Wife of Vincennes Skipper Escapes Bombing in S.D.

The wife of Capt. Will Rogers III, skipper of the San Diego-based guided missile cruiser Vincennes, escaped unharmed Friday morning, moments before a pipe bomb exploded under her van, igniting a fire that gutted her vehicle at a busy La Jolla intersection.

Hours after the 7:40 a.m. explosion, the FBI took control of the investigation, suspecting that the bombing might be an act of “domestic terrorism” linked to the Vincennes’ accidental downing of an Iranian civilian airliner in the Persian Gulf last July. The Navy and Marine Corps tightened security at every military installation in San Diego County.

“Certainly it raises the question whether there was a terrorist group involved in this,” said Gary Laturno, an FBI spokesman.

No one claimed responsibility for the bombing, a federal law enforcement official said.

“At this point in time, we have no motive; we have no suspect,” said Thomas A. Hughes, special agent in charge of the FBI in San Diego. “We do not rule out the possibility of retribution against Capt. Rogers.”

However, a senior Defense Department official said there was “no evidence” of a terrorist connection Friday, and some law enforcement officials described the bombing as “amateurish.”

An FBI spokesman said the Rogers’ van was usually driven by Sharon Rogers, but two highly placed law enforcement sources told The Times that Capt. Rogers drove his wife’s van to a doughnut shop without incident about an hour before the blast.

Stopped at Light

The explosion occurred while the van was in the left-turn lane of northbound Genesee Avenue, just south of La Jolla Village Drive and next to University Towne Centre. A law enforcement official, who asked not to be identified, said Sharon Rogers told investigators that she pulled up behind three or four cars stopped at the red light, then heard two popping sounds.

The official said she believed that her van had been struck in the rear by another car, so she got out and walked to the back of the van to look for damage.

“And then it all went up,” the official said. “That’s all there was to it. There were holes everywhere, and there was plenty of burn.”

The explosion propelled metal fragments through the roof of the white Toyota and ignited a fire that gutted the vehicle.

One law enforcement source said several construction workers nearby reported that, moments after the explosion, a red car quickly made a U-turn over the traffic median on Genesee and sped from the scene, headed south. Witnesses said there were four people in the red car.

“It could have been a guy with a remote-control device who popped the bomb,” the source said, “or it could have been somebody who saw the explosion and was trying not to get hurt.”

Sharon Rogers, 50, was on her way to her job as a fourth-grade teacher at La Jolla Country Day School when the bomb detonated.

Others Escape Damage

Though there were other vehicles on three sides of the van, none was damaged, witnesses said.

“I believe she got out just as it blew,” said Kurt Lent, a laborer who was walking down a dirt embankment toward the vehicle as it exploded.

Sharon Rogers was dazed, but walking under her own power, when the laborers reached her. They took her to a pickup truck, where she told them that she was the van’s sole occupant and she asked them to call her husband. Will Rogers arrived at the scene within minutes, and police took the couple to the San Diego Police Department’s Northern Division headquarters.

“She looked like she’d just been rear-ended or something,” said Charles Archer, one of two masonry workers to reach Rogers first. “She was surprised and shocked, but she wasn’t burned and she wasn’t bleeding.”

San Diego police and FBI agents rushed to the Rogers’ Sherlock Court home, checking two other vehicles and the house with dogs trained to sniff for explosives. Investigators used mirrors to look beneath the vehicles.

Husband Used Van

Two law enforcement sources said Will Rogers left the couple’s home about 6:30 a.m. and drove in the van to a doughnut shop. He returned, drank coffee with his wife, and then Sharon Rogers, who usually drove the van, left in the vehicle, investigators said.

When Sharon Rogers was interviewed, one law enforcement source said, she was nervous and shaken, but she did not immediately connect the explosion with any possible retaliation for her husband’s role in shooting down the Iranian plane.

The official also said that the van had been parked in the driveway overnight but that neither the Rogerses nor any neighbors reported seeing anyone near it. He also said the Rogerses have a family watchdog.

“The dog didn’t bark, and the dog barks at everybody,” the official said.

He also said Sharon Rogers told investigators that her family had received no threats since the airplane was downed.

“There were no threats, nothing,” he said. “That’s what’s funny. If you’re getting telephone calls in the middle of the night and threatening letters and graffiti, you would worry. But here there was nothing.”

The Rogerses were being protected Friday night by the Naval Investigative Service and other Navy personnel at an undisclosed location. “They are not home and we will not disclose their location,” said Chief Petty Officer Craig Huebler, a Navy spokesman. “And we won’t discuss it beyond that. That gets into security, and you can understand the sensitivity to that.”

He said that no special security precautions were undertaken for Rogers, the crew members or their families after the Vincennes returned to San Diego.

“Why should the Vincennes crew be treated any different?” Huebler said. “There was nothing to indicate a threat to the crew or to their families.”

All 360 sailors assigned to the Vincennes were alerted by the Navy after the bombing and were urged to take whatever precautions they deemed necessary, Huebler said.

Police and Navy officials said that Capt. Rogers and his wife telephoned their son, Bill Rogers, at Colgate University, where he is a student. They assured him they were safe.

Declined Comment

Late Friday the FBI declined comment on most aspects of the investigation. But two law enforcement sources said one or two pipe bombs had been placed under the van on the transmission.

“If she didn’t get out like that . . . well, she was very, very lucky,” said one source.

He said he and other investigators determined that the two initial loud bangs apparently came from one or two explosive devices and that the apparatus was connected under the van’s transmission.

He noted that most of the van’s damage resulted from the fire, which he said has led investigators to believe that either low-intensity explosives were planted on the vehicle, or that only a small amount of high-intensity explosives was used.

Within hours, San Diego Fire Department officials confirmed that the blast was caused by a pipe bomb. Archer said he found a flattened, 2-by-3-inch section of metal pipe near the curb and turned it over to investigators.

Investigators from the FBI; the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the Naval Investigative Service; the San Diego Police Department; the San Diego Fire Department and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department swarmed over the scene, searching for evidence within a grid chalk-marked on the pavement around the van.

Although two investigative sources said the device was planted on the transmission, the FBI’s Hughes said at a news conference that “an explosive device exploded in the vehicle.”

Authorities said they plan to keep the site of the bombing sealed off until at least 4 p.m. today. The evidence will be reviewed by federal bomb and anti-terrorist experts from the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington.

Low Intensity

Two terrorism experts acknowledged that terrorists, like those operating in the Middle East, commonly use higher-intensity explosives. They said they could not rule out the possibility that the attack was ordered by Iran.

“I would expect the Iranians to come better-equipped, but it’s not unheard-of for terrorists to use pipe bombs,” said UC San Diego Prof. John Ruggie, a consultant on terrorism for the federal government and the United Nations. “One example is the attack on U. S. servicemen in Germany.” In that attack, two soldiers and a woman patron of a nightclub were killed and 200 people were injured in West Berlin in 1986.

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism specialist with the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, said he has interviewed terrorists trained in Lebanon who said they were under orders to use low-intensity explosives, like pipe bombs, when hitting foreign targets.

The Vincennes, a guided-missile cruiser based in San Diego, returned from its six-month Persian Gulf deployment in October. It remains in port with Rogers as its skipper.

As the Vincennes exchanged fire with Iranian speedboats last July 3, Iran Air Flight 655 appeared on the U. S. warship’s high-tech radar system. After the plane failed to respond to warnings on civilian and military channels, Rogers gave the order to fire.

That decision, he said later, was in defense of his ship and crew. But the aircraft that Rogers feared was an Iranian F-14 fighter was actually an Airbus A300 with 290 people aboard. All of them were killed when the plane was knocked out of the air by a missile launched from the Vincennes.

After the downing of the plane, Iran said it would seek retribution for the deaths of the innocent civilians.

However, Navy spokesmen in San Diego said Friday that no threats had been made against Rogers, the Vincennes or any of its crew members since the ship returned to San Diego. The Vincennes and Rogers received some “negative” mail last July, shortly after the plane was shot down, a spokesman said. That mail was critical of the Vincennes’ handling of the incident but did not contain threats, the spokesman said.

Since the Vincennes returned to San Diego, Rogers has been overseeing routine ship maintenance and training in preparation for its next deployment. The Navy does not disclose the dates that any of its ships will be deployed, but surface ships normally work in 18-month cycles, spending about six months at sea and the rest of the time at or near their home ports.

Federal officials in Los Angeles said Friday that an FBI lookout report was issued in San Diego in late December for a Syrian national allegedly linked to the Dec. 21 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 that killed 259 passengers and crew members in Scotland.

A copy of the FBI document, obtained by The Times, said the Los Angeles FBI office had received an anonymous phone call alleging that the Syrian, identified as Farwan Abdin, was “involved in or responsible for the Flight 103 crash in Scotland.”

The FBI added: “Also mentioned were Navy quarters or TV station. No further information given.”

The FBI’s assessment at the time was that the call was “shoddy” but that efforts should be made to locate Abdin. Officials said Friday that a serious investigation of the call was never launched.

Terrorism experts believe the bombing of Pan American Flight 103 over Scotland may have been retribution for the Vincennes’ shooting down of the Iranian jetliner. But no organization that authorities thought capable of the act has claimed responsibility for the Dec. 21 bombing of the Pan Am aircraft.

Investigators have said that, if retribution for the Iranian Airbus downing is the motive, a group responsible may not feel it necessary to proclaim its role; the retribution itself could carry the message.

Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Anthony Perry, H.G. Reza, Tom Gorman, Jane Fritsch and Patrick McDonnell in San Diego, William Rempel in Los Angeles and Ronald J. Ostrow in Washington.