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

by David Crist

  One of the more popular ideas was to take out the suspected mine-laying vessels in the harbors of Bushehr and Bandar Abbas. U.S. intelligence had narrowed down the possible ships to a relatively few supply or small amphibious ships, refined more with satellite or signals intelligence. The concept envisioned a small team of frogmen dropped off by a U.S. ship or submarine in international waters. Using a SEAL delivery vehicle—a small, fast, open-water submersible—they would stealthily move into an Iranian harbor traveling just under the surface, leaving no wake or visible trace of their presence. Then they would navigate to the targeted ships and plant timed explosives on the bottoms of their hulls. Once the SEALs were safely away, the charges would ignite, sending the minelayers to the bottom of the Gulf. With no evidence that the United States was to blame, there would be plausible deniability for Washington. A high-risk venture to be sure, it was relegated in the opinions of the president and his senior military advisers to an option of last resort. As one senior officer described, “It certainly would give Tehran a taste of their own medicine.”

  Other plans concocted by this cell were far less surreptitious. They looked at using SEALs to conduct a series of hit-and-run raids on the Iranian Silkworm sites as well as on the Iranian islands, the latter backed by extensive naval gunfire and U.S. aircraft. SEAL planners in the Gulf and back in Tampa were less than enthusiastic about these options. Both were very risky, and the islands were so small and heavily defended that it was difficult to merely conduct a raid without just taking the whole island. This required a greater ground force than that possessed by Naval Special Warfare and necessitated bringing in a more robust force of combat marines. To deal with Silkworm sites on Qeshm Island, they devised a plan to insert up to two Ranger battalions by U.S. Air Force MH-53 helicopters launched from Masirah Island, Oman, to physically destroy the sites in a short-duration, high-intensity, direct action operation. “It never got to the rehearsal stage,” Wayne Long later said, “but we had worked up all the plans in case it needed to be done.”33

  Some of the more curious schemes devised by Long tried to exploit perceived divisions within Iran to provide cover for American covert operations. One involved using Iranian exiles, with American special operations forces’ assistance, to infiltrate Iran and blow up some of the Silkworm missile sites around the Strait of Hormuz. Another hoped to take advantage of the growing tension detected by U.S. intelligence between the fanatical Revolutionary Guard and the regular, U.S.-trained Iranian navy and air force. The two were not in a happy marriage; distrust between the two prevailed. One comprised enthusiastic, untrained ideologues, while the other was more professional and slightly more reticent. They maintained separate chains of command, with the Revolutionary Guard being virtually independent, often not even reporting back to Tehran about its operations activities. On several occasions the differences between the two forces escalated to exchanges of gunfire. Colonel Long hoped to take advantage of this discord, providing U.S. deniability while exacerbating the tensions between the regular military and the Revolutionary Guard. He had an American Huey helicopter—a common fixture in the Iranian military—repainted in a brown and tan color scheme and including the Iranian national insignia, a green, white, and red circular emblem painted on the tail boom. Piloted by a TF-160 native Farsi-speaking warrant officer, this bogus Iranian helicopter would approach one of the oil platforms commonly used by the Revolutionary Guard for its attacks on Gulf shipping, such as Sirri or Rostam. After hailing the platform’s occupants to lull them into mistakenly believing it was a friendly helicopter, it would approach close before opening fire with a barrage of machine-gun and rocket fire. With luck, this would knock the platform out of commission, with the blame falling on disgruntled units in the Iranian military. To Long’s irritation, President Reagan never approved the operation.34

  Everything seemed to be going exceedingly well,” Bernsen said in an oral history interview, “[until] the whole operation almost came to a grinding halt”35 when CENTCOM’s formal plan for the mobile sea bases hit the Joint Staff and the four services ignited a bureaucratic hullabaloo. The entire navy leadership and its obsequious supporter, U.S. Marine Corps commandant General Alfred Gray, clamored to kill the concept. Secretary of the Navy James Webb refused to pay for anything related to the program. The opponents argued that the mobile sea base was not really mobile and lacked any protection against aircraft or inbound missiles. The mobile sea bases, therefore, were little more than an enticement dangled before Iran, with three hundred Americans laid helpless before an Iranian missile and air onslaught. Critics objected to a SEAL commanding it and could not envision how this polyglot of marines, sailors, and special forces could be integrated into a cohesive unit. In an age when service parochialism reigned supreme, few wearing the uniform could accept this level of joint interoperability by the armed forces.36

  Over the next week memos, messages, and secure phone calls poured into CENTCOM and the chairman’s office from every senior navy command, all opposing the idea. “This needlessly risks the lives of American servicemen,” wrote one admiral. The Atlantic commander, Admiral Lee Baggett, Jr., thought the idea crazy and told both Crowe and Crist so during an annual meeting of the four-star commanders at Fort Leavenworth: “This is a floating Beirut Barracks!”

  One of the most scathing messages originated from Major General Royal Moore, Jr., a dark-haired, square-jawed marine and brash, cocky fighter pilot. As Admiral Ronald Hays’s operations officer at Pacific Command, upon hearing of the sea base idea, he picked up the phone and called his counterpart at CENTCOM, Major General Samuel Swart of the air force, strongly objecting to this “half-baked, seat of the pants” idea that was “going to get people killed.”37

  The hostility to the sea bases only compounded Crist’s problems inside the Pentagon. Crowe had the CENTCOM commander come to Washington to defend the size of the joint task force before the Joint Chiefs in the Tank. For two hours the chiefs picked apart his planned headquarters, the onslaught led by Trost and Al Gray. The ninety-six men Crist wanted seemed way too many, so without much analysis as to what each man would do, the chiefs summarily pared it down by about half, to fifty-two. In the process, they picked apart Crist’s joint headquarters and the entire surveillance plan. They flatly rejected many of Crist’s ideas, such as a subordinate special operations task force to run all the special operations and the mobile sea bases. Gray questioned having an air force deputy. “If the admiral gets killed, you’re going to have an air force guy running navy ships,” he said disdainfully. “If we have to worry about the admiral getting killed,” Crist thought, shaking his head, “we’ve got bigger problems than one easy-to-replace admiral.”

  Having helped instigate the bloodletting, Crowe finally ended it. “We need to support George and make sure he’s got what he needs.” The chairman backed the scaled-down joint headquarters and the new scheme to combat the Iranian maritime guerrillas.

  Senior naval officers now pushed to fire Crist. Who orchestrated it remains unclear, but the vice chief of naval operations, Admiral Huntington Hardisty, and Ace Lyons both had their fingerprints on the effort.38 The crazy idea of these mobile sea bases was the last straw in a series of decisions made by Crist that undermined the navy’s operational independence and they viewed as lacking sound military judgment. Bowing to their pressure, Crowe raised the issue with Weinberger on two separate occasions. “We may need to replace Crist,” Crowe said in an afternoon meeting with the defense secretary. “He has lost the confidence of the navy.” And just two days before he presided over Ace Lyons’s demise, Crowe recommended replacing Crist with Tom Morgan, the deputy marine commandant. Weinberger’s response is not recorded, but his close confidant, Rich Armitage, recalled, “The navy behaved very badly throughout the entire operation. It was more likely that the navy had lost the secretary’s confidence.” Crist stayed, and Crowe never again raised the subject.39

  Unaware of Crowe’s discussions about replacing him, Crist caved to
the pressure and convened a three-day mobile sea base conference at his headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base. On the morning of September 9, the assembled officers gathered in the main auditorium on the second floor of the main headquarters building, just down the hall from Crist’s office. Senior officers and representatives came from all over the Departments of the Navy and Defense, most wearing navy blue and intending to kill the scheme.40 Lugo explained the overall concept: “Two barges will be positioned along a hundred-mile stretch in the northern Gulf to cover this strategic choke point. Each mobile sea base would be responsible for maintaining control over a fifty-mile ‘alley’ along the convoy route, or SLOC.” This offered a no-cost alternative to risking several navy combatants. The combination of helicopters, small boats, and defensive fire on the barges themselves was more than capable of dealing with any Iranian threat. They intended to move the mobile sea bases randomly every few days among the Saudi islands and oil platforms that dotted the northern Gulf to reduce the likelihood of Iranians being able to target the sea bases.41

  The officers listened skeptically but attentively, occasionally asking questions. When queried about Iranians possibly trying to board the barges, Lugo responded that those assigned would carry 9-mm pistols, M-16s, various machine guns, and hand grenades, and they would be able to “repel boarders.” This led to the under-the-breath sarcastic comment by one flag officer: “Are you going to issue them cutlasses too?”42

  The conference did little to change the opinions of those opposed to it, which remained the majority of the attendees.43 The day after the conference, Royal Moore sent a personal message to Crist’s senior planning officer, Rear Admiral William Fogarty: “Bill, as you know, I developed serious misgivings over the mobile sea base concept. As a result of what I saw and heard, it is my assessment that the concept is so severely flawed that it should be dropped.”44Admiral Crowe had endorsed the mobile sea bases since their conception, but even his own operations directorate within the Joint Staff recommended against the venture.45

  While Crist had the legal authority to implement the mobile sea base plan and he intended to drive forward with deploying the barges, with the entire naval services rising in opposition, the issue found itself elevated to Weinberger’s desk. The opposition to the barges threatened to kill the mobile sea bases, and even Rich Armitage, a staunch supporter of both Crist and the barge idea, worried that the opposition might be too much to overcome.

  On September 17, Crowe arrived in Bahrain. He spent the next two days touring several U.S. ships and getting a ride on a Mark III patrol boat. He went on board the barge Hercules and talked to SEALs about their planned operations and the scheme envisioned for the barges’ defense. After this and several lengthy meetings with Bernsen, he sent a message back to Crist and Weinberger that effectively put an end at least to the overt bashing by the navy of the mobile sea bases. After praising Hal Bernsen, Crowe went on to say about the barges, “I am aware that there are many naysayers as far as the barges are concerned, but I came away from my tour feeling more comfortable with them than I had previously been.” The barges were a “good-sense” alternative and should go forward.46 Weinberger agreed.

  Lieutenant Abdul Fouladvand had an easy command. Commissioned just after the shah’s departure in 1979, the thin twenty-eight-year-old with thick dark hair commanded a 176-foot-long logistics ship named the Rakhsh before the revolution, now called the Iran Ajr. Painted hazy gray, Fouladvand’s ship had a bow ramp and a large open deck for loading bulk cargo. At her stern rose the superstructure housing the bridge and quarters for a crew of around twenty. The war had passed by his tiny ship. For the past few years, he had contented himself with short runs from Bandar Abbas to resupply the Iranian military on Abu Musa Island and the oil platforms. But the hardships of the war had led Fouladvand to hoard supplies. He filled his cabin with foodstuffs, including Iranian-produced aspirin that turned out to be a placebo. Neither hygiene nor maintenance had been high on the young captain’s priorities. The Japanese had built the Iran Ajr in the same year as Fouladvand’s commissioning, but it already displayed severe rust and peeling paint. It had never been cleaned: grease and dirt permeated every compartment and cabin. The one head on board no longer worked, but this had not stopped the crew from continuing to relieve themselves there. Human feces overflowed the toilet, and crewmen had tracked the remnants all around the deck.

  Bandar Abbas was a relatively small town of only twelve thousand people in the mid-1980s. It was Iran’s principal southern port and the region’s leading commercial center. Within the large concrete breakwaters sat two distinct areas: a commercial area and a naval section in a port shaped something like an L, with the Iranian naval base occupying the short horizontal axis. In August 1987, Fouladvand received orders to dock over at the commercial side of the Bandar Abbas port, and the Iran Ajr tied up to one of the T-shaped piers, intermingled with commercial ships. A large warehouse sat next to the wharf. Inside, the Revolutionary Guard stored dozens of large, black, cylindrical mines, staged for quick loading on board the minelayer. The mines remained there for more than a month, until an Iranian agent in Bahrain tipped off the Revolutionary Guard to the ship’s schedule and Tehran made the quick decision to try to mine this target of opportunity.

  In mid-September, two Revolutionary Guard officers with an accompanying small team arrived and took over Fouladvand’s ship. Commander Parvis Farshchian led this special group. A sixteen-year veteran, Farshchian was fluent in English and a staunch Islamic ideologue. His deputy was the cool and collected forty-two-year-old Farhad Ibrahimi. A twenty-year veteran of the Iranian marines, he had joined the Revolutionary Guard, where he put his special forces training to work leading a number of commando attacks against the Iraqis. An impressive man who spoke flawless English, Ibrahimi liked to flaunt his wealth and authority by wearing a very expensive Rolex diving watch.47 Farshchian ordered eighteen mines pulled out from the warehouse and quickly loaded onto the ship’s open deck, intermingling them with oil drums and covering them with a heavy tarp to try to conceal his illicit cargo. The crew welded a metal gangplank to the deck, dangling out over the ship’s starboard side. The Iranians had decided to launch another mining attack. Emboldened by their earlier successes, this time they would target Bernsen directly. Farshchian intended to mine the main channel into Bahrain and the American naval base. By happenstance, the La Salle intended to conduct a gunnery exercise in the exact area Farshchian planned to lay his eighteen mines.48

  The Iran Ajr’s crew did not welcome the new arrivals. The Revolutionary Guard displayed a haughty attitude toward their less dedicated comrades. They ate and slept separately and rarely mingled. In truth, some of the regular navy sailors hated the Islamic Republic. One enlisted man confided that he would gladly have defected had he not been the sole provider for his aging mother.

  The Iran Ajr quietly departed Bandar Abbas on September 20. The 1st Naval District gave Farshchian strict instructions to report his position every hour. He dutifully did, signing off each message as “commander of special mission unit Iran Ajr.”49 As a cover story, Farshchian disguised his operation as a routine transit to the northern port of Bushehr. For a covert operation, the Iranians took this too far. At least eight Iranian soldiers hopped on board the ship looking for a quick trip to visit family and friends around Bushehr. After stopping overnight at the Rostam oil platform for final approval orders, the Iran Ajr continued north. On the evening of September 21, the ship diverted off her route, heading west toward Bahrain.

  American intelligence nearly missed the Iran Ajr. Spy satellites actually photographed mines sitting on the dock next to her and a sister ship on August 16, 1987, but this image somehow got lost and never made it out to Bernsen in the Gulf. Three days before she’d left Bandar Abbas, an intelligence advisory stated: “Do not estimate Iran will deploy mines during next week.” The first Ziegler knew of this impending attack was after the Iran Ajr had set sail; a string of intercepts started flowing into
his small, secure facility on the La Salle, all from a ship calling itself a special mission unit and reporting back in flash messages to its headquarters every hour. Ziegler began tracking her movements, and when the ship stopped at the Revolutionary Guard–manned oil platform of Rostam and one communiqué mentioned an operation for eleven p.m. the next night, he went in to tell Bernsen. The Middle East Force commander ordered the USS Jarrett to investigate. The American frigate had three of the army Little Birds embarked.50

  At ten p.m., the three small jelly bean–shaped helos took off from the fantail into a moonless night. Within forty minutes they had closed to within two hundred yards of the Iranian ship, carefully remaining upwind in order to minimize the chances of being heard. As the American pilots looked on, just before the magic hour of eleven o’clock, Farshchian ordered the ship’s navigation lights turned off. Ibrahimi had six Iranians pull back the heavy tarp covering the mines and oil drums. He began methodically fusing the black spherical objects arranged on top of the flat open deck. With a stopwatch to set the mine intervals, he ordered the 253-pound explosive charge rolled down the small gangplank and into the ocean below. An army pilot watching them calmly reported that they were pushing “minelike objects” over the side.51

  Bernsen and his operations deputy had been listening in to the reports from their command center on the La Salle. Bernsen was actually across the room on a secure phone talking with Crist, who happened to be out in the Gulf of Oman meeting with Denny Brooks, as the new joint task force had formally stood up the day the Iran Ajr left port. When Bernsen heard “minelike object,” he told Grieve, “Take them under fire.”