The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
USS Vincennes, then that the plane was diving towards the American warship and that its identification transponder was not working. Captain Will Rogers the Third, the captain of the Vincennes, believed – according to the Pentagon – that he was under attack by an Iranian F-14 Tomcat fighter aircraft. But the American story began to crumble when the Italian navy and another American warship, the frigate Sides, confirmed that the plane was climbing – not diving to attack – at the time of the missile strike.
So the story changed again. The Pentagon now said that the plane’s transponder might not have been giving out correct signals. Later, this was subtly changed; the transponder was identifying the Airbus A300B2 as a military aircraft, because the Iranians had earlier changed the coding when they used the same plane to take troops to the war front – and had forgotten to revert to the civilian code afterwards. Why the Iranians would have used the Airbus to conceal their troop movements from the Iraqis but blown their own cover by obligingly giving the aircraft a military identification that would reveal its true purpose was never explained by the Pentagon. The all-important issue was to justify the frightfulness of what had happened, to talk of the ‘tragedy’ of the passenger jet’s destruction. Tragedies are forgivable. The advantage for the Americans was that the Iranian side of the story would never be fully told – because those most intimately involved were all dead.
In Dubai, I went straight to the British air traffic controllers who had so often helped me during the ‘tanker war’. They had heard the radio traffic over the Gulf on that fatal Sunday morning – and their story was horrifying. For weeks, they told me, they had been appalled at the apparent lack of training and efficiency of US naval personnel challenging civilian aircraft. The pilots of airliners on scheduled flights down the Gulf from Kuwait were being repeatedly and aggressively challenged by American warship crews who seemed not to know that they were cruising beneath established air lanes.
In one incident – well known to the controllers but kept secret from the press – a US frigate had stationed itself off the Emirates coast and radio-challenged every civilian flight approaching Dubai International Airport. In desperation, the British duty controller at the airport called the US embassy in Abu Dhabi and told American diplomats to instruct the ship to move away because it was ‘a danger to civil aviation’. Civilian helicopter pilots off the coast had often complained that American warships challenged them on the wrong radio frequencies. The controllers in Dubai could hear some of the US navy’s traffic. ‘Robert, the Americans knew at once that they’d hit a passenger airliner,’ one of them told me quietly. ‘There was another American warship close by – we have its coding as FFG-14. Its crew reported seeing people falling at great speed out of the sky.’
I sat behind the Dubai control tower thinking about this. Yes, the passengers would all fall out of the sky like that, over a wide area, together, in clumps, in bits, from 10,000 feet it seemed. I could imagine the impact with the sea, the spouts of water, some of the passengers – no doubt – still fully conscious all the way down. Three days later, in the emergency Bandar Abbas mortuary, I would look at Fatima Faidazaida and realise with horror that she must have been alive as she fell from the heavens, clutching her baby as she tumbled and spilled out of the sky in the bright summer sun, her fellow passengers and chunks of the Airbus and burning fuel oil cascading around her. And she held on to her baby, knowing – could she have known? – that she must die.
From Dubai that Sunday night, I sent three reports to The Times, the longest dispatch a detailed account of the record of the US navy’s constant misidentification of civil aircraft over the Gulf and the near-panic that the air-traffic controllers had heard over the airwaves from the American warships. The Vincennes had claimed it was under attack by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in motor boats at the time it destroyed the airliner. I knew that US warships carried the timetables of civil airliners in their ‘combat information centres’ (CICs). Had Captain Rogers and his crew not had time to look at their copy? Iran Air flight IR655 flew to Dubai every day from Bandar Abbas. Why should it become a target on 3 July?
Captain Rogers himself said that he would have to live for ever with the burden of his own conscience at what he had done. Four years later, he would publish his own account of the destruction of the Airbus. *This would include a vivid description of an attack on the Vincennes by Iranian motor boats, the first alert of an aircraft taking off from Bandar Abbas – a military as well as civil airport – and the information that the aircraft was issuing two transponder codes, one used by passenger aircraft, the other a military code ‘known to have been used by Iranian F-14 fighters’. The plane was also being monitored by the frigate USS Sides, naval coding FFG-14 – this was the ship whose crew, according to the Dubai traffic controllers, would see bodies falling out of the sky.
Before the Airbus was 40 kilometres from his warship Rogers had sent a routinely worded warning – but addressed it to a fighter aircraft: ‘Iranian aircraft … fighter on course two-one-one, speed 360 knots, altitude 9,000 feet, this is USNWS [United States Navy warship] bearing two-zero-two from you, request you change course immediately to two-seven-zero, if you maintain current course you are standing into danger and subject to USN defensive measures …’ Rogers says he asked for further identification of the aircraft when it was 25 kilometres from his vessel. At 9.54 and 22 seconds in the morning, he launched his two missiles. Twenty-one seconds later, they exploded against Rezaian’s passenger jet, which vanished from the Vincennes’s radar screen. ‘The bridge reported seeing the flash of missile detonation through the haze,’ Rogers wrote. ‘There was a spontaneous cheer, a release of tension from the men.’ But crewmen on another US warship would moments later see a large wing of a commercial airliner, with an engine pod still attached, crashing into the sea.
Later investigation would reveal that staff of the CIC on the Sides correctly identified the Airbus’s commercial transponder code at virtually the same moment that Rogers fired. For Captain David Carlson, commanding the Sides, the destruction of the airliner ‘marked the horrifying climax to Captain Rogers’ aggressiveness, first seen just four weeks earlier’. On 2 June, two of Rogers’s colleagues had been disturbed by the way he sailed the Vincennes too close to an Iranian frigate that was carrying out a lawful though unprecedented search of a bulk carrier for war materiel bound for Iraq. On the day the Vincennes shot down the Airbus, Rogers had launched a helicopter that flew within 2 to 3 miles of an Iranian small craft – the rules stated that the chopper had to be no closer than 4 miles – and reportedly came under fire. Rogers began shooting at some small Iranian military boats; an act that disturbed Captain David Carlson on the Sides. ‘Why do you want an Aegis cruiser out there shooting up boats?’ he later asked in an interview with an ex-naval officer. ‘It wasn’t a smart thing to do. He was storming off with no plan …’ Rogers subsequently opened fire on Iranian boats inside their territorial waters. The Vincennes had already been nicknamed ‘Robocruiser’ by the crew of the Sides.
When Carlson first heard Rogers announcing to higher headquarters his intention to shoot down the aircraft approaching his cruiser, he says he was thunderstruck. ‘I said to the folks around me, “Why, what the hell is he doing?” I went through the drill again. F-14. He’s climbing. By now this damn thing is at about 7,000 feet …’ But Carlson thought that the Vincennes might have more information – and did not know that Rogers had been told, wrongly, that the aircraft was diving. Carlson regretted that he did not interrupt Rogers. When his own men realised the Airbus was commercial, ‘they were horrified’. The official US investigation report would later say that computer data and ‘reliable intelligence’ agreed that Captain Rezaian’s airliner ‘was on a normal commercial air traffic plan profile … on a continuous ascent in altitude from take-off at Bandar Abbas’. Newsweek magazine would carry out its own investigation, branding the official report ‘a pastiche of omissions, half-truths and outright deceptions’ and painting a dramatic picture of ‘an overeager captain, panicked crewmen and a cover-up …’ In Newsweek’s report, books had been sliding off the shelves