Iran-US Boat Incident
There are many questions about the audio threats, to be sure. But if by “hoax” you mean, was it completely manufactured? Then the answer is no.
What remains completely unknown -– and may never be resolved -– is the source of the transmission. Navy and Pentagon officials told me last Wednesday that they were still trying to determine if the transmission came from the speedboats or elsewhere.
Those comments were carried in Thursday’s print edition of The Times as well as on The Lede, so the issue was highlighted fairly early in the discussion of the Hormuz encounter for readers of The Times.
Today, the inquiry into the source of the broadcast continues. The audio recording includes a heavily accented voice warning in English that the Navy warships would explode. However, the voice is not accompanied by any of the ambient noise — the sounds of a motor, or the sea or the wind — that would be expected if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small boats that sped around the three-ship American convoy.
Thus, Pentagon officials said they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from shore, or from another ship nearby — although it might nonetheless have come from one of the five fast boats if a high-quality radio system was used.
One new theory is that the threat might have been made by a prankster or group of pranksters who have, over the years, broadcast insults to American vessels in the region. But these pranksters, grouped under the collective name of “Filipino Monkey,” have not issued such specific threats of violence before, mostly sticking to taunts of a personal, ethnic or nationalistic nature, according to Navy personnel who have served in the region.
