See also Beirut bombings; Iranian hostage crisis;
Libya bombing; Middle East and North America;
USSVincennes incident; West Berlin discotheque
bombing.
USSVincennesincident
The Event An American warship accidentally
shoots down an Iranian passenger airliner
Date July 3, 1988
Place Strait of Hormuz
TheVincennesshot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all
290 people on board. Besides being a tragedy for those on the
airplane and their families, the incident further poisoned
relations between the United States and Iran.
In 1980, Iraq—under the leadership of President
Saddam Hussein—invaded the Islamic Republic of
Iran, beginning the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). The
bloody war eventually devolved into stalemate and
led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peo-
ple. One of the war’s battlefields was the Persian
Gulf, specifically the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran
began to attack tankers carrying oil as a means of
damaging Iraq’s economy. The presidential admin-
istration of Ronald Reagan deployed warships from
the U.S. Navy to the region to protect the oil tankers,
if necessary through the use of force.
One of the ships sent to the region in 1988 was the
USSVincennes, a Ticonderoga-class guided-missile
cruiser under the command of Captain William C.
Rogers III. On July 3, 1988, the ship pursued Iranian
gunboats operating in the area. Afterward, the
bridge of theVincennespicked up a single airplane
flying over Iranian territory that seemed to be pre-
paring for a possible attack on theVincennes. In fact,
it was Iran Air Flight 655, an Airbus A300B2 on a reg-
ularly scheduled flight from Bandar Abbas, Iran, to
Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The ship’s bridge ra-
dioed the plane to warn it off, but the Airbus A300
was unable to receive military communications. As
the airliner flew closer to the American cruiser, the
order was given to fire on the airplane. A missile was
launched, destroying the airplane and killing all on
board, including dozens of children.
Impact The USSVincennesincident was met with
outrage in Iran and a denial of responsibility on the
part of the U.S. Navy and the Reagan administra-
tion. Vice President George H. W. Bush later made it
clear that the United States had no intention to apol-
ogize for the tragic mistake, and the commander of
theVincenneslater received a medal from President
Reagan for his service in the region. It would later
emerge that the airliner had been ascending, not de-
scending, as the U.S. Navy claimed in the immediate
aftermath of the attack, and that other American na-
val commanders in the area had been concerned
about the behavior of theVincennes’s captain. Al-
though the U.S. government would never admit re-
sponsibility for shooting down the airliner, it did in
the 1990’s propose compensation to the families of
the dead.Further Reading
Ansari, Ali M.Confronting Iran: The Failure of American
Foreign Policy and the Next Great Crisis in the Middle
East. New York: Basic Books, 2006.The Eighties in America USSVincennesincident 1013
The USSVincenneslaunches a missile during exercises in July,
1987, one year before it shot down Iran Air Flight 655.(U.S.
Navy)