by Orr Kelly
A team of Rangers followed them out the big cargo door on their motorcycles to set up roadblocks at each end of the area to stop any traffic that happened along. They had no sooner reached their blocking positions than an intercity bus carrying forty-three passengers and a driver showed up. It was quickly decided that the people would be put aboard one of the planes and flown out when the planes left, to be returned after the rescue operation had been completed.
Carney describes how the situation unfolded at Desert One:
“While the bus is getting sorted out, we’re establishing the second landing zone, and the 130s are coming in. We were landing the even-numbered ones to the north side and the odd coming in to the right. Then we’re waiting for the helicopters to come in so we can marshal them up behind the 130s.”
The first helicopter came in more than twenty minutes late. The aircraft crews unreeled hoses attached to fuel bladders in the C-130s and began refueling the helicopters as soon as they arrived.
The helicopters, flying just above the desert floor, had run into a hazy cloud of dust that blinded the pilots. One of the helicopters had a malfunction and was abandoned. Its crew was picked up by another helicopter, and they continued on. Another helicopter turned around and returned to the Nimitz. The helicopters straggled in to Desert One far behind schedule, the last arriving eighty-five minutes late. But six of them arrived, and that was the minimum number needed to continue on to Teheran.
The scene was one of barely controlled chaos. The propellers of the C-130s and the rotors of the helicopters continued to spin, churning up dust and making so much noise that communication, even with radio, was difficult. Men moving about the refueling area appeared only as faint shadows.
Carney’s account continues:
“In the course of refueling the helicopters, a helacious ball of fire breaks out up where the box lights are, up at the bend in the road. A fuel truck was coming through, was barreling down on the roadblock we had up there. One of Charlie Beckwith’s guys told a young Ranger to stop the truck. He did. He unlocked an antitank weapon, fired it, and blew the tank truck up, dead on the approach to the north runway.
“Now, we’ve got this fireball up there, and everyone is stunned. What has happened? Everybody is thinking, We’re getting attacked.”
For the pilots arriving on the scene, the truck fire was a shocking surprise. They were wearing night-vision goggles, which intensify even the faintest lights, such as that from the stars. Suddenly, they were blinded by a huge fire on the ground.
“When you look back at that, that was an awesome, awesome task,” Carney says. “Those C-130 crew members did an outstanding job. Here they’ve got to land in the desert with all sorts of sand blowing around. Now you’ve got a fuel truck on fire.
“Can you imagine flying into that area and seeing that big ball of fire? You know damn well they think that’s an aircraft crashed. They come in and land anyway, grease it right in there. We couldn’t have one guy turn around and go back on us. That was fuel we needed. I don’t think they’ve ever been paid the credit for what they really did. I was certainly proud of the job they did.”
To Carney, the scene looked like something out of the movie Apocalypse Now. But he saw six helicopters lined up being refueled—and that was the number needed to continue the mission.
“I remember standing in the middle of the road with Colonel Kyle and Colonel Beckwith. We’re kind of congratulating each other,” Carney says. “I remember Kyle saying good luck to Charlie. As he heads for the helicopter, we see people coming off the helicopter. I ask what the hell’s going on.”
One of the six helicopters had a malfunction in its electronics and could not go on. Carney knew that doomed the operation, and he turned his thoughts to the task of getting everyone back out of Desert One.
The first task was to reposition the helicopters so the C-130s could move out of the area and prepare to take off. As the aircraft began to move, the air was filled with blinding dust and sand.
One of the helicopters lifted off the ground, then suddenly lurched forward and clipped the tail of one of the C-130s. The chopper rose up, spun around, and came down hard on the cockpit of the C-130. The two aircraft were engulfed in flames at the point where they came together.
Five members of the C-130 crew were in the cockpit. They all burned to death. Three crew members in the back of the helicopter also died.
But the pilot got out of the helicopter, and some of Beckwith’s commandos, in the back of the transport plane, also escaped before the craft was consumed by flames.
As the fire worked its way through the transport, it reached ammunition brought along by the commandos. Shells began cooking off, spraying the entire area with bullets. By some miracle, none of the other fuel-laden planes was hit.
“You’re never fortunate if you lose even one person,” Carney says. “But I must say we’re very fortunate we didn’t lose many more in that mess. I have to hand it to those 130 crews. They sat there and waited for us to move them in an orderly fashion and get them out of there. That took a hell of a lot of balls to just sit there and wait for instructions. We had to run over to them and tell them. We gave them the sequence, told them how we were going to get them out of there.”
Carney climbed into the last aircraft with Kyle. One of Carney’s men made a circuit of the area on his motorcycle to make sure no one was being left behind. While they waited, Carney and Kyle debated whether to try to destroy the helicopters that were being abandoned.
“Kyle’s decision, which was a good one, was if we fool around destroying helicopters, we’ll get a piece of shrapnel through an engine in the last plane out of Dodge City. We jumped in the airplane and took off,” Carney says.
Eight men had been killed and five more injured. Five intact helicopters, as well as the wreckage of the helicopter and the C-130 that had collided, were left behind in the desert, along with some classified documents that were left in the helos by the Marine aircrews as they scrambled for the exits. The documents were later found and exploited by the Iranians.
The failure of the rescue attempt was a terrible embarrassment for the United States and especially for its military forces. And the failure to extract the hostages contributed to President Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election.
The postmortems began almost immediately.
At the most simplistic level, Americans asked why, with hundreds of billions a year in taxpayer dollars, the military couldn’t pull off the simple little task of rescuing a few hostages held by a ragtag group that described themselves as militant students. The failed rescue attempt was often compared unfavorably with the raid in which Israeli commandos rescued 106 hostages held by terrorists at the Entebbe airfield in Uganda on 3 and 4 July 1976.
What this question failed to recognize was the great complexity and difficulty of the Iranian operation. Carney summed it up this way:
“You’re trying to pull off what is probably the most sophisticated damn operation in the annals of military history. People want to compare it with Son Tay or Entebbe. Bullshit. There was no comparison. Entebbe, they’re in and out, bingo, bango, they’re gone. Son Tay the same thing. This thing, you’re talking, over a forty-eight-hour period, an absolutely complex mission.”
A six-member commission was named by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to study the rescue attempt. The group was headed by Adm. James L. Holloway III, a former chief of naval operations. It included men with long experience in special operations; including Gen. LeRoy Manor, the commander of the Son Tay raid a decade earlier.
The Holloway Commission unanimously concluded that “the risks were manageable, the overall probability of success good, and the operation feasible.”
But it also criticized a number of aspects of the operation and its planning and raised serious questions about other aspects.
While recognizing the need for secrecy, it implied that the emphasis on secrecy was overdone, resulting in the failure to seek advice (
Manor had not been consulted about his Son Tay experience) and a lack of communication among those involved.
It also concluded that there should have been more than the eight helicopters in the original launch from the Nimitz—at least ten and perhaps as many as twelve.
The Holloway group also strongly implied that the operation would have had a greater chance of success if Air Force pilots experienced in long-range, low-level flights in the dark had been brought in to fly the helicopters.
At the time, the group found, there were two hundred Air Force pilots available with current or recent experience in long-range flight and aerial refueling. Their Air Force helicopters would not fit in the elevators on a carrier because their rotors could not be folded. So they would have had to learn to fly the Navy’s Sea Stallion version of the basic H-53 helicopter. The Holloway Commission found that would have been fairly simple.
Air commandos who have studied the Iranian rescue attempt agree that the decision to give the helicopter job to the Marines was a matter of spreading the work around to avoid interservice jealousy and that the logical choice would have been to put experienced Air Force pilots in the cockpits, even if they had to put them in Navy uniforms, remind them they were on a “ship” and not a “boat,” and teach them to say head and ladder instead of rest room and stairs.
Manor, who frequently lectures on the Son Tay and Desert One operations in classified briefings for military audiences, is convinced that the helicopters should have flown right along with the C-130s, as they did at Son Tay, or that they should at least have been provided with a C-130 pathfinder to lead them to the refueling spot on time.
“The Marines who flew the helicopters were in a difficult position,” he says, “and they did a real good job considering the position they were placed in—following the contour of the terrain. We asked why they were flying that low. They said they had been briefed that radar detection could compromise the mission.
“But the C-130s, on approximately the same route at approximately the same time, were flying at a much higher altitude. Their route took them over the weather phenomenon the helicopters flew into. They did not receive the same warning, that they could be detected by the radar.
“In my estimation, being detected by the radar was not a big problem. So the helicopters could have had it much easier if they had been given the same information as the C-130 pilots and flown at a much higher altitude. It would have been much easier.
“I think if I had been planning it, I would have arranged for the helicopters and the 130s to fly in one formation, which is what we did on the Son Tay operation. The helicopter crews don’t carry navigators, and they were on their own. They don’t have the sophisticated equipment you find on the Combat Talon. Here, the Combat Talons were flying essentially the same route. And they have a couple of navigators on their crew.
“We asked, why didn’t you marry the two together? Well, we were told, the speeds aren’t compatible. Well, the speeds were compatible for the Son Tay operation. Here’s an example where we don’t capitalize on lessons that are learned. It’s true a C-130 normally flies faster than an H-53. But the 130 can reduce its speed and make it possible for a 53 to fly with it, and we’ve done it. We flew formation with the C-130 to Son Tay.”
Gary Weikel, the helicopter pilot who had a firsthand experience of the decline of Air Force special operations capability during the Mayaguez operation, is one of the most outspoken in his contention that the Iran rescue operation was basically flawed, relying on the Army’s hopscotch method rather than a simpler in-and-out operation following Air Force doctrine.
“Why, in 1980,” he asks, “did we have that ridiculous Desert One scenario, and why did we not go back to Son Tay? In Son Tay … they flew straight into North Vietnam, no landings, no intermediate operations, or anything else, and did the assault on the prison. And then they rolled back and came back on out. It was slick. All you had to have was intelligence on one place. You didn’t have to have all these moving parts and all these ground operations. But then, ten years later, we forgot all about that. There were so many moving parts in that thing, so many tactical ground operations.… The damn thing almost had to be doomed to failure.
“Why didn’t we do it the Son Tay way? Where we use refuelable helicopters, and we fly in there, kick their ass on one location, and come on back out? Instead of doing all these crazy, ponderous operations?”
Weikel’s criticism should probably be seen more as a theoretical argument for doing things the Air Force special operations way than as a workable alternative to Operation Rice Bowl. The fact is that the Air Force at that time didn’t have the aircraft or an organization that could have moved in on short notice to carry out the hostage-rescue effort. Manor puts the blame largely on the Air Force:
“In the decade of the seventies, we allowed our capability to dissipate. To zero. When this happened in Teheran, we didn’t have the capability. We could have taken B-52s and bombed the hell out of Iran, but that wouldn’t have solved the problem.
“What we needed was the capability to go in there and do something. The capability didn’t exist. The only capability that had been developed and maintained was Delta. It had a tremendous capability, but there wasn’t the means to get it where it was needed. The Air Force is largely at fault for not having maintained that capability.”
The ignominious failure at Desert One got the attention of top Air Force officers. Within a short time, major efforts were underway to equip the Air Force to go back in again and succeed in the rescue of the hostages.
CHAPTER 23
Back to Teheran
Two months after the disaster at Desert One, the nighttime rest of the residents of Lubbock, Texas, was shattered by the roar of aircraft and the staccato chatter of automatic-weapons fire at Reese Air Force Base, a training base on the edge of the city.
It sounded like war, and alarmed citizens jammed switchboards at the police and sheriff’s offices, demanding to know what was going on.
A quickly devised cover story blamed the uproar on an exercise by the Texas National Guard. In reality, it was a full-dress rehearsal for the first stage of an audacious new plan to go back into Iran to rescue the hostages, and Reese Air Force Base was a stand-in for Teheran’s Meherabad International Airport.
No sooner had he returned to Washington than General Vaught was ordered to prepare for a second rescue attempt. Richard Secord, one of the original Farmgate pilots and, by then, a general and a top official in the Pentagon, Was tabbed as his deputy for air. Since much of the operation would involve aircraft, Secord had a major role to play.
They quickly assembled a huge force: nearly four thousand troops and more than a hundred aircraft. Whereas the original rescue attempt had relied on eight helicopters, Secord rounded up ninety-five helicopters from both the Air Force and the Army.
Under the new plan, two Ranger battalions—more than fourteen hundred men—would be flown in to take over the Meharabad airport. They would be followed quickly by a stream of transport planes carrying additional troops and helicopters. As soon as the planes landed, the helicopters—already fueled and fully armed—would be rolled out and prepared for flight. The goal was to have them airborne, on the way to rescue the hostages, within two minutes.
Overhead there would be AC-130 gunships and Navy F-14 fighter planes to make sure no Iranian fighters interfered with the operation.
No wonder the people of Lubbock thought they were under attack!
Because of uncertainty about where some of the hostages might be kept, there were a dozen contingency plans for finding and moving the hostages to the airfield. Secord later described the operation as “the Carnegie Hall of raids.” Unlike the earlier rescue attempt, which relied on stealth and assumed relatively small casualties among the Iranians, Secord foresaw the force blasting its way in and out of Teheran, inflicting heavy casualties as it did so.
Of the ninety-five helicopters conscripted for the operation, the bulk of them
came from the Army. They ranged from the new Black Hawk, a powerfully armed troop carrier, to tiny scout helicopters with racks attached on the sides to carry several Delta Force soldiers.
The Air Force contribution to this force was modest in terms of numbers. Because of the neglect it had suffered in recent years, Air Force special operations had few helicopters in its arsenal. But the Air Force had one noteworthy piece of machinery that was just being added to its inventory. It was called Pave Low III. The Air Force uses the term pave for a variety of radar systems. Since the aircraft relies heavily on radar for its performance, it was called Pave. Low was added on because the plane spends most of its time within a relatively few feet of the ground. And the III indicated this was the third attempt to develop such a machine.
The Pave Low was the same basic aircraft as the Super Jolly Green Giant rescue helicopter used in Vietnam. In fact, the “new” helicopters were the same machines that had flown in Vietnam, but thoroughly rebuilt, with a dazzling array of new technology that made them capable of going places and doing things that no other aircraft, new or old, could do.
In fact, this new machine, which was to become a mainstay of Air Force special operations in coming decades, was not originally designed for use by special operations, and when some of the air commandos saw it, they said they didn’t want it.
Thirteen years before, in the spring of 1967, the Air Force began work on what eventually became Pave Low. The effort was spurred by the frustrating failure to rescue many of the airmen shot down over North Vietnam and Laos. The practice then was to send in the rescue helicopters as soon as a pilot went down. But when dark came, they had to return to their bases and wait until first light to resume the rescue attempt. Too often, the downed flier was no longer there in the morning.