The threatening radio transmission heard at the end of a video showing harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a locally famous heckler known among ship drivers as the “Filipino Monkey.”[...]
While the threat — “I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes” — was picked up during the incident, further jacking up the tension, there’s no proof yet of its origin. And several Navy officials have said it’s difficult to figure out who’s talking.
[...]
“Based on my experience operating in that part of the world, where there is a lot of maritime activity, trying to discern [who is speaking on the radio channel] is very hard to do,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead told Navy Times during a brief telephone interview today.
[...]
So with Navy officials unsure and the Iranians accusing the U.S. of fabrications, whose voice was it? In recent years, American ships operating in the Middle East have had to contend with a mysterious but profane voice known by the ethnically insulting handle of “Filipino Monkey,” likely more than one person, who listens in on ship-to-ship radio traffic and then jumps on the net shouting insults and jabbering vile epithets.
Navy women — a helicopter pilot hailing a tanker, for example — who are overheard on the radio are said to suffer particularly degrading treatment.
[...]
Several Navy ship drivers interviewed by Navy Times are raising the possibility that the Monkey, or an imitator, was indeed featured in that video.
[...]
Rick Hoffman, a retired captain who commanded the cruiser Hue City and spent many of his 17 years at sea in the Gulf was subject to the renegade radio talker repeatedly, often without pause during the so-called “Tanker Wars” of the late 1980s.
[...]
Furthermore, Hoffman said radio signals have a way of traveling long distances in that area. “Under certain weather conditions I could hear Bahrain from the Strait of Hormuz.”
[...]
Another former cruiser skipper said he thought the Monkey might be behind the audio threats when he first heard them earlier this week.
“It wouldn’t have surprised me at all,” he said. “There’s all kinds of chatter on Channel 16. Anybody with a receiver and transmitter can hear something’s going on. It was entirely plausible and consistent with the radio environment to interject themselves and make a threatening comment and think they’re being funny.”
This former skipper also noted how quiet and clean the radio “threat” was, especially when radio calls from small boats in the chop are noisy and cluttered.
“It’s a tough environment, you’re bouncing around, moving fast, lots of wind, noise. It’s not a serene environment,” he said. “That sounded like somebody on the beach or a large ship going by.”
[...]
The former skipper noted that he warned his crew about hecklers when preparing to transit Hormuz. “I tell them they’ll hear things on there that will be insulting,” he said. “You tell your people that you’ll hear things that are strange, insulting, aggravating, but you need to maintain a professional posture.”
Los Angeles Times
November 12, 1987
MESSAGES FROM ROGUE RADIO OPERATOR COULD PROVOKE ATTACK;
FILIPINO MONKEY: ON BACKS OF MANY IN TENSE GULF---
A cargo ship was sailing through the Strait of Hormuz recently when it was challenged by an Iranian warship demanding to know what it carried.
Iranian gunboats in these waters frequently attack vessels they suspect of carrying war materials to Iraq, and for the crew of the cargo ship, it was a tense moment.
"What is your cargo? What is your cargo?" the voice of an Iranian officer crackled over the radio.
Before the ship's captain could respond, a third voice came on the air: "I am carrying machine guns and hand grenades to Iraq . . . and the atom bomb."
The Filipino Monkey had struck again.
[...]
"He's dangerous," one gulf-based shipping source said. "He gets on the radio when ships are being challenged, and some of the things he tells the Iranians could provoke an attack."
Most of what he tells the Iranians is unprintable.
'Doesn't Like Iranians'
"Whoever he is, he doesn't seem to like Iranians very much," the shipping source said. "He tells them what he thinks of them in graphic terms."
Memories vary, but most shipping sources who have listened to the Monkey say they first heard him about three years ago.
"He started out by playing music and then by taunting other seamen, usually Filipinos, with curses in the middle of the night," one official recalled.
[...]
Also, there may be more than one Monkey. Because he has been broadcasting for far longer than any normal tour of duty for seamen or oil workers in the gulf, officials think the Filipino Monkey has spawned imitators and that there may now be more than one radio operator using the same moniker.
[...]
Early last month, for instance, he broke into the middle of a tense radio exchange between a U.S. ship and an Iranian warship.
The Iranian ship had locked its weapons radar onto the U.S. warship, which was warning it in no uncertain terms to stand down. The warning was repeated three times until the Filipino Monkey added his own.
"Iranian warship, Iranian warship," he said. "You gonna get it now."
Okay, the Navy has known about this ‘Filipino Monkey’ for two decades. You heard the strange sounding voice yourself. Why the decision at this particular time to make fools of themselves by issuing accusatory and inflammatory statements, with such flimsy ‘proofs’ about an Iranian ‘aggression’ that barely escaped retaliation? I think we know.
And also, in the original telling, of the Navy ships being within a hair’s breadth of firing on the Iranian boats, fortunately the Iranians turned and went in another direction seconds before they would have been blasted. In that situation, had it been real, and in any other that is subject to interference on radios, which is apparently common, where’s the safeguard against an explosive incident? What if the Navy had blasted the Iranian boats and the threat had not come from them? Also, whatever became of the “white boxes” tossed into the water in the original report? Surely they didn’t just go uninvestigated, left to float on the sea?
New WBW contributor The Rittenhouse Review discovers a delightful column by John Podhoretz urging Dubya to make an “October Surprise” from an early Iraq invasion."There's a luscious double trap in starting the war as soon as possible, Mr. President. Your enemies are delirious with excitement about the corporate-greed scandals and the effect they might have on your popularity and the GOP's standing in November.
"If you get troops on the ground quickly, they will go berserk. Incautious Democrats and liberal pundits will shriek that you've gone to war solely to protect yourself from the corporate-greed scandal. They will forget the lesson they so quickly learned after Sept. 11, which is that at a time of war the American people want their political leaders to stand together.
"Your enemies will hurl ugly accusations at you, Mr. President. And at least one of them will be true - the accusation that you began the war when you did for political reasons.
"But that won't matter. It won't matter to the American people, and it won't matter as far as history is concerned. History will record that you and the U.S. military brought an end to a barbaric regime on its way to threatening the world."
This is all George Bush is focused on, as revealed in his regular quips about his confidence in history being the judge of his administration.
Podhoretz may be a warmongering neocon (In a widely quoted and much maligned article for the New York Post, [2006] Podhoretz asked whether "liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?" […] Thus, he surmised regarding the Iraq War: "What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them ...? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?" – Rightweb)– for all I know, he could be ‘Filipino Monkey’, but he was certainly on the money in his assessment of our American public.
Update 1/17/08: Final word
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