How the Pentagon planted a false story on Straits of Hormuz

by Alex Evans | Jan 16, 2008 | Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa

Readers will recall the story on January 9 of Iranian speedboats swarming around US ships, with one of them apparently saying over the radio that, “you will explode after a few minutes”.  President Bush, speaking on the eve of his Middle East trip, commented at the time that “we viewed it as a provocative act …  it is a dangerous situation, and they should not have done it, pure and simple”.  The media lapped it up: the New York Times, for instance, said in an editorial that

Iran played a reckless and foolish game in the Strait of Hormuz this week that — except for American restraint — could have spun lethally out of control.

But as Kevin Drum reported late last night, IPS have unearthed a rather different angle: the incident was not remotely out of the ordinary for the Straits of Hormuz.

The encounter between five small and apparently unarmed speedboats, each carrying a crew of two to four men, and the three U.S. warships occurred very early on Saturday Jan. 6, Washington time. But no information was released to the public about the incident for more than 24 hours, indicating that it was not viewed initially as being very urgent.The reason for that absence of public information on the incident for more than a full day is that it was not that different from many others in the Gulf over more than a decade. A Pentagon consultant who asked not to be identified told IPS that he had spoken with officers who had experienced similar encounters with small Iranian boats throughout the 1990s, and that such incidents are “just not a major threat to the U.S. Navy by any stretch of the imagination”.

Just two weeks earlier, on Dec. 19, the USS Whidbey Island, an amphibious warship, had fired warning shots after a small Iranian boat allegedly approached it at high speed. But that incident had gone without public notice.

So why did this incident become such a media circus?

 With the reports from 5th Fleet commander Vice-Adm. Kevin Cosgriff in hand early that morning, top Pentagon officials had all day Sunday, Jan. 6, to discuss what to do about the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz. The result was a decision to play it up as a major incident. The decision came just as President George W. Bush was about to leave on a Middle East trip aimed in part at rallying Arab states to join the United States in an anti-Iran coalition. That decision in Washington was followed by a news release by the commander of the 5th Fleet on the incident at about 4:00 a.m. Washington time Jan. 7. It was the first time the 5th Fleet had ever issued a news release on an incident with small Iranian boats.

That news release did not suggest that the Iranian boats had threatened the US ships, that any threat was made of US ships ‘exploding in a few minutes’, or that US ships had nearly fired on them; “on the contrary, the release made the U.S. warships handling of the incident sound almost routine”.  As the IPS analysis continues, those details only started to appear in later stories – after an off-the-record briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defence for public affairs in charge of media operations Bryan Whitman.

The decision to splice in to video of the incident a separate audio recording of threats made against the US ships was, according to an unnamed IPS source at the US Navy Office of Information in the US, made in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.  As the IPS article concludes,

The decision to treat the Jan. 6 incident as evidence of an Iranian threat reveals a chasm between the interests of political officials in Washington and Navy officials in the Gulf. Asked whether the Navy’s reporting of the episode was distorted by Pentagon officials, Cmdr Robertson of 5th Fleet Public Affairs would not comment directly. But she said, “There is a different perspective over there.”