Above is the single best picture that I found that shows the location of the two cargo ships, the Japanese Kokuka Courageous and Norwegian Front Altair in the Gulf of Oman at the time of the alleged attacks.
This is not about who started the incident. Like many of you, I’m with rational, decent and thinking people everywhere who are highly skeptical of any war Bolton/Pompeo and their Saudi buddies are pushing. There are many holes in the main story too which I hope to write on later.
This diary is not about the incident proper. It’s about a related thing. The subsequent claims made by US military about the Iranian missile that was fired on a US MQ-9 Reaper drone.
Two things don’t add up: The timing and the range of the alleged missile.
Sequence of Events
The Drone part of the story was broken by CNN’s Barbara Star, on Friday, June 14. It was widely circulated in world press, crediting CNN. The headlines were something like “Iran tried to attack US drone”. The attribution in the article was to a “US Official” talking explicitly to CNN.
In the hours before the attack on the two tankers in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday, the Iranians spotted a US drone flying overhead and launched a surface-to-air missile at the unmanned aircraft, a US official told CNN.
In addition to CNN, I found two other sources that did not credit CNN but also attributed “US Officials” that had the same sequence of the story. Military.com and UK Guardian:
US defence officials said on Friday that prior to the attack, Iranian forces had fired an anti-aircraft missile at a US drone that had been monitoring their activity close to the tankers in the Gulf of Oman.
This is not a typo or oversight. It fits in with the story, which is: The US drone spotted Iranian boats close to the tankers (implication that they are getting ready to do something nefarious and don’t want any witnesses). They spotted the drone and tried to take it out. It doesn’t say where the missiles came from though (more on that later).
Prior to taking fire, the American MQ-9 Reaper drone observed Iranian vessels closing in on the tankers, the official added, though the source did not say whether the unmanned aircraft saw the boats conducting an actual attack. CNN
So, the question then arises, what was the US drone doing there to begin with? Did it know about the upcoming attack? Was it following the tankers? Did it get dispatched because American military saw the Iranian ships coming via satellite? Or did it just get lucky?
But before this question could be answered, another unnamed official told Fox News something radically different, on June 15, one day after CNN’s story .
A senior U.S. official told Fox News that an MQ9 Reaper drone was fired on by the Iranians on Thursday shortly after it arrived at the scene where the MV Altair tanker sent out a distress signal amid the attacks the U.S. says were perpetrated by Iran.
Fox’s “senior US official” is saying the drone arrived after the attacks, not before. The story has now changed to first the Iranians attacked the tankers, then the tankers put out a distress signal, then the US drone showed up to check out the scene, and finally that’s when the Iranians tried to take out the drone. Another Fox reporter confirms.
One day after that (June 16), CENTCOM put out a statement that mostly confirmed the Fox account.
On June 13, 2019, according to our assessment, a modified Iranian SA-7 surface-to-air missile attempted to shoot down a U.S. MQ-9 over the Gulf of Oman to disrupt surveillance of the IRGC attack on the M/T Kokuka Courageous. The MQ-9 had arrived minutes earlier at 6:20 a.m. local time at the motor tanker (M/T) Altair and had observed the ship on fire.
All stories on Sunday or later have now been quoting the Centcom statement by Lt. Col. Earl Brown. Examples: LA Times, ABC.
But CNN, Guardian or Military.com have not backed down or issued any clarifications. The auto-video player at the CNN page still emphasizes: “Iranians fired missile at US drone prior to tanker attack, US official says”.
So which came first? The drone or the attack?
Origin of the missile
In a related point of confusion, the Fox News story (remember that this came out before the Centcom statement, but after CNN), quotes a “senior US official” (and also here) as saying the missile was launched — not from a boat — but from Iranian “mainland”:
The official said the first distress call from the MV Altair tanker, a Marshall Islands-flagged but Norwegian-owned crude oil tanker, went out at 6:12am local time. The unmanned MQ9 Reaper drone arrived 8 minutes later.
Then at 6:45am local time, a missile was fired at the drone, but missed. The U.S. military said that it was a modified SA-7 fired from Iran’s mainland. It was fired on after the drone arrived on station to assist the Norwegian tanker.
Iranian SA-7 variant
Here’s the problem with that. The missile is quoted to be “a modified SA-7”. The SA-7 is based on a 1964 Soviet design. It has a simple infrared based homing system. It doesn’t have Satellite positioning or anything. It must be aimed and launched.
Wikipedia says the best variety has a range of 4200 meters. That’s two and half miles. But the Iranians have modified it. It seems they have been able to extend the range.
The Iranian Army operates SA-7 Strela 2M and SA-14 Strela 3 man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS). In addition, Iran manufactures its own indigenously developed Misagh-1 and 2. The Misagh-1 is an all-aspect passive infrared homing system. It is a variant of the Chinese QW-1 Vanguard missile system. The Misagh-2 (bottom two photos) is an advanced version of the Mithaq-1 air-defense system. It features a fire and forget infrared seeker, has an effective range of 5000 meters, a maximum altitude of 3500 meters and a maximum velocity of Mach 2.
5000 meters is closer to 3 miles. But, circling back to the picture on the very top, the ships were in the internationally designated shipping lanes, at least 25 miles from the Iranian shore.
The suspected attacks occurred at dawn Thursday about 40 kilometers (25 miles) off the southern coast of Iran. The Front Altair, loaded with naphtha from the United Arab Emirates, radioed for help as its cargo of flammable chemicals caught fire. The Kokuka Courageous, carrying methanol from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, called for help a short time later. Newsday
Firing the SA-7 from 25 miles away (10x the spec’d range) at a moving target is a joke! Why would anybody do that? Can they even see that far by the naked eye? The flight time alone destroys any hope of precision.
Interestingly the latest Centcom statement did not repeat the claims of the Fox News’ “senior official” about the missile being fired from “mainland”, but it didn’t say where it was fired from.
