Pod Insights Throughline From Hormuz to Suez: the chokepoints of global power About this episode Oil may dominate the headlines about the Middle East, but the real power often flows through water. Three narrow passages - the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz, and Bab el-Mandeb – shape how the world moves. In times of crisis, they've become chokepoints, disrupting global trade, rattling markets, and shifting the balance of power way beyond the region. In this episode, three stories from these waterways… how they've helped define the modern Middle East and, as we've seen recently with Hormuz, the economic currents that affect us all.
Guests:
Alex Von Tunzelmann, author of Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace
Harold Lee Wise, author of Inside the Danger Zone: The U. S. Military in the Persian Gulf, 1987-1988
Farea Al-Muslimi, Yemen and Gulf researcher at Chatham House in London
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This message comes from Rosetta Stone. Rosetta Stone is designed to make language learning intuitive. It mimics how people naturally acquire speech as children, helping users read, write, and think in a second language. More at rosettastone.com.
0:21 Rund Abdelfatah? As evening sets in on July 26, 1956, the president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasr, stands at a podium in Alexandria, looking out at a crowd of 100,000.
0:35 Rund Abdelfatah? He's about to throw a wrench into the plans of the most powerful countries on Earth. At first, the speech seems fairly standard, kind of upbeat. But about halfway into the nearly three-hour speech, Nasr begins to rail against what he calls "the imperialists who have mortgaged our future", his voice growing more fiery.
1:01 Rund Abdelfatah? And then he repeatedly says the name Ferdinand de Lyseps, the 19th-century French developer who built the Suez Canal in the 1860s, which dramatically cut down the travel time between Europe and Asia.
1:22 Rund Abdelfatah? The canal was mostly built by Egyptian laborers. It runs through Egyptian territory. But the two biggest shareholders of the company that controlled shipping in the canal: Britain and France. And towards the end of the speech, Nasr reads a presidential decree nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, putting control of shipping there in the hands of Egypt.
1:49 Rund Abdelfatah? At that exact moment, miles away, Egyptian military forces mobilize to occupy the canal offices, taking control of all its assets.
2:02 Rund Abdelfatah? The crowd erupts with cheers.
2:09 Rund Abdelfatah? Almost immediately, the British and French owners of the Suez Canal Company start freaking out.
2:20 Speaker 02 A new Middle East crisis arises as President Nasir of Egypt tells a wildly cheering crowd.
2:25 Rund Abdelfatah? The clock begins ticking. Can Egypt and these empires come to some kind of agreement?
2:30 Speaker 02 His announcement touches off a rapid series of reprisals and counterreprisals.
2:35 Rund Abdelfatah? Turns out, Britain had already been working on a secret plan to try to get rid of Nasir. And now the moment has come to put it into action, a conspiracy that will nearly bring on World War III.
2:55 Rund Abdelfatah? The feeling that we're hurtling towards World War III isn't unfamiliar today. And over the last week, the headlines have been dominated by one question: Will the latest US-Iran tentative deal hold? And will the oil keep flowing through the Strait of Hormuz? Which highlights an important reality. For decades now, the real power in the region has often flowed through water.
3:21 Rund Abdelfatah? Three narrow waterways shaped the Middle East's relationship to the world, carrying up to a quarter of global trade. Together, they form what may be the most powerful triangle on Earth: the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz, and Bab al-Mendeb. In times of crisis, these waterways become chokepoints, a single disruption sending shockwaves across continents, shockwaves that often reverberate long after ceasefires are signed and tensions cool.
3:54 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm Rande Abdelfattah. And on this episode of Throughline from NPR, we're taking you to three moments on these waterways that helped define the modern Middle East and rewrote the rules of global power.
4:13 Rund Abdelfatah? When we come back, we return to the secret murder conspiracy on the Suez Canal.
4:24 Speaker 03 My name is Fredson Desravie from Silver Spring, Maryland, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.
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5:13 Speaker 05 This week on Up First, we're in the final days before the midterm elections. And this is one of the wonderful things about politics, one of the wonderful things about humanity. We have all this data, we have all this information, and nobody really knows what's gonna happen. We're gonna follow it day by day, through Election Day and beyond. And you can listen to Up First every morning on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
5:37 Speaker 04 Part one, Suez.
5:40 Speaker 06 When people try to talk about what triggers the crisis, they often come to Nasser in nationalizing the Suez Canal Company in July 1956. But I think that you have to understand the world in which that happened.
5:56 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Alex Von Tunzelmann.
5:58 Speaker 06 I'm a historian, and my book is called Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace.
6:06 Rund Abdelfatah? A few months before Nasser made his earth-shattering announcement to nationalize the Suez Canal Company, the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, had actually phoned a colleague in the Foreign Office and said-
6:18 Speaker 06 I want him murdered.
6:19 Rund Abdelfatah? So before we dive into what happened next on the Suez Canal, we need to rewind a little to understand what the world looked like back then and how Nasser ended up at that podium.
6:32 Speaker 06 So Britain and France had been the imperial powers in the Middle East. They'd carved it up between themselves under what was called the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
6:39 Rund Abdelfatah? In 1916, the Sykes-Picot Agreement drew new borders around the Arab territories of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, places like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine, and put them under the control of either Britain or France. Around this time, a British intelligence bureau was set up in Egypt to monitor its neighbors. And then, a couple decades later...
7:03 Speaker 06 Of course, you've got World War II shakes up the entire world. After World War II, complex time in the Middle East.
7:10 Rund Abdelfatah? In theory, it was the end of empires, the end of colonial rule, the beginning of a new world order defined by international law and organizations like the United Nations. In 1947, the UN drafted a plan calling for the partition of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states. Israel was established the following year. An Arab state was not created.
7:35 Speaker 06 That created a lot of instability in the Middle East, largely because most of the other Middle Eastern countries were very unhappy with what they saw as a sort of colonial move after World War II.
7:47 Rund Abdelfatah? The US, not a huge player in the Middle East yet, was a big supporter of this plan and helped push it through.
7:53 Speaker 06 The day after the State of Israel was declared, you had a joint force of Arab armies invading, and that first war that kind of establishes that.
8:03 Rund Abdelfatah? Newsreels from the time show Israeli soldiers driving trucks through the streets.
8:08 Speaker 02 Latest pictures from war-torn Palestine provide these impressions of Haganar forces consolidating areas under their control.
8:16 Speaker 06 And Gamal Abdel-Nassr was among those who fought in that war.
8:20 Rund Abdelfatah? Nasser was from a middle-class family.
8:22 Speaker 06 Very, very bright.
8:23 Rund Abdelfatah? Very ambitious.
8:24 Speaker 06 Also very good-looking, not irrelevant.
8:27 Rund Abdelfatah? And like a lot of young men in Egypt then, who had bigger dreams for themselves, he joined the military.
8:32 Speaker 06 And he really started to come onto the radar of people like the CIA in the early 1950s.
8:39 Rund Abdelfatah? The CIA had been established after World War II and was just starting to build its relationships worldwide.
8:46 Speaker 06 In March 1952, when the CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt was in Cairo, Nassr was a Colonel. Roosevelt had a series of meetings with him and actually established that Nassr was rather a positive figure from the point of view of American interests.
9:01 Rund Abdelfatah? This is the same Kermit Roosevelt that staged the coup in Iran in 1953.
9:06 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah. There weren't too many Kermit Roosevelts. These guys were busy.
9:10 Rund Abdelfatah? Yeah.
9:10 Speaker 06 You know, there was a lot happening at this time.
9:13 Rund Abdelfatah? A lot of secret plots and backroom deals.
9:16 Speaker 06 You can't disentangle it from the history of oil. This part of the world is just becoming incredibly important. And the struggle to control that is absolutely enormous.
9:35 Rund Abdelfatah? Meanwhile, Nassr helped stage a coup and goes on to become Prime Minister of Egypt in 1954 and President in 1956.
9:44 Speaker 06 He was politically positioning himself in a very interesting way because you've got to remember the Cold War was really kicked off by this point.
9:49 Rund Abdelfatah? Nassr refused to align fully with either Washington or Moscow. He promoted Arab unity and anti-colonial nationalism, which made him very popular across the region and threatening to France, which blamed him for encouraging resistance in Algeria.
10:06 Speaker 06 So at this time Algeria is still part of France. It's held in a colonial situation, which it's very unhappy about.
10:13 Rund Abdelfatah? Lucky for France, there was one guy in the British Foreign Office who absolutely could not stand Nassr.
10:20 Speaker 06 Anthony Eden.
10:23 Rund Abdelfatah? Anthony Eden started off as a foreign diplomat and eventually became Prime Minister.
10:28 Speaker 06 He actually spoke Arabic and Persian.
10:30 Rund Abdelfatah? Eden only ever met Nassr once in person.
10:33 Speaker 06 That was in February 1955.
10:35 Rund Abdelfatah? According to witnesses, it did not go well.
10:38 Speaker 06 Eden brought his wife with him. Eden's wife was much younger than him. It was his second wife, Clarissa Churchill, Winston Churchill's niece.
10:46 Rund Abdelfatah? Long story short, Eden, who was getting up there in age, seemed to be trying to impress his young wife and started reeling off classical Arabic poetry to Nasser, this young handsome Arab trailblazer. You can imagine Nasser thinking,
11:00 Speaker 06 What is happening? Why are you saying this?
11:03 Rund Abdelfatah? Then Eden tries to lecture him on defense strategies. He and Nasser start arguing politics.
11:09 Speaker 06 And there he is, kind of losing an argument to a much more handsome, much younger man in front of his wife at dinner. You know, do we think this was maybe a factor? I don't know. The strength of that vendetta against Nasser was so extraordinary that we have to say it's hard to imagine there wasn't some kind of personal element.
11:29 Rund Abdelfatah? Now, this is definitely speculative territory, but she says it gets at something important about big historical moments.
11:37 Speaker 06 As a Cold War historian, I often have a little motto, which is never assume rationality. Never assume that somebody's doing something for really good logical reasons.
11:47 Rund Abdelfatah? By the spring of 1956,
11:49 Speaker 06 The British Secret Service was looking into ways to assassinate Nasser.
11:53 Rund Abdelfatah? Around that time, totally unrelated to that, the US withdrew funding they had promised Nasser to build a massive hydroelectric dam in Egypt. The US and the UK were growing impatient with Nasser's foreign policy and decided to withdraw funding. Nasser was furious, and that's when he nationalizes the Suez Canal Company. Soon after, France and Britain start to set in motion a plan to invade Egypt, get rid of Nasser, and retake control of the Suez Canal Company.
12:25 Speaker 06 And Eisenhower heard about it. They didn't actually approach him.
12:29 Rund Abdelfatah? The American president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been a general in World War II. He'd seen the devastation firsthand. Plus, it was an election year, and he was determined to keep the peace. So he wrote a strongly worded letter to Eden, telling him to stand down, insisting on diplomacy. He then sent in the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, to mediate things.
12:53 Speaker 06 He really drove massive diplomatic campaign with the UN to hash out some sort of user plan for the Suez Canal Company, some kind of joint running of it.
13:06 Rund Abdelfatah? Dulles was actually making a lot of progress. Nasser was playing ball. It was looking like they were going to be able to figure it out.
13:14 Speaker 06 But at the same time that was happening, Britain and France were not happy with it. They were going along with it to like, you know, show good face for the Americans and this, but they were also planning what they called Operation Musketeer.
13:28 Rund Abdelfatah? And they needed Israel's help to carry out Operation Musketeer. The basic plan was Israel would invade Egypt first. Britain and France would then pose as neutral peacekeepers, send in troops, and use the fighting as a pretext to seize control of the canal. Israel agrees to go along with this plan.
13:49 Speaker 06 I think we need to remember this is incredibly soon after World War II, incredibly soon after the Holocaust. There's a real sense among Israelis that this is about survival. And there's quite a ruthlessness that goes with that.
14:03 Rund Abdelfatah? Alex says they were also interested in expanding beyond the border they shared with Egypt.
14:08 Speaker 06 And they had their eyes on the Sinai Peninsula at this point. I think Israel was far more preoccupied with its own borders, as indeed they are today.
14:18 Rund Abdelfatah? At the UN in October, Egypt had agreed to a set of principles for how the canal should be governed. Still, Britain, France, and Israel secretly agreed to go ahead with Operation Musketeer. And on October 29th, 1956. After weeks of stalemate, the Suez crisis burst dramatically into the news again.
14:40 Speaker 06 Israel has invaded Egypt. Britain and France have declared the canal in danger.
14:46 Speaker 06 Initially, Britain and France got together in London for what they said was emergency talks, although of course this had all been planned.
14:54 Rund Abdelfatah? You can hear the sense of surprise in news footage from the time.
14:57 Speaker 06 Come out of this meeting in London and say, we've got an ultimatum. If Egypt or Israel refuses these terms, Britain and France will intervene in 12 hours. Very, very short deadline, just 12 hours. I know that you would wish me as Prime Minister to talk to you tonight on the problem which is in everybody's mind. So, you know, people literally are listening to this on the radio and British civil servants are putting their heads in their hands and saying, what the hell is going on? They don't immediately suspect it's a conspiracy because they can't possibly believe that such a thing has been done. One former civil servant wrote in his diary, you know, we think A E Antony Eden has gone off his head.
15:40 Speaker 06 And one Foreign Office official was asking another what was going on. And the guy said, don't ask me. And then sort of flicked his thumb at 10 Downing Street and said, ask that fucking man over there.
15:53 Rund Abdelfatah? Meanwhile, Nasser also can't believe this is happening.
15:56 Speaker 06 He kind of said, look, let's not leap to conclusions too much. Let's kind of take our time and really work out what's happening here because it seems so unlikely.
16:05 Rund Abdelfatah? But Eisenhower.
16:06 Speaker 06 Eisenhower did work out very quickly that he'd been betrayed because he knew that Britain and France were planning something like this. The journalist, James Reston, he wrote, "The White House crackled with Barracks Room language, the likers of which had not been heard since the days of General Grant." So I think probably some, uh, some big swears going on in the White House.
16:27 Rund Abdelfatah? So they're mad?
16:28 Speaker 06 Yeah, super mad.
16:32 Rund Abdelfatah? Operation Musketeer had quickly started causing huge ripples and confusion, even before the 12-hour ultimatum was up.
16:41 Speaker 06 French warships are out there in the Mediterranean, working with Israeli ships on joint operations. So it's incredibly obvious that they're working together, really, to anyone who's paying the slightest attention.
16:53 Speaker 02 The United States was not consulted in any way about any phase of these actions, nor were we informed of them in advance.
17:01 Rund Abdelfatah? The next day, Eisenhower gives a speech telling everyone to chill out and respect international order.
17:07 Speaker 02 In the past, the United Nations has proved able to find a way to end bloodshed. We believe it can and that it will do so again.
17:17 Speaker 06 It's a very pressure cooker situation, and probably this is the point to mention it. There's the first major uprising against Soviet control in satellite states. So the Hungarian uprising begins at this exact point, totally separate from what is happening in the Middle East.
17:36 Speaker 02 But the heady breath of freedom was short, as 20 red armored divisions sent Hungarians by the thousands fleeing to the Austrian border.
17:44 Speaker 06 The Americans are thinking, what the heck is going on? Why is this happening at the same time? And meanwhile, Moscow starts to think that the CIA must be behind the Hungarian uprising. This is all part of some kind of anti-Soviet move.
17:58 Rund Abdelfatah? So basically, everyone is paranoid about these two crises unfolding at the same time.
18:04 Speaker 06 And this is when people start talking about this could turn into World War III. That's the word they use at the time.
18:15 Rund Abdelfatah? Less than a week into Operation Musketeer, things were spiraling way more than expected. The Hungarian uprising is heating up. And on the ground in Egypt, Britain, France and Israel were militarily pulling off the operation, but not without some serious mistakes, which only intensified the diplomatic firestorm.
18:35 Speaker 06 To give you an example, Britain intended to bomb Cairo West, which was an airfield in Cairo. So the idea is you take out the air power, right? That's always one of the first sort of acts in the war. So British planes are in the air, heading for Cairo West.
18:52 Rund Abdelfatah? But at the last minute.
18:53 Speaker 06 A message crack was through.
18:54 Rund Abdelfatah? Saying 1,300 American civilians are being evacuated through Cairo West.
18:59 Speaker 06 So if the British bomb it, they're probably gonna kill 1,300 American civilians.
19:05 Rund Abdelfatah? Eden frantically sends a message to the bombers and says.
19:08 Speaker 06 Change the target, change target, bomb something else. Just take that out instead.
19:12 Rund Abdelfatah? Crazy. Like, it's crazy that you just bomb another place haphazardly.
19:16 Speaker 06 Right, just something else. Anyway, it goes even wronger than that, though. The planes only had 10 minutes to change those plans. They hadn't been fully briefed and they mistook the civilian airport in Cairo for Al Mazar, the military aerodrome, which is, of course, a major act of war. That shows you kind of the levels of chaos that were going on here and the sort of disorganization.
19:39 Rund Abdelfatah? At this point, the US and the Soviet Union both jump into action. These sworn enemies, engaged in an existential fight over control of the world, end up on the same side, trying to force a ceasefire at the UN.
19:53 Speaker 06 Of course, the problem for the UN Security Council is that Britain and France are on it, so there is a resolution brought against them, but because they're both permanent members of the Security Council, they use their veto and it can't be passed.
20:08 Rund Abdelfatah? And then the US decides it's going to hit Britain where it really hurts: its pocketbook.
20:14 Speaker 06 Eisenhower realizes he has a very, very big lever here, which is oil.
20:21 Rund Abdelfatah? Eisenhower knew that if he forced Britain to pay for oil with dollars, they would soon hit a wall. Inflation would soar and they'd start to crumble economically.
20:30 Speaker 06 He actually says in a private meeting that he's inclined to let them boil in their own oil.
20:35 Rund Abdelfatah? It was a form of sanctions.
20:37 Speaker 06 One Labour MP of the time said the only successful use of sanctions in history was the Americans over Suez.
20:45 Rund Abdelfatah? And the Soviet Union applied its own pressure.
20:48 Speaker 06 The Soviet leadership sort of elliptically threatened a nuclear attack on London and Paris. Now, it didn't go so far as to say, we're going to nuke London and Paris, but said if rocket weapons were used against Britain and France, you would no doubt call this a barbarous act. But how is this different from the inhuman attack carried out by the armed forces of Britain and France on an almost unarmed Egypt?
21:12 Rund Abdelfatah? Was it a real or empty threat? Anthony Eden didn't want to wait to find out.
21:17 Speaker 06 Under threat of rocket attacks, but also with Britain's economy imploding, he actually pulls out.
21:25 Rund Abdelfatah? And just like that, a little over a week after Operation Musketeer begins, it ends in failure. Nasser still in power and Egypt still in control of the Suez Canal Company.
21:37 Speaker 06 Nasser himself was actually very depressed after the Suez crisis because his army had lost all the battles. But actually, he emerged really as unquestionably the preeminent figure in Middle Eastern politics. And, you know, was seen as a hero that had defeated two empires.
21:55 Rund Abdelfatah? The defeat was especially felt by the British.
21:58 Speaker 06 The British Empire was pretty much over already by this point. But I think what it did was kind of end that era psychologically in a huge way. And if you look at how the world is talked about in papers of the time, initially, when people use this word, superpower, they discuss three superpowers, and it's the Soviet Union, the United States, and the British Empire. After Suez, nobody talks about there being three superpowers anymore. It becomes a bilateral world, the US and the Soviet Union, and that's it.
22:27 Rund Abdelfatah? Eden left office pretty soon after the Suez crisis.
22:31 Speaker 06 And apparently, Nasser, when he saw Eden, you know, fall from power, lose his health, he said, "It was the curse of the pharaohs."
22:42 Rund Abdelfatah? Where does Israel come out in all of this?
22:44 Speaker 06 Some of Israel are hoping that they will hang on to Sinai and the Gaza Strip, two territories that they have occupied during this war. But actually, Ben-Gurion says quite quickly to Eisenhower, "We're not intending to occupy it long term. We'll give it back."
22:57 Rund Abdelfatah? Which will, of course, culminate in 1967, right?
23:00 Speaker 06 Absolutely.
23:01 Rund Abdelfatah? And the war that will lead to the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, the Sinai.
23:06 Speaker 06 Yes, you can see the roots of that at this point.
23:10 Rund Abdelfatah? Many later saw Suez as a long-term strategic win for Israel because it strengthened Israel's relationship with France, which helped lay the foundation for Israel's nuclear program. For the US, Suez marked the beginning of a new era. As British influence receded, the US stepped into a leading role in the Middle East, positioning itself as a central outside power. If there's one lesson from this moment, it's that waterways like the Suez Canal can give an underdog like Egypt a massive amount of leverage on the global stage and possibly even upend the power structures of empires. The rules that govern the water are more fluid than those on land.
23:54 Rund Abdelfatah? And the people who start a crisis don't always get to decide how it ends.
24:03 Rund Abdelfatah? Coming up, we travel back to the very first time the US and Iran exchanged fire on the Strait of Hormuz.
24:14 Speaker 02 This is Jack from Springfield, Illinois, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR. Stay tuned for the following announcements
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25:42 Speaker 04 Part two, Operation Praying Mantis.
25:53 Rund Abdelfatah? It's April 14th, 1988, somewhere in the Persian Gulf, and the USS Samuel B. Roberts has just hit a mine, on fire, holes in its hull, gathering water fast.
26:06 Speaker 05 The ship was buckling and threatening to come in, too.
26:15 Rund Abdelfatah? There's no way for another ship to come to their rescue inside the minefield without risking getting hit themselves. So its 200 crew members are stranded. They have to find a way out on their own, or else sink.
26:33 Rund Abdelfatah? By the next morning, they managed to hold the ship together long enough to get out of the minefield and back to safe waters. Miraculously, no one died.
26:48 Rund Abdelfatah? President Ronald Reagan calls the captain of the USS Roberts to congratulate him.
26:56 Speaker 03 Congratulations you and your men for such a great job in getting your ship safely into port after being struck by that mine.
27:07 Rund Abdelfatah? Almost as soon as the USS Roberts was in the clear, American officials in the Middle East got in touch with the Pentagon and Reagan to respond to this attack with a plan that would put the US and Iran on a collision course in the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow 100-mile-long waterway that borders Iran to the north and Oman and the UAE to the south. It's the second stop in our triangle and the one you've likely been hearing about a lot lately. But first, how and why did Iran take control of this strip of water and convert it into a minefield? To understand that, we've got to turn back the clock.
27:48 Rund Abdelfatah? The most dangerous place for merchant shipping today is the Gulf, surrounded by the Gulf War. By 1988, Iran and Iraq had been at war on land for nearly a decade, a war that began just a year after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Hundreds of thousands of people died, including tens of thousands of child soldiers. And when the war stalled on land... An oil tanker runs the gauntlet of air attacks in the Gulf War. It spilled over into the water, with both countries attacking each other's oil tankers.
28:22 Speaker 05 Iran was sort of by itself. The smaller Gulf countries were supporting Iraq. Iraq was at the time led by, as we know, Saddam Hussein, and ironically, the United States was supporting him. Iran wanted to disrupt the flow of oil and then gas, ultimately money, to the allies of its enemy. And so they would attack the tankers going to those countries.
28:50 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Harold Lee Wise. He wrote a book called Inside the Danger Zone: The US Military in the Persian Gulf, 1987 to 1988. It features many firsthand accounts from people involved in what became known as the tanker war. It's one of the busiest waterways.
29:09 Speaker 05 The numbers vary, but they usually hover around 20% of the world's oil and natural gas, the world's energy supply.
29:20 Rund Abdelfatah? So Iran armed small boats on the water and placed mines all over the strait.
29:25 Speaker 05 The Kuwaitis, they approached the United States with a request to escort their attackers. They had to be reflagged with American flags in order to legally be protected by the US Navy. This is what became known as Operation Ernest Will.
29:43 Rund Abdelfatah? For the most part.
29:44 Speaker 05 The escorts are going along just fine. And in April of 88, the Stanley B. Roberts was just not on an escort mission. It was just on a normal patrol. It hit a mine.
29:56 Rund Abdelfatah? In the days after the USS Roberts hit that mine, American military officials in the Gulf and politicians back in Washington debated exactly how to retaliate for this attack.
30:08 Speaker 05 The folks in the Gulf, the military leadership there, wanted to go after the silkworm sites on land.
30:14 Rund Abdelfatah? Silkworm missiles was the nickname given to a new kind of anti-ship cruise missile developed by China around this time and sold to Iran. It was relatively cheap and could be launched from platforms on the shoreline of the strait. Iran would eventually reverse engineer the silkworm missile to create an arsenal of anti-ship missiles.
30:33 Speaker 05 Military people on the ground believed Iran was acting as pirates. Let's take the gloves off and put a stop to some of these things. Washington thought the same, but they wanted to be just proportionate and maybe just a hair over, but not too much over.
30:50 Rund Abdelfatah? They reached the compromise and sent the plan over to Reagan, who gave it the green light.
30:56 Speaker 02 They must know that we will protect our ships, and if they threaten us, they'll pay a price.
31:04 Rund Abdelfatah? The plan was named Operation Praying Mantis, and it was set to take place on April 18, 1988.
31:18 Rund Abdelfatah? Evacuate immediately.
31:21 Speaker 05 The orders came down to start it at 8 o'clock.
31:24 Rund Abdelfatah? American warships were deployed to attack two Iranian gas oil platforms.
31:29 Speaker 05 They approached the first platform. They warned them first. They radioed to the platforms. Evacuate the platform immediately.
31:38 Rund Abdelfatah? The clock struck 8. They waited a few more minutes. And then...
31:42 Speaker 05 It started blasting.
31:46 Rund Abdelfatah? On one of the platforms...
31:48 Speaker 05 The Americans accidentally hit a gas tank.
31:53 Speaker 05 The platform blew up.
31:59 Rund Abdelfatah? At that point, Iran decided to strike back.
32:02 Speaker 05 They send out a missile boat called the Joshan.
32:07 Speaker 05 They started attacking an American boat called the Willie Tide, which is an oil rig support boat. Well, the order came down to destroy that boat. This is a warning. They warned them, one or four times. They radioed, "Stop."
32:24 Rund Abdelfatah? Stop and abandon ship. I intend to sink you. Over. A couple minutes later, they spotted a cloud of rocket exhausts coming from the Joshan. The US returned fire.
32:37 Speaker 05 So for just a second, the missiles were both in the air. And this is the first surface-to-surface missile attack in world history.
32:47 Rund Abdelfatah? Quick side note: The missile fired by the Joshan was ironically an American-made harpoon missile that the US sold to Iran during the Shah era, before the 1979 revolution brought the Ayatollah to power, when there was a lot of business happening between the two countries. The Shah had been installed in 1953 after a US-backed coup orchestrated by Kermit Roosevelt, that CIA agent we heard about earlier in the episode. Okay, back to the battle.
33:18 Speaker 05 The harpoon flew by.
33:21 Speaker 05 And it landed in the water.
33:24 Speaker 05 100 feet away from the ship.
33:27 Rund Abdelfatah? As for the missile the Americans fired...
33:29 Speaker 05 It hit the Joshan.
33:31 Rund Abdelfatah? Eventually, the Americans managed to sink the Joshan.
33:35 Speaker 05 Iran started launching planes and... One of the US ships started shooting missiles at them.
33:40 Rund Abdelfatah? Meanwhile, American planes were circling above the water.
33:44 Speaker 05 And all this time, the USS Enterprise carrier group was outside of the Strait of Hormuz.
33:51 Rund Abdelfatah? A carrier group is a naval task force built around an aircraft carrier that can execute a really serious attack on water.
33:59 Speaker 05 The Enterprise had received an earlier set of orders that told them to definitely destroy one of the big ships. The latest orders said it was optional, but they thought it was a mission priority. These kind of things happen.
34:16 Rund Abdelfatah? These kinds of things as a miscommunication that can lead to a ship getting blown up?
34:21 Speaker 05 Yes.
34:26 Speaker 05 In any case, Iranian commanders sent one of the two large ships out, and it was the Sahan. Now, Iran would play some tricks with these ships. They would repaint their numbers and swap them around. Suppose you see a ship coming out and it has this one number on it. The next thing you see is a different number. You think, oh, that's two ships. Iran has more ships than we thought.
34:48 Rund Abdelfatah? The Iranians send out what the Americans think is the Sabalan.
34:51 Speaker 05 It had the number that the Sabalan had previously.
34:54 Rund Abdelfatah? Whose captain reportedly had a habit of sending oil tankers a message before attacking them.
35:00 Speaker 05 Have a nice day. And they had kind of a grudge against that guy.
35:05 Rund Abdelfatah? An American attack jet flies in for a closer look.
35:08 Speaker 05 And the Sahan started shooting at it.
35:10 Rund Abdelfatah? At the same time, remember that carrier group? Well, their jets also started attacking the Sahan, just as another US warship radios them.
35:19 Speaker 05 And says, back off. I'm attacking the ship. And they said, you back off. We're attacking the ship.
35:25 Rund Abdelfatah? The Sahan gets hit from all sides, and they sink it. Iran reported 45 dead and 87 injured.
35:32 Speaker 05 And it's interesting that in the press release, the Pentagon put out that this is a coordinated attack. See the irony? It was accidentally coordinated.
35:41 Rund Abdelfatah? There's something interesting about that, right? Facts on the ground create a new narrative.
35:46 Speaker 05 Exactly. I mean, you're in media. You know, you can't go by some of these information that you get. Later on, they told the pilot, you would either get court-martialed or get a medal for what you did. Because it was iffy, you know, justification for attacking the ship.
36:06 Rund Abdelfatah? Whether it was like a war crime versus an act of heroism.
36:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, but they ended up getting the medal.
36:13 Rund Abdelfatah? At this point, the American military was sure Iran would cut its losses and back down. But instead.
36:20 Speaker 05 Iran sent out their other big ship.
36:23 Speaker 05 The American planners, they said, this, this is crazy. What, why are they sending it out?
36:29 Rund Abdelfatah? An American plane dropped a single bomb on that ship.
36:33 Speaker 05 The bomb went down the staff ship and exploded in their engine room. And the ship just drifted to a stop and started leaking oil all over the Gulf.
36:44 Rund Abdelfatah? And for a few minutes after, there was a question about whether they should continue the assault on the Iranian ship and try to sink it. Harold says people who were there told him the pilots radioed the Pentagon. And Admiral Crowe, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said.
37:00 Speaker 05 No, call it off. That's enough for today.
37:06 Rund Abdelfatah? In less than 24 hours, Operation Prang Mantis was over. For the US, it was the largest air-sea battle since World War II. They had taken out two Iranian oil platforms, two of Iran's biggest warships, and several smaller boats. And although escorts of oil tankers would continue for another year, this operation effectively ended the tanker war with one notable exception. The USS Vincennes shot two missiles and an Iranian airbus, mistaking it for
37:38 Speaker 05 an Iranian jet fighter. It was in early July of 88 that the US ship, the USS Vincennes mistakenly identified an Iranian passenger plane as an attacking plane.
37:53 Rund Abdelfatah? All 290 people on board died in the crash. The Reagan administration this week offered to pay compensation to the families of the downed airliner. The move was unpopular. In the US, but it's likely to weaken international support for Iran's charge that the missile attack was intentional. Despite that fatal error, the success of Operation Praying Mantis loomed large, and the US was seen as the de facto guardian of the Strait of Hormuz.
38:21 Speaker 05 It really increased the standing of the US military worldwide. It showed the smaller Gulf countries that the US was a reliable ally, which was questionable before this operation started. This reassured the world that the US would keep this oil flowing.
38:41 Rund Abdelfatah? A status quo that was in place until the current war between the US, Israel, and Iran began.
38:47 Speaker 05 And when there's instability in there today, we see in our own pocketbooks how it's affecting us.
38:54 Rund Abdelfatah? Coming up, we travel to the newest frontier in the water wars, which may deepen that hole in our pocketbooks even more.
39:07 Speaker 03 You're listening to Throughline from NPR. This is Taylor from Aramis, California. And I love this show. I find it to be eye opening, thought provoking. Thank you all so much.
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40:46 Rund Abdelfatah? On June 8th, 2026, a spokesperson for Yemen's Houthis released this video, announcing a missile attack on Israel. He also declared a ban on Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, raising fears that there will be major disruptions to shipping traffic in Bab al-Mandeb, which loosely translates to "the gate of grief." It can be the word of grief because al-Mandeb is a double-linguistic word in Arabic. It can be the way out or the way to get stuck in. It's the nick of many things. Like the choke point. Yes, yes, exactly.
41:31 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Faria Al Muslimi. I am a Yemen and Gulf researcher at the Chatham House in London. I am originally from Yemen. The two waterways we've visited so far, the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz, might be more familiar to you. But Faria has spent a lot of time thinking about this third point of the triangle, Bab al-Mandeb, the narrow passage between Yemen and the Horn of Africa that links the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. Each story reveals a different kind of power hidden on these waterways. At Suez, we saw how a waterway could shift the balance of power between nations. In Hormuz, we saw how it could disrupt the flow of oil and goods around the world. In this third story, we'll see something different:
42:16 Rund Abdelfatah? how a narrow stretch of water can be used by non-state actors to make themselves impossible for the world to ignore. Babed Mandeb only really came on the radar of many Americans in the last few years and has become almost synonymous with the Houthis. A militia, a group supported by Iran. They are originally Yemeni. I personally think the Houthis are a combination of Taliban, a FARC in Colombia, and North Korea. They're Shia Taliban because their extreme explanation of Islam is radical and their worldview of human rights, of equality, of women, of the West, of the other is extremely criminalizing.
43:01 Rund Abdelfatah? They are like FARC of Colombia because they depend highly on illicit business revenues, drugs. And they're North Korea because they believe in isolating themselves and everyone from the world. Their biggest dream is to basically keep millions of Yemenis under their control. That has nothing to do with the world.
43:25 Rund Abdelfatah? The Houthis came to power in Yemen a decade ago with a headline-making move. Houthis fighters seized control of the presidential palace in Sanaa. They also took control of state media. Situation on the ground remains unstable. This spiraled into a brutal civil war that quickly ballooned into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. A decade later, it's still ongoing. A disturbing mixture of Libya, Syria, Iraq, and somehow Lebanon together. All put into one package called Yemen. In the U.S., the war in Yemen received very little coverage despite becoming one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. It was not a domestic issue.
44:10 Rund Abdelfatah? It was not an election issue. But then...
44:16 Rund Abdelfatah? They burst into the wheelhouse and order the crew to lie down. On November 19, 2023, a little over a month after the October 7 attacks and the beginning of the bombardment of Gaza... The Houthis showed up in the Red Sea. But a dozen men, wearing body armor and carrying assault weapons, jump out of a helicopter and run along the deck of the Galaxy Leader. A cargo ship called the Galaxy Leader was traveling near Babed Mandeb when armed Houthis hijackers suddenly descended on the ship. According to the Lloyds List, a shipping journal, the Galaxy Leader is Israeli-owned, Bahama-flagged, and operated by a JAB. A Houthi spokesperson didn't comment specifically on the seizure, but said all ships owned or operated by Israel could be targeted.
45:01 Speaker 03 From a media point of view, it was the perfect entrance for them. A Hollywood style.
45:07 Rund Abdelfatah? The Houthis provided the video and blurred faces. Which they released on social media the next day.
45:13 Speaker 03 That was how the Houthis decided to announce themselves to the world. Hundreds of millions of young men and women around the world, feeling senseless, looking for any compass, frustrated partially. A lot of people say nothing will be the same in Palestine and Israel after that.
45:30 Rund Abdelfatah? They're disrupting one of the world's busiest shipping lanes in the Red Sea, where thousands of massive cargo ships travel through every year.
45:38 Speaker 03 Obviously, my immediate reaction was like, holy crap. But in another way, I was like, wait. This actually can be a huge global opportunity in which Yemen can be redefined from, oh, a poor, suffering country into an important country. You know, the Red Sea attacks in 2023 was the very first time since 13 years the world has bade for Yemen war.
46:07 Rund Abdelfatah? Fadia says, in reality, the Houthis weren't even all that comfortable on the water.
46:12 Speaker 03 There are mountains in a group. They hate the water, they're afraid of the water, they're caves people. But suddenly, like, as the whole world, the global was coming, they saw, oh, water, that can be something, you know? The mountain and the sea in Yemen, they hug each other.
46:26 Rund Abdelfatah? Which meant the Houthis could launch attacks on ships in Bab al-Mandeb from the mountains without ever stepping foot in the water. And they got weapons, drones, and maritime training from Iran.
46:39 Speaker 06 Now, three people have been killed and at least two injured in the latest attack by Houthi rebels on a merchant ship.
46:45 Rund Abdelfatah? The attacks already leading to a 5% increase in the cost of shipping a container.
46:50 Speaker 03 From Asia to the east coast of the US since October 7. It started to create that an immediate insurance panic. And insurance beyond anything, it's a feeling. So that feeling was broken. You're no more safe in Bab al-Mandeb. You're no more safe in this part of the world, you know. But it was a panic that you could see in numbers. You can see in Wall Street. It was something in which businessmen started to basically worry about.
47:19 Rund Abdelfatah? And is it too simple to say that?
47:22 Rund Abdelfatah? Part of what garners the attention is as soon as a state or a non-state actor begins to threaten money, the bottom line, that's when, you know, the global community mobile is tends to mobilize most aggressively?
47:37 Speaker 03 Absolutely. You had the EU, one of the most inefficient bureaucracies in the world and the most consensus and time consuming. They started to make a military operation called the Aspides Operation in the Red Sea. The mission named Aspides, the Greek word for protector, involves four countries, Greece, France, Italy, and Germany. Ended up until today happening in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandeb.
48:05 Rund Abdelfatah? Would you call this a form of political piracy?
48:09 Speaker 03 Yes, yes.
48:11 Rund Abdelfatah? Faria also has another name for it. Drone mine diplomacy.
48:16 Speaker 03 They changed the rule not just of business, but of a of a war. If they shoot a drone that takes few thousand dollars, then if US Central COM interrupts that drone with a $70,000 rocket, the Houthis win. It's a choice in which you can only bleed and bleed. And the other side only win or win. If they hit you, they win. If they don't hit you, they also win. Because they created that fear. What will happen of the Houthis? You will sanction them? They don't care. Will you ban them from travel? They don't spend August in Las Vegas. Don't have bank accounts in Belgium or in New York. You're gonna freeze.
48:59 Speaker 03 It also came in a moment where the international law and order is already collapsing by states. It was a fracturing in Palestine. It was a fracturing in Ukraine. It was fracturing in Syria. It was fracturing everywhere else. And the Houthis were like, OK, we can do it too.
49:16 Rund Abdelfatah? And Fatia says there isn't such a clear difference between what non-state actors like the Houthis did in Bab al-Mandeb and what countries like the US have done in recent years.
49:26 Speaker 03 Holding a Venezuelan president.
49:27 Rund Abdelfatah? Or US military strikes on boats in the Caribbean.
49:31 Speaker 03 It's exactly the same playbook. It's a hostage policy. Hold the entire world hostage. We cannot differentiate it, whether it happens in a dishdasha or in a suit.
49:44 Speaker 02 It's a sight to behold of the port of Al Salif. The Galaxy leader was anchored in the harbor under tight security till recently.
49:52 Rund Abdelfatah? The Galaxy leader was taken to a port on the coast of Yemen, and its captive crew was held hostage for 430 days. The news media keeping a close eye on things. During that time, the Houthis continued to threaten other ships on Bab al-Mandeb, leading to some casualties, though some countries were given free rein to travel through it.
50:13 Speaker 03 The Houthis buy drones, buy toys, buy a lot of stuff from China. And that relationship is actually quite strong. And there was some intelligence report about Russians trying to tip the Houthis about information and intelligence on Western ships.
50:29 Rund Abdelfatah? Goodbye, Yemen. Thank you very much. And go home now. Thank you. The crew of the Galaxy leader was finally freed in January 2025 in response to the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. No one was killed while on board. A few months later, in July 2025, the Israeli Defense Forces said they'd bomb the port where the Galaxy leader was being held. The IDF claimed, quote, "Houthis forces installed a radar system on the ship and have been using it to track vessels in the international maritime arena to facilitate further terrorist activities." A Houthis spokesperson posted on X that they, quote, "effectively repelled the Israeli attacks."
51:16 Rund Abdelfatah? Since then, the Houthis have been relatively quiet on the water. But in the last couple of weeks, they announced a renewed blockade of Israeli ships through Bab al-Mandeb. And their involvement may soon escalate further, depending on whether the deal between the US and Iran holds.
51:33 Speaker 03 Bab al-Mandeb will always remain vulnerable. It's the opportunity and the problem of geography. And to have Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb are closed together, that is an absolute nightmare, actually.
51:46 Rund Abdelfatah? There's also the question of whether the Houthis would be able to potentially target the undersea cables that run through Bab al-Mandeb, which are essential to the internet worldwide.
51:56 Speaker 03 Then you will start having Google suffer, Microsoft suffer, Amazon suffer.
52:02 Rund Abdelfatah? I mean, as you're looking towards the future, do you think that that is likely to happen?
52:08 Speaker 03 I think everything is possible.
52:12 Speaker 03 This world is running out of sanity and leadership for the sake of stability.
52:18 Speaker 03 And even beyond Bab al-Mandeb and Hormuz, if we look into the way military and wars and recent conflicts, they really have moved from the mountains and the land into the sea.
52:32 Speaker 03 Everyone is holding each other hostage is the sea. You can be the Houthis, you can be Putin, you can be Erdogan, you can be Iran. It's all about water.
52:45 Speaker 03 This is the world war of water.
52:49 Rund Abdelfatah? The world war of water. Whether it's the Suez or Panama Canal, a strait in the Persian Gulf, or a shipping lane in the Black Sea or the South China Sea. Geography might not be destiny, but it is leverage. And sometimes, a few miles of water can shape events half a world away.
53:20 Rund Abdelfatah? And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Arablouei. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Wyman.
53:31 Speaker 07 Casey Minor. Christina Kim. Devon Katayama. Kiana Mulholland. Irene Noguchi. Leanna Semstrom.
53:38 Rund Abdelfatah? Julia Redpath. Skylar Swenson. Amy Padula. Jasmine Romero. Thank you to Johannes Sturgie, Cheyenne Butler, Yolanda Sangueni, and Tommy Evans. Archival audio in this episode includes clips from Tames TV, TRT World, and France 24. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keely. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected] . And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number, too.
54:22 Rund Abdelfatah? We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. Also, make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.
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