The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  I come across another middle-aged man clutching a handkerchief to his face, walking unsteadily through the cold store, looking for his relatives. Several corpses he rejects; though terribly disfigured by the blast of the two American navy missiles that destroyed the aircraft, the bodies are clearly unknown to him. Only later does he discover his sister and brother-in-law beneath some plastic and kneel to touch their faces gently, weeping as he does so. Just a few hours ago, President Reagan has stated publicly that he has apologised enough for killing all these innocent people. His expressions of regret, he tells the world, are “sufficient.”

  It is extraordinary here in the boiling southern Iranian port of Bandar Abbas how the official explanations of condolence, sorrow and self-absolution in Washington seem both hollow and opportunistic. What in Washington is called a “tragedy”—as if some natural disaster overwhelmed these dead airline passengers around me—seems in Bandar Abbas to be an outrage. In the United States, it was possible for newspaper editors to suggest that the Airbus might have been on a suicide mission, that the pilot was deliberately trying to crash his passenger-packed airliner into the American frigate that shot it down. Even my own paper, The Times, has disgracefully made the same claim. But in Bandar Abbas, where the pilot’s friends and colleagues have spoken openly to me without official prompting, these suggestions are offensive, obscene. An entire family of sixteen Iranians were on the Airbus, travelling to a wedding in Dubai, the children in their wedding clothes. They are still dressed in the same bright, joyful colours in the coffins in the cold store as Reagan sends a letter to Congress announcing that he now regards the matter of the Airbus destruction as “closed.”

  We walk in churchlike silence down the aisles of the dead, Westerners with no excuses, cameramen filming the dead in long-shot for audiences who will not be able to accept—to “cope”—with the reality of what the U.S. Navy has just done. Only those passengers obliging enough to have died without obvious wounds, or who were lucky enough to have been killed without their faces being disfigured by the explosion of the two Standard missiles fired at their plane by the USS Vincennes, would be honoured with photographs in Western newspapers. Our response was predictable: we didn’t mean to do it; the destruction of the airliner was a mistake. But it was Iran’s fault.

  I can remember so well that phone call from The Times. I am holidaying in Ireland that bright warm summer Sunday, and I have spent the morning in Dublin, talking to John Grigg, the historian who will be writing volume VI of the history of The Times from 1966 to 1981, during which Rupert Murdoch took over the paper. Over coffee, I recall for Grigg my four years as a correspondent in Northern Ireland and—although it falls outside his volume—the infamous story of the “Hitler diaries.” Murdoch had been bamboozled into serialising these totally fictitious papers—supposedly the Nazi Führer’s ravings on Chamberlain, his mistress Eva Braun, et al.64

  “I’m sure you know what’s happened,” the duty desk editor says from London. “The editor wants to know how soon can you get to the Gulf.” Every reporter hates that moment. What had “happened”? I hadn’t listened to the news that morning. Sometimes it is possible to bluff this out, to reply vaguely and then hurriedly tune to the radio news to find out what I am supposed to know. This was not one of those occasions. “The Americans have shot down an Iranian passenger jet over the Gulf,” came the voice over the phone. “The American ship was called Vincennes and it fired two heat-seeking missiles at the aircraft . . . They say it was a mistake.” Well, they would, wouldn’t they? I mean, the Americans could hardly claim that the airliner was packed with “terrorists.” Or could they? Sure enough, the Pentagon was already suggesting that the pilot might have been trying to fly his plane into the American warship. The American ship’s captain would travel to Bahrain to explain how he had fired at a civilian plane.

  This was just the sort of “tragedy” I had predicted in my dispatch to The Times from the Gulf in May 1987, an American warship panicked into believing that a civil airliner was an attacking jet. What was it the Broadsword’s lieutenant commander had told me that sweltering night as his British radar operators were checking the transponder numbers over the Gulf? “If you want to avoid burning up six sheikhs in their private jet, you’ve got to be bloody careful.” But this was not a private jet. This was a packed airliner which had been blasted out of the sky. I flew to Paris with Lara Marlowe, who would write a brilliant, scathing dispatch for the International Herald Tribune on the slaughter. Harvey Morris, now of The Independent, was at Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport, dragging on his usual cigarettes. “Now they’ve really copped it,” he said, without explaining who “they” might be. The Iranians or the Americans? We would soon find out. We took the Emirates flight to Dubai—the nearest non-Iranian city to the scene of the mass aerial killing.

  It was an eight-hour flight, hot and stuffy and crowded. In front of me sat a reporter for a London radio station, writing feverishly into his notebook. He was, he said, drafting his first report so that he could go on air the moment our flight landed next morning. And what, I couldn’t help asking—since he had not even arrived in Dubai to make a single inquiry—would be the thrust of this dispatch? “The danger of the Iranians using suicide boats to take revenge on the Americans,” he said. He readily admitted he was making this story up on the plane, but said he also planned to write a report suggesting that the Iranians would try to assassinate the captain of the Vincennes. When I asked if he shouldn’t also be questioning American naval competency, he replied, “We might be challenged on that story.” Already the machinery was turning. The Americans who had destroyed the passenger jet were the potential victims; the real victims—all of them dead—were the aggressors.

  Iran Air flight IR655, piloted by Captain Mohsen Rezaian, had taken off from Bandar Abbas on a scheduled passenger flight to Dubai with 290 passengers. The Americans, as usual, got their version out first, although it would change many times over the coming days. We were told that the Iranian Airbus was not on a normal flight path, then that its pilot failed to respond to warnings from the Aegis-class cruiser USS Vincennes, then that the plane was diving towards the American warship and that its identification transponder was not working. Captain Will Rogers the Third, the captain of the Vincennes , believed—according to the Pentagon—that he was under attack by an Iranian F-14 Tomcat fighter aircraft. But the American story began to crumble when the Italian navy and another American warship, the frigate Sides, confirmed that the plane was climbing—not diving to attack—at the time of the missile strike.

  So the story changed again. The Pentagon now said that the plane’s transponder might not have been giving out correct signals. Later, this was subtly changed; the transponder was identifying the Airbus A300B2 as a military aircraft, because the Iranians had earlier changed the coding when they used the same plane to take troops to the war front—and had forgotten to revert to the civilian code afterwards. Why the Iranians would have used the Airbus to conceal their troop movements from the Iraqis but blown their own cover by obligingly giving the aircraft a military identification that would reveal its true purpose was never explained by the Pentagon. The all-important issue was to justify the frightfulness of what had happened, to talk of the “tragedy” of the passenger jet’s destruction. Tragedies are forgivable. The advantage for the Americans was that the Iranian side of the story would never be fully told—because those most intimately involved were all dead.

  In Dubai, I went straight to the British air traffic controllers who had so often helped me during the “tanker war.” They had heard the radio traffic over the Gulf on that fatal Sunday morning—and their story was horrifying. For weeks, they told me, they had been appalled at the apparent lack of training and efficiency of U.S. naval personnel challenging civilian aircraft. The pilots of airliners on scheduled flights down the Gulf from Kuwait were being repeatedly and aggressively challenged by American warship crews who seemed not to know that they were cruising beneath e
stablished air lanes.

  In one incident—well known to the controllers but kept secret from the press— a U.S. frigate had stationed itself off the Emirates coast and radio-challenged every civilian flight approaching Dubai International Airport. In desperation, the British duty controller at the airport called the U.S. embassy in Abu Dhabi and told American diplomats to instruct the ship to move away because it was “a danger to civil aviation.” Civilian helicopter pilots off the coast had often complained that American warships challenged them on the wrong radio frequencies. The controllers in Dubai could hear some of the U.S. Navy’s traffic. “Robert, the Americans knew at once that they’d hit a passenger airliner,” one of them told me quietly. “There was another American warship close by—we have its coding as FFG-14. Its crew reported seeing people falling at great speed out of the sky.”

  I sat behind the Dubai control tower thinking about this. Yes, the passengers would all fall out of the sky like that, over a wide area, together, in clumps, in bits, from 10,000 feet it seemed. I could imagine the impact with the sea, the spouts of water, some of the passengers—no doubt—still fully conscious all the way down. Three days later, in the emergency Bandar Abbas mortuary, I would look at Fatima Faidazaida and realise with horror that she must have been alive as she fell from the heavens, clutching her baby as she tumbled and spilled out of the sky in the bright summer sun, her fellow passengers and chunks of the Airbus and burning fuel oil cascading around her. And she held on to her baby, knowing—could she have known?—that she must die.

  From Dubai that Sunday night, I sent three reports to The Times , the longest dispatch a detailed account of the record of the U.S. Navy’s constant misidentification of civil aircraft over the Gulf and the near-panic that the air-traffic controllers had heard over the airwaves from the American warships. The Vincennes had claimed it was under attack by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in motor boats at the time it destroyed the airliner. I knew that U.S. warships carried the timetables of civil airliners in their “combat information centres” (CICs). Had Captain Rogers and his crew not had time to look at their copy? Iran Air flight IR655 flew to Dubai every day from Bandar Abbas. Why should it become a target on 3 July?

  Captain Rogers himself said that he would have to live for ever with the burden of his own conscience at what he had done. Four years later, he would publish his own account of the destruction of the Airbus.65 This would include a vivid description of an attack on the Vincennes by Iranian motor boats, the first alert of an aircraft taking off from Bandar Abbas—a military as well as civil airport—and the information that the aircraft was issuing two transponder codes, one used by passenger aircraft, the other a military code “known to have been used by Iranian F-14 fighters.” The plane was also being monitored by the frigate USS Sides, naval coding FFG-14—this was the ship whose crew, according to the Dubai traffic controllers, would see bodies falling out of the sky.

  Before the Airbus was 40 kilometres from his warship Rogers had sent a routinely worded warning—but addressed it to a fighter aircraft: “Iranian aircraft . . . fighter on course two-one-one, speed 360 knots, altitude 9,000 feet, this is USNWS [United States Navy warship] bearing two-zero-two from you, request you change course immediately to two-seven-zero, if you maintain current course you are standing into danger and subject to USN defensive measures . . .” Rogers says he asked for further identification of the aircraft when it was 25 kilometres from his vessel. At 9:54 and 22 seconds in the morning, he launched his two missiles. Twenty-one seconds later, they exploded against Rezaian’s passenger jet, which vanished from the Vincennes ’s radar screen. “The bridge reported seeing the flash of missile detonation through the haze,” Rogers wrote. “There was a spontaneous cheer, a release of tension from the men.” But crewmen on another U.S. warship would moments later see a large wing of a commercial airliner, with an engine pod still attached, crashing into the sea.

  Later investigation would reveal that staff of the CIC on the Sides correctly identified the Airbus’s commercial transponder code at virtually the same moment that Rogers fired. For Captain David Carlson, commanding the Sides, the destruction of the airliner “marked the horrifying climax to Captain Rogers’ aggressiveness, first seen just four weeks earlier.” On 2 June, two of Rogers’s colleagues had been disturbed by the way he sailed the Vincennes too close to an Iranian frigate that was carrying out a lawful though unprecedented search of a bulk carrier for war materiel bound for Iraq. On the day the Vincennes shot down the Airbus, Rogers had launched a helicopter that flew within 2 to 3 miles of an Iranian small craft—the rules stated that the chopper had to be no closer than 4 miles—and reportedly came under fire. Rogers began shooting at some small Iranian military boats, an act that disturbed Captain David Carlson on the Sides. “Why do you want an Aegis cruiser out there shooting up boats?” he later asked in an interview with an ex-naval officer. “It wasn’t a smart thing to do. He was storming off with no plan . . .” Rogers subsequently opened fire on Iranian boats inside their territorial waters. The Vincennes had already been nicknamed “Robocruiser” by the crew of the Sides.

  When Carlson first heard Rogers announcing to higher headquarters his intention to shoot down the aircraft approaching his cruiser, he says he was thunder-struck. “I said to the folks around me, ‘Why, what the hell is he doing?’ I went through the drill again. F-14. He’s climbing. By now this damn thing is at about 7,000 feet . . .” But Carlson thought that the Vincennes might have more information—and did not know that Rogers had been told, wrongly, that the aircraft was diving. Carlson regretted that he did not interrupt Rogers. When his own men realised the Airbus was commercial, “they were horrified.” The official U.S. investigation report would later say that computer data and “reliable intelligence” agreed that Captain Rezaian’s airliner “was on a normal commercial air traffic plan profile . . . on a continuous ascent in altitude from take-off at Bandar Abbas.” Newsweek magazine would carry out its own investigation, branding the official report “a pastiche of omissions, half-truths and outright deceptions” and painting a dramatic picture of “an overeager captain, panicked crewmen and a cover-up . . .” In Newsweek’s report, books had been sliding off the shelves in the Vincennes’s information centre as it manoeuvred prior to the missile launching; little chance, then, that anyone had an opportunity to look up a scheduled airline timetable.

  But in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter, the Americans stuck to the tale of total innocence. Vice President Bush appeared before the UN Security Council to say that the Vincennes had been rushing to the aid of a merchant ship under Iranian attack—which was totally untrue. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher described the destruction of the Iranian Airbus as “understandable.” The Iranian consul in Dubai had a point when he asked me later whether Mrs. Thatcher would have considered it “understandable” if an Iranian warship had shot down a British Airways airliner over the Gulf and then claimed that it was an accident because its captain thought it was under attack by a U.S. jet. One key to the disaster lay in the American claims that a warning was sent to Captain Rezaian on both military and civilian wavelengths. Did Captain Rezaian hear these warnings? If not, why not?

  The evidence of the aircraft’s destruction was laid out for journalists on a parade ground at Iranian naval headquarters in Bandar Abbas. Pieces of engine cowling, wings and flaps had been scored and burned by metal fragments; a jagged hunk of wing flap had a 12-centimetre hole punched through its centre. A section of the passenger cabin wall 3 metres square had been perforated by metal shards. Several of the bodies I saw had scarlet and red burns on their flesh; these passengers must have been sitting in the centre of the aircraft, close to the two engines onto which the Vincennes’s heat-seeking missiles would have locked. Lying beside this wreckage was the nosecone of the Airbus, escape chutes, electrical circuitry and oxygen systems. The explosions had been catastrophic.

  Three days after the Airbus was destroyed, I flew from Bandar Abbas t
o Dubai aboard the first Iran Air plane to resume operations on the route. It was, of course, flight IR655. I sat in the cockpit of the Boeing 707 alongside Captain Rezaian’s former Airbus navigator. Captain Nasser, who had been flying with Rezaian until six weeks ago when he transferred to Boeings—an act that probably saved his life—had marked the point of Rezaian’s destruction on his charts and insisted that his friend, on other flights over the Gulf with him, had always replied when he heard challenges from the U.S. Navy. “He was a sensible, very professional man,” he said. “He would never make a mistake or play games with the Americans. What the Americans did was very crude—they must have panicked.” Suggestions that Rezaian was on a suicide mission, Nasser added, were “disgusting.” Rezaian had flown the Dubai route on at least twenty-five previous occasions and had been piloting Airbus aircraft for almost two and a half years. So what happened on that Sunday morning?

  The answer was not difficult to discover. In our Boeing, Captain Asadapur, the pilot, had to communicate constantly with three traffic-control centres—Tehran, Bandar Abbas and Dubai—which he did in fluent English. While talking to them, he could neither send nor receive on the civilian 1215 radio band to which our Boeing was tuned—the same wavelength on which the Vincennes said it tried to warn Captain Rezaian. Climbing from 12,000 to 14,000 feet—not descending in an “attack mode” as the Americans initially claimed—Rezaian would have been talking to Bandar Abbas when he was 50 kilometres out, when the first American missile blew off the port wing of his Airbus. Bandar Abbas ground control told me that Rezaian’s last message was that he was “climbing to one-four-zero” (14,000 feet). If Rezaian could not hear the Americans on his civilian waveband, he was certainly not going to hear them on the military net, a challenge that was anyway intended for the non-existent F-14 which was supposed to be closing on the American cruiser.