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

by David Crist

  At midafternoon on October 19, Brooks amassed four destroyers and two frigates off Rostam, set to begin the American answer to the Silkworm attack, code-named Operation Nimble Archer. Stationed off to the side was Jerry O’Donnell’s USS Thach with Marc Thomas’s SEALs embarked. Over the standard maritime radio channel the Iranians heard in English and Farsi: “Rashadt [Rostam] oil platform, this is U.S. Navy. You have twenty minutes to evacuate the platform.”

  The Iranians heeded the warning. Looking on from the bridge of the Thach, Thomas could clearly see Iranians scrabbling down the ladder from one platform and into a tethered tugboat. Forming a tight line of battle, separated by only one thousand yards, the five U.S. warships slowly steamed in a lazy racetrack, their guns lowered.26

  “Commence fire.” For the next hour, the American ships rained shell upon shell down on the platform proper and its nearby drilling rig. Most missed, falling over or under or simply passing harmlessly through the Erector Set–like construction of the oil platforms, but enough found their mark to obscure the target in smoke, blowing off the helicopter deck and severing one of the main support legs.27

  From the bridge of the Thach, Marc Thomas watched the fireworks. In walked a slightly overweight chief with glasses, wearing his khaki uniform and a green steel-pot helmet. The chief was an avid reader of Soldier of Fortune magazine and had become friendly with Thomas, asking his opinion about fighting knives and guns described in the magazine. “We are really kicking their ass!” the chief said, pumping both fists into the air. After more than a thousand rounds had been fired, a cease-fire finally was ordered and the Thach with the SEALs closed in.

  Thomas and his SEALs approached the two abject platforms just at sunset. One was completely engulfed in a tower of flames. A shell had ignited the gas coming up from beneath the ocean floor, and as it turned out, the safety valve to prevent such a blowout had been installed backward. Even two hundred yards away the heat was intense. As it was too dangerous to board, Thomas’s SEALs were directed to occupy the northern platform, which had not been shelled, to see if there was any useful intelligence.

  With darkness setting in, Thomas approached the platforms cautiously. While it appeared abandoned, he could clearly see a twin-barrel antiaircraft gun. The SEALs fired a machine gun to clear out any Iranians remaining. The SEALs then clambered up the ladder from their boats and moved room to room clearing the three-story structure, which took more than two hours to complete. Hearing voices in one room, a SEAL tossed in a grenade. When they moved in with weapons drawn, they found the room empty: the voices were coming from the radio. The room proved another intelligence bonanza for the Americans. Reams of messages were stacked up, with some still churning out of the telex machine. Thomas’s men scooped up all the documents, blew up any guns or radios, and headed back to the Thach. When all were safely back, some five hundred pounds of explosives sent one of the platforms into the sea. The other continued to burn until August 1988, when, after the war, repair crews finally got to turn off the flow of gas and oil. Middle East Force coined a name for it: “the flame of freedom.”

  Following the operation, the United States deployed an array of floating hexagonal radar reflectors around Kuwait’s oil terminal and the barge. CENTCOM cajoled the Kuwaitis into deploying antiaircraft missiles on a northern island to shoot down any more missiles. The reflectors proved their worth in early November, when another Silkworm from al-Faw streaked in, only to hit the fabric reflector instead of a nearby tanker.

  The spike in violence and the thwarted attack on the Saudi oil facilities opened the door for more American surveillance aircraft to keep tabs on the Iranians. As part of its covert air force, the CIA maintained a small paramilitary air wing housed near Williamsburg, Virginia. Operating under the Special Operations Group within the agency’s Special Activities Division, it maintained ten specially configured fixed-wing planes and helicopters outfitted with the most advanced night-vision equipment and surveillance radar in the world, as well as forward-looking infrared radar and specially designed terrain-following radar, which permitted low-level flying in complete darkness. This included the small jelly bean–shaped Hughes/MD-500s, which were identical to the Little Birds of the U.S. Army’s Task Force 160. In fact, army and agency aircraft had grown out of the same program, developed for the army. When funds dried up in 1971, the CIA quietly stepped in to finish the project. The army and CIA formed a joint aviation unit called Seaspray. The unit soon broke into two different units, one “white,” or openly acknowledged unit—TF-160 at Fort Campbell—with the other remaining a “black,” or covert, unit.28

  In September 1987, the director of CIA’s operations, Tom Twetten, received a phone call from General Colin Powell. A graduate of Iowa State, now in his early fifties, Twetten was thin and fit with a shock of graying hair. He had the deserved reputation as a thoughtful, taciturn bureaucrat. That afternoon, Powell relayed a request from the Defense Department: “Would CIA be willing to provide some of their aircraft to use in the Gulf to support the escort operations?”

  The CIA owned only a handful of these aircraft, and they were in high demand around the world. In recent years they had played a large role in America’s secret war in Central America, but by 1987 this effort had largely ended. After mulling over Powell’s request for a moment, Twetten said he did not see why not, but would take it up with the recently appointed new director, the popular and competent lawyer William Webster.29 Around the same time, Howard Hart, now the director of the Special Activities Division and thus owner of the paramilitary aircraft, received a phone call on his secure phone from a navy admiral in Crowe’s office. “Mr. Hart, we need to conduct operations in the Persian Gulf and we need a nighttime infrared capability. And we don’t have anything. Do you?”

  A bemused Hart thought, “This must be a joke.” He said, “Admiral, you’re my navy, and you’re telling me you don’t have anything that flies and can see at night?”

  “No, we don’t,” the senior officer responded, adding that they were looking into obtaining it, but needed an interim capability as a stopgap measure.

  Following a more formal letter asking for support coming from Weinberger, drafted by the Joint Staff’s J-3, Special Operations Directorate, Webster held a meeting with his top subordinates to discuss the request. All agreed without hesitation that the CIA should agree to the request and support the military operation. Webster responded to Weinberger, agreeing to provide the aircraft, but with the caveat that they not fly within the “known threat ranges” of the Iranian weapons systems. This necessitated staying several nautical miles away from Iran’s offshore platforms. Weinberger and Crowe both agreed to this stipulation, and while the skilled CIA pilots did not always adhere to this over the next year, it remained the rule on paper.30

  Hart dispatched several CIA officers to Bahrain to meet with both Bernsen and his intelligence officer, Commander Ziegler, to iron out tactical planning details with Middle East Force, a necessary precursor regardless of where they ended up in the Gulf.31 The CIA agreed that its aircraft, while not falling under actual tactical control of Bernsen in the Gulf, would nevertheless take their direction from him and would provide their intelligence directly back to Middle East Force and Brooks’s joint task force.

  Prince Bandar phoned his father, the Saudi defense minister, and after a consultation with the king, Saudi Arabia agreed to allow the CIA planes to be based at a remote corner of the growing U.S. air base at Dhahran. On the night of October 14, a U.S. Air Force transport secretly landed at the Saudi airfield in Dhahran. It carried three CIA helicopters: two small Hughes/MD-500s and a larger Bell 212 helicopter for search and rescue. That night, a fourth plane joined them, a sleek Merlin twin-prop airplane configured with search and FLIR night-vision radars, as well as secure satellite communications back to Washington.

  To maintain their independence and cover, they were housed in separate hangars well away from the seven-hundred-man military detachment supporting the P-3s an
d AWACS planes. The agency pilots operated under cover, refusing to acknowledge to their navy and air force counterparts for whom they worked, although it quickly became an open secret. As General Charles Horner recalled later, chuckling, “They would appear in the mess hall and the ‘O’ club and try to mingle with the other pilots as if they were just fellow military pilots, which most of them were, but it was something of a challenge with their longer hair and beards.”32

  While the CIA used its own connections with the Saudi intelligence service to smooth over any concerns and provide a cover story for its aircraft, the agency’s arrival met with the same suspicion from some Saudi officials in the defense ministry as the arrival of the P-3s, all as part of an American ruse to get military access to the kingdom. Dissuading the Saudis of this concern was not helped by another American SR-71 spy flight just six days later, on October 20. While the sole focus of two air force pilots, Warren McKendree and Randy Shelhorse, was looking at the Iranian Silkworm missile sites around the Strait of Hormuz, the wide turning radius of their high-flying twin-engine Blackbird required them to briefly fly over part of the Saudi kingdom. For suspicion-minded Arabs, was Iran or Saudi Arabia the true target of this sudden rise in U.S. spy planes?33

  Under the code word Eager Glacier, within three days of arrival the four aircraft flew their first mission. The Merlin aircraft especially were tailor-made to fill the vacuum of tracking the Iranians once the sun went down. Its equipment worked well and it could loiter much longer over the Gulf. The two CIA Little Birds worked equally well as their TF-160 cousins, their cockpits specially designed for flying with night-vision goggles.34 The aircraft remained in the hangars during the day, flying only at night, trying to blend in with the normal air traffic over the Gulf before slipping off the main route and heading toward the Iranian side of the Gulf, often into the exclusion zone forbidden to U.S. military planes. There the Merlin loitered several hours every night, monitoring the movements of suspicious Iranian vessels. Specific attention was paid to the three main choke points through which the tankers had to transit: the Strait of Hormuz and the southern Gulf near Abu Musa; the central Gulf near the Iranian platforms at Rostam and Sassan just north of the United Arab Emirates; and in the north near Farsi Island and the Fereidoon oil fields.35

  As agreed, the pilots took their direction from the joint task force’s Middle East headquarters and provided their information back to their liaison officer on Brooks’s staff, having first been quickly digested by a small cell of CIA intelligence analysts with direct communications links to the aircraft from their base in Dhahran. They tended to keep a wide berth of the Iranian platforms and ships, leading a few of the officers on scene to privately view them as being more risk averse than the TF-160 pilots, flying around trying to avoid Iranian machine guns and shoulder-fired missiles. Regardless, they flew virtually every night, often well into the Iranian side of the Gulf, tracking suspicious Iranian vessels and filling a niche capability not found in the U.S. military’s inventory.

  Working within the structured framework of the frequently inflexible and controlling U.S. military did not come naturally to these maverick CIA pilots. They flew where directed, but filing detailed flight plans of their itinerary with the Middle East Force staff felt awkward for those whose job was to remain unseen and inconspicuous.

  “They never wanted to coordinate with anyone,” recalled David Grieve.36 On one occasion this nearly proved fatal. A U.S. frigate detected a small, unidentified aircraft coming directly toward it from the Iranian side of the Gulf. After trying to hail it on the radio, the frigate’s crew checked with Middle East Force on the La Salle, which had no information on any friendly aircraft in the vicinity. After taking more aggressive options, such as locking on to it with its fire control radar, the U.S. warship requested permission to engage. Fortunately, it just did not seem to be flying the profile of a suicide plane, and the on-scene destroyer squadron commander, Captain Donald Dyer, ordered the crew not to engage. “It’s probably one of ours,” he thought.37

  The next day the navy launched an investigation into the mysterious aircraft whose crew nearly met their maker. It turned out to be the CIA’s Merlin aircraft. When accused of being rogue and a hazard, the agency pilots forcefully responded that their mission and area of operation had been assigned by the military Middle East Force, and they had in fact notified that same higher headquarters of their takeoff time. If the military command could not deconflict its flights with the ships it controlled plying the Gulf, “the problem was a fucked-up navy operations staff,” one still irritated participant said ten years later. When the name-calling died down, both sides agreed to procedures to avoid another such close encounter. The Eager Glacier pilots agreed to file a formal flight plan before every mission through General Horner’s air force command in Dhahran, although their mission objectives and their operations over Iranian territorial waters remained tightly held and off-limits to all but a few of the air force or navy staff officers in the Gulf.

  On November 27, 1987, the CIA’s Clair George sent a letter to Jonathan Howe, Crowe’s executive assistant, inquiring about long-term intentions for supporting Earnest Will. Crist wanted the aircraft to remain until a suitable replacement could be found. “There is no single DOD platform which has the combination of capabilities the Merlin provides.” Simply put, it was too valuable in providing real-time intelligence collection on Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval operations.38 After the Pentagon examined some quick alternatives, such as leasing the aircraft from Langley—sans aircrew—or modifying a coast guard jet, both of which turned out to be too expensive and time-consuming, the CIA agreed to keep them there.39

  On October 20, the first two MSOs, the old minesweepers, finally arrived in the Persian Gulf. Over the past six weeks, as they made their way from the East and West Coasts, a competition emerged as to which flotilla would arrive first. The West Coast won the race: the USS Esteem, commanded by a feisty, competitive Captain Robert McCabe, was the first to transit the Strait of Hormuz.40 Hunting for mines was a slow, laborious process. The minesweepers moved slowly back and forth across the tanker routes. Each pass covered only a two-hundred-yard swath of water, and the Farsi mine danger area alone amounted to 140 square miles.41 The crew topside suffered as temperatures reached 130 degrees. To help, the navy flew in ice vests in which frozen gel packs fit in pouches for those standing watch.42 The Saudis agreed to allow the MSO crews to rest in a segregated dock area at the small port of Jubayl. Here they could get some relief from the confines of their wooden cells and barbeque in what the navy called “steel-beach picnics.”

  Everything looked like a mine. Old oil drums, cars, all the junk of the world dumped in the world’s oceans appeared suspicious in the fuzzy glow of the sonar screen. Frank DeMasi’s Inflict investigated ninety-two such contacts in a single day.43 Ships loaded with sheep from Australia and bound for Kuwait became especially irritating. As they approached port, they dumped all the dead sheep over the side. The bloated carcasses turned turtle and the four black hooves bobbed just above the water and looked remarkably like the horns of an Iranian mine.

  On November 19, Frank DeMasi’s ship was operating around a dozen miles south from where the Bridgeton had hit its mine. It was late in the day and getting dark, and DeMasi was about to halt the search for the day. Suddenly, the sonar search radar operator announced, “Minelike contact bearing 020 range 450 yards.” Slowing, the ship inched forward. As they closed to within eighty yards, the crew could clearly see a circular object with a chain going down to the ocean floor. “Jesus Christ, Captain,” the seaman yelled, “this is a mine!”

  As the minesweepers lacked a remotely operated vehicle, standard on the more sophisticated European minesweepers, which would have allowed them to view the mine with a camera and even place a countercharge on it, an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) diver had to be sent to physically view the object and verify it was a mine. It was one of the smaller Iranian-made Myams laid specifically to
catch the American minesweepers. As it was getting late, they decided to throw a buoy attached to a two-hundred-pound concrete block nearby to mark the location and come back the next morning.

  At first light, the three-man explosives team puttered out to the marker in a Zodiac. One diver went over the side and, to his horror, saw a scrape mark down the side of the mine. The current had carried the weight and it had actually hit the mine. Had it struck one of the horns, there would have been nothing left of any of the men to send home for a funeral. The diver carefully placed a block of C-4 with a delayed timer on the side of the cylinder and returned to the boat, and the three men hastened back to the Inflict.

  As DeMasi backed his ship away, his sonar discovered another mine just four hundred yards from the first. After the first mine detonated in a massive geyser of white water, the diver destroyed the other mine. DeMasi drew a line of bearing down the two mines and proceeded to search along the azimuth. In a few days DeMasi’s crew had rolled up the entire mine line. Each time they blew up a mine, the elated crew painted a small mine on the bridge wing. In short order, the Inflict was adorned with ten such characters.

  Meanwhile, the Fearless, searching the area to the north, discovered one of the larger M-08 mines dropped to catch the Bridgeton back in July. Following DeMasi’s playbook, Captain Jack Ross rolled up and destroyed three neatly laid in a straight line.44 DeMasi joined him and discovered five more mines. The Iranians aided their task by laying mines with sequential serial numbers. When the American divers noticed that they had skipped a number, they knew they had missed a mine in between.45 By the end of the month, the aging MSOs had finished a remarkable operation and accounted for all twenty mines dropped by the Revolutionary Guard.

  In addition to those planted on the Gulf floor, dozens of drifting mines presented a hazard to Gulf shipping. Many originated from the Iraqi and Iranian fields in the north and had broken away from their moorings, while the Iranians set others adrift hoping the currents would carry them to the waters of the Gulf Arabs. Around Christmas, one floater was spotted just outside Bahrain’s main harbor. In the middle of a Bob Hope show, Middle East Force ordered Robert McCabe’s ship out to sea to get rid of the mine. They found it just at sunset and decided to detonate it by shooting it with a rifle. Instead of exploding, the hollow case just filled with water and the mine sank to the bottom of the harbor, where it still remains, much to the considerable annoyance of the emir’s government.46