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Now they have reason to grieve again, for the Navy has effectively suppressed the results of the lone independent investigation of the accident. That investigation lays blame for the deaths squarely where it belongs: on the Navy itself.

In April, W.W. Norton published "A Glimpse of Hell: The Explosion on the USS Iowa and Its Coverup" by Charles C. Thompson, a highly regarded Washington author and veteran investigative producer for CBS's "60 Minutes" and other network news programs. Among Thompson's past triumphs were discoveries that the Pentagon had paid $500 for toilets, that the $1 billion a copy B-2 Stealth bombers weren't invisible to radar, that the Bradley Fighting Vehicle could catch on fire and, ranging further afield, that Elvis died of a drug overdose, not a heart problem. As testimony to its accuracy, "A Glimpse of Hell" was praised by reviewers and chosen by the Military Book Club as its main selection last March.

While Thompson's reputation is sterling in publishing circles, however, respect for his work is apparently not shared by the U.S. Navy, which refused to cooperate with the writer after he began to peel away the rotten layers of official misconduct coating the Iowa affair. The Navy has now blocked sales of the book in bookstores on military bases -- retail venues critical to the success of such a book.

It's easy to understand why. Among Thompson's major discoveries was that the Iowa, a World War II battleship de-mothballed at immense expense during the Reagan administration's naval expansion in the 1980s, was "a 59,000-ton accident waiting to happen." But what most people remember about the disaster is that the vicious explosion in gun turret No. 2 was deliberately set off by a homosexual sailor -- Gunner's Mate 2nd Class Clayton Hartwig, 24 -- in a murderous, suicidal response to being rejected by a gay shipmate.

But that was false, as Thompson discovered. Hartwig was not gay, nor was his friend who died with him in the blast. They had not had a love affair, pleasant or tormented. Thompson traced the slander to Navy detectives who browbeat one sailor into making a false statement that gay revenge was at the bottom of the accident, then peddled the dirt to credulous reporters -- in particular NBC's Fred Francis. Francis repeatedly libeled the dead sailor with stories of gay sex, all based on anonymous sources. Francis still covers the Pentagon for NBC, and still stands by his stories, now shown to be patently absurd.

The sailor's false statement was later retracted, a fact that the Navy also covered up in its zeal to pin blame for the affair on Hartwig. Naval officials even went so far as to conceal the retraction from FBI agents who worked at the agency's behavioral studies unit and who produced a "psychological autopsy" buttressing the detectives' theory. The Navy's coverup also included the suppression of evidence showing that Hartwig couldn't possibly have caused the explosion.

Why was the Navy so anxious to blame Hartwig for the blast? Blaming the victim deflected attention from the Navy's own culpability. That culpability included bad maintenance of the 16-inch guns, unsafe working conditions, poor ship leadership and the use of half-century-old gunpowder.

Next page | "One notch above hell"