The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (39 page)

By January 1987, Iran had one Silkworm battery active and had announced the fact by sending a missile in the direction of Kuwait Harbor just before the meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Iran began construction of a series of ten concrete Silkworm missile launchers ringing the Strait of Hormuz. The CIA and CENTCOM viewed this as a major new threat to Gulf shipping and to U.S. warships. Iran now had the means to seriously impede oil exports, as one Silkworm—with a range of fifty nautical miles—could turn a four-hundred-thousand-ton supertanker into so much scrap metal. Iran now had the means to control the Strait of Hormuz and to attack any ship entering or leaving.
⁵⁷

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs made obtaining one of the missiles for dissection a top priority for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which it succeeded in doing in the spring of 1987 with the aid of another intelligence service.

Regardless of Khamenei’s bluster and his new Silkworm missiles, neither Bernsen nor Crist believed Iran would force a fight. “It appears unlikely that Iran will intentionally attack a U.S. combatant or a Kuwaiti flag tanker under U.S. escort,” Crist’s lengthy operational estimate stated. The CENTCOM plan emphasized deterrence over fighting. The Iranians would not risk U.S. retaliation. The carrier in the Arabian Sea provided the necessary muscle for
a credible deterrence, and the Iranian military knew full well the capabilities of the U.S. military.
⁵⁸
The risks posed in the upcoming operation seemed minimal. However, in the month after the Khamenei threat the hazards of the tanker war suddenly became very real. Once again, Saddam Hussein provided a wake-up call.

A
t eight a.m. on May 17, 1987, the USS
Stark
steamed out of Manama, Bahrain, and gradually disappeared over the horizon, heading north out into the opaque blue of the Persian Gulf. Commanded by a forty-three-year-old Pennsylvanian with twenty years of commissioned service, Captain Glenn R. Brindel, the
Stark
was in a class of ships originally conceived as an inexpensive escort ship for Atlantic convoys during World War III. With a sleek hull and a boxy superstructure, she was armed with a little bit of everything, from antiship and surface-to-air missiles to a 20-mm chain gun; the latter, resembling a white R2-D2 from
Star Wars
, was called a close-in weapons system, or CIWS (pronounced “sea-whiz”), capable of firing three thousand rounds per minute and designed to shoot down incoming missiles. With a crew of 221 men, the
Stark
and her sister ships would provide the shield to protect Kuwait from Iran.

The
Stark
’s assigned station sat on the edge of the tanker war’s killing zone. Serving as a radar picket for Middle East Force, the frigate headed for the north-central Persian Gulf, some fifty miles off the Iranian coast and a mere twenty miles outside the Iranian exclusion zone. The area just north of there had seen some 340 Iraqi air and missile attacks on Iranian shipping,
sinking or damaging forty ships.
¹
Recently, Iraq had begun striking Iran-bound ships farther south, flying directly over the areas where American ships operated.
²
Three days before the
Stark
sailed, an Exocet hit a Panamanian tanker just sixty miles from the
Stark
’s intended position. That same day the American destroyer
Coontz
nearly opened fire on an Iraqi pilot who failed to heed warnings and closed to within ten miles of the warship before abruptly turning away when he detected an audible buzz in his headset from the
Coontz
’s weapons control radar.
³
That evening, Middle East Force sent out an intelligence advisory to its ships stating that the Iraqis had conducted ship attack profiles in the central Gulf and that they expected this trend to continue for the next two weeks.

Brindel was well aware of the Iraqi threat. The day after the
Coontz
incident, Harold Bernsen went pleasure sailing with the
Stark
’s commander.
⁴
Bernsen mentioned the previous day’s incident near where the
Stark
would be operating, and he asked Brindel to attend an intelligence briefing the following day that would go over the recent Iraqi attack profiles in the central Gulf as well as the rules for using force. The Iraqis flew fast and low along the west coast of the Gulf near Saudi Arabia, then quickly did the Farsi hook and turned east into the Gulf, at which point they would turn on their search radar and look for a target in the Iranian exclusion zone.
⁵
Frequently they fired at the first target they illuminated, with no attempt to visually identify the vessel. Bernsen instructed Brindel to make this information known to his officers so that there would be no uncertainty of the danger posed by the reckless Iraqi pilots.
⁶

This was not the first time Captain Brindel heard the rules of engagement for the Persian Gulf. When his ship arrived in the Middle East, Captain David Grieve and Bernsen’s intelligence officer, Commander Robert Brown, met the ship in Djibouti.
⁷
Brown emphasized that “the probability of deliberate attack on U.S. warships was low, but that indiscriminate attack in the Persian Gulf was a significant danger.”
⁸
Grieve went through two formal documents governing the use of force and stressed that it was the responsibility of each captain to “take all possible measures and precautions to protect his unit.”
⁹
The rules of engagement allowed any ship to engage an aircraft displaying hostile intent. This included such overt acts as locking on to the U.S. vessel with fire control radar or flying toward them in an attack profile. Iraqi aircraft were unpredictable and should always be regarded as potentially
hostile.
¹⁰
Grieve left the
Stark
’s officers with a final thought: “We do not want, nor intend to absorb, a first attack.”

As the
Stark
headed out into the danger zone, the atmosphere on board remained strangely lax. Bernsen’s sagacity failed to alter Brindel’s attitude, and the ship continued to operate as if it were cruising off the home port of Mayport, Florida, and not in the middle of a shooting war.
¹¹

The ship’s executive officer was focused on an upcoming administrative inspection of the ship’s propulsion plant. Inside the heart of the
Stark
, in the close spaces of the combat information center, where the glow from an array of screens and combat sensors illuminated the darkened confined space, none of the officers knew what defense state the ship should be in, nor did they seem to appreciate the threat posed by either Iran or Iraq.
¹²
Just that morning, Iraqi jets had conducted separate Exocet missile attacks on two large Iranian shuttle tankers, the
Aquamarine
and
Zeus
. Brindel had combined two billets—those of the watch officer and the weapons control officer. This effectively meant that no one was manning the critical weapons control officer station. None of the weapons were manned; the .50-caliber machine guns had no ammo loaded, and their crew was lying on the deck, perhaps asleep. The ship’s defenses, designed to detect and defeat incoming missiles, were turned off.

At 7:55 p.m., the American AWACS flying out of Saudi Arabia picked up an Iraqi Mirage taking off from an air base near Basra flying south in the classic profile to attack Iranian shipping. This track was downloaded in real time to the U.S. warships—including the
Stark
—providing a continuous update on the Mirage’s whereabouts, which due to interoperability problems between the navy and air force systems showed up on the navy radar screens as a “friendly” symbol aircraft.
¹³
Additionally, the destroyer
Coontz
, now pier-side at Manama, updated the Iraqi aircraft’s position every five minutes over a secure radio telephone transmission to all warships, including the
Stark
.
¹⁴

Captain Brindel walked into the combat information center fifteen minutes after the first sighting. The senior watch officer, Lieutenant Basil Moncrief, told his skipper about the Iraqi aircraft, noting that it had just gone “feet wet” and crossed out over the waters of the Persian Gulf. Brindel directed Moncrief to keep a close watch on the Iraqi aircraft and departed, apparently giving it little more thought as he worried about the upcoming
engine inspection. It had become routine for U.S. warships north of Bahrain to go to general quarters as a precaution when an Iraqi aircraft was over the Gulf, but there was no thought of this on the
Stark
that night.
¹⁵

Despite Brindel’s instructions at the outset to keep a close eye on the Iraqi Mirage, none of the nine men in the combat center seemed very concerned. Even as the AWACS reported that the Iraqi jet had made the Farsi hook and was now headed east on a course that would come within eleven miles of the
Stark
’s position, one of the two fire control technicians who manned the radar and CIWS left to make an extended “head” call and was absent for the next twenty minutes.

The
Stark
’s own radar picked up the Mirage at seventy nautical miles and closing at the quick rate of six miles a minute. The radar operator told Moncrief that the Iraqi’s projected path would take it to within four nautical miles of the
Stark
. Moncrief remained unconcerned, even when the ship’s sensors detected the search radar emissions from the Mirage. A minute later, with the Iraqi aircraft now only forty-three miles away, one of the watch standers, Petty Officer Bobby Duncan, asked Moncrief if they should broadcast the standard warning as prescribed in the rules of engagement. “No, wait,” the lieutenant replied, believing the Iraqi either would turn away or was too far out to hear the U.S. voice warning. Instead, Moncrief had them fill out a required administrative report on the incident.

Back in Bahrain, an officer on the flagship monitoring the situation grew concerned and called the
Stark
to make sure that they were aware of the fast-approaching Mirage.

“Affirmative…Evaluated Iraqi F-1…bearing 269, range 27 nautical miles, over,” Moncrief answered. The
Stark
’s executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Raymond Gajan, arrived, having spent the last half hour in Brindel’s cabin discussing the engine inspection. Detecting no sense of urgency, he contented himself to talk about routine administrative issues with Moncrief, paying little attention to an Iraqi jet coming in fast and low on their ship. At seven minutes past nine, the Iraqi pilot fired off his first missile, from only twenty-two miles away.
¹⁶

As the Iraqi missile streaked undetected to the
Stark
, Moncrief finally noticed that the Mirage’s course would take it directly over his ship. He finally ordered Duncan to broadcast a warning to the Iraqi F-1: “Unknown aircraft, this is U.S. Navy warship on your 076 at 12 miles. Request you identify
yourself and state your intentions, over.” There was no response from the Iraqi pilot, who then launched his second missile.

This time, the
Stark
detected his radar, which came in the form of an unmistakable, high-pitched tone easily heard throughout the combat center.
¹⁷
As Gajan looked on passively, an alarmed Moncrief ordered a second warning broadcast to the aircraft and sent a sailor topside to arm the chaff dispensers, which threw up a cloud of aluminum strips designed to confuse incoming missiles. After some confusion about which radar to use, Moncrief ordered the
Stark
’s own fire radar to lock on to the aircraft. He did so reluctantly, apparently worrying that this might be misinterpreted by the Iraqi aircraft as a hostile act. About this time a second missile radar was heard emanating from the F-1. Inexplicably, no one thought to activate the CIWS, the ship’s best defense against an incoming missile, or even to sound general quarters.

Two minutes after the first missile was fired, a lookout on the
Stark
spotted a bright flash just off the port bow, with a “little blue dot coming from the center of that flash.” He yelled into his headset, “Missile inbound!” But it was too late.

The first Exocet hit the port side of the ship. Entering through one berthing area, the missile traveled on into the chief petty officers’ compartment. The warhead did not explode, but doused the interior with burning fuel. As many as twenty-eight men were instantly incinerated by the conflagration. Within the ship, sailors heard a muffled explosion. Captain Brindel, who happened to be in the bathroom at the time, rushed up to the bridge.

A tense voice came over the ship’s internal speakers: “Missile inbound!” The metallic
clang-clang
sounding general quarters rang throughout the ship just as the second missile struck, eight feet from the first; its 330-pound warhead exploded, blowing apart metal and flesh, sending shrapnel through bulkheads, and creating a large gaping hole in the side of the ship.
¹⁸

The
Stark
immediately filled with a thick, acrid smoke. Those trapped within the impact area donned their emergency escape breathing devices—basically a hood with about fifteen minutes’ air supply—and stumbled in the dark trying to get through jammed hatches and past dangling live electrical wires. Six men either jumped or fell from the gaping hole down into the waters of the Gulf. A quick-thinking sailor on deck threw two of them life preservers after hearing calls for help. Men tried in vain to reach sailors trapped in their bunks, screaming for help before being overcome by smoke and fire.