The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (50 page)

P
aul Evancoe looked like a poster boy for the elite Navy SEALs. A natural leader, tall, fit, with dark hair and a matching mustache, he had a reputation as an aggressive—some thought reckless—officer. He’d served as an enlisted man in Vietnam, rose through the ranks, and was now commander of Special Boat Unit 20 in Norfolk. During the reception party after taking over his new command, the flash message arrived giving him just forty-eight hours to load his four boats and sixty-seven officers and men onto the amphibious ship USS
Raleigh
and head for the Persian Gulf. While Evancoe remained for a couple of weeks in Norfolk to scrounge more spare parts and get two smaller Seafox boats flown to Bahrain, his executive officer, Lieutenant Peter Wikul, took charge of the boats heading over on the
Raleigh
. Wikul shared many of the personality traits of his boss; while short and solid, he was aggressive and hyper. He had been burned badly while serving as an observer in Lebanon when he rushed into a tent to save a man when a propane heater exploded.
²¹

Wikul and the boats arrived in the Gulf at the end of August, and a week later he conducted his first patrol north of Farsi Island prior to the next Earnest Will convoy. It turned out to be an arduous 530-mile, five-day mission. While a frigate to the south provided his men showers and hot meals, the constant pounding in the small fiberglass boats left the men and boats bruised and battered.

The Pentagon struggled to meet Bernsen’s requirements for helicopters. The navy primarily used its helicopters for antisubmarine missions and did not want to turn them into gunships. The marines had attack helicopters already on the
Guadalcanal
, but their pilots lacked the skills to fly at night, when the Iranians conducted most of their mining.
²²

Crowe had been briefed on an elite army aviation unit named Task Force 160 (TF-160), the “Night Stalkers,” located at the sprawling army base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, home to the 101st Airborne Division. The Night Stalkers had been formed in October 1981, following the disastrous Iranian hostage rescue effort; their sole mission was to provide helicopter support to special operations forces.
²³
They operated a variety of specially configured helicopters, one of which was a modified McDonnell Douglas 530 helicopter, popularly referred to within TF-160 as “Little Bird.” Crewed by two, it had a
speed of 120 knots and a range of one hundred miles; these small, jelly bean–shaped helicopters were highly maneuverable, easily deployable, and exceptionally quiet. The 530’s specially configured blades produced a subdued
whir
sound rather than the loud
thump, thump
of most helicopters. As one SEAL observed, “At night you could just about see the aircraft’s outline before ever hearing its rotors turning.” These craft were designed to operate exclusively at night; their pilots had hundreds of hours of flying time using night-vision goggles.
²⁴
The helos came in two variants: an attack version outfitted with a 7.62-mm minigun on one side and a 2.75-inch rocket pod with explosive and dartlike fléchette rounds on the other. At three thousand rounds a minute, the minigun cut through a target more like a chain saw than a machine gun. The helicopters operated in threes, with one command and control version, which came with a forward-looking infrared radar (FLIR) and videotape system, and two attack birds.
²⁵

A future four-star general and commander of all U.S. Special Operations Forces, Major Bryan “Doug” Brown flew to Tampa to brief Crist on his unit’s abilities. At thirty-eight, Brown had already spent twenty years in the army, having enlisted as a private in 1967 and soon thereafter earning the coveted green beret of the Army Special Forces. He subsequently obtained his commission before going off to flight school and Vietnam, where he earned a Distinguished Flying Cross. He already had a deserved reputation as a smart, competent officer who was going places in the army.

General Crist was not overly enamored with special operations forces, a view commonly shared by many infantry officers who had fought in Vietnam. They viewed the Green Berets—as well as the SEALs—as aggressive to the point of reckless, “snake eaters” who needed to be carefully watched. Brown arrived on a typically oppressive hot Tampa summer day and found the marine commander combative. Crist commented that he was not sure that his unit’s helicopters had enough firepower or missiles to contend with the Iranian small boats. “He did not think we could actually do the mission,” Brown recalled. But the army aviator stood his ground. “Sir, there are some people who can fire rockets and some who can’t, and we are the guys who can!”
²⁶

Privately, Crist was pleased with the briefing and jotted down a list of the Night Stalkers’ abilities in his black notebook. Behind the scenes, the CENTCOM chief of staff, Major General Don Penzler, who had knowledge of TF-160 from an army assignment, liked the idea of using the army. He
worked with both the army staff in Washington and his own in Tampa pushing the unit’s deployment and did much to get over the lower-level opposition within the military to this unorthodox marriage between the army and the navy.
²⁷

On August 4, a single C-5 transport aircraft lumbered into the sky from Fort Campbell. Its secret cargo comprised six Little Birds, plus thirty-nine men and five pallets of equipment. They arrived at the Bahraini airport in the pitch darkness of the early morning hours of August 5 and immediately taxied for the small U.S. Navy hangar located at the airport. The Bahrainis reluctantly agreed to allow the helicopters to transit through, provided they were gone by daylight and the pallets with ammunition and weapons were ambiguously packaged and marked so as to obscure their contents.
²⁸

Brown and the others were greeted by an air force major dressed in an Arab robe and headdress—a sheik outfit or latter-day Lawrence of Arabia is how one remembered it—in a weak attempt at a disguise. The plan to cover their movement, he explained, would be to follow a Bahraini helicopter out of the airfield. “We’ll call the tower and you just keep your lights out and follow us out. We’ll go ten miles out and turn around, and you head to the
La Salle
.” In an hour the army crew had all six helicopters assembled. They took off, following close to the Bahraini helo, and landed on board the
La Salle
.

The next day they met with Bernsen and his operations staff. The capabilities of TF-160 were a closely guarded secret within the U.S. military, and neither Bernsen nor his staff had any real idea of what these helicopters could do. They initially proposed using them to fly in daylight in front of the convoys looking for mines. Brown respectfully dissented. “Sir, we’ll do whatever you want us to do, but that is a waste of a tremendous asset. We’re night fighters!” They had been brought over by CENTCOM with the intent of using them to hunt suspected Iranian small boats or minelayers, not to fly in the daytime looking for mines in front of the convoy—any standard helicopter could do that. Bernsen quickly grasped the idea, and in two days he had one detachment embarked on the USS
Jarrett
for the next Earnest Will convoy.

T
o support Bernsen, CENTCOM’s senior intelligence officer, Brigadier General Cloyd Pfister, asked for more intelligence out in the Gulf. After discussions with National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci and President
Reagan, on September 9 Weinberger approved a covert national intelligence effort as part of a closely held operation to support Earnest Will, under the unusually named banner of Operation Pollen Count. It involved sending specially configured National Security Agency intelligence teams to the Gulf.
²⁹
Traveling with some small communications vans, they were mobile enough to be positioned far forward, in fact on individual navy destroyers and frigates patrolling the Gulf. Their purpose was twofold: one, to provide much better capability to eavesdrop on Iranian military communications; and two, to tap into the vast array of U.S. signals intelligence.
³⁰
This allowed national intelligence to be piped directly down to the tactical forces who could use it most and, conceivably, allow them to respond quickly to any time-sensitive intelligence gleaned back at NSA’s home in Fort Meade, Maryland. Wearing nondescript green and blue overalls, they joined a growing array of similar “black” units, from the five-man marine radio reconnaissance detachment to the army’s elite unit under U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the Intelligence Support Activity.
³¹
As one intelligence analyst later said, “It was a host of ‘spooky’ cats and dogs wandering around the Gulf, all in sanitized uniforms.”
³²

While Middle East Force implemented its new surveillance regime, CENTCOM looked to refine a new set of covert plans to deal with the Iranians. Shortly after the
Bridgeton
mining, the Joint Chiefs of Staff directed a review of the Invoke Resolve plans. As part of this, CENTCOM started looking to develop alternatives designed to “take the Iranian eyes out,” as Crist described it. Specifically, his concept was to capture key Iranian islands in the Gulf such as Farsi, Abu Musa, Sirri, or the Tunbs. The last three of these were still contested by the UAE, having been occupied and de facto incorporated into Iran by the shah. After feeling out the Gulf Cooperation Council states, Crist concluded that taking them would cause little outrage on the Arab side of the Gulf and would not cause the same dramatic escalation in the minds of Tehran as a more direct attack on the Iranian mainland, such as Bandar Abbas or Qeshm Island. Seizing these Iranian outposts in the Persian Gulf would eliminate their key operating bases and would effectively drive their navy and Revolutionary Guards from the Gulf, push them back into their ports, and eliminate Iran’s ability to project any military power into the Gulf proper that could threaten tanker traffic.

This was an important consideration, especially in the minds of the White House and the secretary of defense. Both Weinberger and Richard
Armitage supported Crist’s strategy. Weinberger had no intention of getting the United States involved in a major war with Iran or of committing the United States to an incursion onto the Iranian mainland. With the Soviet Union still a threat in Europe and the Far East, the United States simply lacked the forces to commit to the expansive landmass of Iran to achieve anything decisive or conclusive. Echoing these sentiments, Richard Armitage knew that, however unpopular the Khomeini regime might be, the Iranians were a proud, nationalistic people, and he feared that such an overt attack would likely rally the populace behind the mullahs and actually strengthen support for the regime. Equally important in Armitage’s mind was that any serious escalation in the conflict would likely result in Tehran’s unleashing its terrorist surrogates on the West. Foremost was Hezbollah, which would likely step up the attacks on Israel from south Lebanon. Further, the Iranians had a sophisticated terrorist network in Europe, and the CIA concluded they would likely try to use it if the United States attacked Iran proper. The key, therefore, in Weinberger’s and Armitage’s minds, was to walk a delicate balance by waging a limited war against Iran to achieve the U.S. objectives of freedom of navigation and protection of the Kuwaiti tankers and by applying enough pressure to contain Iranian ambitions in the Gulf without escalating the conflict.

In addition to these overt plans against Iran, CENTCOM asked for assistance in developing clandestine options should President Reagan decide to strike back with Washington’s own “invisible hand” against the Iranians. The work of developing the “black” plans fell to the newly established Special Operations Command, located only a few hundred yards from CENTCOM’s headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base. As the head of a new command looking for a mission, the SOCOM commander, General James Lindsay, actively supported the development of various plans against Iran. He ordered a special compartmented planning cell to support General Crist, which included a legendary special forces officer, Colonel Wayne Long. Working closely with another similar special planning cell within the CENTCOM J-3, headed by army artillery officer Colonel James “Gunner” Laws, they developed a number of options, and in late July and August these moved from conference room discussions to written concept plans.

One of the more popular ideas was to take out the suspected mine-laying vessels in the harbors of Bushehr and Bandar Abbas. U.S. intelligence had narrowed down the possible ships to a relatively few supply or small amphibious
ships, refined more with satellite or signals intelligence. The concept envisioned a small team of frogmen dropped off by a U.S. ship or submarine in international waters. Using a SEAL delivery vehicle—a small, fast, open-water submersible—they would stealthily move into an Iranian harbor traveling just under the surface, leaving no wake or visible trace of their presence. Then they would navigate to the targeted ships and plant timed explosives on the bottoms of their hulls. Once the SEALs were safely away, the charges would ignite, sending the minelayers to the bottom of the Gulf. With no evidence that the United States was to blame, there would be plausible deniability for Washington. A high-risk venture to be sure, it was relegated in the opinions of the president and his senior military advisers to an option of last resort. As one senior officer described, “It certainly would give Tehran a taste of their own medicine.”

Other plans concocted by this cell were far less surreptitious. They looked at using SEALs to conduct a series of hit-and-run raids on the Iranian Silkworm sites as well as on the Iranian islands, the latter backed by extensive naval gunfire and U.S. aircraft. SEAL planners in the Gulf and back in Tampa were less than enthusiastic about these options. Both were very risky, and the islands were so small and heavily defended that it was difficult to merely conduct a raid without just taking the whole island. This required a greater ground force than that possessed by Naval Special Warfare and necessitated bringing in a more robust force of combat marines. To deal with Silkworm sites on Qeshm Island, they devised a plan to insert up to two Ranger battalions by U.S. Air Force MH-53 helicopters launched from Masirah Island, Oman, to physically destroy the sites in a short-duration, high-intensity, direct action operation. “It never got to the rehearsal stage,” Wayne Long later said, “but we had worked up all the plans in case it needed to be done.”
³³