What Flight 655 Says About U.S. Role in the Mideast

Seven minutes after takeoff on July 3, 1988, Iran Air Flight 655 plunged into the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people on board. The flight was to be a routine “milk run,” a regularly scheduled transit ferrying business people and families from Bandar Abbas in Iran to Dubai. Instead, on a clear mid summer morning, the plane was torn from the sky, brought down by two American anti-aircraft missiles. The USS Vincennes, a high-tech missile cruiser that had been dispatched to the Gulf only weeks before, delivered the fatal blow. The first missile cut the plane in two and severed its left wing. The second shredded it and passengers with searing shrapnel. (See Lee Allen Zatarain's The Tanker War, page 326.) Those not killed immediately plunged over 14,000 feet, where they died on impact.