by David Crist
Bernsen hopped in his car and drove to the Brown and Root office and met with the company’s senior representative, a British national named John Rahtz. He confirmed that there were two barges owned by Brown and Root tied up right in Bahrain that might fit the American need: Hercules and Wimbrown VII. After showing Bernsen the blueprints, they went down to the small shipyard where the two barges sat moored.
At first glance both appeared in terrible shape. Their exteriors were covered by rust and peeling paint, and the decks were piled high with rusting equipment and cables. “They look like crap,” Bernsen said to Rahtz. But when the two went on board and took a tour, it became apparent that both barges were in sound shape, Hercules a bit more so. Hercules was the larger of the two. One of the largest oil barges in the world at 400 by 140 feet, flat and wide, it had been designed for the construction of offshore oil platforms and laying underwater pipelines. On one end sat a large, white, elevated helicopter landing pad complete with a small control tower. At the other end, sitting atop a large cylindrical pedestal, sat a rectangular mount, painted red and orange, that connected to a massive crane 50 feet plus tall. Emblazoned at the back end of the crane in large black letters on a fading yellow background was the word “Clyde.” Its 250-foot-long boom towered above the entire barge, giving Hercules an unmistakably lopsided appearance. In between was a large, flat open space perfect for helicopters and storing small patrol boats. Below the main deck, Hercules had berthing for 160 men, in addition to a large galley, cafeteria, even a theater or recreation room adorned with blue curtains. For potential operations in the mine-strewn area near Farsi, it had the added advantage of being double hulled, surrounded by a floodable tank that would provide excellent protection against a mine strike.
The Wimbrown was smaller, only 250 feet long with a beam of 70 feet. Designed as a jack-up barge, it was equipped with removable extendable legs, whereby the entire barge could be lifted up by air jacks to provide a stable work platform. It had a small helicopter platform on one end, adjacent to a large, elevated modular office building aloft of the main deck.11 It did not have a built-in crane like Clyde, substituting a much smaller tracked commercial variant. It had extensive berthing facilities, capable of housing nearly one hundred more than Hercules. Each had a relatively shallow draft that would make them less susceptible to a mine strike. Each barge was anchored by a four-point mooring system and could be moved only by tugs, a procedure that required two hours to get under way and moved the barges at a ponderous four knots per hour.12 With some cleaning, scrapping, and a new coat of paint, these two just might work, Bernsen said.
Bernsen shot out a flash message to General Crist laying out his thoughts:
In my view, to be successful in the northern Gulf we must establish an intensive patrol operation to prevent the Iranians from laying mines, sweep those few mines that may be placed in the water despite our patrol efforts, and third, protect the reflagged tankers from Iranian small boat attack while transiting the northern Gulf. I believe we can achieve the desired results with a mix of relatively small patrol craft, boats, and helos.
Rather than using regular naval vessels, the area could be better patrolled by a mixture of attack helicopters and small boats augmented by Navy SEALs and U.S. Marines.13
General Crist liked the idea. “What the Iranians were doing reminded me of Vietnam. They planted mines and roadside bombs all along our key roads and line of supply. It seemed to me they were doing the same thing, only on the water,” Crist said in a 1988 interview. The CENTCOM commander coined an expression for the unusual fight in which the Americans now found themselves involved: “a guerrilla war at sea.” He forwarded Bernsen’s plan to both Chairman Crowe and Admiral Ronald Hays in a message for their eyes only.
Crowe also immediately grasped Bernsen’s sea base scheme. His tour in the Mekong Delta during Vietnam had acquainted him with a similar idea called Sea Float, in which the navy had constructed a floating base by connecting numerous pontoon barges together south of the Mekong Delta. It served as a forward support base for riverine patrol boats in an attempt to undermine the Vietcong guerrillas moving along the Cua Lon River. The chairman immediately threw his support behind it. After a meeting between Crowe and Caspar Weinberger on July 31, the secretary of defense approved the deployment of all the patrol boats requested by Bernsen, including eight Mark III patrol boats, with four coming from Special Boat Squadron 2 in Norfolk, Virginia, and the other four from Special Boat Squadron 1 at Coronado, California.14
Bernsen assigned two new officers to turn it into reality. On August 11 Commander Richard Flanagan arrived from California. A SEAL, he commanded Special Boat Squadron 1, which comprised all the U.S. patrol boats on the West Coast.15 Flanagan had cut his teeth as a junior officer in the waterways of the Mekong Delta and knew Sea Float.16 The day after Flanagan’s arrival, Captain Frank Lugo arrived in Bahrain. Commissioned in 1953, Lugo had an impressive résumé of both operational and command billets. A competent, experienced staff officer, he’d recently served as the operations officer for Second Fleet and was slated to start training in preparation for assuming command of a new cruiser on the West Coast. Lugo’s name came up for consideration as he was in between assignments and was well respected by the navy hierarchy, including Chief of Naval Operations Trost and his operations deputy, Vice Admiral Hank Mustin.17
Secrecy about the barges remained paramount. Crist intended to limit those within the military who even knew of the idea to a handful, and had sent the message outlining his concept via a special communications channel under the code name Privy Seal. To prevent Iranian mine laying and small-boat attacks upon U.S. shipping along a hundred-mile route from the Mina al-Ahmadi channel off Kuwait to an area south of Farsi Island, CENTCOM proposed deploying two barges, or mobile sea bases as they were officially designated, in the water astride the convoy route, with each covering a fifty-mile stretch.18 Each mobile sea base would serve as a home base for four sixty-five-foot patrol boats and army special operations helicopters. If the Iranians tried to attack the barges directly, each would be protected by a force of SEALs and marines armed with automatic grenade launchers, heavy machine guns, antitank missiles, and Stinger antiaircraft missiles. In all, each mobile sea base would have a complement of about 140 men.19
Meanwhile, Iran increased the pressure on Kuwait. It launched three Silkworm missiles at Kuwait’s key oil terminal at Mina al-Ahmadi. While all landed harmlessly to the south near some beachside villas at Mina Abdullah, it was a stark reminder to Kuwait about antagonizing its northern neighbor. In response, Kuwait expelled five Iranian diplomats suspected of being covert agents.20
Paul Evancoe looked like a poster boy for the elite Navy SEALs. A natural leader, tall, fit, with dark hair and a matching mustache, he had a reputation as an aggressive—some thought reckless—officer. He’d served as an enlisted man in Vietnam, rose through the ranks, and was now commander of Special Boat Unit 20 in Norfolk. During the reception party after taking over his new command, the flash message arrived giving him just forty-eight hours to load his four boats and sixty-seven officers and men onto the amphibious ship USS Raleigh and head for the Persian Gulf. While Evancoe remained for a couple of weeks in Norfolk to scrounge more spare parts and get two smaller Seafox boats flown to Bahrain, his executive officer, Lieutenant Peter Wikul, took charge of the boats heading over on the Raleigh. Wikul shared many of the personality traits of his boss; while short and solid, he was aggressive and hyper. He had been burned badly while serving as an observer in Lebanon when he rushed into a tent to save a man when a propane heater exploded.21
Wikul and the boats arrived in the Gulf at the end of August, and a week later he conducted his first patrol north of Farsi Island prior to the next Earnest Will convoy. It turned out to be an arduous 530-mile, five-day mission. While a frigate to the south provided his men showers and hot meals, the constant pounding in the small fiberglass boats left the men and boats bruised and battered.
The P
entagon struggled to meet Bernsen’s requirements for helicopters. The navy primarily used its helicopters for antisubmarine missions and did not want to turn them into gunships. The marines had attack helicopters already on the Guadalcanal, but their pilots lacked the skills to fly at night, when the Iranians conducted most of their mining.22
Crowe had been briefed on an elite army aviation unit named Task Force 160 (TF-160), the “Night Stalkers,” located at the sprawling army base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, home to the 101st Airborne Division. The Night Stalkers had been formed in October 1981, following the disastrous Iranian hostage rescue effort; their sole mission was to provide helicopter support to special operations forces.23 They operated a variety of specially configured helicopters, one of which was a modified McDonnell Douglas 530 helicopter, popularly referred to within TF-160 as “Little Bird.” Crewed by two, it had a speed of 120 knots and a range of one hundred miles; these small, jelly bean–shaped helicopters were highly maneuverable, easily deployable, and exceptionally quiet. The 530’s specially configured blades produced a subdued whir sound rather than the loud thump, thump of most helicopters. As one SEAL observed, “At night you could just about see the aircraft’s outline before ever hearing its rotors turning.” These craft were designed to operate exclusively at night; their pilots had hundreds of hours of flying time using night-vision goggles.24 The helos came in two variants: an attack version outfitted with a 7.62-mm minigun on one side and a 2.75-inch rocket pod with explosive and dartlike fléchette rounds on the other. At three thousand rounds a minute, the minigun cut through a target more like a chain saw than a machine gun. The helicopters operated in threes, with one command and control version, which came with a forward-looking infrared radar (FLIR) and videotape system, and two attack birds.25
A future four-star general and commander of all U.S. Special Operations Forces, Major Bryan “Doug” Brown flew to Tampa to brief Crist on his unit’s abilities. At thirty-eight, Brown had already spent twenty years in the army, having enlisted as a private in 1967 and soon thereafter earning the coveted green beret of the Army Special Forces. He subsequently obtained his commission before going off to flight school and Vietnam, where he earned a Distinguished Flying Cross. He already had a deserved reputation as a smart, competent officer who was going places in the army.
General Crist was not overly enamored with special operations forces, a view commonly shared by many infantry officers who had fought in Vietnam. They viewed the Green Berets—as well as the SEALs—as aggressive to the point of reckless, “snake eaters” who needed to be carefully watched. Brown arrived on a typically oppressive hot Tampa summer day and found the marine commander combative. Crist commented that he was not sure that his unit’s helicopters had enough firepower or missiles to contend with the Iranian small boats. “He did not think we could actually do the mission,” Brown recalled. But the army aviator stood his ground. “Sir, there are some people who can fire rockets and some who can’t, and we are the guys who can!”26
Privately, Crist was pleased with the briefing and jotted down a list of the Night Stalkers’ abilities in his black notebook. Behind the scenes, the CENTCOM chief of staff, Major General Don Penzler, who had knowledge of TF-160 from an army assignment, liked the idea of using the army. He worked with both the army staff in Washington and his own in Tampa pushing the unit’s deployment and did much to get over the lower-level opposition within the military to this unorthodox marriage between the army and the navy.27
On August 4, a single C-5 transport aircraft lumbered into the sky from Fort Campbell. Its secret cargo comprised six Little Birds, plus thirty-nine men and five pallets of equipment. They arrived at the Bahraini airport in the pitch darkness of the early morning hours of August 5 and immediately taxied for the small U.S. Navy hangar located at the airport. The Bahrainis reluctantly agreed to allow the helicopters to transit through, provided they were gone by daylight and the pallets with ammunition and weapons were ambiguously packaged and marked so as to obscure their contents.28
Brown and the others were greeted by an air force major dressed in an Arab robe and headdress—a sheik outfit or latter-day Lawrence of Arabia is how one remembered it—in a weak attempt at a disguise. The plan to cover their movement, he explained, would be to follow a Bahraini helicopter out of the airfield. “We’ll call the tower and you just keep your lights out and follow us out. We’ll go ten miles out and turn around, and you head to the La Salle.” In an hour the army crew had all six helicopters assembled. They took off, following close to the Bahraini helo, and landed on board the La Salle.
The next day they met with Bernsen and his operations staff. The capabilities of TF-160 were a closely guarded secret within the U.S. military, and neither Bernsen nor his staff had any real idea of what these helicopters could do. They initially proposed using them to fly in daylight in front of the convoys looking for mines. Brown respectfully dissented. “Sir, we’ll do whatever you want us to do, but that is a waste of a tremendous asset. We’re night fighters!” They had been brought over by CENTCOM with the intent of using them to hunt suspected Iranian small boats or minelayers, not to fly in the daytime looking for mines in front of the convoy—any standard helicopter could do that. Bernsen quickly grasped the idea, and in two days he had one detachment embarked on the USS Jarrett for the next Earnest Will convoy.
To support Bernsen, CENTCOM’s senior intelligence officer, Brigadier General Cloyd Pfister, asked for more intelligence out in the Gulf. After discussions with National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci and President Reagan, on September 9 Weinberger approved a covert national intelligence effort as part of a closely held operation to support Earnest Will, under the unusually named banner of Operation Pollen Count. It involved sending specially configured National Security Agency intelligence teams to the Gulf.29 Traveling with some small communications vans, they were mobile enough to be positioned far forward, in fact on individual navy destroyers and frigates patrolling the Gulf. Their purpose was twofold: one, to provide much better capability to eavesdrop on Iranian military communications; and two, to tap into the vast array of U.S. signals intelligence.30 This allowed national intelligence to be piped directly down to the tactical forces who could use it most and, conceivably, allow them to respond quickly to any time-sensitive intelligence gleaned back at NSA’s home in Fort Meade, Maryland. Wearing nondescript green and blue overalls, they joined a growing array of similar “black” units, from the five-man marine radio reconnaissance detachment to the army’s elite unit under U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the Intelligence Support Activity.31 As one intelligence analyst later said, “It was a host of ‘spooky’ cats and dogs wandering around the Gulf, all in sanitized uniforms.”32
While Middle East Force implemented its new surveillance regime, CENTCOM looked to refine a new set of covert plans to deal with the Iranians. Shortly after the Bridgeton mining, the Joint Chiefs of Staff directed a review of the Invoke Resolve plans. As part of this, CENTCOM started looking to develop alternatives designed to “take the Iranian eyes out,” as Crist described it. Specifically, his concept was to capture key Iranian islands in the Gulf such as Farsi, Abu Musa, Sirri, or the Tunbs. The last three of these were still contested by the UAE, having been occupied and de facto incorporated into Iran by the shah. After feeling out the Gulf Cooperation Council states, Crist concluded that taking them would cause little outrage on the Arab side of the Gulf and would not cause the same dramatic escalation in the minds of Tehran as a more direct attack on the Iranian mainland, such as Bandar Abbas or Qeshm Island. Seizing these Iranian outposts in the Persian Gulf would eliminate their key operating bases and would effectively drive their navy and Revolutionary Guards from the Gulf, push them back into their ports, and eliminate Iran’s ability to project any military power into the Gulf proper that could threaten tanker traffic.
This was an important consideration, especially in the minds of the White House and the secretary of defense. Both Weinberger
and Richard Armitage supported Crist’s strategy. Weinberger had no intention of getting the United States involved in a major war with Iran or of committing the United States to an incursion onto the Iranian mainland. With the Soviet Union still a threat in Europe and the Far East, the United States simply lacked the forces to commit to the expansive landmass of Iran to achieve anything decisive or conclusive. Echoing these sentiments, Richard Armitage knew that, however unpopular the Khomeini regime might be, the Iranians were a proud, nationalistic people, and he feared that such an overt attack would likely rally the populace behind the mullahs and actually strengthen support for the regime. Equally important in Armitage’s mind was that any serious escalation in the conflict would likely result in Tehran’s unleashing its terrorist surrogates on the West. Foremost was Hezbollah, which would likely step up the attacks on Israel from south Lebanon. Further, the Iranians had a sophisticated terrorist network in Europe, and the CIA concluded they would likely try to use it if the United States attacked Iran proper. The key, therefore, in Weinberger’s and Armitage’s minds, was to walk a delicate balance by waging a limited war against Iran to achieve the U.S. objectives of freedom of navigation and protection of the Kuwaiti tankers and by applying enough pressure to contain Iranian ambitions in the Gulf without escalating the conflict.
In addition to these overt plans against Iran, CENTCOM asked for assistance in developing clandestine options should President Reagan decide to strike back with Washington’s own “invisible hand” against the Iranians. The work of developing the “black” plans fell to the newly established Special Operations Command, located only a few hundred yards from CENTCOM’s headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base. As the head of a new command looking for a mission, the SOCOM commander, General James Lindsay, actively supported the development of various plans against Iran. He ordered a special compartmented planning cell to support General Crist, which included a legendary special forces officer, Colonel Wayne Long. Working closely with another similar special planning cell within the CENTCOM J-3, headed by army artillery officer Colonel James “Gunner” Laws, they developed a number of options, and in late July and August these moved from conference room discussions to written concept plans.
