Deadly Mistaken Identity

By Richard Lacayo

As the two helicopters sliced through the blue skies over northern Iraq last Thursday morning, a U.S. Air Force AWACS reconnaissance plane picked them up on radar. The AWACS crew immediately radioed a pair of U.S. F-15C fighters and asked them to take a closer look. Though there had been no reported violations of the no-fly zone over northern Iraq since January 1993, Iraqi helicopters had been a problem in the past, when Saddam Hussein used them to suppress the Kurdish rebellion that erupted after the Gulf War ended in 1991. The crews of the F-15Cs twice flew past the copters and identified them as Russian-made Hinds flown by the Iraqi military. The fateful, terse order came back from the AWACS to fire. Moments later, the blasted helicopters, each of them struck by an air-to-air missile, plummeted to the ground.

As horrified Pentagon officials quickly discovered, however, the two / choppers were not Hinds but U.S. Black Hawks. On board were 21 allied military and civilian officials, including 15 Americans and five Kurds; all of them perished. They had been on their way to meet with Kurdish leaders in the northern Iraq town of Salahuddin, part of the safe haven created for the Kurds after the Gulf War. The crews of all five aircraft in the tragedy were slated to attend a rehearsal one day earlier in which they had reviewed flight routes, radio frequencies and the timing of Thursday's mission. "There were human errors, probably, and there might be process or system errors as well," said Defense Secretary William Perry. Postponing a long-scheduled trip to South Korea and Japan, Perry ordered one investigation into the event and another into the rules of engagement that govern the two no-fly zones in Iraq, as well as the one over Bosnia. He acknowledged that the rules in Iraq did not require fighter pilots to issue a warning to their targets.

Lives lost to friendly fire are a devastating cost of battle. Almost one- fourth of the 148 American combat deaths in the Gulf War resulted from accidental assault by their own side. The Pentagon established a Fratricide Task Force to develop ways to avoid such accidents. Even during the war, however, when hundreds of planes representing more than two dozen allied nations filled the skies, none of those deaths involved aircraft firing upon one another.

Some military analysts believe that deadly misjudgments are made more likely by battlefield technology that hands over decisions to computers. Defense officials acknowledged that last week's mishap is likely to hamper efforts to improve the capability of new U.S. weapon systems to fire on an enemy from far away. "We were just really beginning to push beyond-visual-range technologies," says an executive at McDonnell Douglas, builder of the F-15C. "This is going to put a brake on that."

The downing incident may have had less to do with modern weaponry than with the ancient problem of human error. Presuming the helicopters were not making aggressive moves toward targets on the ground or in the air, why did the pilots rush to fire? They seem to have relied primarily on visual identification, but that can be tricky. Though the blunt shape of the Black Hawks gives them a different silhouette from the needle-nosed Hinds, the external fuel tanks that Black Hawks can carry resemble the gun racks that protrude from Hinds on each side like small wings. To keep from being seen by the copter crews, the F-15C pilots would have approached from above and behind, an angle that might have prevented them from spotting the "U.S. Army" markings on the helicopters or the red, white and blue emblems.

American attack planes also use radio units called IFFs -- for Identify, Friend or Foe -- that contact a target electronically. Though friendly aircraft are equipped to reply with a coded radio "squawk," General John Shalikashvili, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the F-15Cs did not receive a "friendly response" from the copters. Did the crews inadvertently fail to activate their transponders?

Even that possibility leaves open the question of whether any other form of radio contact was attempted -- or whether the fighter jocks' adrenaline overrode their judgment. "I'm sure the F-15C pilots said, 'There's something there -- let's get it!' " says one Pentagon official. "I'm sure they had their fangs out." A short chain of command may also have contributed to the tragedy. Unlike U.S. pilots on patrol over Bosnia, who must obtain radio permission from air operations headquarters in Italy before firing on hostile aircraft, fighter planes over Iraq do not require consent from officers on the ground. Secretary Perry promised last week that the rules would be changed.

The accident virtually wiped out the leadership of the allied Military Coordination Center. Serving as observers in northern Iraq and liaisons with Kurdish leaders and international relief officials, they help organize efforts to rebuild Kurdish villages destroyed by the Iraqis. Among the dead were U.S. Army Colonel Gerald Thompson, who was in charge of the command, his newly selected replacement, Colonel Richard A. Mulhern, and the senior staff from Britain, France and Turkey. The disaster struck at a moment when Saddam has been making bellicose gestures in the area. After the U.N. Security Council refused last month to ease the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq since 1990, the Iraqi Republican Guard moved into positions south of the Kurdish safe haven, which they are forbidden to enter. Since the beginning of March, three suspected Iraqi terrorist attacks have resulted in injuries to four U.N. guards overseeing relief operations there.

Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich said that the accident proved that U.S. forces abroad are overstretched. The White House retorted that Gingrich was seeking unseemly political advantage from a military tragedy, but even some congressional Democrats wondered if the time had come for a closer look at U.S. involvement in Iraq. "I don't think we've really paid much attention to it," says House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Lee Hamilton. "It's been a dangerous area, and it has to come under policy review." So much the worse that some of the dangers have been self-imposed.

With reporting by J.F.O. McAllister and Mark Thompson/Washington