The incident came close to sparking a war, with a planned retaliatory attack – but with Trump’s top advisers reportedly split, doubts seemed to set in
The incident that came close to sparking a new war in the Middle East began late on Wednesday night at the Al Dhafr air base in the United Arab Emirates, just over 30km south of Abu Dhabi.
The base is home to the UAE’s air force and a fluctuating number of US warplanes, including Global Hawk drones, used to fly high above the Persian Gulf looking down on the constant flow of oil tankers and northwards, sucking up huge quantities of data from Iran.
The Iranian government says that the Global Hawk which took off from Al Dhafr on Wednesday night was in “stealth mode”, meaning it had its transponder turned off.
The Pentagon has not commented on this, but the Global Hawk is not a stealthy plane. It is the size of a small commercial airliner and packed with electronic surveillance gadgetry costing $130m, considerably more than the new US F35 fighter. Its primary defence against being shot down is its speed and altitude. It can fly at 400mph at 55,000ft.
The Pentagon has not provided an account of the drone’s route in the early hours of Thursday morning. The version offered by Iran based on its radar tracking show it making a large loop over UAE territory before heading northwards into the Persian Gulf, hugging the Emirati coast until it threaded its way through the strait of Hormuz, which is just 35 miles wide at its narrowest point.
The Global Hawk flew south-east along the Iranian coast, keeping outside Iran’s declared 12 miles of territorial waters. Then it turned back on its tracks to patrol westwards.
This is where the Iranian and US accounts differ. The Iranian version, in a hand-drawn map with a cutout picture of a Global Hawk stuck on it, shows the aircraft cutting a corner on its return route so that it comes inside the Iranian territorial limit.
The air commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Brigadier Gen Amir Ali Hajizadeh, said that the US was warned twice about the infringement, the last time at 3.55am.
“When it did not redirect its route and continued flying toward and into our territory, we had to shoot it at 4.05am,” the general told the Iranian state broadcaster. “Our national security is a red line.”
The IRGC claims there was a second US aircraft in the same area of sky in the early hours of Thursday morning, a P-8 spy plane, with 35 people onboard, shadowing the Global Hawk. The Iranians say they refrained from shooting the P8 after it heeded warnings and moved away from the Iranian coast. The US has not commented on that claim.
The Pentagon version agrees on the time the Global Hawk was shot down, but not the location. The Iranian coordinates put it eight miles off the Iranian coast when it was shot down. The US version puts it 21 miles off. What Tehran portrayed as legitimate self-defence was an unprovoked act of aggression for Washington.
By dawn in Washington, the US Central Command had confirmed the loss of its aircraft, and senior defence officials, including the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Joseph Dunford, were summoned to a morning meeting at the White House, where the president was briefed on what had happened. Soon afterwards, Donald Trump tweeted: “Iran made a very big mistake.”
A second meeting was scheduled for later in the morning in which Trump, the national security adviser, John Bolton; the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo; and the acting defence secretary, Patrick Shanahan, to make a final decision on the US response.
According to several reports, Trump’s top advisers were split. Bolton, Pompeo and the CIA director, Gina Haspel, are said to have backed a military response, while the Pentagon expressed concern about an uncontrolled escalation and reprisals against US forces in the region who were particularly exposed in Syria and Iraq.
At the second meetings, shortly before noon, the hawks appeared to have won the argument. Trump later confirmed accounts, first by the New York Times and then the Washington Post, that he had signed off on a limited military response. The press reports suggest that the targets would be Iranian anti-aircraft batteries – Trump later said there were three targets – a strike seen as proportionate to the downing of the drone.
Congressional leaders were called in to the White House for a mid-afternoon classified briefing on the decision, but even as they arrived, Trump seemed to be having second thoughts.At 00:14 US drone took off from UAE in stealth mode & violated Iranian airspace. It was targeted at 04:05 at the coordinates (25°59'43"N 57°02'25"E) near Kouh-e Mobarak.— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) June 20, 2019
We've retrieved sections of the US military drone in OUR territorial waters where it was shot down. pic.twitter.com/pJ34Tysmsg
Before a lunch meeting with the visiting Canadian prime minister, Trump stressed that no Americans had been killed, noting that it would be a very different matter if they had been, and he speculated – against all the evidence – that the Global Hawk downing had not been ordered from the top in the Iranian military, but was a foolish mistake from a “loose and stupid” rogue Iranian general.
On the other hand, he insisted: “This country will not stand for it, that I can tell you.”
Whatever doubts Trump may have had, the preparations for the airstrikes continued. Close allies were informed, and in Trump’s words, the US military in the Gulf was “cocked and loaded” to launch the operation, just before dawn on Friday.
According to the New York Times, planes were already in the air, but the missiles had not yet launched when Trump aborted the mission.
In a string of tweets just after 9am on Friday, Trump claimed he called it off 10 minutes before the attack, and suggested he made his decision based on casualty estimates provided by an unnamed general of 150 people.
The implication of the tweets is that Trump had not asked, and was not told, of estimated casualties in his two morning briefings, which would be unusual, and only asked when his doubts began to set in.
The missiles stayed on their launchers and the planes returned to base. US allies were informed of the change of mind. The UK, which had been informed of the original plan for attack, was told the raids were off at 3am London time.
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