Iran Air Flight 655

When international tension runs so high that human psychology creates disasters, and the actual truth of what happened remains fiercely disputed to this day.

We have to look at Iran Air Flight 655, July 3rd, 1988.

The USS Vincennes, a billion-dollar state-of-the-art Aegis cruiser commanded by Captain Will Rogers, is skirmishing with heavily armed Iranian speedboats in the Persian Gulf.

The tension is palpable.

It was so short and so familiar that it hardly felt like going abroad.

Iran Air Flight 655 left Bandar Abbas twenty-seven minutes late.

It was a Sunday morning, the third of July 1988.

The plane was an Airbus, and it carried two hundred and seventy-four passengers and sixteen crew.

The radar track was true.

It was Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian airliner.

Yes.

But the human crew in the Combat Information Center misread the data.

Said there's been 73 years of hostility.

goes all the way back to the 1953 coup through the Shah, the Iran-Iraq war, Flight 655, the killing of Qassam Soleimani.

He died like a dog.

The 2025 war, the January 26th unrest, and the current war.

I got to tell you, I went through it and I was like, holy shit.

But you know what? Every one of those major incidents, including the disasters, TWA for not TWA, the Iran Air 655 shoot down.

right? It's a disaster.

We did it.

And sadly, even chemical weapon use, the largest in history was on Halabja, the Kurdish town in northern Iraq.

And then there was an accidental shoot-down of a passenger liner, that was the USS Vincennes, which in the middle of it all, accidentally shot down Iran Air Flight 655, and terribly, 290 deaths.

The war, over those eight years, involved 21 Iraqi divisions, 13 Iranian divisions, a million or maybe even two million total casualties, a half a million total KIA, 113,000 total POWs in untold numbers of MIA.

Economic losses were huge, $1.2 trillion total.

And as you say, last year, Colin Firth played in, in the miniseries, Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, which was based on the 2021 book, The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father's Search for Justice, which Jim Swire, uh, co-wrote with another author.

So yeah, he, Swire believes that Iran was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, that they used the PFLP-GC to bomb the Lockerbie flight, uh, the fl- bomb the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, um, in retaliation for Iran Air Flight 655.

And this, I, I, I'd heard of this one, too.

This was kind of a big deal at the time, wasn't it?