Oppose Any Foe

by Mark Moyar

  During his prior twenty-five years of service in the Army, Beckwith had accumulated lengthy rosters of both loyal followers and staunch enemies. In Vietnam, as an officer in the 5th Special Forces Group, he had in some eyes demonstrated an impressive tenacity in completing tough missions. In other eyes, his most noteworthy trait was a propensity for getting troops killed through impatience and recklessness. The negative version of his reputation dogged him in later years, to the extent that it caused a large number of Special Forces men to shun the new organization he was forming. Knowledge of the damning whispers about his time in Vietnam pained Beckwith, who seemed genuinely intent on atoning for his past sins.

  Beckwith used his considerable smarts, as well as General DePuy’s backing, to gain a bureaucratic foothold for the proposed new unit. Parrying arguments from the Rangers that another unit would merely duplicate Ranger capabilities, Beckwith contended persuasively that his unit could operate less visibly than the Rangers or anyone else. His men would move in very small groups, wear civilian clothing, and mimic the customs of the local population. Beckwith also planned to acquire specialists whose skills were unavailable in the Rangers or anywhere else, such as locksmiths, electricians, and climbers.

  Beckwith did not, however, possess the gifts in oratory and salesmanship that often count for more than substance in persuading others. After hearing Beckwith drone on during a presentation about the new unit, DePuy decided that he would need someone else to brief the concept if it were to obtain the necessary signatures in the Pentagon. He brought in the most talented briefer he could find on his staff, Lieutenant Colonel John Devens. An engineer by trade, Devens knew nothing about special operations, but he quickly picked up the key facts and arguments from Beckwith. His briefings to high Army leaders in the middle of 1977, delivered with a delicate synthesis of eloquence and passion, paved the way for authorization of the unit at year’s end.

  The new unit, code-named Delta Force, fell under the Special Forces. DePuy put it there to give it access to the manpower and resources of the three Special Forces Groups that had survived the cuts of the late Vietnam era. Beckwith set up the unit’s headquarters at Fort Bragg in what had been the base stockade, a relatively new building whose nine acres and barbed-wire fence afforded it an isolation much prized by a secretive organization. Transferring the inmates to a jail in downtown Fayetteville, Delta Force converted the maximum-security wing into a holding area for ammunition, explosives, and sensitive documents. Beckwith, who admitted to a strong partiality for roses, ordered the planting of rose gardens adjacent to the front walkway, dictating that they include every color in the rose palette. Gardeners planted French Lace, All-American, Seashell, Dainty Bess, and Lady X, and groomed them with the meticulousness of the rose coiffeurs of Versailles.

  To both DePuy and Beckwith it was clear that Delta Force would draw its personnel from the Special Forces and the Rangers. Those organizations, however, pulled out every trick in the book to keep their personnel from participating in Delta’s tryouts. After much pressuring from above, the Special Forces and Rangers agreed to allow men with specializations in weapons and demolitions to audition for Delta Force—thereby excluding those with scarcer and more prized skills, such as medicine, communications, and intelligence. They also found ways to keep their best weapons and demolition men from trying out. To Beckwith’s chagrin, few of the initial applicants from the Special Forces and Rangers met his exacting standards.

  Beckwith complained about the personnel problem to his superior in the Special Forces chain of command, Major General Jack Mackmull. Little changed. On March 8, 1978, Beckwith decided to circumvent Mackmull and take his grievances directly to General Edward “Shy” Meyer, deputy chief of staff of the Army. A member of Beckwith’s staff drove from Fort Bragg to Washington to hand deliver the envelope, in order to ensure that the message would not be intercepted by an unsympathetic party or get stuck in the clogged arteries of the Army bureaucracy. In the letter, Beckwith informed Meyer that the obstructionism of the Special Forces and Rangers was preventing Delta Force from obtaining the manpower it needed to fulfill its mission. He requested that Delta be taken away from General Mackmull and placed directly under the authority of the Army chief of staff.

  Undoubtedly Beckwith hoped that General Meyer would take care of the problem without involving General Mackmull. Meyer, however, was the type of leader who wanted the accuser to face the accused. Mackmull was in Korea when Meyer’s office notified him of Beckwith’s protest. News that a subordinate had complained directly to a higher link in the chain of command pleased Mackmull no more than it would have pleased any other leader. Cutting short his trip, Mackmull flew back immediately to Fort Bragg and summoned Beckwith to an early Saturday morning meeting.

  Mackmull paid no homage to subtlety in dressing down Beckwith. “What you did the other day, Colonel, was an act of disloyalty,” Mackmull steamed. “From the beginning, you have shown a reluctance to work within the system.”

  The flame tips of Mackmull’s words had no trouble igniting Beckwith’s emotional tinder. “I am not in the business, General, of getting my ticket punched,” Beckwith retorted.

  Turning red in the face, Mackmull shouted, “Well, Colonel, what’s your game then?”

  “My game is to get out of Dodge,” Beckwith yelled back. “I’m gonna get this unit moved out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Later that very day, General Shy Meyer showed up at Fort Bragg to settle the matter. After receiving an initial briefing, Meyer addressed the group with a forcefulness belying his curious nickname. “I want everyone but the following people to leave: General Warner, General Mackmull, Charlie [Beckwith], Dick Potter, and my two action officers, Colonels Owen and Stotser. Everyone else will leave.” All smiling and joking ceased as the other attendees shuffled out of the room. Casting his eyes across those who remained, Meyer projected an air of sublime authority, so captivating in its effect that Beckwith thought it must have been comparable to King Arthur’s commanding presence at the round table.

  “I have the authority from the Chief of Staff of the Army to hire, to fire, and to transfer anyone in this room,” Meyer intoned. Turning his head to Beckwith, he said, “Charlie, you’ve got to realize something. I think about you and the guys down here every day. But, I’m a busy man. I don’t have time, personally, on a day-to-day basis, to run this unit.” Therefore, explained Meyer, there was no alternative to keeping Delta Force under Mackmull.

  Beckwith put up his hand. “Can I say something?” he asked. Rising to his feet, his voice choking up like that of a nervous high school student during a class presentation, the Delta Force commander spluttered, “How in the hell do you expect me to do my job and run this unit when that general right there told me this morning I was disloyal? How can I continue to work under that man?”

  Looking Beckwith in the eye, Meyer said flatly, “I’m not interested in hearing that, so sit down.” Beckwith sank back into his chair.

  Meyer then addressed Mackmull. “Jack, I’m not sure in my own mind you have supported Charlie. But, I’ll tell you one thing you’re going to do on Monday morning; you’re going to open the gates and allow anyone in the Special Forces who wants to try out for Delta to come on over.” The same would go for the Rangers.

  “There is to be no more bickering,” Meyer continued. “Do you understand, Jack?” Meyer added that if Mackmull and Beckwith came to an impasse, Beckwith could contact Meyer’s office.

  With the manpower spigot now fully open, Beckwith began screening candidates in earnest. Seeking only a dozen men for the first Delta Force training class, he could be extremely selective. Any man who wished to be considered had to meet an age minimum of twenty-two years, a service minimum of four years, and an Army aptitude test minimum of 110. Preliminary screening involved trials of physical fitness, which included swimming one hundred meters in a lake while wear
ing fatigues and boots. Psychologists inundated the candidates with questions, such as: “Do you hear voices? Are you an agent of God? Are people following you? Are you often misunderstood? Do you have thoughts too terrible to speak about?” To identify individuals who might be suffering from ulcers or alcoholism, the questioners inquired, “Is your stool black and tarry?” The prospective special operators were asked to enumerate their weaknesses, and those who responded that they did not have any were eliminated from contention.

  Individuals who passed through the preliminary filters went on to a selection course in the Uwharrie National Forest, near Troy, North Carolina. Because Beckwith prized the ability to operate alone for extended periods, the course compelled the candidates to spend days at a time navigating the wilderness in solitude. Carrying a fifty-five-pound rucksack, they traipsed through hardwood forests, scaled steep hills and mountains, and forded streams and rivers. Men who did not reach prescribed checkpoints in the allotted times were disqualified and sent back to their units. In the end, Beckwith invited the top twelve men of the first candidate class of 163 to join Delta Force. The 7 percent acceptance rate seemed shockingly low at the time, but in fact it would be higher than the rates for all subsequent Delta selection classes.

  The newly inducted Delta operators proceeded to a five-month Operators Course, focused mainly on high-end tactical skills. They practiced breaching, room clearing, land navigation, hostage management, and communications. Each man learned how to climb and rappel from buildings, and how to pick a pin tumbler lock. Beckwith made marksmanship a top priority, in anticipation of stealthy raids in which operators would have to fell dozens of guards without scratching the hostages in their midst. Every man was expected to spend three to four hours a day, five days a week, shooting weapons. In a new $90,000 motion-picture facility, the Delta operators were immersed in videotaped hostage scenarios, the screens freezing the instant a shot was fired so that they could determine exactly whom the shooter had hit.

  Unlike many of its special operations kin, Delta Force did not have to wait long for an opportunity to put its capabilities into use. Nor did it face any doubts about the strategic importance of the first task it was seeking to perform. The opportunity germinated on November 4, 1979, with the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran by elements of Iran’s Islamic revolution. President Jimmy Carter, convinced that resort to military measures involved too much risk, initially vowed to get the sixty-three American hostages back through diplomacy.

  The military, though, has a habit of planning for contingencies, particularly in situations where it doubts that the adversary is as willing to negotiate for peace as the State Department believes. The Joint Chiefs of Staff formed an ad hoc Joint Task Force to plan and organize a rescue mission, labeled Operation Eagle Claw, in case Carter’s confidence in diplomacy ran out. The chiefs named Army Major General James B. Vaught the task force commander and put Beckwith in command of the ground element, which included ninety-three Delta operators and a thirteen-man Special Forces team.

  Because no friendly air bases lay near Tehran, the planners devised an elaborate series of air and ground movements to get Beckwith’s men into the city and get the hostages out. American C-130 transport aircraft were to rendezvous with helicopters at an abandoned airfield 260 miles southeast of Tehran, designated Desert One. The helicopters would be refueled from fuel bladders hauled aboard the C-130s, and would then take the rescue team to a dry riverbed in an area of deserted salt mines fifty miles outside Tehran. The ground operators would transfer to six Mercedes trucks and two smaller vehicles that had been staged there in advance. Accompanied by Farsi-speaking volunteers from the US military and two former Iranian generals who could talk their way through checkpoints, the force would drive into Tehran, disembarking at a street next to the embassy. The ground operators would climb over the embassy walls, shoot the guards with silenced weapons, liberate the hostages, and move everyone to a soccer stadium across the street from the embassy, where helicopters would retrieve them and fly them to Desert Two, an airstrip thirty-five miles south of Tehran. C-130s would be waiting at the airstrip, ready to take them home.

  The task force began training for Eagle Claw in December 1979. To simulate the conditions expected at Desert One, they rehearsed at the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, Arizona, and at the secretive Area 51 in the Nevada desert. The CIA built models of the US embassy compound, exploiting detailed information on circuit breaker locations and wall thicknesses from thirteen women and black men whom the Iranians had released from custody as a gesture of their magnanimity and their contempt for the white American male. The task force practiced assaulting the mock compound so many times that they became bored, depressed even.

  All of the CIA’s case officers in Iran had been taken hostage, and the CIA was unwilling to assume the risks of sending in new case officers to obtain fresh information on the situation. The Department of Defense therefore infiltrated its own spies into Tehran. Dick Meadows, who had reached only the rank of major before retiring from the Army, despite his exemplary service in Vietnam, volunteered to take a small team of men into the city in disguise. Posing as Irish and German businessmen, the team snooped for facts on the embassy and nearby facilities and secured vehicles for the overland phase of the operation.

  Meanwhile, the Iranians were thwarting Carter’s diplomatic initiatives with the deftness one might expect of descendants of Persian rug salesmen in negotiations with a well-meaning Georgia peanut farmer. The Ayatollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, spurned every US envoy, even Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who had publicly voiced support for Khomeini’s revolution. As Carter’s goodwill soured into distrust, he began imposing economic sanctions on Iran, but the sanctions failed to sway Khomeini. Months without result drained the American public’s patience and aroused a yearning for tougher action, embodied in the radio hit “Bomb Iran,” set to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.” President Carter’s approval ratings tumbled, putting his reelection bid in grave jeopardy.

  In the middle of April 1980, a desperate Carter finally invited the Pentagon to present him with military options. General Vaught and Colonel Beckwith were summoned to the White House on April 16 to brief the president on Eagle Claw, which held greater appeal for Carter than did other military options, such as mining Iran’s ports or bombing its oil refineries, as it appeared to involve less risk of provoking the Soviet Union or entangling the United States in a protracted war. Dressed in their formal service attire, the military men were surprised to see White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan strut into the White House situation room wearing Levi’s jeans. Vice President Walter Mondale showed up late in a fancy sweatsuit and sneakers. President Carter, clad in a blue blazer and gray slacks, looked more dignified than his underlings, and he looked to be calm and at ease.

  Carter opened the meeting. “Dave,” he said, addressing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General David C. Jones, “I am seriously considering going ahead with the mission, but I will make a final decision only after this meeting and after I’ve had several days to think about it. I would like you all to assume that none of us knows anything about it and provide us with a step-by-step rundown.”

  Jones introduced Beckwith and Vaught, noting that “the Joint Chiefs’ unanimous recommendation was for Charlie Beckwith to lead the rescue team.” The military officers described the planning in detail, exuding confidence in successful execution of the operation as they stepped through the phases. Having thought through the problem for months, they quickly and effortlessly answered volleys of questions about potential complications.

  Beckwith’s remark that Delta Force planned to “take the guards out” at the embassy drew a question from Warren Christopher, the deputy secretary of state. “Will you shoot them in the shoulder or what?” Christopher asked.

  Beckwith replied, “No, sir. We’re going to shoot each of them twice, right between the eyes.”

  Christopher�
�s nerves went taut. “You mean you’re really going to shoot to kill?” Christopher asked. “You really are?”

  “Yes sir,” Beckwith said. “We certainly are.”

  In the middle of the briefing, Mondale leaned over to Beckwith and asked him for a set of handcuffs. A bewildered Beckwith handed the cuffs over, his amazement escalating as Mondale tinkered with them while the briefers delved into the intricate plan for snatching the prize from the center of the enemy’s lair.

  Carter, however, paid close attention throughout, and he came away thoroughly impressed with both the commanders and their plan. “In their meticulous description of every facet of the operation,” Carter wrote in his memoirs, “I received satisfactory answers to all my many questions.” His congenital aversion to force overcome, Carter ordered the generals to execute Operation Eagle Claw.

  During the next week, the men and equipment of the task force converged on airfields across the United States. Transport aircraft leapfrogged to refueling sites scattered between the Azores and Germany before coming together at an abandoned Soviet airfield at Wadi Kena, Egypt, the operation’s final staging area. Ahead of the task force’s arrival at Wadi Kena, pallets of beer and soda were flown to the airfield and offloaded into two large refrigerators.