Iranian Ships Swarmed U.S. Coast Guard Vessels in Persian Gulf, Navy Says

A group of boats from Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps harassed two U.S. Coast Guard ships earlier this month in the Persian Gulf, Navy officials said, the first such incident in a year, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The incident occurred April 2, just as the U.S. and Iran announced they would conduct negotiations toward renewing the 2015 multilateral nuclear accord. Those talks began earlier this month in Vienna. The episode hasn’t been previously disclosed.

U.S. Navy officials confirmed that three fast-attack crafts and one ship known as Harth 55, a 180-foot, twin-hulled support vessel, swarmed the two Coast Guard ships while they were patrolling international waters in the southern portion of the Persian Gulf.

The larger vessel repeatedly crossed in front of the bows of the two U.S. vessels, the Monomoy and the Wrangell, coming as close as 70 yards away, officials said. That forced the Wrangell to make defensive maneuvers to avoid a collision, Navy officials said.

The American crews issued multiple warnings over a three-hour period as the Iranian ships continued to buzz them. The crew of the Harth 55 responded to the bridge-to-bridge radio queries but the ship continued the unsafe maneuvers, said Cmdr. Rebecca Rebarich, a spokeswoman for the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which oversees the region. It was unclear what the Iranian crews communicated by radio.