U.S. Says Attack Killed 3 Iranians : 26 Crewmen of Tehran Ship in Navy Custody

The U.S. helicopter attack on an Iranian mine-laying vessel in the Persian Gulf on Monday left three crewmen dead and two missing, and 10 mines were captured by Navy commandos who boarded the ship, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Iran, warning that it will make America regret its “wicked acts,” demanded that the United States hand over the remainder of the ship’s crew. According to the Pentagon, 26 sailors, four of them wounded, were rescued from the water and transferred to various Navy ships in the area.

Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, in a television interview, said the United States intends to return the crewmen to Iran by handing them over to the International Red Crescent Society, the Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross, in Oman.

Hovercraft Fired On

In a new incident, the U.S. Navy frigate whose helicopters made Monday’s attack fired warning shots at an Iranian Hovercraft Tuesday after it ignored warnings and closed to less than a mile from the American ship, U.S. defense officials said. The Hovercraft departed without further incident.

The U.S. military had the Iranian mine-laying ship, the Iran Ajr, under surveillance for some time and suspected that it was one of several Iranian craft sowing mines in the gulf, Pentagon sources said.

The sources would not discuss the U.S. surveillance methods, but it is known that sophisticated radar planes, including Saudi Arabia-based AWACS, make frequent flights over the region. U.S. warships also carry advanced electronics and helicopters with night-vision devices.

Iran denied that the vessel was planting mines. However, Weinberger, interviewed Tuesday evening on the McNeil-Lehrer PBS news program, said the evidence of mine-laying is “absolutely incontrovertible.” It is based, he said, on extended surveillance of the Iranian ship that began hours before the attack and was confirmed by Iranian crewmen captured afterward.

“These things certainly weren’t vegetables and fruits,” Weinberger said. The ship was under observation “long enough to satisfy us that they were committing hostile acts.”

Pentagon spokesman Fred S. Hoffman, in a briefing for reporters Tuesday, said the U.S. servicemen aboard the helicopters, which are based on the guided-missile frigate Jarrett, had no doubt that the crew aboard the Iran Ajr was planting mines.

“They were very sure of what they saw,” Hoffman said. “This is the first time we caught them red-handed.”

Reporters in a Pentagon press pool in the gulf who were allowed aboard the crippled Iranian vessel said there were three large gashes in the hull and deck and that it was pocked by machine-gun fire and stained with blood. They quoted sources as saying that it appeared that the crew destroyed documents before abandoning the ship.

Rear Adm. Harold J. Bernsen, the commander of the Navy’s Middle East Force, told reporters aboard his command ship, the La Salle, that the attack occurred in two stages Monday night.

Two-Stage Action

The first attack, he said, was “insufficient to deter the continuation of mining,” and the helicopters moved in again, this time disabling the craft and leaving it burning.

Of the four wounded Iranians, three are being treated aboard the amphibious assault ship Guadalcanal and one is on the La Salle, defense officials said.

The remaining 22 detainees--the Pentagon says they are not “prisoners” because the United States is not at war with Iran--are being held aboard the La Salle.

The Pentagon identified the Iran Ajr as a 750-ton, 213-foot amphibious landing craft built in the Netherlands in 1984.

Military sources said the helicopters involved were probably Hughes Aircraft 500MDs or 500MGs--lightweight, quiet, high-speed attack copters used by the Army’s Special Operations Forces. They carry the weapons used in the Iran Ajr attack--7.62-millimeter machine guns and 2.75-inch rockets--as well as a modern night-vision scope known as FLIR, or forward-looking infra-red imaging system.

The FLIR allows the helicopter pilot, using a standard television screen, to observe a target in darkness a mile or more away. Pentagon officials said the pilots watched the Iranians drop six mines into the water before striking.

The assault left the ship with “rocket holes in the hull and the stern badly damaged,” U.S. officials said.

“There were no warning shots, and no effort was made to communicate with the craft before the helicopters acted,” Hoffman told reporters Tuesday. “After the attack, and just before the boat was seized and its crew detained, crew members were reassured in their own language, in Farsi, that no harm was intended to them.”

When Navy commandos boarded the Iran Ajr at first light Tuesday, they found 10 mines lined up in launchers ready to be placed in the water, the Pentagon said. The mines were described as “old-fashioned contact-type” mines, similar to those believed planted by Iran elsewhere in the gulf and the adjacent Gulf of Oman. Their design dates to World War I.

U.S. intelligence officials believe that Iran bought the mines from Libya or North Korea; the Iranians have also claimed to be manufacturing the devices themselves in large quantities. The mines are capable of sinking a Navy frigate or destroyer, Pentagon officials said.

The Navy sent up minesweeping helicopters to search for six mines that were believed to be already in the water. Hoffman said that one had been spotted floating near the scene of the attack.

Later in the morning, the Jarrett, accompanied by several other U.S. warships, took the Iranian ship under tow toward an offshore anchorage northeast of Bahrain.

During the towing operation, an Iranian Hovercraft approached at high speed and disregarded warnings to move away. The Jarrett fired several bursts at the Hovercraft, which changed course.

“The Hovercraft ignored a request to stop,” a Pentagon statement said. “When the vessel closed to within one nautical mile, the Jarrett fired warning shots. The Hovercraft then turned away and stopped.”

The attack on the Iran Ajr, which occurred in the gulf’s busy sea lanes off the coast of Bahrain, was the most serious confrontation yet between Iran and the U.S. naval forces, which were dispatched to the gulf in July to protect Kuwaiti tankers against the threat of Iranian attacks on commercial shipping.

Coming on the heels of an Iranian attack on a British-flag tanker off the Kuwaiti coast hours earlier, the helicopter incident sharply raised tension throughout the gulf on the eve of the seventh anniversary of the start of the Iran-Iraq War.

Diplomats and shipping sources in the region said they fear that the United States and Iran are now on a collision course likely to lead to a further escalation of the crisis.

“We are very much afraid that the Iranians will do something irrational, perhaps like trying to close the Strait of Hormuz,” one shipping source said.

“The whole situation is much more inflammable now,” a Western diplomat added.

Throughout the day, Tehran radio broadcast threats by Iranian officials to retaliate for the attack.

Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, told a special session of lawmakers that “the Americans will regret the crime they perpetrated in this part of the world on Monday. . . .”

“Those who have entered the region by force and who have embarked on wicked acts will soon regret their actions,” he was quoted as saying.

Tehran radio, which first asserted that the ship was an unarmed freighter carrying only foodstuffs, later acknowledged that it was an Iranian naval vessel. However, the official radio continued to deny that the ship’s crew had been planting mines.

Persian Gulf maritime sources said U.S. warships in the region were warning commercial traffic Tuesday that the Iran Ajr had already planted at least six mines over a 10-mile area before it was discovered.

The sources had no information on whether minesweeping operations had begun, but they said other U.S. warships have been dispatched to the area.

The attack was the second confrontation between U.S. and Iranian forces in the gulf since the Reagan Administration agreed to re-register half of Kuwait’s 22-tanker fleet under the American flag to afford it protection by the U.S. Navy.

On Aug. 8, a Navy F-14 jet fighter fired two missiles at an Iranian warplane approaching a U.S. surveillance aircraft. Both missiles missed.

Diplomats and shipping sources agree that the latest incident is far more serious, however, and not simply because casualties occurred.

Although it has repeatedly threatened to attack U.S. forces if they remain in the gulf, Iran has so far avoided a direct confrontation with the Navy’s vastly superior firepower.

Initially, Iran sought to harass the U.S. convoys by laying mines in their path. However, this tactic was abandoned for a time when it backfired by drawing West European nations into the U.S.-led effort to protect shipping.

Now, however, the fact that Iran has resumed mining the sea lanes shows that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fundamentalist Muslim regime “has not been intimidated by the presence of foreign naval forces and is prepared to risk a confrontation with the United States,” a Western diplomat said.

Along with an attack by Iranian gunboats on the British-flag tanker Gentle Breeze at the northern end of the gulf Monday, the mining also indicates that Iran may be on the verge of stepping up hostilities in the waterway in response to continuing Iraqi attacks against Iranian oil installations and shipping, analysts said.

The timing of the retaliations surprised a number of analysts because they came just before Iranian President Ali Khamenei addressed the United Nations. His speech, in which he threatened retaliation for the attack on the Iran Ajr, may prove to be pivotal in determining whether the U.N. Security Council votes to impose an arms embargo on Iran for rejecting its July 20 appeal for a cease-fire.

Whatever slim hope existed of Iran’s accepting the Security Council resolution appears to have been dashed by the latest confrontation with U.S. forces.

“It is difficult enough for the Iranians, after having lost so much over the past seven years, to justify accepting a settlement that merely ratifies the status quo,” one senior diplomat said.

It is even more difficult for them to do so now, at what would appear to be the point of American guns, and “quite unimaginable” following the attack on the Iran Ajr, the envoy added.

The diplomat said he fears that the Iranians will feel bound to retaliate in some fashion “to save face” and that this will provoke an American counterstrike and lead to “an unpredictable escalation” of the crisis.

Although Iranian Revolutionary Guards, cruising both ends of the gulf in speedboats, frequently harass tanker traffic with small-arms attacks that do little damage, their assault on the Gentle Breeze on Monday night was unusual in its duration.

Shipping sources said the 57,500-ton tanker, which was en route to Kuwait to pick up a cargo of oil, was subjected to a 15-minute barrage of rockets, armor-piercing shells and machine-gun fire that killed one crewman and set the crew’s quarters ablaze in a fire that raged throughout the night.

The Pentagon also announced Tuesday that Defense Secretary Weinberger will leave today for a five-day trip to the gulf region. He will visit U.S. ships there and call on military and civilian officials in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt, the agency said.

Defense Department spokesmen said Weinberger will discuss a wide variety of topics, including “foreign military sales and U.S. escort operations.” The trip has been planned for several weeks.

Weinberger also is expected to continue to press friendly gulf states for the right to base U.S. ships, aircraft and supplies permanently in the area. He may be offering the sale of U.S. military hardware as an incentive, a Pentagon source said.

John M. Broder reported from Washington and Michael Ross from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.