March 26, 2021
Iran’s military bought commercial satellite photos from the West to help it pick out targets for the missiles it fired at a base housing US troops in Western Iraq a year ago, the commander of CENTCOM has let slip out.
Lt. Gen. Frank McKenzie didn’t say what company Iran was doing business with or whether the US has tried to stop the sales. But he said he knew just what photos Iran was buying in real time and waited until Iran had bought its last picture of the day before moving planes and troops off the base. As a result, the Iranian missiles didn’t hit any high value targets.
The revelation that Iran is buying Western satellite photos underscores that Iran has gotten nothing useful despite a decade of trying to put satellites in orbit. Only one satellite Iran has lofted has stayed in orbit more than three months and it is tumbling so it cannot do anything.
The revelation about the satellite photos came in an interview that “60 Minutes” conducted with McKenzie. The CBS News program February 28 took a long look at the Iranian missile attack of January 8, 2020, on the Ain al-Asad Air Base in Iraq.
US officers said they minimized the damage done by the missile attack by removing almost all of the aircraft and transferring half the 2,000 men and women assigned there to other bases.
But there were still far too many troops on the base to get them all protection in the bunkers available, so most of the remaining troops were sent out into the desert to wait out the attack. Only 300-odd service members remained on base.
For those remaining at Al-Asad, CBS News said it was a scary night as the Iranian missiles carried warheads with 1,000 pounds of explosives while the old bunkers left over the Saddam Hussein era were built only to protect against 60-pound warheads.
Luckily, no building occupied by the Americans took a direct hit. But many experienced near missies and the pressure of the exploding warheads meant 110 suffered concussions 24 of them serious enough to earn them Purple Hearts.
Army Major Alan Johnson said the explosions, “knocked the wind out of me, followed by the most putrid tasting, ammonia tasting dust that swept through the bunker and coated your teeth…. The fire was just rolling over the bunkers, you know, like 70 feet in the air.”
Johnson said he still remembers the sound of the incoming missiles “like a freight train going by you.”
He said he believes he only survived out of pure luck. “Luck. The only thing I can actually come up with is that hand of God protected us. Because, really, nobody should have lived through this.”
General McKenzie, commander of US forces in the Middle East, monitored the attack from his headquarters at Tampa, Florida. He said, “I’ve never been on one like this where real missiles were being fired at our forces and where I thought the risks were so high.”
The Iranian attack on Al-Asad was in retaliation for the operation President Trump ordered six nights earlier – a drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleymani.
McKenzie said, “The blood of many Americans is on the hands of Qassem Soleymani. He was as close to an indispensable man as you could find inside Iran. Where he went, violence and death followed.”
During the American occupation of Iraq, Soleymani had orchestrated attacks that killed more than 600 US troops and, according to McKenzie, he was planning to do it again. “We saw intelligence reports where Soleymani was moving various attack streams forward against our forces in Iraq, against our embassy and against other bases there.”
Until then, David Martin of CBS News observed, the US had avoided going after Soleymani for fear killing such a high-ranking official would provoke more Iranian attacks.
McKenzie said, “I never take killing anyone as an easy decision, but I think the risk of not acting in this case outweighed the risks of acting. So, yes, I was good with the decision.”
Martin reported that US intelligence had at least one camera at the Baghdad Airport and McKenzie watched live as Soleymani got off a commercial flight from Damascus. As Soleymani’s entourage pulled away from the plane in two cars, McKenzie gave the kill order to the officer controlling the drones.
Missiles slammed into both vehicles simultaneously.
McKenzie said, “There’s no back slapping. There’s no cheering. Because now I have to prepare to deal with the consequences of the action.” McKenzie was sure Iran would retaliate, but he didn’t know how.
He said he got the first signal of what Iran would do a few days later. “They began to move their ballistic missiles,” he said.
The attack was just hours away when Major Johnson got the word Iran’s most powerful weapons were aiming for Al Asad. “My intelligence officer pulled me aside and basically said, ‘Sir, I’ve got some bad news for you.’ ‘What’s up?’ ‘We have information that Iran is fueling 27 medium-range ballistic missiles and their intention is to level this base and we may not survive’.”
US satellites designed specifically to watch for missile launches and operated from Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado monitored Iran and picked up the actual launches, immediately telling Ain Al-Asad what was on the way. The missiles were in the air only six minutes.
Air Force Lt. Col. Staci Coleman scrambled earlier to evacuate more than 50 aircraft and 1,000 troops before the missiles hit. But the base still had to be manned.
“We still needed to be able to do our mission,” she said. Asked what she thought would happen to those kept behind, she said, “The honest truth is I didn’t think that we were going to survive.”
The best shelter was air raid bunkers built during the rule of Saddam Hussein – but there weren’t enough of them. So, Lt. Col. Timothy Garland sent most of his soldiers out into the desert where they watched the attack from a safe distance.
He said, “There was a lot of people who didn’t want to leave. They didn’t want to be that guy that was going to relative safety.
From his headquarters in Tampa, General McKenzie had tried to time the evacuation just right. “If you go too early, you risk the problem that the enemy will see what you have done and adjust his plans,” McKenzie said.
He said he knew the Iranians monitored Al-Asad by purchasing commercial satellite photos. McKenzie said he waited until after Iran had downloaded its last picture for the day. That way, they saw the air base packed with planes planes that soon flew elsewhere.
Iran fired a total of 16 missiles from three locations. Five missed, 11 landed on Al-Asad many at spots where planes had been parked hours earlier.
From first launch to last impact was 80 minutes. Somehow no one was killed. When the sun came up, the survivors surveyed the damage.
Garland said he surveyed “shells of a building, you know, skeletal frames left with nothing else. Craters about room-sized, deep into the ground. Concrete barriers blown across a field or a street.”
Johnson said, “There are people throwing up; everybody had headaches.”
Sergeant Kimo Keltz said, “I had a concussion for two weeks. [It felt like] someone hitting me over the head with a hammer over and over and over.”
Military doctors diagnosed 110 cases of traumatic brain injury. Major Johnson and 23 other soldiers received Purple Hearts, the US military award recognizing a combat injury.
Martin asked McKenzie if he had estimated the losses if he hadn’t evacuated much of the base. McKenzie said, “I think we might have lost 20 or 30 airplanes and we might have lost 100 to 150 US personnel.”
The general said the Iranian missiles were quite accurate. “Their missiles are accurate,” he said. “They hit pretty much where they wanted to hit,” that is, where multi-million-dollar aircraft had been parked hours earlier.
Martin asked if McKenzie had a plan to retaliate if any Americans were killed.
“David, we had a plan to retaliate if Americans had died,” McKenzie said.
Iran was on alert for a possible US retaliatory strike and hours later mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian airliner, thinking it was an American missile.