The downing of Flight 655 marked a critical moment in the late 20th century histories of the Gulf and to the shifting relationship between energy, the global political economy, and modern war. The attack ushered in the beginning of the end of what had been a long and bloody war between Iran and Iraq See the following articles for the details: Iran Air Flight 655 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Iran Air Flight 655 was an Iran Air flight from Tehran, Iran, to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, via Bandar Abbas, Iran. On 3 July 1988, at the end of the Iran–Iraq War, the aircraft serving the flight, an Airbus A300B2-203, was shot down by SM-2MR surface-to-air missiles fired by the United States Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes as it flew over the Strait of Hormuz. The aircraft, which had been flying in Iranian airspace over Iran's territorial waters in the Persian Gulf on its usual flight path, was destroyed. All 290 on board, including 66 children and 16 crew, perished.[1] Ranking seventh among the deadliest disasters in aviation history, the incident retains the highest death toll of any aviation incident in the Indian Ocean and the highest death toll of any incident involving an Airbus A300 anywhere in the world.[2] The Vincennes had entered Iranian territorial waters after one of its helicopters drew warning fire from Iranian speedboats operating within Iranian territorial limits.[3] According to the United States Government, the crew incorrectly identified the Iranian Airbus A300 as an attacking F-14 Tomcat fighter (a plane made in the United States and operated at that time by only two forces worldwide, the United States Navy and the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force). Contributing to the error was the fact that the airliner did not respond to several inquiries to change course and did not identify itself clearly as civilian. This was because Vincennes was signaling warnings on a military channel and the civilian plane could not technically receive it.[4] The Iranian government maintains that Vincennes negligently shot down the civilian aircraft. The event generated a great deal of controversy and criticism of the United States. Some analysts have blamed U.S. military commanders and the captain of Vincennes for reckless and aggressive behavior in a tense and dangerous environment.[5][6] In 1996, the United States and Iran reached "an agreement in full and final settlement of all disputes, differences, claims, counterclaims" relating to the incident at the International Court of Justice.[7] As part of the settlement, the United States agreed to pay US$61.8 million, an average of $213,103.45 per passenger, in compensation to the families of the Iranian victims. However, the United States has never admitted responsibility, nor apologized to Iran.[8] As of January 2012, Iran Air was still using flight number IR655 on the Tehran–Dubai route as a memorial to the victims, contrary to the informal convention amongst many other airlines that discontinue flight numbers associated with accidents. Source: Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 Iran Air Flight 655 The New York Times What Iran Air Flight 655 says about America’s role in the Middle East By Max Fisher October 17, 2013 at 4:52 pm In 1988, the U.S. Navy ship Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian flight, Iran Air 655, killing all 290 passengers and crew on board. The incident has hung over U.S.-Iranian relations for 25 years and remains extremely sensitive. Toby Craig Jones, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University who focuses on U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf, argues that the incident is a symbol and product of the U.S. strategy in the Gulf, where militarization and energy policies can often blur. What follows is an edited excerpt on the Vincennes and Flight 655 from Jones's forthcoming book, "America's Oil Wars," to be published by Harvard University Press. Seven minutes after takeoff on July 3, 1988, Iran Air Flight 655 plunged into the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people on board. The flight was to be a routine “milk run,” a regularly scheduled transit ferrying business people and families from Bandar Abbas in Iran to Dubai. Instead, on a clear mid summer morning, the plane was torn from the sky, brought down by two American anti-aircraft missiles. The USS Vincennes, a high-tech missile cruiser that had been dispatched to the Gulf only weeks before, delivered the fatal blow. The first missile cut the plane in two and severed its left wing. The second shredded it and passengers with searing shrapnel. (See Lee Allen Zatarain's The Tanker War, page 326.) Those not killed immediately plunged over 14,000 feet, where they died on impact. A little over six weeks after the attack, the U.S. Department of Defense released a 150-page incident report that remarked [that] the downing of Flight 655 was “a tragic and regrettable accident,” the unfortunate outcome of a complicated “combat environment.” American military and political leaders argued it was a series of inadvertent mistakes, “the fog of war,” and especially Iranian aggression that led to catastrophe. The Vincennes, captained by William C. Rogers and managed by an inexperienced crew, was outfitted with a sophisticated new computerized command and control system known as Aegis that was untested in battle. At the time of the attack, Rogers had ordered the Vincennes and his ship’s helicopter to pursue and fire on several Iranian gunboats, which had reportedly been harassing merchant shipping moments earlier. Flight 655 departed from Bandar Abbas on a flight-path that would have taken it directly over the battle being waged below. While gunning at Iranian speedboats on the surface waters of the Gulf, the crew of the Vincennes tracked Flight 655 above. Almost immediately, they wrongly identified it as an F-14 fighter. Their confusion was partly because the passenger jet had taken off from a dual-use military and civilian airfield. In the midst of battle, they assumed Iran had scrambled a single fighter jet in defense of the small naval craft. Compounding the original error, they made even more crucial mistakes. Most importantly, the crew wrongly determined that the flight was descending toward the ship, as if to launch a bombing run, when in fact it was climbing. It was a perplexing mistake. With data from the ship’s computer clearly showing Flight 655 as gaining altitude, it remains a mystery why the ships’ technicians claimed otherwise. Investigators determined the misreading of the ship’s data and the “tragic” decision to fire had been the product of combat stress brought on by Iranian aggression. Those later looking to deflect American responsibility honed in on Iran’s alleged bad behavior. In hearings held before the U.S. Senate in September Admiral Robert Kelly, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued that Iran “must share some responsibility for this tragedy,” a sentiment that drew broad support from those present as well as from the American public. In its initial report, the Pentagon withheld key details of the incident, particularly the chain of events that led to it. Newsweek magazine later alleged that the military, protecting itself, engaged in a fraudulent cover-up. They wrote that while the Iranian gunboats may have been harassing merchant shipping, they had then disengaged and were in full retreat in the face of superior American firepower. After the gunboats began their initial withdrawal, the American commander in Bahrain ordered U.S. forces to break off their pursuit. Captain Rogers, according to Newsweek's story, ignored the order. He also ignored the military’s standing rules of engagement that limited the American use of deadly force to defensive measures. It was the Vincennes, not the Iranian gunboats that provoked the clash between them. Rogers had the Vincennes pursue the gunboats into Iranian sovereign waters, from which it launched the two missiles that felled Flight 655. David Carlson, who commanded the cruiser USS Sides, and was in supporting role of and less than 20 nautical miles from Vincennes when it launched its attack, denied that the Iranians had been especially aggressive. Carlson later remarked that there “was no coordinated attack involving” the Iranian gunboats. He even challenged the prevailing assumption that the Iranian posture in the Gulf was threatening more generally. He reflected, “my experience was that the conduct of the Iranian military forces in the month preceding the incident was pointedly non-threatening.” While Carlson conceded that he thought the flight might have been an F-14 at the time, several of his crew rightly identified it as a civilian aircraft. Either way, Carlson never believed Flight 655 posed a risk and watched in horror as the Vincennes launched its missiles. In disputing more apologetic accounts that sought to justify the Vincennes’s choices, the Sides’ commander offered a much less flattering analysis. “Having watched the performance of the Vincennes for a month before the incident,” he recalled that his “impression was clearly that an atmosphere of restraint was not her strong suit.” Revealing that his colleagues had taken to calling the Vincennes “Robo Cruiser” well before July 3, Carlson suggested that his “guess was that the crew of the Vincennes felt a need to prove the viability of Aegis [the ship’s new computerized system] ... and that they hankered for an opportunity to show their stuff.” Carlson’s was a damning account, although perhaps it was one that could be dismissed as the product of competing egos among rival commanders in the Gulf. Whatever happened on the bridge of the Vincennes that led Rogers to make a terrible choice, the significance of Flight 655’s fate had as much to do with the broader political and political economic forces at work in the region and in the moment that made the tragedy possible in the first place. The downing of Flight 655 marked a critical moment in the late 20th century histories of the Gulf and to the shifting relationship between energy, the global political economy, and modern war. The attack ushered in the beginning of the end of what had been a long and bloody war between Iran and Iraq. Convinced that the U.S., which had ramped up its military presence in the region in 1986, was committed to their defeat, and with Iraq having fully embraced the use of chemical weapons, Iranian leaders agreed to a United Nations-backed ceasefire in late July, just three weeks after the incident. While U.S. officials sought to deflect criticism and minimize their responsibility, the reality was that the tragedy helped serve American interests. The United States threw its support behind the Ba’ath regime in Baghdad and over the course of the 1980s its levels of support for the Iraq war machine, including the direct projection of American military might, deepened considerably. By the summer of 1988, the U.S. Navy was patrolling the Gulf, shepherding oil tankers as they passed through the Strait of Hormuz, had established an elaborate anti-Iranian surveillance and policing network, and was trading shots with the Iranian Navy. Little reported at the time, just months before the July attack the U.S. staged its largest Naval confrontation since World War II against Iran. American antagonisms and work to thwart Iranian mobility in the Gulf have remained in place ever since. After the war was over, and after the United States turned on its former Iraqi partners, the American commitment to maintaining a large military in the Middle East further intensified. So too would the commitment to its use of force and to what should be understood as the genesis of one long American war in the Middle East. The attack on Flight 655 also reflected something more complex and uncertain about the character of the broader conflict that was settling in. While the U.S. and its allies would go on to wage conventional campaigns in Kuwait in 1991 and again in Iraq in 2003, the moments in between and after can better be understand as a kind of permanent quasi-war – not war, but also not its absence. The condition of almost war, in which the military was engaged in hostilities that aimed to “contain” Iran, was already in place in the late 1980s. Indeed, the lack of certainty around the United States’ strategic objectives, and ambiguity about the US Navy’s mission in 1988 in particular, are crucial to understanding what was going on when the Vincennes shot down Flight 655. Much of the hand-wringing inside the United States government around that incident was framed around that claim that “war begets accidents.” Commander Carlson’s remarks in rebuttal to such thinking – “that is axiomatic, but we were not at war" – reflected both the uncertainty of the moment and also drew attention to the exceptionally high human stakes of strategic uncertainty. In addition to uncertainties about the U.S. mission and how it should behave were broader questions about how it arrived at precisely that point and how we should think about the character of the region’s emerging political order, one in which violence steadily intensified and in which war was not exceptional, but a permanent structural feature of the order of things. The downing of Flight 655 was rooted in a shifting politics around energy, and, in the making of a regional order in the 1980s in which “energy” and “war” became increasingly interdependent. The argument here is that the expansion of both the American presence and its use of violence resulted in the fundamental transformation of the relationship between energy and war, one in which the distinction between them was erased. The United States had intensified its military presence in the mid-1980s, ostensibly to protect the flow of oil from the Northern Gulf, where the Iran-Iraq war had intensified, to global markets. A year before the downing of Flight 655, Richard W. Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and the Reagan administration’s most visible spokesperson for its military policy in the Gulf, remarked in prepared testimony to Congress that “ready access to Gulf oil is critical to the economic well-being of the West.” He continued that the Middle East “is strategically important to the United States. We would suffer a major strategic defeat should a power hostile to the United States sharply increase its power and influence in the region... The administration like its predecessors, is committed to maintaining the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz and supporting the individual and collective self-defense of the Arab Gulf states.” Ensuring the flow of oil, or stated otherwise, providing security for oil, was and remains a central tenant of the American case for its role in the Gulf. But the now-common idea of "energy security" is an articulation that obscures more than it reveals. The neat division of energy and security into related but still separate categories misses the more important ways in which the two have become inextricably connected, physically and technologically built into one another. In creating a new techno-political order around energy and war starting in the mid-1980s, the United States and its allies engaged in a struggle to make and unmake space and movement in the Gulf, to create both a system of surveillance and control that privileged themselves as well as in a struggle to refashion the political geography of the region. The fluidity of the Gulf, the fact that both the seascape and the objects moving on it were always in motion, gave rise to a corresponding fluidity in the techno-political and geopolitical order in the region. The system was leaky and uncertain and mobility both on the sea and in the air was precarious. The result was the system was, according to those who sought to control, always in crisis and, thus, always at war. It has been ever since. Max Fisher is the Post's foreign affairs blogger. He has a master's degree in security studies from Johns Hopkins University. Sign up for his daily newsletter here. Also, follow him on Twitter or Facebook. Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/17/what-iran-air-flight-655-says-about-americas-role-in-the-middle-east/?wpisrc=nl_wv The New York Times The forgotten story of Iran Air Flight 655 By Max Fisher, Updated: October 16 at 7:00 am If you walked into any high school classroom in the United States and asked the students to describe their country's relationship with Iran, you'd probably hear words like "enemy" and "threat," maybe "distrust" and "nuclear." But ask them what the number 655 has to do with it, and you'd be met with silence. Try the same thing in an Iranian classroom, asking about the United States, and you'd probably hear some of the same words. Mention the number 655, though, it's a safe bet that at least a few of the students would immediately know what you were talking about. The number, 655, is a flight number: Iran Air 655. If you've never heard of it, you're far from alone. But you should know the story if you want to better understand why the United States and Iran so badly distrust one another and why it will be so difficult to strike a nuclear deal, as they're attempting to do at a summit in Switzerland this week. The story of Iran Air 655 begins, like so much of the U.S.-Iran struggle, with the 1979 Islamic revolution. When Iraq invaded Iran the following year, the United States supported Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein against the two countries' mutual Iranian enemy. The war dragged on for eight awful years, claiming perhaps a million lives. Toward the end of the war, on July 3, 1988, a U.S. Navy ship called the Vincennes was exchanging fire with small Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. Navy kept ships there, and still does, to protect oil trade routes. As the American and Iranian ships skirmished, Iran Air Flight 655 took off from nearby Bandar Abbas International Airport, bound for Dubai. The airport was used by both civilian and military aircraft. The Vincennes mistook the lumbering Airbus A300 civilian airliner for a much smaller and faster F-14 fighter jet, perhaps in the heat of battle or perhaps because the flight allegedly did not identify itself. It fired two surface-to-air missiles, killing all 290 passengers and crew members on board. The horrible incident brought Tehran closer to ending the war, but its effects have lingered much longer than that. "The shoot-down of Iran Air flight 655 was an accident, but that is not how it was seen in Tehran," former CIA analyst and current Brookings scholar Kenneth Pollack wrote in his 2004 history of U.S.-Iran enmity, "The Persian Puzzle." "The Iranian government assumed that the attack had been purposeful. ... Tehran convinced itself that Washington was trying to signal that the United States had decided to openly enter the war on Iraq's side." That belief, along with Iraq's increased use of chemical weapons against Iran, led Tehran to accept a United Nations cease-fire two months later. But it also helped cement a view in Iran, still common among hard-liners in the government, that the United States is absolutely committed to the destruction of the Islamic Republic and will stop at almost nothing to accomplish this. It is, as Time's Michael Crowley points out in an important piece, one of several reasons that Iran has a hard time believing it can trust the United States to ever stop short of its complete destruction. This is not just an issue of historical grievance: It matters in immediate geopolitical terms to the efforts by President Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to find their way to a nuclear deal and perhaps a first step toward detente. For any deal to work, both countries will have to trust that the other is sincere about its willingness to follow through on its promises. For the United States, that means trusting that Iran is really willing to give up any nuclear weapons ambitions and ramp down the program as promised (Washington has real, legitimate grounds to worry about this; Iran has its own history of misdeeds). For Iran, it means trusting that the United States will actually accept the Islamic Republic and coexist peacefully with it. The eight-year war with Iraq, which is widely seen in Iran as a war against not just Hussein but his Western backers, and the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 that came near its conclusion, have convinced many in Iran that the United States simply cannot be trusted to let Iran be. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Rouhani's boss, often appears to share this deep distrust. Khamenei and other hard-liners could scuttle any deal; a similar drama will likely play out in Washington. If Iran believes that the United States is so committed to its destruction that it would willingly shoot down a plane full of Iranian civilians, then Tehran has every incentive to assume we're lying in negotiations. It also has strong incentives to try to build a nuclear weapon, or at least get close enough to deter the American invasion that it feared was coming in 1988 and perhaps again in 2002 with President George W. Bush's "axis of evil" speech. Americans might not know about Flight 655. But Iranians surely do -- they can hardly forget about it. © The Washington Post Company http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/16/the-forgotten-story-of-iran-air-flight-655/ Iran Time Four Good Reasons Why Iran Doesn’t Trust America A brief survey of justifiable Iranian resentment By Michael Crowley @CrowleyTIME Oct. 15, 2013 One basic obstacle for the new round of talks over Iran’s nuclear program that open today will be America’s basic distrust of the Iranian regime. Before striking any deal with Tehran, the Obama Administration will have to gauge whether a country where hostility toward the U.S. has been a core political theme since 1979 is acting in good faith. That could be a hard notion to swallow, given that some Iranian leaders still call America the Great Satan, and that Iran still celebrates the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran with a national holiday. But as Iran and Western negotiators sit down in Geneva today, it’s worth considering some of the reasons why Iran bears such animus toward America, and why cutting a deal with the U.S. won’t be easy for Tehran either. Many of those reasons have to do with the basic Islamic fundamentalist philosophy of Iran’s clerical leaders, to be sure. But as the nuclear talks move forward, it’s worth remembering that the U.S. bears some blame for the poisoned state of the relationship between the two countries. Consider the way Bill Clinton — then seeking a thaw with Iran — once put it. “It may be that the Iranian people have been taught to hate or distrust the United States or the West on the grounds that we are infidels and outside the faith,” Clinton said in April 1999. “I think it is important to recognize, however, that Iran … has been the subject of quite a lot of abuse from various Western nations. And I think sometimes it’s quite important to tell people, ‘Look, you have a right to be angry’” at things the U.S. has done. Here are four of them: 1. The Coup and the Shah Iran’s 1979 revolution overthrew a monarch who had become despised for his corruption and political repression. The Iranian Shah was also known as a puppet of the U.S., thanks in part to his installation by a 1953 coup widely believed to be the handiwork of the CIA, after the Eisenhower Administration grew alarmed that Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was drifting into the Soviet orbit. “It it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright conceded in a 2000 address, which also acknowledged that the U.S. gave “sustained backing” to the Shah’s regime, which, she admitted, “brutally repressed political dissent.” In what may have been a gesture of contrition, the CIA finally admitted to its role on the coup’s 60th anniversary this summer. But all is not yet forgiven in Tehran, where Iran’s parliament recently gave preliminary approval for suing the U.S. in international court for staging the coup. 2. Iraq and Chemical Weapons When Iran fought a brutal eight-year war against Iraq from 1980 to 1988, Tehran felt that it was also fighting a shadow enemy: the U.S. Saddam Hussein was sustained for much of the war by arms, money and intelligence assistance that flowed from Washington. Most infuriating for some Iranians, the U.S. tolerated and even aided Saddam’s repeated large-scale chemical attacks on Iranian forces using sarin and mustard gas. By some accounts, America actually assisted Iraq with intelligence like satellite imagery and maps in advance of what Washington knew would be gas attacks. (To Iranians aware of that history, Barack Obama’s outrage over his “red line” in Syria had a hypocritical ring.) “Aspects of U.S. policy toward Iraq during its conflict with Iran appear now to have been regrettably shortsighted,” Albright said in 2000. 3. Iran Air 655 In the summer of 1988, American warships were patrolling the Strait of Hormuz to protect commercial shipping, including oil tankers, during the Iran-Iraq conflict. It was perilous duty: a year earlier, an Iraqi jet had mistakenly fired a missile into a U.S. Navy ship, killing 37 Americans. And on the morning of July 3, a helicopter from the Navy guided-missile cruiser U.S.S. Vincennes came under fire from Iranian patrol boats. With the Vincennes in pursuit of the Iranians, Iran Air flight 655 departed from Bandar Abbas in southern Iran, en route to Dubai. As the Airbus jet headed toward the Vincennes, the Americans misidentified the Iranian jet as a hostile fighter — Iranian fighter jets sometimes also took off from Bandar Abbas — and the Vincennes fired two surface-to-air missiles that destroyed the plane. Two hundred and seventy four passengers and 16 crew were killed, nearly all of them Iranians. The U.S. paid $61.8 million to the Iranian victims’ families. But America has never admitted responsibility or apologized. And Iran has not forgotten: Iranian state television aired a documentary on the 25th anniversary of the tragedy this summer. An official Iranian government Twitter account noted, “Our civilian plane was shot down by U.S. warship in Persian Gulf, killing all 300. They awarded its captain medal of honor.” (Two top officers on the Vincennes were later awarded medals, though not for the Iran Air incident.) And an official Facebook page for Iran’s Supreme Leader posted this hard-to-forget image. 4. The ‘Axis of Evil’ and Regime Change In the late 1990s Iran and the U.S. made efforts at a diplomatic thaw. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the two countries cooperated against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and some diplomats saw a chance for a breakthrough. But in his January 2002 State of the Union address, George W. Bush described Iran as a member — along with Iraq and North Korea — of an “axis of evil” that threatened the civilized world. The line surprised and outraged Iran. According to Ryan Crocker, then a U.S. diplomat in Kabul who was engaged in talks with Iranian officials, it crushed momentum toward a rapprochement. “We were just that close,” Crocker recently told the New Yorker. “One word in one speech changed history.” Some current and former U.S. officials call that an overstatement. But more serious for Iran than Bush’s “evil” insult is the belief that Washington’s goal is not simply to stop Iran’s nuclear program, but to replace the country’s Islamist regime entirely. Prominent figures like GOP Senator John McCain have openly called for a U.S.-backed regime change, an idea that President Obama felt compelled to address in his Sept. 24 speech to the U.N.: “We are not seeking regime change” Obama assured. Whether Iran buys that assurance is critical to whether a nuclear deal can be struck. Iran’s leaders are well aware, after all, that Saddam might still be in power if he’d had a bomb. Time, http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/15/four-good-reasons-why-iran-doesnt-trust-america/#ixzz2iBuWuxXH NEWSWEEK SEA OF LIES The inside story of how an America naval vessel blundered into an attack on Iran Air 655 at the height of tensions during the Iran-Iraq War, and how the Pentagon tried to cover its tracks after 290 innocent civilians died. Newsweek, July 13, 1992 Exclusive -- On July 3, 1988, and American warship shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290 civilians. This is the true story of how it happened -- and how the Pentagon tried to cover up the tragic blunder. The modern navy has many ladders. Its officers can earn their stripes at sea or in the air. They can prosper by navigating the shoals of technocracy. But the one sure path to glory is the same as in the Roman times: victory at sea. Sailing in harm's way is a matter of vocation. Capt. Will Rogers III, USN, spent his career preparing for combat. Winning his commission in December 1965 at the age of 27, Rogers came late to the navy, but he made up for lost time with a gung-ho attitude and - after a spell on the staff of the chief of naval operations - friends in high places. In 1987, Rogers won command of the navy's most prized high-tech warship, an Aegis cruiser. The billion-dollar Vincennes seemed a sure ticket to flag rank. But Rogers, who like many peacetime naval officers had never been under fire, longed to see action. On July 3, 1988 Captain Rogers got his wish. He sought out and engaged the enemy in a sea battle in the Persian Gulf. From the captain's chair of a warship combat information center, he made life-and -death decisions in the heat of conflict. It was the moment he had yearned and trained for, and it should have been the apex of his life in the service. Only it wasn't much of a battle. Rogers had blundered into a murky, half-secret confrontation between the United States and Iran that the politicians did not want to declare and the top brass was not eager to wage. The enemy was not a disciplined naval force but ragtag irregulars in lightly armed speedboats. Fighting them with an Aegis cruiser was like shooting at rabbits with a radar-guided missile. And when it was over, the only confirmed casualties were innocent civilians: 290 passengers and crew in an Iranian Airbus that Captain Rogers's men mistook for an enemy warplane. The destruction Iran Air Flight 655 was an appalling human tragedy. It damaged America's world standing. It almost surely caused Iran to delay the release of the American hostages in Lebanon. It may have given the mullahs a motive for revenge and provoked Tehran into playing a role in the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103. For the navy, it was a professional disgrace. The navy's most expensive surface warship, designed to track and shoot down as many as 200 incoming missiles at once, had blown apart an innocent civilian airliner in its first time in combat. What's more, NEWSWEEK has learned , the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters a the time of the shoot-down - in clear violation of international law. The top Pentagon brass understood from the beginning that if the whole truth about the Vincennes came out, it would means months of humiliating headlines. So the U.S. Navy did what all navies do after terrible blunders at sea: it told lies and handed out medals. This is the story of a naval fiasco, of an overeager captain, panicked crewmen, and the cover-up that followed. A NEWSWEEK investigation, joined by ABC News's "Nightline," encountered months of stone-walling by senior naval officers. Some of the evasions were products of simple denial; a number of the seamen and officers aboard the Vincennes that morning in July 1988 are still in therapy today, wrestling with guilt. But the Pentagon's official investigation into the incident, the Fogarty Report, is a pastiche of omissions, half-truths and outright deceptions. It was a cover-up approved at the top, by Adm. William Crowe, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Captain Rogers insisted to "Nightline" last week that he had made the "proper decision." He had opened fire only to protect his ship and crew, he said. But drawing on declassified documents, videotapes and audiotapes from the ships involved in the incident, and well over 100 interviews, NEWSWEEK has pieced together an account that belies the skipper's stoic defense. It is almost a parable for an era of "limited" warfare, with its blurry rules of engagement and its lethal technology in frightened young hands. It is as well an age-old story of hubris, of a warrior who wanted war too much. A MURKY MORNING At 6:33 local time on the Vincennes, on the morning of July 2, the phone buzzed in Will Rogers's cramped sleeping quarters. The captain was shaving. Already, just two hours after the sunrise, the 100-degree heat of the sun was overwhelming the ship's air- conditioning systems. Fine-grained sand whipped across the gulf from the Arabian Desert, creating a yellowish haze. Rogers picked up the phone. It was the duty officer in the ship's combat information center, the nerve center two decks below Rogers's sea cabin: "Skipper, you better come down. It sounds like the Montgomery has her nose in a beehive." Some 50 miles to the northeast, the U.S. Navy frigate Montgomery was coming through the western entrance of the Strait of Hormuz. Everyday, tankers bearing half the world's imported oil wend their way through the strait, only 32 miles wide at its choke point. The Iran-Iraq War had turned the strait into a gauntlet. Gunboats of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, based on the islands of Hengam and Abu Musa, had been attacking tankers and merchantmen bound to and from Kuwait, Iraq's main ally in the war. Anxious to keep Kuwait's oil flowing, the United States had agreed to provide escort to Kuwait tankers registered under the U.S. flag. On this July morning, the Montgomery spotted a half-dozen Revolutionary Guard launches venturing out from the island hideouts. On this own, Rogers decided to enter the fray. At 6:33 the Vincennes log records, he ordered "all ahead flank." The cruiser's four massive gas-turbine engines cranked up to 80,000 horsepower and sent the warship smashing through the waves at 30 knots. By 6:50 - according to the official version of events later offered by the navy - the Montgomery had spotted 13 Iranians gunboats in the strait. Several were said be milling about near a Liberian tanker called the Stoval. At 7:11, the Montgomery reported hearing "five to seven" explosions coming from the vicinity of the tanker. It was only when the radio crackled with the report of these mysterious explosions that the fleet headquarters in Bahrain thought to call the Vincennes. Rear Admiral Anthony Less, the commander of the Joint Taskforce-Middle East, ordered the cruiser northeast to support the Montgomery. The Bahrain command wasn't interested in drawing the Vincennes into action, however. Admiral Less merely wanted to dispatch the Vincennes's helicopter on a reconnaissance mission. So Capt. Richard McKenna, Less's chief of surface warfare, relayed what he thought were clear orders to Rogers: send your helo north to investigate, but keep your ship farther south, in case more boats emerge from the Revolutionary Guard base on Abu Musa. At 7:22, the Vincennes's SH-60B Seahawk helicopter lifted off and sped north; within 20 minutes it was circling over the Iranian gunboats. The pilot of Ocean Lord 25, Lt. Mark Collier, found the gunboats hovering around a German cargo vessel, the Dhaulagiri. They weren't shooting. It was a common harassment tactic. In Bahrain, as he listened to the radio traffic, Capt. Richard Watkins, Admiral Lee's chief of staff, decided that the situation was, as he later put it, "defusing." He left the flag plot to do some paperwork. But aboard the Vincennes, things were just heating up. With a blast of the klaxon, Rogers sent his crew to battle stations and ordered the small arms stations along the sides of his ship into readiness against small-craft attack. The Vincennes had a dubious reputation inside the U.S. fleet in the gulf. Officers on other ships sarcastically referred to the ship as "Robocruiser." In deskbound war games in San Diego, just before the Vincennes left for the gulf, Rogers consistently pushed beyond the exercise's rules of engagement, according to another participant. At a Subic Bay, Philippines, briefing on the rules of engagement in the Persian Gulf, the most senior officer attending from the Vincennes was a lieutenant. In early June, Rogers infuriated Capt. Roger Hattan, the commander of the frigate USS Sides, by ordering him to close in on an Iranian warship in a way he deemed provocative. Hattan refused - and fleet headquarters in Bahrain backed him up. By early July, Rogers was widely regarded as "trigger happy," according to several high-ranking officers. He was unquestionably eager to get at the gunboats trailing after the Mongtomery, Onward the Vincennes charges, past the German merchantman (which nonchalantly flashed an "A-OK" signal) until it drew abreast of the Montgomery at 8:38. By now Oman's coast guard was on the radio, ordering the Revolutionary Guard boats to head home. The Omanis wanted the Vincennes to leave, too. "U.S. Navy warship," an Omani officer intoned over the radio, "maneuvering at speeds up to 30 knots are not in accordance with innocent passage. Please leave Omani water." By chance, a navy cameraman named Rudy Pahoyo was aboard the Vincennes that day, shooting videotape on the bridge. His video captures the officers' response to the Omani request. They smirked at each other, and did not bother to reply. The Omanis weren't the only ones who wanted the Vincennes out of the area. At 8:40, Captain McKenna in Bahrain returned to his command center and was startled to see that the Vincennes was on the top of the Omani peninsula - about 40 miles north from where he believed he had ordered Rogers to remain. In some irritation, McKena called Rogers and asked what he was doing. Rogers reported that he was supporting his helo, and that he'd been having communication problems. Unimpressed, McKenna told him to head back toward Abu Musa. "You want me to what?" Rogers bristled over the circuit, McKenna could hear chortles of laughter from the Vincennes combat information center. Now angry, McKenna delivered a flat order: the Vincennes must come south - and the Montgomery too. He was furious at the attitude of the captain and officers of the hotshot billion-dollar cruiser. "Aegis arrogance," he muttered to himself. Rogers grudgingly obeyed the order - but he left his helo behind to watch the Iranian boats. It was to be a fatal mistake. In the cockpit of Ocean Lord 25, pilot Mark Collier could not resist the temptation to follow the gunboats north, as they retreated toward their island lair. He later explained that he wanted to drop down and see how many men were aboard the launches, and how they were armed. He almost found out the hard way. As he banked around them, Collier saw what he later describes as "eight to 10 bursts of light" and "sparks...just a big spark" in the sky 100 yards from his helo. He though for a moment it was the sun glinting off of a boat, but then he saw puffs of smoke. "Did you see that?" Collier, called out to Petty Officer Scott Zilge. "Yeah," Zilge replied. "Let's get out of here. That was an airburst - antiaircraft fire." As Colier dropped the helo to the safety of 100 feet, the aircraft's commander, Lt. Roger Huff, sitting in the co-pilot's seat, radioed the Vincennes: "Trinity Sword. This is Ocean Lord 25. We're taking fire. Executing evasion." In the combat information center, this was all Rogers needed. At last the gunboats had committed a hostile act. Under the navy's rules of engagement in the gulf, Rogers could order hot pursuit. "General Quarters," he snapped. "Full power." Once again, the Vincennes forged north at 30 knots. Meanwhile, some 200 miles to the southeast, on station just inside the mouth of the Gulf of Oman, lay the aircraft carrier USS Forestall. In his flag plot, Rear Admiral Leighton (Snuffy) Smith, commander of Carrier Battle Group 6, heard the Vincennes's breathless news that its helo had been fired upon, and that the cruiser was pursuing the attackers. At 9:14, Smith ordered the launch of two F-14 fighters and two A-7 attack planes. By 9:28, they had blasted off from the carrier deck. The planes were not to jump onto the fight: that was a sure recipe for "blue on blue" as the navy terms U.S. warships shooting down U.S. aircraft. Rather the warplanes headed for Point Alpha, a rendezvous point 50 miles outside the Strait of Hormuz. Once there, they would be less than 80 miles - seven minutes flying time - from the Vincennes. But Rogers was not thinking about air support at that moment. He was intent on the Iranian gunboats swirling ahead. The task as not easy. Aegis cruisers were not designed for small-craft battles. They were built to take on the Soviet Navy in the North Atlantic. The Aegis's ultra-high tech radar system is designed to track scores of incoming missiles and aircraft in a major sea battle. The Iranian launches were so small that as they bobbed on the swell, they flickered in and out of the Vincennes's surface search radar, showing up not as separate targets but as a single symbol on the radar screen. Impatiently, Rogers turned to his tactical action officer, Lt. Cmdr. Victor Guillory. "Can the bridge see anything?" he demand. The bridge reported that it could occasionally glimpse the wakes of a few boats as flashes through the haze. At 9:39, still lacking a clear target, Rogers radioed fleet headquarters and announced his intention to open fire. In Bahrain, Admiral Lee's staff was uneasy. Captain Watkins quizzed Rogers on his position and the bearing of the gunboats. Finally, he asked "Are the contacts clearing the area?" The question could have been a show stopper. Judging from later testimony, few in the Vincennes CIC that day believed that the ship was under attack. In fact, the gunboats were just slowly milling about - evidently under the impression that they were safe in their own territorial waters. Through the haze, it is doubtful that the low-slung launches could have seen the Vincennes. Rogers, however, continued to argue for permission to shoot. On the bridge, the lookouts reported that though their giant "Big Eyes" - they could see the launches' wake more clearly now, turning randomly this way and that. A couple seemed to be heading in the direction of the Vincennes. For Rogers, that was enough. He reported to Bahrain that he gunboats were gathering speed and showing hostile intent. Again, he announced his intention to open fire. Aboard his command ship, Less finally concurred. The time was 9:41. On the bridge, the chief quartermaster had just called out that the Vincennes had now crossed the 12- mile limit off the coast - into Iranians waters. the Vincennes was operating in violation of international law, but Rogers was not paying attention to juridical niceties. Commander Guillory ordered the Vincennes's guns to fire when ready. Two minutes later the ship's five-inch gun opened up on its first target, a launch 8,000 yards away. Some 25 miles to the east, aboard the frigate USS Sides, Capt. David Carlson listened and watched Rogers's maneuvering with mounting incredulity. "Why doesn't he just push his rudder over and get his ass out of there?" muttered one of the frigate's officers. When Carlson heard Less assent to Rogers's request to open fire, Carlson turned to his number two, Lt. Commander Gary Erickson, and gave two thumbs down. Carlson thought there was going to be a massacre. He had no idea. FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER Some 55 miles to the northeast, at precisely 9:45:30, Iran Air Capt. Mohsen Rezaian announced to the tower at Bandar Abbas airport that his A300B2 Airbus was ready for takeoff. A minute later, he throttled up his two General Electric CF6 engines and lifted the airline into the haze. His course would take the plane and its human cargo southwest to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. Though Rezaian could not know it, his flight path would also go almost directly over the USS Vincennes. At that moment Captain Rogers was sitting in his own cockpit - the darkened, windowless combat information center of the Vincennes, directing a sea battle by remote control. To the uninitiated, the CIC of an Aegis cruiser looks like a luxury video arcade. Rows of operators hunch over radio consoles, each monitoring one element of the battle. All the information from their screens is then integrated by the mighty Aegis computer into, literally, the "big picture" - thrown up as symbols on maps displayed on four giant 42-inch-by-42-inch screens at the head of the room where the captain and his two "battle mangers" sit. The $400 million Aegis system can track every aircraft within 300 miles. Its computers tag each contact with the symbol for "friendly," "hostile" or "unidentified" (chart, page 32). In war at sea, Aegis is expected to seek and identify all airborne threats to an entire carrier battle group, to display the speed and direction of each, and to rank them by the danger they present. Aegis is so powerful that it can not only track up to 200 incoming enemy aircraft or missiles, but also command missiles to shoot them down . In the full-scale war against the Soviet Union for which Aegis was designed, the captain and the crew would have had little choice but to switch the system to automatic - and duck. In the cramped and ambiguous environment of the Persian gulf, however, Rogers chose to rely on his own judgment and the combat skills of his crew. Those skills had never been tested. Indeed, some experts question whether even the best-trained crew could handle, under stress, the torrent of data that Aegis would pour on them. A 1988 Government Accounting Office report accused the navy of rigging Aegis sea trials by tipping the crews off to the precise nature the "threats" they were to face. The navy could not afford to risk failure in the trails for fear that Congress would stop funding the Aegis program. Some of the Vincennes's most senior officers were less than adept at computerized warfare. Under normal procedures, Captain Rogers rarely touched his console. He could have delegated the battle against the launches to Guillory, his tactical officer for surface warfare. But Rogers didn't entirely trust Guillory, a former personnel officer who was uncomfortable with computers (His fellow officers in personnel snickered because , one said, instead of plotting job changes by computer spreadsheet, he used his computer screen as a surface for "self-stick" notes.) In essence, the skipper pushed Guillory aside and ran the battle himself. Rogers set the range on the "big picture" display screen in front of him to 16 miles, to focus on the gunboats. He was oblivious to anything beyond. At 9:47, the Vincennes's powerful Spy radar picked up a distant blip - a plane lifting off from the airport at Bander Abbas. The blip was in fact Iran Air's Flight 655 on its twice-a-week milk run to Dubai. But since Bander Abbas is a military as well as a civilian airport, any flights out over the gulf was automatically "tagged" by the navy ships as "assumed hostile." At his computer console in the Vincennes's CIC, Petty Office Andrew Anderson saw the blip for an incoming bogey go up on one side of the big blue screens. Anderson's job in "Air Alley," the row of operators who handled air warfare, was to identify any air traffic within range of the ship. He told the Aegis system to query the incoming plane: Identify, Friend or Foe? By standard practice, all planes carry a transponder that automatically answers the IFF query with Mode 1 or 2 (military), or Mode 3 (civilian). Anderson got a Mode 3. "Commair" (commercial airliner) he figured. He reached beside his console for the navy's listing of commercial flights over the gulf. But as he scanned the schedule, he missed Flight 655. Apparently, in the darkness of the CIC, its arc lights flickered every time the Vincennes's five-inch gun fired off another round at the hapless Iranian gunboats, he was confused by the gulf's four different time zones. Anderson turned to the petty officer next to him in Air Alley, John Leach, and wondered aloud if the blip could be an Iranian warplane - an F-4 or F-14 perhaps? Their boss in Air Alley, Lt. Clay Zocher, overheard the two enlisted men talking, Zocher was already nervous. He had stood on this watch only twice before during General Quarters and he'd never mastered the computer routines for his console. He was worrying at the moment about an Iranian P-3 patrol plane that was making its way down the Iranian coastline. Could the P-3 be coordinating an attack on the Vincennes with the unidentified bogey? Zocher decided to pass the chatter in Air Alley up the chain of command to his boss, Lt. Cmdr. Scott Lustig, the Vincennes' tactical commander for air warfare. Lustig ordered Zocher to flash the incoming plane a warning: "Unidentified aircraft...You are approaching a United States naval warship in international waters." It was the standard challenge, broadcast over the international distress frequencies routinely monitored by military and commercial aircraft. Briefly, Lustig considered another option. On the display screen in front of him Lustig could see that the Forestall's F-14s where circling just five minutes away. There was enough time - barely - to call them in to check out the bogey. The Forestall, too, had seen the blip on its radar screens. In the air, the F-14 pilots were itching to close in; a bogey out of Iran, heading for an American warship, are a rare opportunity for combat-hungry aviators. Aboard the carrier, Admiral Smith held them off. His staff was telling him that the blip was most likely a commercial airliner. But Smith stuck to the navy rule that the captain on the spot makes the decisions. He decided to let Rogers fight his own battle. Aboard the Vincennes, it was now 9:49. Rogers was totally consumed with his fire fight against the gunboats. He was shouting for the five-inch-gun crew to load faster, and ordered hard-right rudder to bring his stern gun to bear. The ship shuddered and heeled to starboard. Military theorists write about "friction", the inevitability of error, accident and miscalculation in the stress of combat. The architects of modern warfare have tried to use the technology to minimize battlefield blindness. But the electronic babble in a combat information center can be just as confusing. Officers and men communicate by headphones over several channels, with left and right ears usually listening to different circuits. Rogers and his key officers in the CIC were all on the same circuit - but so was half of the ship. Ingenious crewmen had discovered they could tap into the "command net" to hear the action over their Sony Walkmans. But in so doing, they drained power and the volume faded. Whenever it got too low, Lustig had to yell "Switch" so everyone could turn to an alternate command circuit. Then the hackers would switch to that channel, too. Over this erratic "net," a few seconds after 9:50, someone called out that the incoming plane was a "possible Astro" - the code word for an F-14. No one was ever able to find out who. In Air Alley, the operators thought the word came from the technicians in the ship's electronic-warfare suite. The technicians thought the warning came from Air Alley. Galvanized by this warning, Petty Officer Anderson again beamed out an IFF query. Ominously, the response he know got back was different. Upon his console flashed Mode 2: military aircraft. Only much later did the investigators figure out that Anderson had forgotten to reset the range on his IFF device. The Mode 2 did not come from the Airbus, climbing peacefully above the gulf, but from an Iranian military plane, probably a military transport, still on the runway back in Bander Abbas. "Possible Astro!" Anderson sang out, at a moment of near chaos in the CIC. It was 9:51. Having swung full circle, Rogers was now bringing his reloaded forward gun to bear on the Iranian launches. The gun fired off 11 rounds - and jammed. The skipper again ordered the rudder hard over. The stern swung around, and in the CIC, papers and books toppled of consoles as the ship heeled over. At his station to Rogers's left, Lustig looked at his screen. The incoming plane was 32 miles away. What do we do? he asked Rogers. His commanding officer was not too overwhelmed by the Iranian speedboats to forget the woeful example of Capt. Glenn Brindel, the skipper of the USS Stark. A year earlier, Brindel had been in the head when his ship was struck and almost sunk by a pair of anti-ship missiles fired by the pilot of a lone Iraqi Mirage F-1. Rogers decided that the Vincennes fire control radar would "paint" any possible hostile plane that got within 30 miles. At 20 miles, the Vincennes would shoot it down. Rogers was not absolutely sure that his ship did face an enemy warplane . The plane seemed too high - some 7,000 feet - for an attack approach. At his rear, another officer, Lt. William Mountford, warned "possible commair." Three more times, the warnings went out: "Iranian fighter...you are steering into danger and are subject to United States naval defensive measures." Then something happened that psychologists call "scenario fulfillment" - you see what you expect. Petty Officers Anderson and Leach both began singing out that the aircraft, now definitively tagged on the big screen as an F-14, was descending and picking up speed. The tapes of the CIC's data later showed no such thing. Anderson's screen showed that the plane was travelling 380 knots at 12,000 feet and climbing. Yet Anderson was shouting out that the speed was 455 knots, the altitude 7,800 feet and descending. Rogers had to make a decision. An F-14 could do little damage to the Vincennes. The version that Washington sold to its ally the Shah of Iran in the early 1970's was purely a fighter plane, not configured to strike surface targets. Still, if Rogers meant to attack it with a missile, he had to fire before the aircraft closed much within 10 miles. At 9:54:05, with the plane 11 miles away, Rogers reached up and switched the firing key to "free" the ship's SM-2 antiaircraft missiles. In Air Alley, Zocher had been given the green light to fire. The young lieutenant was so undone, however, that he pressed the wrong keys on his console 23 times. A veteran petty officer had to lean over and hit the right ones. In the CIC, the lights dimmed momentarily, like a prison's during an electrocution. Some 10 miles away, Captain Rezaian of Iran Air was calmly reporting to Bander Abbas that he had reached his first check-point crossing the gulf. He heard none of the Vincennes warnings. His four radio bandwidths were taken up with air-control chatter. "Have a nice day," the tower radioed. "Thank you, good day," replied the pilot. Thirty seconds later, the first missile blew the left wing off his aircraft. On the Vincennes's bridge, cameraman Rudy Pahayo was still filming. His audio captured a babble of voices: "Oh, dead!" "Coming down!" "We had him dead on!" One voice commanded: "Hold the noise down, knock it off!" Another shouted, "Direct hit!" then a lookout came in from the wing of the bridge. The target couldn't have been an F-14, he said. The wreckage falling from the sky, he murmured to the Vincennes's executive officer, Cmdr. Richard Foster, is bigger than that. A few miles away, on the bridge of the Montgomery, crewmen gaped as a large wing of a commercial airliner, with an engine pod still attached, plummeted into the sea. Aboard the USS Sides, 19 miles away, Captain Carlson was told that his top radar man reckoned the plane had been a commercial airliner. Carlson almost vomited, he said later. On the Vincennes, there was an eerie silence. The five-inch guns ceased their pounding. None of the Revolutionary Guard boats had come within 5,000 yards of the cruiser. No one was sure how many had been hit; perhaps one, perhaps more. Rogers gave the order to head south, out of Iranian waters. ANATOMY OF A COVER-UP In Washington, almost 11 hours later, at 1:30 pm EST, Adm. William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stepped to the podium in the Pentagon press room. Formal in his summer whites, the admiral told reporters there had been a terrible accident. Stressing that the information was incomplete, relying on what he had been told by Captain Rogers, Crowe said that the Iranian airliner was flying outside the commercial air corridor and had failed to respond to repeated warnings. The plane had been descending and picking up speed when it closed in on the Vincennes. Rogers had only been protecting his ship. A large map showed the position of the Vincennes at the time of the shoot-down. It was well within international waters. At the United Nations, the Iranians compared the tragedy to the Soviet shoot-down of Korea Air Lines 007 in 1983. The White House decided that Vice President George Bush should defend the United States before the U.N. Security Council. The job of preparing the case fell to Richard Williamson, the assistant secretary of state for international organizations. He found it exceedingly difficult to get answers out of Crowe's staff, who were handling the affair at the Pentagon. Suspicious, he warned the vice president's chief of staff, Craig Fuller, to be very careful about committing Bush to any facts. Fuller's reaction was that he never trusted the Pentagon anyway. Bush's speech focused on the need to end the Iran-Iraq War. But what facts it did include were wrong. The vice-president claimed that the Vincennes had rushed to defend a merchantman under attack by Iran. By July 14, the day of Bush's speech, the Pentagon knew the truth but failed to share it with the vice president. The tapes of the Vincennes Aegis system, with its combat and navigational data reached the United States on July 5 and what they showed was reported to the Pentagon on July 10. The Vincennes had been in Iranian territorial waters. The Iranian airliner was well within the commercial air corridor and had been ascending, not descending. There was no beleaguered merchant vessel. The cover-up was compounded by the official report on the incident. On July 3, Crowe chose Rear Adm. William Fogarty , a senior officer on the staff of Central Command, which controls military operations in the Middle East, to investigate. Crowe sent his own legal advisor, Capt. Richard DeBobes, to sit at Fogarty's side at Centcom headquarters in Tampa as he prepared his report. The investigation was notable for the questions it failed to ask. The commanders on the carrier Forestall were never interviewed; nor was Captain McKenna, the surface warfare commander in Bahrain whose orders Rogers ignored. McKenna's staff mailed a tape of his tense exchange with Rogers before the sea battle, but never received a response. The report released to the public did not include any chart of navigational data to show the Vincennes' position at the time of the shoot-down. The map displayed by Fogarty when he briefed Congress in September placed the Vincennes and its helicopters well clear of Iranian waters and erroneously reported the position of the Montgomery. Fogarty produced stills from the Aegis-generated map of events displayed in the Vincennes's CIC. According to three sources on board the Vincennes that day, the real map had shown Hengam Island, Iranian territory less than nine miles from the Vincennes at the time of the shootdown. On the frames shown by Fogarty, the island was simply deleted - miraculously placing the Vincennes safely in international waters once more. Asked about the Forestall's aircraft by inquiring lawmakers, Fogarty put them 180 miles, then 250 miles away, even though those same Aegis stills show them clearly tagged only 75 miles from the Vincennes. Most mysteriously, Fogarty told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Vincennes had been racing to rescue a Liberian tanker, the Stoval, that morning. There is no such tanker reported in any ship registry. According to two sources, including a naval officer involved in the investigation, the Stoval was a decoy, a phantom conjured up by fake radio messages to lure out the Iranian gunboats. According to these sources, the Iranian aggression that Vice President Bush had so vigorously decried at the United Nations had in fact been in the trial run for an American sting operation. The navy might have gotten away with all of these deceptions had it not been for the slow grinding of international law. A lawsuit by the Iranian government has now forced Washington to admit, grudgingly, that the Vincennes was actually in Iranian waters - although Justice Department pleadings still claim the cruiser was forced there in self- defense. The admission is contained in fine print in legal briefs; it has never received public attention until Crowe, confronted with the evidence, conceded the truth last week on "Nightline." Crowe denies any cover-up; if mistakes were made, he told NEWSWEEK, they were "below my pay grade." Rogers continues to insist that his ship was in international waters. In the end, of course, Will Rogers will not get an admiral's two-inch gold stripe. He instructed navy captains in San Diego for two years before retiring honorably in August 1991. The men of the Vincennes were all awarded combat-action ribbons. Commander Lustig, the air-warfare coordinator, even won the navy's Commendation Medal for "heroic achievement," his "ability to maintain his poise and confidence under fire," enabled him to "quickly and precisely complete the firing procedure." Given the target he was firing at, the commendation seems rather surreal. But so was the atmosphere in the Vincennes CIC that July morning, and the attempt, in months and years that followed, to cover up what happened there. John Barry is NEWSWEEK's national security correspondent. Roger Charles is a retired Marine colonel and military intelligence officer who is now a freelance writer in Washington. Also reporting were Daniel Pederson in London, Christopher Dickey in Paris, Theresa Waldrop in Bonn, Donna Foote in Los Angeles, Tony Clifton in New York and Peter Annin in Houston. Source Newsweek http://alt-f4.org/img/seaoflies.html
