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THE IRAN HOSTAGE RESCUE ATTEMPT
By William Terdoslavich
Desert one, America zero.
The limits of American power are drawn in failure. It can make the United States look weak and hapless. That was the kind of nation President Jimmy Carter was leading in the late 1970s. His well-meant decency and his indecision only made things worse.
Carter was plagued with problems beyond his control. The economy was in recession and inflation was rampant—a combination economists said was impossible. The Shah of Iran was overthrown in a revolution. Iranian oil exports ceased. The price of gas doubled. Americans waited in long lines to refuel their cars for the second time in six years.
And on November 4, 1979, protesting Iranian students overran the US embassy in Tehran, taking more than fifty State Department employees hostage. At first, this seemed like just another crisis.
The media didn’t see it that way. Beginning in January 1980, CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite signed off every night by reminding Americans how many days had passed since the hostages were first taken. And those days added up . . . 60 . . . 65 . . . 72 . . . 84 . . . 90 . . . 100 . . . 120 . . .
Americans rallied around the flag, united by their outrage. They also noticed that no one seemed to be doing anything about the hostage crisis. And that sucked.
Taking America Hostage
What triggered the embassy seizure? The deposed Shah of Iran, despised by Iranians for his tyrannical rule, wanted to enter the US for cancer treatment. Carter at first refused. But Chase Manhattan chairman David Rockefeller and former foreign policy top gun John J. McCloy pressured the president to change his mind, as the US had to stand by its allies for better or worse.
US chargé d’affaires L. Bruce Laingen in Tehran warned higher-ups in the State Department that it would be a bad idea to let the shah into the US. Iranians feared that the United States would try to reinstall him as Iran’s ruler. When Carter did allow the shah in for “humanitarian reasons,” the Iranian government did not see it that way. Protesting Iranian students had no trouble penetrating the flimsy perimeter of the US embassy compound. They took the personnel inside captive.
Carter appeared decisive at first, expelling all Iranian students studying in the US, freezing Iranian assets, and placing an embargo on Iranian oil imports. But three sets of talks in five months failed to obtain the release of the hostages. As soon as US negotiators had a deal, Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s real leader, would veto it.
All this was happening while Carter was running for reelection, facing a very stiff primary challenge from Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA). On April 11, 1980, the mild-mannered Carter decided a rescue mission was a better option than talking to the Iranians. He needed results. Now.
A Reach Too Far
Colonel Charlie Beckwith had a plan.
Beckwith created the US Army’s Delta Force, tasked with high-risk rescue when terrorists took hostages. But the plan was not simple.
Delta Force commandos would be flown into Iran on C-130 transports, landing at a remote, abandoned airstrip, and board a flight of US Navy RH-53 helicopters. The refueled choppers would then fly to a hide spot, where the Deltas would switch over to trucks for the drive into downtown Tehran.
Upon their arrival at the embassy, one Delta team would storm the walls while a second team set up a perimeter. A smaller third team would seek out the senior American diplomats, including Laingen, held at another location. The teams would round up the hostages and board the RH-53s that were scheduled to arrive as the raid concluded. They would fly to another airstrip to join the C-130s, then fly out of the country.
The plan faced some politically necessary alterations. Interservice rivalry required that all four services participate. The plan could be practiced in parts, but never as a whole.
In spite of this, Operation Eagle Claw was on. The mistakes could come later.
Eagle Claw, Turkey Flight
Any plan on paper changes the moment it comes into contact with reality. For Beckwith and the Deltas, that came on April 24. The inbound flight of C-130s arrived at the airstrip, known as Desert One, on time.
Then things began to go wrong. A truck and a bus drove by Desert One just as the C-130s were taxiing in. The truck was shot at. The bus passengers were detained.
A dust storm played havoc with the navy’s inbound flight of eight RH-53s. One turned back. A second suffered mechanical failure en route and was abandoned, its crew picked up by the other choppers. The helicopters arrived late, not all at once, and low on fuel. Next, a third helicopter developed a hydraulic problem and could not fly. Beckwith did the math. He needed to move about 178 hostages and commandos out of Tehran. Six helicopters were the mission’s minimum and he was down to five, risking further losses if he proceeded.
Beckwith called it off.
As planes and choppers departed, an RH-53 clipped a C-130 carrying a fuel bladder. Both aircraft went up in a single fireball, killing eight. The survivors, some burned, fled to the other C-130s, which took off without further incident.
For Want of a Helicopter, a Presidency Was Lost
The raid to free the hostages and Carter’s bid for reelection were tied together. He needed one to succeed in order to achieve the other. Instead, his hopes for reelection went up in smoke at Desert One.
The hostages were finally released on January 20, 1981, as Reagan took his oath of office. The fifty-two Americans were flown to Germany, where ex-president Carter welcomed them back to freedom.
But could this story have ended differently?
Carter could have avoided the entire hostage crisis by telling the Shah of Iran to go someplace else for cancer treatment. The president would have caught hell from foreign policy elites, but keeping the shah out would have dampened the spark that set off the embassy seizure in Tehran.
Relations with Iran would have remained fraught, since the US was instrumental in overthrowing Iran’s government in 1953. As Laingen recalled, the US was willing to improve relations with revolutionary Iran before the hostage crisis and had no interest in restoring the dying shah to power.
Maintaining an embassy in the following years would have made it easier to monitor Iran. Terrorism? Nuclear program? It is easier to find these things out if you are on the scene. The US would have more leverage in Iran today if it had a relationship to build on, making it easier to negotiate a more thorough nuclear treaty than the one under consideration as of mid-2015.
Keeping the shah out would not have guaranteed Carter’s reelection. He was presiding over a wrecked economy. But lack of a hostage crisis would have robbed Reagan of his best issue to challenge Carter. The election would have been closer, the outcome still uncertain.
The other possibility is more implausible. Say the hostage rescue actually worked. Carter would have crushed Kennedy in the primaries and vanquished Reagan in the fall election. America’s tilt toward conservatism would have received a sharp check.
Carter and his associates knew that it was the hostage crisis that sank Carter’s presidency. “I wish I’d sent one more helicopter to get the hostages and we would have rescued them and I would have been reelected,” said Carter at a 2015 press conference.
Then again, Carter getting reelected would have ended Ronald Reagan’s political career. For many Americans, history without Reagan would be unthinkable.