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

by David Crist

  Over the next several months, the hodgepodge of forces effectively cleared the mines and shut down Iran’s Revolutionary Guard operation in the northern Persian Gulf. In December, the Wimbrown finally joined the Hercules as the SEALs and army pilots continued to refine their tactics. Operating in pairs and at night, except when investigating a specific contact, the patrols ranged from four to twelve hours. Occasionally, in an attempt to confuse the Iranians, all four were sent out in a close diamond formation so as to appear as a large target to the Iranians on Farsi Island. When just outside the twelve-mile exclusion zone around the island, the boats would split apart at high speed, appearing to a thoroughly baffled Iranian radar operator as though the object had multiplied before his eyes. On one occasion, a Little Bird flew around the far side of Farsi and flew over the island just above the buildings. If the Iranians tried to pursue, Wikul sat waiting in an ambush with patrol boats and more Little Birds. After Middle Shoals, the Iranians showed little stomach to tangle with the Americans.

  As a new year dawned, it appeared that the United States finally had the upper hand. A new American commander, Rear Admiral Tony Less, was headed to take charge in the Gulf, and the convoys went back and forth unmolested. Iran had not tried another mining since the loss of the Iran Ajr. The war with Iraq was turning against Iran, and leaders in Tehran grew increasingly desperate to try to curtail the Arab support for Saddam Hussein. But rather than calming down, the quasi-war between Iran and the United States was actually reaching its climax.

  Seventeen

  NO HIGHER HONOR

  On a bright sunny late February day, General Crist joined Hal Bernsen for a ceremony on the fantail of the USS La Salle, tied up pier-side in Bahrain. A strong wind blew the flags and flapped the awning covering the dignitaries from the Middle East sun. This was apropos, for a new American commander had arrived in the Gulf, Rear Admiral Tony Less. Less had a quick smile, a quicker wit, and a sharp temper. He had an effusive, sanguine personality that melded with common sense to make him a popular leader. He was a respected pilot with the navy and the former commander of the elite Blue Angels aerobatic flight team. The new commander knew a lot about what had transpired in the Gulf over the past few months. He’d commanded one of the carrier battle groups in August when Ace Lyons flew out with his Window of Opportunity plan. Crist, dressed in a high-collared white uniform, took to the podium: “Napoléon once said, ‘Nothing is so important in war as undivided command.’ One hundred fifty years later we are participating in a ceremony which bears witness to the truth of these words.”

  Admiral Less had arrived to relieve both Dennis Brooks and Harold Bernsen, consolidating both the joint task force and Middle East Force under one commander. Since the formation of the joint task force in September 1987, relations between Bernsen’s and Brooks’s staffs had become estranged, with the problem lying both in personalities and, more important, philosophical differences between the two navy commanders. Brooks had the difficult assignment of running an operation whose subordinate command was far more versed with the intricacies of the political and military concept of Earnest Will. Brooks disliked the idea of the mobile sea bases and delayed deploying the second barge Wimbrown VII.1 He opposed the decentralized nature of the intelligence collection and viewed the use of the special operations forces as an overly aggressive posture toward Iran.2 He believed that the best way to avoid clashes with Iran was to stay out of the Gulf, running heavily armed convoys when necessary. Otherwise, avoid confrontations. Unfortunately, this ran counter to the entire operational scheme. The end of Brooks came when Crowe grew irate following a phone call to Bernsen in which he learned that Brooks had refused to send a tanker to pick up free fuel offered by Kuwait as compensation to the Americans, apparently worried about the safety of sending a military tanker into the Gulf.3 This decision by Brooks cost the U.S. government nearly five million dollars.4

  While Brooks, having been fired, left the Gulf without fanfare, Bernsen received a proper send-off. In his address at the change of command, the CENTCOM commander lavished praise upon Bernsen: “I am sure that often in the privacy of his cabin, this calm, unflappable commander must have echoed the thoughts of General Joffre, the French hero of the first world war, who said: ‘I don’t know who won the Battle of the Marne, but if it had been lost, I know who would have lost it.’”5

  By early 1988 the United States was firmly established in the Gulf. By the end of January, a total of thirty major convoys had made the three- to five-day transit from the Gulf of Oman to just south of Kuwaiti waters, or vice versa. While tension remained high, Iranian activity appeared to have tapered off. There still seemed no end in sight for the U.S. commitment, as critics of the reflagging operation continued to point out, but by the spring of 1988 events were finally coming to a head.6

  On the afternoon of April 14, 1988, the American frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts steamed south toward the Strait of Hormuz, having just escorted two reflagged tankers—Gas King and Rover—to Kuwait, the twenty-fifth successful convoy of Earnest Will.7 With a cloudless blue sky overhead and a light wind, the Roberts cruised at a brisk twenty-five knots as it headed to rendezvous with an oiler for some fuel before taking another Earnest Will convoy back north. She passed by the Shah Allum Shoal approximately fifty-five miles northeast of Qatar, an area of shallow water that forced the deep-draft tankers into a more constricted sea-lane. A mere two hours earlier, the French frigate Dupleix had passed through the area, reporting nothing of interest. The two navies exchanged officers, and occasionally food, back and forth for a pleasant change in the daily staple of the two ships patrolling the Gulf. Recently the Roberts and the Dupleix had held a combined mess night in the Roberts’s wardroom, complete with some smuggled French wine, a welcome treat on board a dry U.S. Navy warship. More important, the two combatants looked out for each other; when an Iranian vessel loomed nearby, the Roberts noticed the French destroyer lying in the vicinity ready to provide assistance.8

  The Sammy B, as her crew affectionately called her, was a newly commissioned Oliver Hazard Perry–class frigate, of the same class as the ill-fated USS Stark. It was the third ship to bear the name; the original Samuel B. Roberts had been sunk off Samar in the Battle of Leyte Gulf on October 25, 1944, with a loss of ninety crew. In his after-action report, the surviving captain, Robert Copeland, wrote: “In the face of this knowledge, the men zealously manned their stations wherever they might be, and fought and worked with such calmness, courage, and efficiency that no higher honor could be conceived than to command such a group of men.” “No higher honor” stuck and became the motto of the next two ships. With a slender, 450-foot-long knife-shaped hull and boxy superstructure, the Roberts displaced more than four thousand tons and held a crew of 215 men. The navy had designed the frigate as an inexpensive solution to complete such unglamorous tasks as antisubmarine and convoy duties.

  Commander Paul X. Rinn, forty-two, commanded the Roberts. Born in the Bronx, he had a rough-and-tumble upbringing, with a .22-caliber bullet hole in his leg to show for his youthful indiscretions. But he eventually turned himself around, graduated from a small Catholic college, Marist, in Poughkeepsie, New York, and in 1968 was commissioned as an ensign in the U.S. Navy. In 1972, during the waning days of the Vietnam War, Rinn found himself in a very unusual billet for a surface warfare naval officer. He worked as an adviser as part of the secret CIA war in Cambodia. Operating near the Laotian border building patrol bases along the Mekong River, he spent over two hundred days in combat areas being mortared and fired at along with a polyglot force of Navy SEALs and native levies. He ended up being the last U.S. naval officer out of Phnom Penh as the Khmer Rouge closed in and Cambodia became a killing field. The experience forever changed Rinn. Unlike many of his contemporaries who had never heard a shot fired, in anger or otherwise, Rinn learned what it took to lead men in combat and strove to instill in his subordinates the importance of training for the realities of modern war, anticipating the eventuality of going in
to harm’s way.

  Captain Rinn had the deserved reputation as an aggressive, cocky, in-your-face skipper. He spoke loudly and with confidence and had a temper dampened by a good-natured, sardonic sense of humor. In a service whose officers were largely engineers who acted more as technicians, Rinn was a bit of a novelty—he had charisma. It was contagious and engendered loyalty among his officers and crew.

  The Samuel B. Roberts arrived in the Gulf on February 2, 1988, as part of Destroyer Squadron 22, commanded by a Red Man tobacco–chewing Captain Don Dyer. Over the next two months, the Roberts escorted five convoys entering the bizarre world of the Persian Gulf and the tanker war. On his first inbound transit through the Strait of Hormuz, Rinn nearly fired on two Iranian F-4 Phantoms coming from Bandar Abbas. At the last minute, both turned away, seconds before Rinn, standing over the shoulder of a seaman with his finger hovering above the launch button, intended to give the go-ahead. That night, he had another close encounter with the CIA’s Eager Glacier aircraft flying out of Dhahran on its nightly patrol off the Iranian coast. Less’s command informed him it was a friendly aircraft, but only a minute before the Roberts would have sent a missile skyward.

  Rinn and the Roberts increasingly found themselves executing a new, more aggressive strategy against Iran. The new secretary of defense, Frank Carlucci, came to the Pentagon intent on making some changes to the U.S. operations in the Gulf. He was appalled at the specter of Iranians attacking unarmed merchant ships in plain sight of U.S. warships. He agreed with Joint Chiefs chairman Crowe that it was unseemly to have U.S. captains—bound by strict rules of engagement—unable to come to the aid of helpless seamen being gunned down by Iranian frigates and small boats. Admiral Crowe phoned General George Crist in Tampa late that January to direct him to up the ante on the Iranians. “Don’t start a war,” he said. “But, George, be aggressive and use radar, or this ship’s presence—whatever you can do to break up their attacks.” U.S. warships could not enter Iranian waters, but if they needed to push up into the Iranian exclusion zone, so be it.

  It fell to Tony Less to implement the new strategy. “The Iranians are chicken shits,” Less said. “When they see a ship coming over the horizon, they run for home.” Less briefed the newly arrived ship skippers, including Rinn: “Guys, we’re at war. Don’t lose your ship, but you’ve got radars…. Stymie them, don’t let them lay mines, don’t let them attack ships.” What followed was a series of intensifying confrontations between the two fleets, with the Roberts leading the charge.

  The first encounter occurred near the Iranian island of Sirri. The Roberts detected the Iranian frigate Sabalan closing in for an attack on the unsuspecting Greek tanker Tandis. Rinn ordered “all ahead flank” as the Roberts rapidly closed on the Iranian ship. The British-built Sabalan was smaller than her American counterpart, only 311 feet in length and less than half the tonnage. But she represented the most formidable ship in the Iranian navy and was armed by a rapid-fire 114-mm turreted gun forward and three relatively small Sea Killer antiship missiles aft. The Sabalan was commanded by Abdollah Manavi, a regular navy officer with the dubious reputation of being one of the most cruel Iranian captains in the war. This odious skipper had earned the nickname “Captain Nasty” due to the ship’s infamous reputation for deliberately attacking the crew quarters of neutral shipping. Even when his command in Bandar Abbas directed Captain Nasty not to attack a tanker, he often disregarded the order or openly lied to his superiors, seemingly delighting in aiming the ship’s gunfire at the crewmen and their lifeboats. Then the Sabalan would transmit to the helpless tanker, “Have a nice day.”9

  Rinn brought his ship up on the Sabalan’s stern, closing to within one mile. The crew of the Iranian vessel stared nervously back, pointing deck-mounted machine guns at the American ship. With the U.S. frigate on his stern, the Iranian captain turned hard to port and hit the accelerator. What followed was a strange minuet, with the Sabalan resembling a hare trying to elude a pursuing fox, turning rapidly to the left and right trying to throw off the pursuing U.S. ship and get into a position to bring her forward gun to bear while the Roberts matched her turn for turn. After several hours, the Sabalan had enough and headed north toward Iran. The Roberts did not pursue. That night an elated Rinn wrote his brother, “Crew on a high—captain’s got balls!”10

  The next few encounters between the two ships near Abu Musa Island nearly ended in bloodshed. While the Sabalan continued to back down from a confrontation, her sister ship, the Sahand, was not so docile. On one occasion, the Roberts and the Sahand spied each other on radar; each turned immediately and headed directly for the other. Closing at a combined speed of nearly sixty knots an hour in a deadly game of chicken, each locked on to the other with its fire control radar, as Rinn put a missile up on his forward mount, ready to send it screaming toward the Sahand should the Iranian open fire. Just before the two collided, the Sahand turned away.

  Rinn continued to harass the Iranian ships near Abu Musa. On one occasion, he shadowed an Iranian ship all night despite some of the worst weather in the Gulf, with waves higher than the Roberts’s bridges, following the Iranian warship into the Iranian exclusion zone and breaking off pursuit only after daybreak. Less was pleased. While he admonished Rinn about being “too provocative,” he admired the skipper of the Samuel B. Roberts. “He was one of the best captains I’d seen,” Admiral Less later commented. The aggressive new strategy seemed to be working; Iranian attacks dropped off as the U.S. ships had the desired intimidating influence. U.S. intelligence monitoring Iranian communication at the 1st Naval District headquarters in Bandar Abbas noted the Iranians’ growing concern at an inability to attack ships in the southern Gulf, one report remarking that the United States seemed intent on doing everything to “protect” Saddam Hussein’s war machine.

  One person who saw this cat-and-mouse game firsthand was an Associated Press reporter named Richard Pyle. Short, with black hair and a bit of a hangdog face, he possessed a quick wit and an attentive mind. Few reporters had as much combat experience as Pyle. He served briefly in the army before becoming a reporter, rising to become the AP bureau chief in Saigon for much of the Vietnam War. Here he learned firsthand the idiosyncrasies of the U.S. military, as well as the tragedy of war, brought home by the loss of four reporters and close friends in Laos, including famed reporter Larry Burrows. Pyle was the only American reporter continuously covering the ongoing Iran-Iraq War and the U.S. intervention, Earnest Will. He lived in Bahrain, where his wife attended the same small Catholic church as Tony Less and his wife. Pyle threw himself into the tanker reflagging story; he rode nearly every ship in the Gulf and served in virtually every press pool, including the very first with the Bridgeton.

  Pyle watched the increased harassment with great interest, fully aware that the United States had escalated the operation and of the likelihood of more military confrontation. He rode on the Roberts with Rinn during his long night tracking the Iranian frigate. “I could not believe what this guy Rinn was doing. He must have scared the hell out of that Iranian ship!” In an interview with him in his stateroom, Rinn said, “We are going to follow him. He’ll know we are there and we are going to make him think that we know where he is and what he is doing all the time. It’s a psychological operation.” Whether the Iranians were intimidated, however, was a different story.

  As the United States tracked Iran’s boats, the Iranian military was doing the same to the U.S. Navy. The Revolutionary Guard noticed a seam in the American surveillance scheme: the area in the south-central Gulf. In the summer of 1987, Bernsen had recommended stationing the Guadalcanal there to provide surveillance, but this had been denied. Less had tried to cover it by stationing warships and overflights of the P-3s operating from Saudi Arabia, but they could not be maintained continuously. Iran noticed an opening as the U.S. ships were pulled to the north and south on various duties, leaving a momentary window of opportunity. When Iranian forces on Rostam and Sassan confirmed the dearth of U.S. force
s, they decided to act. For the first time in five months, Iran gambled with the invisible hand.

  Following a meeting with senior military leaders in Tehran, on April 12 the Iranian ship Charak sailed from Bandar Abbas without fanfare. A small vessel at thirteen hundred tons and two hundred feet long, she had been designed as a lighter or support ship, with a wide, flat open area running from the bow back to the bridge and superstructure near the stern. She had a complement of around twenty, not counting a small fanatical Revolutionary Guard detachment. After a brief stop at Abu Musa Island for some last-minute instructions, Charak headed off west past the Iranian oil platforms manned by other Iranian guards: Sirri, Sassan, and Rostam. A four-engine, American-made Iranian P-3 flew the route that afternoon, providing some intelligence on U.S. ship positions, relaying it back to Abu Musa. On the night of April 13, the Charak discharged her duties. In a location where shoals forced the tanker route into a channel, the Iranian ship aligned herself with a navigation light on the horizon. Extinguishing her navigation lights, she sailed in the blackness. One officer had a stopwatch in his hand, while others methodically fused the black spherical objects arranged on top of the flat open deck hatch and carefully rolled them to the edge of a plank protruding off the side. Twelve mines fell over the side; unlike the Iran Ajr, the mines were arrayed in a circular pattern, designed to saturate the area and increase the chances of finding a target. Either that night or the next, the Charak or her sister, the Souru, undertook a similar mission some sixty miles to the southeast along an old Earnest Will tanker track that had not been used for several convoys.