Ten sailors almost derailed the carefully negotiated Iran deal.
It was nearly nightfall Tuesday and the two camouflaged U.S. Navy speedboats were off course in the Persian Gulf, possibly taking a shortcut through Iranian waters and apparently running out of gas on their more than 300-mile journey back to base.
When Iranian naval vessels approached, the 10 U.S. sailors aboard the two 50-foot-long riverine boats tried to make a run for it. But one boat developed engine trouble that slowed its escape, and the crew and both craft were quickly seized.
To complicate matters, U.S. officials said Thursday, the Navy crew inexplicably lost all radio and other communications with the 5th Fleet’s operations and command center during the tense encounter, leaving the Pentagon in the dark.
The Navy was able to track the missing boats as they were apparently towed to a military pier on Iran’s Farsi Island — where the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps happens to operate a base.
The result was the 16-hour detention of all 10 U.S. crew members by the Iranian military, an incident that provoked international headlines and several rounds of high-level diplomacy before the quiet release of the sailors and their vessels on Wednesday. But while the Pentagon initially appeared to portray the encounter as a case of a simple mechanical malfunction, new details emerged Thursday that suggest otherwise.
The mechanical problems, according to a more complete account from U.S. officials, were only part of a litany of troubles that befell the U.S. Navy that evening in the middle of one of the most volatile waterways in the world.
The situation became only more complicated when a U.S. aircraft carrier task force led by the Harry S. Truman, on patrol in the gulf, quickly launched search helicopters into Iranian airspace. That served to further alarm Tehran, even as U.S. officials began considering a possible rescue operation.
That sparked a frantic series of phone calls between top State Department and Pentagon officials, backed by the White House, and their Iranian counterparts as both sides sought to prevent an apparent accident from escalating into a hostage standoff and a potential armed confrontation.