February 07 2020
by Warren L. Nelson
In a fiery recall of the shooting down of an Iran Air flight one-third of a century ago by the United States, the Islamic Republic’s military has shot down a Ukrainian airliner over Tehran, killing all 176 on board.
If there was one thing that went completely unmentioned in the media coverage of the horrible accident January 8, it was the horrible incident in which the USS Vincennes fired two missiles at an Iran passenger jet July 3, 1988, killing all 290 aboard.
The Iran Times found not even a solitary reference to the Vincennes in the Iranian media, suggesting the regime’s censors had mandated silence about the 1988 incident, for fear the public might see too much resemblance.
But there was a huge difference. The Islamic Republic has spent a third of a century saying the Iran Air flight could not have been accidentally downed, accusing the United States of intentionally shooting down a passenger jet that it could not have confused for a combat plane.
But the United States did not accuse Iran of shooting down the Ukrainian plane intentionally. Even President Trump—usually quick to slam the Islamic Republic— specifically said the shooting was likely a “mistake” in his very first comment. And in successive days, he made no effort to mine the fatal downing for political profit, the reverse of what the Islamic Republic has done for 32 years in the case of the Vincennes shootdown.
More than a political incident, the shootdown was a human horror with many stories. Mohsen Ahmadipour and his wife, Roja Azadian, 43, were booked on the flight. He had ticket problems and missed the plane. But she boarded—and died.
More than the accident itself, the public in Iran quickly focused on the regime’s embarrassing effort to cover up what it had done. Its denials for three days that it had ever fired on the plane further added to its international standing as a pariah state.
When the lie was exposed, five days of anti-regime protests erupted, although they were far smaller than the anti-regime protests of last November and were largely concentrated on campuses, probably because most of the dead were graduate students flying to Canada for their education. (See accompanying story below.) Six of the dead had won gold and silver medals in the international math and science Olympiads in previous years. The dead were viewed as among Iran’s best and brightest.
The New York Times quoted sources in Tehran as saying the military told Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi immediately what had happened, but lied to President Rohani for three days. When he learned the truth, he demanded the military confess publicly, but the military refused. The Times said a Khamenehi aide in the room during this argument called the Supreme Leader, who ordered the military to do what Rohani demanded. The next day, the Pasdaran held a news conference and confessed.
The explanation was that an air defense missile unit commander—probably a lieutenant or captain, though he has not yet been identified—saw what he determined to be an American cruise missile flying at about 8,000 feet. He lacked authority to fire and sought permission from his superiors. He could not get through—perhaps because the Americans were jamming the equipment, Iran said—and then made the decision himself to fire two missiles.
This explanation did not hold water. The US cruise missile that would be fired at such a distance to reach Tehran is the Tomahawk and the air defense officer would surely have been taught that the Tomahawk does not fly at 8,000 feet. The whole point of the Tomahawk is that it hides by flying just 100 to 160 feet (30-50 meters) over treetop level. So, the object the radar picked up at 8,000 feet—and coming from the Imam Khomeini International Airport—could not possibly have been a Tomahawk.
Second, the US jamming aircraft would have to have been flying in the Tehran area to block communications there. But all US aircraft were at least 500 miles away over the Persian Gulf.
The honesty of the Islamic Republic was further called into question when photos of the crash scene taken the day after the shootdown showed a bulldozer being used on the site, which should never be used as it destroys evidence.
The Islamic Republic allowed investigators from both Ukraine (owner of the plane) and Canada (from which the largest group of non-Iranian passengers came) to enter Iran. News reports said the Pasdaran knew they could not hide what they had done when Ukrainians pointed out shrapnel holes all over the top of the fuselage from an air defense missile. Others pointed to news photos that they said showed the nosecone of a Tor-M1 Russian-made missile (known as the SA-15 in the West) lying on the ground of crash site, which was southwest of Tehran between the suburban towns of Parand and Shahedshahr.
The immediate concern has become the black boxes, which Iran has refused to turn over to another country with the equipment to read their contents. The boxes aren’t likely to reveal much other than the reactions of the cockpit crew when the first missile exploded above them. But Iran’s refusal to turn them over has become an issue with many and is taken as further evidence of the regime’s recalcitrance. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has publicly complained about Iran’s failure to turn over the black boxes, saying Iran has no ability to read the data.
The plane was carrying 83 Iranians, 57 Canadians (Canada is paying 25,000 Canadian dollars (US$19,000) to each of their families), 17 Swedes, 11 Ukrainians (including the nine crew members), four Afghans and four Britons. (Iran changed the numbers several times before these numbers were produced.) Of the total, 138 were headed to Canada, mostly to study. The plane was a Boeing 737-800 built in the US with engines built by CFM International, a joint US-French firm.
The plane was late leaving Imam Khomeini Airport and took off at 6:12 a.m. January 8, just hours after the Pasdaran had fired volleys of missiles at US troops stationed in Iraq in retaliation for the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleymani.
Iran’s air defense units had been alerted to the possibility of US retaliation that day.
On January 26, The New York Times published a full-page report on the shootdown and its aftermath, detailing what it had been told by multiple sources and also based on public remarks by senior Iranian officials about the three-day coverup and the decision to reverse the denials. Here is a summary of that timeline with additional details added by the Iran Times from the published record.
WEDNESDAY
As Wednesday, January 8, began, Iran was preparing to launch a ballistic missile attack on American military outposts in Iraq. The Pasdaran deployed mobile antiaircraft defense units around a sensitive military area near Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport. The armed forces were put on “at war” status, the highest alert level.
Brig. Gen. Amir-Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Guards’ Aerospace Force, said later that his units had asked officials in Tehran to close Iran’s airspace and ground all flights, to no avail.
Iranian officials feared that shutting down the airport would create mass panic that war with the United States was imminent, members of the Pasdaran and other officials told The Times. They also hoped that the presence of passenger jets could act as a deterrent against an American attack on the airport or the nearby military base, effectively turning planeloads of unsuspecting travelers into human shields.
After Iran’s missile attack began, the central air defense command issued an alert that American warplanes had taken off from the United Arab Emirates and that cruise missiles were headed toward Iran.
The officer on the missile launcher near the airport heard the warnings, but did not hear a later message that the cruise missile alert was a false alarm.
The warning about American warplanes was also apparently wrong. United States military officials have said that no American planes were in or near Iranian airspace that night. They were awaiting orders from Washington on how to respond.
When the air defense missile officer spotted the Ukrainian jet, he sought permission to fire. But he was unable to communicate with his commanders because the network had been disrupted or jammed, General Hajizadeh said later. He said the officer had only 10 seconds in which to decide—although that is not consistent with the claim that he was trying to reach his superiors by telephone.
On his own initiative, the officer fired two missiles, about 20 seconds apart.
General Hajizadeh, who was in western Iran supervising the attack on the Americans, soon received a phone call with the news of the colossal error.
General Hajizadeh advised the generals not to tell the rank-and-file air defense units for fear that it could hamper their ability to react quickly if the United States did attack.
“It was for the benefit of our national security because then our air defense system would be compromised,” Hajizadeh said in an interview with Iranian news media. “The ranks would be suspicious of everything.”
The military leaders created a secret investigative committee drawn from the Pasdar aerospace forces, from the air defense force, and from intelligence and cyberexperts. The committee and the officers involved in the shooting were sequestered and ordered not to speak to anyone.
The group also investigated the possibility that the United States or Israel may have hacked Iran’s defense system or jammed the airwaves. By Wednesday night, the committee had concluded that the plane was shot down because of human error.
“We were not confident about what happened until Wednesday around sunset,” General Salami, the commander in chief of the Guards, said later in an address to the Majlis. “Our investigative team concluded then that the plane crashed because of human errors.”
The Supreme Leader was informed. But the Pasdaran still did not inform the president, other elected officials or the public.
That evening, the spokesman for the Joint Staff of the Armed Forces, Brig. Gen. Abolfazl Shekarchi, told Iranian news media that suggestions Iranian missiles struck the plane were “an absolute lie.”
THURSDAY
On Thursday, as Ukrainian investigators began to arrive in Tehran, first Canadian and then other Western officials were saying publicly that they had evidence Iran had accidentally shot down the plane.
A chorus of senior Iranian officials — from the director of civil aviation to the chief government spokesman — issued statement after statement rejecting the allegations, their claims amplified on state media.
The suggestion that Iran would shoot down a passenger plane was a “Western plot,” they said, “psychological warfare” aimed at weakening Iran just as it had exercised its military muscle against the United States.
Rohani tried several times to call military commanders, officials said, but they did not return his calls. Members of his government called their contacts in the military and were told the allegations were false. Iran’s civil aviation agency called military officials with similar results.
“Thursday was frantic,” Ali Rabii, the government spokesman, said later in a news conference. “The government made back-to-back phone calls and contacted the armed forces asking what happened, and the answer to all the questions was that no missile had been fired.”
FRIDAY
On Friday morning, Rabii issued a statement saying the allegation that Iran had shot down the plane was “a big lie.”
Several hours later, the nation’s top military commanders called a private meeting and told Rohani the truth.
Rohani was livid, according to officials close to him. He demanded that Iran immediately announce that it had made a tragic mistake and accept the consequences. The military officials pushed back, arguing that the fallout could destabilize the country.
Rohani threatened to resign, The New York Times was told.
He said the damage to Iran’s reputation and the public trust in the government would create an enormous crisis at a time when Iran could not bear more pressure.
As the standoff escalated, a member of Khamenehi’s inner circle who was in the meeting informed the Supreme Leader. He sent a message back to the group, ordering the government to prepare a public statement acknowledging what had happened.
Rabii, who had issued the flat denial just that morning, reportedly broke down. Abbas Abdi, a prominent critic of Iran’s clerical establishment, told The New York Times that when he spoke to Rabii that evening, Rabii was distraught and crying. “Everything is a lie,” Rabii said, according to Abdi. “The whole thing is a lie. What should I do? My honor is gone.”
Iran’s Supreme National Security Council held an emergency meeting and drafted two statements, the first to be issued by the Joint Staff of the Armed Forces followed by a second one from Rohani.
As they debated the wording, some suggested claiming that the United States or Israel may have contributed to the accident by jamming Iran’s radars or hacking its communications networks.
But the military commanders opposed it. General Hajizadeh reportedly said the shame of human error paled compared with admitting his air defense system was vulnerable to hacking by the enemy.
Iran’s Civil Aviation Agency later said that it had found no evidence of jamming or hacking.
SATURDAY
At 7 a.m., the military released a statement admitting that Iran had shot down the plane because of a “human error.”
It blamed that error on the plane having made a sharp unexpected turn toward a sensitive military area. But the map that was released (see accompanying photo) later showed there was no sharp turn. It shows the plane following the normal air corridor leaving Imam Khomeini Airport. News reports said nine other aircraft had left the airport and followed the same flight route in the hours after the Pasdaran started firing missiles at the Americans and before the Ukrainian jet was downed—which further compounded the confused explanation for shooting down the Ukrainian plane.
In a 12-minute presentation, Gen. Hajizadeh said, “The reason it took several days before it was announced to the media wasn’t that some had wanted to hide the truth, but that this was the procedure and the [armed forces] had to investigate it. But that was a falsehood as the military didn’t say it was investigating what happened but flatly denied any missile had been fired.
The statement said the aircraft took “the flying posture and altitude of an enemy target. That was what the USS Vincennes said 32 years ago. Both the Pasdar and Vincennes’ statements were wrong. In both cases, the targeted planes were rising in altitude as they left an airport, not descending as if aiming for a ground target.
Ever since 1988, the Islamic Republic has insisted that radar can distinguish between a small warplane or missile and a large airliner. But Iran did not make that claim this time. Radar cannot tell the size of an object in the sky.
Three days after the admission of guilt, the Tasnim news agency quoted President Rohani as saying the tragic incident “is rooted in the US and it was the US that caused such an incident to take place.”
Foreign Minister Moham-mad-Javad Zarif wrote: “Human error at time of crisis caused by US adventurism led to disaster.”
The missile operator and up to 10 others have been arrested, the military has said. They have not been identified by name, position or rank and no announcement has been made about any charges.
In the last four decades, seven non-military planes have been shot down by missiles—one each by the Soviet Union, Russia (both apparently intentional), one by Israel (which admitted it was intentional when the plane refused orders to land), Somalia, Ukraine, Iran and the US Navy.