Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (34 page)

As problems were identified, the number of mission planners at the Pentagon kept growing. They were crammed into a relatively small space, along with tables, chairs, filing cabinets, maps, and displays. Room 2C840 was off the chairman’s corridor, a ceremonial stretch of hallway lined with portraits of the lengthening line of men who had served as chairman of the joint chiefs. There was a cipher lock on the door to enter the outer office, and a second steel door inside with another cipher lock that led to the inner sanctum. It was a classic boiler-room environment, windowless, crowded, and noisy with conversation and ringing phones. The space was so cramped that it resembled the inside of a submarine, with exposed wires and pipes in the ceiling and wall-to-wall desks, safes, files, maps, and people. The air-conditioning didn’t work well, and about half of those in the room smoked. Briefings were held every morning and every afternoon for the chairman of the joint chiefs and the secretary of defense, Harold Brown, and in the afternoons Brzezinski usually sat in. Sometimes Hamilton Jordan stopped by. Brzezinski dominated the meetings, going on often at sometimes infuriating length about theoretical things that the nuts-and-bolts men in the room found irrelevant. The chairman, General Jones, was so soft-spoken and deferential that even when he spoke the men in the room sometimes couldn’t make out what he was saying. Brown would fiddle with his glasses and sometimes look at Jones imploringly, as if to say, Tell me what to do here. The goal was always to reach a point where Jones and Brown felt comfortable that the mission had a reasonable chance of success, and day after day it was clear that they were still a long way from that goal.

The mission posed problems that seemed insoluble, but giving up was not an option. Early on, one of the officers involved tried to capture the improbability of the exercise with a list of “requirements” and “conditions,” all of them true.

Requirements

Fly 15,000 miles around the world—850 miles of it in Iran.Enter into Tehran undetected.Breach the embassy and rescue the hostages.Return the hostages without harm.Don’t hurt any civilians, Iranian or otherwise.Rescue the three Americans at the Foreign Ministry simultaneously.Do not permit the Iranian forces to be aware of or react to our presence.

Conditions

No country will help you.You must invent the force to do the job. It does not now exist.The operation could go in ten days and you must always be ready to execute in ten days.The entire training program must be kept secret—not only from the public but from most of the services themselves.There will be no money directly provided for the program.Most service points of contact cannot be directly approached.The entire operation must take place in darkness.

Beckwith did away with the fifth of the “requirements.” At one of the early briefing sessions, as he outlined the plan for assaulting one embassy gate, a high-ranking navy officer asked, “What about the guard?”

Beckwith was startled by the question and leaned his imposing mass across the table in the questioner’s direction, looking him squarely in the eyes.

“He will be taken out,” he said.

“You mean killed?” asked the officer, who seemed shocked.

Beckwith growled at him, “I’ll shoot him right between the eyes and then do it again just to make sure.”

The failure of the blivits meant that they would have to land large fixed-wing aircraft in the desert, which meant finding a location with hard enough soil and flat enough ground to serve as a makeshift runway. Some thought was given to simply seizing an airport outside Tehran, but that would have blown the surprise critical for Delta’s success.

By the end of the month a mission was taking shape. Sea Stallion helicopters would fly off the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk in the Arabian Sea. They would cross over into Iranian airspace at locations known to be uncovered by that country’s radar intercept system—Americans had designed it and built it, so they knew its weaknesses. Six choppers would fly to Desert One, an as yet unidentified rallying point in the desert. At the same time, six MC-130 transports equipped with sophisticated navigation and electronic countermeasure devices would fly from Wadi Kena, an airstrip in a remote corner of Egypt that had been built by the Russians a decade before. They would use the same secure flight path and land on a rudimentary strip that would have to be prepared by a clandestine mission in advance. The transports would carry Delta Force and the fuel bladders that had failed the drop test.

At Desert One, the spent choppers would be refueled from the bladders and boarded by Delta. The transports would take off and fly back out of Iran to prepare for return flights the following night, and the choppers would fly to secure locations outside of Tehran where they and the Delta assault force would be parked and hidden throughout the next day. Securing these hide sites was only one part of a mission that would be completed by Delta Force and CIA agents who would sneak into the country days before the rescue attempt.

On the second night, Delta would be driven to the embassy compound on trucks and carry out their assault. At the same time, a ranger company would take a little-used airport outside the city. A separate army special-forces unit would raid Iran’s Foreign Ministry to free Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland. Overhead, two fixed-wing, four-engtine AC-130 Spectre gunships would provide heavy firepower over the embassy to suppress crowds or any military force that scrambled to counter the raid. Once the raiding force and freed hostages had crossed the street to the soccer stadium, the choppers hidden through the long day before would fly in and carry them out to the seized airport. Big C-141 transport jets, one configured to provide emergency medical care, would land at the occupied airport, load up Delta, the rangers, and the hostages, and fly out of Iran with a fighter escort. The choppers would be destroyed and left behind.

It was as inelegant as a Rube Goldberg contraption, with parts borrowed from everywhere. Everyone, including Delta, was going to be attempting something they had never done. Any operation this complex, with this many difficult and critical pieces, was a sitting duck for Murphy’s Law. Success was a long shot at best. None of the senior commanders at the Pentagon believed it would be successful. Those preparing for it did so with a sense of fatalism that waxed both grim and cheerful.

“The only difference between this and the Alamo is that Davy Crockett didn’t have to fight his way in,” quipped Captain Wade Ishimoto, Delta’s assistant intelligence officer.

Not the least of the problems faced by the rescue force was maintaining secrecy. The planning effort at the Pentagon alone now numbered more than forty-five. Because the rescue force had no budget, it simply took what it needed. During the dress rehearsal in Yuma, local commanders complained about planes and helicopters gobbling up aviation fuel without accounting for it. They were silenced by a call from the Pentagon. It was a challenge to assemble all the night-vision goggles needed by the operators and mission pilots. The amazing goggles, which illuminated the darkest night in monochromatic shades of green, were new, expensive, and rare, and the units who had them were loathe to part with them. They had to be commandeered without explanation. To cover the absence of Delta Force, which was spending most of its time at its “undisclosed location” in Virginia, a skeletal undeployed staff at its Fort Bragg “Stockade” worked overtime to maintain the appearance of normalcy, answering phones, driving out to the firing range and shooting off enough rounds to make it sound like the unit was doing its usual practice sessions, moving vehicles around to maintain the appearance of normal workday comings and goings. The staff did its best to handle the volume of phone calls, but one persistent general insisted on speaking to Beckwith himself. The colonel ignored him until the general became abusive to the staff, at which point Beckwith asked General Vaught to get rid of the caller.

By the end of the month six Sea Stallion helicopters had been moved on one pretext or another to the Kitty Hawk, where they were now stashed safely belowdecks. Not even the carrier’s commander was fully aware of their purpose. An alert reporter for a local newspaper had noticed the choppers being loaded on a giant C-5 Galaxy transport to be ferried to the carrier and speculated in print—with pictures!—that they might be on their way to a staging area for a rescue mission in Tehran. Fortunately, no one else picked up on the story.

The assault force rehearsed its violent ballet over and over again. There was so much about the mission that Beckwith couldn’t control that he was determined to get his piece of it perfect. At Camp Smokey, life settled into a routine. The men studied in the daytime and rehearsed at night. When they weren’t working they had permission to shoot deer, so they practiced with their expensive sniper rifles and their cook prepared venison dinners. Late at night many of them drank. For men who liked this kind of life, it was pleasant and without stress. Despite the seriousness of the planning and training, few believed they would ever be deployed.

Fitch was convinced of it. He put his heart into the work—the tactics they were perfecting had lots of potential applications, so none of the effort was wasted—but he believed that the chance something this risky would be attempted by this president was about nil. He didn’t believe Carter had the balls.

In early December, John Limbert was placed in a van and driven off the embassy grounds. Initially, he was elated; he was wired that way; his first instinct was always hope. Maybe they were being released! He knew he would make quite a picture on the evening news. He had lost weight and was unshaven and haggard. On the morning of the takeover he had wanted to get a haircut, now his thick dark hair was so long he doubted his wife, Parveneh, and their two children would recognize him. But it was soon clear that he wasn’t going home.

Instead he was led into a large private home with marble floors and a grand foyer with a high ceiling from which hung an enormous, gaudy chandelier. At the center of the house was a wide, curved staircase, which led up to a carpeted landing with hallways leading off in several directions. It was luxury abandoned in haste. Limbert and his two new roommates, State Department communicator Rick Kupke and the ICA chief John Graves, found expensive clothes still hanging in the closet. It must have been the home of someone important in the royal regime. The windows in their upstairs room had been sealed shut and blackened. They soon perceived that other hostages were there too. Dave Roeder and Bob Ode were down the hall.

Limbert took this move as bad news. It suggested a higher level of coordination and resolve and felt like a long step away from freedom. They were watched over by a guard they dubbed “Two Shirts,” because his wardrobe alternated invariably between a pink one and a green one. Two Shirts had no sympathy for his captives’ physical discomfort. He accused them constantly of surreptitiously communicating and ordered all three of them to face different walls. This meant Kupke and Graves had to lie in bed for the guard’s entire eight-hour shift, in the same position, staring at the tan walls. Limbert, who conversed with most of the guards at length, had such contempt for Two Shirts’ inflexibility that he would turn his back to him every time he came in the room. The other guards sometimes took pity on them. Kupke and Graves were allowed to sit up and place their feet on the floor, and once or twice they were allowed to stand and walk around the room, but not often.

Limbert spoke to the guards in Farsi, while Graves, a tall man with a full graying beard and a mustache he waxed and drew out to points at each end, seemed calm and aloof, puffing away obsessively on his pipe. Kupke retreated into hours of reverie, imagining himself as the star in football games he had watched as a boy from the stands, or taking long walks down Main Street in his hometown of Rensselaer, Indiana, stopping to chat with people in every store. Passing the hours on his mattress on the floor, Limbert finally let go of his expectation of early release, reconciled himself to open-ended confinement and uncertainty, and began the routines that would see him through the ordeal.

The goal was to structure this ocean of time and use it productively. He had read that keeping fit and clean were two simple things that passed time and fostered health in confinement, so he commenced doing sit-ups and leg lifts. He avoided working up a heavy sweat, because he was allowed to shower only once every few weeks and he didn’t want to smell worse than he already did. Meals came regularly, and the food was edible, but he was still dropping weight. His pants swam on him.

Day and night he read. Because he knew Farsi he had more options than the other hostages, and he made a point of asking the guards for books about their revolution. They were eager to oblige. They brought him first the writings and speeches of Ali Shariati, the intellectual father of the revolution, and then other books by revolutionary leaders. Limbert’s erudition and fluency intrigued his guards, and he made an effort to engage them in conversation whenever they came to the room. Kupke and Graves listened silently to long conversations they couldn’t understand. Limbert knew that hostages who made a connection with their captors had a better chance of surviving, so while steering away from political topics he asked the guards an endless stream of questions about themselves. Most of them were young, naive, and far too polite to tell him simply to shut up. When he asked a question about their religion, such as, “Explain martyrdom to me,” they would typically oblige with a lengthy and spirited answer, seeing an opportunity to enlighten the infidel spy. Limbert would listen patiently and ask still more questions. He had nothing but time. Drawing his captors out relieved his boredom, helped satisfy his curiosity about them, and had an element of self-preservation. He was determined to see his guards as individuals, and for them to see him as one, too, as someone with feelings and ideas rather than just another Yankee imperialist. It was a survival tactic. If he fell ill and needed help, it would be a lot easier to ignore someone you didn’t know or like. After a month, all of the hostages were devising their own strategies to cope, and his was conversation. If there was a rescue attempt, then the guard in the room with him might have thirty seconds to decide whether to shoot him. If he hesitated, even for only a few seconds, it might spare his life. So Limbert chatted with them and drew them out as though his life depended on it.