Inside the Danger Zone

INSIDE THE

DANGER ZONE

The latest edition of this work has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest.

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 2007 by Harold Lee Wise

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-61251-516-8 (eBook)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Wise, Harold Lee, 1966–

Inside the danger zone : the U.S. Military in the Persian Gulf, 1987–1988 / Harold Lee Wise.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Iran-Iraq War, 1980–1988—Naval operations, American. 2. Samuel B. Roberts (Frigate : FFG-58) 3. United States—History, Naval—20th century. I. Title.

DS318.85.W57 2007

955.05’4245—dc22

2007000960

Print editions meet the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

1413121110987987654321

First printing

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Prologue

CHAPTER1An Opportunity

CHAPTER2The Attack

CHAPTER3Damage Control

CHAPTER4The Reaction

CHAPTER5Operation Earnest Will

CHAPTER6Guerrilla War at Sea

CHAPTER7Death Waits in the Dark

CHAPTER8The Middle Shoals Buoy

CHAPTER9Operation Nimble Archer

CHAPTER 10Change of Command

CHAPTER 11Samuel B. Roberts

CHAPTER 12Operation Praying Mantis

CHAPTER 13Disaster

CHAPTER 14Moving On

Acronyms

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Adapted from U.S. Department of State, International Court of Justice, Case Concerning Oil Platforms (1993). (Harold Lee Wise)

FFG-7 Guided Missile Frigate Diagram

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

E VERYONE WHO CONTRIBUTED by granting interviews, sharing resources, reviewing chapters, or in countless other ways played a vital part in the creation of this book—it is impossible to properly acknowledge them all. My heartfelt appreciation goes to each and every one, including: Dr. James Olson and the history department at Sam Houston State University for their wisdom and guidance; Cdr. Paul Evancoe, USN (Ret.), whose encouragement was invaluable; D. Scott Roche and Greg Ball, beta readers; the Dare County Library, the Newton-Gresham Library, the Naval Historical Center, and the International Court of Justice; Michael Palmer of East Carolina University; Col. Larry Outlaw, USMC (Ret.); Cdr. Steve Hales USN; Capt. David Grieve, USN (Ret.); Rear Adm. Harold Bernsen, USN (Ret.); Tom Cutler of the Naval Institute Press; my agent Jeff Gerecke, who never gave up; my parents, Harold and Irene, who taught me so much; and my extended family, too numerous to name.

Finally, thanks go to my wife, whose patience, support, love, and assistance helped immeasurably, and our children, Ruth and Stephen, who were behind me every step of the way.

Harold Lee Wise

Manteo, NC

PROLOGUE

Inside the Danger Zone

S HORTLY AFTER 9:00 PM Persian Gulf time on 17 May 1987, Radioman Larry Hardin of the guided missile frigate USS Stark (FFG-31) walked toward his berthing area located on the second deck on the port side near the bow. As he neared the hatch, he smelled fresh popcorn, and although he was tired from standing watch, the smell made him hungry for a snack. ¹ Instead of going to stretch out in his bunk, he followed the aroma down the narrow passageway to its source, the enlisted personnel’s mess deck.

Hardin walked in, took a bag of popcorn, and relaxed with some other off-duty crew in a blue vinyl booth near the soft-drink machine. The Sailors ate and made small talk while a movie played on the ship’s closed-circuit television. The mood in the mess deck was jovial. For some of the more experienced crew, this was their second tour of duty in the region and so far it had been a quiet, routine cruise. Some called it boring.

Unlike most other areas of the world where the U.S. Navy deployed, the Persian Gulf lacked liberty ports, places where the Sailors could go ashore to unwind, drink, and party. Back in March, Stark visited Karachi, Pakistan, outside the Gulf, and the crew got the chance to do some shopping. Hardin bought a leather jacket. Still, even with that brief respite, the monotonous duty wore on the Sailors. Their morale was good, but naturally they looked forward to an August return to sunny Florida to enjoy a late summer at home. Until then, the crew anticipated more of the same in the Gulf. Although Iran and Iraq were at war, Stark, as a neutral presence in international waters, had no reason to expect action.

Suddenly, the crew heard a big loud thud and felt a shudder that reverberated through the ship. Hardin’s first instinct was that it was an internal problem. Have we blown an engine? he thought as the crew in the mess sprang to their feet and looked at each other in puzzlement, wondering if it was something serious. As if in answer, they heard the unmistakable sound of the general quarters alarm—a loud, electronic bong, bong, bong . . . coming over the ship’s speaker system—calling the crew to battle stations.

The crew scattered to their respective assigned locations. Hardin quickly walked to his battle station, the radio room, and discovered the communication system had no electricity. The power suddenly flickered back on, and as Hardin and the other radio personnel struggled to bring the radios online, still not knowing what was happening, they felt another tremendous jolt. This time the power went off for good. With it went Stark’s main communication link with the outside world.

Several minutes passed as scattered reports came in over the sound-powered internal phone system. The news was chilling. The two impacts were missiles, both direct hits, and an uncontrolled fire raged below decks. Stark was under attack. Following standard procedure when faced with the possibility of capture or sinking, Hardin and the others in radio began to gather sensitive materials for possible destruction. As they performed these emergency duties, the room temperature soared. Eventually, Hardin realized that the ship’s control berthing compartment, home to off-duty Sailors, where he would have been had he not gone to the mess, was filled with fire from burning rocket fuel.² If not for the tempting smell of the popcorn, Hardin would have been among those in the inferno.

For Hardin and the surviving Stark crew, this was the beginning of the longest night of their lives. For the United States as a whole, it was the beginning of a new phase, an ever-deepening military involvement in the Persian Gulf. A large deployment of American forces in the Middle East soon became a fact of life, although in May 1987, at the time of the attack on Stark, the American presence in the Gulf consisted of a mere seven smaller-model Navy ships, all based in Bahrain, and an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) support contingent in Saudi Arabia. In the next fourteen months, an unprecedented number of American military personnel would serve in the Persian Gulf region. This was the first step of an ever-deepening long-term military commitment to this crucial part of the world.

The Persian Gulf was a place of shadowy danger. From May 1987 through July 1988, when Saddam Hussein and Iraq had yet to become the enemy, America was, in the words of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, not at war, but certainly not at peace either.³ From the perspective of the Sailors and Marines who manned the ships and the pilots who flew the planes it was, at times, a full-out shooting war. During this period, U.S. ships escorted oil tankers, dealt with Iranian mine fields, shelled Iranian installations, and sunk enemy ships. On occasion, American and Iranian forces engaged in open combat, most notably during Operation Praying Mantis in April 1988, the world’s largest naval battle since World War II.

This book sheds some light on this time period, a time when the United States was just dipping its military toes into the Persian Gulf. The tanker escorts and associated operations were the first large-scale deployment of U.S. service personnel since Vietnam, and this experience laid the foundation for future American operations in the Middle East. In the post-Vietnam, pre–Desert Storm era, when the U.S. armed forces became better known for spectacular failures than for noteworthy successes, the 1987–88 involvement in the Persian Gulf saw both extremes.

CHAPTER 1

An Opportunity

I N J UNE 1986, eleven months before the Stark attack, Rear Adm. Harold Bernsen left the position of director of plans and policy for Central Command in Tampa, moved his family to Bahrain, and took on the role of Commander, Middle East Force. ¹ Bahrain, a tiny island kingdom in the central Persian Gulf, was a familiar venue for the forty-nine-year-old Admiral Bernsen. Six years earlier, he had spent nearly a year as the commanding officer (CO) of USS LaSalle (AGF-3), the Middle East Force flagship stationed in the Bahraini capital of Manama.

Bernsen knew the territory and was familiar with Arab culture, necessary attributes because historically, the admiral who led that isolated and far-flung naval command was expected to also be a diplomat and a representative of the United States to the friendly regional powers. Bernsen recalled, I spent a huge amount of my time, probably 30 to 40 percent, just visiting Gulf countries. I flew from Pakistan to Egypt and met with every military commander and most of the political leaders. The relationship between the Middle East Force admirals and the Gulf rulers was such that the Emir of Bahrain, during a 1983 state visit to Washington, D.C., used the possessive phrase my admirals when talking about the various Middle East Force commanders he had known.² This trust, developed over the years, was a valuable asset for the United States and something the American government wanted to cultivate.

On the military side, since its creation in 1949, the U.S. Middle East Force usually consisted of between three and five navy ships deployed on a rotating basis. According to Bernsen, this small fleet was there to ensure access to oil, protect U.S. interests in the region both ashore and at sea, and to enhance stability with a show of force. As Commander, Middle East Force, or COMIDEASTFOR, Bernsen was responsible for the entire Persian Gulf and, if needed, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Oman. Yet the Middle East Force was a small command. The support facilities ashore in Bahrain had few of the amenities found on larger installations. We lived on . . . the remnant of the British base in Juffair, Bernsen stated. We had improved it to a degree by adding some buildings and some fencing and so forth, but essentially that is what it was. Rather than have an office ashore, the admiral ran the Middle East Force from LaSalle. When Bernsen took command, the flagship and the five Middle East Force destroyers constituted the only combat-capable U.S. military force in the Persian Gulf.

Rear Adm. Harold Bernsen, Middle East Force commander 1986–88. (U.S. Navy photo)

For decades, the Middle East, and especially the Persian Gulf, had been the oil lifeline of the free world and maintaining access to this vital region was an important part of U.S. Cold War strategy. Following the Royal Navy’s withdrawal from all points east of Suez in 1972, the United States assumed the security role in the Gulf, but several obstacles worked against keeping a large American military presence in the area. The Gulf is geographically remote from the United States, and with the loss of Iran as an ally in 1979, the availability of the few suitable military bases depended on the volatile political and military climate. Even overflight permission for American warplanes often depended on the political whims of the Gulf rulers. The United States could not station large numbers of ground forces in any of the friendly Gulf countries because the presence of the American military was domestically unpopular. For those friendly governments, the relationship was a balancing act between their need for American support and their reluctance to host foreign military forces on their territory. Bahrain allowed the Americans to use the old naval base at Manama, but only while maintaining a very low profile. The Bahraini government had strict rules designed to keep the U.S. presence as low-key as possible. Any photos taken of U.S. ships, for example, could not show Manama in the background.

In general, the U.S. Navy employed only smaller ships in the Middle East Force—frigates or destroyers. There were a number of reasons for this, among them ease of logistic support and the suitability of smaller warships for operations in the shallow, littoral waters of the Gulf. Because of the tight confines of the Gulf, aircraft carriers had only operated in the Gulf on one or two occasions since the creation of the Middle East Force. To provide an air capability for emergencies, the Navy settled for having a carrier outside of the Strait of Hormuz—beyond Bernsen’s control—in the Arabian Sea. Being far from established areas of operations meant long lines of communication and supply for the few ships at a time that rotated into the Middle East Force. While dealing with these realities, the fact remained: the United States and its allies needed the oil from the Gulf and good relations with Gulf leaders. The position of Middle East Force commander called for a well-rounded, confident, independent leader.

Bernsen was well suited for the dual role of diplomat and military commander. A former carrier pilot, his articulate and personable style, along with his knowledge of the region and Arab culture gained through his previous duty as LaSalle’s skipper and his post at Central Command, had prepared him well to interact with the governing sheiks and other members of the Persian Gulf elite. Unlike most deployed admirals, the Middle East Force commander traditionally was a throwback to the older days of the Navy when a flag officer on foreign duty rarely, if ever, reported in person to his superiors back home. Bernsen said that Rear Adm. John Addams, his predecessor as Commander, Middle East Force, had an extra year on his tour and during that entire three years he never came to the States. [My tour] was slightly less than two years, but I never came back either. In the late-1980s U.S. Navy, the Middle East Force command was a distant outpost. Operating independently had special meaning in that environment.

Bernsen formed working relationships with many of the Gulf officials while making his frequent diplomatic visits. Part of his job was to talk to them about Operation Staunch, an American initiative begun in 1985 to cut off arms shipments to Iran from places like China and North Korea. Described by Secretary Weinberger as diplomatic efforts to block and complicate Iranian arms resupply efforts, Operation Staunch was part of the public U.S. stance on the Iran-Iraq War, now dragging into its sixth year with no end in sight.³

The official justification for the fact that Operation Staunch applied only to Iran, as President Reagan explained in a letter to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas, was that Iraq had stated its willingness to negotiate an end to the war while Iran had not.⁴ In reality, since early in the war, the United States leaned toward Iraq in various, little-publicized ways.⁵ Besides the lingering bad feelings about the long captivity of the American embassy hostages, the current concern was that if Iraq fell, Ayatollah Khomeini’s numerous forces could potentially march through militarily weak Kuwait and deep into Saudi Arabia, leaving the bulk of the world’s oil supply in hostile hands.

The governments of America’s Arab allies in the Gulf region—Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and most importantly Saudi Arabia—were wary of revolutionary Iran and all, in one way or another, supported Iraq, though not necessarily out of sympathy for Iraq’s cause. The Gulf monarchies feared the expansionist potential of Iran’s Shiite revolution. Race also played a part. Bernsen observed, Iran is Persian, not Arab, whereas Iraq and Baghdad are Arab. The Arab connection, the ethnicity there, is a very, very important factor. Even then, I don’t think any of the Bahrainis that I knew, or the Kuwaitis for that matter, had any particular love for Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless . . . the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people were better, in their view, than the Iranians. Given the situation, the regional allies welcomed Operation Staunch. As Bernsen, the highest-ranking American officer in the Persian Gulf, made his rounds encouraging the allies to support the program, he believed Staunch was the only policy of the Reagan administration toward Iran.

After five months on the job, Bernsen discovered another policy, a secret one that directly affected his command. In November 1986, while visiting Amman, the capital of Jordan, he decided to meet with one of his contacts, a senior Jordanian military official who he said would later become the equivalent of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs in Jordan. Expecting a cordial routine talk about military affairs in the Gulf, Bernsen stepped into a hornet’s nest. When I walked in the door, I realized I was in trouble, Bernsen said. The look on the Jordanian’s face spoke volumes. News of the Iran-contra affair had broken on regional television the night before, and Bernsen was about to learn what the United States had really been doing in the Middle East; namely, conducting secret dealings with Iran to trade arms for hostages while all along publicly promoting an Iranian arms embargo. Soon, Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved with the illegal deal would become household names as the scandal took center stage in the United States.

Bernsen learned firsthand the Arab reaction that day in Amman. The scowling, physically imposing officer angrily lectured Bernsen for thirty long minutes. As the admiral sat and listened, the Jordanian explained that only recently a high-ranking American had come to Amman to explain Operation Staunch and how the United States was doing all it could to limit the weapons available to Iran. Now, having discovered that the United States itself was secretly sending quantities of modern arms to Iran, the Jordanian felt betrayed. As the lecture wound down, the official told Bernsen, You can tell all of your buddies that they might as well not come around here anymore.

Stunned and unable to defend the indefensible, Bernsen considered the ramifications of the covert deal. In his mind, it was devastating and not only because of the political effect on relations with the Gulf countries that the United States needed to keep on friendly terms. The practical aspect of the affair really concerned the admiral. Here I was trying to run an operation in the Gulf, and we’ve got a bunch of, in my view, right-wing extremists playing games by selling the Iranians weapons that they could use against our own forces. When Bernsen finally left the Jordanian’s office, he knew his job was about to get much harder.

In general, relations in 1986 between the United States and its Gulf allies were already strained even before the Iran-contra revelations. In the spring of that year, Vice President George H. W. Bush visited Saudi Arabia and immediately felt a diplomatic chill in the air. The Saudis were not happy either with American pressure about oil prices or the Reagan administration’s handling of other issues, such as several delayed or canceled arms sales. Also, the Saudis wanted the United States to do more to stop the Iran-Iraq War. They showed their displeasure by offering various breach-of-protocol insults to Bush, including sending a mere district governor to greet him and delaying his meeting with King Fahd, the Saudi ruler.⁶

Near the end of Bush’s visit to the desert kingdom, the Saudis arranged for a ceremonial demonstration of their air forces. The vice president expected a flyby of U.S.-made planes in a gesture of the long-standing special relationship between the two countries, which, after all, were close allies. Saudi Arabia had been one of the twin pillars (with Iran) of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East dating back to the Nixon years. Since the fall of the shah of Iran, the Saudis were the closest U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf region and regularly received special consideration in many ways, not the least of which were sales of advanced weapons systems such as AWACS and F-14 fighter planes, the very planes that were about to soar as the symbol of Saudi-U.S. unity. Along with the American-made planes, Tornado attack aircraft of British manufacture also roared across the desert sky, sending a signal to the United States that other allies were available to the Saudis should the United States neglect their special relationship.

While U.S.-Saudi relations had cooled, elsewhere in the Gulf it was no better. As 1986 came to a close, the United States faced many questions about its commitment to the region. From the perspective of the Gulf countries, there were examples stretching back for several years of the United States failing to honor commitments, or to be militarily effective, in the Middle East. For instance, the United States had said all the right things to its supposedly solid ally the shah of Iran, but then abandoned him when the Iranian revolution occurred in January 1979. Ayatollah Khomeini then made the United States appear helpless when Iran seized the American embassy in Tehran and took the staff hostage in November 1979. The U.S. military attempt to rescue the hostages from Iran in 1980 was a disastrous failure. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late 1979, the Carter administration could do little except send equipment to the Afghan forces and boycott the Olympic games in Moscow. Likewise, the Reagan administration stationed peacekeeping forces in Lebanon, but had withdrawn the forces after the Beirut barracks bombing in 1983 killed 241 American military personnel. Now, after the Iran-Contra deal became public, the suspicion in the Gulf was that the United States was playing both sides in the Iran-Iraq War for its own gain and was not to be trusted.

Another concern for all parties involved was the fact that the military situation between Iran and Iraq in the Gulf was steadily deteriorating. The war had begun in September 1980 when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein ordered an invasion of Iran. Hussein hoped to take advantage of the disorganization in postrevolutionary Iran to quickly seize oil-rich territory near the Iran-Iraq border. Iran resisted with surprising force and the two countries settled in to a long-term battle of attrition, the bloodiest and longest war in the second half of the twentieth century. This war combined modern weaponry such as missiles and jet aircraft with older tactics like trench warfare, chemical warfare, and human-wave attacks. Iran had a great advantage in manpower while Iraq had an edge in newer war-fighting technology; neither side, however, gained much territory in the numerous battles along the long common border.

The Iran-Iraq War was predominantly a land and air clash; however, in 1984, the fight spilled over into the Gulf. The maritime part of the war, called the Tanker War, involved attacks by both sides on unarmed tankers and other merchant shipping. The mutual goal was to hinder the commercial traffic, mostly oil shipments, of the enemy. Each side proclaimed overlapping areas of the Gulf near their coastlines—exclusion zones—where only friendly ships could travel. Any other vessel would be considered hostile and thus, fair game. A ship that ventured into the exclusion zones took a risk because both sides, especially Iraq at first, pursued the attacks with vigor. According to one estimate, from 1984 through 1986, Iraq attacked 152 ships and Iran attacked 77.⁷ This did not appreciably slow overall maritime commerce in the Gulf, but it caused problems and created fear among the shipping community. As time went on, the rate of the attacks increased as Iran matched Iraq’s aggressiveness.

Iraq fought the Tanker War almost exclusively from the air. For them, the Tanker War was an extension of the air phase of the larger war. Lacking a significant navy, the Iraqis primarily used air-to-surface missiles, such as the French-made Exocet, against Iranian shipping. These attacks did not sink the most valuable ships because the largest tankers were simply too big for the relatively small missiles. The big tankers were designed to hold massive amounts of oil and could handle significant flooding. Exocet missiles were more than enough to kill crew and inflict severe damage on all but the biggest vessels. The Iraqi air force did not have the range to attack the Strait of Hormuz or the southeastern Gulf so Iraq mostly struck targets closer to home in the northern part of the Gulf, such as the Iranian oil facilities on Kharg Island. Ironically, Iraq used the Iranian exclusion zone, much larger than its own, to pick its targets. Since traffic unfriendly to Iran avoided this area, Iraq considered any ship inside the zone to be Iranian.

Iran had a different strategic view of the Tanker War. Since Iraq did not have a tanker fleet (Iraq used overland pipelines to transport its oil), Iran attacked ships heading to and from the Gulf states that supported Iraq, mainly Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Iranian tactics changed over time. In the opening two years of the Tanker War, 1984 and 1985, the Iranians struck from the air using American-made F-4 fighter planes and Maverick missiles left over from the era of the shah. These missiles were relatively small, and as time went by the assets of the Iranian air force dwindled from wartime attrition, age, and a lack of spare parts. For most of 1986, Iran switched to helicopters as the primary means of attack and then, in late 1986, surface forces became the primary means for the attacks on shipping. Iran possessed a long coastline that ranged along the entire northeastern Gulf. The Iranian navy, with U.S.-made equipment and a number of U.S.-trained officers, far outclassed the tiny Iraqi navy.

In early 1987, both the regular Iranian navy and the Revolutionary Guard Pasdaran force, a separate naval entity that used speedboats armed with machine guns and rocket launchers, carried out hit-and-run attacks with increasing frequency. At first, the regular navy used smaller surface-to-surface missiles, like the Italian Sea Killer, that could do little damage to a huge tanker, but Iran began to obtain and deploy larger missiles, commonly called Silkworms, from China. The Silkworms carried an eleven hundred–pound warhead, three times the size of the French-made Exocet, and the Chinese missiles quickly became the most feared weapon in Iran’s arsenal. Potentially, they could give Iran the power to actually sink one of the oil-carrying behemoths. The area around the Strait of Hormuz became known as the Silkworm Envelope because it was within range of these larger missiles. Hormuz was a choke point for the maritime traffic both in and out of the Gulf, and the deployment of the powerful Silkworms greatly concerned the Gulf countries, as well as the U.S. Navy.

The Iranians also used more low-tech tactics, including sowing explosive mines in the shipping lanes and directly attacking tankers by firing machine guns into vulnerable areas such as the bridge and crew quarters. One Iranian ship in particular, a British-built SAAM-class frigate named Sabalan, gained a notorious reputation for these activities. The captain of Sabalan, known as Captain Nasty to Americans, would board tankers and other merchants bound for Kuwait, Iraq, or Saudi Arabia and pretend to carry out a friendly inspection.⁸ Sometimes he would even dine with the ship’s master. Then, once the charade was over, Captain Nasty would order an attack on his defenseless prey. Often, Captain Nasty would send a parting message by radio to his victim and say, Have a nice day. Sabalan and its sister ship, Sahand, were both feared by merchants in the Gulf. As a neutral force, the U.S. Navy could only act in self-defense or in the defense of U.S.-flagged vessels. Many times, American ships watched helplessly as both sides left merchants and tankers in flames.⁹

Tiny Kuwait especially felt the pressure. Economically powerful but geographically vulnerable, Kuwait lived at the mercy of its larger, violent neighbors. Twice in its short history, Iraq had seriously threatened invasion, and now, ironically, Kuwait was in the position of supporting Iraq by giving Baghdad millions of dollars in financial aid and allowing Soviet arms shipments for Iraq to arrive via Kuwaiti ports.¹⁰ A Time magazine article stated the Soviet Union supplied at least 70 percent of Iraq’s weapons in the war with Iran, in part because it feared the Iranian Revolution spreading to its own Muslim population.¹¹ Iran was well aware that Kuwait helped Iraq, and as the ground war raged mere miles from Kuwait’s northern border and as the Tanker War heated up, Kuwait became the scene of several deadly Iranian-backed terrorist incidents. Entirely dependent on tankers to transport the oil that was the key to its great wealth, Kuwait became worried as Iran increasingly singled out Kuwaiti ships for attacks in 1986.

The Kuwaiti Oil Tanker Company, or KOTC, owned and operated by members of the royal family, held title to the besieged tanker fleet. With the addition of the Chinese Silkworms, the KOTC feared that Iran would be able to cause real damage to their tankers’ oil-carrying capacity, and the loss of even one of its eleven Gulf tankers for an extended period could cause Kuwait to lose millions in revenue. Concerned, Kuwait brought up the topic of tanker protection at the 1 November 1986 meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC, a group consisting of five smaller Gulf countries along with Saudi Arabia.¹²

When those countries could not agree on a plan, Kuwait turned its attention to the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Kuwait traditionally kept both titans at arms’ length, but at this critical point, it needed protection from a strong navy. Following an internal debate, Kuwait decided to approach both nations. In retrospect, some Reagan administration officials believed that Kuwait’s courting of the Soviets was a response to the Iran-contra scandal. Kuwait was hedging its bets in the event the United States, despite frequent assurances of protection for freedom of navigation in the Gulf, abandoned the effort at the first sign of trouble.¹³ Because the United States seemed a shaky ally, the Soviets were Kuwait’s ace in the hole.

Kuwait first sent a diplomatic feeler to the Soviet Union in November 1986 asking about the possibility of providing naval escorts to their tankers. Shortly afterward, on 10 December, the Kuwaitis asked the U.S. Coast Guard about its standards for ships registered to American companies. It took some time for the news of this inquiry to filter back to Washington, and at first, the U.S. government was slow to respond. The administration did not learn about the Kuwaiti dealings with the Soviets until 13 January 1987, when the Kuwaitis made the official request to the American embassy. At first, the proposed plan called for the Soviets and the Americans to split the escorting duties, placing six tankers under U.S. protection and five tankers under Soviet guard. Of course, increased Soviet naval presence in such a crucial area was very unpopular in Washington. Nevertheless, the U.S. response was slow in coming.¹⁴

In the spring of 1987, the investigation into the Iran-Contra affair was the number-one issue in Washington, but the tanker escort discussion continued at the highest levels of the U.S. and Kuwaiti governments. As the dialogue progressed, it became increasingly evident the Kuwaitis wanted the United States to take on the lion’s share of the task. Decision-makers in the Reagan administration generally favored the concept of U.S.-led escorts, with no Soviet involvement. To Secretary Weinberger, the request was an opportunity to change the image of the United States in the region for the better. He knew America’s reputation had suffered because of the Iran-contra episode and other incidents and said there were a lot of theories around that we would never do anything to protect Kuwait and we would never put ourselves in danger, that we were all talk.¹⁵ Also, Weinberger did not want the Soviet Union to get a foothold in the region. He remembered, There were a lot of Soviet attempts made to intrude themselves into the Gulf from any opportunity that offered it. I was concerned that the Kuwaitis would ultimately accept that offer in lieu of having anything else to protect their ships.

In talks with the president, Weinberger brought up another angle, portraying the Iranian Pasdaran as pirates attacking innocent ships on the high seas.¹⁶ He also urged the president to offer to escort all eleven of the Kuwaiti tankers. Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who often argued with Weinberger on other issues, agreed in this instance that the United States should go ahead with the plan.¹⁷ He, too, believed it was important for America to see the mission through after the recent embarrassing incidents in the Middle East. He and Weinberger did not see eye-to-eye on every detail, but they both believed that the basic idea was sound. Eventually, President Reagan gave permission to proceed with a plan that completely excluded the Soviets, and the focus moved to the organization that would actually be responsible for the escorts, the armed forces.

Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., himself a former