THIRTY-ONE

THIS WAS SUNDAY. 4 November 1979. Delta Force had already closed back into Fort Bragg by the time I drove in at 1500 hours.

The drive north was without incident. Occasional patches of dark color showed through the leafless trees lining the interstate. The morning sun had still held a little warmth. Around Marion, South Carolina, I’d stopped and called the Duty Officer at the Stockade to determine if there were any messages waiting. In North Carolina it was a day on which to play football—crisp and cloudless.

A and B Squadrons were unpacking and cleaning their gear as I read the AP and Reuters wire service reports of the takeover. Through the headquarters there floated a sense that Delta would somehow have a role in this.

Late in the afternoon, when nothing official had arrived, the troops were sent home.

The first telephone call came in early Monday morning; it was from Major Shaw in the Army’s Special Ops Division, asking Delta to send a liaison officer to Washington to work with the staff officers of the JCS. Buckshot and Major Watson (pseudonym) of Delta were selected to go. Buckshot was outranked by Watson, but as he had a better understanding of the Joint Chiefs arena he was placed in charge and authorized to speak for Delta. Major Watson was not real comfortable with this arrangement, but indicated he could live with it.

A couple of days later Dick Meadows was also dispatched to Washington. Everyone in the Pentagon knows how this game is played. If Delta had sent one man to the JCS, the action officers there would have said, “Beckwith doesn’t really think much of this or he would have sent more men.” One man could be thought to be opinionated and therefore ignored. Two men might be outvoted, but three men acting together would be heard. I didn’t want to learn that some notion or plan had been put in concrete without Delta having had an opportunity to have its comments heard clearly, accurately, and forcefully.

Buckshot called on a secure phone line each day. “The planners are still looking at various alternatives, but I don’t really think they have any role for us yet. It seems they are compiling a list of viable options that can be used against Iran.”

Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the President’s National Security Advisor, had gone over to the Pentagon and his visit had instilled in the planners a feeling of urgency. The Special Ops Division, Buckshot reported, just hummed with activity.

I had not at all begun to assess the problems of mounting a rescue mission, beyond realizing what any military man would know—logistically speaking it would be a bear. There were the vast distances, nearly 1,000 miles, of Iranian wasteland that had to be crossed, then the assault itself, against a heavily guarded building complex stuck in the middle of a city of 4,000,000 hostile folks. This was not going to be any Entebbe or Mogadishu. Nothing could be more difficult. If our government does elect to use force, I thought, obviously Delta, the country’s door-busters, will be used; but they’ll never get to that point. Too many other diplomatic options remain unexplored. Negotiations and compromise are the tools this administration will use. Delta might get to an alert status, but this administration really doesn’t have enough grit to do anything more. My opinion of President Carter was very low. I had not voted for him and I was bitterly disappointed when he gave amnesty to those Americans who had gone to Canada to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. I was also concerned with the way the administration was forcing some of the most experienced operators out of the CIA. In any event, I knew I’d have nothing to do with any rescue mission—real or hypothetical.

My household goods had all been shipped and my family and I were preparing for a permanent change of station to West Germany. Teheran was a long way away. Then, things changed almost immediately. Buckshot called just at dusk on the 10th. “I’m coming in, Boss, and we gotta talk. They’re flying me down in a T-39.” Normally anyone traveling back and forth from Bragg to the capital went on a Piedmont 737. Occasionally the Army coughed up a small prop aircraft, but a T-39 was more expensive than flying a commercial airline. If they’re using it to whip Buckshot down here tonight, I thought, it has to be important. T-39 Sabre-liners are used to fly generals around, not majors.

We met outside Base Operations at Pope Air Force Base. Buckshot was very serious. “Everybody in the JCS is leaning forward, but in some cases they’re grasping for straws. I’ve heard some idiotic concepts and some of them include Delta. Some guy today thought we could parachute into the outskirts of Teheran and just like tourists ride up to the embassy in a motorcade. Before they commit us to something stupid, Boss, you need to go up to the JCS and shoot down some of these concepts. The trouble is that Meadows has a tendency to go along with some of those ideas. Maybe he’d be put to better use back here.”

I drove Buckshot to Bragg and we sat in the car talking in front of his quarters.

“I have informal approval for Delta to relocate to a secure training site in the northern part of the state. You’ll be receiving more information on this from Washington either tonight or tomorrow morning,” Buckshot said.

Before he got out of the car, he told me that a decision had been made to appoint Major General Vaught commander of the rescue task force. General Kingston and Mackmull had also been considered for this command, but moving either of them out of their respective command positions at this time would have telegraphed to other countries our rescue intentions. General Vaught, an officer with Airborne/Ranger experience and a distinguished career who was already assigned to the Pentagon, seemed an appropriate choice.

I began to examine the news Buckshot had brought me. If they direct Delta to move to what was called Camp Smokey—the secure training site—someone was getting serious about this. After dinner I began to work out the necessary logistics required to move A Squadron and a handful of support personnel out of Bragg and to the new location. During a sleepless night I pondered whether B Squadron should be recalled from its ski training in Colorado.

Moses called on secure first thing Sunday morning. It was a miserable day; cold and rainy. November at its worst. He wanted my opinion on relocating to Camp Smokey and whether it could be done without drawing unwanted attention to ourselves. Operations security, he emphasized, was paramount. He would call General Mackmull. I told him I’d call him within the hour.

The Delta staff was collected and we discussed our ability at Fort Bragg to tailor Delta for a rescue operation. It is the home of the Special Forces and the 82nd Airborne Division, and is the target of hostile intelligence services. The Russians and Cubans listen to message traffic through their commercial flights, which are rigged with electronic monitoring gear. Although their flight patterns keep them over the Atlantic, they are still within range of Bragg. It, therefore, became very clear that if any reasonable degree of operations security was to be obtained, Fort Bragg was out. Furthermore, it was decided the move from Bragg to Smokey could be made that evening—the post is usually quiet on Sundays—without attracting unnecessary attention. Torrents of slanting rain continued to pour down from the darkened sky. Lights were turned on early in all the offices.

I called Moses back and received his blessing for the relocation that evening. After I hung up the secure phone, I recalled that months earlier we had worked on a proposal with Keith Gwynn at the State Department about assessing several of the American embassies and trying to harden them where necessary. The Army was willing to pay the temporary duty expenses for two or three Delta operators to travel to embassies, but some State Department people couldn’t come up with their share of the money. The trip was canceled. Embassy security had a very low priority. The embassy in Teheran was one of the facilities scheduled to be appraised before it was called off. It was sickening.

The November chill seeped through the halls of the Stockade.

Over several cups of coffee, Delta’s staff finalized the plans for moving A Squadron to the piedmont country of northern North Carolina. The actual location of Camp Smokey was no problem as it had been the area of the Quebec terrorist training exercise.

Our plan called for small groups of men to travel in rented cars. The support people made calls all Sunday afternoon to a number of car rental agencies throughout the area—Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro. To have rented a bus or asked for a plane would have alerted anyone who was watching Delta.

Wade Ishimoto and No Lips were ordered to go on ahead, and in a small motel north of Raleigh they set up an office where the operators would stop to receive directions on how to get to their final destination. The drivers were given the motel’s address, a room number, and a time when they were expected to check in with Ish and No Lips.

In the motel, because there was some time before the first Delta car arrived, Ish decided to go out and get something to eat. No Lips, who is a very fit type of individual, was not inclined. He was more concerned with doing his exercises. But Ish pulled rank and the two went to dinner.

Buckshot and I left Bragg earlier than the troops, to make sure their arrival at Camp Smokey would go smoothly. Unfortunately, I had to leave Katherine in our quarters with a flooded basement.

Around midnight Buckshot called the motel to tell Ish we would be coming in shortly and that we’d be taking him with us when we left.

Once Ishimoto was picked up, No Lips was left alone in the motel room. Over the next four days he would give final directions to the Delta drivers who checked in with him. Because only the drivers knew when they would arrive at the motel, No Lips could never leave the room. The maids became suspicious. Who was this man who never went outdoors?

At first the messages I received, as the early cars drove into Smokey, were that No Lips was getting awfully lonesome. By the end of the second day, the messages said he was getting awfully hungry. Toward the end of the third day the drivers reported that No Lips had resorted to bribery. He would not give them their instructions until they either went and got him a Big Mac or they let him go and get one.

During those long four days, No Lips continued to do his thousand push-ups and thousand sit-ups. The last car through picked him up and he arrived at Smokey fit and famished.

I had one problem that caused me a lot of worry during this period. What if one of the cars had an accident on a back country road and a local deputy sheriff found the ammunition and machine guns packed in the trunk? Each of the drivers carried a card with an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms 800 emergency telephone number. A call would clear up any situation, but it would be awkward and not what Moses had in mind. It was a great relief to watch the last one drive into Camp Smokey.

Monday morning, not long after the sun had come up and begun to dry out the ground and barracks, intelligence community personnel installed a secure telephone-teletype line from the new headquarters at Smokey to the Pentagon. Nothing works that fast in the Army unless it has a very high priority. At the same time a secure teletype line to the Stockade was installed.

Much needed to be done at the new camp, so much that it was decided that Major Buckshot would not return to Washington but stay at Camp Smokey to help settle Delta into its temporary home. I grabbed him, Captain Ishimoto, and a packet of 3″ x 5″ cards and began to make notes on a rescue scheme.

What was needed most was intelligence. Where in the embassy compound were the hostages being held? How many hostages were being held? At this time, many figures were being used and issued to the press—all in an attempt to keep the Iranians from deducing that in fact six Americans were hiding in the Canadian Embassy. Delta needed to know the true figure. What did the embassy look like? Were the hostages being held in a group or had they been separated? Who was holding them? Were they students, militia, or regular army? Were there any Palestinians involved in seizing the embassy? In guarding the hostages? Precisely how many guards were there and how were they armed? What were their routines, especially during night hours? Where were they posted? Where were the walking guards and where were the stationary ones? What kind of reinforcements could they summon? To whom could we go for information about Iran and its geography? It is a long way from the green hills of North Carolina to the gray stony deserts of Iran.

From the nature of the calls I was receiving, it was obvious that Department of the Army had chopped Delta to the control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It became even more evident, when I was told to report to the River Entrance of the Pentagon. The River Entrance is the JCS entrance.

I flew up on Monday afternoon. On this bright, early winter’s afternoon an Army car was waiting at Davison Army Airfield at Fort Belvoir to take me directly to the River Entrance.

Inside the Pentagon, after showing a military ID, I turned right on the E-ring and walked a short distance down a busy corridor. The portraits of American military immortals—Sheridan and Stuart, Halsey and Spruance, Ridgway and Stilwell—looked out from the walls.

Shortly after passing the offices of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I hung a left onto corridor 8. If you miss this junction you will end up sometime later at the Mall Entrance. These rings and corridors wind around for seventeen miles and it’s easy to get lost in them. I had learned this the hard way a few years earlier when I was getting Delta off the drawing board.

A little way down the corridor, past portraits of former Chairmen—Admirals Radford and Moorer, Air Force Generals Twining and Brown, Army Generals Bradley, Lemnitzer, Taylor, and Wheeler—there is a closed door which opens into the Special Operations Division of the JCS.

On entering this large room I noticed six times as many people and more activity than I’d ever seen before. A lot of paper was moving around. I heard typewriters, telephone bells, and the murmur-murmur of a dozen conversations. Small groups of action officers huddled together and I began to hear, like a siren above city traffic, the word “Delta.”

“We can infiltrate Delta by foot…”

“Delta can be dropped in…”

People I’d never seen before were talking about Delta the way they talked about the Washington Redskins. Buckshot was correct. There was a lot of activity being generated in this division. I saw a lot of new faces. The key, of course, was to identify who amongst them were credible and who weren’t.

I worked my way into the office of the Director of Special Operations, Col. Larry Stearns.

“Come in, Charlie, and shut the door.” That was General Meyer. I looked around and saw two other general officers standing there. Gen. Glenn Otis was one of them. He was General Meyer’s DCSOPS. The other one, Maj. Gen. James Vaught. He had visited Delta at an earlier time and, because of the slow way he had of speaking and the way he chewed on his words, some of the troops called him “The Neanderthal Man.” I knew him fairly well. I was going to get to know him much better.

General Vaught, whose radio call sign was Hammer, perceives himself as a soldier’s soldier. He’d served in combat and was very quick to tell you he’d served in three wars: World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. He is an airborne general. I saw him as having a large ego matched only by his ambition. I knew of him when he had been Chief of Staff for the XVIII Airborne Corps and met him when he commanded Fort Stewart and controlled the 1st Ranger Battalion. We had spoken during one of my recruitment drives and I felt he was in favor of Delta. A few of his soldiers from the 24th Infantry Division at Fort Stewart had even volunteered to come up and run our selection course. General Vaught wanted everyone to know he was, first, a general officer and, second, that he was in control. He would have told you his first name was General. I never once called him Jim, yet I was comfortable with him. The planning phase of the mission he now commanded was to eventually be dubbed, for operations security purposes, Rice Bowl.

General Meyer asked my opinion about a rescue attempt. I told him we had real problems with the distances we’d have to travel. After I’d dropped Buckshot off, the night he’d flown down to Bragg in the T-39, I’d gone home and looked at a big National Geographic atlas. With Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east, the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman to the south, Iraq and Turkey to the west, the Caspian Sea and the Russian steppes of central Asia to the north, Iran is a long damn way from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Teheran, the capital, is buried deep in the Iranian interior, surrounded and protected by mountains and deserts. I wasn’t telling General Meyer anything he didn’t already know. What kind of airplanes would be used? Where would they take off? Where would they land?

When I finished asking all the questions I had written on those 3″ x 5″ cards, he said, “Charlie, you need to clearly understand that the people you saw on the other side of this wall will not do your planning. You will develop the ground tactical plan—how many operators are required, the nature of the equipment you’ll need, and whether you’re ready to go. If you cannot answer this last question positively, the President will be so informed.” I appreciated Moses talking like this. It was reassuring, especially after overhearing some of the ideas I’d heard in the outer office area. I also appreciated that General Vaught had heard all of this and now knew what my charter was in the newly formed joint Task Force (JTF).

I restated the concerns I was having about getting into and out of Teheran. “Charlie,” General Meyer said, “that’s really the responsibility of the air people. They’re the ones who have to fly you there. Let them worry about that particular problem. I don’t object to your sticking your nose into it, but it would appear to me that you have a full plate designing the ground tactical plan.”

After this business had been settled and our meeting adjourned, I spent some time with a nucleus of planners I was introduced to. Air Force Gen. David Jones, who was then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had begun to pull together officers from his own staff. Requests were also pending for recruits from the different services and commands—the European Command, Military Airlift Command, Tactical Air Command, the Navy, others.

Some of the operations planners were responsible for coming up with ideas for the rescue. They told me, “Some of the ideas you’ll hear are weird, but we’d like to drive them by you anyway.” I then heard ideas for using parachutes, fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, trucks, buses, and automobiles.

One of the planners said, “What we ought to do is get on helicopters and crash land them in the embassy.”

“Well,” I said, “if you crash land them, how will we get out?”

“Oh.”

He hadn’t thought that part out yet.

Delta had been given a mission: Assault the American Embassy in Teheran; take out the guards; free the hostages and get everyone safely out of Iran. That part was simple. All we needed to do now was come up with a plan. But without sufficient intelligence, nothing they said made any sense. We needed three things: information, information, and information.

I was concerned with one piece of news I’d heard earlier in the evening. It was hard to believe. I’d been nosing around the intelligence planners in an attempt to learn the status of their effort; and I’d been introduced to the CIA liaison officer who recently had been assigned to the Joint Task Force to support and assist in its planning. He knew the Iranian situation well, having previously been assigned to Teheran. I’d said to him and others standing by, “What we gotta do is get in touch with the stay-behind assets in country and task them with our intelligence requirements.” (In English, get in touch with our agents in Teheran and have them answer the mail.) He led me to a quiet corner and whispered the astonishing news, “We don’t have any.”

All the news wasn’t that grim. The intelligence section of special ops at the JCS had done a lot of spade work. Besides acquiring detailed maps, they were having built a large-scale model of the embassy’s buildings and grounds. There were no people in this section who hadn’t read past Ned-The-First-Reader. They were optimistic, busy, and professional. An Air Force lieutenant colonel whom I’ll call Ron Killeen spent a lot of time filling me in with what he knew.

Before departing the Pentagon that evening, I asked General Vaught if he had any guidance for me. He said, “I’ve just been called back from London and don’t know any more than you do. I’ve got to play catch-up ball, then get this task force in gear. As soon as I can, I’ll be down to see you.”

During the flight back to Camp Smokey that evening, conflicting and confusing images ran through my mind. There were just too many questions and too few answers. Not much useful would come out of what was then known.

It was well past midnight by the time I arrived back in Camp Smokey.