Sea Of Lies

FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER

Some 55 miles to the northeast, at precisely 9:45:30, Iran Air Capt. Mohsen Rezaian announced to the tower at Bandar Abbas airport that his A300B2 Airbus was ready for takeoff. A minute later he throttled up his two General Electric CF6 engines and lifted the airliner into the haze. His course would take the plane and its human cargo southwest to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. Though Rezaian could not know it, his flight path would also go almost directly over the USS Vincennes.

At that moment Captain Rogers was sitting in his own cockpit-the darkened, windowless combat information center of the Vincennes, directing a sea battle by remote control. To the uninitiated, the CIC of an Aegis cruiser looks like a luxury video arcade. Rows of operators hunch over radio consoles, each monitoring one element of the battle. All the information from their screens is then integrated by the mighty Aegis computer into, literally, the "big picture"--thrown up as symbols on maps displayed on four giant 42-inch-by-42-inch screens at the head of the room where the captain and his two "battle managers" sit. The $400 million Aegis system can track every aircraft within 300 miles. Its computers tag each contact with the symbol for "friendly," "hostile" or "unidentified" (chart, page 32). In war at sea, Aegis is expected to seek and identify all airborne threats to an entire carrier battle group, to display the speed and direction of each, and to rank them by the danger they present. Aegis is so powerful that it can not only track up to 200 incoming enemy aircraft or missiles, but also command missiles to shoot them down. In the full-scale war against the Soviet Union for which Aegis was designed, the captain and crew would have had little choice but to switch the system to automatic-and duck.

In the cramped and ambiguous combat environment of the Persian Gulf, however, Rogers chose to rely on his own judgment and the combat skills of his crew. Those skills had never been tested. Indeed, some experts question whether even the best-trained crew could handle, under stress, the torrent of data that Aegis would pour on them. A 1988 Government Accounting Office report accused the navy of rigging Aegis sea trials by tipping the crews off to the precise nature of the "threats" they were to face. The navy could not afford to risk failure in the trials for fear that Congress would stop funding the Aegis program.

Some of the Vincennes's most senior officers were less than adept at computerized warfare. Under normal procedures, Captain Rogers rarely touched his console. He would have delegated the battle against the launches to Guillory, his tactical officer for surface warfare. But Rogers didn't entirely trust Guillory, a former personnel officer who was uncomfortable with computers. (His fellow officers in personnel snickered because, one said, instead of plotting job changes by computer spreadsheet, he used his screen as a surface for "self-stick" notes.) In essence, the skipper pushed Guillory aside and ran the battle himself. Rogers set the range on the " big picture" display screen in front of him to 16 miles, to focus on the gunboats. He was oblivious to anything beyond.

At 9:47, the Vincennes's powerful Spy radar picked up a distant blip-a plane lifting off from the airport at Bandar Abbas. The blip was in fact Iran Air's Flight 655 on its twice-a-week milk run to Dubai. But since Bandar Abbas is a military as well as a civilian airport, any flight out over the gulf was automatically "tagged" by the navy ships as "assumed hostile. " At his computer console in the Vincennes's CIC, Petty Officer Andrew Anderson saw the blip for an incoming bogey go up on one of the big blue screens. Anderson's job in "Air Alley," the row of operators who handled air warfare, was to identify any air traffic within range of the ship. He told the Aegis system to query the incoming plane: Identify, Friend or Foe? By standard practice, all planes carry a transponder that automatically answers the IFF query with Mode 1 or 2 (military), or Mode 3 (civilian). Anderson got a Mode 3. "Commair" (commercial airliner), he figured. He reached beside his console for the navy's listing of commercial flights over the gulf. But as he scanned the schedule, he missed Flight 655. Apparently, in the darkness of the CIC, its a lights flickering every time the Vincennes's five-inch gun fired off another round at the hapless Iranian gunboats, he was confused by the gulf's four different time zones.