Skipper Defends Downing of Jet : But Says He’ll Carry Burden Rest of His Life

The captain of the U.S. warship Vincennes, which mistakenly shot down an Iranian jetliner Sunday, killing all 290 aboard, said Monday that his action was legitimate self-defense but called the tragedy “a burden I will carry the rest of my life.”

“I believed the aircraft to be a definite threat to this unit and operating in direct response to the ongoing surface engagement,” Capt. Will C. Rogers III wrote in a message to his superiors. Rogers oversaw Sunday’s action from the Aegis-system cruiser’s sophisticated electronic combat center.

Rogers made his comments as the Pentagon dispatched a six-member investigative team under command of Rear Adm. William M. Fogarty to the Persian Gulf to determine the cause of the deadly miscalculation.

President Reagan, meanwhile, said the downing of the Iran Air jetliner was “an understandable accident” caused in part by the behavior of the plane’s pilot.

Rogers said he refrained from launching the missiles that downed the jetliner as long as he could, firing only after he had exhausted every means of warning the plane by radio.

Officers aboard an Italian frigate in the Persian Gulf confirmed the U.S. contention that the A-300 Airbus failed to answer several radio warnings and appeared to be off course, a Navy Ministry spokesman in Rome said Monday.

The Italian official said that officers on board the frigate Espero, on escort duty in the gulf, heard the Vincennes order the aircraft several times to identify itself and change course. “The warnings were not replied to,” the spokesman said.

The Vincennes shot down the Airbus at 10:55 a.m. Sunday local time, eight minutes after spotting it on radar. The plane was heading directly toward the American cruiser at more than 500 miles an hour as the Vincennes was engaged in a naval skirmish with several small Iranian gunboats, according to U.S. accounts of the incident.

Rogers and his officers thought the plane was an Iranian F-14 fighter preparing to attack the ship, according to the Defense Department.

“Although I had requested permission to engage at 20 nautical miles, I withheld engagement until nine nautical miles and only after an exhausting request” for the airliner’s pilot to identify his craft and state his intentions, the captain wrote.

U.S. officials said Rogers tried seven times to contact the Iran Air plane on military and civilian channels. A device known as a transponder, which is carried by all commercial planes as a form of identification that can be picked up by special radio receivers, either was not working or sent back signals that led officers on the Vincennes to believe that the airliner was an Iranian F-14, officials said.

Facts and Opinions

The Pentagon asked its six-member investigative panel to report findings of “fact, opinions and recommendations as to the cause of the incident; the reason for the attack; the extent of the damage and loss of life as it relates to potential claims, and responsibility for the incident, including any recommended administrative or disciplinary action, if considered appropriate.”

The investigative team, in an effort to determine why the Vincennes’ ultra-sophisticated Aegis defense system could fail to distinguish between a fat Airbus and a sleek and smaller F-14, will attempt to reconstruct the data received by the Vincennes, rerunning audio and computer tapes to reproduce the symbols that appeared on the radar screen.

The investigators also hope the Iranians will make the plane’s flight data and voice recorders available to help reconstruct the disaster, officials in Washington said.

Fogarty, the team’s leader, is a former commanding officer of the battleship New Jersey who is now director of plans and policy for the U.S. Central Command, the Tampa-based military unit with responsibility for gulf operations.

Lawyer, Radar Specialist

Also on the panel is an attorney, Lt. Cmdr. Christine M. Yuhas, and a specialist in the Aegis radar and weapons system aboard the Vincennes, according to Central Command officials.

All testimony received by the group will be taken under oath, according to Fogarty’s orders. The team’s report is due in 15 days.

President Reagan, who spoke with reporters at the White House upon returning from a weekend at Camp David, said he did not want to “minimize the tragedy,” adding, “And we all know it was a tragedy.

“But we’re talking about an incident in which a plane, on radar, was observed coming in the direction of a ship in combat, and the plane began lowering its altitude,” he said. “So I think it was an understandable accident to shoot and think they were under attack from that plane.”

A ‘Premeditated Attack’

Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed Mahallati, charged that the passenger plane was destroyed without warning in a “premeditated attack” and said the Vincennes’ electronic battle management system was “definitely” capable of distinguishing between a large commercial jet and an F-14 fighter.

Asked to comment on the Iranian charge that the attack on the jetliner was deliberate, Reagan replied forcefully, “I don’t go much by what the Iranians say--ever.”

He said that the fleet of 28 U.S. warships will remain in the gulf to carry out the mission of protecting neutral shipping from attacks by Iranian or Iraqi forces. Iran and Iraq have attacked hundreds of commercial ships in the gulf as part of their bloody war, now nearly eight years long.

“We want peace in the gulf, but we also want the right of navigation in international waters,” Reagan said.

Attack by Speedboats

Sunday’s disaster began at 10:10 a.m. local time when at least three Iranian Boghammar speedboats fired on a Navy helicopter flying a reconnaissance mission off the Vincennes. Half an hour later, the Vincennes and the frigate Elmer Montgomery opened fire on the speedboats, sinking two and crippling one.

At 10:47, Iran Air Flight 655 lifted off from Bandar Abbas airport, a joint civilian-military facility, on a regularly scheduled flight for Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The Vincennes picked up the plane on its radar scope but, because of poor visibility, made no visual sighting.

Two minutes later, the Vincennes began a series of warnings to the aircraft to identify itself and alter course. There was no response, although there were “electronic indications on the Vincennes that led it to believe that the aircraft was an F-14,” according to Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Details Called Classified

Crowe refused to elaborate, saying that details of the ship’s electronic systems were classified.

Receiving no response to repeated radio calls and believing from the plane’s behavior that it was a hostile aircraft, Rogers radioed Rear Adm. Anthony Less, commander of the Joint Task Force Middle East, and asked permission to shoot down the plane. He received it but waited until 10:54 a.m., when he ordered two Standard SM-2 radar-guided missiles fired at the incoming target.

Crewmen aboard the Vincennes first saw the jet as it disintegrated after being hit by at least one of the missiles.

There were no U.S. losses in either the surface or the air action.

The investigative team will try to discover why the Iranian pilot failed to respond to radio calls from the American cruiser. According to a Navy official in Washington, contacts between U.S. warships and commerical airliners of all nations, including Iran, are common in the gulf, and the planes almost always respond.

Hair-Trigger Rules

The officer could cite no incident in the gulf in which a plane has ignored warnings to steer clear of a combat zone. All commercial pilots in the region have been warned that the United States is operating under hair-trigger rules of engagement that allow ship and aircraft commanders to shoot at anything that displays “hostile intent.”

Crowe said Sunday that pilots were advised last September that “failure to respond to requests for identification and intentions or to warnings and operating in a threatening manner could place the aircraft at risk by U.S. defensive measures.” U.S. forces “do not have to be shot at before responding,” Crowe added.

Another point of dispute between American and Iranian accounts is the altitude at which the plane was flying when it was shot down. Crowe said the jetliner was at 9,000 feet, descending and accelerating. Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency said the airliner was at 7,500 feet and flying on a steady course.

Location Also In Dispute

The plane’s location at the time of the attack also was in dispute. Crowe said the Iran Air jet was four or five miles outside the established air corridor for the Bandar Abbas-to-Dubai run.

But Mahallati, the Iranian diplomat, said in a television interview, “It was, indeed, in the recognized corridor.”

As a result of the tragedy, two airlines that fly over the gulf quickly changed their flight paths. Japan Air Lines said its twice-weekly flight from Tokyo to Athens will alter its route over the gulf to avoid the area where the shooting took place. And Cathay Pacific Airways said the daily Hong Kong-to-London flight will change its gulf route.

Vice President George Bush, seeking to play down the U.S. destruction of the Iranian airliner, said in his first public comment on the incident Monday that he did not think “it’s more significant than other incidents” that have taken place since U.S. forces began patrolling the Persian Gulf a year ago.

‘Our Hearts Go Out’

“Obviously, as we celebrate our great national holiday, our hearts go out to the loved ones and families of those who were lost,” Bush said at an airport press conference in Detroit. But, he added, “life goes on, and our mission goes on. The world keeps turning.”

Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, who will oppose Bush in the November presidential election, criticized Reagan and Bush for not doing enough to end the Iran-Iraq War.

“Nearly 300 people have died as a result of that terrible accident,” Dukakis said regarding Sunday’s incident. “Nothing we can do can change that, and our hearts and prayers go out to their families and friends who mourn their loss.”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said there were more similarities than differences between the shooting down of the Iranian airliner and the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983.

Comments in Chicago

At an informal news conference in the yard of his Chicago home, Jackson said the U.S. account of the incident “sounds so much like the same arguments the Russians were making when the KAL was shot down. We did not accept those arguments as being valid, and most people in the world will not accept our arguments at this point as being valid.”

Reagan angrily rejected charges by Jackson and by Soviet officials that the attacks on the two passenger planes were comparable.

“Our shot was fired as result of a radar screen of a plane approaching it . . . ,” Reagan said. “Remember the KAL--a group of Soviet fighter planes went up, identified it for what it was and then proceeded to shoot it down.”

Also contributing to this story were Don Shannon in Washington, David Lauter in St. Louis, Keith Love in Charlestown, Mass., and Karen Tumulty in Chicago.