Operation Eagle Claw
In his extraordinary book Guests of the Ayatollah, journalist Mark Bowden cites a list of requirements and conditions one of Boykin’s colleagues wrote down at the time, describing just how challenging was their task. Among the requirements: “Enter Tehran undetected”; “Breach the embassy and rescue the hostages”; “Don’t hurt any civilians”; and “Do not permit the Iranian forces to be aware of or react to our presence.” Among the conditions: “No country will help you”; “The entire training program must be kept secret”; and “The entire operation must take place in darkness.”129
The task was overwhelming. But Beckwith, Boykin, and their men had no other choice. No one had much confidence that the diplomacy of the Carter administration would be able to resolve the crisis peacefully. Even given their limited understanding of radical Islam at the time, they realized that the ayatollah was a jihadist at heart and was loving every moment of his standoff with the “Great Satan.” Delta had to be ready, and they had to deliver. So much was on the line.
Soon, a concept emerged. It was code-named Operation Eagle Claw.
“As we started our planning,” Boykin explained to me, “the first thing we looked for was who in the region would support us. We had hoped that Turkey would, but Turkey chose not to. We had hoped that Pakistan would, but Pakistan made the same decision. It was only Egypt and Oman that agreed to support us in the region, so we had to launch our operation from one of those two places.
“As it turned out, we launched from Oman. Our plan was to fly our assault troops—roughly a hundred Delta, with some support from the Rangers—on Air Force C141 Starlifters from a base in Wadi Kena, Egypt, to Masirah, Oman. Then we would put everyone on C-130 Talons [enormous Army cargo planes] and secretly fly into a location about a hundred miles from Tehran, where we would offload in the desert in a remote spot known as Dasht-e-Kavir.
“Meanwhile, eight empty RH-53D Sea Stallion troop transport helicopters would launch off of the deck of the Nimitz [an aircraft carrier operating in the Indian Ocean] with nothing but their crews on them. They would link up with us at this area that we would call Desert One. We would refuel the helicopters. All of the troops from Delta would then board the helicopters and fly into a second location, which we called Desert Two, where we would hunker down and get some rest.”
The next night, Boykin explained, three Delta teams—designated Red, White, and Blue—aided by some Farsi-speaking CIA agents, would board large trucks (disguised as though they were carrying fruits, vegetables, and canned goods to market) obtained and driven by Iranians who had been recruited by the CIA. The trucks would be driven into Tehran and right up to the embassy under the cover of darkness. Around midnight, Blue Team—commanded by Boykin—would bolt from one of the trucks and, using .45 caliber grease guns fitted with silencers, take out the guards at two posts along Roosevelt Avenue. Blue Team would then secure the perimeter as Red and White teams scaled the compound walls, quietly dropped onto the other side, and stormed the embassy, taking out all the hostiles they encountered.
Red Team was to assault a warehouse on the embassy grounds known as “Mushroom Inn,” where some of the hostages were believed to be. White Team, meanwhile, would blast their way into the chancery, where the majority of the hostages were holed up.
Once the operation was successfully under way, the plan was for Boykin’s Blue Team to race across the street to storm and hold a soccer stadium. They would position snipers on rooftops where they could see and stop any military reinforcements that might be heading to the embassy. The stadium would also serve as the site where the rescue helicopters would land, load up all the hostages and the Delta operators, and then fly out of the city with a fighter jet escort.
The choppers would then fly to an Iranian airfield in Manzariyah that would be seized during the rescue operation by a separate Ranger element. C-130 Talons would fly in, pick up all the Americans, and get them out of the country, after the Rangers and Delta operators had destroyed all of the helicopters.
On November 19 and 20, the Delta planners got some good news. The Iranians had released thirteen women and African-American hostages in a bid to win some international sympathy. They didn’t get much sympathy, but U.S. intelligence officials got a treasure trove of fresh and detailed information. Suddenly, some of Delta’s hundreds of previously unanswered logistical and operational questions were getting answered. Using details gathered from the released hostages, Delta was soon able to construct and fine-tune a precise mockup of the embassy compound at the Farm. There, they practiced their assault, made their mistakes, corrected them, and tried again, day after day, week after week.
“We presented our concept to our president,” Boykin recalled. “We were anxious to go, because frankly we needed as much darkness as possible, and obviously, as the spring and summer approached, we were running out of hours of darkness. I’m sad to say that the president waited until the very last minute until we said, ‘Beyond this point our plan will have to be revised and we’ll have to come up with a new concept or wait until fall until we start to get the proper hours of darkness again.’”
In his book Never Surrender, Boykin noted, “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.’ . . . 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 global humiliation of the nation he meant to lead. . . . 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.”130
“Eight Off the Deck”
After months of White House hand-wringing and fruitless State Department back-channel negotiations with the Iranians, Carter finally gave the “go” order in early April of 1980.
The actual operation date was set for April 24. Beckwith took his men to Egypt on the twenty-first to pre-position them for the mission and wrap up final details. On the morning of the twenty-fourth, he gathered them together for one last briefing and pep talk, then asked Boykin to lead the men in prayer.
Boykin was stunned. The colonel was as rough and tough a special forces soldier as he had ever met. Beckwith had never discussed faith or religion in his presence, much less prayed. Most of the time he was screaming at his men, cursing them, and telling them he was going to fire them if they didn’t improve, not encouraging them to look to God. Nevertheless, the task before them was almost impossible, and even Beckwith seemed to recognize their need for divine intervention. Boykin was honored and humbled by the moment.
“You know, guys, about three thousand years ago, right in this very desert where we’re standing, God led the Israelites out of bondage,” Boykin told his band of brothers. “They traveled across this same desert to a new freedom. And I believe God has called us to lead fifty-three Americans out of bondage and back to freedom.”
With that, he bowed his head, closed his eyes, and led the men in a prayer.
“Almighty God,” he began, “we’ve placed ourselves in Your hands. And we ask You to lead us and guide us so that we might liberate our fellow Americans. We ask for Your hand of mercy to be upon us. We ask for wisdom and strength and courage. We ask that You keep us safe, and keep safe the people we’re going after. Bring us all home to our families. And I pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.” Together, the men sang “God Bless America.” Then they grabbed their gear, boarded the transport planes, and headed for Iran.
The flight was long, and it was quiet but for the radio transmission from the Nimitz—“Eight off the deck”—meaning the eight helos had been successfully launched and were en route to the rendezvous point.
Ev
entually, the transport planes filled with American special forces and a whole lot of extra fuel penetrated Iranian airspace undetected using gaps in Iran’s coastal radar system—gaps that the American contractors who had designed the system for the shah had purposely created for unforeseen future contingencies. This was certainly one of those unforeseen contingencies. But it was about the last good thing that happened on this mission.
On final approach to the makeshift landing strip at Desert One, Boykin saw a massive explosion erupt in the distance. What in the world could that be? he and his men wondered. They were in the middle of nowhere, hours from civilization.
Only moments later, they learned that a group of smugglers had been driving a fuel tanker, probably filled with stolen gasoline, through the desert. The smugglers had stumbled upon a detachment of U.S. Army Rangers who were providing perimeter security for the rest of the incoming Talons. When the Rangers tried to stop the fuel truck, the smugglers—obviously not expecting to find anyone in their path—had panicked and tried to escape. The Rangers dared not take the risk that the smugglers might alert others to their presence, so they had fired a light antitank weapon at the tanker, blasting it to smithereens. Now, however, the entire team worried the explosion itself might give them away. That, it turned out, was the least of their problems.
Soon afterward a passenger bus filled mostly with women drove by. The bus passengers were just as startled as the smugglers had been to find foreign troops on Iranian soil, along with burning wreckage. The Rangers fired warning shots at the bus and forced it to stop. Now they had nearly fifty temporary prisoners to deal with. And the hits just kept coming.
The inbound helicopters now reported they were experiencing a haboob, an intense sandstorm common to the Iranian wastelands but rarely experienced by American chopper pilots. “That created a delay,” said Boykin, “and I think the helicopters were somewhere around an hour and a half late. Again, we were running out of the hours of darkness that we needed. We had very little margin to work with.”
And when Boykin and his colleagues finally heard the helos approaching, they saw only six, not the eight that had been launched; two had encountered mechanical difficulties and turned back.
Disaster
This was a grave development.
When the helos landed, however, there was more devastating news. One of the six remaining helicopters now had hydraulic problems. They were down to five.
During their planning meetings back at the Pentagon, Beckwith and his logisticians had determined that they absolutely, positively needed a minimum of six helicopters to complete the mission and get all the hostages, soldiers, advance teams, and equipment out of Tehran. Fewer than six would require Beckwith to abort the whole mission.
Now they were deep inside enemy territory with a green light from their commander in chief to rescue fifty-three American souls, but they were suddenly in danger of having to head home empty-handed.
Sure enough, Beckwith came over to Boykin and his team a few moments later. “We’re going to have to scrub the mission,” he said.
Boykin couldn’t believe it. “His words hit me like a punch in the gut. My mind flashed to the hostages. We’d all studied their faces for months. We’d memorized every detail. We knew their stories. And I also knew that if we didn’t go forward to get them now, we’d never go at all.”
He was prepared to argue, but it became readily apparent that Beckwith would not budge. He could not, after all, risk the lives of his entire team. They had made the six-helo minimum for a reason—back at home, without emotion, without adrenaline—and Beckwith was sticking with it. He ordered his men to start reloading the C-130s with all of their equipment.
“People have questioned the wisdom of not going forward with the five that we had,” Boykin told me. “And here’s the fact: we needed every single man that we had to assault a twenty-seven-acre compound, plus assault the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is where three of the hostages were being held. But more importantly, we needed all of the lift capacity we could get to bring out the hostages. If we went forward with a reduced force and succeeded in retaking our hostages, we were going to be in a dilemma because the helicopters simply wouldn’t lift everybody out. So we were going to exchange one set of hostages for another, and that was not a good option either.”
Boykin and his men moved quickly. Light would be dawning soon, and they did not want to be found in Iran, exposed in the open desert, when the sun came up. But just then, disaster struck. Boykin watched as one of the helicopters that had just been refueled lifted off the ground and prepared to reposition itself away from the transport planes. But as a blinding amount of dust and sand was stirred up by the rotors, the helo’s pilot experienced vertigo. The pilot lost command of where he was and and began setting down directly on top of one of the C-130s.
A moment later, another massive fireball lit up the predawn sky as the chopper and transport plane collided. Boykin felt a wave of searing heat wash over him, and then he realized dozens of his colleagues were trapped inside the burning plane. Worse, the plane was filled with thousand of pounds of additional fuel, which would erupt any second. Boykin, choking on sand and smoke, shouted out a desperate prayer to save his men. “Father, please don’t let these men die!” he pleaded. “We put ourselves in Your hands, and now they’re all going to die unless You perform a miracle!”
Almost before he could say “Amen,” Boykin watched one of the Talon’s emergency doors, already engulfed in flames, burst open and his colleagues start leaping out and running from the plane as fast as they possibly could. “As the men approached me,” he recalled, “I shouted for them to get behind the C-130 that was behind me, to protect themselves from the heat and the new blast that was just moments away.” Then sure enough, the Talon exploded, along with the ammunition and various rockets and shoulder-mounted missiles that were packed inside.
Impact
When it was all over, eight U.S. servicemen were dead. Seven American helicopters had been lost, along with a C-130. The hostages were still in the hands of the Radicals. And the whole world was about to find out.
Beckwith radioed the devastating news back to the National Military Command Center, the high-tech, nuclear-bomb-proof war room deep underneath the Pentagon. David Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, then called the president, who was stricken, as was his senior staff. Hamilton Jordan, the White House chief of staff, promptly excused himself, stepped into the president’s private bathroom, and threw up.131
At 7:00 eastern time, the president broke the news to the nation in a live, televised address from the Oval Office.
The nation was stunned.
In the months to come, right or wrong, Carter would get the blame both for the hostage crisis and for his administration’s failure to get the hostages out. And then voters would drive him out of office, replacing him with Ronald Reagan, the anti-Communist former actor and former California governor who promised to rebuild the American military, stare down her enemies, and restore her pride.
Throughout the presidential campaign, Carter and his advisors tried to scare the electorate into thinking Reagan was a radical, right-wing warmonger. The strategy did not work in the States. Reagan won in a landslide.
But Carter’s rhetoric did seem to work in Tehran. All fifty-three American hostages were released on January 20, 1981, just hours after Reagan took the oath of office.
But the political implications of the tragedy at Desert One were not on Boykin’s mind at the time. What bothered him most was the evil he saw being unleashed through the Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers, an evil neither he nor most Americans had ever experienced before.
“What is really important,” Boykin insisted to me, the pain of those memories still evident on his face and in his voice, “is to realize that the Iranians recovered the bodies of eight of our people that were killed there and desecrated them, mutilated them. The U.S. media was unwilling to show what they were doing. We saw it bec
ause we saw it on international networks. But that was something that we had never experienced. That was something that we couldn’t understand—the inhumanity of it. What drives people to take such pleasure in mutilating and desecrating the bodies of fallen warriors?”132
Chapter Six
“We Must Export Our Revolution”
Iran, Hezbollah, and the tragedy in Lebanon
At 6:25 local time on the morning of October 23, 1983, agents of the ayatollah used a suicide bomber to plow a truck filled with explosives into the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut, Lebanon.
The attack resulted in “the largest non-nuclear explosion that had ever been detonated on the face of the earth,” according to a U.S. federal court judge who found the Islamic Republic of Iran liable for perpetrating the crime.133 Locked doors on a building nearly three hundred feet away were ripped off their hinges. All the trees in the surrounding area were stripped completely bare of their leaves. The windows in the control tower at Beirut’s international airport were blown out. And the four-story cement and steel Marine facility collapsed into fifteen feet of rubble, ash, and smoke.
When my wife and I got married in the summer of 1990 and settled in the Washington, D.C., area, we soon met Charlie and Lynn Derbyshire, a couple at church who had experienced the evil of the Iranian Revolution firsthand. Lynn lost her oldest brother—Marine Captain Vincent Smith—in the Beirut bombing. Charlie was still helping her heal from the loss when we met. But the horrors of 9/11 and the subsequent deaths of American and Israeli forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon in the years that followed ripped open those wounds afresh. Through Lynn and Charlie, my wife and I have gotten a personal and painful glimpse at the lasting emotional scars left by the jihadists.
When I set out to write this book, I wrestled with whether or not to even ask Lynn if I could share her story. In the end, however, I did ask. I felt it was important for others to understand the human impact of the Revolution and to realize that for the victims of terrorism, the trauma is in many ways as real today as it was so long ago.
Inside the Revolution Page 10