The FReeper Foxhole Revisits Operation Eagle Claw (4/24/1980) - Apr. 24th, 2004

http://www.afa.org/magazine/jan1999/0199desertone_print.html ^

[snippy_about_it]

Lord,

Keep our Troops forever in Your care

Give them victory over the enemy...

Grant them a safe and swift return...

Bless those who mourn the lost.
.

FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer
for all those serving their country at this time.


...................................................................................... ...........................................

U.S. Military History, Current Events and Veterans Issues

Where Duty, Honor and Country
are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.

Our Mission:

The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans.

In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should feel free to address their specific circumstances or whatever issues concern them in an atmosphere of peace, understanding, brotherhood and support.

The FReeper Foxhole hopes to share with it's readers an open forum where we can learn about and discuss military history, military news and other topics of concern or interest to our readers be they Veteran's, Current Duty or anyone interested in what we have to offer.

If the Foxhole makes someone appreciate, even a little, what others have sacrificed for us, then it has accomplished one of it's missions.

We hope the Foxhole in some small way helps us to remember and honor those who came before us.

To read previous Foxhole threads or
to add the Foxhole to your sidebar,
click on the books below.

The FReeper Foxhole Revisits

Operation Eagle Claw
Iranian Hostage Crisis

For some, the current political debate over the combat readiness of today's American military stirs memories of a long-ago event that, more than anything else, came to symbolize the disastrously "hollow" forces of the post-Vietnam era.

It began in the evening of April 24, 1980, when a supposedly elite US military force launched a bold but doomed attempt to rescue their fellow American citizens and their nation's honor from captivity in Tehran. In the early hours of April 25, the effort ended in fiery disaster at a remote spot in Iran known ever after as Desert One.

This failed attempt to rescue 53 hostages from the US Embassy in Tehran resulted in the death of five US Air Force men and three Marines, serious injuries to five other troops, and the loss of eight aircraft. That failure would haunt the US military for years and would torment some of the key participants for the rest of their lives.

One, Air Force Col. James Kyle, called it, "The most colossal episode of hope, despair, and tragedy I had experienced in nearly three decades of military service."

The countdown to this tragedy opened exactly 20 years ago, in January 1979. A popular uprising in Iran forced the sudden abdication and flight into exile of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the longtime ruler of Iran and staunch US ally. Brought to power in the wake of this event was a government led, in name, by Shahpur Bakhtiar and Abolhassan Bani Sadr. Within months, they, too, had been shoved aside, replaced by fundamentalist Shiite Muslim clerics led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.



On Nov. 4, two weeks after President Jimmy Carter had allowed the shah to enter the US for medical care, 3,000 Iranian "student" radicals invaded the US Embassy in Tehran, taking 66 Americans hostage. Chief of Mission L. Bruce Laingen and two aides were held separately at the Iranian Foreign Ministry.

The students demanded that the shah be returned for trial. Khomeini's supporters blocked all efforts to free the hostages.

Thirteen black and female hostages would be released later as a "humanitarian" gesture, but the humiliating captivity for the others would drag on for 14 months.

Rice Bowl

Carter, facing a re-election battle in 1980, strongly favored a diplomatic solution, but his national security advisor, Zbignew Brzezinski, directed the Pentagon to begin planning for a rescue mission or retaliatory strikes in case the hostages were harmed. In response, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. David C. Jones, established a small, secretive planning group, dubbed "Rice Bowl," to study American options for a rescue effort.

It quickly became clear how difficult that would be.



The first obstacle was the location. Tehran was isolated, surrounded by more than 700 miles of desert and mountains in any direction. This cut the city off from ready attack by US air or naval forces. Moreover, the embassy was in the heart of the city congested by more than four million people.

A bigger hurdle, however, was the condition of the US military, which had plummeted in size and quality in the seven years since it had staged a near-total withdrawal from Vietnam. Among the casualties of the post­Vietnam cutbacks was the once-powerful array of Army and Air Force special operations forces that had performed feats of great bravery and military skill in Southeast Asia.

The one exception was an elite unit of soldiers recently formed to counter the danger of international terror. This unit, called Delta Force, was commanded by Army Col. Charles Beckwith, a combat-tested special forces officer. Delta, which had just been certified as operational after conducting a hostage rescue exercise, was directed to start planning for the real thing at the Tehran embassy.

The immediate question was how to get Delta close enough to do its job. Directing the planners who were trying to solve that riddle was Army Maj. Gen. James Vaught, a veteran of three wars, with Ranger and airborne experience but no exposure to special operations or multiservice missions. Because of the need for extreme secrecy, he was denied the use of an existing JCS or service organization. Vaught had to assemble his planning team and the joint task force that would conduct the mission from widely scattered sources.



One of the early selections was Kyle, a highly regarded veteran of air commando operations in Vietnam, who would help plan the air mission and would be on-scene commander at Desert One.

When Beckwith ruled out a parachute drop, helicopters became the best option for reaching Tehran, despite the doubts Beckwith and other Vietnam veterans had about their reliability. Navy RH-53D Sea Stallions, which were used as airborne minesweepers, were chosen because of their superior range and load-carrying capability and their ability to operate from an aircraft carrier.

Even the Navy Sea Stallions could not fly from the Indian Ocean to Tehran without refueling. After testing and rejecting alternatives, the task force opted to use Air Force EC-130 Hercules transports rigged with temporary 18,000-gallon fuel bladders to refuel the helicopters on their way to Tehran.

Finding the Spot

However, that decision led to the requirement of finding a spot in the Iranian desert where the refueling could take place on the ground. That required terrain that would support the weight of the gas-bloated Hercules.

US intelligence found and explored just such a location, about 200 miles southeast of Tehran. In planning and training, this site was known as Desert One.



Because the RH-53s were Navy aircraft, the Pentagon assigned Navy pilots to fly them and added Marine copilots to provide experience with land assault missions.

That combination soon proved unworkable, as many of the Navy's pilots were unable or unwilling to master the unfamiliar and difficult tasks of long-range, low-level flying over land, at night, using primitive night vision goggles.

In December, most of the Navy pilots were replaced by Marines carefully selected for their experience in night and low-level flying. The mission ultimately had 16 pilots: 12 Marine, three Navy, and one Air Force.

Selected to lead the helicopter element was Marine Lt. Col. Edward Seiffert, a veteran H-53 pilot who had flown long-range search-and-rescue missions in Vietnam and had considerable experience flying with night vision goggles.

Beckwith described Seiffert as "a no-nonsense, humorless--some felt rigid--officer who wanted to get on with the job."

Delta and the helicopter crews never developed the coordination and trust that are essential to high-stress, complex combat missions. Possibly, this was caused by the disjointed nature of the task force and its training.



While the helicopter crews worked out of Yuma, Ariz., the members of Delta Force did most of their training in the woods of North Carolina. Other Army personnel were drilling in Europe. The Air Force crews that would take part in the mission trained in Florida or Guam, thousands of miles away in the Pacific.

The entire operation was being directed by a loosely assembled staff in Washington, D.C., which insisted that all the elements had to be further isolated by a tightly controlled flow of information that would protect operational security.

"Ours was a tenuous amalgamation of forces held together by an intense common desire to succeed, but we were slow coming together as a team," Kyle wrote in his account of the mission.

Meanwhile, Beckwith and his staff were desperate for detailed information on the physical layout of the embassy, the numbers and locations of the Iranian guards, and, most important, the location of the hostages.

Six Buildings

Without that data, Delta had to plan to search up to six buildings in the embassy compound where the hostages might be held. That required Beckwith to increase the size of his assault force, which meant more helicopters were needed.

No intelligence was coming out of Iran because Carter had dismantled the CIA's network of spies due to the agency's role in overthrowing governments in Vietnam and Latin America.

It would be months before agents could be inserted into Iran to supply the detailed intelligence Beckwith said was "the difference between failure and success, between humiliation and pride, between losing lives and saving them."

Despite all the obstacles, the task force by mid-March 1980 had developed what they considered a workable plan, and all of the diverse operational elements had become confident of their ability to carry it out.

The plan was staggering in its scope and complexity, bringing together scores of aircraft and thousands of men from all four services and from units scattered from Arizona to Okinawa, Japan.

Be sure to visit Freeper RaceBannon's site to get more info on
Operation Eagle Claw and the Iranian Hostage Crisis

---

---

FReeper Foxhole Armed Services Links

[Soaring Feather]

Come on over snippy, I have one pound of bacon and some eggs, I'll cook!! LOL Got bread too. :-)

[The Mayor]

we're staying in the 50's and 60's all week.

At least we are having a spring.
There is still ice flowing down the river.
It's more than 2 weeks now.

[Iris7]

The Pat Tillman story is big this morning. Not as big as it should be.

I found out too late that most Americans (those that defile that proud name) are not worth fighting for.

There is a remnant, however, of an entirely different sort. With pride I name Pat Tillman my Countryman. He will be missed.

I am sure all here at the Foxhole join in my sentiment.

[Professional Engineer]

1962 1st Lockheed A-12 is taxi tested

THE LOCKHEED YF-12
Project Summary

The YF-12 "Blackbird" was an experimental fighter-interceptor version of the Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft. In Air Force flight tests on May 1, 1965, the YF-12 set a speed record of 2,070.101 mph and an altitude record of 80,257.65 feet. First publicly displayed at Edwards Air Force Base in 1964, the YF-12 was never adopted by the military as an operational aircraft. It was, however, a precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance plane.

Two YF-12s were flown in a joint Air Force-NASA research program at the NASA Flight Research Center (after 1976, the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center) between 1969 and 1979. A third shared plane, piloted primarily by the Air Force, was lost to an in-flight fire in 1971.

The YF-12 allowed NASA researchers at all four of the agency's aeronautical centers (Langley, Lewis [now Glenn], and Ames as well as the Flight Research Center) to study the thermal, structural, and aerodynamic effects of sustained, high-altitude, Mach 3 flight. Painted flat black, the YF-12 was fabricated primarily from titanium alloy, which enabled it to withstand skin temperatures of over 500º F.

Work on the YF-12 began in secret in the late 1950s at the Lockheed Advanced Development Projects office, better as known the "Skunk Works," in Burbank, Calif. Flight data remained classified long after President Lyndon Johnson announced the plane's existence on Feb. 29, 1964. After the announcement, the plane received the Air Force designation YF-12A.

(The "Skunk Works" was the unofficial designation of Lockheed's secret development entity in Burbank. It was located near a plastics plant that exuded a rather strong odor. Since the engineers were also brewing up their secret designs, the "Skonk Works" in Al Capp's comic strip "L'il Abner," where Kickapoo Joy Juice was made, seemed an appropriate designation. However, it was changed to Skunk Works to avoid plagiarism.)

Although it yielded large amounts of research data, the YF-12 program was terminated in the late 1970s when NASA's research agenda shifted from speed to efficiency. During its nine-year life, the YF-12 research program logged 297 flights in the joint NASA-Air Force program and approximately 450 flight hours.

Only one YF-12 remains in existence. It is displayed at the U.S. Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

Requisite NASA pic.

Rather cool SR-71 pic.

[SAMWolf]

Thanks Valin.

[SAMWolf]

Breakfast? What's breakfast? Is that something to do while drinking The Mayor's coffee?

[SAMWolf]

Morning PE. Thanks for letting us know about the Three Flags Ceremony. Learned something new.

[SAMWolf]

Eagle Claw was intensely micro-managed by the White House

That was my understanding too. Decisions that should have been made in the field were being made at the White House.

[Professional Engineer]

ROFL. He should have visited a habbardashery first.

[SAMWolf]

With pride I name Pat Tillman my Countryman.

People like Pat Tillman and the others who are serving make me proud to call myself an American.

[SAMWolf]

Snippy and I got to get a close look at a Blackbird.

Impressive plane.

[Professional Engineer]

Thanks for the three flag post and link about the Louisiana purchase. I love history. ;-)

I didn't know about this one either. I fell into it looking for Bentfeather's daily flag o'gram.

[snippy_about_it]

Of course!

[snippy_about_it]

Right after I posted Sam showed up with my Starbucks in hand! It doesn't get any better than this.

I am hungry though. I'd love to come on over.

[snippy_about_it]

At least we are having a spring.

That's good. I know the last few years back east we've barely had one.

[Professional Engineer]

With pride I name Pat Tillman my Countryman.

People like Pat Tillman and the others who are serving make me proud to call myself an American.

Yes sirree!

Msdrby and I had this conversation last night.

[snippy_about_it]

I am sure all here at the Foxhole join in my sentiment.

I'm sure we do. Most of us are here because we are "like minded".

Thank you for fighting for those of us that are worth it, at least I hope we were. We are forever in debt to you and all the other veterans who gave some and of course to those who gave all. "We" will never forget.

[snippy_about_it]

Snippy and I got to get a close look at a Blackbird.

It was actually smaller than I expected it to be. Maybe because it was near the B-17 and the Spruce Goose, but it seemed like it should have been bigger.

[Professional Engineer]

The only time I've been near on was on the parade ground at Lackland AFB. Of course being in parade formation, I had plenty of time to crawl over, under and around it. ;-(

[Valin]

SUCCESS! Oh it was nip and tuck there for a while, but I just said what would John Wayne do? So I sucked it up and charged in, knife and fork a blur. Needless to say the eggs and bacon didn't stand a chance.
grrr