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Iran Threatens U.S. Convoy

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By ROBERT BURNS, The Associated Press

Published: January 8, 2008

WASHINGTON - An Iranian fleet of high-speed boats charged at and threatened to blow up a three-ship U.S. Navy convoy passing near Iranian waters, then vanished as the American ship commanders were preparing to open fire, the top U.S. Navy commander in the area said Monday.

No shots were fired and an Iranian official in Tehran said the incident amounted to "something normal."
Bush administration officials complained that the Iranian actions amounted to a dangerous provocation, but one private analyst said the Iranians may have thought they were acting defensively in a narrow waterway that is heavily trafficked by commercial ships, including oil vessels.

The three U.S. warships - cruiser USS Port Royal, destroyer USS Hopper and frigate USS Ingraham - were headed into the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz on what the U.S. Navy called a routine passage inside international waters when they were approached by five small high-speed vessels thought to be from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy.

The Iranians "maneuvered aggressively" in the direction of the U.S. ships, said Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, the commander of U.S. 5th Fleet, which patrols the gulf and is based at nearby Bahrain. The U.S. ship commanders took a series of steps toward firing on the boats, which approached to within 500 yards, but the Iranians suddenly fled toward their shore, Cosgriff said.

At one point the U.S. ships received a threatening radio call from the Iranians, "to the effect that they were closing on our ships and that the ships would explode - the U.S. ships would explode," Cosgriff said.

"Subsequently, two of these boats were observed dropping objects in the water, generally in the path of the final ship in the formation, the USS Ingraham," he said. "These objects were white, boxlike objects that floated."

The boxes were not retrieved. Cosgriff said U.S. ship commanders were moving through a standard series of actions, including radio calls to the Iranians that went unheeded, but did not reach the point of firing warning shots.

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