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Posted on 04/24/2003 6:21:28 AM PDT by SAMWolf
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 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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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.  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. 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. 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. 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. Operation Eagle Claw and the Iranian Hostage Crisis
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Hope you feel better.
The mission failed because Carter had gutted intelligence and defence, depriving our forces of the training and preparation necessary for success.
I well remember watching the taking of the hostages on television (at thirty-three, with clarity).
Let it be recalled that Carter made a point of consorting with all the basest dictators and betraying all our allies.
He gave away our Canal and betrayed the Shah and Taiwan, allowed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Pol Pot massacre of two million.
During his malaise his response to adversity was to don a cardigan and turn down the White House thermostat.
It would take a man, a leader, an American to reverse Carter's death spiral and win the Cold War.
But let us look again at the key paragraph from the above account of Operation Eagle Claw:
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.
Indeed, Carter dismantled the CIA. From Bill Gertz, Breakdown: How America's intelligence failures led to September 11, Regnery, 2002, page 63:
[Reference Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Foot Soldier in the CIA's War On Terror, Crown, 2002.]
Robert Baer, the persecuted CIA field agent, said that when he first entered the CIA in 1976, the agency's espionage branch was reeling from a devastating series of firings by President Jimmy Carter's director of Centeral Intelligence, Admiral Stansfield Turner.
Turner, who had no professional experience with intelligence, decided to cut 820 positions within the CIA Operations Directorate. The cuts were announced in imprersonal notices sent out on Halloween--October 31, 1977. "It has been decided that your services are no longer needed," the termination notes stated. For the Clandestine Service, the cuts were a blow from which it never recovered. Every director of Central Intelligence since then has tried in vain to "rebuild" the operational capability of the CIA.
Modern American warfare uses intelligence assets seamlessly with battlefield awareness, precision targeting and a volunteer force given every tool to maximize its morale and proficiency.
Carter was the diametric apposite: he denigrated the military and cut its resources with the ensuing tragic result in Operation Eagle Claw.
We now provide training and resources to ensure the success of our missions.
Meanwhile Carter garners a Noble Peace Prize for insulting our president and commander-in-chief, and giving aid and comfort to the scum of the earth from Fidel Castro to Hugo Chavez to Kim Jong Il.
God Bless the valiant warriors of Operation Eagle Claw.
Let their revenge vis a vis the pigs of Iran be swift and sure, from the streets of Basra to the coming counterrevolution in Teheran.
Thanks for your role in this Race.
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