MANAMA, Bahrain -- The amphibious assault carrier USS Guadalcanal has arrived off Bahrain with minesweeping helicopters after slipping through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf, witnesses said Sunday.
Shipping sources said the warship arrived Saturday 30 miles off Bahrain, and a reporter for British Independent Television News said its helicopters spent Sunday carrying out exercises that included low-level attack routines.
The reporter, Brent Sadler, said he watched the 11,000-ton warship for 36 hours but was not able to file his dispatch until Sunday.
'The deck is packed with helicopters from bow to stern,' Sadler told United Press International in a ship-to-shore interview from a rented boat.
Sadler said he counted eight Sea Stallion minesweeping helicopters on the deck of the Guadalcanal and said they are supported by helicopter gunships and Chinook transport choppers.
Shipping sources, who confirmed the ship's presence, speculated the Guadalcanal might weigh anchor as early as Monday at dawn and sail to meet other U.S. Navy warships escorting the supertanker Bridgeton from Kuwait. The Bridgeton was hit by a mine off Farsi Island July 24.
The sources said although three other re-flagged Kuwaiti tankers are at Kuwait ready to make the perilous 550-mile voyage through the Strait of Hormuz, because of insurance policy reasons the tankers cannot be escorted with the Bridgeton.
The movements of the Guadalcanal, which has hundreds of marines on board, have been kept secret by the Pentagon since it took on board the Sea Stallions at the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia last month.
A U.S. Embassy spokesman in Bahrain said he had no information on the movements of the Guadalcanal.
The Reagan administration ordered the Guadalcanal and Sea Stallions into the gulf to clear the sea of mines for 11 re-flagged Kuwaiti tankers that are being escorted by U.S. warships.
In Washington on Sunday, Frank Carlucci, President Reagan's new national security adviser, said the beefed up military presence 'is not an open-ended commitment' and 'if the danger recedes, the escorting can stop.'
The warship began its gulf duty as Iran warned Western powers it has the capability to destroy their fleets in the Persian Gulf and marksmen from the United Arab Emirates detonated two mines in the Gulf of Oman.
Coast guard cutters and helicopters from the UAE searched waters off the port of Fujairah for a second day but found no trace of five seaman, including British Capt. Gerry Blackburn, who are missing and presumed dead after their supply vessel Anita hit a mine Saturday and sank.
One other seaman died at a hospital Saturday after being plucked from the sea. The incident marked the first casualties in the Gulf of Oman since the Iran-Iraq war started nearly seven years ago.
Police marksmen using machine guns detonated two mines spotted Saturday near where the Anita went down, the official Emirates News Agency said.
Port officials at Fujairah still were broadcasting 'until further notice' warnings to shipping to stay out of a 50-square-mile exclusion zone just north of the port, the harbor master's office said.
A shipping source told United Press International that some oil inspectors and surveyors -- who check the quality and quantity of cargos of tanker crude oil -- are refusing to leave Fujairah following the Anita sinking. Some are refusing to go to sea at all, he said. Others are using the Emirates port of Ras al Khaimah just inside the Persian Gulf.
The source said the mining was having a considerable disruptive effect on the passage of oil through the Strait of Hormuz.
In Tehran, Iranian President Ali Khamenei said Iran can destroy Western fleets in the gulf, Tehran newspapers reported Sunday.
'We warn them not to get involved with the conflict in the Persian Gulf,' Tehran newspapers quoted Khamenei as saying Saturday. 'If we use our facilities to attack their ships, none of them would remain.'
Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Akbar Rafsanjani indicated the futility of searching for sea mines, saying, 'Mining the Persian Gulf is like sowing seeds.' The United States has accused Iran of planting mines in gulf to disrupt shipping.
'We have a mine-producing factory, which could produce mines like seeds,' he said. He called on Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey to pressure Iraq to stop attacks on Iranian oil installations.
Iraqi warplanes Sunday attacked Iranian oil fields for the second time in less than a week in a southern province at the northern tip of the Persian Gulf, setting fires and explosions, the state-run Iraqi news agency INA said.
In Damascus, the president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, and Syria's President Hafez Assad held a second round of talks aimed at finding ways to defuse the growing tension in the gulf.
In Moscow, the Communist Party daily Pravda said the United States was seeking 'revenge' for the failure of its arms shipments to establish relations with Iranian leaders and said the mines found in the Persian Gulf provided a 'pretext to increase pressure on West European allies' to join the military action.
'In the strained military and political situation which is reigning in the Persian Gulf, one U.S. shell or missile may prove enough for a flare-up that would be fraught with the conflict's spreading beyond regional boundaries,' Pravda said.
