Sea Of Lies

Anderson turned to the petty officer next to him in Air Alley, John Leach, and wondered aloud if the blip could be an Iranian warplane--an F-4 or F-14 perhaps? Their boss in Air Alley, Lt. Clay Zocher, overheard the two enlisted men talking. Zocher was already nervous. He had stood this watch only twice before during General Quarters, and he had never mastered the computer routines for his console. He was worrying at the moment about an Iranian P-3 patrol plane that was making its way down the Iranian coastline. Could the P-3 be coordinating an attack on the Vincennes with the unidentified bogey.? Zocher decided to pass the chatter in Air Alley up the chain of command to his boss, Lt. Cmdr. Scott Lustig, the Vincennes's tactical commander for air warfare.

Lustig ordered Zocher to flash the incoming plane a warning: "Unidentified aircraft ... You are approaching a United States naval warship in international waters." It was the standard challenge, broadcast over the international distress frequencies routinely monitored by military and commercial aircraft. Briefly, Lustig considered another option. On the display screen in front of him, Lustig could see that the Forrestal's F-14s were circling just five minutes away. There was enough time-barely-to call them in to check out the bogey.

The Forrestal, too, had seen the blip pop on its radar screens. In the air, the F-14 pilots were itching to close in; a bogey out of Iran, heading for an American warship, was a rare opportunity for combat-hungry aviators. Aboard the carrier, Admiral Smith held them off. His staff was telling him that the blip was most likely a commercial airliner. But Smith stuck to the navy rule that the captain on the spot makes the decisions. He decided to let Rogers fight his own battle.

Aboard the Vincennes, it was now 9:49. Rogers was totally consumed with his fire fight against the gunboats. He was shouting for the five-inch-gun crew to load faster, and ordering hard-right rudder to bring his stern gun to bear. The ship shuddered and heeled to starboard.

Military theorists write about "friction," the inevitability of error, accident and miscalculation in the stress of combat. The architects of modern warfare have tried to use technology to minimize battlefield blindness. But the electronic babble of a combat information center can be just as confusing. Officers and men communicate by headphones over several channels, with left and right ears usually listening to different circuits. Rogers and his key officers in the CIC were all on the same circuit-but so was half the ship. Ingenious crewmen had discovered they could tap into the "command net" to hear the action over their Sony Walkmans. But in so doing, they drained power and the volume faded. Whenever it got too low, Lustig had to yell "Switch!" so everyone could turn to an alternate command circuit. Then the hackers would switch to that channel, too.

Over this erratic "net," a few seconds after 9:50, someone called out that the incoming plane was a "possible Astro"-the code word for an F-14. No one was ever able to find out who. In Air Alley, the operators thought the word came from the technicians in the ship's electronic-warfare suite. The technicians thought the warning came from Air Alley. Galvanized by this warning, Petty Officer Anderson again beamed out an IFF query. Ominously, the response he now got back was different. Up on his console flashed a Mode 2: military aircraft. Only much later did investigators figure out that Anderson had forgotten to reset the range on his IFF device. The Mode 2 did not come from the Airbus, climbing peacefully above the gulf, but from an Iranian plane, probably a military transport, still on the runway back in Bandar Abbas.