The Great War for Civilisation (55 page)

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 U.S. 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 thunder-struck. “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 U.S. 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 in the
Vincennes
's information centre as it manoeuvred prior to the missile launching; little chance, then, that anyone had an opportunity to look up a scheduled airline timetable.

But in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter, the Americans stuck to the tale of total innocence. Vice President Bush appeared before the UN Security Council to say that the
Vincennes
had been rushing to the aid of a merchant ship under Iranian attack—which was totally untrue. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher described the destruction of the Iranian Airbus as “understandable.” The Iranian consul in Dubai had a point when he asked me later whether Mrs. Thatcher would have considered it “understandable” if an Iranian warship had shot down a British Airways airliner over the Gulf and then claimed that it was an accident because its captain thought it was under attack by a U.S. jet. One key to the disaster lay in the American claims that a warning was sent to Captain Rezaian on both military and civilian wavelengths. Did Captain Rezaian hear these warnings? If not, why not?

The evidence of the aircraft's destruction was laid out for journalists on a parade ground at Iranian naval headquarters in Bandar Abbas. Pieces of engine cowling, wings and flaps had been scored and burned by metal fragments; a jagged hunk of wing flap had a 12-centimetre hole punched through its centre. A section of the passenger cabin wall 3 metres square had been perforated by metal shards. Several of the bodies I saw had scarlet and red burns on their flesh; these passengers must have been sitting in the centre of the aircraft, close to the two engines onto which the
Vincennes
's heat-seeking missiles would have locked. Lying beside this wreckage was the nosecone of the Airbus, escape chutes, electrical circuitry and oxygen systems. The explosions had been catastrophic.

Three days after the Airbus was destroyed, I flew from Bandar Abbas to Dubai aboard the first Iran Air plane to resume operations on the route. It was, of course, flight IR655. I sat in the cockpit of the Boeing 707 alongside Captain Rezaian's former Airbus navigator. Captain Nasser, who had been flying with Rezaian until six weeks ago when he transferred to Boeings—an act that probably saved his life—had marked the point of Rezaian's destruction on his charts and insisted that his friend, on other flights over the Gulf with him, had always replied when he heard challenges from the U.S. Navy. “He was a sensible, very professional man,” he said. “He would never make a mistake or play games with the Americans. What the Americans did was very crude—they must have panicked.” Suggestions that Rezaian was on a suicide mission, Nasser added, were “disgusting.” Rezaian had flown the Dubai route on at least twenty-five previous occasions and had been piloting Airbus aircraft for almost two and a half years. So what happened on that Sunday morning?

The answer was not difficult to discover. In our Boeing, Captain Asadapur, the pilot, had to communicate constantly with three traffic-control centres—Tehran, Bandar Abbas and Dubai—which he did in fluent English. While talking to them, he could neither send
nor receive
on the civilian 1215 radio band to which our Boeing was tuned—the same wavelength on which the
Vincennes
said it tried to warn Captain Rezaian. Climbing from 12,000 to 14,000 feet—not descending in an “attack mode” as the Americans initially claimed—Rezaian would have been talking to Bandar Abbas when he was 50 kilometres out, when the first American missile blew off the port wing of his Airbus. Bandar Abbas ground control told me that Rezaian's last message was that he was “climbing to one-four-zero” (14,000 feet). If Rezaian could not hear the Americans on his civilian waveband, he was certainly not going to hear them on the military net, a challenge that was anyway intended for the non-existent F-14 which was supposed to be closing on the American cruiser.

Then there was the mystery of the transponder. On our Iranian flight, a green light glowed beside the co-pilot's left knee, showing that it was sending out our identification into the dark night above the Gulf. Any warship down there on the moonlit sea would know who we were. Asadapur repeatedly told Dubai control— for the benefit of all listeners—that we were flight IR655 “with forty-four souls on board.” If the transponder was not working, the light would have been out. Asadapur said he would never take off without checking it. Hossein Pirouzi, the Bandar Abbas ground controller and airport manager on 3 July, told me he “assumed” Rezaian's transponder was working. Rezaian would scarcely have taken off without ensuring that it was glowing that comforting green light. Pirouzi, a middle-aged man with a smart brown moustache, wavy hair and a thorough training in air-traffic control from London's Heathrow Airport, said that he did not know a naval engagement was in progress at the time of Rezaian's take-off. But as we were later to discover, there was no battle as such taking place. “The Americans broadcast warnings every time they see a speeding boat—they go on ‘red alert' when they see every plane,” Pirouzi said. “The Americans have no right to be in the Gulf challenging our legitimate right to fly our air routes—so why should we reply to them?”

His comment was devastating. If Pirouzi's blithe assumption that the Americans would never fire at an Airbus was to be the basis of his air-traffic policy, how easy it was to understand why the U.S. naval crews, equally psyched up against the country which their president blamed for the Gulf War, should have panicked and fired at the first plane to approach their ship after they had engaged an Iranian patrol craft.

Was it panic, as
Newsweek
was to suggest four years later, that caused the officers of the
Vincennes
to misread the information on their own radar screens, to see an aircraft descending which was clearly ascending, panic and the oppressive heat that cloaks the bodies and energies of all naval crews in the Gulf? Besides, was not Iran the enemy? Was not Iran a “terrorist state”? Was it not, in Reagan's words, “a barbarous country”? Unknown to them, Captain Rezaian and his passengers over the Gulf were flying across a cultural and emotional chasm that separated America from Iran, a ravine so deep and so dangerous that its updraft blew an Iranian Airbus out of the sky.

Nothing could have illustrated this more painfully than the American response to the
Vincennes
's killing of 290 innocent civilians. Citizens of Vincennes, Indiana, were raising money for a monument—not to the dead Iranians, but to the ship that destroyed their lives.
⁶⁶
When the ship returned to its home base of San Diego, it was given a hero's welcome. The men of the
Vincennes
were all awarded combat action ribbons. The air warfare coordinator, Commander Scott Lustig, won the navy's Commendation Medal for “heroic achievement,” for the “ability to maintain his poise and confidence under fire” that enabled him to “quickly and concisely complete the firing procedure.” Even
Newsweek
was constrained to describe this as “surreal.” Rogers retired honourably in 1991. Less than a year after the destruction of the Airbus, the captain's wife, Sharon, was the target of a pipe-bomb which exploded beneath her Toyota van in San Diego. She was unharmed. Rogers was to write that the “centerpiece” of his book was formed by “the events of 3 July 1988 and 10 March 1989”—as if the bloodbath over the Gulf and the failed attempt on his wife's life were comparable, a suggestion contained on the book's cover, which described its contents as “a personal account of tragedy and terrorism.”

In fairness, however, Rogers was to quote in full in his book a long and bitter handwritten letter which he received from Captain Rezaian's brother Hossein. “He was turned into the powder at the mid-air by your barrage missile attack and perished along with so many other innocent lives aboard, without the slightest sin or guilt whatsoever,” Hossein Rezaian wrote.

I was at the area of carnage the day after and unfortunately I saw the result of your barbarous crime and its magnitude. I used to be a Navy Commander myself and I had my college education in U.S. as my late brother did, but ever since the incredible downing I really felt ashamed of myself. I hated your Navy and ours. So that I even quit my job and I ruined my whole career . . . me and my family . . . could somehow bear the pain of tragedy if he [Mohsen] had died in an accident but this premeditated act is neither forgiveable nor forgettable . . . the U.S. government as the culprit in this horrendous incident, showed neither remorse nor compassion for the loss of innocent lives . . . Didn't we really deserve a small gesture of sympathy? Did you have to say a pack of lies and contradictory statements about the incident in a bid to justify the case? . . . or it was the result of panic and inexperience. I do appreciate your prompt response.

It was much to Rogers's credit that he gave this letter so much prominence in his book. “Despite the diatribe,” he wrote, “the pain and grief pouring from this letter struck me hard. All of the sorrow and grief that had haunted me since July returned in force.” He had wanted, Rogers said, to reply but a naval public relations officer warned that return correspondence “could be used by the Iranian government as some sort of political lever.” Again, the Iranians were the bad guys. Hossein Rezaian's letter was handed over to the U.S. Naval Intelligence Service. Who knows, maybe they read it.

There certainly wouldn't have been much to gain from reading my first report on the massacre. When a newspaper had been so loyal to a reporter as
The Times
had been to me over the past eighteen years—fighting off the British army in Northern Ireland, the Israelis and Palestinians, the American authorities and the Iranians and Iraqis whenever they complained about my reporting—there was a natural inclination to feel great trust in my editors. If my reports were cut, this was done for space reasons—I was usually given the chance to shorten my own dispatches—or because a breaking news story elsewhere in the world was forcing the paper's night editors to change the pages after the first edition. But cuts were never made for political reasons.

Murdoch had already bought
The Times
when the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982, but I reported without any censorship on Israel's killing of up to 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians—most of them civilians—and the subsequent butchery of hundreds of Palestinian refugees by Israel's Christian allies. The Israeli embassy had condemned my dispatches, as they did the reporting of any journalist who dared to suggest that Israel's undisciplined army killed civilians as well as soldiers. But under Charles Douglas-Home's editorship, no foreign correspondent was going to have his work changed out of fear or bias or prejudice. His deputy, Charles Wilson, was a tough ex-Royal Marine who could be a bully, but who did not mince his words about Israel or any other country which tried to impugn the integrity of the paper's journalists. “What a bunch of fascists,” he roared when I had proved to him that an Israeli statement condemning my work was riddled with factual mistakes.