Sea Of Lies

By July 14, the day of Bush's speech, the Pentagon knew the truth but failed to share it with the vice president. The tapes of the Vincennes's Aegis system, with its combat and navigational data, reached the United States on July 5 and what they showed was reported to the Pentagon on July 10. The Vincennes had been in territorial waters. The Iranian airliner was well within the commercial air corridor and had been ascending, not descending. There was no beleaguered merchant vessel.

The cover-up was compounded by the official report on the incident. On July 3, Crowe chose Rear Adm. William Fogarty, a senior officer on the staff of Central Command, which controls military operations in the Middle East, to investigate. Crowe sent his own legal adviser, Capt. Richard DeBobes, to sit at Fogarty's side at CentCom headquarters in Tampa as he prepared his report.

The investigation was notable for the questions it failed to ask. The commanders on the carrier Forrestal were never interviewed; nor was Captain McKenna, the surface-warfare commander in Bahrain whose order Rogers ignored. McKenna's staff mailed a tape of his tense exchange with Rogers before the sea battle, but never received a response. The report released to the public did not include any chart or navigational data to show the Vincennes's position at the time of the shoot-down.

The map displayed by Fogarty when he briefed Congress in September placed the Vincennes and its helicopter well clear of Iranian waters and erroneously reported the position of the Montgomery. Fogarty produced stills from the Aegis-generated map of events displayed in the Vincennes's CIC. According to three sources on board the Vincennes that day, the real map had shown Hengam Island, Iranian territory less than nine miles from the Vincennes at the time of the shoot-down. On the frames shown by Fogarty, the island was simply deleted--miraculously placing the Vincennes safely in international waters once more. Asked about the Forrestal's aircraft by inquiring lawmakers, Fogarty put them 180 miles, then 250 miles away-even though those same Aegis stills show them clearly tagged only 75 miles from the Vincennes.

Most mysteriously, Fogarty told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Vincennes had been racing to rescue a Liberian tanker, the Stoval, that morning. There is no such tanker reported in any ship registry. According to two sources, including officer involved in the investigation, the Stoval was a decoy, a phantom conjured up by fake radio messages to lure out the Iranian gunboats. According to these sources, the Iranian aggression that Vice President Bush so vigorously decried at the United Nations had in fact been the trial run for an American sting operation.

The navy might have gotten away with all these deceptions had it not been for the slow grinding of international law. A lawsuit by the Iranian government has now forced Washington to admit, grudgingly, that the Vincennes was actually in Iranian waters -although Justice Department pleadings still claim the cruiser was forced there in self-defense. The admission is contained in fine print in legal briefs; it has never received public attention until Crowe, confronted with the evidence, conceded the truth last week on "Nightline." Crowe denies any cover-up; if mistakes were made, he told NEWSWEEK, they were " below my paygrade." Rogers continues to insist that his ship was in international waters.