Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (33 page)

“Allahuakbar!”

“Allahuakbar!”

“Allahuakbar!”

Immediately after wowing the brass at Fort Stewart in early November, and then staying up almost all night with Beckwith to celebrate, Major Logan Fitch had taken his newly certified Delta Force squadron for a week of skiing in Breckenridge, Colorado. He called it “winter warfare training” but the trip was primarily a reward, a chance to blow off steam. They all had been working for two years without a break. Fitch was an expert skier himself, and he hired some local instructors to assist him. They spent their days on the sunny slopes and their nights in the resort’s bars and restaurants. But before the week was up, Fitch was summoned back east. He was flown back alone to the CIA “Farm” in southern Virginia.

There he met with Beckwith and the rest of the unit’s commanders, and within two days, joined by his squadron and the one under Schoomaker’s command, he began training to rescue the American hostages in Iran. None of the men had been given a chance to go home on a quick stopover at Fort Bragg to gather up their gear, and none was allowed to contact family members to explain where they were and what they were doing. Fitch’s men had left for what they thought would be a week in the high Rockies and instead had disappeared into the sprawling acres of the Farm, a “secure, undisclosed location.” It would be Christmas before they would have permission to visit home.

Less than a month after it had gone to work inside the secret suite on the inner rim of the Pentagon, the small group of unorthodox military planners had made substantial progress. Delta had the luxury of not worrying about how they were going to get to Tehran and back, so they concentrated on what they called “action at the objective,” how to most effectively take down the embassy compound and free the hostages. The release of thirteen hostages had provided a bonanza of detailed information. Debriefing the released blacks and women, they learned a lot about who was guarding the Americans, what kind of weapons they had, where they were positioned inside and outside the embassy gates, and what kind of reaction they might expect when they stormed the compound. The fact that the guards appeared to all be untrained amateurs was good news. They learned roughly where the hostages were being held, in which buildings, and in what parts of those buildings, at least as of mid-November. The fact that the captors had created more or less permanent holding areas for large groups of hostages, such as the Mushroom Inn and the chancery basement, was more good news. Still, pinpointing and keeping track of where the captive Americans were being held would be a consistent problem.

At the Farm, an elaborate eight-by-eight-foot model of the compound was built, with the buildings reproduced in exact detail. There were two separate take-apart models of the chancery and warehouse. The roofs could be lifted off and upper floors removed so that the men could memorize the layout of each floor. The models, along with blueprints of the buildings and up-to-date satellite surveillance, allowed them to know the compound better than they knew their own homes. The drawings revealed the location of circuit breakers, where they could cut the electricity and black out the entire compound during their assault. From television they learned about how the compound and each building inside it was guarded on the outside. To practice storming the compound they used engineering tape to lay out a silhouette on the grass of the main buildings and outer walls, and then they timed themselves storming in from various directions, looking for the fastest way in and out. The tape would be taken up whenever Soviet surveillance satellites were known to be passing overhead. They spent hours and hours on scenario training, practicing moving into rooms and hallways and confronting guards, all the while fine-tuning their force structure. They did a lot of weapons training. Of great help was Captain Robinson, the intelligence officer unknowingly released by the Iranians simply because he was black. Robinson was able to answer a myriad of small practical questions. Do certain doors open out or in? What material is it made of? How thick? How thick were the walls in various places and how were they constructed? How thick was the brick wall around the compound? In the warehouse, the only access to the Mushroom Inn on the blueprints was a narrow staircase that led down to a long hallway. This meant the raiding force would have to move to the bottom of the stairs and then race down a perilous length before bursting into the rooms where hostages were being held, allowing the guards potentially disastrous seconds to grasp what was happening and react, possibly by shooting hostages. From one of the freed hostages, Delta’s planners learned that the wall at the bottom of the steps that separated the holding rooms from the hallway was flimsy and could easily be knocked down. So the raiding force could break directly into the rooms, saving precious seconds and adding the shock and confusion Delta needed to create in the attempt.

They planned to enter the compound stealthily, coming over the back walls and using weapons equipped with silencers to shoot guards who got in their way, but on the way out they planned to blow a hole in the wall big enough to walk all of the hostages out. So they built brick walls of identical thickness and practiced blowing holes in them.

It was an intricate maneuver that would require careful choreography; when Schoomaker likened the raid to a ballet one day he heard guffaws, but that’s what it was. One of the men promptly produced a cartoon showing a fully outfitted Delta operator wearing a tutu and dancing on tiptoe. The men were broken into three teams—Red, White, and Blue—one to deal with matters outside the embassy walls, and two to conduct the takedowns inside. The Blue element, the smallest, was led by Major Jerry Boykin, and its primary responsibility was to cover the gates to the compound once the raid had begun and to storm, take, and hold the soccer stadium across the street to the compound’s north. Inside the walls, the hostage takers had placed obstacles on rooftops, tennis courts, and any flat places where helicopters might land. Because of this the plan called for the hostages and rescue force to rally inside the soccer stadium, where the choppers would land, load, and leave. Boykin’s force employed sniper teams with machine guns to prevent any Iranian force from entering the compound or stadium. Fitch’s White team had the biggest job, assaulting the ninety-room chancery, which had been “hardened,” outfitted with barred windows, sandbags, and heavy doors prior to the takeover. If the hostage takers utilized the defensive measures, the main building was going to be a damn hard target. Schoomaker’s Red team was going to assault the warehouse that contained the Mushroom Inn. There were also two command elements, a primary one led by Beckwith himself and a backup led by Burruss.

They were constantly fine-tuning the ballet. They had chosen to go over the walls to begin the raid by ascending ladders from the outside and then jumping down six feet to the tennis courts. One day, Intelligence Sergeant Gary Moston made a surprising discovery poring over satellite photos. Examining the shadows around the tennis courts, he noticed that they were sunken; they were twelve feet from the top of the wall, not six! So the assault force would have jumped in the dark expecting to drop only six feet, and instead would have fallen twice that far. Burruss could picture his men in a helpless pile with broken ankles and legs, and with more men raining down on top of them. They chose a different spot for the ladders.

If things went wrong and the helicopters couldn’t make it in, they practiced alternate scenarios to evade capture and escape by driving trucks into either Turkey or Afghanistan, three hundred to four hundred miles distant. Delta built portable facades that could be placed inside a vehicle so that if its back doors were opened it would look like it was loaded with canned goods or boxes—the hostages and rescuers would be hidden behind. The unit practiced dealing with customs questions and learned some key phrases in Turkish and Afghan. The military combed its ranks to select volunteers who spoke fluent Farsi to join the force as truck drivers.

By the end of November, Delta was basically ready to storm the compound, but the problem of delivering them and getting them out remained. It was determined that the only helicopters large enough for the job, with enough range and with folding tail booms that would enable them to be stored secretly belowdecks on an aircraft carrier, were navy RH-53D Sea Stallions, which were used primarily for minesweeping operations. The choppers would have to be hidden below decks because the Soviets flew regular reconnaissance over the American fleet, and they would surely notice eight additional choppers. The model could also be outfitted with additional external fuel tanks. The Sea Stallions had good range, but nowhere near enough to fly from the Persian Gulf or neighboring countries to Tehran and back without refueling several times, and the military lacked the capability of refueling them in the air. So they needed to establish a remote refueling point somewhere in the desert south of Tehran. In the Pentagon suite, one group set about finding a suitable desert location, while another worked on plans for delivering the fuel.

An early scheme was to package the aviation fuel in rubber bladders big enough to hold five hundred gallons each and drop them from aircraft to the refueling spot. Parachutes would slow the multiton blivits’ descent, and the forces aboard the choppers would then roll them into position to transfer the fuel with manually operated pumps. This would avoid the necessity of landing large fixed-wing aircraft in the desert, a risky maneuver.

It proved easier said than done. At a complete dry run of the mission staged in the Arizona desert outside Yuma at the end of November, Burruss was standing with General Phillip C. Gast, Fitch, and Boykin when a practice blivit-drop was attempted. It was a clear desert night with a full moon and they could clearly see growing black blobs against the dark blue sky as they descended. Major Schoomaker was looking up with night-vision goggles, expecting to see a neat row of pallets come flying out of the plane at intervals, then blossom with parachutes, and instead saw what looked like an airplane vomiting something off its back ramp. It was immediately apparent that some of the blobs were falling much too fast, plummeting actually. Something about their squishy bulk had played havoc with the rigging and their parachutes had failed to open. They streamered in, great black hurtling, truck-sized watermelons that hit the desert floor with a gigantic cracking sploosh! The air was suddenly pungent with the odor of splattered aviation fuel. More followed.

“Jesus Christ, I hope none of them is coming my way,” said Fitch.

Cigarettes were hastily extinguished.

It was sploosh! after sploosh! as the blivits crashed in. Three of the ten blivits landed safely, but moving them across the uneven desert ground proved more difficult than imagined. Eventually the riggers would lick the problem of landing the blivits softly, but the time it took to move them and pump fuel from them, along with the unforgettable experience of hearing them crack into the desert floor, permanently soured the mission planners on the method. So it was back to the drawing boards.

The dry run had disclosed other serious problems. The navy chopper pilots were especially unimpressive. They were accustomed to flying relatively low-stress minesweeping runs over water. This mission would call for something much harder. The choppers were going to be loaded right up to their maximum carrying capacity—Delta had carefully calculated how much ammunition and water each man could carry in order to make sure they stayed just under the limit—which made them difficult to maneuver in the best of circumstances. The pilots would be flying in blacked-out conditions wearing night-vision goggles, which were a technological miracle but which sharply reduced range of vision and could be worn for only thirty minutes at a time before causing severe eye strain. The pilots had to take turns wearing them on a long flight. Entering Iran stealthily called for maneuvering in darkness through mountain ranges flying low enough to avoid radar, which was often hair-raising. Landing and taking off in the desert stirred up dust storms that often meant flying blind. After the first dry run, one of the pilots begged off the mission. Beckwith wanted him court-martialled, calling him a “quitter” and worse, and though the pilot was not punished, he was forced to remain in isolation, for fear of leaking information. Eventually the entire navy squadron was replaced by marine pilots who lacked experience with the Sea Stallions but who had more experience flying missions over land, and in combat. This did not completely placate Beckwith and his squadrons, who had worked with veteran air force special-ops pilots whom they trusted and greatly respected. But this was a “joint op,” and the air force already had its piece of the mission, flying the fixed-wing aircraft. Beckwith suspected, rightly, that the marines were given the choppers to fly to satisfy their need for a role. The marines believed their pilots were at least as good as the air force’s, if not better, but there was no convincing “Charging Charlie.” As far as he was concerned, he was getting second-string pilots because the brass was less interested in success than in keeping things collegial in the Pentagon dining halls. This suspicion, that Pentagon politics was being given a higher priority than excellence, would continue to influence morale. Delta believed the men recruited to deliver them and fly them out were not in their league.

The biggest problem remained intelligence, specifically what in tactical parlance was called EEI (Essential Elements of Information). There was no CIA presence in Iran—the three agency officers were being held hostage. In a message to General Vaught after the Yuma exercise, Beckwith produced an alphabetized list of concerns.

My most critical EEIs remain unanswered. These are the vital questions which must be answered to reduce the current risk and accomplish our rescue mission: A. Are all the hostages actually in the embassy compound during the hours of darkness? B. Where and in what strength are check points along major routes in Tehran which lead to the embassy compound? C. What assistance and support can be provided to Delta by in-place assets? D. Who will drive the trucks if and when [they are obtained]? E. Are there any safe houses in the vicinity of the compound Delta could use prior to the actual rescue? F. What is the night time MO [modus operandi] of roving patrols and sentry posts in and around the compound? G. What is the strength of the enemy inside the compound during the hours of darkness? Can the enemy reinforce the compound? If so, in what strength?