The Iranian Rescue Mission: Why It Failed

by Paul B. Ryan

Fair-minded evaluation of the failed hostage rescue attempt. Too much secret compartmentalization was a key problem, says author.

Genres: Military Fiction

136 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1985

Reviews

[Kevin Keating · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book by the Naval Institute Press is a little old (1985) and a little wonky, but it's kinda interesting. I feel I have a better grip on what happened, but not really the full story. I want to check more recent stories to see what's come out to better explain it.

[Andrew Kaufman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book presents a strikingly objective, well-documented, and highly-readable account of the doomed 1979 mission to rescue the fifty-two American hostages being held at the U.S. embassy in Iran. We are shown in copious detail how this mission was intended to be carried out and how and why it went wrong.

The book is based on the findings of the military’s inquiry into the reasons for the mission failure, and on information and perspectives provided by the generals who planned it and the Army and Air Force colonels who led it, taken from interviews, articles, and press conferences. Although published by the Naval Institute Press and written by a retired Navy captain, the book makes no effort either to glorify or spare the reputations of those involved. Unlike some other books on this subject, it does not resemble a script for an action movie but reads as an unbiased, thorough, and compelling work of dedicated reportage.

The mission, as we learn, consisted of eight helicopters and six transport and refueling planes. After taking off from an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, the helicopters were to fly five hundred miles in darkness to a remote desert landing strip in central Iran, to be refueled by two C-130 planes. Still in darkness, the helicopters were then to fly the ground troops a hundred miles to a second remote desert air strip, fifty miles southeast of Tehran. The troops, consisting of over a hundred Delta Force and Special Operations soldiers, were to conceal themselves at this second location throughout the hours of daylight. They were then to be driven, in a bus that had been procured by intelligence operatives in Iran, into heavily armed downtown Tehran, where the twenty-seven acre U.S. embassy compound was located. Upon arrival they would have to shoot their way into the compound, believed to have been guarded by two to three hundred heavily armed captors. Rescuers had to quickly find the hostages the hostages, then lead them on foot to a nearby open area. From here, waiting helicopters were to fly them and the ground troops to an airfield that was to have been secured by commandos, where the hostages and rescuers were to board two waiting transport planes and be flown out of Iran.

Things went wrong from the start. Two of the helicopters were sidelined by mechanical difficulties while flying to the initial landing site. A third helicopter then crashed into a transport plane on the ground here, causing the mission to be aborted and killing eight soldiers. Its organizers had determined beforehand that a minimum of six helicopters would be needed to carry out their plan. The crash left five. The seventh and eighth helicopters, which had been deployed due to concern about helicopter reliability under the likely conditions, proved insufficient.

President Carter authorized the mission, having been impressed by the can-do confidence of the senior generals who formulated and conveyed the plan to him, despite their estimate that there was a thirty to forty percent chance the mission would fail. This estimate was in significant part based on concerns that the helicopters were not built to fly six hundred miles with capacity payloads at an altitude of five hundred feet, through sand and dust that the pilots later likened to flying through milk. Especially in hindsight the odds conveyed to Carter, however unappealing, seem inexplicably overoptimistic.

As negotiations remained at a standstill, the hostage crisis had placed him under increasingly intense pressure to act, as it had been dominating the news each day for close to six months, eroding his reelection chances, and causing concern about the country's standing abroad.

Beyond helicopter-related issues, the mission’s complexity and precariousness posed major risks at each turn. In addition to getting fourteen aircraft into and out of Iranian air space without being detected, other risks were posed by the need to keep more than a hundred troops in Iran for nearly two days; by the plan to transport them fifty miles by bus into heavily armed downtown Tehran where the embassy was located; and the need to outgun two to three hundred heavily armed guards. The rescuers would then need to lead the hostages on foot to a nearby open area, from where waiting helicopters would fly them to an airfield that was to have been secured by a separate unit of ground troops. From here hostages and soldiers would board waiting transport planes that would fly them out of Iran.

It would seem apparent even to an untrained eye that this plan included too many high-risk stages, each of which could have easily gone awry and resulted in catastrophic numbers of casualties. After the hostages’ eventual negotiated release, at least two, including the embassy's charge d'affaires, said they believed the failure of the mission in the Iranian desert likely saved their lives and many others. As the book makes clear it seems difficult to disagree with this assessment.

The author points out still more problems. The type of helicopters used had not been tested under the conditions they were likely to encounter. The requirement that the pilots maintain radio silence to avoid detection prevented them from sharing information about the locations and extent of opaque clouds of dust and sand. They had not been instrument-trained on this type of helicopter, despite having to fly at low altitude at night, often with almost no visibility while passing over and around mountains. Pilots with greater experience and skill at operating these helicopters could have been selected from the Air Force rather than the Navy, or else the best suited pilots could have been drawn from among the military's four branches. Due to what the book describes as an excessive concern for pre-mission secrecy, ground forces from different units never rehearsed the mission together, nor did they rehearse it with the pilots. Issues emerged involving overlaps in the chain of command among the different participating military branches, which may have contributed to the confusion that caused the crash.

Anyone interested in a painstakingly objective, unsparing, detailed yet highly engaging account of the plans for this mission and why it failed in the desert without encountering a single Iranian soldier could do no better than to read this book, not withstanding that it was published forty years ago, in 1985.

[Mike Glaser · Rating 3 out of 5]

An oldie but a goody. My original copy disappeared in one of our moves so I found a used copy on Amazon. It was interesting to see how my opinions of some of the individuals in this book have changed as I have gotten older. The helicopters were definitely underused prior to the mission and in my opinion that led to a number of the issues that they had when they flew to Desert One.