Strait of Hormuz new Gulf of Tonkin?

Bill Weinberg

Iran is contesting Washington’s version of the Jan. 5 incident in the Strait of Hormuz. From the Los Angeles Times, Jan. 11:

Iran releases its own tape on Hormuz ship incident
BEIRUT — Iran released a videotape Thursday to support its side of an ongoing propaganda battle with Washington over a weekend naval confrontation in the narrow waterway leading into the Persian Gulf.

The videotape, broadcast on Iran’s state-owned English-language Press TV channel, was meant to bolster Iran’s contention that nothing more than routine contact took place between speedboats of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and three U.S. warships attached to the Bahrain-based 5th Fleet.

U.S. officials, including President Bush, have alleged that the Iranian boats harassed the ships in what they described as a dangerous provocation in the Strait of Hormuz. They released a four-minute, 20-second videotape this week purporting to show snippets of the incident with the Iranian boats sailing too close to the U.S. ships and making threats by radio during what was described as a 20-minute confrontation.

Iran has called the U.S. tape a fake. Its own version, also brief and heavily edited, shows the Revolutionary Guard naval forces making radio contact with the warships, and the Americans calmly replying in what Iranians describe as everyday interaction.

“Coalition warship 73, this is Iranian navy patrol boat 16. Come in. Over,” an Iranian sailor aboard a speedboat says in English to a U.S. warship apparently in the distance. “Request present course and speed.”

“This is coalition warship 73,” a voice says over the radio in American English. “I am operating in international waters.”

[…]

U.S. officials, including President Bush, have alleged that the Iranian boats harassed the ships in what they described as a dangerous provocation in the Strait of Hormuz. They released a four-minute, 20-second videotape this week purporting to show snippets of the incident with the Iranian boats sailing too close to the U.S. ships and making threats by radio during what was described as a 20-minute confrontation.

Iran has called the U.S. tape a fake. Its own version, also brief and heavily edited, shows the Revolutionary Guard naval forces making radio contact with the warships, and the Americans calmly replying in what Iranians describe as everyday interaction.

“Coalition warship 73, this is Iranian navy patrol boat 16. Come in. Over,” an Iranian sailor aboard a speedboat says in English to a U.S. warship apparently in the distance. “Request present course and speed.”

“This is coalition warship 73,” a voice says over the radio in American English. “I am operating in international waters.”

A Jan. 9 New York Times report also raised doubts about the US version:

The unidentified Revolutionary Guard official quoted in the Iranian news media asserted that the video of the speedboats had been released to coincide with a trip by President George W. Bush to the Middle East and “was in line with a project of the Western media to create fear.” The official said the sounds and images on the video did not go together, adding, “It is very clear that they are fake.”

The Fars news agency had said that the confrontation had been fabricated to present Iran as a threat to its neighbors before Bush’s trip so he could justify United States forces in the gulf.

The episode was initially described Monday by American officials who said it took place Sunday in the Strait of Hormuz.

They said five armed Iranian speedboats approached three United States Navy warships in international waters, then maneuvered aggressively as a radio threat was issued that the American ships would be blown up. No shots were fired. The video runs slightly more than four minutes and, Pentagon officials said, was shot from the bridge of the guided-missile destroyer Hopper.

The audio includes a heavily accented voice warning in English that the navy warships would explode. However, the recording carries no ambient noise — the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind — that would be expected if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small boats that sped around the three-ship American convoy.

Pentagon officials said they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from shore, or from another ship nearby, although it might have come from one of the five fast boats with a high-quality radio system.

Blogger Glenn Greenwald on Salon has also been keeping track of reasons for skepticism:

Iranian Hooman Majd at The Huffington Post noted that the voices on the tapes issuing the melodramatic threats were unquestionably not Persian. As he put it: “the person speaking doesn’t have an Iranian accent and moreover, sounds more like Boris Karloff in a horror movie than a sailor in the elite branch of Iran’s military.” A regular Iranian commenter at Cernig’s blog made the same point. Listen for yourself to the audio and see how credible the threats sound.

Greenwald then goes on to make the obvious analogy to the Gulf of Tonkin. If this is another such subterfuge, perhaps its evident collapse after not even a week is a sign that the healthy adversarial relationship between press and state has been revived somewhat since 1964—and perhaps even, despite our deep skepticism, that the Internet and “crowdsourcing” are having a salubrious effect on the intellectual climate…

See our last post on Iran.

  1. Even the Pentagon is questioning …
    ABC and others mention that the Pentagon has now ‘clarified … that the threat may have come from the Iranian boats, or it may have come from somewhere else’.

    According to one poster the maritime radio frequencies in the Strait are like CB radio with jokes, music and random chatter. So, random joke? And if so, by whom?

  2. “Hecklers” behind Hormuz Strait scare?
    From Navy Times, Jan. 11:

    ‘Filipino Monkey’ may be behind radio threats, ship drivers say
    he threatening radio transmission heard at the end of a video showing harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a locally famous heckler known among ship drivers as the “Filipino Monkey.”

    Since the Jan. 6 incident was announced to the public a day later, the U.S. Navy has said it’s unclear where the voice came from. In the videotape released by the Pentagon on Jan. 8, the screen goes black at the very end and the voice can be heard, distancing it from the scenes on the water.

    “We don’t know for sure where they came from,” said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson, spokeswoman for 5th Fleet in Bahrain. “It could have been a shore station.”

    While the threat — “I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes” — was picked up during the incident, further jacking up the tension, there’s no proof yet of its origin. And several Navy officials have said it’s difficult to figure out who’s talking.

    “Based on my experience operating in that part of the world, where there is a lot of maritime activity, trying to discern [who is speaking on the radio channel] is very hard to do,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead told Navy Times during a brief telephone interview today.

    Indeed, the voice in the audio sounds different from the one belonging to an Iranian officer shown speaking to the cruiser Port Royal over a radio from a small open boat in the video released by Iranian authorities. He is shown in a radio exchange at one point asking the U.S. warship to change from the common bridge-to-bridge channel 16 to another channel, perhaps to speak to the Navy without being interrupted.

    Further, there’s none of the background noise in the audio released by the U.S. that would have been picked up by a radio handset in an open boat.

    So with Navy officials unsure and the Iranians accusing the U.S. of fabrications, whose voice was it? In recent years, American ships operating in the Middle East have had to contend with a mysterious but profane voice known by the ethnically insulting handle of “Filipino Monkey,” likely more than one person, who listens in on ship-to-ship radio traffic and then jumps on the net shouting insults and jabbering vile epithets.

    Navy women — a helicopter pilot hailing a tanker, for example — who are overheard on the radio are said to suffer particularly degrading treatment.

    Several Navy ship drivers interviewed by Navy Times are raising the possibility that the Monkey, or an imitator, was indeed featured in that video.

    Rick Hoffman, a retired captain who commanded the cruiser Hue City and spent many of his 17 years at sea in the Gulf was subject to the renegade radio talker repeatedly, often without pause during the so-called “Tanker Wars” of the late 1980s.

    “For 25 years there’s been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats,” he said. “He could be tied up pierside somewhere or he could be on the bridge of a merchant ship.”

    And the Monkey has stamina.

    “He used to go all night long. The guy is crazy,” he said. “But who knows how many Filipino Monkeys there are? Could it have been a spurious transmission? Absolutely.”

  3. “Millennium Challenge 2002” and the Hormuz Strait scare
    The Millennium Challenge 2002 war games is invoked by the New York Times Jan. 12 in connection with the Stait of Hormuz incident. The article does not mention that retired Gen. Paul Van Riper, who helped oversee the exercises, protested that they had been “rigged” to assure a US victory.

    Iran Encounter Grimly Echoes ’02 War Game
    WASHINGTON — There is a reason American military officers express grim concern over the tactics used by Iranian sailors last weekend: a classified, $250 million war game in which small, agile speedboats swarmed a naval convoy to inflict devastating damage on more powerful warships.

    In the days since the encounter with five Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz, American officers have acknowledged that they have been studying anew the lessons from a startling simulation conducted in August 2002. In that war game, the Blue Team navy, representing the United States, lost 16 major warships — an aircraft carrier, cruisers and amphibious vessels — when they were sunk to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in an attack that included swarming tactics by enemy speedboats.

    “The sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack,” said Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper, a retired Marine Corps officer who served in the war game as commander of a Red Team force representing an unnamed Persian Gulf military. “The whole thing was over in 5, maybe 10 minutes.”

    If the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, proved to the public how terrorists could transform hijacked airliners into hostage-filled cruise missiles, then the “Millennium Challenge 2002” war game with General Van Riper was a warning to the armed services as to how an adversary could apply similar, asymmetrical thinking to conflict at sea.

    General Van Riper said he complained at the time that important lessons of his simulated victory were not adequately acknowledged across the military. But other senior officers say the war game and subsequent analysis and exercises helped to focus attention on the threat posed by Iran’s small, fast boats, and helped to prepare commanders for last weekend’s encounter.

    “It’s clear, strategically, where the Iranian military has gone,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters on Friday. “For the years that this strategic shift toward their small, fast boats has taken place, we’ve been very focused on that.”

    In the simulation, General Van Riper sent wave after wave of relatively inexpensive speedboats to charge at the costlier, more advanced fleet approaching the Persian Gulf. His force of small boats attacked with machine guns and rockets, reinforced with missiles launched from land and air. Some of the small boats were loaded with explosives to detonate alongside American warships in suicide attacks. That core tactic of swarming played out in real life last weekend, though on a much more limited scale and without any shots fired.