Carried away: The inside story of how the Carl Vinson's canceled port visit sparked a global crisis

Sending the release with the thinly veiled language would be a message to North Korea and nervous allies: The Navy’s big guns were on the way so behave accordingly.

“A press release was really the only option,” one official said.

But that’s when things went haywire.

Over the course of 10 days, a series of gaffes and missteps throughout the entire national security structure to its highest levels would raise the specter of a nuclear showdown, send the U.S. and Chinese governments into crisis mode, and expose alarming communication deficiencies within the American military at large. The breakdown fueled a war frenzy at major newspapers and networks, running with the narrative that Trump was diverting the carrier personally to send a message, outlandish claims made without checking for facts until the crisis rhetoric had spun out of control.

This behind-the-scenes account is based on interviews with nearly a dozen defense officials in Washington, and in the Pacific, all of whom spoke to Navy Times on the condition of anonymity to relay in candid terms how the carrier’s movement spun out of control from a routine Navy operation to a full-on crisis.