Pompeo Says Intelligence Points to Iran in Tanker Attack in Gulf of Oman

The Navy surveillance plane took extensive footage of the attached mine — which crew members on the Courageous also noticed after an initial explosion prompted the crew to evacuate the vessel.

A ship with a Netherlands flag, the Coastal Ace, first responded to the distress call from the Courageous and evacuated the crew members. Govert Jan van Oord, the managing director of Acta Marine, which owns the Coastal Ace, said in a telephone interview that some of the responders noticed something conspicuous on the hull of the Courageous.

“As they conducted the evacuation, our crew noticed an object above the waterline on the hull of the tanker,” he said, referring to what the Navy later judged to be the limpet mine. “We’re not military experts, so we couldn’t identify what it was — but whatever it was, it was the reason for the crew of the tanker to evacuate the whole ship.”

Naval explosives experts were preparing Thursday to approach the stricken ship, to secure and to remove the mine, and examine it for clues about who attached it to the ship, the defense official said.

“Iran’s supreme leader has to carefully calibrate his response to Trump’s maximum pressure campaign,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, referring to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “If he responds insufficiently he risks losing face. If he responds excessively he risks losing his head.”

Prompting a regional militia to attack an oil tanker would allow Iran to walk that line, he said, adding, “Tehran can maintain implausible deniability, spike the price of oil and impress upon U.S. allies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East that they will also pay a price for Trump’s pressure campaign.”

Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Bolton have led the Trump administration in taking a hard-line stand on Iran. In May 2018, President Trump withdrew from a nuclear containment deal that the Obama administration and world powers reached with Iran in 2015. The United States reimposed harsh sanctions on Iran last November.