In the Straits of Hormuz where the Persian Gulf narrows, Captain William T. Rogers, III, was at the helm of the US Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes. Since his deployment, Rogers had developed a reputation as an assertive commander among some of his fellow captains participating in a program to protect Gulf shipping from hostilities between Iran and Iraq that had been ongoing since 1980. His sailors had grown used to the heat, humidity, and boredom that came with the duty. Unbeknownst to most of them that Fourth of July weekend was that a series of highly secret and aggressive special operations by US Navy SEALs was taking place in the Persian Gulf off of Iran. While publicly the United States was neutral in the Iran–Iraq War, the Reagan administration had been a secret ally of Saddam Hussein since 1981.
That morning Captain Rogers had his Aegis-class cruiser Vincennes and the frigate USS Elmer Montgomery cruising the placid sea just on the edge of Iranian territorial waters. A patrol helicopter off the Vincennes suddenly came under small-arms fire from Iranian gunboats firing near an Iranian oil platform. Aboard the Vincennes and Montgomery all hands were called to quarters and told to man battle stations. Captain Rogers later said that a small gunboat turned toward the ship: “As they turned and began to maneuver and close in on us [at a] fairly high speed and on erratic courses, we asked permission to fire a warning shot. The bridge reported that they were firing at us and indicated that we were taking this small craft under fire.”
Almost precisely at the same time — 10:17 AM — Captain Mohsen Rezaian was lifting off from Bandar Abbass on Iran Air Flight 665. He followed a standard international air corridor, and the plane’s commercial transponder steadily emitted the plane’s electronic identification signature.
Rogers remembers that the Vincennes was “maneuvering rapidly . . .” Nearby, the Montgomery fired at the gunboats — obliterating them and their crews. In the midst of all this confusion, Captain Rogers was notified that the huge Aegis radar array atop the Vincennes had detected an aircraft departing Bandar Abbas and heading in the ship’s direction. Captain Rogers would later say that the aircraft became a tactical concern when “it was around forty-seven miles away, primarily because aircraft flew in the Gulf. It was pointed out at this point that the aircraft was essentially inbound” toward the USS Vincennes. He claims the aircraft was warned away by the ship’s radio. Rogers says, “At some point in time, you have to make the decision. I was having — I had difficulty at twenty miles. I just did not want to shoot. I could not believe that this was really happening to us. So I held my fire. When the aircraft reached a little over ten miles, at that point in time I either make the decision then, or I don’t make it at all, because I reach minimum weapons range. And the decision was made at that, and it intercepted and killed the aircraft.”
Rogers had just given the order to shoot down a civilian airliner carrying 290 passengers and crew. He said he thought he had shot down one of the Iranian air force’s F-14s: “That’s what I thought. Otherwise, I would have certainly never released two standard missiles at it.”
The missiles, deployed with precision by the Aegis system, hit Iran Air 665 as it was still gaining altitude. Two-hundred-and-ninety bodies as well as the Airbus debris rained down. Television cameras showed the bodies of women and children floating dead in the clear, blue Gulf waters. It was a human tragedy and foreign policy disaster for the United States.
The level of terrorism sponsored by Iran was enormous, especially in Lebanon where Tehran’s surrogate, Hezbollah, was actively kidnapping and killing Americans. President Reagan had every reason to declare war on Iran, but he had a problem. Key members of his government had been secretly dealing with the Islamic regime since his election campaign. His CIA Director, William Casey, had attended secret meetings with Iranian officials in Madrid. There had been payoffs by Republican Party officials to key Iranian mullahs to get US Embassy hostages returned by the January 1981 inauguration. Vice President George H.W. Bush was deeply involved with former CIA Directorate of Operations official Theodore C. Shackley in an arms-for-hostages deal that had erupted into a major scandal in 1986 called Iran-Contra. Reagan’s team had to find a way to divert blame away from the president for not only the Iran-Contra scandal, but now for the shoot down of a civilian airliner.
The claim that the Vincennes crew confused the small radar profile of an Iranian fighter-interceptor with a huge passenger Airbus made no sense to radar experts. These initial series of lies would come back to haunt the navy.
A cover-up was already in progress by the Reagan administration to protect the aggressive action by SEAL teams in the Gulf against Iran. This action was in addition to protecting the secret aid that was being given to Saddam Hussein and the secret arms deals being made with Iran. It was an election year, and George H. W. Bush’s bid to succeed Ronald Reagan was already suffering from the scandals that came to be known as Iraqgate and Iran-Contra.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Crowe, began the cover-up with a briefing to the Pentagon press. Crowe told the media that the Airbus was flying outside its prescribed commercial corridor, which turned out not to be true. He told the press the plane was heading on a direct route for the USS Vincennes at 450 knots per hour. In fact the Airbus was traveling at 385 knots and had already turned away from the Vincennes on its normal route across the Gulf to Dubai. The biggest untruth told that day was that the Vincennes was firing in self-defense, first at the gunboats and later at the airliner. In fact, the Vincennes had been in Iranian waters and was considered the aggressor.
On Monday, July 4, President Reagan told the press after his helicopter landed from the holiday weekend at Camp David that the Iranian aircraft was shot down because the plane began lowering its altitude and thus presenting a threat to the US ships — a claim that was directly contradicted by the Vincennes’s own radar tapes of the incident.
Vice President George H. W. Bush, in the middle of his presidential campaign, continued the cover-up at the United Nations. Bush told the Security Council: “One thing is clear, and that is that the USS Vincennes acted in self-defense. This tragic accident occurred against a backdrop of repeated, unjustified, unprovoked and unlawful Iranian attacks against US merchant shipping and armed forces. And it occurred in the midst of a naval attack initiated by Iranian vessels against a neutral vessel and subsequently against the Vincennes when she came to the aid of the innocent ship in distress.” Both Vice President Bush and President Reagan knew by this time that Captain Rogers was in Iranian territorial waters when he ordered the shoot- down. Reagan wrote Congress a letter that was technically true when he said: “On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes and the USS Elmer Montgomery were operating in international waters of the Persian Gulf, near the Strait of Hormuz.” The problem is by the time the attacks took place from the gun boats and the airliner was shot down, that was no longer the case. The truth is the ships were at the time supporting secret Navy SEAL operations inside Iranian waters. The military and the administration did not want to reveal the exact location of the Vincennes at the time of the shoot-down of the Iranian airliner.
