
Over the past several years Bernsen had become friendly with an American businessman from Houston who owned a company based out of Sarjah, UAE, that leased oil service boats. With a quick mind and a slow Southern drawl, he knew the Gulf as few other Americans did.10
Bernsen decided to call him. “This is a nonconversation, but I’m looking for some boats that I can put some helicopters on that can hold about two hundred people.”
The man from Houston called back in a couple of hours. “I’ve spoken to a friend of mine at Brown and Root.” This was the Halliburton subsidiary that maintained extensive dealings throughout the Persian Gulf, including with the Iranians, supporting the oil industry. “They have two oil construction barges that are not being used sitting right there in Bahrain. One of them is named the Hercules. There is a Brown and Root office about a mile from where your ship is tied up. Why don’t you go over and talk to him; I’ve already made the arrangements with Brown and Root’s Middle East representative.”