CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

NEWS ANCHOR WALTER CRONKITE closed his broadcast of April 24, 1980 with, “American citizens at our embassy in Teheran have today been held hostage for 171 days.” At this point he didn’t know about Operation Eagle Claw, which the president and National Command Authorities had ordered activated to rescue the hostages.

That night passed long and tense for those of us at the Pentagon listening with mounting apprehension and anger to frantic satellite radio passages coming out of Iran in the early hours of April 25.

About forty of us stuffed ourselves into a SCIF—Special Classified Intelligence Facility—across the corridor from the Big JCS situation “tank” with its wall-sized screens and state-of-the-art communications where the upper echelon of Washington politics and military gathered. The SCIF was a sixteen-by-thirty-foot room suspended within a larger room in order to preclude penetration by eavesdropping devices. Armed guards at three SOD—Special Operations Division—checkpoints cleared each person before he was allowed to proceed. The room’s low ceilings and fluorescent lights cast everything in a greenish light.

Junior action officers, planners, spooks, and SpecOps warriors in the SCIF sat on molded plastic chairs around two long meeting tables in the center and worked ourselves into tension headaches compounded by caffeine overload. Moldy coffee cups, crumb-laden paper plates, and butt-filled ashtrays littered the tables. A half-dozen small, square loudspeakers attached to cables running across the floor to wall jacks carried intercepts from NSA, Wadi Kena, Masirah, Desert One, and from Teheran where an American agent on the ground had his own PRC-101 radio transmitter tied into the satellite network.

The entire Eagle Claw mission operated on the same frequency, which allowed us to hear Delta’s transmissions, the aircraft pilots’ chatter, and the various commanders’ comments and orders all in real time as it happened. I would rather have been there with them, but by now I was at a point in my career when I had to be content with relegation to the planning stages.

Under cover of darkness, eight RH-53D helicopters lifted off the carrier USS Nimitz on station in the Arabian Sea for the six-hundred-mile flight inland, while six C-130 tankers and troop planes departed Masirah Island at Oman. The plan was for them to assemble at a secured prearranged site in the wastelands of Iran, code-named Desert One. From there, Chargin’ Charlie Beckwith, on-ground commander, and 120 Delta Force operators would proceed in refueled helicopters to a hide site near Teheran where in-country operatives would then transport them surreptitiously to the American embassy in vehicles.

Once the hostages were extracted, everything went into reverse: trucks to helicopters, helicopters to waiting C-130s, and then everybody the hell out of Dodge. It was a good plan and should have worked. Except for Murphy’s Law, which states that anything that could go wrong, would.

Inside the Pentagon’s SCIF we heard the first chopper report “feet dry” as it crossed the Iranian coastline just west of Chah Babar on its way to the Desert One rendezvous. The rest of the eight made landfall shortly thereafter. That was when things started to fall apart.

Two of the choppers had to abort and return to Nimitz because of mechanical failures. A third suffered a hydraulic leak. It auto-rotated down into the desert, where another RH-53D dropped in and picked up the stranded crew. The remaining choppers arrived late at Desert One due to a desert storm known as a haboob. That left five choppers, when Beckwith and other planners deemed a minimum of six were needed to complete the mission.

About this time an Iranian bus appeared on its scheduled route. Guards detained the driver and about forty-five passengers.

Shortly thereafter, a gasoline tanker truck drove up from the opposite direction. Seeing the bus and airplanes, the driver pounded pedal to the metal. A rocket from a LAW (Light Antitank Weapons System) stopped the truck. The driver leaped out as it burst into flames and fled down the road until another car picked him up, screeched into a U-turn, and headed back toward Teheran. Flames from the abandoned tanker truck leaped more than one hundred feet into the desert sky.

In Washington, one of the spooks in the SCIF expressed the group’s common distress: “This is gonna be a goatfuck.”

Our chins dropped onto our chests, and the room fell totally silent when Colonel Beckwith came up on the air to announce that he was calling the mission off.

But Murphy and his law weren’t finished yet. A helicopter repositioning itself to refuel from a C-130 for the long flight back to Nimitz collided with the plane. Both aircraft exploded and became engulfed in flames. Sounds of explosions, screams, and total confusion erupted from SCIF speakers.

“Oh, my God!” someone exhaled from the stricken room.

Fires from the burning aircraft and the tanker truck could be seen for miles. Iranian air defenses were expected to arrive within a very short time. Beckwith loaded his team on the C-130s and fled Iran, evacuating five injured Americans and leaving eight dead behind. Operation Eagle Claw had turned into Operation Goat Fuck.

Doom hovered like a dark cloud over official Washington, D.C. Failure in the attempted rescue proved a major embarrassment for the military and for Delta Force’s first major mission. Iranian TV showed the burned bodies of dead U.S. servicemen left behind. Footage of it rebroadcast on U.S. networks.

“And tonight,” said Walter Cronkite, “our hostages remain in captivity for 172 days.”

* * *

Following the disaster, panels and committees throughout government rushed into session to determine what went wrong at Desert One and how problems with the nation’s special operations forces might be remedied. The Holloway Commission, the DOD (Department of Defense), the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Special Operations Rescue Group, and the Rescue Mission Report all came up with the same criticism—the lack of a central overall control. They also presented a common recommendation that a Joint Special Operations Command be created at Fort Bragg to place all special ops forces—SEALs, Green Berets, Delta, Marine Recon, Rangers—under their central commanding authority, which would coordinate and oversee, plan, train for, and conduct counterterrorism activities.

I was appointed a member of the Special Operations Advisory Panel and of the Counterterrorism Joint Task Force charged to come up with specific recommendations. One of the most important of these was that SpecOps be provided dedicated aircraft rather than drawing whatever might be available from conventional assets. The suggestion was immediately implemented in the formation of the 160th Special Operations Air Regiment—160th SOAR.

“All we need now,” I confided in Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, “is a president with balls instead of marbles.”