Debacle in The Desert

Carter's mission to rescue the hostages goes down in flames

Two lines of blue lights etched the outlines of the remote landing strip. Suddenly flames illuminated the night sky, then gradually flickered out. On the powdery sands of Dasht-e-Kavir, Iran's Great Salt Desert, lay the burned-out hulk of a lumbering U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules aircraft. Nearby rested the scorched skeleton of a U.S. Navy RH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter. And in the wreckage were the burned bodies of eight American military air crewmen.

A few hours later, in a display of whipped-up outrage, the Iranian air force dispatched American-made F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers to blast the ruins of the charred aircraft and to disable four other undamaged Sea Stallions abandoned by the U.S. Ironically, as the rubble bounced, one Islamic Guard patrolling the site was killed and two others wounded.

The fire and the fury dramatized the dimensions of a new American tragedy--the inability of the U.S. to extricate 53 American hostages held by Iranian militants and the unstable, faction-torn government of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. In a startlingly bold but tragic gamble, President Jimmy Carter had ordered a courageous, specially trained team of American military commandos to try to pluck the hostages out of the heavily guarded U.S. embassy in Tehran. The supersecret operation failed dismally. It ended in the desert staging site, some 250 miles short of its target in the capital city. And for the world's most technologically sophisticated nation, the reason for aborting the rescue effort was particularly painful: three of the eight helicopters assigned to the mission developed electrical or hydraulic malfunctions that rendered them useless.

For Carter in particular, and for the U.S. in general, the desert debacle was a military, diplomatic and political fiasco. A once dominant military machine, first humbled in its agonizing standoff in Viet Nam, now looked incapable of keeping its aircraft aloft even when no enemy knew they were there, and even incapable of keeping them from crashing into each other despite four months of practice for their mission.

That was embarrassing enough, but the consequences of the mission that failed were far more serious; they affected everything from the future of Jimmy Carter to the future of U.S. relations with its European allies and Japan. While most of Carter's political foes tactfully withheld criticism, his image as inept had been renewed. Already hurt by mounting economic difficulties at home, the President now had a new embarrassment abroad. The failure in the desert could prove to be a blow to his re-election hopes.

The international impact of the ill-fated American venture was the most serious consequence of the operation. As thousands of joyful Iranians rushed again into Tehran's streets to gloat over America's discomfort, Iran edged ever closer to new economic and diplomatic collaboration with the Soviet Union, the menacing neighbor to the north that Khomeini had recently denounced. Handed an irresistible propaganda opening by Carter, the Soviet press made the most of it. TASS accused Carter of an "abortive provocation" that could have caused "mass bloodshed and the death of the hostages"--lives TASS claimed the U.S. President was willing "to sacrifice for his election interests." Carter's misadventure also shifted international attention away from the invasion of Afghanistan and the Soviets' problems in the Muslim world.

America's European Community allies, as well as Japan, officially held their fire in public, but some of their diplomats privately seethed at Carter. They had backed the U.S. only two days before by promising to help isolate Iran economically, not because they thought sanctions would help free the hostages but to preserve an alliance that only the previous week had seemed to be dangerously strained. By going along with the U.S., the allies clearly thought they had secured a guarantee from Carter that he would not make a military move against Iran. Any such action, the allies feared, might endanger a major part of their Middle East oil supplies and make even worse the frigid relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Now they felt betrayed by the President of the U.S. What was more, they were astonished by his timing and the ineptness of the maneuver. Fumed a high official in Bonn: "The incompetence that permeates this Administration is incredible." Said a senior analyst in the French government: "I would feel much better if Carter were to go before the American public now and say, 'Your new President is Walter Mondale.'"

When Jimmy Carter went on television at 7 a.m., Friday, to announce the most surprising event of his presidency, his face was ashen, his mood was grim, but he was unshaken in his determination to press on to secure the release of the hostages, whose six months of captivity have left Carter and his White House aides somehow captives too. Like John Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, Carter gamely took full blame for the rescue mission's failure. Said he: "It was my decision to attempt the rescue operation. It was my decision to cancel it when problems developed. The responsibility is fully my own."

Carter conceded that "the operation was certain to be difficult and it was certain to be dangerous." But he said the rescue team was "highly trained" and had undergone "repeated rehearsal." He insisted that the operation had "an excellent chance of success." Carter emphasized that the rescue was "a humanitarian mission. It was not undertaken with any feeling of hostility toward Iran or its people. It has caused no Iranian casualties."

But why take such action now? Carter said he had decided that "the Iranian authorities could not or would not resolve this crisis on their own initiative." He noted "the steady unraveling of authority in Iran and the mounting dangers that were posed to the safety of the hostages." Indeed, factional strife between leftist students who had occupied universities in Iran and Muslim authorities seeking to remove them had broken into violent rioting and bloodshed on a dozen campuses. When it finally subsided last week, the clashes with clubs, cleavers and daggers had left 60 students dead and nearly 2,000 wounded. Summed up Carter of the rescue mission: "This attempt became a necessity and a duty."

Both the President and Defense Secretary Harold Brown, who appeared haggard but resolutely amiable and relaxed when he held a large televised press briefing at the Pentagon, revealed an unsurprising but well-concealed fact: military training for a rescue had begun last November, shortly after militant students took over the embassy. Repeated claims by various security experts at the Pentagon, State Department and White House that a mission to free the hostages was virtually impossible were actually designed to lull the captors into believing that no such effort would be mounted. This attempt to protect the possibility of surprise was about the mission's only success.

The members of the rescue team, drawn from the four services, belonged to elite all-volunteer groups. Most were tough Army paratroopers. Their instructors reportedly included advisers from Britain's crack Special Air Services Regiment (S.A.S.), which has been effectively employed against Irish Republican Army terrorists in England and Northern Ireland. West Germany's Grenzschutzgruppe (G.S.G. 9), similar antiterrorist specialists, are also said to have helped in the training. With its diverse support forces, the team flew to undisclosed desert sites in the U.S. Southwest, where it conducted seven full rehearsals of the operation, some at night, to overcome the problem of operating in clouds of sand kicked up by high winds or the landing and take-offs of huge helicopters and cargo craft.

Aerial reconnaissance pictures were taken of likely landing sites in Iran. In November a group of the big Sikorsky choppers was placed aboard the nuclear aircraft carrier Nimitz. On Jan. 8 the President continued the deception, declaring at a press conference that a military rescue "would almost certainly end in failure and almost certainly end in the death of the hostages."

By early April Carter had lost patience with the frustrating process of trying to deal with Iran's changing leadership and the erratic Khomeini. He thought he had reached agreement for the Iran government to take control of the hostages from the more zealous militants, but Khomeini squelched any deal. As political pressure built up in the U.S. for more forceful action, Carter embarked on a very risky two-track course. Publicly, he pressured the Western European nations to join the U.S. in breaking diplomatic ties with Iran and in cutting off most trade, hinting none too subtly that he would otherwise take some kind of unspecified military action by mid-May. Most privately, Carter signaled his military commanders on April 11 to get the team ready to go. The public talk about a May deadline was designed in part to make a more immediate rescue strike seem most unlikely. Says a top State Department official: "To the extent that people were looking not at next week but at next month--and that includes everybody --the chances for success were increased and the chances of loss of life were decreased."

The imminence of the rescue raid apparently was one of Carter's motivations for announcing what then looked like an ill-advised travel ban on Americans to Iran, including the families of the hostages. He also urged U.S. journalists to reduce their presence in Iran.

Beyond the key operational military commanders, only a few high civilian officials knew the nature of the secret mission. They included Vice President Mondale, Brown, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, CIA Director Stansfield Turner and White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan. Not even Stuart Eizenstat, Carter's chief adviser on domestic policy, was told about the raid. In mid-April Carter summoned the team's leaders to the White House Situation Room and wished them well on their perilous mission.

Ironically, some members of the White House staff grew restive at all the public threats by Carter about taking military action against Iran--presumably in May. Last Tuesday Jordan called a meeting to hear their complaints. Speech Writer Hendrik Hertzberg said he could not shake "an uneasy feeling that we're slipping down a slippery slope toward a military confrontation." Eizenstat said he was worried about a disruption in world oil supplies if other Persian Gulf countries reacted to U.S. military moves by cutting oil shipments to the West. Insisted Jordan: "'The President has made no decision, not even a tentative one, to embark on such a course." When news of the dissension leaked out, Brzezinski was furious, terming such disclosures "a sickening business."

In fact, the innocent White House aides were protesting the wrong plans --and by accident helping the mission's cover story. At that very moment some of the rescue unit's pilots and crews were already in Egypt, ostensibly to take part in joint air transport training exercises with Egypt and Saudi Arabia--a handy disguise for what was to come.

The time to move now seemed ripe. An International Red Cross visit had determined that all 50 hostages seized at the embassy were still being held in the compound. U.S. planners had learned that the number of militants guarding the captives had declined. Soon the protective darkness of the nights would shorten, and the desert temperatures would soar by day, making it even more difficult for the helicopters to operate in the hot, light air. The period for best operational conditions was narrowing fast. On Thursday, with the Common Market Foreign Ministers having just bowed to Carter's pleas for allied solidarity, the President gave the word Go. The U.S. had swung into action on its own.

On Thursday afternoon, six of the team's C-130s rose from an undisclosed airfield in Egypt, where Carter's increasingly helpful friend, President Anwar Sadat, made no attempt to deny his nation's involvement in the American mission. Said Sadat later: "I have promised the American people that I shall give facilities for the rescue of the hostages and for the rescue of any Arab state in the Gulf."

The transport planes carried about 90 commandos in camouflage garb and another 90 crew members. Following an undisclosed route, the small air fleet droned along as low as 150 ft. to foil Iranian radar as it approached its first staging site in the desert near the isolated village of Posht-e Badam. Other planes are reported to have helped by jamming Iranian detection systems.

One of the many ironies of the entire mission was the fact that the C-130s were heading for a remote spot in the desert that the Iranians had feared might some day be used by U.S. forces. Indeed, they even had a map of the spot. It was discovered in the papers of Mahmoud Jaafarian, a pro-Shah counterinsurgency strategist who was executed after the revolution a year ago. Jaafarian was actually trying to burn the map when he was seized by the revolutionaries. Jaafarian told his captors that the staging site had been secretly built by the CIA, with the Shah's knowledge, for possible emergency use. The Iranian air force proposed destroying the site, suspecting it might contain hidden navigational gear that could guide landing American planes. But so confused was the Iranian government that nothing was done about the matter. When an Iranian officer insisted upon a decision, he was told by a senior official: "The Americans must know the site is discovered. They won't ever consider using it."

One by one, the cumbersome C-130s roared in over the desert and landed on the strip marked out on the salt flats near Posht-e Badam. Meanwhile, the eight RH-53 helicopters were finding the going much more difficult. As they emerged over land from the Gulf of Oman, flying without lights in the moonlit night, two of the choppers ran into a fierce desert sandstorm. Both developed crippling problems. One could not stay aloft because of hydraulic troubles and settled down in the bleak desert. Another helicopter crew found the disabled craft, picked up its occupants and completed the five-hour, 500 nautical mile flight to the landing strip. The second laboring chopper discovered a faulty gyro and turned back to the Nimitz, which was standing offshore. Finally, six of the eight RH-53s reached their destination.

Then came a critical accident. After landing, one of the helicopters had its entire hydraulic system knocked out; the aircraft could not fly. The commanders debated whether the mission could fulfill its task with just five choppers. The plan had called for a minimum of six. Two extra had seemed a sufficient backup. Now three were out of action.

As the C-130s proceeded to refuel the remaining helicopters, the rescue team leaders debated whether the mission should be scrubbed. The on-site commander, an Army paratroop colonel, concluded that the diminished passenger capacity of the fleet would mean that if the later stages of the raid were not entirely successful, some of the hostages or commandos might have to be left behind in Tehran. He radioed his recommendation that the odyssey be ended to his superiors at an undisclosed--probably airborne--command post in the Middle East. The Army major general who was mission commander relayed the message to the Pentagon's National Military Command Center. The final decision was bucked to Carter at the White House. Seated in his small study off the Oval Office, the President heard Secretary Brown describe the desperate situation. At 4:50 p.m. in Washington, after the would-be rescuers had been on the ground in the Iranian desert for nearly four hours without being discovered, the very disappointed President agreed that the team should be recalled. He gave the order to Brown to abort. Carter found one consolation in the succession of misfortunes. "At least there were no casualties," he said. "And there was no detection. It could have been worse."

But matters were about to get much worse. Around midnight (local time) a bus carrying some 40 Iranians had rolled along a dirt road that ran right through the landing area. Both the travelers and the Americans were startled to see each other. "We first thought they were bandits," one of the Iranians later recalled. "A couple of them spoke Persian. They told us to get off the bus and raise our hands. They said no one would be hurt unless we tried something funny." But the bus driver screamed in fright. Said the villager: "They hit him on the head with the butt of a rifle. They tied his hands behind his back. They told us all to lie down on the ground."

The passengers reported that two American officers on motorcycles rushed around the airstrip, consulting other military leaders. Finally more radio messages were flashed across the 8,000 miles from the desert to the Pentagon. What should be done with the unexpected visitors? The decision: put them all on a C-130 and fly them temporarily out of Iran. Recalled the Iranian: "They told us to get on the bus again. An American drove us to one of the aircraft. He told us to get off and board the aircraft." Explained an American official in Washington later: "They were going to have a nice long trip."

The mission's most tragic moment intervened. "We were about to board the airplane when one of the other planes caught fire," said the Iranian passenger. "I don't know how. It just caught fire."

Actually, two aircraft were ablaze. One of the helicopters had refueled on the ground from a C130. When the large plane's tank ran dry, the chopper lifted slightly to move toward another C-130 to pick up more fuel. But in doing so, the pilot turned his RH-53 too abruptly; its rotary blade ripped into the transport's fuselage. Instantly, flames roared through the two aircraft. Ammunition began exploding, striking other aircraft. Three Americans in the Hercules were killed. Five died in the Sea Stallion. Four others sustained severe burns, one of them hauled to safety out of the blazing C-130 by heroic efforts.

Meanwhile, a truck had come down the road and the driver escaped after a headlight was shot out by the U.S. troops. The unexpected traffic along the remote road, the certainty of discovery, the deaths of their comrades and the need to get the burn victims to hospitals all forced a difficult decision: the Americans had to leave the desert immediately. There was no time to let the aircraft wreckage cool to recover the bodies. Instead, the rescuers had to rescue themselves. They climbed into the remaining C-130s and took off.

Back in the White House, the crisis managers had gathered earlier. Mondale, Brzezinski, Vance, Brown, Jordan and Jody Powell jammed into the President's small study. They discussed how, if at all, the news of the embarrassing failure should be broken. Some leaned toward remaining mum, letting Iranian authorities deal with the desert wreckage and the night's mysterious events in any fashion that they chose.

But then, at 6:21 p.m. (Washington time), the President learned for the first time about the fiery accident and the injuries. Minutes later he heard the worst: eight Americans were dead. Stunned, Carter agreed that the tragedy could not be concealed but that the first priority was to get the survivors to safety. At 7:30 p.m., the word arrived: the team was off the ground and flying out of Iran.

Now the worst was over, but there were still great worries. Would the emotional militants at the U.S. embassy carry out their threats to kill the American hostages once they learned that an attempt had been made to free them by force? Would the mobs in Tehran go on any new rampage? How would the allies react? What about Soviet leaders? Just how much of the secret rescue plans could still be protected--and who might yet be hurt if they were not?

The President and his men moved into the larger Cabinet Room and sat down to a dinner of sandwiches. As they talked about limiting the damage, they were joined by Turner, who had been following the unfolding events from his CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. While Carter telephoned some foreign leaders and key members of Congress, Vance directed his staff at the State Department to get ready to inform the relatives of the hostages. The meeting ended at midnight, but each participant returned to his own office to work on into the night.

At 2 a.m. on Friday, Carter asked his staff to find a copy of John F. Kennedy's remarks following the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. Indeed, the phrases he used in his broadcast five hours later were highly reminiscent of Kennedy's remarks after the earlier failure. At 3 a.m. Rosalynn Carter arrived home from campaigning in Texas to be with her husband.

Alhough a few reporters were aware of the unusual activity at the White House, the secret held until the Government's carefully couched announcements were ready. The first, issued at 1 a.m., foreshadowed the tone of sorrow over the deaths but no regrets over the mission's launching that Carter later carried personally to U.S. television viewers in his early morning address.

Once that sad duty had been performed, the President returned to the Cabinet Room. There, sometimes aided by Brown or General David Jones, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he somberly briefed the leaders of Congress. Some had seemed skeptical, puzzled or even angry as they entered, feeling that they should have been consulted under the terms of the War Powers Resolution. But Carter convinced them that the mission was an act of mercy, not of war. What was more, the Senators and Congressmen who had doubted the wisdom of the plan were persuaded that the rescue effort had been a carefully thought through and quite practical operation, despite its dismal outcome. "The plan appeared militarily feasible," said Republican Senator John Tower later. Agreed Democratic Congressman Clement Zablocki, who had earlier criticized Carter's "stupidity": "All members of both political parties praised the President for his courage and were fully supportive of his operation." At week's end Carter prepared a report to Congress in which he gave the bare outlines of the operation and insisted, contrary to statements from Tehran, that no American serviceman remained in Iran.

The legislators who attended the meetings with Carter revealed few of the details about the mission, and Secretary Brown was even more secretive on the subject at his press conference. Gradually, however, the outlines of the plan became clear. The helicopters were to have carried the commandos to a second staging site, named Mountain Hideout, just outside of Tehran, but concealed from Iranian radar and defense forces by mountains. Some of the rescuers were to slip into the embassy compound in trucks--although where the vehicles would come from remained a mystery. At a prearranged time, the rescuers were to disable the unsuspecting guards, presumably with gunfire and some kind of chemical weapon, just as the choppers landed on the embassy rooftops. The helicopters would then carry the hostages and the combat team to a rendezvous with the C-130s. The Sea Stallions would be abandoned as the big Hercules flew everyone to safety.

That sketchy scenario did not satisfy some experts familiar with such operations. They speculated that some kind of help on the ground must have been anticipated--either from Iranians friendly to the U.S. or American agents who had been sent into the country secretly in advance. Said one Israeli military specialist: "You don't gain control over the embassy with 90 men, and you don't do it with eight helicopters." A respected Egyptian magazine called October said that 40 Iranians trained in the U.S. had taken part in the raid. The Administration had no comment to make on the report.

The second puzzling question posed by the mission was why the rescue force did not push on to Tehran despite the loss of three helicopters. That still left five out of the original force of eight, and the Pentagon felt that it needed only four to pluck the hostages out of the embassy. But the planners feared they might lose two or more helicopters during the rescue attempt and dip below the minimum. Why not start out with more than eight choppers? The more aircraft in the air, the Pentagon argues, the higher the risk of their being spotted and the greater the chance that some would be forced down. On this point the Pentagon was strongly supported by Shimon Peres, who was Israel's Minister of Defense during the successful Entebbe raid in 1976. Peres told TIME: "On an operation like this, one must be satisfied with the minimum of equipment. If you have too much, you blow the whole thing." Nor could the Nimitz dispatch more helicopters to help out when the three were disabled. There had been only eight on board. Had there been more, the force in the desert would have had to wait the whole night for their arrival, an unacceptable risk.

When the mission was over, Iran's leaders attacked the U.S. with rhetoric but refrained from taking any reprisals against the hostages. Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh sounded threatening enough. Said he: "The U.S. has committed an act of war. We will make the appropriate response."

But, for the moment at least, Khomeini indirectly lowered the likelihood that the hostages would be harmed. "Carter is prepared to resort to any crime and inflame the entire world," the Ayatullah railed. "Carter has reduced his political prestige to zero. He must give up the hope of re-election." Khomeini implied that only if the U.S. tried another such rescue mission would the hostages be punished. Said he: "I warn Carter that should he resort to such foolish things, then it would be impossible for us and the government to control these Muslim, combative and heroic youth who are guarding the spies in the spy nest, that he would be responsible for their lives."

On Saturday the militants took new steps to make sure that no second rescue mission could work any better than had the ill-starred first attempt. They announced that the hostages were being taken out of the compound and sent individually to widely scattered--and undisclosed--new sites.

The wounded Americans were treated at West Germany's Ramstein Air Base, then flown back to the U.S. Following in due course, said President Abolhassan Banisadr, would be the bodies of the eight American servicemen, five from the Air Force and three from the Marine Corps.

The aftermath of the mission that had come to a bloody and unsuccessful end in an Iranian desert left conflicting feelings high in the ranks of the Administration that planned it. Some State Department officials felt that the whole venture had been badly timed--that it should have been either launched months ago, or postponed until later in the spring, after the U.S. had determined the success of the sanctions imposed by its allies. Said Richard Helms, former CIA chief and onetime Ambassador to Iran: "The timing is peculiar. You spend so much effort getting your allies to take some other line of approach. And just when you seem to be succeeding, you pull this caper."

But Carter's top aides remained confident that the mission had been well worth trying. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained," said one. "I have no regrets. If we could replay history, I would do it again."

Carter now has to rely even more on the power of economic sanctions to force Iran to give up the hostages. But the President made it clear in his extraordinary address to the nation on Friday morning that he is not about to rule out resorting to arms against a nation that ignores international law and defies the world.

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