Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson

history as told by the people who were there and this week the former US Secretary of State

Madeline Albright on the NATO bombing of Serb targets in 1998.

When people ask me what I'm proudest of that I did, it was Kosovo.

I thought we can't stand by.

This was genocide. Plus the man who revealed the true identity of

Deep Throat. He told me that he was not out to get Nixon. He was just trying to

do his job. He did remember that. And Russian conceptual art, which hinted that in the post-communist era, people lived in toilets.

They would ask, okay, I see some brown by the window is it what I think it is I will say of

course exactly what you think it is and many many questions like this more of that

later in the podcast but first we're going back 30 years to an incident in the Persian

Gulf which perfectly illustrates how the fog of war all too often leads to tragedy.

During the 1980s the war between Iraq and Iran for dominance of the

Gulf region grew into one of the worst conflicts of the 20th century, trench warfare, the use of

chemical weapons and deliberate attacks on civilian targets led to an estimated death toll of around a million.

Against this background, the Gulf was the The Iranians did what they could to disrupt that flow.

Inevitably, the tankers and their escorts came under attack.

Amid this dangerous confusion, which I witnessed firsthand as a reporter on board helicopters, which were frequently challenged by Iranian gunboats,

a US Navy warship the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian passenger plane,

killing all 290 people on board.

Alex Last has been hearing a rare first-hand account

from someone who was on that warship that day.

...