Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (11 page)

“While en route, a third helicopter (No. 2) experienced a partial hydraulic failure, but the crew elected to continue to the refueling site believing repairs could be accomplished there. Upon landing, however, the crew and the helicopter unit commander determined that the helicopter could not be repaired. A hydraulic pump had failed due to a fluid leak, and no replacement pump was available. Even if a pump had been immediately available, there was insufficient time to change it, repair the cause of the leak, service the system, and complete the next leg prior to daylight. The helicopter was unsafe to continue the mission unrepaired.

“Earlier, it had been determined that a minimum of six operational helicopters would be required at the refueling site to continue the mission. Since at this point there were only five operational, the on-scene commander advised COMJTF [Commander, Joint Task Force] by radio of the situation, and he in turn communicated to Washington the status of the force and his intention to abort the operation and return to launch base. The President concurred in the decision that the mission could not continue, and preparations began for withdrawal of the five operational helicopters, the C-130s, and the rescue force.”
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The first helicopters to arrive would have had no trouble in spotting Desert One. This was not because a CIA-contract pilot, at great risk, had landed there in a Twin Otter aircraft a month before to plant infrared landing lights to be activated as the task force approached. By the time the helos arrived, the scene was illuminated by a blazing road tanker, a sign that on the ground as well as in the air, the operation was already compromised. The element of chance—bad luck—struck almost as soon as Delta landed. Beckwith spotted a Mercedes bus approaching the landing zone, ordered his men to halt it and, leading by example, fired at its tyres. Some 45 passengers, most of them women and children, clambered out, bewildered. One who spoke English asked the black Ranger guarding her where the armed men came from. “We’re African commandos,” he joked.

The next civilian vehicle to blunder into what was, by now, a war zone was the fuel tanker. One of Beckwith’s team fired an anti-tank missile at it. The tanker exploded and burned for hours, illuminating the runway, the waiting aircraft, and the herded bus passengers. The tanker was accompanied by a smaller vehicle which paused long enough for the tanker driver to escape into the darkness on foot. Eagle Claw had now been compromised on the ground three ways within, perhaps, 30 minutes.

Speculation continues, thirty years later, that sand filters to protect the helicopter engines had been removed to reduce weight and increase range. The hazard of dust in the desert is no novelty. If this was a factor in the calamity that followed, Beckwith did not address it in his account. Nor did the unclassified version of the Holloway report. But Colonel John T. Carney, Jr., an Air Force Special Operations officer who took part in Eagle Claw, suggests that MC-130 Combat Talon pathfinder aircraft should have led the helicopters safely to the target, as they did in the Son Tay raid. They were on the scene and might even have passed within sight of the ill-fated Sea Stallions.

There was another problem. Navigation equipment that would have helped blind-flying was removed to reduce weight. “Thus,” writes Carney, “they were literally flying blind and could not advise one another of the actual weather conditions, which were much more benign than the pilots believed…. The [Marine] pilots should have broken radio silence for a second or two to query the Combat Talons, regain their bearings, and find better weather.” According to Beckwith, high command suggested following these technical failures that he should proceed with five helicopters. The sinister implication of that was that Delta would be obliged to dump as many as twenty of its own at Desert One. As Beckwith put it: “In a tight mission, no one is expendable
before you begin!
[his emphasis]. Which twenty would I leave?”
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Other factors were at work to undermine the mission. Feuding between the CIA, then headed by Admiral Stansfield Turner, and the National Security Agency prompted fears among the Joint Chiefs of Staff about a loss of security. NSA was headed by a Vice Admiral, Bobby Ray Inman, and had been excluded from the prolonged planning for Desert One. In spite of that, NSA got wind of what was going on as a result of insecure communications by some of the planners. Inman, in charge of NSA, later suggested that Air Force General David C. Jones, JCS chairman, “was so stunned by the potential of blowing the security at the beginning that he imposed awesome communications security constraints and it probably directly impacted on the readiness of the forces. The fact that the helicopters were put on carriers, sent for five weeks, never flown until they left the carrier, all of this out of concern that they would be detected in the process…” along with total radio silence, lack of pre-mission helicopter training, and the choppers’ condition after they sat unused on the carrier deck for so long all contributed to the disaster.
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To abort the operation rather than write off twenty men was a bitter decision for Beckwith, but it was, at least, one that did not reinforce a calamity in the making, a calamity that might have resulted in the deaths of many of the hostages as well as their would-be rescuers. Beckwith’s choice required moral courage as well as military cool. Yet fate had one last evil card to play. As Admiral James Holloway put it, in laconic, deadpan language: “While repositioning one helicopter to permit another to top off his fuel tanks for the return flight, the first helicopter collided with one of the refueling C-130s. Both aircraft were immediately engulfed in flames in which eight crew members died and five other members of the team were injured. Since the C-130 was loaded with members of the rescue force awaiting extraction, even greater injury and loss of life were avoided only by swift and disciplined evacuation of the burning aircraft. Shortly afterwards, ammunition aboard both aircraft began to explode. Several helicopters were struck by shrapnel from the explosion and/or the burning ammunition, and at least one and possibly more were rendered non-flyable. At this point, with time and fuel running out for the C-130s, the decision was made to transfer all helicopter crews to the remaining C-130s and to depart the area.”

The Iranians, remarkably, were able to recover several of the grounded Navy helicopters intact. Holloway reported:

“
Destruct devices on mission rescue helicopters:
Helicopter No. 6 developed mechanical problems en route to Desert One and landed in the desert short of destination. Ground personnel tasked with responsibility for helicopter destruction were not available. An unforeseen accident and ensuing conflagration at Desert One prevented the on-scene commander from implementing the helicopter destruction plan because he perceived it to be too risky. As a result, five RH-53Ds [Sea Stallion helicopters] were abandoned intact.

“As planning proceeded, an option to destroy the helicopters in Iran, should a contingency situation warrant, was considered. This contingency called for individuals to place thermite grenades in the helicopters if their destruction was called for and then to detonate them. This option was never implemented at Desert One because of the perceived danger of exploding helicopters and ammunition to personnel and aircraft evacuating the site and to Iranians aboard a nearby bus.”

This was not the only choice, Holloway suggests. There is good reason to believe explosives, when properly installed, are no more dangerous to crew and passengers than the onboard fuel supply. Moreover, explosives for use in destroying the helicopters and breaching the Embassy walls had to be carried aboard several, if not all, helicopters. Therefore, it is a moot point as to what explosives were carried onboard and where they were placed. On the Son Tay mission, explosives for helicopter self-destruction were placed onboard at the outset. The helicopter to be abandoned was fitted with explosives and detonators. Electrical initiators were placed apart from the explosives, and the electrical leads left disconnected. Aircrew members destroyed the helicopter, when necessary, by simply connecting the initiator to the explosives and activating a built-in timing device. With regard to aircrew reluctance to have similar devices to the ones used in the Son Tay raid aboard their helicopters, Iranian-mission aircrews interviewed stated that this procedure was acceptable to them. Moreover, they admitted that most explosives were less of a danger than other hazardous material carried on-board mission helicopters—e.g., fuel.

“Equipping rescue mission helicopters with easily removable, separated, and disconnected explosive devices and initiators should not have jeopardized safety and would have enhanced the ability to destroy helicopters at any point in the mission….”

As the C-130s, rumbled away south from Desert One, a dawn sun caught their wings as if to remind the survivors of the fires they had left burning. By the time they touched down at the sanctuary of Masirah Island, part of friendly Oman, an Iranian army team was searching the site. It found eight American and one civilian Iranian dead. Much worse, it discovered documents that compromised an American agent on the ground in advance of Eagle Claw. This was retired Major Richard Meadows, one of the first Americans to serve with the SAS in 1960 and son-in-law of an SAS warrant officer. Born in 1931, Meadows enlisted at the age of sixteen and emerged from the Korean War three years later as the Army’s youngest master sergeant. He joined Special Forces in 1953 and in 1970 led the Son Tay rescue attempt. He extracted his team safely. The need for better intelligence in the future, and quicker reaction to what intelligence there was, was not lost on Meadows. By the time the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was occupied in 1979, Meadows had been in retirement for two years. The Pentagon invited him to act as the forward eyes and ears of Beckwith’s mission on the ground in Tehran, and he accepted.
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After the mission was aborted, using an Irish passport in the name of Richard H. Keith supplied by the CIA, he kept his cool, checked in at Tehran airport, and flew out on a civil airliner, undetected.

A final indignity awaited Beckwith back in the Pentagon’s press briefing room. He was to address a press conference. What gutted him was not the prospect of talking to journalists. He’d done that in Vietnam from time to time. But “what kicked the wind out of me was losing my cover and having to answer questions about sensitive classified matters.”
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The failure at Desert One prompted a major re-examination of the role of Special Forces in the U.S. A fundamental flaw was the ad hoc nature of its order of battle. It was a cherry-picking, mix-and-match process, conditioned by the availability of air and intelligence assets. It was not organic. Following the Holloway inquiry, another level of bureaucracy was added: a counterterrorist joint task force and an advisory panel. On the sidelines, battalions of experts offered their sometimes-conflicting advice.

In March 1983, the National Strategy Information Center, the National Security Studies Program at Georgetown University, and the National Defense University sponsored a two-day symposium on the role of Special Operations in U.S. strategy for the 1980s. Dr. Edward N. Luttwak, for example, suggested that the Eagle Claw rescue plan was “clearly designed by people without a clue as to the realities of war.” It is worth noting that in his own book, first published in 1983, Beckwith blamed “political considerations” in Washington for delaying the mission from mid-January, when Delta was ready, when “the weather favored us,” until April, the season of sandstorms and dust. “National resolve is weakened by many forces,” he wrote. “The longer the crisis is allowed to run, the more such forces come into play. The longer a government waits to respond to a terrorist incident, the harder is the rescue by military means.” His solution, a counsel of perfection, was “predictive intelligence,” with contingency plans to cover a crisis before it happened.

The structural changes in U.S. preparedness were still being worked through when President Barack Obama took office in 2009, but in the shorter term, useful reforms were introduced. In 1982, the Army consolidated its Special Operations Forces (known as ARSOF) in a Special Operations Command. On 1 January 1984, following the Hizbollah bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut with the loss of 237 men, the Pentagon created a Joint Special Operations Agency without any command authority over any SF element [see Special Operations Command.com online]. After years of debate in Congress, President Ronald Reagan signed off the establishment of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) on 13 April 1987, almost exactly seven years after Delta set off for Desert One. The CIA’s Special Activities Division (known as SAD) continued, meanwhile, to run its own high-risk, plausibly deniable operations involving subversion and unconventional warfare using surrogates. The sub-group concerned was inherited from the MAC/SOG era in Vietnam and was now known as the Special Operations Group.

Beckwith had been ordered not to trust the State Department because it could not keep secrets. Who could? As the Holloway Commission Report made plain: “intelligence drove the operation from the outset,” but “certain elements of the Intelligence Community seemed slow in harnessing themselves initially for the tasks at hand.” Could it be that this criticism was aimed at the Central Intelligence Agency, whose role is never mentioned in the unclassified version of Holloway? Since the Agency provided Meadows with his bogus Irish passport, it clearly gave some support to Eagle Claw. A month before the mission was launched, “a CIA Twin Otter had flown into…Desert One. A USAF Combat Controller had rode [
sic
] around the landing area on a light dirt bike and planted landing lights to help guide the force in. That insertion went well….”
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