Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

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 US 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 US 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. *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 powderat 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 US Naval Intelligence Service. Who knows, maybe they read it.