Lockerbie: The Truth E-Book

Douglas Boyd

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 386

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

On 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to Detroit was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers and sixteen crew. Large sections of the aircraft, bodies and personal effects crashed onto residential areas of Lockerbie, Scotland, resulting in the deaths of a further eleven people on the ground. The psychological damage to traumatised residents would take many years to disappear; in some cases, it never did. Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is the only person to have been convicted of the crime – though few believe that he acted alone and some believe him innocent. Author Douglas Boyd presents evidence that it was Iran, not Libya, which was responsible for the attack. On 3 July 1988 (less than six months before the Lockerbie bombing), Iran Air flight 655 was in Iranian airspace on a Bandar Abbas-Dubai flight when it was shot down by missiles from the USS Vincennes sailing illegally into Iranian territorial waters. Government leader Ayatollah Khomeini decreed that blood should flow in revenge. However, this line of enquiry was quietly closed and Libya declared guilty because the White House wanted neighbouring Syria and Iran on-side for the build-up to the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Lockerbie: The Truth at last reveals the facts about what happened on that awful night at Lockerbie.

Leseprobe

LOCKERBIETHE TRUTH

Also by Douglas Boyd

Histories:

April Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine

Voices from the Dark Years

The French Foreign Legion

The Kremlin Conspiracy: 1,000 Years of Russian Expansionism

Normandy in the time of Darkness: Life and Death in the Channel Ports 1940–45

Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass: Treachery, Torture, Murder and Massacre – France, 1944

De Gaulle: The Man Who Defied Six US Presidents

Lionheart: The True Story of England’s Crusader King

The Other First World War: The Blood-Soaked Russian Fronts 1914–22

Daughters of the KGB: Moscow’s Cold War Spies, Sleepers and Assassins

Agente: Female Spies in World Wars, Cold Wars and Civil Wars

The Solitary Spy: A Political Prisoner in Cold War Berlin

Red October: The Revolution That Changed the World

Novels:

The Eagle and the Snake

The Honour and the Glory

The Truth and the Lies

The Virgin and the Fool

The Fiddler and the Ferret

The Spirit and the Flesh

LOCKERBIETHE TRUTH

DOUGLAS BOYD

This book is dedicated to the memory of 270 people of all ages who died in an act of mass murder on 21 December 1988 above and in the town of Lockerbie and in homage to the individuals and families who lost their loved ones on that night but were denied justice and closure by government agencies in the USA and the United Kingdom.

First published 2018

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Douglas Boyd, 2018

The right of Douglas Boyd to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7509-8965-7

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

Introduction

Part 1

1      In the Beginning

2      Medals for Murder

3      The Qisas

4      Of Mules and Malta

5      Autumn Leaves

Part 2

6      The Fatal Last Flight of Maid of the Seas

7      A Night in Hell

8      The Morning After

9      Drugs and Dollars in the Debris

10    The Fatal Accident Inquiry

11    Investigating Mass Murder

12    The Plot Thickens

13    A Unique Solution

Part 3

14    The Trial

15    The Impossible Verdict

Part 4

16    The Most Hated Man in Europe

17    The Second Appeal

18    ‘Mr Megrahi, You May go Home!’

19    Late News

Annexe: List of Fatalities at Lockerbie

Acknowledgements

Further Reading

Notes and Sources

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

AAIB

Air Accident Investigation Branch (of British Ministry of Transport)

ACSSP

Air Carrier Standard Security Programme

ATC

air traffic control

ATS

air traffic system

AWACS

airborne warning and control system

BfV

Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz

BKA

Bundeskriminalamt (West German anti-terrorist police)

BND

Bundesnachrichtendienst

CCRC

(Scottish) Criminal Cases Review Commission

CIA

Central Intelligence Agency

CIC

Combat Information Centre

DEA

(US) Drugs Enforcement Agency

DIA

(US) Defense Intelligence Agency

ETA

estimated time of arrival

FAA

(US) Federal Aviation Authority

FIR

flight information region

GID

(Jordanian) General Intelligence Directorate

GSG-9

Grenzschutzgruppe 9

ICAO

International Civil Aviation Organization

ICJ

International Court of Justice

IDF

Israel Defense Forces (Israeli armed forces)

IED

improvised explosive device

IFF

Identification friend or foe

LICC

Lockerbie Incident Control Centre

METFC

(US) Middle East Task Force Command

MI6

(British) also known as SIS – Secret Intelligence Service

MOIS

(Iranian) Ministry of Intelligence and Security

NSC

(US) National Security Council

PFLP

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

PFLP-GC

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command

PLF

Palestine Liberation Front

PLO

Palestine Liberation Organisation

PO

petty officer

PPSF

Palestine Popular Struggle Front

RARDE

Royal Armaments Research and Development Establishment

TADMUS

Tactical Decision Making Under Stress

TN

tracking number

UAE

United Arab Emirates

UAR

United Arab Republic

USN

United States Navy

WMD

weapon(s) of mass destruction

INTRODUCTION

This is a real-life whodunnit, without the final scene where the master detective calls all the suspects together and reveals who committed the crime – which, in this case, is mass murder.

It is a scandal that, thirty years after the worst civil aviation accident in British history, we do not officially know for certain who blew up the Pan American Boeing 747-121 Clipper, registration N739PA, named Maid of the Seas above a small Scottish town on 21 December 1988, causing 259 deaths in an awful night when bodies and body parts of passengers and crew rained down from the sky onto Lockerbie. Amazingly, only eleven other people were killed on the ground although large parts of the Boeing jumbo jet fell on or just outside the town, causing a fireball 300ft high.

In the following days and months, thousands of police, military personnel and specialised investigators of the Ministry of Transport Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) scoured southern Scotland, finding debris over an area of 1,500 square miles. Investigators from the US Federal Aviation Authority took part and representatives of the FBI and CIA were present for reasons not divulged. Three years of the joint British/US investigation involved 15,000 statements being taken, producing as many questions as answers.

An improvised explosive device inside a modified Toshiba radio cassette player similar to the one that brought down the Pan American flight which crashed on Lockerbie had recently been seized from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) terror group by West German anti-terrorist police, but the Palestinian and Syrian terrorists and bomb-makers concerned were then released by a German judge ‘for lack of evidence’ connecting them with a substantial cache of weaponry and bomb-making equipment in their possession.

So, was this criminal act of mass murder the work of that breakaway Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) faction, hoping to disrupt ongoing talks between Washington and Yasser Arafat’s mainline PLO, which, as a gesture to show that it had renounced terrorism, had given warning that something like this might happen? Was it the work of the Abu Nidal / Fatah group, as seemed to have been indicated in the mysterious warning by a man with an Arabic accent who telephoned the US Embassy in Helsinki a couple of weeks earlier? Was it the revenge of the Iranian Government for the unprovoked shooting down by missiles from the USS Vincennes five months earlier of an Iran Air Airbus A300 B2-203 on a scheduled flight while over Iranian territory above the strait of Hormuz, causing 290 innocent civilian deaths? Was it the act of an intelligence officer of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, whose agents in Africa had been found ten months earlier allegedly carrying similar components for a Semtex bomb? Was it the FBI, which was implicated in the deliberate falsification of evidence in its forensic laboratories between the Lockerbie bombing and the trial eleven years later? The pièce à conviction was said in court to be a tiny fragment of a circuit board made by a Swiss firm that had supplied similar boards to Libya and the Stasi, but this may not ever have been on the Pan Am 747. The technician who made it admitted to lying in court and stealing a circuit board, which he gave to a Lockerbie investigator to be used as fabricated evidence.

Eleven years after the fatal night, three senior Scottish judges, under pressure to come up with a culprit at the court hearing on neutral territory in the Netherlands, pinned the blame on a Libyan Arab Airlines security officer and freelance businessman named Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, largely on the evidence of a Maltese merchant who identified al-Megrahi as a customer who had, eleven years before the trial, bought some clothes that may have been in the suitcase with the Lockerbie bomb. Not only did the Maltese merchant change his statement eighteen times, but shortly before the identity parade he had seen a recent photograph of al-Megrahi in a magazine article linking him with the crash. In court, all the Maltese witness said was that al-Megrahi resembled the long-ago customer.

The court chose to believe that the bomb which al-Megrahi allegedly used to destroy Pan Am Flight 103 had been smuggled in an unaccompanied suitcase onto Air Malta flight KM 180 in Luqa Airport on the morning of the fatal day, flown to Frankfurt and trans-shipped that afternoon onto Pan Am feeder flight 103A to London and there placed on board Maid of the Seas. There was a more rational conclusion that did not implicate al-Megrahi. It made far more sense for professional terrorists with experience of sabotaging aircraft to introduce the suitcase containing the improvised explosive device into the baggage system at London’s Heathrow Airport, rather than send it on two previous flights, at any point during which it could have detonated prematurely or been detected when on the ground between flights. But the court that condemned al-Megrahi to life imprisonment was not told that the baggage area in Heathrow’s Terminal 3 was reportedly broken into by a person or persons unknown under cover of night a few hours before Flight 103 took off for New York.

Al-Megrahi was found guilty of murdering the 270 Lockerbie victims. Official UN observer at the trial Professor Dr Hans Köchler repeatedly declared – in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2007 – that the verdict was a spectacular miscarriage of justice. That opinion was shared by many other legal figures and, perhaps surprisingly, by relatives of the victims present in court, who surely had every reason to want a conviction. In June 2007 the Scottish Criminal Review Commission found that al-Megrahi might have suffered a miscarriage of justice. After serving ten years of his sentence, he was liberated on the compassionate grounds that he was suffering from incurable prostate cancer with a short time to live. Yet he lived for two more years. So, was the allegedly compassionate release really a cover-up to avoid the embarrassment of new evidence being produced at his scheduled second appeal?

Nothing in the investigation of the Lockerbie crash and the trial of the man found guilty for it can be taken at face value.

PART 1

1

IN THE BEGINNING

Thirty years after the tragedy which saw nearly 300 people simultaneously murdered in December 1988, the name of Lockerbie is still a synonym for mass murder.

Actually, there are twice as many victims in this story and half of them died five months earlier. The sequence of events really begins shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution that deposed Iran’s last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and replaced his British- and American-backed regime by a theocratic government headed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In the revolutionary disorder, many senior Iranian officers were executed as being loyal to the shah, with command of some military units being taken over by imams. This led Iraq’s Baathist dictator Saddam Hussein to revive the millennial Persian–Arab conflict by invading Iran on 22 September 1980, using as his casus belli a dispute about the common border of the two countries in the Shatt el-Arab waterway. The real reason for the invasion was to capture Iranian oilfields. Far from being a primitive squabble between ‘people in faraway countries’, as Neville Chamberlain might have said, this war was the first one in which modified Soviet ballistic missiles were used by both sides, and chemical weapons claimed thousands of victims. It continued for nearly eight years at a cost of some 1.5 million lives, half of them civilians shot by small-calibre projectiles, blown to pieces by artillery shells and bombs or killed by poison gas.

Having, like Britain, previously supported the corrupt regime of the Shah of Iran in return for controlling the country’s oil supplies, the USA was not unnaturally suspected of giving support to anti-Khomeini elements in the hope of regaining control of the Iranian oil. In fact, the CIA had been running a significant number of agents inside Iran and the tension between Washington and Tehran reached ignition shortly after US President Carter announced on 23 October 1979 that he was allowing the exiled shah into the USA for treatment of his late-stage terminal cancer. American diplomats in Iran were aghast, knowing that this was the last straw for all Iranians who suspected US interference in their affairs. They were right to be horrified. On 4 November allegedly spontaneous rioting by ‘students’ ended with sixty-six American diplomats and other US nationals taken hostage by the rioters and confined in the US Embassy in Tehran. One woman and two Afro-Americans were released on 19 November after praising the aims of the revolution in front of cameras and microphones; the following day four more women and another six Afro-Americans were also released. After one more prisoner was freed, suffering from belatedly diagnosed multiple sclerosis, the remaining fifty-two hostages were held for a total of 444 days.

Diplomatic negotiations and sanctions failed to secure the release of the hostages. On 20 March 1980 at a top-level meeting in the White House, a blockade of all Iranian ports was debated, for both imports and exports. More aggressively, Admiral James Lyons drew up a plan for carrier-based US marines to take by force and occupy the undefended Kharg island in the north of the Persian Gulf, where 95 per cent of all Iranian oil exports was piped into waiting tankers. He promised that would bring Tehran to its knees inside two weeks. Fortunately for the hostages, who would have been subject to retaliation, cooler heads prevailed. Instead, President Carter did approve a rescue operation dubbed Eagle Claw using Rangers and newly formed Delta Force units based on the massive American aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and USS Coral Sea, which were on station in international waters near Iran. The essence of the plan was to take advantage of the Iranians’ preoccupation with their war against Iraq to land the special forces from military helicopters near Tehran, where they would be picked up and transported by CIA sleepers into the capital to kill the guards at the embassy and drive the hostages to a sports stadium nearby. There, the helicopters would land to spirit rescuers and rescued away to safety.

On 24 April 1980 the rescue attempt failed catastrophically after two helicopters were put out of action by dust storms encountered during the mission – which, due to the extreme secrecy surrounding Eagle Claw, lacked any current meteorological information. A third helicopter crashed into a fixed-wing aircraft, killing eight soldiers. This was a high cost in lives for a failed rescue operation. Removed from the embassy and dispersed all over Iran to prevent any further American rescue attempt, the unlucky fifty-two were eventially released on 20 January 1981 after mediation by Algeria and the payment of a king’s ransom: 50 tonnes of gold worth $7.98 billion.

In early 1983 US President Reagan’s National Security Council (NSC) expressed the view that the Iraq–Iran conflict might spread to other Middle Eastern countries and his National Security Planning Group considered that the conflict must lead to higher oil prices and/or disrupt oil supplies from the region. The war was also taking its toll at sea, with Iraqi missile attacks and bombing of Iranian shipping and offshore oil platforms leading Tehran to retaliate against ships in the Persian Gulf that belonged to Arab states giving Saddam Hussein huge loans to bolster his war effort. In one three month period, February to April 1984, Iraqi aircraft sank or heavily damaged sixteen ships,1 mostly tankers that exploded in huge fireballs with some loss of life. Wrongly blamed by Arab states supporting Iraq for starting what was called ‘the tanker war’, Iran eventually replied in kind. This resulted in the US Navy (USN) launching Operation Earnest Will in July 1987, during which American warships escorted reflagged Kuwaiti oil tankers safely through the Persian Gulf. There were frequent firefights between US warships and a flotilla of armed speedboats built by the Swedish company Boghammar AB and capable of reaching speeds of 45 knots. Armed with 12.7mm heavy machine guns, rocket launchers and mortars, they were manned and operated by the Iranian Guardians of the Revolution paramilitary navy, which regarded the Iranian Navy as politically unreliable because its personnel was averse to martyrdom!

The war in the Persian Gulf was a dirty affair, even by the standards of undeclared warfare. It reached its nadir at the Conference of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation at Kuwait in January 1987 when delegates debated the treachery of the USA, which insisted on a worldwide blockade of Iran and yet was supplying arms shipments to Tehran in the Iran–Contra deals negotiated by Colonel Oliver North. None of the speakers gave much credibility to the Reagan administration’s excuse that this was a rogue operation, not approved by the White House.2

Readers whose memories go back no further than the two Iraq wars involving Western coalition forces – Operation Desert Storm in 1991, triggered by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait the previous year, and the war of 2003 ironically dubbed ‘Iraqi Freedom’ and spuriously justified by claims from US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair that Saddam Hussein was about to use weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) – none of which were ever found by UN inspection teams – may be surprised to learn that, in the preceeding eight-year war between Iraq and Iran, geopolitical considerations had aligned America and its allies on the side of Saddam Hussein. This was despite Iraq’s close ties with the USSR throughout the Cold War and the fact that it had been placed on Washington’s List of State Sponsors of Terrorism on 29 December 1979 for its support of the Abu Nidal and other terror groups. Yet, throughout the Iran–Iraq War the USA remained officially neutral, although supplying political support and some aircraft to Saddam Hussein. When, in March 1982, Iran launched a successful counteroffensive, the USA upped its level of support for Iraq to prevent an Iranian victory and helpfully removed Iraq from the List of State Sponsors of Terrorism, so that American arms manufacturers could legally supply arms to Iraq; sales to Iraq reached a record high in 1982.

During the Cold War neither NATO governments nor those of the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact countries wished to become directly involved, so they supported proxy wars instead. Yet, in June 1987, when US Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage visited Hawaii, Admiral James ‘Ace’ Lyons, Commander-in-Chief, US Pacific Fleet defied the normal channels of communication by lobbying them to ‘take the war to the enemy’ by exploiting an operational advantage that would come in August when the aircraft carrier USS Constellation and her battle group, deployed to the Gulf of Oman in support of Earnest Will, was due to be relieved by USS Ranger and her battle group. With two carrier battle groups briefly on station during the handover, plus the recommissioned Second World War battleship USS Missouri and five other warships tasked to Earnest Will, Lyons argued there was a short window of opportunity to destroy the economy of the Islamic Republic of Iran by taking out harbours, oil installations and strategic targets inland in one massive blow before the Iranians had time to react.

Whatever Weinberger and Armitage thought of the idea, President Reagan’s National Security Adviser Lieutenant General Colin Powell blocked the idea. Yet in October 1987 US warships attacked Iranian offshore oil platforms in retaliation for an Iranian attack on a US-flagged Kuwaiti oil tanker. On 14 April 1988, the American frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts was badly damaged by an Iranian mine, with ten sailors wounded. The American response four days later, dubbed Operation Praying Mantis, was an attack on Iranian vessels in Iranian waters, which sank or damaged half of Iran’s small navy in a few hours, including the two British-built frigates Sahand and Sabalan.

The choke point for international shipping carrying supplies to Iraq at the head of the Persian Gulf and conveying in the other direction one-fifth of the world’s oil exports each day was at the Strait of Hormuz – the narrow passage leading from the Gulf of Oman to the Persian Gulf. Because the strait is only 21 nautical miles across at its narrowest point, internationally designated seaways through it traverse what would otherwise be territorial waters of both Iran to the north and Oman to the south. US Navy warships on escort duty also used these seaways under an Iranian law of 1934, as amended by a law of 1959.3 On Sunday, 3 July 1988, one of these was the heavyweight Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes, commanded by Captain William C. Rogers III.

Vincennes was the most sophisticated ship in the US Navy, costing more than $1 billion. Crewed by about 400 officers and ratings, she had two 5-inch guns and a range of other anti-ship and anti-aircraft weaponry. Most importantly, it had Aegis, a state-of-the-art seaborne alternative to an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft covering the Strait of Hormuz, supposedly giving a similar degree of accurate, detailed real-time analysis of airborne and surface activity and communications in the region.

What sort of man was the captain of Vincennes? In view of what was about to happen, it seems incredible that Rogers was a son of a Second World War US Navy psychologist and himself a university-qualified psychologist. Having enlisted in the navy at the mature age of 27, this was his twenty-third year of service after two years of teaching high school science in civilian life. His attitude to authority was not what one might expect from a former schoolteacher. That was made clear when he sent only a lowly lieutenant from his crew to the important briefing on the rules of engagement in the Gulf on being posted there in May 1988. When officers of the departing USS Wainwright offered to brief their replacements on the current situation, they were cold-shouldered with, ‘Aegis will sort all that out’. In war games at Tactical Training Group, Pacific, Rogers had both ignored instructors’ advice and repeatedly violated the rules of engagement laid down.4 Once on station in the Gulf, where his mission was to supervise and, if necessary, back up smaller naval craft escorting tanker convoys, Rogers chafed at the bit, frequently pleading with his superior, Rear Admiral Anthony Less, for a more aggressive role for Vincennes – one message specifically asking permission ‘to go into harm’s way, for which [Vincennes] was intended’.5

Rogers, who had been given command of the missile cruiser Vincennes in April 1987, was from the same mould as Admiral Lyons. Since joining Operation Earnest Will, Rogers had earned a reputation among other USN captains in the region for extreme aggressiveness and his ship was given the nickname ‘Robocruiser’ after the cartoon character Robocop, always spoiling for a fight. It seems that he thought the moment had come on 3 July 1988 to seize the mantle of Lyons. That morning, Vincennes was 40 nautical miles north of its station allotted by Middle East Task Force Command after Roberts had received reports from the USS Montgomery in the Strait of Hormuz of some gunfire from Iranian speedboats in the area. Driven by the 80,000 horsepower of its four gas-turbine engines, Vincennes travelled towards the location at 30 knots until Rear Admiral Less at Fleet Headquarters in Bahrain ordered Rogers to stay clear of the area and instead despatch a Seahawk SH-60B LAMPS helicopter to assess the scene at a distance. The pilot reported back that a small number of the fast Iranian Boghammars were routinely harassing a German-flagged Pakistani freighter, the Dhaulagiri, but not attacking it.

Rogers headed north again, still making 30 knots. Passing the Dhaulagiri, he ignored a signal from it reading A-OK. At 0840 the Omani coastguard radioed the Iranian small craft to clear the scene. The coastguard also warned Vincennes that its excessive speed and aggressive posture were not acceptable in Omani waters. Almost simultaneously, Fleet HQ in Bahrain ordered Rogers to return to his allotted station, leaving the Seahawk helicopter to observe. Rogers grudgingly complied until the co-pilot of the helicopter radioed that he was taking airburst fire from the gunboats. In fact, one Iranian Revolutionary Guard boat near the freighter quite reasonably fired ten warning shots well ahead of the Seahawk when it intruded into Iranian airspace. It also defied the rules of engagement, ignoring the agreed 4-mile separation by approaching to within half that distance of the Iranian boats.

Taking this as sufficient reason to send his crew to battle stations, Rogers ordered full speed and headed north again to engage the Boghammar speedboats that were ‘attacking’ his helicopter. The $400 million Aegis combat information system on board Vincennes, with its three-dimensional phased-array AN/SPY radar, was not designed for skirmishes with small boats, but for all-out war with the Soviet Navy, being capable of tracking simultaneously up to 100 incoming enemy missiles or attacking aircraft and launching missiles to destroy them. As the small patrol boats bobbed up and down in the swell, well inside Iranian waters, they kept disappearing from the American radar. In line of sight, the poor visibility due to a sand haze permitted only momentary glimpses of their wakes from the deck of Vincennes, although the very high-powered binoculars of the lookouts seemed to show two small craft headed towards Vincennes.

The Revolutionary Guards commander in Bandar Abbas was a young ‘student’ named Ali Fadavi. As Vincennes and Montgomery entered the Iranian exclusion zone, he ordered one Boghammar to suss out Vincennes’ intentions. The speedboat made a fast pass with crewmen on both sides staring at each other close-up. Rogers informed Bahrain that he was being attacked and announced his intention of opening fire on the Iranian boats. Apparently unaware that Vincennes was then 50 miles north of its correct position, Admiral Less approved Rogers’ request to defend his vessel against the Iranian ‘attack’.

At 0941 his navigation officer informed Rogers that Vincennes had just left the international seaway and crossed into Iranian territorial waters. At 0943 the two American warships opened fire on the gunboats with their 5-inch guns at approximately 8,000 yards’ range. A radar-directed barrage of some 100 shells commenced, which eventually damaged one Iranian boat and set two others on fire, sinking them.6 Twenty-five miles to the east, Commander David Carlson, captain of USS Sides, had heard Rogers’ communications with Bahrein and was horrified. He knew that it was extremely unlikely that the lightweight fibreglass Iranian craft would attack the heavily armoured and armed Vincennes, because that would end in their annihilation. By attacking them, Rogers was committing an act of war, when his mission in Operation Earnest Will was to prevent escalation.

The Iranian national carrier Iran Air had a twice-weekly scheduled flight due to depart that morning from Tehran, destination Dubai, with a brief stop at Bandar Abbas Airport in southern Iran, after which, designated IR655, it was to use an internationally recognised civilian aviation route code named Amber 59 across the strait on its 140-mile flight. The captain of the Airbus operating this flight, an A-300 B2-203 registration EP-IBU, was Mohsen Rezaian, an experienced pilot with 7,000 hours of flight time, of which 2,000 hours were on Airbus A-300 aircraft. The Bandar Abbas–Dubai sector was part of a regular passenger service that Iran Air had operated for over twenty years using Air Traffic System Amber 59 or ATS route A59. This regular flight was dubbed ‘the Haj flight’ by watching American monitors because it was heavily used by Iranian pilgrims to Mecca, as it was on 3 July 1988, a few days before the important ritual of Eid al-Fitr that ends the fasting month of Ramadan.

Captain Rezaian was familiar with the route, having flown it many times in the past two years. His second officer was also experienced, as was the flight engineer. All three flight deck crew held valid commercial pilots’ licences. A subsequent investigation by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) found no evidence that any one of them was physically or psychologically unfit. The report of that investigation states that the timetable of commercial flights using this route dated 28 June 1988, including the one flight due to take place in the morning of 3 July 1988, was available on board all US naval vessels in the region. On that day, there were three US warships present in the area. All had received the civilian flight schedule for the region dated 28 June showing that the only flight due to leave Bandar Abbas Airport on the Iranian side of the straits that morning, after its scheduled stopover there, was IR655. In the ICAO report, times are given in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), i.e. Greenwich Mean Time. The local time was four and a half hours in advance of this. The following is in corrected local time.

Captain Rezaian’s Airbus A-300 took off from Bandar Abbas twenty-seven minutes late, due to a passenger having visa problems, at 1117 Tehran time, or 0947 as shown on board the US ships.7 US personnel monitoring Iranian civil aviation frequencies heard Bandar Abbas tower clear the Airbus to use the airport’s runway 21. On board, according to the passenger list later supplied by the Iranian Government to the International Court of Justice were 238 Iranians – many of them on pilgrimage to Mecca – plus thirteen citizens of the United Arab Emirates, ten Indians, six Pakistanis, six Yugoslavs and one Italian. The flight deck and cabin crew numbering sixteen brought this to a total of 290 people on board, including sixty-six children.

At 1119.18 Captain Rezaian notified Bandar Abbas tower that he was on track and climbing from 3,500ft to 14,000ft, destination Dubai International Airport. He estimated reaching the MOBET reporting point at 1122 and reporting point DARAX at 1128, to land in Dubai at 1145. IR655 transmitted the same information to Tehran air traffic control (ATC) when the aircraft was at 7,000ft and still climbing. In accordance with international aviation practice, all these transmissions were in clear English, as was Tehran’s transmission of this flight information to United Arab Emirates (UAE) ATC on the other side of the straits and the acknowledgment by UAE ATC. Two USN frigates in the area – USS John H. Sides and USS Elmer Montgomery – identified IR655 on their radar screens as a civilian aircraft 4 miles off the centre line of the 20-mile-wide international air corridor.

The USA had issued a Notice to Airmen, conventionally called a NOTAM, warning that aircraft in the region, even if taking off from a regional airport, must not come within 5 nautical miles of an American warship at an altitude of less than 2,000ft. Doing so would be deemed an attack profile and risk the warship launching ‘defensive measures’, i.e. shooting down the perceived threat. At 1121.30 Tehran asked IR655 to notify when it reached 14,000ft at reporting point DARAX, where the Tehran Flight Information Region (FIR) ended and the UAE FIR began. Asked by Tehran to confirm that IR655’s transponder was squawking the allotted Mode 3 identification code 6760, Rezaian replied, ‘Affirmative’.

By that stage, the large display screens in the darkened combat information centre (CIC) of the USS Vincennes had been showing the plot of IR655, designated as TN (for tracking number) 4131 for several minutes.8 At 1124 IR655 transmitted its last message to Bandar Abbas, giving its position at reporting point MOBET. This was acknowledged and Rezaian replied in the normal courtesy of civil aviation communications, ‘Thank you. Good day.’

According to the American Government, the crew in the Aegis combat information centre aboard Vincennes incorrectly identified the Iranian Airbus as an attacking F-14A Tomcat fighter despite the fact that its transponder was squawking call-sign 6760 in Mode III, which clearly identified it as a civilian aircraft. The Tomcat was a supersonic variable-geometry interceptor made by US constructor Grumman in service only with the US Navy and the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force which had inherited seventy-nine of them, plus spare engines, other parts and compatible armament, including AIM-54 Phoenix air-to-air missiles that were supplied at a cost of $2 billion to the shah before the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The shah, being a trained military pilot, wanted the F-14 to intercept Soviet Mig-25 Foxbat reconnaissance aircraft that regularly overflew Iranian territory.

At least, that was the official reason for the purchase, but many elements in this story are not what they seem at first sight. The Soviet overflights were Moscow’s reaction to increasing pro-US intelligence-gathering by Iranian and American units based close to the Iran–USSR border, a major task of which was Operation Dark Genie: the exploring of routes by which US bombers could penetrate the Soviet Union via Iran with least radar vulnerability and the execution of high-altitude photo reconnaissance of new military bases in that period of the Cold War before satellite surveillance was possible. It is relevant to what happened on 28 June 1988 that the F-14s supplied to Iran were constructed and supplied to Iran by an American company. So the US Navy well knew that they were configured for air-to-air combat, not for attacking surface craft.

2

MEDALS FOR MURDER

In the tense atmosphere of Vincennes’ windowless, dimly lit CIC, with all the display screens more resembling an arcade of video games than the real world outside, the men monitoring the large-screen displays had been briefed that the Iranian F-14s carried non-guided bombs, Maverick missiles and unguided rockets. The Vincennes crew later claimed to have made ten attempts to contact the aircraft taking off from Bandar Abbas and warn it off, using both military and civilian radio frequencies without receiving any reply. Later allegations by CIC personnel aboard Vincennes were quite different and smacked of collusion. Several of them reported a squawk in Mode II – the military IFF mode – indicating an Iranian F-14, although none of the Vincennes data recorders showed any IFF response other than Mode III, Code 6760. It was alleged later that a petty officer in the CIC forgot to reset the range of his IFF set and mistook the squawk from an Iranian military aircraft on the ground at Bandar Abbas as coming from the transponder of TN 4131.

Since the so-called black box flight recorders of the Iranian Airbus still lie at the bottom of the strait, it will never be known whether Capt Rezaian ignored the American challenges or simply did not hear them because he was talking to Bandar Abbas and Tehran at the time. In any case, the official ICAO report stated that these attempts to contact Iran Air 655 were sent on the wrong frequency and addressed to a non-existent Iranian F-14. So, even if they had been heard on the flight deck of the Airbus, Rezaian would have had no reason to think that the aircraft being warned off was his, any more than he could have known an American warship lay ahead, more or less under his regular flight path well within Amber 59.

According to the ICAO report, the height and speed of the Airbus, and the size of the radar echo from this large commercial airliner measuring 177ft long by 171ft wingspan, as against the 62ft length of a two-seater supersonic Grumman F14 Tomcat and wingspan only 38ft in swept-wing attack profile, should have told the operators in the CIC of Vincennes beyond any doubt that the echo on their screens of Rezaian’s Airbus could NOT be a much smaller and faster F-14 descending at less than 2,000ft on an attack run. Although the large-screen displays rather strangely did not give the altitude of the plane being tracked, other operators in the CIC did have this information. Even if the echo had been from an Iranian F-14, it was in Iranian airspace and still climbing, thousands of feet higher than an attacking fighter in a combat dive. Later American allegations that the Airbus was 4 miles outside Amber 59 were blatant lies, and had Vincennes been in its allotted station there could never have been any assumption on board that TN 4131 was headed towards an American missile cruiser involved in a pointless and unprovoked skirmish with the Revolutionary Guard boats.

The Vincennes attack radar, which functioned as an electronic path, along which a smart missile could travel unerringly to the target, was locked on to, or ‘painting’, the Airbus. This caused Commander David Carlson aboard USS Sides, the frigate nearest to Vincennes at the time of the incident, to observe that the pilot’s failure to take any evasive action confirmed its civilian status, since Rezaian and his flight deck crew had no way of knowing that their aircraft was being targeted, whereas the pilot of an Iranian military aircraft would have been warned by his own onboard systems the second he had been ‘painted’, and immediately peeled away, to avoid a missile launch that would blow him out of the sky. Testimony from those aboard USS Sides corroborates the Airbus flight path and the Mode III IFF squawk. Yet, it seems that Vincennes had no communications receivers able to monitor civil aviation frequencies, other than the International Air Distress frequency. After the shoot-down, all USN warships in the Persian Gulf were equipped with tunable VHF receivers, able to listen in to traffic on civilian frequencies.

Carlson later jeopardised the rest of his service career by going into print, saying that the events of that morning marked the ‘horrifying climax to Captain Rogers’s aggressiveness’, which he first observed on 2 June 1988, when Rogers sailed Vincennes threateningly close to an Iranian Navy vessel making a lawful search of a bulk carrier and launched a helicopter within 3 miles of an Iranian Navy vessel in defiance of the rules of engagement requiring the 4-mile separation and opened fire on Iranian patrol boats.1 Carlson also commented that Iranian vessels he had encountered in the area during the month prior to the incident were both non-threatening and professional.2 Listening in to Rogers’ announcement to US Middle East Task Force Command that he was going to shoot down the approaching aircraft, Carlson, who was under tactical control of Rogers on Vincennes at the time, is reported to have been thunderstruck, saying to personnel with him on the bridge of USS Sides, ‘Why, what the hell is he doing?’ With a real-time data link between the CIC in Vincennes and Sides, Carlson knew exactly what was being shown on the screens in front of Rogers’ CIC crew. Let alone its size, how could TN 4131 be an F-14 in attack profile at less than 2,000ft, when it was already visibly at 7,000ft and still climbing?

Rogers had apparently been informed by his air warfare coordinator Commander Scott Lustig that the tracked aircraft designated TN 4131was diving. Lustig was a well-liked officer, but had never been in combat before and apparently lost his nerve in the confusion of the skirmish with the surface craft combined with the new perceived threat. Carlson later wrote in the US Naval Institute journal Proceedings that he had ‘wondered aloud in disbelief’ on hearing of Vincennes’ intentions to effect a shoot-down, and wondered at the time whether the crew of Rogers’ ship ‘felt a need to prove the viability of Aegis in the Persian Gulf, and … hankered for the opportunity to show their stuff’.3 He also wondered what such a heavyweight and costly vessel as Vincennes was doing skirmishing with highly manoeuvrable Iranian small patrol boats. It was, as a Newsweek journalist later remarked, like shooting rabbits with a radar-guided missile.4

A detailed analysis of ‘the Vincennes incident’ by three researchers at Massachusets Institute of Technology5 cited Petty Officer Andrew Jackson in the Aegis combat information centre aboard Vincennes during the shoot-down as correctly attempting to consult commercial air traffic schedules to check the possibility that the plot designated TN 4131 did represent a commercial airliner. In this he was handicapped by (1) the poorly lit CIC losing all lighting each time Vincennes fired on the Iranian patrol boats; (2) his uncertainty how to read the schedules, since the ship was on Bahrain time and Iran Air’s schedules showed Tehran time and (3) the Airbus had taken off twenty-seven minutes later than scheduled.

In addition, Vincennes had a ‘foul bore’ – a shell jammed in one gun that could not be fired at the Iranian patrol boats. To compensate for this, Rogers executed a violent manouvre, turning 50 degrees at 35 knots to bring another gun to bear on the small craft. When Vincennes heeled right over at this speed, papers and other objects on the CIC crew’s desks that were sent flying onto the floor included the commercial air traffic schedule Jackson had been trying to read.

To that unfortunate combination of circumstances must be added that Rogers in his darkened control cockpit next to the CIC was continuing personally to oversee his pointless skirmish with the Iranian patrol boats – for which sort of engagement Vincennes was not designed. Lustig was later described as ‘increasingly hysterical’6 and appears to have assumed that the presence of those craft and their warning fire to drive the intruding American helicopter back into international airspace were a deliberate decoy operation to distract attention from the approach of a hostile aircraft. Somehow, the Aegis system confused TN 4131 with the trace of a US naval jet descending to land on a USN carrier in the Gulf of Oman and Rogers was told that ‘his’ TN4131 was diving. His multi-tasking confusion and the general sense of urgency on board Vincennes generated a variation of the ‘fog of war’ labelled ‘scenario fulfilment’ by military psychologists, in which the stress of combat causes men to blot out alternative possibilities and focus on one alone – in this case, the wrong one.

The personnel in the Vincennes CIC had been trained to handle multiple simultaneous attacks without panicking. Yet, with the misidentified aircraft 11 miles distant, Rogers reached up and turned the key in his cockpit that empowered the Aegis weapons control system to fire missiles. The young lieutenant at the console was so panicked by what was happening that he fumbled the firing switches several times until an older petty officer leaned across him and hit the switches. Two supersonic SM-2MR surface-to-air missiles erupted from the forward turret of the cruiser, to follow the attack radar path to the target. A few seconds later both of the missiles hit IR655 – one on the Airbus’s wing and the other on its tailplane – at a range of 8 nautical miles and an altitude of 13,500ft, blowing one wing with its engine completely off.

On board Vincennes a lookout came onto the bridge and announced that the falling debris was far too large to be from an F-14. The crew of USS Montgomery saw a wing and engine pod fall into the sea. The chief radar operator on USS Sides told Carlson that the destroyed target was probably a ‘commair’ or commercial aircraft. Without knowing how many people had been on board, Carlson was almost physically sick. By then, all 290 people on board the Airbus were dead. At noon that day, Iranian helicopters and patrol boats were searching the Strait of Hormuz and recovering bodies, body parts, luggage and wreckage. According to an article in Washington Post next day – Independence Day in the USA – President Reagan at the presidential country retreat of Camp David in Maryland said that this was a ‘terrible human tragedy’, but that the Vincennes missile launch was ‘a proper defensive action’. At the same time, Iran was accusing the USA of a ‘barbaric massacre’ and vowing to ‘avenge the blood of our martyrs’.7

In the absence of any gesture of guilt or atonement by the USA, the events of that fateful morning are fully documented in a ‘memorial’ submitted to the International Court of Justice on 24 July 1990 by the Islamic State of Iran, stating that:

the use of force by the United States naval units in destroying IR 655 and the killing of its passengers and crew violated the most fundamental principles of international law, including specific provisions of the Chicago convention and the Montreal convention which govern and protect international civil aviation. The shooting down of the aircraft also violated Article 2[4] of the United Nations Charter and rules of customary international law prohibiting the use of force. In unlawfully intruding into the Islamic Republic’s internal and territorial waters, in breaching its stated neutrality in the area, in endangering civil aviation generally and in destroying the aircraft, the United States also violated the Islamic Republic’s sovereignty and the principle of non-intervention as well as the principles of neutrality enshrined in the Hague Conventions of 1907. All of these actions were in breach of the Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations and Consular Rights between the United States and Iran, customary practice and rules relating to the Law of the Sea, including those reflected in the 1958 Geneva Conventions on the Law of the Sea and the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, as well as the provisions of Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. This case also involves a flagrant violation of the principle of non-interference in the affairs of a sovereign State and of elementary principles of humanity and norms of international behaviour.8

As to why it had taken two years for it to be submitted, the memorial continues:

Despite these [and] numerous [other] violations of international law, the United States has refused to accept responsibility [although] immediately after the incident, the Islamic Republic [of Iran] referred the matter to the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization [the ICAO Council]. Although on previous occasions the ICAO Council had condemned the actions of members who had shot down civil aircraft, it took no such action in this case.