by David Crist
The Iran-Iraq War consumed much of Lang’s time as defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, and he found himself frequently called upon to brief senior officials on the ebb and flow of the war. At the direction of Caspar Weinberger’s powerful assistant secretary, Richard Armitage, these briefings included the close confidant of many administrations, Saudi ambassador to Washington Prince Bandar bin Sultan. For his first meeting with Bandar, Lang traveled to the Saudi’s sprawling home off Chain Bridge Road along the Potomac, lugging a case of large classified maps of front lines. The two men spread the maps out across the floor of Bandar’s study, poring over them for the next three hours and carefully discussing the blue and red symbols that represented the armies of Iraq and Iran.1
Bandar liked the presentations and discussions so much that he asked Armitage if Lang could give the same talk to Jordan’s King Hussein. Armitage agreed, and Lang quickly found himself on a plane to Amman.
The king arrived a few minutes late. He had been out riding and appeared dressed in jeans, checkered shirt, snakeskin cowboy boots, and a belt with a large silver rodeo buckle in the shape of Texas. They cleared off a large marble coffee table, and Lang laid out satellite photos and maps and provided a detailed talk on the current military situation along the Iran-Iraq front lines.
At the end of his formal presentation, King Hussein asked, “Is there anything the Iraqis could do better—something they could fix?”
“Well, yes, Your Majesty, there is.” Pointing down to the map, he fingered two Iraqi units near Basra. “One has its front line on the riverbank and the other is deployed half a kilometer back. They are not tied in together at all. If Iranian patrols discover this gap, they could exploit it and drive right between the two divisions.”
“How could they make such a mistake?” asked the king.
“I don’t know, but it needs to be corrected right away.”
King Hussein turned to the chief of Jordanian intelligence and asked in Arabic, “Can you fly to Baghdad and brief our brothers about this?” Quickly realizing that Lang understood Arabic, a sheepish King Hussein asked if they could take the map and brief the Iraqis on their ill-disposed army.
“Sir, my map is your map,” answered Lang. That afternoon a team of Jordanian officers arrived in Baghdad with Lang’s map, and by the time Lang arrived back in Washington, the Iraqis had moved their forces to close the vulnerable hole in their front line.
In early 1988, spurred on by Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, the White House renewed its help for Iraq. The DIA focused on helping the Iraqi air force. Lang established a dozen-man cell, replete with satellite imagery interpreters and air force targeting officers, near the director’s office at the DIA building at Bolling Air Force Base. Lang’s deputy was Major Rick Francona, a Middle East air force specialist fluent in Arabic. Francona became the point man for working with the Iraqis. Lang’s team focused on the key operational targets behind the Iranian front lines whose destruction would upend Iran’s ability to launch major offensive operations. These targets included division and corps headquarters, supply dumps, railroad bridges, boatyards where the Revolutionary Guard stored landing craft, and troop cantonments. The Iranians had no real appreciation for modern airpower. They carelessly built large supply bases far forward to support their attacks; most sat out in the open, without adequate protection and virtually undefended from air, or even artillery, attacks. Destroying these would scuttle any Iranian offensive before it began. Within days they had put together twenty target packages, each with multiple individual targets, to pass on to Baghdad. Each one consisted of beautiful hand drawings made from the satellite photographs, plus maps with the locations of nearby Iranian antiaircraft weapons.2
After receiving approval from both nations’ joint chiefs, Lang and Francona flew into Kuwait and drove up to the Iraq border, where the U.S. defense attaché in Baghdad, Colonel David Lemon, and a major in Iraqi intelligence greeted them. The Iraqi major greeted them warmly. “My orders are to take you anywhere you want to go on the way to Baghdad.” Lang decided to test his sincerity: “Okay, I want to see the Iranian front lines around Basra.”
The group drove straight up to Basra, ending at the riverbank near the Sheraton Hotel. Lang climbed up a nearby berm to get a better view and could clearly see the Iranian trenches in the near distance. After a couple of minutes the Iraqi major came up beside him. “Sir, the Iranians have seen you by now. May I suggest you get back down unless you want to die right here.” It was sage advice. As they drove off, their vehicle was straddled by six Iranian artillery shells, exploding uncomfortably close. The Iraqi driver froze in panic, his eyes as wide as saucers and hands clutching the steering wheel in a death grip. Colonel Lemon reached across and grabbed the steering wheel and jammed his foot down on the accelerator. They pulled away just in time to avoid the next six incoming salvos. They arrived at the al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, and both Francona and Lang headed straight for the bar.
Lang and Francona met with a collection of Iraqi generals and colonels and briefed their proposed targets. As Lang expected, they were ecstatic. “We were greeted like long-lost brothers, or as the cavalry arrived to save the fort.” Lang told them, “We are going to give these intelligence packages to you. We can give you feedback after each strike and tell you whether you destroyed it or need to hit it again, but it’s up to you to prosecute these targets—we’re not going to do it for you. You need to knock them out by yourself.”3
The very next day the Iraqi air force began bombing the first of the twenty target sets, with the DIA back in Washington looking at the imagery following each strike to see what effect the Iraqis had achieved. Despite its large, modern air force and the United States giving the grid coordinates of the Iranian targets down to the meter, the Iraqi pilots displayed greater concern for self-preservation than for military effectiveness, often dropping their bombs from too high an altitude or simply not even approaching the target. As Richard Armitage later observed with open disdain, “They weren’t very good.” But with the DIA providing a steady stream of intelligence updates, the Iraqi pilots went back again and again, bombing the Iranians until they obliterated the bridge or troop cantonment, killing hundreds of soldiers and seriously disrupting Iran’s ability to mount any sort of large-scale attack.
Lang and Francona developed a good rapport with the Iraqis, exchanging ideas for new Iranian military nodes to bomb. By the time the war ended, in August 1988, the Iraqi air force had attacked thirty-five different target arrays provided by the United States. America’s proxy war against Iran proved a remarkable success.
The defense secretary did not authorize Lang to help the Iraqi army, but when asked his military opinion by an Iraqi general, Lang gave it to him. On numerous visits to Baghdad or down to the front as a guest of one of the Iraqi Republican Guard divisions, over a hot cup of sweet tea, a senior Iraqi general would lay a map of the front line on the table in front of the army colonel. “We are looking at attacking here. What do you think of that?” Lang offered suggestions, such as attacking the Iranians from an exposed flank rather than head-on. The Iraqis invariably took his advice, and while it did not decide the war, the Iraqi Republican Guard battered the Iranian army in a series of tactical victories. Both Lang and Francona became minor celebrities in Iraq, including being invited as guests of honor of Saddam’s elite Hammurabi division.
Saddam Hussein was justifiably pleased with the American intelligence support. In payment, the Iraqis provided American intelligence officers access to dissect the latest Soviet tanks and missiles, and Francona was invited on a tour of captured Iranian trenches where the evidence of Iraqi chemical weapons littered the ground in the form of atropine injectors used by desperate Iranians to stave off the horrific effects of nerve gas. The U.S. Army analysts produced a detailed report on the artillery piece, classified with the highly unusual caveat: “Secret/Not Releasable to Foreign Countries except Iraq.”4 In honor of the United States, Saddam Hussein named a n
ew Republican Guard mechanized division the Tawakalna Division, short for Tawakalna ala Allah, or “In God We Trust,” the motto of the United States. The division would be destroyed by American airpower three years later during Operation Desert Storm.
Saddam increased the pressure on Iran in his normal brutal way. Iraq rained dozens of missiles down on Iranian cities, sending at least two hundred screaming down into Tehran, including eleven in one day. Each missile cut a swath of destruction, killing or wounding scores of civilians. By the end of the war, these attacks had killed or injured twelve thousand civilians. The randomness of the destruction played on the population’s fears as the notoriously inaccurate Scud missiles hit schools, apartment buildings, commuters headed home from work. One Iranian living in the United States received a letter telling him that the nice old lady down the block who used to bake cookies was killed when her house took a direct hit from an Iraqi missile. Civilians stayed away from downtown and government buildings. A massive exodus of frightened people fled from the city to the countryside. In April and May 1988 protests began as people started questioning the continuation of the war. This led to clashes between police and rock-throwing students. One of the demonstrations occurred following a Scud hit on a hotel that killed more than one hundred people who had been celebrating a wedding. Protesters started criticizing Khomeini himself, which was unprecedented even after eight years of war.
Robocruiser had arrived. The USS Vincennes was the most sophisticated ship in the U.S. Navy. The Ticonderoga-class cruiser had been commissioned just three years earlier at a cost of more than $1 billion. With a crew of about four hundred, she bristled with modern weapons, including two 5-inch guns and an array of antiair and antiship missiles. But the Vincennes’s real worth lay in her radar. Outfitted with the latest Aegis combat system and combined with the ship’s radar, weapons, and command suite, the warship could track and engage dozens of surface or air targets simultaneously. As early as September 1987, the Pentagon pushed to station such an advanced cruiser in the Persian Gulf to monitor Iranian activity in the congested Strait of Hormuz. The chief of naval operations, Admiral Carl Trost, had balked at sending such a ship to the Gulf, telling Colin Powell, “Why would you want to put a diamond in a pigsty?”5 But Weinberger had countered, “What other war do you have going on?” He and his successor, Frank Carlucci, finally ordered the deployment, and USS Vincennes arrived in the Gulf a month after the April clash of Operation Praying Mantis.
The commanding officer of the cruiser Vincennes, Captain William Rogers, was not afraid to sail into harm’s way. When his draft deferment ended in the mid-1960s, he joined the navy, attending officer candidate school in Newport, Rhode Island. He had two great loves: his wife and the navy. Self-confident and aggressive, he wanted to prove the mettle of his ship and its advanced Aegis system in combat. When the outgoing officers of the Wainwright offered to brief his crew on the air picture in the Gulf, “Aegis will sort it out” was the dismissive refrain from the Vincennes’s officers. In keeping with its role to control the surveillance of the Strait of Hormuz, Rogers’s ship took station inside the Gulf but well away from the Revolutionary Guard attacks. Disrupting their attacks and escorting the convoys fell to the smaller frigates and destroyers. This role did not sit well with Rogers. He wanted to take a more active role in the aggressive shadowing operations that Admiral Tony Less had initiated. Rogers wrote numerous messages to Less urging him to aggressively use the Vincennes against the Iranians—to “go into harm’s way for which she was intended,” as he said in one message.6 Commander David Carlson, captain of the USS Sides, which was frequently located near the Vincennes, commented of the ship’s behavior: “My impression was clearly that an atmosphere of restraint was not her long suit.”7 Soon, sailors around the Gulf took to calling the Vincennes “Robocruiser” for her similarity to the popular futuristic movie Robocop, in which a half man, half machine cleaned up the streets of a crime-plagued city.
On April 29, 1988, President Reagan ordered U.S. forces to broaden the protection of vessels in the Gulf. This marked a major change in the rules of engagement in the Gulf and muddled the clear distinction about belligerency. U.S. warships were now free to take any action necessary to end an Iranian attack in progress, including using deadly force, but they could not retaliate for an attack that had previously occurred. The Iranians had to be caught in the act. Anticipating reporters’ questions about whether this constituted an expansion of the mission or a tilt in U.S. neutrality, during a press conference announcing the change Carlucci responded in his prepared statement: “We are not the policemen of the Gulf, nor do we wish to be.” The truth was somewhat different.8
In June, Iranian military activity increased again in the Gulf. The Iraqis continued to press the land offensive and intensified their air attacks on Iranian oil facilities and shipping in the northern Persian Gulf.9 As expected, the Iranians retaliated by attacking shipping around the Strait of Hormuz. Even the Iranian air force came back to life. It shifted two or three F-14s from Bushehr to a joint military-civilian airfield at Bandar Abbas.10 While the F-14 had been designed as a fighter jet, Iran had shown a proclivity to improvise, and Less’s intelligence section worried that Iran might have been able to outfit the fighters to drop bombs.11 On July 2, the USS Halsey warned away two potentially hostile Iranian aircraft near the Strait of Hormuz.12
On July 2, the USS Elmer Montgomery received a distress message from the Danish ship Karama Maersk, outbound from Saudi Arabia. In accordance with the new rules laid out by Washington, the Montgomery moved to intervene and observed at least three Revolutionary Guard boats shooting at the Danish ship.13 The U.S. vessel fired several warning shots at the Iranian speedboats, which promptly broke off their attack.
The next morning, several more Revolutionary Guards challenged a Pakistani merchant ship. Less agreed to allow the Vincennes helicopter to investigate, but on his own volition Rogers moved his ship nearly fifty miles north of his assigned station to join the Montgomery. When the destroyer flotilla commander learned about this, he ordered Rogers to return to his designated station south of Abu Musa Island. But the helicopter remained, shadowing a group of Revolutionary Guard boats loitering off Qeshm Island and well within Iran’s territorial waters. With the Vincennes’s helicopter buzzing overhead, one of the guard boats fired off about ten rounds in front of the helicopter—a not uncommon way for the Iranians to warn away military or civilian helicopters when they approached too close.
“We are taking fire!” the pilot radioed back to the ship.
With this pretext, Rogers immediately turned his ship about and, along with the Montgomery, headed back north at more than thirty knots to where the Iranian boats lay. In doing so, and in violation of the standing rules of avoiding Iran’s war exclusion zone, he crossed into Iranian waters, a fact dutifully recorded by a military combat camera team that happened to be on the Vincennes’s bridge.14
As the two ships closed on the Iranian small boats, two of them turned toward the approaching American warships; the others, according to Rogers, acted erratically and appeared to be maneuvering to attack him. Rogers requested permission to open fire. He described the Iranians as in attack profile and having fired on his helicopter. Neither Less nor his command had any idea that Vincennes was in Iranian waters, but approved the request, believing the ship was under attack.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander at Bandar Abbas was a young firebrand named Ali Fadavi. Bright and circumspect, like many guard officers he had been a student transformed by war into a military commander, and he’d moved quickly up through the ranks. An avid supporter of the revolution, he believed the new Iranian fleet of small boats and mining vessels was a more effective strategy to deal with the Americans than the large ships of the regular navy. As the senior Revolutionary Guard commander in Bandar Abbas, Fadavi had orchestrated a number of attacks from there on shipping headed to and from the Gulf Arabs who supported Iraq. Following the drubbing the regular navy ha
d taken in April following the attack on the Roberts, Fadavi’s mosquito fleet remained the only force capable of continuing the tanker war. The new aggressive American posture complicated his operations, so the guards lurked just across the exclusion zone border and quickly struck passing tankers before the Americans arrived. But now the Americans had taken their cat-and-mouse game to a new level and entered Iranian waters intent on a fight.
As the American ships closed in, one Revolutionary Guard boat moved down to reconnoiter the Vincennes; it passed along the side of the large cruiser, its small crew crouched low as the two sides stared at each other. When the other Iranian boats maneuvered to spread out, two boats headed toward the U.S. warships. Rogers characterized this as a hostile act to Less’s command, and he received permission to defend his ship from an attack entirely of the American captain’s own making.
At 9:43 a.m., the two American ships opened fire. Shells splashed down around the Iranian boats, which maneuvered to and fro firing their machine guns wildly in the direction of the Americans.15 Nearly one hundred shells were fired, and several hit home. Two Revolutionary Guard speedboats caught fire and sank, while a third was damaged by a near miss.
At 9:47, Iran Air Flight 655 took off from Bandar Abbas destined for Dubai. Mohsen Rezaian held the yoke of the Airbus A300, painted in the blue and white livery of Iran Air. An experienced pilot, he had flown this short, thirty-minute route many times, a regularly scheduled flight every Sunday and Tuesday.16 On this day, a passenger with a visa problem had delayed the flight, and Iran Air 655 took off twenty-seven minutes late. After being cleared by the tower in Bandar Abbas and being advised to make sure his civilian transponder was set to mode 3, which broadcast his plane as a civilian airliner, Rezaian lifted off and headed southwest on a straight line to Dubai. Rezaian began his steady ascent up to fourteen thousand feet approximately three to four miles off the center line, but well within the twenty-mile-wide air corridor. Neither he nor the air traffic control tower knew that the flight path would take his Airbus directly over the Vincennes and the skirmish under way in the Gulf.
