The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (45 page)

But DeMasi’s hunch proved correct. The idea of sending these small, aging man-of-wars to the far-off Persian Gulf came up just after the
Bridgeton
incident. On July 25, Crowe called the Pacific Fleet commander Ace Lyons: “We are looking at possibly sending some MSOs,” Crowe told the admiral. Lyons had already anticipated this. “We are getting them ready now, but we
need to lean on the Saudis and the French.” When the Saudis proved unable and the Europeans unwilling, the news spread quickly that some of the MSOs were headed for war.
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The navy settled on sending six MSO minesweepers, with three coming from each coast.
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The main problem would be how to get them the nine thousand miles to the Gulf. The navy brass decided to tow them. A larger ship on each coast was detailed to pull them along by running a cable to each minesweeper. This enhanced tow allowed the minesweepers to use just half of their engines, while still maintaining a respectable speed of thirty knots. Departing in the first week of September, like a mother duck with three ducklings following behind, they would make a six-week trip to the far side of the world, where the East and West Coast ships would finally meet up in Bahrain.
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A nineteenth-century adage refers to seafarers as “wooden ships and iron men.” The journey across the two oceans in cramped 170-foot ships conjured up that saying in the minds of twentieth-century sailors. The old MSOs produced enough freshwater for just two daily twenty-minute sets. Showers became an assembly line. One man jumped into one of the three stalls, wetted down, and then stepped out to lather himself while the next man in the queue hopped in. Fresh food ran scarce, and the daily meal often consisted of Spam or canned ravioli. The ships rolled in such an unorthodox manner in the ocean swells that many sailors took to carrying “barf bags.” Both flotillas had close calls. Across the Atlantic, the
Illusive
’s rudder stuck hard left and crossed the towline of the
Fearless
, dragging them together before the line could be thrown off. In the Pacific, two MSOs collided while being towed, and one had to be sent back to Subic Bay for repairs.
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With every resource in the limited American minesweeping arsenal on its way to the Gulf, Bernsen remained optimistic that the conflict would not expand. Iran had not laid any more mines, and that appeared promising. Bernsen suspected Iran would confine its mining campaign to the northern Gulf, where shipping would be destined only for Kuwait. “The fact that the central and southern Gulf have not been mined probably reflects Iran’s conscious unwillingness to expose ships not in trade with Kuwait to this type of threat,” he wrote in a message in early August.
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The Iranian leadership saw the situation quite differently. Khomeini’s gamble with the “invisible hand” had worked. An emboldened Revolutionary Guard now clamored to lay more mines against the Great Satan. And unlike
Bernsen’s prediction, anywhere they saw an American ship would be fair game. While the United States rushed to send helicopters and ships to the Gulf, on August 1 the Iranian ambassador in Tripoli met with Gaddafi. Their collaboration on naval mines had been a tremendous success, and now the Iranian government accepted an offer for even more military aid.

“There is a strong likelihood of a direct confrontation with the U.S. because of the American president’s intentions and our firm resolve to respond,” Iran’s ambassador in Tripoli told the Libyan leader. “We have put the first stage behind us with sea mining, and as you saw, the first oil tanker did strike a mine.”

Looking on from his headquarters in Honolulu, Ace Lyons fumed. Iran had deliberately targeted the United States and mined international waters in a clear breach of international law. Yet Washington had done nothing in response to this naked aggression. Although Crist and CENTCOM ran the operation, Lyons, as the Pacific Fleet commander, still controlled all the ships outside the Gulf, including the aircraft carrier when its planes were not protecting Crist’s convoys. And Ace Lyons had been working on his own secret plan to deal with the Iranians. His boss, Ron Hays, would never support it, but Lyons had the chairman’s ear. All that was needed was a window of opportunity.

T
he chairman would like you to call him,” said Captain Kevin Healy to his boss, Admiral James “Ace” Lyons, during a short break between meetings. The executive officer did not consider the request by Admiral William Crowe anything remarkable. Since the crisis had begun with the
Bridgeton
, Crowe spoke daily to his longtime acquaintance in Hawaii. The chairman wanted new ideas on how to respond to the Iranian mining.

Lyons served as a useful coadjutor to Crowe. Since Lyons worked for Crowe in the 1970s, Crowe had tapped Lyons, looking for ideas on fighting the Soviets and for ways to get things done, frequently outside of the normal channels. “Ace Lyons had a great mind,” Crowe said years later. “He loved imaginative and unorthodox solutions.”
¹
For Crowe, Lyons was a man who could get things done militarily in a way the more politically minded Crowe never could, all the while offering the chairman plausible deniability if things turned out ugly.

Lyons picked up the phone as Healy went to his desk to listen in on another line. “Any ideas?” Crowe asked. “You’ve got access to me directly if you need to pass any information.”

Lyons always had a suggestion. “A window of opportunity is coming up later this month.” There would be two carriers turning over outside the Gulf
and the battleship
Missouri
would arrive in the Middle East. “We may well be in a position to exert a considerable amount of power against the Iranians,” Lyons told Crowe. “Keep it very, very quiet.”

The prospect of drubbing the Iranians appealed to Crowe. He had been privately advocating seizing Farsi Island with special operations forces, but Colin Powell as deputy national security adviser did not support such an aggressive move. But these were the type of ideas he liked from Lyons. “Okay,” Crowe answered. “Work out a code word and you say whatever it is and you go.”

“Write me a letter,” Crowe directed, asking for Lyons’s thoughts about striking back at Iran.

Ace Lyons already had an Iran war plan, appropriately called Operation Window of Opportunity. Beginning in late 1986, he’d designed a top secret plan outside of the normal military channels. Without General Crist’s knowledge at CENTCOM, Lyons crafted a U.S. Navy–only operation comprising two days of punishing attacks on Iranian military sites all along the Iranian coast—from Chah Bahar outside the Gulf working up to Bushehr. Convinced that Iran could not stand up to a sustained American attack and that military force might bring down the regime, Lyons planned to hit dozens of Iranian military units, including headquarters, airports, ports, and missile sites—all pummeled by the combined firepower of two aircraft carriers and the World War II battlewagon USS
Missouri
, lobbing salvos of two-thousand-pound shells. But Lyons did not stop with destroying Iran’s military. The second day of his grand design targeted Iran’s economy by destroying its oil storage at Kharg Island, Iran’s only gasoline refinery, and its major harbors. U.S. jets would destroy Iranian docks, and mines would be laid to close the large Iranian ports of Bushehr and Bandar Abbas. “Mining of Bandar Abbas and Bushehr and destruction of the port facilities essentially eliminates Iranian capacity to receive refined petroleum products and essential war matériel,” Lyons noted. The admiral even intended to reduce the two partially completed light water reactors at Bushehr to concrete rubble and twisted rebar.
²

Lyons had been pushing this idea for months. A month before the first convoy, in June 1987, Ace Lyons had briefed the secretary of defense on his idea. On June 18, Caspar Weinberger and Richard Armitage stopped in Honolulu on a swing through Asia, and Lyons saw an opportunity to get his plan to take down the Khomeini regime in front of the Reagan administration. At
three p.m., Weinberger paid an office call on Lyons. With the two men sitting around a table, and Armitage and Lyons’s executive officer Kevin Healy in the background, the bulldog admiral pulled out his Iran plan and leaned forward in his chair.

“Mr. Secretary, we have an opportunity,” he began. On August 26, the carrier
Ranger
would be relieving the
Constellation
on station in the Gulf of Oman, giving a brief overlap when two of the battle groups would be available. Additionally, the Joint Chiefs had just decided to send the battleship
Missouri
and five more warships to the Gulf about the same time. Lyons then pulled out his fourteen-page Window of Opportunity plan. There had never been so much firepower available near the Persian Gulf, he added. “We can cut 70 percent of their imports and exports. The objective of these strikes is to facilitate freedom of navigation and apply pressure to Iran to enter into serious negotiations to end the Iran-Iraq War.”

Weinberger listened politely but took no notes. Weinberger had no intention of bombing Iran without a provocation or of getting the United States mired in a war and alienating many Gulf allies. He viewed Lyons as an activist, and this performance was in perfect keeping with Ace’s personality, trying to take advantage of his visit in order to get his agenda pushed to the top. Several times the defense secretary tried to get out of his chair, but Lyons kept gesticulating forward to keep him seated. After an hour, Weinberger left without comment. Armitage just shook his head. “It was typical bullshit from Ace. The secretary had no intention of starting a war with Iran.”
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Undaunted, Lyons pitched his plan to any senior official who came to Hawaii. When Secretary of the Navy James Webb swung through, Lyons received a more positive response. Lyons did not think much of the thirtysomething secretary, but he offered to keep him informed of his other thoughts and views. Webb gave him the green light: “If you ever need to speak with me, call me directly.” Lyons interpreted the message as a clear sign not to worry about the chain of command.
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Not that Ace Lyons had ever worried too much about the formalities of obtaining his boss’s permission. His relationship was strained with his senior at Pacific Command, Admiral Ronald Hays, and naval operations chief Admiral Carl Trost had grown alarmed at some of Lyons’s antics designed to intimidate the Soviets, especially some provocative mock air attacks directed at the Soviet forces at Petropavlovsk. He feared Lyons intended to start a war with the Soviets. “Ace had no concept of a chain of command if it did not fit
his needs. He was making U.S. policy and setting the means to execute that policy without any guidance from those above. I think guys like that are dangerous,” Trost said.
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Now, following Crowe’s solicitation for ideas, Lyons composed a letter for Crowe. On August 11 he sent a six-page document typed on Lyons’s four-star stationery, offering many suggestions for the chairman on how to run the Persian Gulf operation. “I have come to the conclusion,” he began, “that no amount of ships and aircraft will deter Iran as long as its leaders believe we will not respond to isolated attacks.”

He advocated using his Window of Opportunity plan. Lyons included an updated version that added the
Missouri
’s 16-inch guns pulverizing the Silkworm sites ringing the Strait of Hormuz and marines from the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit storming the beaches to seize the small but strategically placed island of Abu Musa. Lyons stressed for the chairman, “Our response needs to be vigorous and decisive. Half measures and gradualism will not do if we are to ever get their attention,” he wrote in the opening paragraph of the plan.
⁶
Lyons suggested to Crowe that the best time for the strike would be August 29, when the battleship, two carriers, and a marine amphibious force would all be near the Gulf. “We will not have a similar opportunity for some time,” he wrote.
⁷

Since Lyons distrusted the security of normal communications channels, he dispatched his lawyer, Captain Morris Sinor, to hand carry the letter plus the latest version of his Window of Opportunity plan back to Washington and drop it off in Crowe’s office at the Pentagon. Despite Lyons’s general disdain for navy lawyers, he trusted Sinor, and his long-suffering lawyer had a reciprocal respect for his boss: “Admiral Lyons could be rude, crude, and arrogant, but he was the most brilliant naval officer I ever met.”
⁸
Sinor dutifully complied, leaving the classified package with Crowe’s executive officer and fellow navy captain Joseph Strasser.

Crowe called Lyons the next day after reading his letter. “That is a lot to ask of the U.S. government and the president,” Crowe said.

With the Iran-Contra congressional hearings in full vigor and the Reagan administration being raked over the coals every night on the evening news, Lyons responded, “Bill, it’s going to save the president.”
⁹
The chairman kept the letter and Lyons’s plan in his files, but never shared it with either Crist or Trost.

Crowe and Lyons did, however, conspire on slipping the large amphibious
ship USS
Guadalcanal
past the Iranian Silkworm missiles around the Strait of Hormuz and into the Gulf, where it would be used to support helicopters clearing Iranian mines.

“Do you have any thoughts as to how she should go through?” Crowe inquired, then adding, “We don’t want any messages.”