What happened was this: After the first meeting in the Situation Room, Vance went on vacation. In his absence the national security team met and picked the date, with Vance’s deputy, Warren Christopher, voting in favor. When Vance found out about the meeting, he called Christopher and learned that Christopher had voted for the mission, wrongly assuming that was Vance’s position. Carter said that when Vance returned from Florida, “he’d had a change of mind; he said now he thought it was an improper thing to do; it had too much of a connotation of an act of war.” So Carter held another meeting and another vote, and it was 6–1, with Vance voting no.
While he felt that Vance’s philosophy of seeking nonmilitary solutions to problems was close to his,143 Carter added caustically that Vance had threatened three times previously to resign; this time he was hurt that the president had bypassed the State Department in making a major foreign-policy decision. Carter felt Vance got his chance when they voted at the second meeting. The president decided to go forward, since neither Vance nor anyone else had a better alternative. Carter recalled that Vance “would come to the Oval Office and say I’m going to resign, and I would talk him out of it, and he would go back to work; and that was the fourth time he threatened to resign.”144 This time he felt so strongly that he told the president he was quitting before the operation, regardless of its outcome. From my own observation of Vance during the administration and my later discussion with him out of office, I believe that he was worn down by the constant clashes with Brzezinski, and this daring but risky attempt to rescue the hostages was the last straw.
* * *
On the evening of April 24, 1980, after almost a half-year of planning and training, the intricate, complex two-night mission, Operation Eagle Claw, began. It took almost two weeks to get everything in place. It included 132 Delta Force soldiers under Beckwith’s command to rescue the hostages in the embassy, and another 13-man army special forces team to free the three U.S. diplomats, headed by Bruce Laingen, in the Iranian Foreign Ministry; 12 Rangers to block the dirt road through Desert One, and manned missile launchers to protect everyone from attack the first night; 15 Iranian and American Persian-speakers to act as truck drivers; six C-130 transport planes, three carrying the Delta Force to free the hostages, and three for logistical supplies; two C-141 Starlifter strategic airlift planes; and eight RH-53 helicopters with sand camouflage and without markings. Three weeks earlier U.S. Air Force Major General John T. Carney, Jr., and two CIA officers had been flown to the Desert One location and successfully prepared an airstrip, taking soil samples, laying hard-packed sand, and installing remotely operated infrared lights and a strobe to establish a landing pattern.145
Nonetheless, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Only two hours after the RH-53 helicopters took off from the Nimitz, whose crew had no idea why they had been carrying them for months, they began their night flight of nearly six hundred nautical miles at low altitude to rendezvous with the C-130 planes carrying Beckwith’s force and the additional fuel, which left a staging base in Egypt, flying over the Gulf of Oman to Desert One in Iran. Beckwith’s Delta Force went with the words taken from the book of Samuel: “So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone” (1 Samuel 17:50).
One helicopter pilot reported that a warning light indicated a possible rotor-blade failure and returned to the carrier. Pustay later noted that the helicopter had a history of false warning lights, yet the pilot followed the military manuals and aborted without seeking authorization.146
General Jones, himself an air force pilot, later said that fighter pilots on critical missions like this one generally ignore such warning lights.147 As the first C-130 approached the landing area, the pilots noted curious patches in the sky. They were two separate haboobs, sandstorms of suspended particles that could extend upward thousands of feet and could last for hours—not a problem for the huge C-130s but a hazard to the helicopters, whose pilots could not be warned in flight because of radio silence. Never briefed on such blinding conditions, they had to break out of their formation to avoid hitting one another.
As the first C-130 approached the landing area, its crew detected something in the isolated desert—a pickup truck coming down the road. The plane landed in soft, ankle-deep sand due to recent weeks of sandstorms, not the hard-packed sand they had been expecting, and lowered its ramp. When the truck spotted the C-130, it quickly turned around and fled. Rangers gave chase but could not catch up, and one of the pursuers fired an antitank missile at the escaping truck, which was loaded with fuel. As it burned bright in the night sky, the men saw one of its occupants jump from the cab and drive away in a jeep the truck had been towing. That intrusion was ignored because they were probably smugglers who thought they were running from Iranian authorities and not Americans, but secrecy may have been compromised nonetheless.
Now the men looked up and saw a bus, piled high with luggage, heading toward them. The passengers, Iranians making a religious pilgrimage through the isolated area, were herded into captivity. After consulting with Brzezinski, who relayed the troubles to the president, it was agreed that the Iranian pilgrims would be flown out on one of the C-130s and returned when the mission was complete.
A second helicopter now experienced navigation and instrument failure in the poor-visibility conditions. At that point Brzezinski called Brown, who was with the president in the Oval Office, and asked if he was willing to proceed. The president told him to do so, since that left six helicopters, using up the margin for error but still enough to complete the mission. Then, remarkably, a third helicopter experienced a partial hydraulic failure, incredibly caused by a crew member who placed his pack over the air blower cooling the systems, which could not be repaired because the spare parts were on the helicopter that had returned to the aircraft carrier. So this helicopter, too, was out of the mission. Air force colonel James Kyle, commander at the Desert One site, felt they could not proceed without that third helicopter.148 When Beckwith realized they were down to five helicopters, he radioed Brown for permission to abort the mission, and Brown concurred. As Jones put it: “The president probably knew that this had a serious impact on his future, but he never blinked [and] accepted blame for what went wrong.”149
Now the problems only grew worse, if that was possible. While repositioning one helicopter to permit another to top off its fuel tanks for the return flight, the pilot lifted it up and hovered about fifteen feet above the ground. Its rotors kicked up a dust storm of the fine, soft sand. The pilot picking up the crew from the disabled helicopter was blinded by the sandstorm, and all he could see was the shadowy figure of the combat controller on the ground, which the pilot then used as his visual point of reference. But the pilot did not notice that the controller had moved next to the wing of the parked C-130. He kept the nose of his helicopter down and turned in the direction of the controller. Suddenly they heard a loud crack. One of the rotors had hit the wing of the C-130. The helicopter lurched forward and crashed into the cockpit of the C-130.
Sparks from the collision ignited a tremendous blaze, immediately engulfing both fuel-filled aircraft in flames. The men in the C-130 opened the back loading ramp, only to be confronted by a wall of flame. The same sight met their eyes when they opened the port troop door. They knew the entire plane could explode within minutes. The starboard troop door was clear of flames and men began crowding around it to escape. Flames were licking the walls of the plane now. As each man escaped from the plane’s door, he scrambled in the sand to flee the impending explosion. The ammunition inside the plane began to crack and explode, and finally the entire plane was consumed. The Iranian pilgrims on the bus were freed and the remaining troops fled aboard the C-130s. Eight crew members died, and five other members of the team were injured.
* * *
Because of the time difference, the drama encompassed a full working day in Washington—from 10:30 a.m., when the helicopters took off from the carrier, until 6:00 p.m., when the first n
ews arrived of the fatal collision and fire. President Carter and the small group in the White House and State Department that followed the mission maintained a normal work schedule to avoid compromising secrecy. Ham recalled: “I could hardly hide my excitement as the day passed. Every time I looked at my watch, I would try to think what Beckwith and the Delta team would be doing at that moment.”
In the Oval Office earlier in the week, the president had admonished Zbig, Jody, the vice president, and Ham to carry out their regular schedules and not do anything out of the ordinary that would arouse suspicion: “And above all, don’t tell anyone—not anyone, do you understand? I know that you all have devoted secretaries who know everything about your work, but I don’t want them to know about this!’”150
At 4:30 p.m., in the midst of a campaign meeting in the Treaty Room planning television spots for the Pennsylvania primary, the president was called to the phone. Ham watched Carter and read his face. The president said nothing, then put down the phone. “Y’all continue. I’ve got to run to the Oval Office for a minute,” Carter said. With that he was gone. About ten minutes later, the phone rang again, and the operator announced: “The President for you, Mr. Jordan.” Carter said: “Ham, I want you to get Fritz and Jody and come to the Oval Office at once. Try not to arouse suspicion.” When they entered the president’s private study, he was standing behind his desk, his coat off, sleeves rolled up, and his hands on his hips. Brzezinski was with him: “I’ve got some bad news. I had to abort the rescue mission.”
Minutes afterward, the phone rang again. It was General Jones, who told him that not only had the mission been aborted because of the shortage of helicopters, but in the process, blinded by the sandstorm, one helicopter had crashed into the C-130 transport, killing eight men and wounding several others; seven helicopters and one C-130 transport were destroyed. The president softly said: “I understand,” and explained the tragic outcome to Vance, Brzezinski, and Ham. Vance said painfully: “Mr. President, I’m very, very sorry.” Ham was so distraught, knowing that the presidency had potentially gone down in flames with the military equipment, that he rushed into the president’s bathroom and, in his words, “vomited my guts out.”151
One more painful decision faced the president: Whether to send in fighter planes to destroy what was left of the helicopters, which carried the mission’s planning documents and other classified information. Bombing them from the air meant that the explosions might kill the busload of Iranians. Carter decided not to order the fire and to save the pilgrims, a humanitarian decision for which he took much criticism.152
Rosalynn, who also knew of the rescue plan, was making speeches and campaigning on the fateful day, pretending that nothing special was happening. She remembered: “It was awful. I knew what was going on and I couldn’t say that; I could hardly think about what was happening and what I was supposed to be doing.” When she got the bad news, “I was actually physically ill. They had it all planned so neatly and if it hadn’t been for the accident of the helicopter flying into the plane.…” Even years later her voice trailed off in sorrow.153 The failure was the worst day in the memory of virtually everyone involved. I was called by the White House Operations Center while I was asleep at home. I immediately told Fran that the fate of the hostages and Carter’s political future were inseparable: For all practical purposes the election was over.
* * *
For Jimmy Carter it was personally devastating. His bold mission failed; eight Americans were dead; the hostages remained captive; and he lost his secretary of state. Within hours the hostages were blindfolded and put in leg irons, then dispersed to every corner of Iran. And the sad result, rather than being seen as the bold and courageous decision that it was, the failed rescue became instead a metaphor for all the problems of the Carter administration. Carter gets no credit for the audacity of the effort. Mondale remembers that after Carter polled everyone about going ahead with it, he asked: “Now, if in the course of this rescue mission our hostages are harmed or killed, would you tell me what policy we should pursue?” When the room fell silent and nobody came forward with an answer or an alternative plan, Carter said: “That’s what I thought.”154 Its failure overwhelmed his courageous decision, and as Rafshoon looked back: “Everything just fell apart after the rescue attempt.”155
In the cold light of hindsight, what made success in such a high-risk operation almost impossible was a mundane reason—lack of practice. Carter, who normally steeped himself in detail, left the planning and execution to the military, and oversight to Defense Secretary Harold Brown, perhaps the smartest and most effective member of his cabinet. But there had been no previous instance when four separate military services—Army Special Forces, Navy ships, Marines and Air Force helicopters, and C-130 planes—had to coordinate in a joint mission. Fear of leaks prevented joint practice of the entire complex operation. None of the meet-ups and handovers were rehearsed, and the chain of command was unclear among the four separate services. There were no interservice run-throughs, and Brown himself conceded afterward that the mission “was not well rehearsed [because] we were probably overly concerned with security.”156
There had been no opportunity for joint or integrated training and a full-scale dress rehearsal. The drivers took their trucks over simulated courses in the American desert mountains. The Green Berets whom the drivers were supposed to ferry to the target ran a number of simulations indicating that they could smash into the embassy buildings and retrieve all the hostages within fifteen minutes. But the drivers, the assault troops, and the helicopter pilots who were supposed to pluck everyone from Tehran and fly them to safety never once practiced together.
Colonel Beckwith put the problem in earthy, Southern terms: When the famed Alabama football coach Bear Bryant prepared his team for games, he had all the players working together, from linemen to running backs and the quarterback. “But here the army Delta Force was doing one thing, the air force was doing something else, so we never all trained together.”157
The official Pentagon Rescue Mission Report concluded that the clandestine operation was consistent with U.S. national security objectives; feasible though high-risk; command and control were excellent at upper echelons but more tenuous at intermediate levels; external resources were not a limiting factor; and planning and preparation were “adequate except for the number of backup helicopters and provisions for weather contingencies”—and “except for the lack of a comprehensive, full-scale training exercise.”158
At 7:00 a.m., April 25, 1980, a somber president addressed the nation from the Oval Office to share the disastrous news of the failure of the rescue mission. He explained that it had been undertaken because of the “steady unraveling of authority in Iran” and the “mounting dangers” to the American hostages; praised the courage of the rescue team; expressed sorrow to the families of those who died; stressed it was a “humanitarian mission” and was not directed “with any hostility toward Iran or its people”; and accepted full responsibility for the operation and its cancellation.159
Now he realized he had to get himself out of the box of his self-imposed ban on traveling and campaigning. And he did it in the most maladroit way possible. At a press conference on April 30, he lamely stated that because the rescue operation was now over and our allies were joining with us to convince Iran to resolve the hostage crisis promptly, sanctions had been imposed against the Soviet Union for their invasion of the Soviet Union; our new anti-inflation proposals had been sent to Congress; our energy legislation was on its way to passage with a windfall profits tax; and the challenges facing the country were “manageable enough” (emphasis added) to permit him to resume his outside activities.160 Watching the press conference, Ham Jordan saw his secretary visibly wince, and said, “We’ll catch hell for that” and “We deserved to.”161
DIPLOMACY UNFROZEN
It is hard to blame Carter alone, and there was one positive and enduring outcome—a change in how the military operated. The
Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 changed the way the services interact, creating a Joint Special Operations Program involving all the services. This helped make possible the success of the type of daring raid that killed Osama bin Laden during the Obama administration.
There was also a positive and immediate outcome: It unfroze the diplomatic impasse and led to negotiations that ultimately freed the hostages unharmed. It became clear that Khomeini understood he had by now leveraged everything possible out of the hostages to consolidate his own leadership, and that U.S. sanctions and Iran’s image as a pariah state presented increasing problems. He had already announced in late February that the hostage crisis would be ended when Iran had an elected government following parliamentary elections.
The Iranian elections were held in August 1980, and when a new government was formed, Khomeini’s forces controlled it. The hostages had lost their political value, and U.S. sanctions, imperfect as they were, had begun to bite. The Americans were moved back to Tehran—this time to an Iranian prison where they could hear the screams of others being tortured. A Khomeini emissary contacted the West German government on September 12 to propose negotiations to end the hostage crisis. This was the first time someone with Khomeini’s authoritative backing had proposed a negotiated settlement, and the emissary wanted it resolved before the American presidential election on November 4.
Negotiations between the administration and Iran’s representative, Sadegh Tabatabai, had begun in earnest in Bonn when they were waylaid by a totally unexpected event: Fearful that a resurgent Shiite Iran would undermine his Sunni political base, Saddam Hussein had the Iraqi army invade on September 22, ostensibly because of a dispute with Iran over territory claimed by Iraq at the head of the Gulf, known as the Shatt al Arab. Tabatabai could not even return from Bonn because the air space was closed. Iran wrongly assumed that the United States was behind the invasion, and the nation now was engaged in a war for survival. The American hostages were no longer the Iranian government’s top priority.
President Carter Page 97
