IN 1978 IRAN, REVOLUTION WAS IN THE AIR. For thirty years, the Americans and the Soviets had been locked in nuclear standoff, playing out a game of trench-coat chess, each side working to block the other from gaining control of the Islamic third world and its oil resources. America allied itself with mainly Sunni Islamic powers who held to the concept of civil government—their version of separation of church and state. But beneath the surface, the anger of Shia fundamentalists simmered, then boiled up into rage. To them, America was a greedy and power-mad infidel, not an ally but the “Great Satan” that must be driven from Islamic lands. In place of Iran’s whorish foreign alliances, the Shias envisioned a glorious government under Sharia—or Koranic—law, led by fundamentalist clerics, an order author Mark Bowden would later call “totalitarianism rooted in divine revelation.” In 1978, led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, this Islamist revolution swept aside the government of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, forcing him into exile.
As it had in the U.S. for the previous ten years, the intoxicating scent of revolution seized university campuses in the Iranian capital, and many students embraced the spiritual and political fervor. With the shah gone, the dream of Islamist utopia was within reach, they felt. But in the heart of Tehran sat a cancer: the American embassy. Certain the diplomats there were actually counterrevolutionaries working to overthrow the new regime, a small inner circle of Islamist students hatched a plan. They would overrun the embassy, seize it, and occupy it for three days.
During that time they would broadcast a series of communiqués denouncing the United States. Khomeini, in a speech he gave a few days after the students discussed their plan, urged “all grade-school, university, and theological students to increase their attacks against America.” The student revolutionaries rejoiced. The Ayatollah had surely heard of their plan and was with them!
It wasn’t true. Khomeini knew nothing of them.
On November 4, 1979, hundreds of Iranian students, led by a small hardcore group, poured over the embassy walls, breached the buildings, and took sixty-six Americans hostage. Ordered to stand down by their diplomatic superiors, Marine Corps embassy guards never fired a shot.
Bowden’s 2006 account of the embassy seizure, Guests of the Ayatollah, revealed that though this brief occupation was supposed to be peaceful, at least one of the students, Mohammed Hashemi, “prepared himself to die.” Following Islamic instruction for jihadi martyrs, Hashemi performed the same ritual washing and prayers that nineteen hijackers would perform two decades later, on September 11, 2001, before murdering nearly three thousand Americans on U.S. soil. By the time Delta got news of the embassy takeover, reports had begun trickling in that the students were armed. Some hostages had been threatened at gunpoint and others severely beaten.
And so, on November 4, 1979, literally within hours of Army and intel evaluators certifying Delta ready for action, we loaded up in C-130s and flew from Georgia back to Bragg to launch our first mission.
Logan had been planning to take his squadron to Colorado for “winter warfare training” after the final eval. It was actually a ski trip to celebrate Delta’s official inauguration. Bucky recalled them immediately. Most of Delta redeployed to the Farm, a secure CIA isolation site. I didn’t go with them. Instead I went to Washington, D.C., joining Charlie and a Delta colonel named Chuck Whittle to meet with Pentagon brass and begin planning a rescue operation. That was how quickly it happened. Though the hostages’ captivity stretched into weeks, then months, and Americans clamored for their government to storm in and get them back, the rescue planning actually began within days of the attack.
On November 8, I arrived for the first time on the Pentagon’s innermost “E Ring,” just past the offices of the Joint Chiefs. I was a little in awe just being there and felt a sense of history as I passed the portraits of past JCS chairmen, including General Omar Nelson Bradley, an officer who had such compassion for his men during World War II they called him “the soldiers’ general.” I admired that.
Normal wooden doors punctuated the walls of Corridor 8 until the end. There stood a steel door secured with a spin-dial cipher lock. I pressed a button and an Air Force sergeant opened the door then escorted me into another smaller interior hallway with a second steel door. Behind that door was Room 2C840.
I half expected to step into a sleek secret-agent kind of space. Instead, I found a tiny, cramped room with exposed pipes running along the ceiling, mismatched government-issue furniture, and filing cabinets crammed into every possible space. On the wall, a row of white clocks announced the time in strategic locations around the world. The center of the room held a warren of desks and a small conference table. A secure telephone sat in the corner. The stale cigarette smell of a thousand planning sessions hung in the air.
I had just taken a seat at the conference table when the service chiefs began streaming into the room, including Joint Chiefs chairman General David Jones and Harold Brown, the Secretary of Defense.
With everyone seated, Secretary Brown spoke first. “What do we know? What kind of intel do we have?”
The answer was, very little. But CIA was working the problem. The U.S. had three CIA agents stationed inside the American embassy in Tehran. But since all three were now hostages, very little intel was coming out of Iran. We did not know, for example, that the students who seized the embassy originally meant to stage only a three-day sit-in. Nor did we know one of the students may have been Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who in 2005 would be elected president of Iran. But some embassy officials, off-site at the time of the takeover, spoke with embassy employees by phone before they were overrun and communications cut off. From that, we did know of the violence against the Americans.
Brown then asked who, exactly, the hostage takers were and what it was they wanted.
“Iranian students of some kind, sir,” an intel officer said. “Loyal to Khomeini. Their demands are unclear at this point.”
Brown scowled, unsatisfied with the vague answer.
“Has the Iranian government made any public statements?” Chairman Jones said.
“Nothing of substance,” the same intel officer answered.
Then Jones asked the money question: “What do we have in terms of capabilities?”
“We’ve put Delta in isolation at the Farm and they’re starting to do the tactical planning,” a Special Ops colonel said. “We’re looking at going in on Air Force helos. Spec Ops has CH-53s, so we’re looking at those and Army Chinooks to see if they can play a role.”
These planning considerations were aimed at two problems that, on a difficulty scale of one to ten, made this mission a fifty. First, this was not like the hostage scenarios that played out in Entebbe or Mogadishu, with not only a friendly host city, but also a handy beach perfect for a coastal insertion. Tehran was tucked away in the dry heart of Iran. A thousand miles of desert waste separated the city from the nearest coastline, which lay south. To the north was central Asia, the gateway to the Soviet Union. Afghanistan and Pakistan formed Iran’s eastern border, and to the west sat Turkey and Iraq. The Soviets weren’t going to help, of course, except maybe to cheer for Iran. And while America had friends in Iraq, involving other Islamic governments was, from a security standpoint, out of the question. The only regional allies willing to support us were Egypt and Oman.
This dovetailed with the second problem: Delta trained for operations in permissive environments with the support of local government, military, and police. Now, suddenly, we found our first mission was not only in a nonpermissive environment with no support, but also the local government was going to be the enemy. Not only that, but the embassy itself was buried in a city of five million people who hated America. We would face either informants or outright armed resistance at every corner.
All those problems meant any rescue attempt would have to begin in the air from a logistically nightmarish distance. What kind of aircraft could cover the kind of distances we were talking about? Long-range transport aircraft need long, weight-stressed runways. None of those were lying around in countries that would let us use them. And even if one would, where would we land them in Iran? It was a pretty good bet the Ayatollah wasn’t going to open Mehrabad International Airport for us. Meanwhile, short-range aircraft presented trouble of their own: where and how would they refuel?
Given the distances, any aircraft involved in the mission would either have to launch from friendly turf within flying range of Iran, or from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf. We didn’t yet know how all that would come together, but those were our only options.
“We’re going to have to bring State into this,” Joint Chiefs vice chairman Jack Vessey said. “They’ll have to coordinate the staging bases.”
“All right, call State,” Brown said. “Start working the staging areas and overflight approvals.” Then he looked at Charlie, Chuck Whittle, and me. “You guys keep working the plan. We’ll get back together tomorrow.”
As the meeting broke up, Charlie began speaking in low tones about the critical lack of intel with an Army two-star I recognized as Jim Vaught, a staff officer with the Joint Chiefs. A rugged-looking combat veteran of three wars, Vaught wore a chest full of decorations. Listening in to his conversation with Charlie, I learned that Vaught had been named commander of the rescue mission.
As planning began, the knowledge that the Iranians could begin executing hostages at any moment haunted us. It meant we might have to launch any day, using an emergency mission plan slapped together with duct tape and chicken wire. Because procedure required it, we came up with a plan like that. It involved blasting our way into Mehrabad airport, blasting our way through Tehran, snatching the hostages, and blasting our way out. The chances of success were zero. Less than zero. But we were pretty sure we’d have time to come up with a better plan. Because unless the Iranians forced his hand by executing a hostage, none of us thought Jimmy Carter had the guts to order us in.