Delta trained in a highly unorthodox form of warfare, a violent strike hybrid of guerilla and law enforcement tactics. Though Charlie and Bucky sent FORSCOM a letter detailing Delta’s training standards so they could design appropriate tests to measure us, it seemed that letter wound up at the North Pole.
For example, in the room-clearing portion of the evaluation, exercise controllers put terrorist targets behind hostage targets, so that when Delta stormed the room, they had to move around for several seconds in order to find and fire on the hostile targets. In a real-life hostage scenario, targets wouldn’t stand still, but would move to engage us. The way it was set up, the hostages were dead meat before the “rescue” began.
I knew Mountel and Blue Light had been lobbying FORSCOM hard to keep their mission. Between the hostage-rescue demo and later, an equally impossible scenario designed to test our snipers, I began to wonder if the evaluators wanted us to fail.
Later in the day, after a Delta NCO sent the FORSCOM martial-arts evaluator to the hospital with a concussion, a key part came in our test: a double-hostage scenario. South American terrorists had seized both a building and an airliner. Delta assault teams were tasked to take down both—and rescue the hostages—at the same time.
As I mentioned, we’d been training on real commercial airliners, the kind actually in use in modern times. But FORSCOM was doing this evaluation on the cheap. They raided a bone yard somewhere and dragged in a Lockheed Super Constellation, a WWII vintage aircraft on which the last recorded passenger flight had occurred when Lyndon Johnson was president. On the day they gave us the scenario, they gave us the Super Constellation. I was to lead F-1, the element that would take down the aircraft. I had a great team, including Popeye; Cheney, a big-hearted bear of a man; Joplin, a Special Forces medic who earned a Silver Star during the Son Tay Raid; and Mike Kalua, a huge, delightful Samoan, who spoke rapid-fire, island-accented English and always called me “Boss.”
When they gave us the Connie, we knew we’d have her only for a few hours. So we had to work fast, learning the location of all the doors, hatches, locks, and how they worked, as well as the interior layout of the aircraft and every possible rat hole that might conceal a terrorist. Ish and Delta’s intel staff inundated the evaluators with questions: How much fuel is aboard? How much baggage? Who are the passengers? What does the flight crew look like? And on and on. The answers were mostly “We don’t know” and “We’ll get back to you.” That made planning difficult, but also highlighted the nitty-gritty detail of our training. The evaluators were impressed.
While my team planned the aircraft assault, Pete and a separate element laid out a plan to take down the building.
“L-1 window open.” That meant the first window on the left side of the plane.
“T-1 in the cockpit.” Every terrorist had a number.
“H visible at L-1.” “H” was the code for hostage.
As night fell, we split into assault elements and headed toward our separate targets. Each operator wore black coveralls, black gloves, and an assault vest full of spare ammo magazines, flex cuffs, a first-aid kit, and various signaling devices. Black balaclavas covered our heads, revealing only our eyes. Underneath the balaclavas, each of us wore a MX-360 earpiece and push-to-talk mike hooked onto our vests. All of us carried .45s and six magazines, but ten men also carried grease guns.
In addition, some operators carried specialty items. Jack carried his medical gear. Popeye carried the Chem-Lights he’d use to string a glowing walkway along which assaulters would lead the hostages from the aircraft to Jack’s treatment area. Mike Kalua had a PRC-77 FM radio strapped to his back; that linked us with Beckwith and Pete.
During our study of the target, we had learned that, in addition to its main door, the Super Constellation had two emergency hatches over the wings. So we carried three ladders with us, one for each entrance, each lightly padded so that they could be laid silently against the bird in preparation for the assault.
Silence was a critical part of our training. Operators not only learned to recon, breach, climb, rappel, rig explosives, and take out sentries by approaching them from behind and snapping their necks, we learned to do it without making a sound. Absolute stealth increased the chances of success in real hostage rescue. But it was also critical during an exercise, because the way you fail an exercise is to be discovered and have the terrorist/actors start mock-murdering hostages.
Now, my team of twenty-five men crept toward the airfield under cover of darkness. The low night sounds of the Carolina woods were enough to drown any hint of our approach. Observers later said we blended into the landscape like shifting shadows, indiscernible. Moving slowly because of the ladders, we finally reached a stand of high grass near the edge of the tarmac about 150 yards off the Connie’s tail. Our assault plan called for us to address the plane from the rear, where it had no windows. From our distance, we couldn’t see any movement aboard, and heard only the high hum of the auxiliary power unit that pumped electricity to the aircraft. As fireflies sparked in the warm, swampy air, we hunkered down in the grass for an hour, watching.
Finally, Beckwith issued the execute code word: jasmine.
F-1 swept across the tarmac like a silent black tide. I was near the rear of the formation, just ahead of Mike and his radio. The belly of the plane stood about five feet off the ramp. Bending slightly to fit, we edged underneath, dropping lower as the tail sloped toward the concrete. Suddenly, behind me, a loud scrape echoed off the Connie’s metal skin. It was the PRC-77 antenna sticking up off Mike’s back. Instantly, I spun around, wrapped the big Samoan in my right arm, and took him to the ground. F-1 froze. Seconds passed as I lay nose to nose with Mike. Even though his balaclava covered all but his eyes, I could see he had I’m sorry, Boss! written all over his face. I felt bad for him.
We listened for the telltale pop-pop of blank rounds, the sign that hostages were dying. But there was only quiet, overlaid with the noise of the auxiliary power unit. At this distance, its steady hum had been enough to mask our error. When our snipers reported no change in activity inside the plane, the op was still a go.
Lightning-quick, an assault team of a dozen operators laid ladders below the main door and against the wings. Popeye moved to the nose of the aircraft and waited underneath. Once they were in position, I made a quick radio check with Charlie to make sure Pete’s team was in position for the building assault.
Then I keyed my mike, and the order filtered into each man’s ear: “Execute.”
The assaulters flowed up the ladders and breached the doors.
Five seconds passed.
Above us, pistol reports rang out. Muffled voices from the plane’s interior. “Remain calm! We’re here to get you out! Everybody place your hands on your head.”
Since the hostage takers were supposed to be Latin American, Dave Cheney repeated the last command in Spanish. “Manos en las cabezas!”
Ten seconds gone.
Jack sprinted away, off the Connie’s port side, to set up his treatment area. Popeye moved out from under the aircraft’s nose and began laying his Chem-Light path. More shots.
The snipers kept their scopes trained on the breached hatches.
“All secure,” Dave reported. “Ready to evacuate.”
Time elapsed: fifteen seconds.
Pete’s team was just as effective. The after-action report showed that the speed and violence of their assault on the building stunned the terrorist/actors, immobilizing them like headlight-speared rabbits on a country road.
After the exercise, we immediately trucked back to the isolation site at Bragg. Tired, dirty, and still in our assault gear, Delta gathered in the conference room. The FORSCOM evaluators were there: General Volney Warner, General Guy S. “Sandy” Meloy, a couple of colonels. The room was packed. By then, Delta’s tactical teams had been twenty-four hours with no sleep and forty-eight with little. It was clear we’d executed the dual takedown scenario with stunning efficiency. But
how would the evaluators balance that with our earlier performance in the individual skills tests?
General Warner was the on-scene observer with F-1. “That was the most professional cross-country movement I have ever seen,” he said of our approach to the Connie. “Never heard a person say a word.”
When Meloy spoke up, he was less effusive, but still gave us pretty decent marks overall.
But that wasn’t the way Charlie saw it. He was still pissed off about the individual tests, and still stinging from the clear indications that no one had bothered to read his letter detailing Delta’s training. Also, he was dead certain this entire early eval was a set-up, designed to dismantle Delta and clear the way for Mountel and Blue Light.
Colonel Beckwith stood and faced the generals. And when he opened his mouth, he said, “I never knew there were so [expletive] many counterterrorism experts in the Army.”
Inwardly, I rolled my eyes. There’s going to be one hell of a fight before we get out of here tonight.
4
CHARLIE HAD HIS SAY and so did a couple of the generals. But in the end, Delta’s performance on the evaluation proved that Blue Light was redundant. Mountel’s rival force was disbanded.
Delta went back into training, now focused on upgrading equipment and improving strategies. Pete and I devised more complex training scenarios, and Charlie and Bucky encouraged all of us to innovate. Staff Sergeant Terry Hall improved the efficiency of the grease guns, developing a quick-operating thumb safety. Pat Hurley, the guy who slept with his boney butt in my back during the Delta selection course, invented battery-operated pop-up targets we could take to remote sites for training. Delta became the counterterrorism equivalent of a brain trust as all the guys worked on new concepts and techniques.
We also began a kind of foreign exchange program with the other elite counterterrorist units: West Germany’s GSG-9, France’s GIGN, and the predecessor to us all, the British SAS. Those units also sent observers when, on November 1, 1979, our final evaluation began. This was the real deal, finally, with representatives from CIA, FBI, the Secret Service, Treasury, and Justice in attendance. The State Department sent Ambassador Anthony Quainton. The three-day test was rigorous. In addition to the individual skills tests, we had to plan and perform another dual takedown scenario, this time on a building and a Boeing 727. Apparently, we were moving up in the world.
Delta wowed the evaluators in every phase. Oohs and aahs all around. We finally wrapped up at around 2 a.m. on November 4. A lot of folks piled into vehicles and drove into Hinesville to grab some Waffle House breakfast. But I hadn’t slept in more than forty-eight hours. Somehow, I managed to drape my six-one frame across a little loveseat in an office somewhere and drop into the deathlike sleep of total exhaustion.
“Jerry . . .”
Am I dreaming?
“Jerry, wake up.” Someone was shaking my shoulder, trying to rouse me out of my deep stupor.
I cracked my eyes and could see daylight.
“Hey, get your stuff packed,” Bucky Burruss said. “We’re going back to Bragg. The American Embassy in Tehran has just been seized.”
Welcome To World War III
Iran Hostage Crisis 1979–1980
1
IN 1978 IRAN, REVOLUTION WAS IN THE AIR. For thirty years, the Americans and the Soviets had been locked in nuclear standoff, playing out a game of trench-coat chess, each side working to block the other from gaining control of the Islamic third world and its oil resources. America allied itself with mainly Sunni Islamic powers who held to the concept of civil government—their version of separation of church and state. But beneath the surface, the anger of Shia fundamentalists simmered, then boiled up into rage. To them, America was a greedy and power-mad infidel, not an ally but the “Great Satan” that must be driven from Islamic lands. In place of Iran’s whorish foreign alliances, the Shias envisioned a glorious government under Sharia—or Koranic—law, led by fundamentalist clerics, an order author Mark Bowden would later call “totalitarianism rooted in divine revelation.” In 1978, led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, this Islamist revolution swept aside the government of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, forcing him into exile.
As it had in the U.S. for the previous ten years, the intoxicating scent of revolution seized university campuses in the Iranian capital, and many students embraced the spiritual and political fervor. With the shah gone, the dream of Islamist utopia was within reach, they felt. But in the heart of Tehran sat a cancer: the American embassy. Certain the diplomats there were actually counterrevolutionaries working to overthrow the new regime, a small inner circle of Islamist students hatched a plan. They would overrun the embassy, seize it, and occupy it for three days.
During that time they would broadcast a series of communiqués denouncing the United States. Khomeini, in a speech he gave a few days after the students discussed their plan, urged “all grade-school, university, and theological students to increase their attacks against America.” The student revolutionaries rejoiced. The Ayatollah had surely heard of their plan and was with them!
It wasn’t true. Khomeini knew nothing of them.
On November 4, 1979, hundreds of Iranian students, led by a small hardcore group, poured over the embassy walls, breached the buildings, and took sixty-six Americans hostage. Ordered to stand down by their diplomatic superiors, Marine Corps embassy guards never fired a shot.
Bowden’s 2006 account of the embassy seizure, Guests of the Ayatollah, revealed that though this brief occupation was supposed to be peaceful, at least one of the students, Mohammed Hashemi, “prepared himself to die.” Following Islamic instruction for jihadi martyrs, Hashemi performed the same ritual washing and prayers that nineteen hijackers would perform two decades later, on September 11, 2001, before murdering nearly three thousand Americans on U.S. soil. By the time Delta got news of the embassy takeover, reports had begun trickling in that the students were armed. Some hostages had been threatened at gunpoint and others severely beaten.
And so, on November 4, 1979, literally within hours of Army and intel evaluators certifying Delta ready for action, we loaded up in C-130s and flew from Georgia back to Bragg to launch our first mission.
Logan had been planning to take his squadron to Colorado for “winter warfare training” after the final eval. It was actually a ski trip to celebrate Delta’s official inauguration. Bucky recalled them immediately. Most of Delta redeployed to the Farm, a secure CIA isolation site. I didn’t go with them. Instead I went to Washington, D.C., joining Charlie and a Delta colonel named Chuck Whittle to meet with Pentagon brass and begin planning a rescue operation. That was how quickly it happened. Though the hostages’ captivity stretched into weeks, then months, and Americans clamored for their government to storm in and get them back, the rescue planning actually began within days of the attack.
On November 8, I arrived for the first time on the Pentagon’s innermost “E Ring,” just past the offices of the Joint Chiefs. I was a little in awe just being there and felt a sense of history as I passed the portraits of past JCS chairmen, including General Omar Nelson Bradley, an officer who had such compassion for his men during World War II they called him “the soldiers’ general.” I admired that.
Normal wooden doors punctuated the walls of Corridor 8 until the end. There stood a steel door secured with a spin-dial cipher lock. I pressed a button and an Air Force sergeant opened the door then escorted me into another smaller interior hallway with a second steel door. Behind that door was Room 2C840.
I half expected to step into a sleek secret-agent kind of space. Instead, I found a tiny, cramped room with exposed pipes running along the ceiling, mismatched government-issue furniture, and filing cabinets crammed into every possible space. On the wall, a row of white clocks announced the time in strategic locations around the world. The center of the room held a warren of desks and a small conference table. A secure telephone sat in the corner. The stale cigarette smell of a thousand planning
sessions hung in the air.
I had just taken a seat at the conference table when the service chiefs began streaming into the room, including Joint Chiefs chairman General David Jones and Harold Brown, the Secretary of Defense.
With everyone seated, Secretary Brown spoke first. “What do we know? What kind of intel do we have?”
The answer was, very little. But CIA was working the problem. The U.S. had three CIA agents stationed inside the American embassy in Tehran. But since all three were now hostages, very little intel was coming out of Iran. We did not know, for example, that the students who seized the embassy originally meant to stage only a three-day sit-in. Nor did we know one of the students may have been Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who in 2005 would be elected president of Iran. But some embassy officials, off-site at the time of the takeover, spoke with embassy employees by phone before they were overrun and communications cut off. From that, we did know of the violence against the Americans.
Brown then asked who, exactly, the hostage takers were and what it was they wanted.
“Iranian students of some kind, sir,” an intel officer said. “Loyal to Khomeini. Their demands are unclear at this point.”
Brown scowled, unsatisfied with the vague answer.
“Has the Iranian government made any public statements?” Chairman Jones said.
“Nothing of substance,” the same intel officer answered.
Then Jones asked the money question: “What do we have in terms of capabilities?”
“We’ve put Delta in isolation at the Farm and they’re starting to do the tactical planning,” a Special Ops colonel said. “We’re looking at going in on Air Force helos. Spec Ops has CH-53s, so we’re looking at those and Army Chinooks to see if they can play a role.”
Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent Page 10