by David Crist
The Vincennes radar detected the jet taking off from Bandar Abbas. A sailor manning the radar initially received a military aircraft reading (mode 2) on his sensors, likely from an Iranian F-14 sitting on the tarmac at Bandar Abbas. As the Iranian Airbus took off, he mistakenly kept the cursor on the plane at Bandar Abbas and not on the one taking off. This confirmed in his mind that the two were synonymous. Even when the ship’s system started tracking the Airbus’s civilian transponder, the ship’s anti–air warfare coordinator, Lieutenant Commander Scott Lustig, took the initial signal at face value, since Iranian military jets often transmitted using both military and civilian modes. Lustig was an affable man, liked by Rogers and the reporters who came on board with the media pools, but he had never seen the stress of combat, and his reaction to the stress of the ongoing surface fight in the Gulf was noticeable. A petty officer working for Lustig consulted the scheduled flights; he found none for that time and apparently never considered that planes do not always take off as scheduled.17
In moving north into Iranian waters, Rogers had placed his ship directly in the flight path of the Iranian jet. Lustig passed along to Captain Rogers, now engaged in a fight of his making, that an F-14 had taken off from Bandar Abbas headed in their direction.
At that moment, a shell casing jammed the forward gun on the Vincennes. Rogers ordered the ship’s rudder hard over to spin the ship around so his aft gun could be brought to bear on one of Fadavi’s boats. The Vincennes heeled over. Books, coffee mugs, and papers went flying across the darkened room of the combat center where Rogers sat controlling the fight. In the chaos and tension of their windowless environment, men grappled with their first experience of combat. Not all performed well. With an ongoing surface engagement and a possible Iranian aircraft closing in, an increasingly hysterical Lustig became convinced that the Iranians were conducting a coordinated air-sea attack.
David Carlson on the USS Sides watched the same aircraft take off from Bandar Abbas. Stationed to the northeast of the Vincennes, he saw the designation of the aircraft as an F-14. When it failed to heed any verbal warnings, Carlson ordered it painted with his missile’s radar, a signal any combat jet would immediately recognize as a threat. When the jet did not alter its course or speed but continued its straight, gradual ascent without emitting any characteristic electronic signatures of an F-14, Carlson concluded it had to be a civilian airliner. Unfortunately, he never passed this along to Rogers, falsely concluding that the Vincennes’s much more sophisticated systems had to show something his didn’t. Carlson would regret his hesitancy.
As the Iranian Airbus continued to close on the Vincennes at 360 knots, more warnings were broadcast, but no response came from the aircraft. Rogers asked again about the unidentified plane, using its computer-generated target number, 4474.
“TN 4474 is descending. Speed 450 knots!” said a petty officer monitoring the screen. This proved yet another blunder by the Vincennes crew. During an update of the radar picture by the Aegis system, the computer had renamed the Airbus TN 4131, from the radar track of the USS Sides. Unknown to Rogers, the old number had been reassigned by the Aegis computer to a U.S. jet descending to an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Gulf of Oman. When Rogers asked the question, the petty officer gave the right answer, but for the wrong plane. A quick look at the radar by anyone in the information center would have immediately shown that the plane in question continued to ascend, had not accelerated, and had emitted no weapons radars. But no one bothered. Groupthink took hold in the darkened command center. It all fit: an F-14 from Bandar Abbas had taken off to support the Revolutionary Guard and was now diving down to attack the Vincennes.
On the Airbus, Rezaian was busy talking to the tower at Bandar Abbas and preparing to report passing a waypoint, and he coped with demands of the cockpit during a short flight. Even if his radio had been set to monitor the Vincennes’s warning over the distress frequency, there was no way he could have known that the warnings were intended for him.
At ten miles out, with Lustig panicking, Captain Rogers had to make a decision. The aircraft was not responding to the repeated warnings.18 Having instigated the fight with the speedboats, Captain Rogers now found himself in a larger engagement than he had bargained for. At approximately 9:54, less than ten minutes after he’d fired his first shells at Fadavi’s boats, Rogers reached above his head and turned the key granting permission to fire. A light flashed on the console of the missile operator sitting behind Rogers.
“Do I have a take order on TN 4131?” he asked.
“Yes, take,” an officer said.
Two missiles blasted off, leaving a trail of white smoke as they streaked toward the airliner. One hit the Iranian Airbus’s wing, the other its tail. The airplane broke apart as the force of the air stripped the clothes from its passengers, sending their nude bodies raining down on the blue waters of the Persian Gulf. All 290 souls on Iran Air 655 perished.
“That was dead-on! A direct hit!” shouted a sailor on the Vincennes’s bridge looking at the radar. The crew cheered before being told to quiet down by the officer on watch. Soon Dubai airport started inquiring about a plane overdue, and Rogers noted that Iranian helicopters and even Fadavi’s small boats had broken off and were headed on a rescue mission over to where the plane had gone down.
With the information being fed by Lustig and his officers, Rogers had made the correct decision to fire. He had been told it was an Iranian military jet closing in on his ship. Yet it had been Rogers’s own actions that created the situation whereby he had no choice or time to reevaluate the approaching aircraft. Still, Captain Rogers remained undaunted. In the family gram sent out by his ship after the incident, it said, “Two burning and the rest turning. Vincennes operating in its natural environment.” It was an oddly boastful statement considering what had just happened.
The navy and the U.S. government closed ranks behind Rogers and the Vincennes. To Admiral Crowe, the principle at stake was supporting a captain who’d adhered to the rules of engagement and who had not taken the first hit like the Stark. “It was important that captains knew that we would back them up if they used force to defend their ships,” he explained in an interview.19 In a press conference after the incident, Crowe said the Vincennes had been in international waters the entire time—a lie the United States clung to until a Newsweek article in 1992 exposed the truth. The official investigation by Rear Admiral William Fogarty accurately described the details of what had happened, but the U.S. government had carefully redacted key details that showed the Vincennes had violated the standing orders and instigated the fight. The investigation did not recommend disciplinary action against anyone on the Vincennes and concluded: “Based on the information used by the CO [commanding officer] in making his decision, the short time frame available to him in which to make his decision, and his personal belief that his ship and the USS Montgomery were being threatened, he acted in a prudent manner.”20 In the heat of combat and in the short time available for decisions to be made, mistakes were made, but not with malice. Essentially, the tragedy was a function of the fog of war.
The U.S. Navy handed out medals. Captain Rogers received a Legion of Merit medal, a high-level award usually given to a commander following a successful command, not to one who could be viewed as having been responsible for the death of 290 innocents.21 Lustig received a comparable medal and went on to get promoted.
Commander Carlson of the Sides held a different view of events than that of the official investigation: “The helicopter drew fire because it was a nuisance to the IRGC [Revolutionary Guard] boats. The Vincennes saw an opportunity for action, and pressed hard for Commander Middle East Force to give permission to fire. Deescalation went out the window. Equipment failed. The fog [of war] rolled in.”22
Iran took its grievances to the United Nations Security Council. Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, gave an impassioned speech in which he produced transcripts of the plane’s flight recorder, leaving lit
tle doubt the plane had been a civilian airliner. While agreeing to pay restitution to the families of the victims, the U.S. delegation, led by Vice President George Bush, said Iran was the real culprit in the tragedy. Bush launched a vigorous defense before the world body, one of half-truths and obfuscations, including an assertion that the Iran Airbus had been well off the flight path—in truth, it had been well inside the designated air corridor.23 The United Nations refused to condemn America’s actions. Even within the Muslim world, there was little outcry. Only Syria publicly supported Iran. The Islamic Republic had become so isolated that the deaths of 290 civilians failed to move the international community.
On July 12, the Iraqi 4th Corps and Republican Guard attacked along an eighty-mile front and in five hours shattered all remaining opposition in the south. Their advance continued until they’d penetrated some forty miles inside Iran.24 The intelligence provided by the CIA and DIA were key in Iraq’s eventual victory. The resources of American intelligence closed opportunities for the adaptive Revolutionary Guard. “It bolstered the Iraqi military’s confidence,” Pat Lang said. Whether Saddam Hussein ever really stood in danger of losing remains debatable, but the American intelligence assistance greatly mitigated the chances of any Iranian breakthrough. The DIA’s targeting allowed the Iraqi air force to knock out the key pillars underpinning the Iranian military. The steady stream of intelligence and poststrike analysis by Lang’s team turned a lackluster Iraqi air force into a killing machine.
Iranian leaders believed the shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus had been intended to send a message to end the war. Serious discussions began about finally ending the war out of fear the United States would take even more drastic action against Iran. A few days after the Iran Air incident, a secret meeting was held between the Ayatollah Khomeini, parliament speaker Rafsanjani, Prime Minister Mousavi, and Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezai. Rezai stated that the Revolutionary Guard could continue the struggle for years, but the others saw things differently. They convinced Iran’s spiritual leader that the choice was “between ending the war now, or continuing it and facing the eventual destruction of the Islamic Republic.”25 They added that the regime was isolated and confronting an American-Iraqi coalition that would stop at nothing to defeat Iran, including using chemical weapons and shooting down helpless civilians. They had no ability to replace their battlefield losses, the economy was in shambles, and the very survival of the regime was at stake. Iraqi missiles rained down on Tehran, creating near panic in the streets. Lacking the same missile capability, Iran was helpless to respond. Large demonstrations had occurred in major cities across the country. Khomeini agreed there was no choice but to accept UN Security Council Resolution 598 and end the war with Iraq. The last official attack against a Kuwait-bound ship occurred on July 15, when two Iranian gunboats attacked the Liberian-registered ship Sea Victory with rocket-propelled grenades.26
On July 20, in a statement read on Tehran radio, the Ayatollah Khomeini said he personally had made the difficult decision to accept UN Resolution 598 and end the eight-year war with Iraq—a decision he said “was more deadly than taking poison.”27 The ayatollah’s statement followed a July 18 letter to the United Nations by Iranian president Seyed Ali Khamenei, in which he said the war against Iraq had now reached “unprecedented dimensions, bringing other countries into the war and even engulfing innocent civilians.”28 Khamenei went on to say that the shooting down of the Iranian Airbus had pushed Iran into accepting a cease-fire, in the interest of sparing Iranian civilians continued suffering at the hands of the revolution’s enemies. On August 20, the cease-fire went into effect and the Gulf grew quiet for the first time in nearly eight years.
On a windy day in November 1988, the command of Central Command passed from General George Crist to army General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. The new commander was a large, imposing officer with an explosive temper but a skilled military planner and combat veteran. As the cease-fire held, the United States began to withdraw forces. On September 11, the Vincennes left with little fanfare and without replacement. Eight days later, Eager Glacier ended and the CIA aircraft at Dhahran were sent back to the United States.29 Saudi Arabia briefly considered taking over the two mobile sea bases, but with the war over, it decided not to. On July 11, 1989, the secretary of defense approved standing down the Hercules, and it was towed to Bahrain, where sailors removed U.S. equipment and turned it back over to Brown and Root. CENTCOM wanted to resist the temptation to rapidly draw down American forces, a move that would alarm the Gulf states about the U.S. commitment to the region.30 On October 2, 1989, President George H. W. Bush signed National Security Directive 26. This presidential directive designated the Persian Gulf as an area vital to U.S. national interests. The directive noted that the United States had achieved an “unprecedented level” of cooperation with the Gulf states since the operation had begun, and that this should be broadened by continued joint military exercises, planning, and arrangements to pre-position U.S. equipment in the area. Immediate termination of Earnest Will could jeopardize this newfound influence. As a result, Bush directed that any change in forces in the Gulf be taken only after an interagency review with input from political, military, and intelligence agencies.
In December, the newly appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin L. Powell, ordered a review of U.S. force structure and the continuation of the Earnest Will mission. Powell urged caution, concerned about the perception of a decreased American commitment to the Gulf. But the Joint Staff proposed U.S. forces should be withdrawn down to a baseline force of one flagship and five combatants, or one warship over pre–Earnest Will levels. Schwarzkopf strongly disagreed with these numbers. Schwarzkopf pointed out that Kuwait continued to provide the U.S. Navy with $6 million every month in free fuel—a bonus that would end with the convoy mission. The United States, he argued, was actually making a profit by continuing the current arrangements, and it “is probably the only military operation in the world operating at a net profit.”31
In conversations with Powell, however, Schwarzkopf finally conceded, saying he could live with five combatants. Secretary of Defense Richard B. Cheney accepted Powell’s recommendation to reduce forces in the Gulf. The last minesweeper deployed to the Gulf for the convoys finally returned in April 1990, nearly three years after their arduous journey to the Persian Gulf. They would return to the Gulf a mere four months later, when America’s former ally Saddam Hussein created another new crisis centered around Kuwait.
The final act of the Reagan Iranian saga turned into one of the biggest disasters in the history of American intelligence. Around 1985, a new director arrived to run Tehfran, Stephen Richter. Slight, with dark hair, the Washington, D.C., native had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1963. His entry in the school’s yearbook, the Lucky Bag, noted that “he considers himself one of the best shower singers in the world.” After his obligation to the navy, he joined the CIA’s clandestine service, although he continued to proudly wear his large, bulbous Annapolis ring.
Richter and his boss, Tom Twetten, agreed that the rationale for BQ Tug was gone. There seemed little reason to maintain two dozen men staged to conduct sabotage and attacks against a Red Army now bogged down in Afghanistan. The operation seemed to continue more for the steady payments from the Defense Department than out of any operational necessity. Richter’s predecessor at Tehfran had proposed the idea of converting the Tuggers into standard spies. Although they had been recruited to carry out paramilitary operations and were neither positioned nor trained for espionage, Richter pushed the idea, with Twetten’s approval. It raised no alarms up the chain.
“The U.S. government was never serious about it,” said retired CIA officer Jack Devine of the Iranian desk. “You have peoples’ lives on the line and the government’s not really committed to the operation. That gets people killed.”
At this point, the decision to merge the BQ Tug assets with the other spies exacerbated the CIA’s emerging cata
strophe. All communications with the Iranian agents, now including the Tuggers, were handled through a few post office boxes in Frankfurt. The reason was either laziness or incompetence, but it was easier to use an address close to Tehfran rather than a variety of different addresses that would require a case officer to travel to pick up the communiqués. Compounding this error, every return letter written to those American agents in Iran was written by one person, frequently writing the letters in English, not Farsi. On at least one occasion, all the letters were simultaneously mailed to around twenty agents. Each was mailed from Frankfurt, written by the same hand, with the same return addresses in Frankfurt.32
Iranian authorities were already wise to the BQ Tug effort when several years earlier, one perspective CIA recruit had reported the contact with American intelligence officers to security officials.
Alerted by the failed recruitment, Iranian agents employed countless workers to painstakingly screen all incoming mail. They could not possibly have overlooked the unusual cluster of letters from Frankfurt, with some likely destined for suspected BQ Tug agents.33