1 Vincennes Officer May Be Disciplined in Disaster

Top military officials reviewing the downing of an Iranian passenger jet by the Vincennes have recommended no disciplinary action against any officer involved in the incident other than the ship’s operations officer, Pentagon officials said Saturday.

A Navy board considered and rejected recommending action against officers as high as Rear Adm. Anthony A. Less, commander of the Persian Gulf naval task force, of which the Vincennes was part.

In a 1,000-page report that will be presented to Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci this week, military officials said Saturday, the board places most of the blame on the operations officer for his role in misinterpreting information which resulted in the cruiser mistakenly shooting down the jetliner on July 3, killing all 290 people aboard.

A report now being reviewed by Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommends a letter of reprimand to the operations officer, which would not become part of his official personnel file, officials said. The name of the officer has not been disclosed by the Navy.

The report was compiled by an investigative team headed by Rear Adm. William N. Fogarty and given to Marine Gen. George B. Crist, head of the Central Command, which controls the Persian Gulf region for review. It was then forwarded to Crowe, who has been reading it this weekend and could recommend lesser or greater disciplinary measures, officials said.

By the time an unclassified version of the report is made public, it may have been changed during this complicated review process, Pentagon officials said. But they added that there is little inclination among high officials to take a hard line against anybody from Less, who was in the gulf on his flagship, the Coronado, at the time of the shoot-down, to the sailors who misinterpreted data displayed on their consoles on the high-tech cruiser.

The general conclusion of the report is that a series of human errors led to the misidentification of the Iranian jetliner and that there was no significant malfunction in the performance of the Vincennes’ high-technology Aegis radar-tracking and identification systems, according to officials.

Still to be explained is how the high-tech equipment on the Vincennes could have been misinterpreted.