AROUND CHRISTMASTIME 1979, another hostage, a woman, was interviewed on television. Her innocence struck me, the unfairness of her having her life stolen from her when she had done nothing wrong. Her interview brought into focus for me the plight of all fifty-three remaining hostages. To live in fear. To wonder if you’ll ever see your family again. To wonder if each morning is the last you’ll ever see.
None of us in Delta believed the U.S. could successfully negotiate the release of the hostages. Backed by the Ayatollah, the Iranian students were now locked in a macho standoff with America, the big kid on the block. To blink first would’ve been, in the Islamic mind, unthinkable. As long as they held the global limelight, as long as they held American prestige in their hands, the student rebels would hold our citizens prisoner.
Just after the embassy takeover, President Carter declared publicly that America wouldn’t do anything to endanger the lives of the hostages. What he should have said was: “We will go to any length to get our people back. All options are on the table.”
At the Farm, it didn’t build confidence in us that Carter was unwilling to state that publicly. Most of us saw him as a weak president before the hostage crisis. Now, all of us interpreted his public comments as revealing that he didn’t have the stomach for armed conflict, even if it meant the global humiliation of the nation he meant to lead.
It wasn’t just Delta who thought Carter lacked the mettle to order us in. Some intelligence agencies repeatedly told us, “You can rehearse all you want, but this thing is never going to go off.”
As a result, I believe those same agencies didn’t go after intelligence as hard as they might have under a different president. Their resources were already stretched keeping up with the trench-coat intrigue of the Cold War. Then, in December 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, further diluting the intelligence resources that could have been directed at Tehran.
As we continued to refine the mission plan, anticipation burned in my heart. I truly believed Delta would storm the embassy and bring home fifty-three Americans. At the same time, though, I worried about the unknown. The complexity of the problem—and thus of the plan—was unprecedented. With so many contingencies, we pegged the chance that something, and probably several things, would go wrong, at about 100 percent. Still, from end to end, the strategy we hammered out accounted for every known detail. We had practiced for six months. Pete knew every inch of the embassy corridors. Fast Eddie blew up his replica of the embassy wall so many times Charlie was tired of going out to watch him do it. And Boris fell so deeply in love with the violence of the MAG-58 I started to wonder whether any woman would ever be able to compete for his affections. The attitude of the men was, If we’re going to do this thing, let’s go do it.
At the Farm, the action officers were very concerned that Carter would draw out the embassy standoff until the Iranians executed a hostage. Then Delta would have to launch without the critical element of surprise. The Iranians would then have plenty of time to move the hostages, separate them into difficult-to-rescue groups, and harden more buildings in the embassy compound. We also worried that the hostages might attempt to escape, resulting in more American deaths.
I was disappointed in Jimmy Carter. I knew he was a man of faith, and I didn’t understand his interpretation of his God-given responsibility to defend the defenseless. We believed that ultimately, it would be events—and not his own courage—that would force him to act.
We were wrong. In the end, it was just the solar system.