Sea Of Lies

On the Vincennes's bridge, cameraman Rudy Pahoyo was still filming. His audio captured a babble of voices: "Oh, dead!" "Coming down!" "We had him dead on!" One voice commanded: "Hold the noise down, knock it off" Another shouted, "Direct hit!" Then a lookout came in from the wing of the bridge. The target couldn't have been an F-14, he said. The wreckage falling from the sky, he murmured to the Vincennes's executive officer, Cmdr. Richard Poster, is "bigger than that."

A few miles away, on the bridge of the Montgomery, crewmen gaped as a large wing of a commercial airliner, with an engine pod still attached, plummeted into the sea. Aboard the USS Sides, 19 miles away, Captain Carlson was told that his top radar man reckoned the plane had been a commercial airliner. Carlson almost vomited, he said later.

On the Vincennes, there was an eerie silence. The five-inch guns ceased their pounding. None of the Revolutionary Guard boats had come within 5,000 yards of the cruiser. No one was sure how many had been hit; perhaps one, perhaps more. Rogers gave the order to head south, out of Iranian waters.

ANATOMY OF A COVER-UP

In Washington almost ll hours later, at 1:30 p.m. EST, Adm. William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stepped to the podium in the Pentagon press room. Formal in his summer whites, the admiral told reporters there had been a terrible accident. Stressing that the information was incomplete, relying on what he had been told by Captain Rogers, Crowe said that the Iranian airliner was flying outside the commercial air corridor and had failed to respond to repeated warnings. The plane had been descending and picking up speed when it closed in on the Vincennes. Rogers had only been protecting his ship. A large map showed the position of the Vincennes at the time of the shoot-down. It was well within international waters.

At the United Nations, the Iranians compared the tragedy to the Soviet shoot-down of Korean Air Lines 007 in 1983. The White House decided that Vice President George Bush should defend the United States before the U.N. Security Council. The job of preparing the case fell to Richard Williamson, the assistant secretary of state for international organizations. He found it exceedingly difficult to get answers out of Crowe's staff, who were handling the affair at the Pentagon. Suspicious, he warned the vice president's chief of staff, Craig Fuller, to be very careful about committing Bush to any facts. Fuller's reaction was that he never trusted the Pentagon anyway. Bush's speech focused on the need to end the Iran-Iraq War. But what facts it did include were wrong. The vice president claimed that the Vincennes had rushed to defend a merchantman under attack by Iran.