Air Crash Investigations - Killing 290 Civilians - The Downing of Iran Air Flight 655 By the USS Vincennes

By Dirk Jan Barreveld, editor

On July 3, 1988, the American navy ship USS Vincennes, a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser operating in the Persian Gulf, shot down Iran Air Flight 655, an Airbus A300B2-203, on its way from Tehran to Dubai. All 290 people on board died. Iran Air 655 flew within its assigned corridor. The USS Vincennes thought it had to deal with an Iranian F-14 fighter jet. From this point of view it was simply a case of mistaken identity. It is amazing that a guided missile cruiser with extremely advanced electronic capabilities such as the USS Vincennes, equipped with an ultra modern system such as Aegis, could make such a case of mistaken identity. Although the U.S. had to pay damages, a clear admission of guilt, the officers and commander of the Vincennes received awards and decorations after all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365590702

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Air Crash Investigations - Killing 290 Civilians - The Downing of Iran Air Flight 655 By the USS Vincennes

AIR CRASH INVESTIGATIONS

Over the last decades flying has become an every day event, there is nothing special about it anymore. Safety has increased tremendously, but unfortunately accidents still happen. Every accident is a source for improvement. It is therefore essential that the precise cause or probable cause of accidents is as widely known as possible. It can not only take away fear for flying but it can also make passengers aware of unusual things during a flight and so play a role in preventing accidents.

Air Crash Investigation Reports are published by official government entities and can in principle usually be down loaded from the websites of these entities. It is however not always easy, certainly not by foreign countries, to locate the report someone is looking for. Often the reports are accompanied by numerous extensive and very technical specifications and appendices and therefore not easy readable. In this series we have streamlined the reports of a number of important accidents in aviation without compromising in any way the content of the reports in order to make the issue at stake more easily accessible for a wider public.

An e-Book is different from a printed book. Especially tables, graphs, maps, foot and end notes and images are sometimes too complicated to be reproduced properly in an e-Book. For those who are interested in the full details of the story we refer to the printed edition of this publication.

Dirk Jan Barreveld, editor.

AIR CRASH INVESTIGATIONS--KILLING 290 CIVILIANS--THE DOWNING OF IRAN AIR FLIGHT 655 BY THE USS VINCENNES

AIR CRASH INVESTIGATIONS--KILLING 290 CIVILIANS--THE DOWNING OF IRAN AIR FLIGHT 655 BY THE USS VINCENNES

The "Formal Investigation into the Circumstances Surrounding the Downing of Iran Air Flight 655 on July 3, 1988," by Rear Admiral William Fogarty, and comments from various sources.

All Rights Reserved © by Foundation Sagip Kabayan

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No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Dirk Jan Barreveld, editor

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A Lulu.com imprint

ISBN: 978-1-365-59070-2

Table of Content

AIR CRASH INVESTIGATIONS--KILLING 290 CIVILIANS--THE DOWNING OF IRAN AIR FLIGHT 655 BY THE USS VINCENNES

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: The official US Navy report of the downing of Iran  

Air Flight 655

I.   Preliminary Statement

II. Executive Summary

III. Findibg of facts

IV. Opinions

V.  Recommendations

List of acronyms/unofficial navy abbreviations/

acronym definition

Chapter 3: A close look at the accident report and what really

Happened

Notes

Other Air Crash Investigations

Preface

On July 3, 1988, the American navy ship USS Vincennes, a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser operating in the Persian Gulf, shot down Iran Air Flight 655, an Airbus A300B2-203, on its way from Tehran to Dubai. All 290 people on board died. Since World War II at least 21 civil aviation airplanes were shot down. Most of these planes were shot down by local terrorists or rebels. In a few cases they were shot down because the planes unintentionally crossed borders into hostile countries. Examples of these cases are the shooting down of Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114, a Boeing 727-224 of Libyan Arab Airlines shot down by two Israelian McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom II fighter jets killing 108 people and the shooting down by a Russian fighter jet of Korean Air Flight 007, a Boeing 747-230B, west of Sachalin island, killing all 269 people on board. The most recent case is the shooting down over Ukraine of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a Boeing 777-200ER, all 298 people on board were killed in this incident.

The recent downing of MH17 created especially in the U.S. an avalanche of media attention to shooting down of civilian airplanes. The media focussed their attention primarily on comparisons with the downing of Korean Air Flight 007. Just as was the case with Korean Air 007 it were the Russians or their friends who were responsible for the downing MH-17. The downing of Iran Air 655 by the American navy did not get any atttention at all. In the case of the Korean plane it was a case of clear entering Russian airspace. Whether or not that is sufficient cause to shoot down a fully packed Boeing 747 is another matter. Fact is that in those times, we are talking about the Cold War, all had to be done to prevent entering your enemy’s air space. That there were lapses in flying the North Pacific route was established and corrections were made to prevent it happening again.

The downing of Iran Air 655 was clearly a different case. The airplane flew within its assigned corridor, there is no question about that. It was simply a case of mistaken identity. The USS Vincennes thought it had to deal with a F-14 fighter jet. It is amazing that a guided missile

cruiser with extremely advanced electronic capabilities such as the USS Vincennes, equiped with an ultra modern system such as Aegis, could make such a case of mistaken identity. What went wrong? Notwithstanding the terrible mistake, a mistake that did cost the lives of 290 civilians and for which the U.S. had to pay damages, the officers and commander of the Vincennes received awards and decorations. The investigations into what happened exactly to MH-17 is not finished and might take considerable time. Whether or not the culprits will ever be brought to justice is still an open question, but one thing is sure nobody who was involved did get any award or decoration for the downing of MH-17.

Chapter 1: Introduction

The Middle East is a tumultuous place to say the least. The centre of this area is Mesopotamia, it is formed around the two Iraqi Rivers the Euphrates and Tigris. This is the area where the Garden of Eden, Paradise, is said to have been situated. According to the world’s most important religions, Judaism, Christiannity and Islam it was here that Adam and Eve walked around at the dawn of humanity. The Garden of Eden or Paradise is supposed to be an area of serene peace, an area of quietness. However, Adam and Eve could not stick to the rules God had given them and a serpent deceived Eve into eating fruit from the forbidden tree. From that moment on it went wrong.

Mesopotamia had its ups and downs over the centuries. Three thousand years ago it became the Babylonian Empire, the first in its kind in the world. The area produced famous figures such as Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar. Many Bible stories find their origin in the history of Mesopotamia and Babylon. In the 8th century AD Islam took hold of the area. Babylon became the centre of the Abbasid Caliphate and gave rise to the Golden Age of Islam. In the 16th century the Caliphate was replaced by the Turkish Ottoman Empire. It lasted until World War I. The Turks lost and their empire was carved up by two European civil servants: the British Mark Sykes and the French François Georges-Picot. Their creation of the Middle-East, the so-called Sykes-Picot Agreement, stills stand up to today. Nobody in the Middle-East, except for the Jewish Zionist Movement, had any inbreng in it. The fate of tens of millions of Middle-Easterners was simply decided upon by a pencil and a ruler. Sykes and Picot created some kingdoms and threw around some sheiks and emirs who were promoted to king and that was it. Of course the Europeans took care that the oil wells were protected and were available for their exclusive use. They created the protectorate system, each and every area of the Middle East was part of either the British or French Protectorate. Protectorate means protection but protection from who was never precisely defined. In practice it meant protection for French and British interests in the area concerned. And that meant in practice the oil industry. Until World War II the US was really not involved in this area.

US involvement in the Middle East

The first attempt by the US to participate in a major (oil) project in the Middle Easthe US was the Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement (1944). The Agreement was an attempt by the British and American governments to establish a lasting agreement to manage international petroleum supply and demand. The agreement would have established the International Petroleum Commission (IPC) for the purposes of balancing supply and demand of petroleum. The real purpose of the Agreement becomes crystal clear from a remark President Roosevelt made to a British Abassador in 1944:

"Persian oil … is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it’s ours.¹

The Agreement was signed but it faced near total opposition from the (American) petroleum industry, prompting U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt to withdraw the treaty from ratification by the American Congress. To a certain extend the IPC would have been a sort of OPEC. Although the treaty was not ratified it divided in practice the Middle Eastern oil between the United States and Britain. By the end of the Second World War, the United States had come to consider the Middle East region as the most strategically important area of the world.² The main reason for this was the fact that America had become a major oil importer instead of an oil exporter as it used to be before World War II.

The U.S. was an ardent supporter of the creation of a Jewish homeland in the years 1947-48. Whatever Israel did, right or wrong, was always covered up by the U.S. The rights of the Palestinians

were simply forgotten.

Operation Ajax

American Middle East policies is riddled with unbelievable mistakes, often with long time consequences that caused a lot of harm to the United Sates. One of those was Operation Ajax.

Persia, todays’ Iran, is the heir to one of the world’s oldest civilizations. It is a country that has the right to be extremely proud on its history. But it is also the country with the worlds’ second largest oil reserves. Apart from the amount of oil the country’s oil is one of the cheapest to pump up. There are sources who claim that the production costs of Iranian oil are as low as $1 per barrel³. For a country such as the United States of America, emerging out of the bloodiest and costliest war the world had ever seen, Iran was a price to go after.

Already during World War II the Americans kept a jealous eye on the British hold on Iran. Cheap and almost unlimited volumes of oil, that was what the U.S. needed for its postwar society. In the postwar era Persia or Iran was ruled by a rather weak monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was called for short the Shah (the Emperor). In the Western World the Shah was probably better known because of his beautiful (second) wife Soraya than by being Emperor of Persia.

Figure 1. Mohammad Mosaddegh

Iran or Persia was a bulwark of Shia Islam. For simplicity purposes the difference between Shia and Sunni Islam can be seen as the difference in Christiannity between Protestantism and Catholocism. The worldwide Shia’s denomination is with roughly 20% of Islam by far the smallest of the two.

Most power in Persia was in the hands of the prime minister, in 1953 that was Mohammad Mosadegh. Oil exploration was in the hands of the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) -- now part of British Petroleum (BP). When in 1953 the AIOC refused the Persians to audit its books Mossadegh nationalized the company, and threatened to expel foreign corporate representatives from the country⁴. The British did get mad and with help of the American Central