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By Megan Rose, Robert Faturechi, and T. Christian Miller, 

Just before sunset on Jan. 12, 2016, 10 American sailors strayed into Iranian territorial waters in the Persian Gulf, a navigation error with potentially grave consequences. On their way to a spying mission, the Americans had set sail from Kuwait to Bahrain. It was a long-distance trek that some senior commanders in the Navy's 5th Fleet had warned they were neither equipped nor trained to execute.

Surrounded by four boats operated by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the U.S. sailors, in two small gunboats, surrendered rather than opening fire. The officer in charge of the mission later said he understood that had a firefight erupted, it could well have provoked a wider conflict and scuttled the controversial nuclear deal the two countries were poised to implement in mere days.

The Navy dialed up an elaborate rescue mission to free the sailors from tiny Farsi Island involving fighter jets and a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group. But the return of the sailors was ultimately secured peacefully. The nuclear deal went forward with the U.S. providing sanctions relief and unfreezing billions in Iranian assets in exchange for Tehran's promise to curb its nuclear ambitions.

President Donald Trump explicitly invoked the 2016 incident last week as he weighed actions against Iran amid rising tensions. Trump told 

 that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had mishandled the high-stakes confrontation, a mistake he would not make. "The only reason the sailors were let go is that we started making massive payments to them the following day," Trump said. "Otherwise the sailors would still be there."

But a ProPublica investigation makes clear that Trump's repeated claims about the captured sailors - Obama's weakness; that the money was improper - obscure the more troubling realities exposed by the Navy's 2016 debacle in the Persian Gulf. The Farsi Island mission was a gross failure, involving issues that have plagued the Navy in recent years: inadequate training, poor leadership, and a disinclination to heed the warnings of its men and women about the true extent of its vulnerabilities. 

Now, the Navy, and the 5th Fleet based in the Persian Gulf, are staring at the possibility of a military conflict, standing ready for a commander in chief who lacks a permanent secretary of defense and is thus more dependent on uniformed military leaders.

In the wake of the Farsi Island incident, the outlines of the Navy's fumbles were widely reported. But ProPublica reconstructed the failed mission, and the Navy's response to it, using hundreds of pages of previously unreported confidential Navy documents, including the accounts of sailors and officers up and down the chain of command. Those documents reveal that the 10 captured sailors were forced out on dangerous missions they were not prepared for. Their commanders repeatedly dismissed worries about deficiencies in manpower and expertise.

Prior to the mission, the sailors had received little training on their weapons, and the crew of one boat forgot to load the limited number of guns at their disposal during the transit. One sailor prepared to record the potentially hostile encounter with the helmet camera she'd been issued but  couldn't get it to work. So she filmed it on her personal iPhone 4. And when they were captured, a rescue seemed unlikely given that no one back at shore had yet realized they were off course. 

The Farsi Island episode is consistent with ProPublica's findings in its ongoing examination of the Navy's state of combat readiness. ProPublica's detailed review of the Navy's 

 in the Pacific in 2017, which killed 17 sailors from the 7th Fleet, shows that the most senior uniformed and civilian leaders mishandled years of warnings about degraded ships, undertrained and overworked crews, and the potentially fatal costs of tasking vulnerable sailors with an unceasing number of sometimes ill-conceived missions.

Immediately after the release of the Farsi Island sailors in early 2016, Vice Adm. Kevin Donegan launched an investigation that would divide the highest levels of the Navy over the question of who was to blame for the embarrassing incident. The findings of that investigation, completed in February 2016, did not spare the commanders and crew of the two riverine combat boats, or RCBs. They had violated fundamental Navy doctrines regarding navigation and leadership, the report found. Senior 5th Fleet commanders were also faulted and two were relieved of their commands.

Donegan's investigators, though, dug deeper. They concluded that the riverine unit had not been properly manned or trained before being dispatched to the Persian Gulf. Riverine sailors had had to train themselves. The sailors had done most of their exercises on smaller patrol boats instead of the RCBs used in the Gulf. They had received a minimum amount of training on the latest navigation system. They had never conducted a lengthy training voyage in the open sea, something they would be asked to do routinely in the Gulf.

The investigation's files included the personal plea of one of the enlisted men taken captive on Farsi Island, Petty Officer 1st Class Kevin Diebold.

"I cannot, nor am I in a position to, determine the exact reasons why my crews were captured," Diebold wrote. "This is something that should be discussed frankly and openly."

The seeds of the mishap, Diebold wrote, did not "materialize on the 11th of January, nor do they end, neatly, on the morning of the 13th. It is my hope that the current investigation and the team's findings are used not to punish 10 sailors, but educate and refocus a critical, if neglected force, if not our Navy as a total warfighting organization."

The Navy ignored the sailor's request. In internal Navy memos, commanders criticized parts of the investigation for being "deficient," "incomplete" and "unsubstantiated" amid disputes over how much training has actually taken place. To address the differing views, the Navy ordered a second investigation and embraced its findings that pre-deployment training and manning for the RCB unit, in fact, had been adequate. 

"Pre-deployment training and manning were not contributing factors to this incident," the second investigation, which was released to the public, concluded.

The Navy's top commander, John Richardson, signed off on the more reassuring set of findings.

"I'm not prepared to say that there's a larger problem," Richardson told reporters in 2016.

Over the weekend, the details of Iran's downing of an unmanned American drone that further escalated the confrontation remained unclear, but it seemed possible the Navy had again mistakenly entered Iran's territory. Iran insists the plane had penetrated its airspace; the United States says it was in international territory. Last week, The New York Times 

 an unnamed U.S. official as saying Trump had pulled back in part because of emerging evidence that the Global Hawk drone or a second, manned U.S. spy plane may have indeed breached Iranian territory. Trump cited the high number of possible Iranian casualties. 

In a written response to questions, the Navy said it had implemented reforms to improve the coastal riverine units. U.S. trainers now keep careful track of the instruction gunboats and their crews receive while deployed. New maintenance teams are ready to fly into deployed areas to make repairs. The RCB boats have been replaced by a newer gunboat known as the Mark VI. 

Rear Adm. Charlie Brown, the Navy's spokesman, said that many of the changes were still being implemented, but that the Navy's most senior leaders were confident that "the Coastal Riverine Force is ready to carry out all missions assigned in any numbered fleet area of operations." 

Brown also said the Navy's investigation was "conducted in an independent manner." 

"There were no instances of facts or opinions being silenced," Brown wrote.

Brown also offered a broader defense of the Navy's preparedness.

"No naval forces are deployed without ensuring full readiness," he said. "There should be no doubt -- U.S. Navy Forces deployed globally are ready in all respects."

In an interview with ProPublica on Friday, Donegan, who stepped down as commander of the 5th Fleet in September 2017, said the margin for error is small in such extraordinary circumstances. Training matters. Mistakes can prove dire.

"My biggest concern is about miscalculation," said Donegan, who now works as a security consultant. "When you have heightened tensions, no direct communications between the two sides and forces in close proximity, an event that one side thinks is low-level might compel the other side to respond in a way that leads to expanded conflict."

To some at the Navy's outpost in Kuwait, the last-minute mission for which they were briefed on Jan. 11, 2016, seemed preposterous.

The RCBs would have to travel from Kuwait to Bahrain -- a 260-mile trip, two times longer than any they'd ever done -- carefully avoiding nearby territorial waters. Once there, the National Security Agency, as part of its intelligence operations, would load up their small boats with listening equipment and have them float along the Persian Gulf's coastline. The mission was given a name: "Radio Creep." It was unclear who they'd be spying on, but several officers took the order as urgent, and, given worsening weather conditions, one decided the sailors would have to launch within 24 hours.

The crew raised what seemed to be an essential problem: Only one of the three RCBs was currently operational.

They might be able to fix one of the two disabled boats, Gunner's Mate Isaac Escobedo guessed, but it would be a rush job, he later told investigators.

The boats had been run 3,000 hours beyond the cut off for required overhauls. 

Lt. Kenneth Rogers, the officer in charge of the RCB unit, also had concerns. The boats were needed for another mission; to make it to Bahrain, they'd have to refuel at sea, something they'd only done once before -- while they were close enough to base to make it home  if it didn't go well; and the crew, if it scrambled to get at least one more boat ready, would be exhausted when it set out, Rogers argued.

Cmdr. Greg Meyer, Rogers' boss, was sympathetic to Rogers' concerns, records show, and took the case up the chain of command. 

Kyle Moses, the commodore with ultimate authority over the RCB unit, didn't want to hear any of it. He thought the worried officers were being "overly cautious." Moses said he didn't know why so many of his officers were concerned about the riverine command boats making this kind of trip, since "the RCB is a boat and boats float." 

"Navigation is navigation," Moses, an explosives expert, later told investigators.

The Navy's 5th Fleet is based in Bahrain and is responsible for about 2.5 million square miles of water and some 20 countries. The vast expanse includes three critical chokepoints at the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal and the Strait of Bab al Mandab at the southern tip of Yemen. The 5th Fleet has been a vital nerve center for American action and interests in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 5th Fleet, though, doesn't have warships of its own and instead relies on vessels and aircraft rotated in from the enormous 7th Fleet in the Pacific as well as stateside fleets.

Riverine boats, if a modest segment of the Navy's full arsenal of ships and aircraft, have nonetheless been a staple of operations for decades, typically deployed to patrol rivers and marshes, whether they be in Vietnam or Iraq. The RCBs were then the most recent incarnation of the gunboat: 53 feet long, holding crews of eight and loaded with heavy machine guns and high-tech navigation gear. 

In the Persian Gulf, the RCBs for years mostly performed escort missions for destroyers and other ships, assignments that kept them in fairly shallow waters for fairly short durations. But in late 2015, the RCBs were pressed into different and more debatable roles. The Navy, overstretched, had just removed a carrier strike group from the region, leaving the Persian Gulf without a U.S. aircraft carrier for the first time in years. The carriers -- three football fields long, stocked with dozens of fighter jets and accompanied by other warships -- had been a mighty show of force against regional foes like Iran. 

Now, to help fill the void, the Navy was going to use three riverine boats. It took barely a month for the 15 sailors in the RCB unit in Kuwait to be confounded -- and angry. The idea that their presence served as a show of military might seemed absurd. Sailing flat-bottomed boats designed for rivers in 8-foot waves felt reckless.

The unit had just one sailor and one private contractor available for repairs. Getting parts with which to make the repairs was a constant challenge. A delivery of needed parts took 89 days to be shipped. At one point, the sailors were so desperate for basic materials that they bartered Monster energy drinks with the Army unit on base in exchange for paint.

The men spent hours sailing in open waters in the Persian Gulf, launching a reconnaissance drone and filming nothing but empty ocean day after day, week after week. 

"What are we doing here?" Escobedo, the gunner's mate, asked at one meeting with senior leaders. "What is the mission?"

Escobedo's despair was not isolated. A routine "command climate" survey of Moses' officers meant to assess morale produced withering results.

"Across the board, the officers hated the command and their jobs," said Lt. Cmdr. John Pucillo, the director of the Maritime Operations Center.

Moses, the commodore, was incensed by the results, Pucillo told investigators. He summoned all officers to a conference room and went through each complaint individually, demanding answers. The comments were supposed to have been anonymous. 

"It felt like it was a witch hunt," Pucillo said.

On Jan. 11, those who had been pushing back against the mission to Bahrain did what they could to follow orders. Late that night, Escobedo and others stripped parts from one boat to fix a broken water pump to get a second boat ready to sail. The next morning, crews struggled to get the communications gear to work, ultimately succeeding, just before the mission would have been scrapped.

Meyer, the unit's commander, spoke to the officer who would lead the boats. Lt. David Nartker thought it was futile to argue more.

"My sailors and I can accomplish it," Nartker told Meyer. 

Chapter 2. "I Figured That Someone Would Be Keeping Track of Us."

At 12:40 p.m. on Jan. 12, Nartker ordered his boats toward the open sea. The repairs had put them hours behind schedule, in danger of being late for the planned refueling with a Coast Guard ship. Nartker decided to take a more direct route to Bahrain than had been planned. 

"We were worried about darkness," Collin Foley, a machinist's mate fireman, told investigators. "If we can't find them for whatever reason, we're out there running on fumes. We'll run out of gas and be stranded."

Nartker had forgotten to order the crew on his boat to load the weapons with ammunition. It was as if the crew had suddenly become blind to the fact that it was traveling in one of the world's most contested waterways. 

Then, the Coast Guard changed the location for the planned refueling. Nartker sought a shortcut. His boat had a computerized mapping program called COGENT as its primary navigation system. He had only received about two hours of formal training on the system back in the United States. 

He had one of his men pinpoint the new refueling location on the map. Nartker used the program to draw a straight line to the new spot. The more direct route, he figured, would reach the Coast Guard ship, the USCGC Monomoy, with about 25 minutes to spare before nightfall. Looking at his navigation screen with the view zoomed out to see his entire track rather than a more detailed picture, he saw nothing along the way that was cause for alarm.

Nartker did not tell anyone in his chain of command that he was abandoning his intended course. It was an astonishing lapse of navigational protocol. 

"I figured that someone would be keeping track of us," he told investigators.

The 5th Fleet maintains a series of operations centers to monitor and control Navy activity throughout the Persian Gulf. Smaller stations feed information up the chain of command to larger ones, so that anybody, from a lieutenant in Kuwait to an admiral in 5th Fleet headquarters, has some level of awareness of Navy traffic in the Gulf.

But when it came to tracking the safe transit of the 10 sailors in the riverine boats, that system broke down. 

Every 30 minutes, the boats radioed their position to their local operations center in Bahrain. But the sailors there did not plot the coordinates on a map, nor did they always pass them on. The next station up, based in the United Arab Emirates, showed the boats' course on a computerized map. But the officers using the map had not set it to display the boundaries of sensitive territorial waters around Saudi Arabia and Iran.

One more oversight: During the hectic initial planning, Meyer, the commander of the riverine task force, believed that a Navy ship or plane would be assigned to keep a close eye on the boats in case anything went wrong. His superiors, however, never made such an assignment.

Almost four hours into the trip, several crew members noticed what they told investigators looked like "a bunch of random rocks" off the ship's bow. Some men thought they were seeing an oil platform. 

"I asked what it was," Foley said. "No one knew. We asked [Nartker]. He had no idea what it was."

Petty Officer 3rd Class Randall Price, an electronics technician, was passing the time below deck when he got word from other sailors of the unidentified island. He put down the book he packed for the long transit and climbed up to the pilot deck. 

Like the other sailors, he couldn't work the boat's navigation system for an answer. The screen showed a small purple dot. No name. But Price pulled up a navigational app he'd downloaded on his phone.

He zoomed in on their location. He found the island. He told investigators he saw "a long Arabic name."

"My curiosity was satisfied," he said. "I went back down to continue reading."

At 3:42 p.m., a crew member on the refueling ship, the Monomoy, plotted the boats' location and realized that Nartker was drastically off course from his original route, the first time that anybody higher in the chain of command noticed the deviation.

The crew member on the Coast Guard ship realized the speck of land about the size of Grand Central Terminal was Farsi Island. It was Iranian territory, and it served as a naval outpost for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite force of the Iranian military that Trump recently declared a terrorist organization.

The Monomoy immediately called the base in Bahrain on a secure channel to alert it that the boats were headed into Iranian waters. 

A sailor in Bahrain noted the Monomoy's warning in a log. But there is no sign the information was passed any further up the chain of command, or to the sailors on the RCBs.

What unfolded over the next 12 hours transformed a bumbling operation into a historic fiasco. 

First, one of the boats broke down when the water pump that had worried the crew back in Kuwait fell from the engine block. The sailors decided to stop to make repairs. The gunboats were dead in the water.

"I fucking told everybody this would happen," Escobedo shouted while he scrambled to repair the damage and his boat bobbed in the waves, powerless.

The sailors then spotted two small boats headed their way. There were only two men on the first boat and just one on the second. They were wearing track suits and sandals. The boats were tiny, roughly 15 feet long.

Then a sailor screamed: "They got weapons!"

The Americans could make out rocket tubes mounted on the pilothouse of one boat. Heavy machine guns were fixed on the bows of both.  

Diebold asked for his rifle, which he kept stowed by the boat captain's seat. There weren't enough rifles for everyone.

"Each craft was only issued four -- I emphasize four -- rifles," Diebold told investigators. "I specifically requested one rifle per crew member, with a minimum of six magazines per sailor. I do not know the reason why I was given less."

Foley spotted a blue flag atop one of the boats. He pulled out a Navy reference manual. The flag belonged to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Foley shouted that the men were Iranians.

Nartker was holding up a wrench and pointing at his engine to indicate to the Iranians that his boat was in need of repair.

Inside the engine room, Escobedo made quick work of the repairs on the water pump and then started up the engines. With each movement, the more maneuverable Iranian boats blocked him and the men aboard them racked their weapons. He could see them squeezing their triggers.

Nartker decided to ignore the shouting men.

In 2016, 10 sailors were captured by Iran. Trump is making it a political issue. An investigation by ProPublica shows that it was a Navy failure, and the problems run deep.

Trump keeps talking about the last military standoff with Iran -- here's what really happened

Go Deeper.

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