Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (64 page)

With Delta on the planes was an assortment of Farsi-speaking volunteers from various branches of the American military (all of them Iranian-American) and two former Iranian generals. A onetime SAVAK agent who had trained with the group, and who had boasted for months of his eagerness to shoot a few Khomeini fanatics, had gotten cold feet at the last minute. The Farsi-speaking American soldiers would drive the trucks and vans that would carry the assaulters through Tehran to the embassy for the next night’s raid, and the former generals were there to try to talk their way through any contacts with the Iranian military. In such instances, they would attempt to pass themselves off as a secret Iranian force on a training exercise. In fact, the contingency did not arise. Even though the second formation of planes was spotted from the ground as it moved over the coast, and a question about it was broadcast to a military station, the Iranian self-defense forces concluded without inquiring that the planes were Iranian. If the nation was alert to the possibility of an American invasion, they certainly wouldn’t expect it to arrive in a small low-flying formation of propeller-driven planes.

As the lead plane closed in on the desert landing site, its pilots noted curious milky patches in the night sky. They flew through one that appeared to be just haze, not even substantial enough to interfere with the downward-looking radar. They approached a second one as they got closer to the landing site and it was noticed by John Carney, who had come into the cockpit to be ready to activate the landing lights he had buried on his trip weeks earlier. One of the pilots asked him, “What do you make of that stuff out there?”

He looked through the copilot’s window.

“You’re in a haboob,” he said.

The men in the cockpit laughed at the word.

“No, we’re flying through suspended dust,” Carney explained. “The Iranians call it a haboob.”

He had heard about it from the CIA pilots who had flown him in earlier. Shifting air pressure frequently forced the especially fine desert sand straight up thousands of feet, where sometimes it hung like a vertical cloud for hours. It was just a desert curiosity. The dust clouds were too insubstantial to cause a problem for the planes, but Air Force Colonel James H. Kyle, the air commander whose responsibility included all the airborne aspects of the mission, knew that the haboob would create much bigger problems for a helicopter. He noticed that the temperature inside the plane went up significantly when they were passing through them. He advised the copilot to radio “Red Barn,” the command center at Wadi Kena, and have them warn the trailing helicopter formation. The chopper pilots might want to break formation or fly higher to avoid the stuff. This second patch took them about thirty minutes to fly through, which meant that it extended for about one hundred miles.

As the lead C-130 approached the landing area, Carney activated his buried infrared runway lights by pressing the button of his garage-door opener. The lights came on below, but the plane’s newfangled FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared Radar) detected something on the road, which proved to be a truck hurtling along the dirt road that ran through the landing site, so the pilots passed over the spot and then circled back around.

On the second pass the stretch of desert was clear. They circled around for a third time and touched down—Fitch was amazed by how smoothly. The plane coasted to a stop, and when the back ramp was lowered Ishimoto and the rangers roared off in the jeep and motorcycle to give chase to the truck; word that an American plane had landed in the desert, relayed promptly to the right people, could defeat the whole effort. They were followed by Carney and his men, who would help guide in the other Hercules formation and the choppers.

One of the first things Carney noticed, stepping off the ramp, was that the hard-packed surface of three weeks prior was now coated with a layer of feathery sand, the consistency of baby powder, ankle deep in some places. It made it more difficult to taxi the planes, and the backwash from the propellers kicked up a serious dust storm, but it also accounted for the extraordinary softness of their landing.

Fitch followed with his men, walking down the ramp and stepping into a cauldron of noise and dust. His team had nothing to do at Desert One except wait to offload camouflage netting and equipment from the second C-130, which had not yet arrived, and then board helicopters for the short trip to the hiding place. The big plane’s propellers were still roaring and kicked up the powdery desert floor. Fitch raised his arm to cover his eyes and face, and as he turned to his right he was shocked to see, coming toward him, a bus! Out of nowhere. The odds that the plane would intersect with both a truck and a bus past midnight on such a lonely, isolated, little-used dirt road were vanishing, but there it was, a big Mercedes passenger bus lit up like midday inside, its roof piled with luggage and filled with more than forty astonished Iranian passengers, honoring an absolute law of military operations, the certainty of the unexpected.

Then, suddenly, the night desert flashed as bright as daylight and shook with an explosion. In the near distance, a giant ball of flame rose high into the darkness. One of the pursuing rangers had fired an antitank weapon at the fleeing truck, which turned out to have been loaded with fuel. The thing went up like a miniature sun and kept on burning brightly. Their clandestine rendezvous spot, this patch of desert in the middle of nowhere, was spotlit like Friday night football back in Texas. The men with night vision removed their goggles. It appeared as though at least one of the men in the truck’s front cab had bailed out in time, climbed into a trailing pickup truck, and escaped at high speed. A ranger on the motorcycle gave chase but couldn’t catch it. The truck was a ball of fire; no one could get close enough to see if anyone had been caught inside.

In this sudden brightness the bus now rolled to a stop with a leaking radiator and a flat right front tire. Rangers had fired their weapons to disable it. Fitch, still confused, sent machine-gun teams to either side of the stalled, steaming vehicle and led a group of his men to the front. There were already rangers aboard.

“What the hell is going on?” Fitch asked a sergeant as he mounted the steps.

“I’m trying to get these people off the bus, but they won’t move,” he said. The passengers were obviously astonished. “Should I fire a shot over their heads?” the sergeant asked.

“No,” said Fitch. “Why don’t you just get off the bus and I’ll get my people in here.”

One of Delta’s specialties was handling hostages, herding them, searching them, securing them. In the next few minutes, Fitch’s men firmly and efficiently emptied the bus, searched the passengers for weapons, and deposited them on the powdery sand. They then stripped the baggage off the top of the bus, searched it, and found no weapons. The passengers appeared to be poor Iranians, simply traveling through the night from Yazd to Tabas. The bus was decorated with placards and posters of Khomeini. They had rolled into the wrong place at the wrong time. One of them spoke English and recognized the soldiers as Americans.

“It’s about time,” he said. He kept asking questions, which no one answered.

“How’s it going, Joe? Where are you from?” he asked Captain E. K. Smith. “I’m from Pittsburgh.”

They were all instructed in Farsi to remain silent, without effect. Most of the passengers were women, all of them wearing chadors and wailing eerily in their distress. Sergeant Eric Haney had trouble silencing one of the few young men among them, who insisted on loudly whispering to the others despite even their apparent desire for him to shut up. Haney put the muzzle of his automatic rifle under the man’s nose and repeated, in Farsi, for him to be silent. But soon the offender was whispering again, so Haney roughly put the muzzle of his weapon in his ear and dragged him away from the group. Fearing he was being taken off to be shot, the young man began crying and begging, holding both hands up beseechingly. Haney sat him down on the road a good distance from the others and left him there, whimpering and praying.

The question of what to do with the bus passengers was relayed all the way to the White House, where it was late afternoon. The president and his staff were deliberately going through motions of a typical workday, secretly hanging on every update from the desert. The secret had held, but just barely. The tenacious Los Angeles Times bureau chief Jack Nelson had sensed something serious afoot and had called Powell two days earlier to ask about it. He said he had heard that the president was about to do something that might “involve us in a war.”

“You people aren’t really thinking about doing anything drastic like launching a rescue mission are you?” he had asked Powell directly. The press secretary swallowed hard and lied.

“If and when we are forced to move militarily, I suspect it will be something like a blockade,” Powell said. “But that decision is still a step or two down the road.”

Nelson accepted Powell’s word. He wrote a story citing high-level White House sources stating that military action was not pending, and that a rescue attempt was entirely impractical. It had run yesterday.

Brzezinski relayed the unexpected problem of the bus to the president, and Carter agreed that the only thing to do was to fly all the Iranians out that night on one of the C-130s, and then return them to Iran when the mission was complete. The decision was conveyed to Beckwith, who now fretted about which plane to choose. One of the Iranian generals who had flown in with them had evidently discarded his weapon, probably out of fear—if he were captured with a weapon, he would have had a harder time claiming that he had been held hostage by these Americans. Beckwith didn’t want to put a crowd of kidnapped Iranians on a plane that had a loose handgun. Search parties were organized to find the general’s nickel-plated revolver, without success.

The passengers had been set down on the right side of the bus, so Fitch wandered around the left side to take a look and found another Iranian hiding beside the front wheel. Fitch approached him and shouted for him to stand, and when the man didn’t move Fitch fired a shot into the ground. This got him on his feet and he made a move as if to run away, so Fitch swung his weapon and clobbered him in the head with its butt. In the process, the Delta squadron commander accidentally raked the gun sight over his own nose and opened a deep cut, which in the excitement of the moment he neither felt nor noticed. Fitch led the stunned man, who turned out to be the assistant driver, back around to the others.

He had been on the ground for only a few minutes and already the veteran soldier was bleeding, coated with dust, and amazed. Three vehicles? This patch of desert suddenly seemed like a major thoroughfare.

Carney and his men better marked the two parallel runways for the following planes and set up the portable guidance device. Shortly before midnight things grew louder and busier as the second C-130 roared in for a landing, right on schedule. It taxied to a stop. Behind it came the four tankers. As Burruss and his men came down the lowered ramp of the first of these planes, they gaped at the ball of flame, the bus, and the passengers.

“Welcome to World War Three!” greeted Fitch.

Burruss looked at the bleeding face of his friend and said, “What the hell is going on?”

For the first time Fitch noticed that he was cut. He explained, shouting over the noise of all the planes. It was hot and the desert air now smelled of burning gasoline. No one seemed concerned. Their makeshift airport was lit up a lot more than they would have liked, but these were veteran soldiers; they knew operations like this went smoothly only in briefings and on paper. In a way, it felt good to have encountered the unexpected right at the outset, and coped with it.

“I think we’ve got everything under control,” Fitch told Burruss. They would have to take their chances with the men in the fleeing pickup, who they assumed, given the time of night and method of transport, to have been smuggling gasoline. It didn’t seem likely that they would go to the police, and if they did, what sense would be made of their story? A plane landed in the desert and attacked them? Even if it was investigated, the effort would take the better part of a day, at least, and by then it would be too late to interfere with the mission.

Desert One was now looking more like an airport, and Carney’s men were busy directing traffic, preparing for the arrival of the helicopters. Shortly after midnight, all four bladder birds were parked and positioned. The communications plane stayed, but the two lead planes, having delivered their cargo, took off for their rendezvous with the airborne tankers and the return flight to Masirah.

The unloading had gone pretty much as planned. The second C-130 had landed a few thousand feet farther off the landing zone than expected, so the job of hauling the camouflage netting from it was a correspondingly bigger job. The netting would be draped over the helicopters at the hide site at daylight. It was not an especially warm night in the desert, but all the men were overdressed, wearing layers of clothing and body armor, and they were sweating heavily with exertion. Moving through the loose sand made it an even more difficult task. The air force crews struggled to unfurl hundreds of pounds of hoses from the parked tankers, positioning them to receive the choppers. The bus had to be moved, so all the passengers were herded back on and it was repositioned.

“What is the status of the choppers?” Beckwith asked the commanders at Wadi Kena.

The command station at Masirah responded by relaying a request from the lead chopper for conditions at Desert One.

“Visibility five miles with negative surface winds,” reported Colonel Kyle, who was with Beckwith in the desert.

Then they heard from the lead chopper. “Fifty minutes out and low on fuel.”

It was a satisfying moment. The fuel crews had practiced the routine like pit crews at the Indy 500, and had the whole exercise down so well that it took only ten minutes to refill a landed chopper and send it on its way. Everything was behind schedule, however, which meant that even if the refueling and loading operations were done perfectly, the choppers would not arrive at the two hide sites before the crack of dawn. That posed only a small risk. The sites were in mountains outside the city, the choppers had been painted the same colors as Iranian army choppers, and it would still not be full daylight when they arrived. Still, if they didn’t land soon, they would be arriving at the hiding places in daylight. Burruss asked one of his men to check their maps for a gully or natural depression where they might be able to sit the choppers short of the planned hide site.