by David Crist
That evening, October 2, an American AWACS radar plane out of Saudi Arabia patrolled the northern Gulf. Designed to detect airborne targets, on that night it used its radar to look for any movement on the surface of the water. Suddenly, it picked up forty-five small blips moving rapidly toward the Saudi-Kuwait border and the al-Khafji oil facility. The expected attack appeared under way, and the pilot sounded the general alarm. Saudi Arabia scrambled F-15 fighters. Harold Bernsen at Middle East Force ordered the two frigates carrying the army Little Birds plus the helicopter carrier Guadalcanal with the marine attack helicopters north at maximum speed to intercept the Iranian horde.7
When the host of American and Saudi ships and planes arrived, they found no Iranian fleet, just a few odd fishing dhows plying the waters. The next day the American P-3s began flying, and they too saw nothing unusual. After a week of intelligence warnings, the Iranian forces had simply disappeared.
Saudi generals then accused the Americans of making up the entire attack story. Penzler received an earful from the skeptical commander of the Saudi land forces, General Yusef Rasid, who accused him of being part of an elaborate hoax to get U.S. military forces inside his country. Others pointed out that it had been a stormy night; perhaps the AWACS had picked up nothing more than wavelets?8
In truth, Mohsen Rezai had had every intention of attacking Saudi Arabia that night. The dark moonless night and rough seas had combined to turn his attack into a fiasco. The missile boat serving as the command ship became disoriented. She veered well off course, heading in the wrong direction. The high seas swamped one of the small boats and tossed and scattered the others all over the northern Gulf.9 Undaunted, the Revolutionary Guard commander ordered another attempt for the following week. This time, Captain Riahi could not get the message out to his American handlers at Tehfran.
Into this environment, the barge Hercules deployed for her first operation in the northern Gulf. Paul Evancoe was assigned as the commander, and since his arrival in early September, the SEAL had worked tirelessly to outfit this first mobile sea base. His men filled twenty thousand sandbags and installed metal ballistic shields around the gun emplacements in the four corners. He had old crew quarters and drilling equipment removed and replaced by steel ammunition bunkers, an aircraft hangar, and a communications van. At one point forty welders worked twenty-four hours a day to transform the Hercules into an armed firebase bristling with weapons manned by 177 marines and special operators and a few intelligence linguists.10 Meanwhile, work continued on the Wimbrown. Unfortunately, it would not be ready for operation until December.
The Hercules had a civilian crew of about thirty serving in such capacities as welders, cooks, and crane operators. Despite the secret nature of the sea bases, the civilian crew hired by Brown and Root were a motley group from Pakistan and the Philippines. Their background checks appeared sketchy to American counterintelligence officers, who worried that some might be Iranian spies or saboteurs.11 Over the next year of the mobile sea bases’ existence, however, other than to serve overly spicy curry to American special operators, all behaved properly and kept quiet.
Incredibly, as tugs towed the Hercules up to its station near Farsi Island on October 6, neither Evancoe nor Wikul knew anything about the near war between Iran and Saudi Arabia the preceding week.12 For the first two days, they sent out their patrol boats looking for suspicious vessels. They found one, an Iranian dhow with an antenna sticking out of its cockpit, which appeared to be collecting intelligence on the barge. Both Wikul and Evancoe felt a growing sense of unease. With the nearest American ship, the frigate USS Thach, which provided air defense for the Hercules, twenty miles to the south, “we had the distinct feeling of being hung out to dry,” Wikul said.13
On the evening of October 8, Wikul and Evancoe talked about their situation. Each had a strong suspicion that the Iranians intended to attack. Rather than just sit back and wait for the Iranians, they decided to put out a listening post to try to find out what the Iranians on Farsi Island were doing. After nightfall, they would send two patrol boats out with a small radar-absorbing Seafox. It would carry a couple of marine Farsi linguists with sophisticated eavesdropping equipment. As the patrol boats passed close to the Middle Shoals buoy marking shallow water, approximately fifteen miles west of Farsi, the Seafox would be dropped off, its radar signature blending into that of the buoy’s.14 From there, the marine linguists could listen in on the Iranian island and the Revolutionary Guard small boats. Similar tactics had proved successful with marine helicopters in other parts of the Gulf.15
After dark the operation got under way. Two blacked-out patrol boats left Hercules at nine p.m. with the small Seafox in tow and headed for the buoy only eight miles away. As insurance, Evancoe had three of the Little Birds fly ahead to scout out the buoy in front of the slower-moving patrol boats.16 The lead helicopter, looking through its black-and-white infrared camera, noticed three boats already at the buoy. “That’s strange,” the pilot thought. “Our boats shouldn’t be here yet.” As he closed to within one hundred yards, he saw someone lean up in a small bass boat and man a heavy machine gun mounted on a tripod at the bow. As the American helicopter banked hard to the left, a string of tracker bullets whizzed past his canopy, missing the helicopter by mere feet.
Unbeknownst to the Americans, that very same night Mohsen Rezai decided to retry the Operation Hajj attack plan that had been thwarted by bad weather the week before. While the main flotilla assembled around some Iranian platforms in the northern Fereidoon oil field, that morning one of the larger cabin cruiser–type boats called a Boghammer and two smaller boats had departed Bushehr for Farsi Island. The group was commanded by a very forceful and competent young Revolutionary Guard officer named Mahdavi, who told his men, “You are headed on a great mission!”17 Not all of the ten-man crew shared their commander’s enthusiasm. They were a motley collection of conscripted landlubbers: one was a hulking illiterate farm boy, and another had deserted the army and traveled to Bushehr to visit a friend. The guards swept him off the street and threw him on the Boghammer to serve as their cook.18
After a brief stop at Farsi, where they waited for darkness and said their prayers, the three boats headed out shortly after sunset. The flotilla comprised the Boghammer with five men, including the officer in charge, and two small fiberglass fishing boats, each with a crew of three. All three men were armed with the traditional weapons of the Revolutionary Guard navy—a 107-mm multiple rocket launcher, heavy machine guns, and smaller-caliber weapons. But one Iranian on the Boghammer carried one of the American Stinger missiles, with orders to shoot any American helicopter he saw.19 Mahdavi’s mission was to prevent the Americans from interfering in the big attack on Saudi Arabia.
The three boats pulled up near the buoy and clustered together, the Iranian crews talking, relaxing, and smoking cigarettes as they prepared to bed down for the night. A man on one of the smaller boats heard the low whirl of a helicopter. He sprang to his gun and opened fire into the darkness in the general direction of the noise.
The lead Little Bird pulled out and vectored in the two attack variants trailing just behind. One unleashed two deadly fléchette rounds filled with tiny darts into the cluster of Revolutionary Guard boats. The American helo followed it up with a burst of machine-gun fire and explosive rockets. One of the fiberglass boats erupted in a massive fireball, blowing it in half and spreading burning gasoline across the water. The American pilot’s wingman came in and unleashed on the remaining small boat and the Boghammer, leaving the former on fire. One crewman pushed the throttle full forward, and the Boghammer tried to pick up speed and maneuver to avoid being hit. The guard commander ordered it to circle back around and then slow to try to pick up survivors from the other two boats. The Little Birds closed in again and were greeted by the flash of a missile or rocket coming up from the Boghammer, which passed harmlessly by the helicopter. The Boghammer got up speed and tried to flee, maneuvering erratically. One of the Iranians grasp
ed an Iranian flag and kneeled down on the cabin floor, praying for deliverance. A Little Bird launched his last rocket, which skipped off the water and hit the cabin cruiser squarely in the port side, igniting a fuel tank. The boat erupted in a massive fireball, instantly killing the man praying in the cabin as well as Mahdavi. The boat sank in less than thirty seconds.
Evancoe had immediately ordered general quarters at the first sight of tracer fire, clearly visible in the darkness eight miles away. As the marine security platoon manned their positions, the remaining patrol boat was lowered into the water, joining the other already serving as a local protection and reaction force. Marines and SEALs tossed grenades over the side in case Iranian frogmen might be lurking, ready to storm the Hercules. The commander launched the other two patrol boats, which took a position just north of the barge. Three additional Little Birds arrived as reinforcements.
The two U.S. patrol boats went to full speed and quickly arrived at the scene. Fire and debris littered the water. They pulled five Iranians out and discovered a sixth man terribly burned, clinging to the buoy. As they slowly searched for more survivors, Petty Officer James Kelz noticed a Styrofoam case floating in the water that looked like one that housed a battery for a Stinger missile. He dove over the side of the boat and swam out to retrieve the case. It proved to be electrifying evidence. Word quickly made it to the president that Iran had the most advanced surface-to-air missile in the American inventory.
With only one corpsman, Wikul established a makeshift aid station in the small office, its floor appropriately painted red. The medic frantically worked to save the six Iranians. One badly burned Iranian died shortly after arriving. Another more truculent Revolutionary Guard sailor muttered insults in Farsi at the Americans. He kept wiggling and seemingly trying to get up from his stretcher and kill them. One of the unsmiling SEALs leaned over and said, “How does it feel to be shot by the Great Satan?” Wikul realized that something more than hatred plagued the disgruntled Iranian. With a pistol trained on the patient, Wikul ordered the corpsman to turn him over, and when they removed his bunched-up shirt, a fountain of blood spurted out of a gaping bullet hole in the man’s back. The corpsman tried to plug the wound, and they carried him up the ladder to the flight deck to an awaiting medical evacuation helicopter. Halfway up the ladder, the wounded sailor let out a gurgled gasp of air and “suddenly got very heavy,” as one litter bearer recalled. Although this second Iranian died, the other four survived, and a marine helicopter flew them to a hospital on an awaiting warship.
Captain Frank Lugo immediately summoned Bernsen, who was in town having dinner with some Bahraini officials. Well to the south, an Iranian fired a missile from Rostam platform at a U.S. Navy helicopter operating from one of the frigates. The Middle East Force commander ordered the entire fleet to high alert.
While Evancoe tried to answer insistent questions from a nervous Middle East Force about the firefight at Middle Shoals buoy, the radar on the Hercules picked up forty small craft that appeared to be headed south toward the mobile sea base. To Wikul, it appeared to be part of a coordinated attack with the small boats at the buoy.20
Evancoe picked up the radio and called the commander of the two patrol boats, Lieutenant John Roark, standing in the path of the Iranian onslaught. “John, do you have the high-speed contacts?”
“Roger, Skipper. What are your orders?”
Evancoe calmly replied: “Turn and engage.” And Roark did.21
Twenty miles to the south on the USS Thach, Captain Jerry O’Donnell was working out in the ship’s weight room when a call came from the watch officer: “Captain, your presence is required in the CIC [combat information center].” He ran to the darkened room filled with radios and the glow of various radars. His own helicopter was aloft, using its radar to guide the Little Birds. O’Donnell had it return to his ship to pick up his corpsman and take him to the Hercules to help treat the wounded prisoners.22
His radar then detected the Iranian flotilla, only they were west, toward Saudi Arabia, and not coming from Iran. After relaying this back to Lugo on the La Salle, and without waiting for permission, O’Donnell ordered general quarters and then flank speed. As men ran to their battle stations and manned and loaded the automatic grenade launchers and machine guns, the frigate kicked up a rooster tail of white foam as it made thirty knots north to position the ship between the Hercules and the Iranian small boats. There they joined four patrol boats and six army Little Birds, all arrayed to do battle with Mohsen Rezai’s Revolutionary Guard fleet.
Suddenly, the radar images started breaking up. Then they just disappeared. Although the images had been solid contacts, unlike any weather effect commonly witnessed, O’Donnell concluded they had all been a false echo, in part because they appeared right off the Saudi coast. While Evancoe and Wikul remained convinced of the Iranian presence, the captain of the Thach reported back to Bernsen that it had been a false echo.
But the two SEALs had been right. Operation Hajj was in full force, and the three Iranian flotillas off the Saudi coast were about to open fire. The boats had just landed Iranian commandos onto the Saudi beach when news of the disaster at Middle Shoals reached their makeshift headquarters in Bushehr. The ferocity and precision of the American attack stunned the Revolutionary Guard. With three boats sunk and seven sailors killed, and now faced with American helicopters and patrol boats headed toward them from the south, either Rezai or his deputy immediately concluded they had walked into an ambush. The Saudis and the Americans had been waiting for them. He recalled the entire force, which hastened back to Bushehr.
“No one realized how close a call we had that night,” both Evancoe and Lugo recounted. By sheer serendipity for the United States, the unwitting commander of the Hercules had arrived just in time to thwart the largest Revolutionary Guard naval operation of the war. In war it is sometimes better to be lucky than good. On October 8, 1987, the American special operations forces were both. Unbeknownst to the anxious servicemen on board the Hercules, this marked the first and only time the Iranians would seriously challenge the barges for control over the northern Gulf.
In Bushehr, Mohsen Rezai and other senior officers immediately suspected that someone had tipped off the Americans. They had a traitor in their midst. Iranian counterintelligence agents looked to the handful of senior officers with access to the details of the Hajj plan. Already wise to the CIA’s Tehfran operation, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security focused on those who still harbored sympathy for the Americans. This included Captain Riahi.
Stung by two successive defeats, Iran decided to strike back at the chief culprit who had invited the Americans in: Kuwait. A week after the Middle Shoals shoot-out, the Liberian-registered tanker Sungari sat taking on a load of crude at Kuwait’s main oil terminal just south of Kuwait City. A bright light, almost like a flare, appeared in the distance. It grew closer and larger. A massive Silkworm missile streaked in just above the waves. Its massive thousand-pound warhead slammed into the side of the Sungari, causing a fire but no casualties.
The next day, the reflagged tanker Sea Isle City approached the terminal to fill its own holds with Kuwaiti oil before the next convoy. The tanker’s master did a slight deviation to look at the damage to the Sungari from the day before. He chose the wrong time to be a tourist. Another Silkworm missile lumbered in. Locking on to the Sea Isle City’s white superstructure, the missile plowed into the pilothouse and crew quarters. The blast permanently blinded the American captain and the Filipino lookout and wounded sixteen other crewmen.
Although Iranian president Ali Khamenei said that “Almighty God alone knew best where the missile came from,” American intelligence quickly backtracked the missiles’ paths and found that both originated from the Iranian-captured peninsula of al-Faw, Iraq.23 Both Silkworms had actually been captured from the Iraqi military.
Rear Admiral Dennis Brooks commanded a newly established joint task force of all forces involved in the convoy operations. He decided
to run this operation with little input from Bernsen. He hated the mobile sea base idea and disliked much of the surveillance scheme, including deploying the NSA assets down to the smaller ships. But Brooks knew what his boss, General Crist, wanted in the plan. With Washington unwilling to take stronger measures, the United States would move only to destroy the oil platforms that enabled the Revolutionary Guard to operate in the Gulf. Prime on Crist’s mind was the one at Rostam. Rostam was actually three platforms—two only about a hundred yards apart and one to the north about two miles away, each resembling a square building and a three-level parking garage on stilts. They had facilitated the Iran Ajr’s mission and served as a major forward command post for the Iranian small boats. Strategically situated in the south-central Gulf along the convoy route, they provided the Iranian military with a steady stream of reports about U.S. ship movements in the Gulf.24 While Crist ordered Brooks to give warning to the Iranians in order to avoid loss of life, any display of hostility would be met with American firepower, and he authorized Brooks to go into Iranian waters and airspace if necessary.25