Posted on 04/15/2005 4:22:10 PM PDT by F14 Pilot
WASHINGTON - It was a quarter-century ago this month, April 24, 1980, that the secret American raid into Iran to rescue 53 hostages from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran collapsed in disaster on a make-shift airstrip in the middle of the Iranian desert.
The embarrassingly public failure of the raid, code-named Operation Eagle Claw, was a low-water mark for the Carter administration and for our military as well, still struggling to get back on its feet in the wake of the debacle in Vietnam just five years before.
Eight American servicemen died when the raid came apart with the fiery collision of a Marine RH-53 helicopter and an Air Force EC-130 on the ground. President Jimmy Carter had already ordered the mission aborted when too few helicopters were still usable after a low-level flight into Iran from an American aircraft carrier out to sea.
With the raid the world also got its first partial look at a super-secret U.S. Army Special Operations force known as Operational Detachment-Delta and its legendary founding commander, Col. Charlie Beckwith, a Special Forces and 101st Airborne Division veteran of two tours in Vietnam.
Carter announced the failure and, appropriately, took full responsibility for it. He had micro-managed the operation from the White House and bent to pressure from all the services for a piece of the action and the glory.
Beckwith's forces did not own their own transportation, so the Air Force would haul the raiders into the staging and refueling area deep in the Iranian desert by C-130 turboprop transport planes, while Marine helicopters that would ferry the Delta operators from the airstrip to Tehran came in from the sea.
The helicopter crews had to be cobbled together from Marine, Navy and Air Force pilots at the last minute when it was discovered that some of the Marine pilots lacked the skills needed to fly such a mission.
A number of Operation Detachment-Delta operators and agents had already infiltrated into Tehran to help conduct the strike to rescue the 53 diplomats and Marine guards who were taken hostage when a mob seized the U.S. Embassy on Nov. 4, 1979.
Beckwith and higher-ranking supporters in the Pentagon had lobbied for the rescue mission to be carried out by the hostage-rescue experts of Delta, and had begun planning a rescue within hours of the seizure of the Americans.
But all that planning and hard work had come apart so disastrously. The raiders and the air crews, their secret airstrip now marked by the towering flames of burning aircraft, packed up and flew out on the remaining C-130s. Orders were given to destroy the helicopters but in the confusion they weren't carried out. The secret plans fell into the hands of the Iranians, and the Tehran agents working for the United States narrowly escaped capture themselves.
Some say the failure paralyzed the administration and led directly to Carter's defeat by Ronald Reagan the following November. The Iranians finally freed the hostages on the day Reagan was inaugurated, 444 days after they were seized.
Not long afterward Beckwith quietly retired from the Army. He never tried to put the blame on Carter then, or ever. He died nearly 15 years later, convinced that most of the blame lay with inter-service rivalry.
What grew out of that failure was a determination by some powerful members of Congress, as well as those who believed in and nurtured the small special operations community, that this would never happen again, that a command designed to ensure the success of such secret missions was needed and it needed to be totally self-sufficient in everything, including aircraft, helicopters and pilots.
Against stubborn opposition in the Pentagon, such a command was born. It is today's U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Base, Fla., headed by a four-star flag officer - general or admiral - and has come into its own since 9/11.
Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers. Readers may write to him at: Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, 700 12th St. N.W., Suite 1000, Washington, D.C. 20005-3994. His column appears most Fridays in the American News.
LOL!
That was F14, not me. :-)
They reached all of their objectives, they all got in and out alive...there were just no POWs there.
There was NOBODY there....
The embarrassingly public failure of the raid, code-named Operation Eagle Claw, was a low-water mark for the Carter administration and for our military as well, still struggling to get back on its feet in the wake of the debacle in Vietnam just five years before.
I was sitting at Cairo West in Egypt........didn't have a clue it was going down till nooooze broke. I have a good friend .....T. Hall, that was on the raid. When he does talk about it I gathered that weight was an issue. Their field jackets had MP5 mag pouches sewn into them and they were limited to very little as far as gear , weapons etc . His I love me wall validated his past......as do his cred's . Good stories as stated when ya can get him to talk about it ....rare occasion if ever.
Stay safe !
I was thinking almost the same thing but with a different Pres. when the Chinese made us look like b*tches when they forced our aircraft down and chopped it up into pieces and charged us to mail it back to us.
A guy at ST2 with a colorful past who was a native German speaker was in Teheran at the time, and E and E'd all the way to Turkey when TSHTF.
Thanks for the ping!
It was a bad plan from the start. Too complex.
Funny Ross Perot was able to get his people out when they were held hostage with the
help of Lt. Col. Bull Simons as his planer & leader.
"Can it happen again and if it does, what will be American response?"
I don't think the Iranians have any doubt as to the response by GWB or any other Republican president. Remember, the frenchies were dragging their feet on a lot of things leading up to the last election; when it became clear that GWB would be there for another 4 years, they began to talk a bit but they obvously wanted John F'n Kerry or anyone other than a Republican president.
Thanks for posting this.
This is an excellent reminder of what Carter did to our military, our intel and our country.
Carter was/is the best friend of Islamofascists and Communist Dictators have ever had. He enabled and set up the current two plus decade of Islamo terrorism.
fyi
u r most welcome ;-)
Yes Carter was a real Schmuck!
Carter operated the entire damn military on a shoestring. We didn't have enough money for training and not enough money for bullets.
Dumbass had visions of "Entebbe II" and came out looking like Keystone Cops.
Worst....President....Ever.
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