‘My father hosted a party for me. Family and friends were all there to celebrate the success of my mission. My father was in a great mood. I know what he was thinking, a Holocaust survivor. His son at the time was a lieutenant colonel in the Israel Air Force and had just flown thousands of miles in order to save Jews. It probably added ten years to his life. After my father’s death, I found his letters from Bergen-Belsen that he sent to Kibbutz Mishmar Haemek. The letters describe his experiences during the Holocaust, what happened to his family, etc. One of his letters said, My only comfort is Joshua. He gives me reason to continue.4
Chapter 6 Endnotes
1 The Israeli ground task force numbered approximately 100 personnel. The small ground command and control element comprised the operation and overall ground commander, Brigadier General Shomron, the air force representative Colonel Ami Ayalon and the communications and support personnel. The 29-man assault element was led by Yonatan Netanyahu, this force was composed entirely of commandos from Sayeret Matkal and was given the primary task of assaulting the old terminal and rescuing the hostages. The Paratroopers force - the securing element - led by Colonel Matan Vilnai was tasked with securing the airport, clearing and securing the runways, protection and fuelling of the Israeli aircraft in Entebbe. The Golani force led by Colonel Uri Sagi was tasked with securing the C-130 for the hostages’ evacuation, getting it as close as possible to the terminal and boarding the hostages. They were also general reserves. The Sayeret Matkal force led by Major Shaul Mofaz was tasked with clearing the military airstrip, destroying the squadron of MiGs on the ground to prevent any possible interceptions by the Ugandan Air Force and holding off hostile ground forces from the city of Entebbe.
2 According to senior unit members, the first problem was that Netanyahu missed much of the planning stage. He only returned from a training exercise in the Sinai on Thursday, two days before the mission began.
3 Kenyan Minister of Agriculture Bruce MacKenzie persuaded Kenyan President Kenyatta to permit Israeli Mossad agents to gather information before the hostage rescue operation in Uganda and to allow Israeli Air Force aircraft to land and refuel at a Nairobi airport after the rescue. In retaliation, Ugandan President Idi Amin ordered Ugandan agents to assassinate MacKenzie, who was killed on 24 May 1978, when a time bomb attached to his plane exploded as it flew above Ngong Hills, Kenya in a flight from Entebbe.
4 Joshua Shani stayed in the IAF for a while - more than 30 years, in fact. He accumulated 13,000 flight hours, including nearly 7,000 in C-130s. Over the years, he commanded three squadrons and a mixed base of four squadrons and eight ground units. From 1985 to 1988 he was the Air Force attaché in the Embassy of Israel in Washington, DC. He retired from active duty in 1989 as a Brigadier General. For ten years after that he was in the reserves. He became the vice president of Israel operations for Lockheed Martin. ‘And to think, as a new recruit in the IDF, I was not interested in being in the Air Force - and airplanes became my life. You never know how things will turn out.’
Chapter Seven
Operation ‘Eagle Claw’
DC, 11 April 1980, Washington Noon.
The meeting began with Jimmy Carter’s announcement: ‘Gentlemen, I want you to know that I am seriously considering an attempt to rescue the hostages.’
Hamilton Jordan, the White House chief of staff, knew immediately that the president had made a decision. Planning and practice for a rescue mission had been going on in secret for five months, but it had always been regarded as the last resort and ever since the 4 November embassy takeover, the White House had made every effort to avoid it. As the president launched into a list of detailed questions about how it was to be done, his aides knew he had mentally crossed a line.
Carter had met the takeover in Iran with tremendous restraint, equating the national interest with the well-being of the fifty-three hostages and his measured response had elicited a great deal of admiration, both at home and abroad. His approval ratings had doubled in the first month of the crisis. But in the following months, restraint had begun to smell like weakness and indecision. Three times in the past five months, carefully negotiated secret settlements had been ditched by the inscrutable Iranian mullahs and the administration had been made to look more foolish each time. Approval ratings had nose-dived and even stalwart friends of the administration were demanding action.
Mark Bowden The Atlantic May 2006. Iran had been a US ally until the Shah was ousted from power by the Revolutionary Guard. Student militants stormed the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979 taking the Marine guards and embassy staff as hostages. After releasing some of the hostages, 53 remained. It is not usually militarily expedient for a commander in the field to have all his eggs in one basket. However, all the USAF, USN and USMC forces trained in air rescue and special operations are combined into one force and are therefore an exception to this rule. Nor is it militarily expedient to mount an operation using available USAF transports, Navy helicopters and USMC tanker aircraft - despite political attempts to the contrary, often using financial savings as a justification. This was proved at huge cost during the final days of the Carter administration when Operation ‘Eagle Claw’, a joint USAF/USMC attempt to rescue 52 diplomats held captive at the US embassy in Tehran on 24 April 1980 using Hercules aircraft and US Navy RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters flown by marine pilots, ended in disaster at ‘Desert One’, Posht-i-Badam, a remote location in Iran. The operation encountered many obstacles and was eventually aborted. Its failure and the humiliating public debacle that ensued damaged US prestige worldwide.
‘Colonel Charlie Beckwith, the creator of Delta Force, the Army’s new, top-secret counterterrorism unit, was summoned to the White House. He and President Jimmy Carter, both proud Georgians, swapped stories about their neighbouring home counties. Beckwith, a brave and commanding soldier, was a big, gruff man whose energy filled a room and he had flaws as outsized as his virtues. He was a difficult man, proud, tough and at times arrogant and capricious; these traits were aggravated when he drank, which was often. But at the White House he was on his best behaviour, impressing the president with his aura of blunt certainty as he presented the proposed mission in ever greater detail.
‘The colonel was an accomplished salesman. He had spent a career selling the idea of his elite unit and now that it existed, he was eager to show what miracles it could perform. His enthusiasm was infectious. He and his men had been rehearsing the mission for so long that they could have done it in their sleep and they were going to make history - not just cut this particular Gordian knot but write their names in the annals of military glory. In a sense, Beckwith’s long crusade to create Delta Force had been a rebellion against the mechanization and bureaucratization of modern warfare. He held to an old and visceral conviction: that war was the business of brave men. He loved soldiers and soldiering and his vision was of a company of men like himself: impatient with rank, rules and politics, focused entirely on mission. He had created such a force, choosing the best of the best and training them to perfection. They were not just good, they were magnificent. And now he would lead them into battle.
‘Technically, Carter had not yet given the goahead, but when Beckwith left the White House, he was certain he had sold the mission. He flew to Delta’s stockade at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and immediately assembled his top men. ‘You can’t tell the people; you can’t tell anybody,’ he said. ‘Don’t talk about this to anyone. But the president has approved the mission and we’re going to go on April 24.’
The operation was designed as a complex twonight mission. On the first night three EC-130Es (Call signs: ‘Republic 4 to 6’) would carry the Delta Force and other protection elements and three MC-130E Combat Talons (‘Dragon 1 to 3’) would carry the logistical supplies. They would enter Iran in a remote coastal area sixty miles west of Chabahar and fly to ‘Desert One’ via the Dashte Lut or Great Salt Desert, a 500-mile-long and 200-mile-wide expanse of sand and salt in the high plateau region of north central
Iran. It is both desolate and unpopulated. Large tracts of it are broad, flat and hard packed. Its western edge is roughly a hundred miles southeast of Tehran. ‘Desert One’ would be secured and established with a protection force and approximately 6,000 gallons of jet fuel would be brought to the area in collapsible fuel bladders carried in each ‘fuel bird’. Next, eight USN RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters (‘Bluebeard 1 to 8’) of HM-16 with USMC crews would arrive from the USS Nimitz under way in the Arabian Sea.1 Marine pilots, who ended up flying almost all of the helicopters, had little experience in long distance flying over land with night vision goggles. They were not special operations personnel and had no experience with sand storm conditions but the helicopters would refuel and fly the Delta Force soldiers 260 miles further to ‘Desert Two’, 52 miles short of Tehran. The second night would involve the rescue operation. AC-130 gunships would be deployed over Tehran to provide any necessary supporting fire.
Logan Fitch, a tall Texan and one of Delta’s squadron leaders recalled that: ‘When we briefed General David Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff it was just dusk. I can picture him today wearing a brown suede bomber jacket, a Madras shirt and blue trousers. And he put his arm around me and said, ‘Logan, looks like y’all got at least the rudiments here. Now we have to get the other services involved. Think about that. What that means is, oh, gosh, there might be some glory here and since I’m in charge of all the military I’ve got to make sure that the Air Force gets its part, the Marines, Navy, blah, blah. Well, the bottom line was that we had people flying those helicopters who really didn’t want to be there. Not that they were cowards or anything. I often use the analogy that, if you take a Greyhound bus driver who’s been driving a bus for forty years and you put him behind the wheel of an Indy 500 race car, he’d kill himself and a bunch of other people, probably. So I think that the people that piloted the helicopters were not the right people; Not bad people, not cowardly people, just not the right people.’2
‘Just after dark, the Hercules moved in over the coast of Iran at 250 feet, well below Iranian radar and began a gradual ascent to 5,000 feet. It was still flying dangerously low even at that altitude, because the land rose up abruptly in row after row of jagged ridges - the Zagros Mountains, which looked jet black in the grey-green tints of the pilots’ night-vision goggles. Its terrain-hugging radar was so sensitive that even though the plane was safely above the peaks, the highest ridges triggered the loud, disconcerting horn of its warning system. The co-pilot kept one finger over the override button, poised to silence it.
‘The decision had been made to fly into Iran on fixed-wing transports rather than helicopters and since then Beckwith had added still more men to ‘Eagle Claw,’ as the rescue mission was now codenamed. Most notable among them were a group of soldiers from the 75th Ranger Regiment, out of Fort Benning, Georgia, who would block off both ends of the dirt road that angled through Desert One and man Redeye missile launchers to protect the force on the first night in the event it was discovered and attacked from the air. A separate thirteen-man Army Special Forces team would assault the foreign ministry to free the three diplomats being held there. Also on Beckwith’s lead plane was John Carney, an Air Force major from the team that had slipped into Iran weeks earlier to scout the desert landing strip and bury infrared lights to mark a runway. He would command a small Air Force combat-control team that would orchestrate the complex manoeuvres at the impromptu airfield.
‘Some of these men sat on and around the Jeep. The mood was relaxed. If there was one trait these men shared, it was professional calm. They had taken off at dusk from the tiny island of Masirah near Oman. An hour behind them would come five more C-130s - one of them carrying most of the remainder of Beckwith’s assault force, which now numbered 132 men; three serving as ‘bladder planes’ and a back-up fuel plane carrying the last Deltas and sophisticated telecommunicationsmonitoring equipment.
‘Delta was made up of men who would have felt crushed to be excluded from this mission. They were ambitious for glory. They had volunteered to serve with Beckwith and had undergone the trials of a gruelling selection process precisely to serve in improbable exploits like this... They were a motley, deliberately unmilitary-looking bunch of young men. In fact, they looked a lot like the students who had seized the embassy. Most were just a few years older than the hostage-takers. They had long hair and had grown moustaches and beards, or at least gone unshaven. Many of those with fair hair had dyed it dark brown or black, figuring that might nudge the odds at least slightly in their favour if they were forced to fight their way out of Iran. The loose-fitting, many-pocketed field jackets they wore, also dyed black were just like the ones favoured by young men in Iran. Under the Geneva Conventions, soldiers (as opposed to spies) must enter combat in uniform, so for the occasion the men all wore matching black knit caps and on their jacket sleeves had American flags that could be covered by small black Velcro patches... Beckwith had insisted on a Ranger tradition: each man carried clips and a length of rope wrapped around his waist, in case the need arose to rappel. With his white stubble, dangling cigarette or cigar and wild eyes under thick dark eyebrows, Beckwith himself looked like a dangerous vagrant. Before leaving Masirah, the men had joked about which actors would portray them in the movie version of the raid and they decided that the hillbilly actor Slim Pickens, who in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove had ridden a nuclear weapon down into doomsday waving his cowboy hat and hallooing, would be the perfect choice for the colonel.
Delta Force ‘B’ Squadron shortly before Operation ‘Eagle Claw’. Those ringed, including, far left, Major Richard L. Bakke, were killed during the operation when their EC-130E (62-1809) was destroyed in a collision with US Navy RH-53D 158761 Sea Stallion.
Map showing the routes taken to and from ‘Desert One’ on 24 April 1980 when Operation ‘Eagle Claw’, a joint USAF/ USMC attempt to rescue 52 diplomats held captive at the US embassy in Tehran using Hercules aircraft and US Navy RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters flown by marine pilots, ended in disaster at Posht-i-Badam, a remote location in Iran.
‘On the morning of the mission, the men had assembled in a warehouse, where Major Jerry Boykin had offered a prayer. Tall and lean, with a long, dark beard, Boykin stood at a podium before a plug box where electrical wires intersected and formed a big cross on the wall. Behind him was a poster-sized sheet displaying photographs of the Americans held hostage. Boykin chose a passage from the first Book of Samuel: And David put his hand in his bag and took thence a stone and slang it and smote the Philistine in the forehead; that the stone sunk into his forehead and he fell on his face to the earth. So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone …
‘They had flown from Wadi Kena to Masirah, where they had hunkered in tents through a bright and broiling afternoon, fighting off large stinging flies and waiting impatiently for dusk. They would make a four-hour flight over the Gulf of Oman and across Iran to ‘Desert One’. The route had been calculated to exploit gaps in Iran’s coastal defences and to avoid passing over military bases and populated areas. Major Wayne Long, Delta’s intelligence officer, was at a console in the telecommunications plane with a National Security Agency linguist, who was monitoring Iranian telecommunications for any sign that the aircraft had been discovered and the mission compromised. None came.’
Not long after the lead Hercules departed Masirah, eight Sea Stallions left the Nimitz nearly sixty miles off the coast of Iran and moved out over the Gulf in order to make landfall shortly after sunset. They had been preceded by the EC-130 refuellers and the MC-130 Combat Talons carrying Delta Force, from Masirah.
‘Word of the successful helicopter launch - ’Eight off the deck’ - reached those in the lead plane as especially welcome news, because they had expected only seven. Earlier reports had indicated that the eighth was having mechanical problems. Eight widened the margin of error.
‘As the lead plane pushed on into Iran, Major Bucky Burruss, Beckwith’s
deputy, was on the second C-130, sprawled on a mattress near the front of the plane. Burruss was still somewhat startled to find himself on the actual mission; although there was still no telling if they were really going to go through with it. One thing President Carter had insisted on was the option of calling off the raid right up to the last minute: right before they were to storm the embassy walls. To make sure they could get real-time instructions from Washington, a satellite radio and relay system had been put in place at Wadi Kena.
‘As the lead plane closed in on the landing site, its pilots noted curious milky patches in the night sky. They flew through one that appeared to be just haze, not even substantial enough to interfere with the downward-looking radar. They approached a second one as they got closer to the landing site. John Carney, who had come into the cockpit to be ready to activate the landing lights he had buried on his trip weeks earlier, was asked, ‘What do you make of that stuff out there?’
‘He looked through the co-pilot’s window and answered, ‘You’re in a haboob.’
‘The men in the cockpit laughed at the word.
‘No, we’re flying through suspended dust,’ Carney explained. ‘The Iranians call it a haboob.’
‘He had learned this from the CIA pilots who had flown him in earlier. Shifting air pressure sometimes forced especially fine desert sand straight up thousands of feet, where it hung like a vertical cloud for hours. It was just a desert curiosity, nothing that could cause a problem for the planes. But Air Force Colonel James H. Kyle, whose responsibility included all airborne aspects of the mission, knew that the haboob would be trouble for a helicopter. He had noticed that the temperature inside the plane went up significantly when they passed through the first haboob. He conferred with the plane’s crew and suggested they break radio silence and call ‘Red Barn,’ the command centre at Wadi Kena, to warn the helicopter formation behind them. The chopper pilots might want to break formation or fly higher to avoid the stuff. It took the lead plane about thirty minutes to fly through this second patch, indicating that it extended about a hundred miles.
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