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

by David Crist

  An uncertain Grieve responded, “Sir, only minelike.”

  “Bullshit!” Bernsen answered. “They’re mines!”52

  Two Little Birds came in low and fast. While one strafed the deck with his minigun with nearly two thousand bullets, the other unleashed a hail of machine-gun fire and explosive rockets into the bridge and stern. One Iranian sailor who happened to be dumping trash caught the full force of one rocket in his face, cleaving off half his head, sending brains and bloody goo across the deck. A propane tank explosion killed another sailor near the engine.53 The two helicopters broke hard right, and then came back around for another strafing run, showering the bridge and deck with bullets and fléchette rockets filled with tiny darts. They returned to the Jarrett to quickly rearm, leaving the Iran Ajr on fire and dead in the water.

  When the helicopters returned about fifteen minutes later, incredibly, they found the ship under way and Ibrahimi’s men pushing more mines over the side. The American helos came in again with two more strafing runs. One Iranian pushing a mine died instantly, while another was knocked overboard and disappeared into the black sea. The fusillade caught Farshchian: a bullet passed through his side and another blew off part of his hand; a fléchette ripped open his side, exposing his pelvic bone. An explosion knocked Ibrahimi to the metal deck, badly bruising his face. This time, the Iranians had had enough, and Lieutenant Fouladvand yelled, “Abandon ship!”

  A dozen men jumped over the side, while ten more took to an inflatable life raft, bringing along the grievously wounded Farshchian. Others made their flight in an inflatable Zodiac speedboat. When one of the army helicopters approached and dropped down to a hover, an Ira-nian jumped up and made what the pilot later described as a “threatening gesture.” As the helicopter flew alongside the boat, one of the army pilots pulled out a submachine gun from his holster, took aim, and blew the man away.54

  Within thirty minutes, news of the firefight had arrived in the Pentagon. Crowe quickly held a short meeting with Weinberger, before heading to the maze of the National Military Command Center in a guarded area just down the hall from his second-floor office, where he spent the next eight hours monitoring the crisis. After informing the White House and key members of Congress, Weinberger authorized seizing the Iranian ship.

  This order made National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci and his deputy, Colin Powell, nervous. Powell spoke with Weinberger. “The president has been informed,” the army general said, “yet we do not want to risk American lives by seizing the ship. We want to keep it contained and get them to surrender.” Then he added, “But you can shoot if they offer resistance.” Neither Weinberger nor Crowe thought that directive made much sense, and it took nearly an hour before Carlucci finally informed Weinberger that the president had agreed they should seize the ship, but should avoid any unnecessary risk to U.S. personnel.55

  Lieutenant Commander Marc Thomas had been happily sleeping in his stateroom on the Guadalcanal when news of the firefight with the Iran Ajr interrupted his slumber around midnight. With his dark skin, Thomas could have easily been confused for an Arab rather than an elite Navy SEAL. His bright eyes, infectious smile, and easygoing demeanor made him popular with both senior officers and the fifteen men in his platoon. He had originally been a part of Gordon Keiser’s marine amphibious unit, which the marine colonel had successfully lobbied to keep on board the ship in Diego Garcia. Now Bernsen wanted the SEALs’ special skills to seize the stricken minelayer. Thomas rousted his men, and they donned their war-fighting kit and flew over to the La Salle. There Thomas found Bernsen’s staff hastily trying to put together a plan to seize the Iran Ajr and round up the Iranian sailors scattered about the mine-strewn water. Thomas proposed simultaneous assault fast-roping down onto the ship from helicopters while marines assaulted from rubber boats.56

  But Bernsen had just spoken with Crowe. Reflecting the nervousness in Washington, the chairman passed on that Bernsen could seize the boat only if it looked as though there was no armed opposition on board. To avoid running into mines and to be able to see any armed Iranians, Bernsen told Crowe and Crist that he would take the Iran Ajr the next morning, just after sunrise.57 The SEALs would use one of the La Salle’s logistics boats to storm the ship in broad daylight. Two U.S. Marine Cobra attack helicopters and Paul Evancoe’s patrol boats would provide backup in case they got in trouble.58

  At first light on September 22, the La Salle flooded its well deck; then Thomas boarded the landing boat and puttered toward the drifting Iranian ship in the bright blue daylight. With the SEALs crouched around the gunwales, the coxswain pulled alongside with a metal clang, turning his engines hard to keep his boat pressed against the side of the Iranian ship. “One hand grenade could kill us all,” Thomas thought as he and his platoon scrambled up the side, moving swiftly to seize the bridge and engine room. They then methodically searched the ship, looking for saboteurs hiding in closets. But other than finding three bodies, the ship was empty.59

  The SEALs discovered a treasure trove of intelligence. In their haste, the Iranians had tossed their radio crypto over the side, but had left reams of messages and decoded teletype. SEALs found the entire secret Ghadir mining plan to close the Strait of Hormuz; it was a remarkable bit of carelessness by the Iranian navy. They found a map detailing all of Iran’s covert mining operations. Reams of messages contained details of their oil platforms’ role in coordinating attacks and Iranian command and control procedures. The United States learned about Iranian eavesdropping on the radio bridge transmissions of the escorted tankers. One SEAL noticed a piece of paper sticking out of the foul-smelling toilet. He reluctantly stuck his gloved hand down and pulled it out, to discover an important codebook that some crewman had tried to hastily conceal.60

  Among the documents, the Americans found poignant reminders of the humans they had just attacked. On one of the corpses, a marine Farsi interrogator found a photograph of a smiling ten-year-old boy—the same age as his own son.61

  As Thomas cleared the ship, Evancoe and Wikul’s two patrol boats suddenly appeared off the starboard side. In their haste to leave Bahrain, the boat with their only secure radio had run aground. They had no idea what frequency Thomas’s forces used, and they could not raise the La Salle. Undaunted, they pressed on, planning their own assault on the Iran Ajr, determined to kill anyone remaining, unaware that Thomas’s SEALs had already boarded.62

  Evancoe spied a dark-skinned man carrying a rifle and immediately ordered all the guns trained on him. Thomas always thought Evancoe overly aggressive, and this action got his attention. “Okay, Paul, please don’t shoot me!”

  Wikul commanded the lead boat and ordered his men to hold their fire pending his order. When he rounded the other side of the Iran Ajr, he saw the La Salle’s boat. “My heart almost came out of my mouth. I nearly shot my friend.”63

  With disaster averted, Evancoe and Wikul turned their attention to picking up the survivors. Their two boats closed on a tented circular bright orange life raft. Unsure of what awaited them, Wikul pointed a shotgun at the Iranians and motioned for them to put their hands in the air. All immediately complied. One by one, each swam over to Wikul’s boat. The Americans bound them, covered their eyes with gray duct tape, and stacked them unceremoniously facedown on the abrasive nonskid deck. When a SEAL discovered a pistol on one, he punched him unconscious and tossed the weapon overboard.

  One man remained inside the raft: Commander Farshchian. Wikul grabbed a pistol, swam over, and climbed onto the life raft bobbing nearby. Unsure of the Iranian’s intentions, Wikul started frisking him for a weapon and his finger inadvertently went inside a gaping wound in the Iranian’s side. Farshchian screamed out in agony. Reflexively, Wikul pressed his gun to Farshchian before realizing it had not been a precursor to the Iranian blowing himself up. As he transferred Farshchian over to the American boat, the Iranian looked at Wikul and said in perfect English, “I still have four of my men in the water; would you please rescue them?” Even Wiku
l was impressed. “It’s hard not to respect a guy who, despite his own wounds, his first words were for the welfare of his men.”64 The final tally: five Iranians dead and twenty-six captured, with several in the same bad shape as Farshchian.

  The capture of the Iran Ajr was one of the biggest American intelligence coups in modern history. The invisible hand of God proved to be made out of Iranian flesh and spilled blood. That afternoon both Crist and Bernsen visited the Iranian vessel. They brought along photographers, and the next day newspapers around the globe carried front-page photographs of nine mines sitting on the Iran Ajr’s open deck.

  Iran denied that the ship had been carrying mines. Speaking before the United Nations, President Ali Khamenei called the American charges a “pack of lies,” and an Iranian spokesman said the ship had only carried foodstuffs.65

  As the Iranian prisoners were being repatriated through Oman—all wearing newly provided USS La Salle T-shirts—Weinberger flew out to the Gulf and inspected the ship.66 There a gleeful secretary told the assembled reporters that the capture was “not just a smoking gun, but a blazing gun.” With the evidence obvious as to this ship’s real mission, and public commendations coming even from the Soviet Union, Weinberger smiled, pointed to the mines sitting on the deck, and said: “That’s the biggest load of groceries I’ve ever seen!”67

  Weinberger ordered the Iran Ajr sunk. To make a point, a U.S. warship towed the minelayer well inside the Iranian-declared exclusion zone. Paul Evancoe rigged explosives and blew out the ship’s bottom. She quickly sank, leaving only an oil slick and a few of the oil drums that had unsuccessfully tried to hide her deadly cargo.68

  The Iranians immediately halted all mining operations. Embarrassed and exposed, with the world condemning them, Ayatollah Khomeini agreed to draw back the invisible hand. But Iran had hardly caved to American pressure. In Tehran during the Friday prayers after the seizure of the Iran Ajr, President Ali Khamenei told the gathering that “we will respond to America’s wicked acts in the Persian Gulf.” The Iranians were about to turn up the burner and make the Gulf a great deal warmer for the Americans.

  Sixteen

  A VERY CLOSE CALL

  When Admiral William Crowe read the top secret CIA memo, he immediately realized the magnitude of the crisis. The United States verged on the brink of war in the Middle East. Iran planned to conduct a massive naval attack on Saudi Arabia with the objective of crippling Saudi oil production, the late September 1987 report stated bluntly. Over the past month, American intelligence had reported an unusual congregation of small boats manned by fervent Revolutionary Guard sailors in the northern Persian Gulf, and recent satellite images confirmed boats being moved by truck from southern Iran.1 But Iran’s intentions eluded the Pentagon; analysts suspected it was only a military exercise. This new report, however, described in detail the numbers of Iranian boats and their targets in Saudi Arabia, and even predicted the time for the attack: within seventy-two hours. Crowe held the outline for Tehran’s entire war plan.

  “How good is your source for this?” Crowe asked the CIA officer.

  “He is a recent recruit, a navy captain well placed within the Iranian military. He has proven reliable in the past,” the officer replied.

  After quickly checking with the deputy national security adviser, Colin Powell, at the White House, Crowe dismissed the CIA officer and swiveled around in his chair, picked up the secure telephone on the credenza behind his imposing wooden desk, and punched the autodial for the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Their relationship remained strong with Bandar helping to arrange financial support for the CIA’s secret wars in Afghanistan and Central America, and he had recently hosted a meeting at his Potomac River home between the CIA and Iraqi officials about sharing satellite intelligence of Iran.2

  That afternoon the two men met in Crowe’s office. “We have a tip-off from a source of an impending attack on your oil facilities,” Crowe began. “The Iranians are deliberately flooding their radios with false information, so we don’t know the exact day, but likely October second. You need to give them a warm welcome.”3

  “I told you the Iranians were building up for something,” Bandar replied, referring to a conversation between the two men earlier. “If pushed, we will respond forcefully.” He grew visibly angry as he continued. “We will bomb their oil facilities! Our military plans are doable; we will hit Iranian oil facilities on Kharg Island and their port of Bushehr with ten Tornado aircraft! I just need to know,” Bandar added, “will you support us?”

  In July 1987, Iran had tried to instigate an uprising in Mecca during the annual hajj. Dozens of Revolutionary Guard soldiers had secretly arrived in the holy city armed with rifles and explosives. One of William Casey’s CIA recruits in the Revolutionary Guard, Reza Kahlili, had tipped off the agency to the Iranian scheme. The CIA passed it to Saudi security, which moved forcefully against the Iranians, killing 275 Iranian demonstrators, including some hapless civilians. The commander of the Revolutionary Guard, Major General Mohsen Rezai, advocated retaliation. The truculent former electrical engineer had long advocated an attack on Saudi Arabia or American forces in the Gulf, and he had nearly succeeded in doing so on the night of the first convoy, until he was reined in by the supreme leader. This time, Ayatollah Khomeini agreed with Rezai. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia needed to be taught a lesson.

  Captain Touradj Riahi served in a plum billet as head of the navy plans division in Tehran. He worked closely with a Revolutionary Guard officer and former colleague in the old shah’s navy to write a plan to strike back at Saudi Arabia, fittingly named Operation Hajj. The plan showed a rare level of cooperation between the Revolutionary Guard and the Iranian navy. The Iranians would amass dozens of guard small boats at Bushehr and Kharg Island in the northern Gulf. With a Revolutionary Guard officer in charge, embarked on one of the smaller navy missile boats serving as his flagship, this mosquito swarm of a fleet would be split into three flotillas. Under the cover of darkness, they would move en masse across the Gulf and then attack different Saudi and Kuwaiti oil facilities around al-Khafji with rockets and machine guns. One group would land commandos in Saudi Arabia to destroy a vital oil pumping station, perhaps even one of the Saudi desalination plants, which provided much of the desert kingdom’s freshwater.

  On September 30, 1987, General Rezai arrived at the Persian Gulf port of Bushehr. To control Operation Hajj, the Iranians had established a makeshift headquarters in an old dormitory building next to the jetty at Bushehr. Captain Riahi came down from Tehran to serve as the senior naval officer, with the head of the Revolutionary Guard, General Rezai himself, supervising the operation. Using the diversion of their well-publicized “Martyrdom” military exercise around the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians quietly began pulling a number of the small Boston Whaler–type gunboats out of the water and loading them on flatbed trucks. They covered the boats with tarps to conceal their nature from prying eyes and passing American satellites. Over a period of several weeks, the Revolutionary Guard drove an untold number of boats up to Bushehr and quietly amassed at least four dozen small boats and one missile patrol boat in the northern Gulf.

  After the Iran Ajr sinking, the Iranian commander decided to also establish a blocking force to interdict any American reinforcements moving up from Bahrain. He would park a few boats astride the shipping channel, and they would carry a nasty surprise. In case the army Little Birds helicopters showed again, the Revolutionary Guard brought along a Stinger missile, the most sophisticated American handheld antiaircraft system. Only recently the U.S. government had decided to allow the CIA to provide these to the Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviets, and the Stingers had helped turn the tide of the war against Moscow. Without the agency’s knowledge, Ismail Khan, a powerful Afghan warlord friendly to Iran, had spirited ten of these missiles to the Iranian military. Now Iran gleefully intended to turn America’s own weapons back on the Great Satan. As the day of the attack approached, senior officials
from Tehran arrived to witness the operation, joining a cadre of army and navy officers.

  Within the CIA, Captain Riahi was a prized agent. He had repeatedly proven his worth by a steady stream of timely and accurate information about the Iranian military. He now found himself as the senior naval officer in the most significant Iranian military operation of the entire war. At considerable risk, Riahi managed to quickly get the details of the Iranian attack back to his handler at Tehfran. How he passed this is not clear. He may have relayed it through a German-speaking man in Tehran simply known as “the Austrian.” While the CIA had a spy effort against Iran in Vienna (Austria was one of the other countries where Iranians could obtain a visa to the United States), his true nationality remains ambiguous. This mystery man emerged from the shadows on one occasion: he turned up one evening for a party at Captain Riahi’s home and was introduced as the man who’d helped obtain his son’s visa.4

  Alerted to the threat, CENTCOM started monitoring the massing of small boats near Bushehr. On September 26, the DIA reported up to thirty-three small boats alone at the port. Four days later, U.S. intelligence detected as many as seventy Revolutionary Guard boats arrayed along a forty-five-mile-long front.5 This alert brought Bandar into Crowe’s office that afternoon.

  On October 1, General George Crist, who was in the region, called Crowe to update him about a conversation with senior Saudi military officials. If Iran attacked, the Saudis would allow U.S. attack helicopters and surveillance aircraft into the kingdom. Crist wanted to send three U.S. Navy P-3 turboprop planes immediately to Saudi Arabia, as their excellent surface search radar would be invaluable for detecting the Iranian boats. Crowe contacted Bandar and relayed the request, adding that these were “nonoffensive” planes. Prince Bandar immediately called his father, the defense minister, in Riyadh and obtained his permission for the deployment of the P-3s to the King Abdul Aziz Air Base at Dhahran. Crist assigned his chief of staff, Don Penzler, to coordinate the details with the Saudi military.6 The next day, Crowe, Crist, Armitage, and Bandar (accompanied by a Saudi major general) gathered for a hastily arranged conference in the chairman’s office. Bandar appeared nervous and agitated but struck a defiant tone. His government, however, was clearly worried and wanted reassurances of American support if Iran attacked. The P-3s were on the way, Crowe said, due in Dhahran in three days, and Crist offered to deploy attack helicopters or fighter jets if the Saudis asked.