"Navy Times': Strait of Hormuz 'Showdown' with Iran May Have Been the Work of Prankster

By: E&P Staff It was said to be proof of Iran's threatening intentions of the U.S., and President Bush and Republican candidates have been using it to threaten attacks against the aggressor. But tonight the Navy Times reports, "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.'

"Since the Jan. 6 incident was announced to the public a day later, the U.S. Navy has said it?s unclear where the voice came from. In the videotape released by the Pentagon on Jan. 8, the screen goes black at the very end and the voice can be heard, distancing it from the scenes on the water. 'We don?t know for sure where they came from,' said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson, spokeswoman for 5th Fleet in Bahrain. 'It could have been a shore station.'

"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."

Some have even said the voice sounds more like Borat than a real Iranian.

More from the Navy Times story follows.
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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.