by Orr Kelly
“I said, ‘Shit, it seems to me like practicing for a broken leg. It either picks me up or it doesn’t. I don’t want to practice it, that’s for goddamn sure.’ I’ve seen dummies go up in the air and come right back down again.
“I don’t know to this day if I would have gotten in that thing. I’d probably have run my little motorcycle until it ran out of gas.”
As it turned out, there was no reason for Carney to be plucked from the desert. When his hour-long survey was done, he rode back to the plane and awakened the pilots, and they flew away.
Carney’s one-man survey of the potential landing site confirmed that it could be used as a refueling point for the helicopters that would carry Beckwith’s Delta Force into downtown Teheran.
More important, the decision to send Carney into Iran was a crucial factor in moving the rescue operation—under the code name of Operation Rice Bowl—from talk and paperwork to action.
“You need the help of a lot of other agencies, and there wasn’t a lot of help being given to General Vaught,” Carney says. “Another agency was given the task of getting me in and out of there. That was General Vaught’s way of getting everybody serious, getting them involved.
“When the president okayed the reconnaissance mission, then everybody had to get involved. There was no time to sit back and debate it. It was kind of ingenious on General Vaught’s part.”
Planning for the rescue operation had begun some five months earlier, immediately after the Americans had been taken hostage.
It did not take a military genius to realize that this was very close to a mission impossible. A sizable commando force would have to be inserted right into downtown Teheran, a city where virulently anti-American mobs roamed freely, deep inside Iran. They would have to fight their way into the embassy building where the hostages were being held, and search it carefully to make sure all the hostages were found. And then some way would have to be found to get the rescuers and the rescued safely out of a city and a country that were by now thoroughly aroused.
Lee Hess, then a major on the air staff at the Pentagon and now a retired colonel, recalls searching for the closest friendly air base. They found a field in a remote section of southern Turkey, near the Iran border, that was not being used by the Turks. It would be a perfect staging area for the rescue effort—or at least as close to perfect as was possible in these circumstances. But would the Turks permit the use of their territory for a raid on another Muslim nation? Probably not. Someone suggested that the United States, which routinely conducted military operations from Turkish bases, just go ahead and use the field and not tell the Turks. The State Department, already noticeably cool to any rescue attempt, quickly signaled thumbs down on that idea.
Because of the need for secrecy, the five members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff took a personal hand in planning the operation. To head it, they chose General Vaught, an Army Special Forces veteran. Vaught understandably thought in terms of his own experience and the Army way of doing things.
When the Army moves a force by air, it uses something known by the inelegant designation of FARRP—which stands for “Forward Area Refueling and Rearming Point.” Depending on the distance to be covered, the Army might use a series of FARRPs, hopscotching its way toward the objective.
Air Force special operators, on the other hand, tend to think in terms of a single long jump to the objective, refueling in the air, if necessary, rather than stopping at a FARRP.
This was the pattern in Burma; in long behind-the-lines penetrations in Europe during World War II; in ARCS operations during the 1950s; and in the Son Tay raid. Even in the Mayaguez operation, Air Force helicopters flew from a base two hundred miles from the scene of the action, although, in that case, they had no choice.
Whether there was a choice in the Iran rescue effort that might have avoided the use of the FARRP technique is still a matter of debate. But, at the time, with an Army general in charge, there seems to have been little thought given to any alternative to the use of the Army’s hopscotch method.
As the plan evolved, Beckwith’s 138-man Delta Force assembled on the island of Masirah, off the coast of Oman in the Arabian Sea, to be flown to the refueling point, designated as Desert One, in three MC-130 Combat Talon transport planes. Three C-130 transport aircraft, modified to carry internal fuel bladders, were loaded with eighteen thousand gallons of jet fuel, preparing them to serve as filling stations for the helicopters that would carry the soldiers on to Teheran. One of the troop-carrying MC-130s also carried three five-hundred-gallon rubber bladders of fuel as a backup.
Eight RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters—a Navy version of the basic bird used by the Air Force in the Son Tay and Mayaguez operations—were assembled aboard the USS Nimitz, which took up position in the Arabian Sea, about fifty nautical miles off the south coast of Iran. Since the planes were a type used in minesweeping, Marine helicopter pilots familiar with minesweeping were chosen for the operation, although one Air Force officer served as a copilot.
The plan called for the helicopters to make three stops. The first would be at Desert One, the site checked out by Carney. There, the helicopters would be refueled, and the soldiers would transfer to the helicopters. They would then fly two hours and ten minutes to a drop-off point. The soldiers would hike five miles to a hiding place in the hills outside Teheran. The helicopters would proceed on to another hiding place of their own. The penetration of Iranian air space, the refueling, the flight to the drop-off point, and the flight to the hiding place would take about eight hours, and it would all have to be done within the hours of darkness. At that time of the year, it would be dark for only a little over nine hours, so timing was critical.
After hiding all day, hoping they and their helicopters would not be detected, the soldiers would be taken on the second night of the operation to the embassy in trucks to conduct their raid. At the proper moment, the helicopters would leave their hiding place and fly to a soccer stadium adjoining the embassy. Once the Delta Force had found and rescued the hostages, they would all climb into the helicopters for the flight to the Manzarïyeh airfield south of Teheran.
Meanwhile, a hundred Army Rangers, flying from Wadi Kena in Egypt, would have taken over the field. Overhead would be gunships to help in securing the airfield and, if needed, to push mobs back away from the embassy during the rescue operation. They would also prevent any Iranian fighters from taking off from another nearby airfield.
As soon as Manzarïyeh was captured, two big C-141 transport planes, one of them equipped as a flying hospital, would land and stand by to carry the Delta Force and the rescued hostages out of Iran.
It was a highly complex operation, involving scores of aircraft operating from widely scattered air bases and an aircraft carrier and requiring precise timing and coordination.
As the complexity grew, so, too, did the number of opportunities for things to go wrong.
Although the raiding force itself was made up of Army soldiers and the helicopters would be flown by Marines, the success of the operation as a whole depended heavily on the skills of the Air Force special operations units involved.
Unfortunately, Air Force special operations had fallen into one of its recurrent periods of neglect following the Vietnam War. The signs of disintegration in capability were already evident at the time of the Mayaguez incident five years earlier, and things had gotten progressively worse in the meantime.
For a period of years, special operations had been assigned to the Tactical Air Command, dominated by fighter pilots. They had little interest in, or appreciation of, special operations except as a source of money and promotions. Funds were siphoned off from special operations to pay for new F-15s and F-16s for the fighter pilots. And, with special operations swelling the size of the Tactical Air Command, there were more opportunities for promotions. As the special operators saw it, the promotions all went to the fighter pilots. Carney himself was passed over for promotion twice before his skills were finally reco
gnized and he was advanced to the rank of colonel earlier than normal.
Except for the assignment of Carney and his handful of combat controllers to work with Beckwith and Delta, the Air Force had given little thought to its possible role in efforts to combat terrorism and to rescue hostages.
The attitude of many in the Air Force was summed up at the time by Gen. Larry D. Welch, a fighter pilot who was then vice-chief of staff and later chief of staff: “We can lose any number of terrorist encounters and low-intensity conflicts without endangering the nation one whit. But, fail to deter or lose a conventional or nuclear war.…”
As a result, when the hostages were taken by the Iranians, the Air Force had failed to develop a sophisticated helicopter suitable for such a long-range rescue effort. Specialized transport planes and gunships left over from the Vietnam War had been shunted off to the reserves.
Moreover, except for the link between the combat controllers and the Delta Force, little thought had been given to coordinating Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine units to work together on such an operation, and they had done little training together.
General Vaught thus had to create a rescue force out of bits and pieces of the military. He also had to do his job in the greatest secrecy. Everyone agreed that the rescue effort had to come as a total surprise to the Iranians. The slightest hint of what was up would doom the effort to failure. As a result, Vaught was extremely limited in his ability to reach out to combat veterans who might have helped increase the odds of success.
Hess, who was deeply involved in the planning for the rescue, recalls with some bemusement how he was also helping to develop several other contingency plans headed by generals and admirals who were kept in the dark about the rival plans. In some cases, for example, the different plans called for using the same tankers that were integral to the success of the other plans.
Secrecy also had a strong impact on training for the operation. Key phases of the rescue effort were practiced in the most realistic ways possible, but there never was a full-scale practice session with all the actors on stage at once.
To pull together the Air Force portion of the effort, Vaught chose Col. James H. Kyle, a veteran Combat Talon pilot with a thousand hours’ combat flying in his logbook. Shortly before the rescue attempt got underway, Kyle was also named the on-scene commander at Desert One.
As early as mid-December, rehearsals began at a Marine airfield at Twentynine Palms, California. Kyle stood at the side of the blacked-out field as the time came for the arrival of the first C-130. An overcast had blotted out the moon, cutting visibility to zero. It was not until the plane had landed, using infrared landing lights, and moved into position to unload a planeload of Rangers, that Kyle heard its engines and realized the plane had landed undetected by those awaiting its arrival.
The training was as realistic as possible, but it was conducted in separate compartments. Those involved in various parts of the effort spent hours thinking and talking about what might go wrong and how to avoid problems, but they seldom had the chance to sit down with those involved in other phases of the operation to work out the glitches.
While the Delta Force practiced by themselves on a mockup of the embassy, the helicopters and C-130s exercised in the western desert. The AC-130 gunships that would provide overhead support flew off to Guam, thousands of miles from the rest of the task force, to practice low-level gunship operation.
The secrecy was so tight that aircrews involved in a deception operation related to the rescue didn’t know that’s what they were doing. They also weren’t asked for their advice, which might have been helpful.
Ron Jones, the pilot referred to in Chapter Fifteen who flew leaflet-dropping missions over North Vietnam, was operations officer of the Seventh Special Operations Squadron, a Combat Talon unit stationed in Germany. Jones was by then a lieutenant colonel. Early in 1980, the unit was sent on temporary duty to Wadi Kena, an air base in the Egyptian desert, for training. The decision made sense. Because of objections from the citizenry, they were running out of areas in Europe where they could practice one of their most vital skills—low-level flying at night. Egypt offered vast spaces where such flights would disturb no one but an occasional camel herder.
Wadi Kena was also, unknown to Jones and his colleagues, to become a major staging area for Operation Rice Bowl. The flights by the Seventh SOS accustomed people in the area to seeing C-130s lumbering overhead, so that, when the planes involved in the rescue operation arrived, they attracted little attention.
“None of us related what we were doing to what was going on in the States, primarily because we didn’t know what was going on in the States,” Jones recalls. “We flew against the Egyptians’ surface-to-air sites. They had SA-2, SA-3, and SA-6 missiles, plus they had the MiG-21 interceptor.
“The Seventh SOS deployed on an operation to England just about the time the task force was coming into Wadi Kena. I was picked as USAFE [United States Air Force in Europe] liaison officer to the task force. They’d been there a week or more, and I arrived a week or so before the mission.
“I didn’t know what was going on. I walked into the big hangar that was their operations center and asked what was going on. I was told, ‘We don’t have time to tell you. Go around, look over people’s shoulders, and figure it out.’ I spent most of a morning and afternoon looking over people’s shoulders, trying to figure out what was going on.
“There was a very cavalier—and I don’t mean to call attention to myself when I say this—but there was one thing that will always stick in my mind was how cavalier the people were in planning this mission with regard to being able to operate out of somebody else’s country.
“Four or five days before the mission was to go down, General Gast [Lt. Gen. Philip Gast, an Air Force officer who was deputy commander of the operation] was there in the mission ops [operations] center talking about a phase of the mission and the various operating locations.
“I said, ‘Well, General, how do you plan on getting out of here?’
“He looked at me, and he said, ‘Well, we’re just going to go out and take off with no clearance, and we’re just going to fly out of country. What’s the problem?’
“I said, ‘Well, you’ve got a big problem, General. One of the things is, you’ve got an SA-2 battery that sits about two or three miles off the end of this runway that does not require authorization to fire. You go flying airplanes off of here, you’re going to end up with some smoking holes in the ground. Did you ever think about coordinating with the Egyptians?’
“He said, ‘You’ve got my attention.’”
At that time, the Egyptians had only recently signed a peace agreement with Israel. The memories of the 1967 war, when much of their air force was destroyed on the ground in a surprise attack, and the violence of the 1973 war were still fresh. Jones vividly recalled one training mission.
“One night, we flew a couple of airplanes against the Aswan High Dam. They had SA-2s, SA-3s, and SA-6s at the dam. They locked on our airplanes with all those systems. [A lock-on by the missile’s guidance radar is the last step before firing.] It was the first time some of our crews had ever seen an actual lock-on by any of those systems. We were flying terrain-following at a thousand feet. We dipped down to 250 feet, and they lost us. They couldn’t maintain the lock. It scared them to death. They said, ‘Don’t you ever do that again. You’ll always fly at a thousand feet so we can see you,’ We flew at a thousand feet from then on.”
What was particularly worrisome was that the individual Egyptian antiaircraft sites had authority to fire without checking with any higher headquarters. Egyptian friends told Jones they feared a hostile plane could get through their defenses in the time it took for a SAM battery to get permission to fire. Jones was very busy the next few days:
“I stayed busy for the last four or five days coordinating with the Egyptians, without telling them in so many words what was going on, just telling them there would be a large contingent
of airplanes departing at approximately this time, exiting the country at this point, and then they’ll be returning at approximately this time. I believe, without that notice, the Egyptians would have fired on them.”
The rescue operation, as it began to unfold late on the afternoon of 24 April, was like a carefully choreographed ballet, with every intricate movement beautifully coordinated.
The C-130s slated to serve as filling stations at Desert One—so heavily laden with fuel that they could hardly take off—and the Combat Talons flew from Wadi Kena to Masirah. AC-130 gunships and C-141 transport planes stood by at Wadi Kena to help take over the airfield at Manzarïyeh and carry out the evacuation after the rescue effort.
One Combat Talon carrying Beckwith and part of his force, plus Carney and his team, took off first from Masirah at dusk on 24 April, with the rest of the force scheduled to follow about an hour later.
In a completely separate movement, the eight helicopters lifted off from the deck of the Nimitz and headed toward the Iranian coast. They were ordered to fly as low as possible, sneaking in under the Iranian radar. The helicopters did not carry navigators, and the pilots depended on being able to see the ground.
As the lead MC-130 approached Desert One, Carney leaned forward between the pilots. It had been twenty-four days since he had buried the beacons in the desert. If, for any reason, the lights failed to function, the rescue effort would be doomed at the start. A member of Carney’s team sent the signal to turn the lights on. Suddenly, four lights appeared in a square on the desert floor, with a fifth light blinking to mark the end of the landing zone.
The first plane lined up on the beacons and settled down to a smooth landing on the desert. Carney and his six-man team roared out the rear of the plane on their motorcycles and raced across the road to set up a second box-and-one to delineate a second landing strip on the other side of the roadway. It was their job to line the C-130s up in refueling slots and, when the helicopters arrived, to move them in behind the C-130s.