U.S. Copters Told to Fire on Iraqis Who Appeared to Surrender, Navy Board Finds : Gulf War: But the fact-finding panel recommends only mild censure for the commander.

A Navy fact-finding board, issuing the first official ruling of wrongdoing by American troops in the Persian Gulf War, has found that a Navy skipper ordered U.S. helicopters to open fire on Iraqi soldiers on oil platforms despite reports that some appeared to be surrendering, officials said Wednesday.

In what one knowledgeable defense official called an apparent “cover-up,” the commanding officer of the U.S. frigate Nicholas also withheld reports of the possible Iraqi surrender from the commanders of Operation Desert Storm, the three-member Navy board found.

But the board concluded that even though the commanding officer, Cmdr. Dennis G. Morral, “demonstrated extremely poor judgment,” he did not violate the rules of engagement in the Gulf or international rules of war.

As a result, the board called on the Navy to issue only a nonpunitive letter of caution, a recommendation that has been endorsed by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Frank B. Kelso II. The relatively mild censure, which would not be entered into Morral’s personnel file, has stirred controversy among those familiar with the board’s findings, officials said Wednesday.

“Some lawyers think this guy should have gotten hung out to dry,” said one Defense Department official familiar with the case. “There was a lot of political pressure” to impose sterner punishment, the official said.

The panel’s findings have cast a pall over a raid that was one of the Navy’s most significant and successful operations during the six-week Gulf War.

Five Iraqi soldiers were killed, three wounded and 23 taken prisoner in the raid on nine oil platforms off Kuwait, which took place on the night of Jan. 18 in the early hours of the war against Iraq. The Iraqi troops were said to have been firing anti-aircraft guns and missiles at the allied air armada mounting an intensive bombing operation against Iraqi forces in Kuwait and Iraq.

Six to eight hours before the raid was to be launched against the platforms, U.S. Army and Navy helicopters surveyed the offshore drilling rigs. Several helicopter crew members reported sighting two Iraqi soldiers, on separate platforms, waving a light piece of cloth in an apparent gesture of surrender.

But Morral, the officer in command of the key Navy operation, found the reports contradictory and concluded that there was no “general surrender” by the troops manning the platforms.

Further surveillance flights, he reasoned, might tip off the Iraqi troops, who were believed to be identifying targets for Iraqi Silkworm anti-ship missiles, to the imminent raid.

According to investigators, Morral then ordered subordinates not to relay the reports of the flag-waving to higher military authorities, who might have delayed the raid or ordered further efforts to investigate the Iraqis’ willingness to surrender.

“He told them, in effect, ‘I’ll take care of that,’ ” said a Pentagon official familiar with the report. While the helicopter crew sightings did appear in the captain’s log and in after-action reports of the incident, investigators said that Morral had “demonstrated extremely poor judgment” by failing to notify commanders of those reports before the operation began.

The skipper’s “lapse in judgment,” investigators concluded, “raises unique command responsibility issues.”

Investigators nevertheless agreed that there appeared to be no evidence that Iraqi soldiers aboard the oil rigs would have surrendered en masse before being fired upon. In interrogations of the 23 Iraqi prisoners-of-war taken in the raid, only one made a comment about trying to surrender, investigators found.

They added that Morral’s actions were based in part on advice from Kuwaiti naval personnel, who warned that during the Iran-Iraq War, Iraqi forces manning oil rigs had used offers of surrender as a ruse to draw Iranian troops within firing range.

Speaking to reporters aboard the Nicholas after the raid had been completed and the prisoners rounded up, Morral said the captured Iraqis appeared to have been ill-trained and poorly fed reservists.

“I don’t think that they wanted to fight,” Morral said. “I don’t think they knew how to fight. I think they were very relieved that we were rescuing them from this situation.”

Morral received a Silver Star, an award for acts of heroism in combat, for his role in the Gulf operations. While several military attorneys and officers privately suggested that Morral should be stripped of the honor, neither the investigating board nor Kelso recommended such punishment.

The Navy inquiry, headed by Rear Adm. Douglas J. Katz, began in June, after the Navy received a letter from one of Morral’s subordinates accusing the captain of not acting on reports of Iraqi surrenders.