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.
1. Fly 15,000 miles around the world—850 miles of it in Iran.
2. Enter into Tehran undetected.
3. Breach the embassy and rescue the hostages.
4. Return the hostages without harm.
5. Don’t hurt any civilians, Iranian or otherwise.
6. Rescue the three Americans at the Foreign Ministry simultaneously.
7. Do not permit the Iranian forces to be aware of or react to our presence.
1. No country will help you.
2. You must invent the force to do the job. It does not now exist.
3. The operation could go in ten days and you must always be ready to execute in ten days.
4. The entire training program must be kept secret—not only from the public but from most of the services themselves.
5. There will be no money directly provided for the program.
6. Most service points of contact cannot be directly approached.
7. 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.