US SPECIAL FORCES
ON OCCASION THE United States Special Forces work together on major operations, including counter-terrorism missions. Some of these are a great success, but others end in death and disaster despite the high calibre and commitment of the personnel involved.
One such hellish experience was the attempt by US Special Forces to rescue sixty-three Americans taken hostage during the invasion and occupation of the United States Embassy in Tehran by an army of some five hundred Revolutionary Guards in November 1979. Following the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, at the beginning of the year, Ayatollah Khomeini had returned to the Iranian capital from exile in Paris. The Islamic revolution had arrived in Iran and it would sweep the country, winning the support of both the poor and the middle classes.
One of the main targets of the young firebrand revolutionaries was the United States, which they dubbed ‘the Great Satan’. Demonstrations, including burning of the Stars and Stripes, were almost a daily occurrence outside the US Embassy in Tehran and then, some ten months later and without warning, the demonstrators invaded the building and took the all of the staff hostage.
The United States tried to negotiate but was rebuffed at every turn. Other governments, including Britain and France, tried to intervene through diplomatic channels in an effort to persuade Ayatollah Khomeini to release the innocent hostages. All to no avail. The US President, Jimmy Carter, ordered the Pentagon to prepare a rescue mission.
The task was handed to Delta Force, a counter-terrorist unit which had only come into existence in 1977, after Colonel Charles Beckwith, who had served with Britain’s SAS in the 1960s, persuaded the senior generals of the United States Army to form the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment. Beckwith believed that the United States desperately needed an SAS-style Special Force dedicated to counter-terrorism and unconventional warfare. He was right.
Beckwith was given command of Delta and a training base at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, and set about recruiting volunteers to join his new elite force. He adopted the same stringent tests as the SAS for those seeking to join the new force, as well as the same tough training schedules. Six months later Beckwith had selected just seventy-five men who he believed had the guts, determination and ability to make the grade. He was given two years to have two Delta squadrons up and running efficiently as a serious counter-terrorism force, ready for operations overseas. Incredibly, exactly twenty-four hours after Beckwith officially informed the US Army that Delta was operational, the Iranian revolutionaries invaded the US Embassy in Tehran and took the sixty-three hostages.
Beckwith and Delta were handed the tough task of rescuing the hostages. It would prove to be a baptism of fire for the fledgling Special Forces unit.
One week later Delta Force received orders to move to Camp Peary, in Virginia, the CIA’s secluded base for training members of its Directorate of Operations in covert operations and counter-terrorism. Major General James Vaught, who had served with the US Rangers, was given overall command of the rescue operation, code-named Eagle Claw. Firstly, a detailed model of the twenty-five-acre Tehran Embassy compound was constructed. Measuring some eight feet by twelve, this showed the fourteen buildings contained within the wooded compound, which was protected by high walls. The model proved extremely useful in drawing up detailed plans of the rescue, and then thrashing out the optimum tactics and techniques, including the methods of entry and escape.
One month later a plan had been devised. A Delta Force unit of one hundred and twenty men, including a detachment of US Air Force ground crew, would fly in two giant Lockheed C-141 Starlifter transport planes to Frankfurt in Germany, where a thirteen-man US Special Forces unit which had trained to carry out the actual rescue of the hostages would join the flight. The C-141s would later fly to the island of Masirah, off the coast of Oman, from where the rescue plan would be launched.
The rescue unit would fly to a location code-named Desert One, in the Dasht-e-Kavir Salt Desert, two hundred and fifty miles south-east of Tehran, where they would be joined by eight Sea Stallion helicopters from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, which was then slowly cruising in the Gulf of Oman. The helicopters would fly the one hundred and twenty Delta Force soldiers from Desert One to some fifty miles south of Tehran.
Great care had been taken to ensure that the whole operation would go smoothly. Those in command knew that the eyes of the entire world would be on this mission, for hardly a day passed without TV, radio and newspapers reporting whatever details they could discover about it. On the front of some newspapers and in numerous news bulletins a figure would appear showing how many days the hostages had been in captivity. And throughout the United States yellow ribbons began to adorn trees – a powerful symbol of the importance the men, women and children of America placed on the insult to their country perpetrated by the Iranian hostage-takers. Hardly a day passed without appeals being made, plans drawn up, ideas suggested of how the United States could bring this tense situation to an end.
Two weeks before the Delta Force unit flew to Frankfurt a four-man recce unit was secretly smuggled into Tehran to find suitable landing sites for the choppers, routes for the entrance of the Delta soldiers and exits for them and the hostages, some of whom were likely to need physical assistance.
The plan was for the Delta soldiers to split into three groups. Red Group would attack the western side of the embassy compound and release any of the hostages it discovered. Blue Group would take the eastern side. White Group would secure the withdrawal route for those hostages brought out by Blue and Red Groups as they were ushered to a sports stadium opposite the embassy. From here the hostages would be airlifted by waiting US helicopters to a location some thirty miles from Tehran, where US aircraft would be ready to fly them out of Iran.
Throughout the rescue operation two AC-130 Spectre helicopter gunships would orbit the compound, suppressing any opposition from the Iranians guarding it and the hostages.
On Sunday April 20 1980 the Delta unit flew to Frankfurt and on to Egypt, where their weapons and equipment were given their final check. Four days later they flew on to Oman. As dusk fell that night the men took off in three smaller MC-130 transport planes for Iran, as did the eight Sea Stallions from the Nimitz.
However, earlier in the day bad luck had dogged the operation from the very start. A road ran alongside the landing site, and no sooner had the eight-man team deployed to watch the road for any danger than a bus packed with passengers trundled along it towards them. The passengers had a wonderful view of three US aircraft standing idly in a deserted area. The US unit opened fire, aiming to bring the bus to a halt by shooting out its tyres. It worked perfectly; the bus stopped and the Delta team ushered the frightened and surprised passengers off the bus and ordered them to sit on the ground and wait. Four men were left to guard them.
The passengers had just been herded into the field when a petrol bowser came down the road. One soldier fired a single M72 light-armour shot, hitting the bowser, setting it on fire and sending a great ball of flame shooting up into the night sky. It could be seen for miles. Within minutes a light van came down the road, picked up the bowser’s driver and mate and disappeared into the night, never to be seen again. That was serious.
However, the delivery of the full complement of one hundred and thirty-three troops in Iran went smoothly, with the US transport planes depositing the men and their equipment and taking off again for Oman. But the eight Sea Stallions, which were to fly the troops to within fifty miles of the embassy, were very late. Mechanical breakdown had forced one to be abandoned and instrument failure had forced another to return to the Nimitz. The other six finally made it to the pick-up point, but they had run into severe sandstorms which had reduced visibility to zero.
As the Delta soldiers were clambering into the six helicopters, one of them sprung a leak in its hydraulic system and had to be abandoned. Now the rescue force was down to five instead of the planned eight choppers. The highly
experienced Colonel Beckwith, who had been responsible, with other senior Special Force officers, for planning the entire rescue operation, knew it was extremely dangerous to continue with only five helicopters. The decision to ‘stop or go’ went to President Carter himself, who ordered the mission be aborted. Beckwith gave the order for the entire force to fly out on a single MC-130 transport plane and three EC-130 helicopters and for the remaining Sea Stallions to be destroyed.
It was at that moment that disaster struck. As Peter Harclerode wrote in Secret Soldiers:
As one of the helicopters was manoeuvring to refuel from one of the EC-130s at the northern end of Desert One, its rotors struck the port side of the tanker which exploded in a fireball. Members of the Blue Group already aboard the EC-130 were forced to leap for their lives as fire engulfed both aircraft, killing the EC-130’s five crew and three others aboard the helicopter. Total confusion now reigned throughout Desert One as the flames turned night into day and exploding ammunition and Redeye missiles provided an impromptu fireworks display. Without further delay, all personnel boarded the three remaining aircraft which took off for Oman. In the haste to depart, however, the destruction of the five remaining, now abandoned, helicopters appeared to have been forgotten.
Operation Eagle Claw had been an unmitigated disaster, highlighted by the loss of eight lives. The abortive raid, the first ever undertaken by Delta Force, was hugely embarrassing to the US Special Forces, and Delta in particular, the US Marine crews who had abandoned the helicopters, the planners and President Jimmy Carter and the United States Army. Indeed across the world the mismanagement and apparently amateur approach to the rescue mission showed the US armed forces in a dreadful light. They became the butt of jokes the world over, particularly among the armed forces. Worse still, they eventually became the target of jokes on TV. It was a ghastly, humiliating episode.
Later it was revealed that not only had the US Marine crews abandoned the five helicopters in a totally unprofessional decision, but, unbelievably, they had even left intact on board the choppers’ secure communications equipment and documents giving details of Operation Eagle Claw and of US agents within Iran. As a result, some of those US agents were picked up by Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary guards and executed after suffering the most horrendous torture.
This debacle, however, has been used ever since in Special Forces training lessons throughout the world. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with the planning, the training of those taking part or the commitment of the Delta Force, the US Marine Corps, the US Air Force or other members of the US armed forces who were involved in the operation. What went wrong concerned the professionalism and the attitude of some of those who took part. For example, it seemed that the Marines had totally failed at the moment of truth, not even caring what highly secret documents they were leaving behind for the enemy to peruse, not bothering to destroy the helicopters they had been forced to abandon. Such measures were a matter of common sense and yet, when the heat had been turned up and people had to think on their feet, they simply weren’t up to the mark.
It is noteworthy that after the failure of the US Marine Corps in that ill-fated venture it was decided by Pentagon chiefs that Delta Force needed its own helicopter unit in the same way that the SAS has its own dedicated chopper and transport unit on permanent standby. In 1997 Delta’s order of battle was upgraded and now includes an Aviation Platoon with its own fleet of helicopters.
When President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 he let it be known to friend and foe alike that he was determined to ensure that the United States would not be pushed around by anyone again, and would not permit any nation to cock a snook at Uncle Sam. Furthermore, he was determined that the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean, some of which were then flexing their muscles and opting to follow Cuba’s example, would not be permitted to seize power and set up hard-left or communist regimes in America’s backyard.
On October 12 1983 the elected government of the tiny island of Grenada – a left-wing junta led by Maurice Bishop – was overthrown in a coup led by the hard-left New Jewel Movement. One week later the popular Bishop and six other government ministers were taken from their prison cells, lined up along the walls of Fort Rupert and shot dead in a traditional Latin-American execution. Bishop’s execution brought demonstrators on to the streets of Grenada in protest, but the island’s new leaders, also left-wing, replied with bullets. The situation was deteriorating rapidly.
Bishop had been put into power with the help of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Soviet government finance had been used to construct a ten thousand-foot runway capable of handling long-range transport planes, a new control tower and sophisticated airfield facilities. Allegedly, all this was intended to encourage tourism. But the CIA believed the runway would be used as a first-rate facility for Soviet transport planes to stop over when bringing material, weapons, ammunition and supplies to support popular revolutionary movements in Central and South America.
Studying medicine on the beautiful island of Grenada at that time were six hundred American students, and the Reagan administration was worried that here was a hostage crisis just waiting to happen. The young Americans could easily be taken as pawns in a dangerous, high-stakes ploy aimed at stopping the US armed forces from invading the island. But in fact the small nations of the region looked to the United States for leadership because they feared that a powerful left-wing Grenada, backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba, might be a threat to the entire region.
Reagan decided to launch Operation Urgent Fury. It was only four years since the debacle in Iran, and Reagan and the Pentagon were determined that this operation would go like clockwork, whatever the cost and whatever the number of troops needed to ensure total success. Reagan was also keen to show himself as a strong leader, a president who was prepared to use force once again whenever the need arose. He also wanted to overcome the nation’s defeatist attitude following its humiliating and costly withdrawal from Vietnam. He told the Pentagon to throw everything into the operation and to make sure that it was totally successful.
Grenada, only some fifteen miles long and ten miles wide, was at one time a part of the British Empire but became an associated state within the Commonwealth in 1967. In the 1980s its army, the Grenadian Defence Force, totalled about three thousand soldiers armed with only rifles, pistols and sub-machine guns. They were backed by some seven hundred and fifty Cuban troops, euphemistically described as ‘construction workers’.
Against this enemy the United States launched an attack which included the 22 Marine Amphibious Unit, a team of Navy SEALs, elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, a small fleet of warships and, from the United States Air Force, one hundred and sixty Black Hawk helicopters, a Tactical Fighter Wing and the First Special Operations Air Wing.
At dawn on October 25 1983 the invasion was launched when Delta Force soldiers were ferried by air to an airfield at Point Salines, which they were tasked to seize and control to enable USAF transports to fly in with troops and supplies. As the Delta teams arrived, two battalions of US Rangers – some sixteen hundred men – parachuted on to the airfield. The Cuban defenders seemed totally overawed by this dramatic illustration of US combat power. There were a few brief firefights with defenders, but within thirty minutes the Delta teams and the Rangers had full control of the airfield, the all-important control tower and all the other buildings.
But the battle for Grenada was by no means over.
The United States was keen to ensure the safety of other Grenadian politicians, dignitaries and others who, it had been led to understand, had been rounded up and incarcerated in Richmond Hill Prison. It was fearful that the new government might decide to slaughter all the ‘political’ prisoners in retaliation for the US invasion in the same way that they had executed Maurice Bishop and his ministers without trial. The attack on the prison was undertaken by Rangers in six Black Hawks. But the intelligence passed to the US Special Forces units taking part in the invasio
n proved to be poor and totally inadequate. The CIA had once again failed the US military and it would be members of the courageous Special Forces units who would suffer and die as a result. As they attacked, the Black Hawks found themselves under fire from the latest, most advanced and sophisticated Soviet-built ZSU-23-2 (twin 23mm) anti-aircraft guns. The United States had no idea the Soviet Union had installed these in Cuba, let alone tiny Grenada.
Then, as the helicopters circled to land, the Soviet anti-aircraft guns on Fort Frederick, just three hundred yards from the prison, opened up, sending two of them spiralling out of control to the ground and killing the crew and eight Rangers on board. The other four Black Hawks were able to take evasive action, but they could find nowhere to land. Two hovered low enough for SEALs to fast-rope down and rescue their wounded comrades just as the People’s Republican Armed Forces arrived on the scene. A firefight developed within seconds, with the SEALs desperately trying to protect their wounded comrades and keep the PRAF troops at bay. The SEALs called up another helicopter gunship, which arrived an hour later, just as their ammunition was running low. The gunship wreaked havoc on the enemy forces, killing and wounded some and scattering the rest. It was not until the following day that the SEALs and their wounded comrades could be pulled out by US helicopters and flown to safety. Altogether twelve Rangers were wounded in an attack that had been a total disaster.
On the southern shores of Grenada, Delta paratroopers also had a tough time as the wind pushed them out to sea. They had been dropped some twenty miles off the coast, along with two inflatable craft. Waiting below were two small whalers, manned by US Navy forces, which would take them to the island. But the wind and heavy seas made it very difficult for the boats to locate and pick up the SEALs. Some twenty Delta men had major problems in the rough waters, battling against the current to the shoreline and weighed down with all their equipment. Four drowned as they tried to link up with the surface vessels.
Death Before Dishonour - True Stories of The Special Forces Heroes Who Fight Global Terror Page 16