Desert One: The Wrong Man and the Wrong Plan
Keisling, Phillip
Desert One: The Wrong Man and the Wrong Plan by Phillip Keisling One consequence of the American invasion of Grenada already is clear: its relative ease has momentarily dispelled the lingering...
...Slipping silently over the walls of the American embassy, the members of Delta Force would ?an out and search the buildings for hostages, killing any Iranian who resisted...
...Based on their mentality...
...it was up to others to evaluate their criticisms...
...Beckwith’s superiors instead tended to rely on the judgments of the very people with a stake in the mission...
...The delay ensured that Delta probably couldn’t reach Desert Two before sunrise, thereby vastly increasing the chance of detection...
...And as he awaited the helicopters’ arrival, he made a decision that, in retrospect, seems more dubious than his later one to abort the raid...
...Months of waiting-Delta was put on alert seven times before it finally left for Iran-gives plenty of time to conjure up new contingencies...
...But there should be little doubt that Iranian casualties of that magnitude would have hardly helped in justifying the raid to the world...
...Beckwith’s failure to acknowledge the first reason is perfectly understandable...
...unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened...
...Finally, Beckwith’s case will be aided by his considerable personal charm...
...In this instance, no one would have been better able to critique the plan than Beckwith’s adversaries in the commando communityGenerals Mackmull and Meloy, for starters...
...With the roar of 12 helicopter rotors and 16 C-130 engines, communication was possible only if you “put your face up to the other person’s and yelled or used hand and Army signals...
...So what were the flaws...
...Jordan’s account adds a flourish that seems to reflect his boss’s political preoccupations at the moment...
...Cyrus Vance, the secretary of state, was alone in having grave doubts about the plan’s success...
...One can understand the process...
...For all his courage as a soldier-his nickname was wellearnedBeckwith’s account of how the mission was planned and his own behavior at Desert One suggest something truly disturbing: that when the going got tough, the man to whom the Pentagon entrusted this crucial mission lost his cool...
...Tho of the major flaws-perhaps insurmountable ones-involved the absolute need for secrecy before Delta Force reached the embassy, and the time it took to locate, free, and evacuate the hostages...
...All four services were involved in the planning and execution of the raid: Marine helicopter pilots would fly from Navy ships to rendezvous with Army commandos who’d arrived on Air Force cargo planes...
...what he and many others have failed to recognize is that the Iranian rescue mission had been lost long before Delta Force set foot in Iran...
...But if Beckwith’s tendency to ignore unsettling questions about the plan is somewhat understandable, the tendency of his superiors to do the same isn’t...
...How do I know that...
...In Teheran, several hundred Iranian civilians would probably be dead, and many more wounded...
...There’s a very good case to be made, ” he says, “that the mission’s failure illustrates the terrible price one pays for secrecy...
...The weapon scared us a lot:’ Beckwith admits...
...during one practice night landing, for example, the helicopters had landed nearly a mile from one another...
...to press his case, Beckwith often went over the heads of his superiors directly to Army Chief of Staff E.C...
...Finally, there’s the tendency to want to reduce the consequences of one’s own mistakes...
...And this is Beckwith’s response when he’s asked to reconcile his different time estimates, or to seriously contemplate the possibility that Iranian resistance, inside the embassy or in Teheran’s streets, would have turned the surprise mission into a sudden debacle...
...The longer it took to free the hostages, the greater the likelihood that Delta Force would have to fight its way out of downtown Tekeran-and the greater the likelihood that sbme of the hostages would have been caught in the crossfire...
...It doesn’t make sense...
...America needs a win’ As those in the military know, plans have a way of taking on a momentum of their own...
...The script, however, is as predictable as can be imagined...
...So it was that the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Jones, asked for a special meeting with Beckwith the week before the mission to discuss the upcoming raid...
...No enemy was pressing in on Delta, but Beckwith was so preoccupied with leaving that these considerations were momentarily forgotten...
...The likely result, Beckwith admits, was Iranian casualties of “several hundred people...
...Its failure had almost been assured by the military’s process of planning the raid, analyzing it for defects, and choosing the man to lead it...
...To counteract this tendency to suppress the unpleasant fact, ways must be found to leapfrog the existing chain of command...
...That would change-a hole would be blown through the embassy wall, shattering windows in a three-block area...
...Still, the process not only should have been resisted, as the Holloway report suggested, but it should have communicated something disturbing to Beckwith’s superiors...
...If one of the helicopters had crashed with the hostages on board, the whole point of the mission would have been destroyed...
...The second response to the threat was to make the mission even more complicated than it already was...
...This resolve to stay with the plan came just minutes after Beckwith had decided to alter the plan...
...By that time, however, everyone had left...
...Virtually nothing on a helicopter is armored...
...Beckwith now says that he would have had no objection to that, providing they were “objective” in their criticisms, which of course they wouldn’t have been...
...Delta couldn’t assault the large compound, seize and clear 14 buildings, secure and hold adjoining Roosevelt Avenue, organize, protect, and move 53 hostages-it just couldn’t be done with fewer than 70 operators...
...But more honorable motives than fear are involved...
...And though a similar loss of calm at a crucial moment in Teheran might have ruined the whole mission, at Desert One Beckwith’s lapses had one saving grace: they were not the cause of the mission’s failure...
...And picture the scene: the helicopter landing on the West Lawn of the White House, with 53 hostages stepping out into the spring sunshine to shake hands with a beaming president, whose reelection hopes had just soared...
...None of this seems to have happened...
...Still, the confusion hardly excused the breakdown of leadership and the panicked retreat from Desert One that Beckwith’s account graphically suggests...
...And I’ve always believed that when we blew the wall, all hell would have broken loose...
...According to Beckwith’s account, he replied, “Sir, we’ve got to do it...
...Its soldiers not only aren’t hiding under the bed...
...Delta was going to protect itself by resorting to a sizable and conspicuous display of force...
...The stress showed most when the dispirited commandos returned to Egypt and Beckwith delivered an angry denunciation of the helicopter pilots, some of whom had expressed doubts about continuing the mission...
...I made.up my mind...
...But Beckwith has made his case many times before...
...What are their concerns...
...The original estimate of 70 commandos-which General Vaught initially thought was already too high-assumed that all 14 embassy buildings needed to be searched for hostages...
...In the ensuing confusion, the hostages would be rounded up and loaded on the helicopters, which by nowhad arrived on the scene If the helicopters could not land on the embassy grounds-indeed, the student militants had placed poles in the open areas to prevent this-the hostages would be taken to the soccer stadium across the street...
...Those who have a personal stake in the success of a given plan are particularly susceptible to this process, and Beckwith was certainly among them...
...Delta didn’t discover where the hostages were until after it had arrived in Egypt in preparation for the raid...
...The C-130 pilots flew much higher, having been informed that Iranian radar wasn’t working that night...
...Not surprisingly, Beckwith defends his decision to abort the mission at Desert I after three of eight helicopters could not proceed-two because of mechanical failures and one because its pilot turned back in a fierce sandstorm less than 100 miles from his destination...
...The situation became even more chaotic when, during refueling, one of the helicopters crashed into a C-130 and eight men died in the ensuing explosion...
...Any slip-up along the route-the Iranians’ picking up any of the helicopters or planes on their radar, Delta’s failing to pass unnoticed through one of the roadblocks into Teheran, a sheepherder’s spotting the helicopters overhead and notifying his local mullah-would have destroyed that secrecy and put the militants on alert...
...The hostages would be flown home by C-141 transport planes that were to arrive from Egypt, Of course, the whole thing unraveled at Desert One...
...Colonel Harry Summers, author of a recent study of military tactics during the Vietnam war entitled On Strategy, offers a more pointed assessment...
...Beckwith greeted the idea with scorn...
...The mission was wellexecuted...
...The plan for the raid, approved and monitored by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, violated a fundamental tenet of military strategy, which holds that the possibility of failure increases exponentially with a plan’s complexity and size...
...Iran wasn’t supposed to have a chance in its war with Iraq, but if anything Iran is winning...
...every extra minute would have given the Iranians more time to respond to the intrusion, with small-arms fire, the ZSU-23-4, or perhaps even some of the F-5 fighters that the Khomeini government had inherited from the Shah...
...Meadows likewise played little role in the planning process...
...There was regular chaos in the country...
...Meadows had favored using a relatively small assault force of about 40...
...Delta Force, after all, was the result of a long and acrimonious battle he’d waged within the Army bureaucracy...
...After having let 53 hostages escape, wouldn’t Khomeini’s loyalists have simply rounded up 53 more Americans to replace them...
...military since the Muyuguez rescue mission in 1975 in which 15 Marines died...
...I know what I would have done in that case-and that’s get under the bed...
...But looking back, what the mission needed was not a John Wayne so much as a Gary Coopersomeone who would be cool under fire, not overanxious to charge or quick to anger...
...William Safire of The New York Times recently dubbed as “Beckwithism” the notion of always sticking to the plan, “not taking a risk to win a victor$’ But in almost calling Beckwith a coward, Safire is grossly unfair...
...The general, or someone who has his complete trust, should talk to the lieutenants, the sergeants, even the privates who will actually be performing the mission...
...Beckwith technically wasn’t the officer in charge of the Desert One phase of the operation, but it’s clear he was calling the shots...
...But now picture the scene half a world away...
...According to Beckwith, the raid would have worked because the Iranians would have panicked...
...FDR knew, for example, that two of his top officials-Harry Hopkins and Harold Ickes-despised each other...
...His account of the raid indicts the familiar culprits we’ve long since come to associate with Carter’s presidency: bureaucratic ineptitude, failure of nerve, plain bad luck...
...The mission’s complexity cannot be overestimated...
...This meant that the hostage rescue plan was never subjected to rigorous testing and evaluation by qualified independent observers and monitors short of the Joint Chiefs of Staff themselves...
...after being fired upon, the gasoline tanker exploded and burned for several hours...
...I’m not a perfect person...
...At this time, I may have also called the helo pilots cowards...
...A hell of a lot more than that would be needed...
...you get hit in the rotor or the fuel tank and that’s it:’ Hoven says...
...By the time Delta left Egypt for Iran in April, on board the C-130s were 132 men, including two former Iranian generals...
...Several days before the raid, the Iranian militants discharged a Pakistani national who’d been cooking for the hostages...
...By the time Delta Force arrived at Desert I, the mission was no longer Beckwith’s to botch...
...From there, the hostages would be flown to an abandoned airfield 35 miles south of Teheran, at Manzariyeh, by now supposedly overtaken by a separate team of Army Rangers...
...But it likely would have been planned differently, particularly when it came to the size of the force...
...The raid would begin at midnight...
...At one point he approvingly relates a conversation between two friends about whether John Wayne would be right to play Charlie Beckwith in a movie of his life...
...A bus carrying 40 Iranian tourists appeared on a supposedly seldom-traveled road...
...Beckwith stresses throughout the book how crucial it was to get to the embassy without arousing Iranian suspicions...
...And if anything, flying during daylight hours would have jeopardized the mission’s success more than the decision to proceed with only five helicopters, particularly since only three were necessary to carry the commandos and the 53 hostages out of Teheran...
...More specifically, the book revealsinadvertentlytwo important reasons the rescue mission’s failure was inevitable rather than accidental...
...There wasn’t the kind of rigorous questioning you needed to expose the flaws in the plan...
...I carried a great deal of stress from the time we left Egypt until we returned...
...The commandos would then be driven in the trucks into downtown Teheran, past several roadblocks...
...The failure of the helicopters seems like a plausible explanation...
...This is hardly a trifling discrepancy...
...But think about what was involved...
...He should know it will be a disaster if we go forward with five...
...Beckwith himself would be loath to acknowledge either reason...
...The trouble with the “they’re-different-thanus” attitude isn’t just that it might be wrong, but that it might be right in exactly the wrong way...
...if anything, the planning for the rescue mission adhered even more closely to the chain of command than missions of much less consequence...
...American casualties, on the other hand, were assumed to be “maybe one or two hostages...
...he also was familiar with the military’s penchant for self-denial, having served as secretary of the Army under President Kennedy...
...a gasoline tanker truck appeared soon after...
...So whenever Ickes proposed something, Roosevelt would ask Hopkins about it, and vice versa, knowing that their mutual dislike would inspire each to spend a lot of time trying to identify weaknesses in the other’s proposals...
...Beckwith made their job harder by showing off his program to maximum effect: one common technique was to put visiting dignitaries in a room that was full of dummies, turn out the lights, and then have a Delta Force team burst in and open fire with live ammunition...
...Never mind that we lost eight of our new UH-60 helicopters to small-arms fire, that most of our casualties resulted from accidents or “friendly fire” from our own troops, or that our intelligence failed on such basic matters as estimating the number of Cuban troops on the island...
...I heard them before they came into sight:’ Beckwith writes about waiting for the choppers at Desert One, which gives you some idea of the racket they make...
...We’re ready...
...But its criticisms of the planning process are about as strongly worded as such internal reviews usually dare to get: “Planners [of the raid] in effect reviewed and critiqued their own product for feasibility and soundness as they went along...
...Paul Hoven, a pilot who flew over 1,000 missions in Vietnam, describes an all-toocommon experience when he tells how he once watched nine of ten choppers go down as a result of small-arms fire from AK-47s...
...Add to that the difficulty of maneuvering in a city, at night, and Hoven considers the plan a “one-in-a-thousand operation!’ To make matters worse, the Iranians had more than rifles...
...In Delta Force he claims that it would have taken just 45 minutes...
...military for many years...
...The Joint Chiefs of Staff were acting in essence as their own action officers...
...Someone on the site (Beckwith can’t remember who), suggested that an airstrike be called in, but Carter vetoed the idea...
...No matter when the choppers arrived-and no matter when we arrived at the hidesite-we would go ahead:’ he writes...
...Stay with the plan...
...And at Desert One, he summarily dismissed taking fewer men in five helicopters, even though the task at the embassy was now much easier than he had thought when he began...
...The information resulted from the kind of serendipity that seems contrived even by Hollywood standards...
...That particular alarm bell stopped ringing!’ This is exactly when the alarm bells should have started ringing for Beckwith’s superiors...
...I really didn’t care...
...We need one real, real bad...
...Of course, few people could have kept calm amidst such tragedy and bitter disappointment...
...if problems arise, the plan should be refined and improved, but not abandoned...
...The plan exists...
...They could have taken a lesson from President Franklin Roosevelt and asked Beckwith’s enemies within the bureaucracy to critique the plan...
...Beckwith’s reaction displays something less than dispassionate deliberation: “I lost respect right then for General Vaught...
...This is ludicrous...
...It’s an unsettling question-and just one of many that Beckwith, not to mention his superiors, never honestly confronted...
...We “won” one for a change...
...Morale soared...
...How could Beckwith’s superiors have known which tough questions to ask...
...Delta would have no chance against it!’ The response of the raid’s planners to the threat of the ZSU-23-4 epitomizes the larger tendency to dismiss the toughest questions with blithe assumptions...
...The Holloway report hardly excoriated the military for having botched the rescue operation, and it refused to examine the most important question-whether the plan stood a reasonable chance of working had Delta Force ever gotten beyond Desert One...
...The military systematically ignored or downplayed intelligence that suggested the difficulty-if not the impossibility-of the task...
...That’s what I got paid to do...
...The passengers were detained...
...Delta Force, Colonel Charlie A. Beckwith, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $14.95...
...When those responsible for the classified information tried to retrieve it, they were instead hustled onto the C-130...
...But they’re important to recognize, for behind them lie some critical weaknesses that, our “victory” in Grenada notwithstanding, persist to this day...
...His fights inside the bureaucracy-particularly with General Jack Mackmull of the Special Forces Center at Fort Bragg and General Guy “Sandy” Meloy of the Army Rangers-are described at length in the book...
...subordinates also want to protect their bosses from having to deal with every little detail that arises...
...Victory seems closer if you convince yourself that the enemy is unable, or unwilling, to fight...
...The natural desire to protect the lives of one’s men encourages the commander to err on the side of excess...
...Of course, it’s impossible to say whether the Iran raid would have worked under the leadership of someone like Meadows...
...The rescue mission was the single largest military action undertaken by the U.S...
...They had vast stores of U.S...
...To protect against the ZSU-23-4 and other hostile fire, the task force decided tocall in two AC-130 E/H gunships that would fly in a tight circle above the embassy, firing on anything down below that looked unfriendly...
...I had laughed when it was suggested that 40 of them be used...
...A number of downtown blocks (including the entire embassy compound) would have been reduced to rubble...
...Whereas Beckwith made his reputation during his bold mission to relieve the besieged defenders of Plei Mei in 1965, Meadows made his as the leader of the 1970 raid on Son Tay prison camp in North Vietnam to rescue American POWs...
...Accordingly, few generals really understood the strengths and limitations of Delta Force...
...For over 24 hours the 132-man force and six helicopters would have to remain undetected...
...Subordinates, after all, are generally reluctant to pass on information that their bosses don’t want to hear for fear of somehow being held responsible...
...In December 1979, the force was increased to include 92 men-which happened to be the entire Delta contingent at Camp Smokey, North Carolina...
...That’s the point...
...The rationale for this-the importance of maintaining complete secrecy-was understandable, but in retrospect it’s clear that the concern became an obsession that needlessly undermined any chance the raid may have had...
...This wasn’t Grenada, where the loss of surprise and some embarrassing failures of intelligence increased US...
...I gotta tell you, I was emotional:’ writes Beckwith...
...In this respect Beckwith provides a vivid contrast to another famous special forces soldier, Major Richard Meadows, who was described by David Martin in a July 1982 cover story in Newsweek, by far the best account to date of the internal workings of the raid...
...Having them overhead made the Delta operators feel more comfortable:’ Beckwith writes...
...Even Beckwith admits that he figured on losing “one or two helicopters” over the soccer stadium alone in the effort to lift out the hostages...
...in interviews, his soft Georgia accent and the somewhat corny figures of speechL‘You’re singing a beautiful song now” is his way of saying “I agree”-are disarming...
...Carter didn’t find out until after the raid of the grumbling about the quality of the helicopter pilots...
...Damn, I thought, how in the hell can the boss ask me that...
...And the number didn’t stay at 70...
...Delta had the firepower to destroy all the helicopters, but didn’t...
...That so many find reassurance in winning this obvious mismatch is due, in large measure, to our fears about America’s prowess, which had their origin in the Korean stalemate, were reinforced in Vietnam, and were culminated in the early morning hours of April 25, 1980, at a place called Desert One...
...As the Holloway report gently observed in criticizing the growth in the raiding party, “A commander is always tempted to improve his posture up to the point where the battle is joined...
...what distinguishes Delta Force is its insights into how the United States military makes decisions...
...Because special operations have always been a step-child inside the military-by definition, their adherents disdain conventional tactics and thinking-few officers who have championed them have risen to the top...
...These reasons have been largely overlooked or merely hinted at in almost all accounts of the raid, from news stories to the military’s ocficial post mortem, known as the Holloway report...
...The easiest way to deal with these unpleasant scenarios was to dismiss them the same way American officials dismissed the notion that we could lose in Vietnam...
...on the plane home, he happened to sit next to a deepcover CIA agent...
...Desert One: The Wrong Man and the Wrong Plan by Phillip Keisling One consequence of the American invasion of Grenada already is clear: its relative ease has momentarily dispelled the lingering aura of “Can’t Do” that has haunted the U.S...
...Yet the two were not actively involved in the process...
...Instead of paring down the number of commandos, he simply re-divided their tasks...
...Before beating a hasty retreat, the raiders left eight men dead and enough sensitive documents lying around in abandoned aircraft to blow the cover of the few CIA operatives then in Iran...
...Their soldiers aren’t being paid...
...As a result of this pervasive desire to have the plan work, information that suggested otherwise didn’t make it all the way up through the chain of command...
...unfortunately, intelligence failed to disclose that the POWs had been evacuated shortly before...
...I wanted to get everyone out of the desert as soon as possible:’ he says...
...Meyer...
...And had Delta Force been driven to fight it out in the streets of Teheran, it would have made the confusion at Desert One look tame by comparison...
...But every additional man complicates the logistics of the mission and increases the danger of detection...
...The several hundred Americans still living in Teheran, many of them journalists assigned to cover the hostage crisis, would be waking up to learn of the raid for the first time...
...according to his account (which he obviously got straight from Beckwith), Jones was also told, “Besides, sir, America needs a win...
...Looking back, this element of wishful thinking-notice it’s not “We will win” but “We need a win’Lextended up the chain of command all the way to the president and his inner circle...
...After hiding all day, the 132-man force (93 members of Delta and 39 support personnel) would load in the dark onto six trucks secured for them by CIA operatives who’d recently infiltrated the country...
...First, the military assumed that their enemy would be inept and incompetent, unable to get their heavier weapons into place for at least 90 minutes due to the chaos in the Iranian army...
...One reason for this was ignorance...
...But first it’s necessary to recall how the raid-particularly after Desert One-was supposed to work...
...There, a team of Army commandos was forced to abort its mission to rescue the 53 Iranian hostages...
...Everyone was doing two jobs as it is, some of them three, ” he remarks...
...During that period, the commandos would have to move between three hiding places-Desert One, Desert Tho, and the outer walls of the embassy...
...The embassy, remember, was in the middle of Teheran, and the arriving helicopters-each the size of two Greyhound buses strapped side-by-side-could hardly be unnoticed...
...One of them was Hamilton Jordan, who in his book Crisis extols Beckwith’s virtues at great length...
...This was no time to substitute wishful thinking for hard, clear analysis...
...Three of the helicopters near the burning planes contained classified information that would later fall into Iranian hands, endangering the lives of the undercover agents helping in Teheran...
...Colonel Charles (Chargin’ Charlie) Beckwith was commanding officer of “Delta Force:’ the name of the unit picked to rescue the hostages and the title of his book on the failed raid...
...When the craft developed hydraulic problems, General James Vaught, the off-site commander of the mission, radioed to ask Beckwith’s opinion about proceeding with five helicopters...
...The helicopters were 90 minutes late, in large part because the pilots thought they had to fly at treetop to escape detection by radar...
...Both Meadows and Beckwith had been asked shortly after the hostages were taken to recommend a rescue plan...
...many are undertaking, in the name of Khomeini and Allah, the kind of suicide missions reminiscent of the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War 11...
...Perhaps most important, an undue obsession with secrecy prevented the plan’s proper evaluation and allowed those ultimately responsible for the mission-the Joint Chief3 of Staff and the president-to convince themselves the raid stood a reasonable chance of succeeding...
...Some say I did...
...Offered without proof, the response also raises the question of why Beckwith was willing to proceed with a force he still thought was too small...
...NO, John Wayne’s not tough enough:’ one of the friends replied...
...Phillip Keisling is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Despite the increased risks of detection, Beckwith decided to change the plan and proceed with the mission...
...It was a logical question, and one that national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, from the safety of the White House Situation Room, was hoping Beckwith would answer affirmatively...
...Beckwith, in arguing for more men anyway, responded that the main embassy building, the chancellory, was better fortified than originally thought...
...Up to this point, the raid is supposedly still a secret...
...But his rank and position made him seem like a logical choice...
...for example, in the Newsweek story last year, Beckwith estimates that it would have taken three or four hours...
...It’s a scene Beckwith and others have played for all the high human drama it supposedly portrays: the savvy chief looking the rough-hewn commando straight in the eye as they sit in Beckwith’s car on the side of the road and asking him for his candid appraisal...
...One of the mistakes, of course, was entrusting so much responsibility to Beckwith himself...
...Coop or the Duke...
...The worst aspect of the helicopters was their vulnerability...
...casualties but hardly ruined the invasion...
...The rescue mission’s planners also suspected the Iranians had the ZSU-23-4, a Russian-made cannon mounted on an armored chassis and equipped with tracking radar...
...Exactly what the mission planners really thought is unclear...
...Delta Force .would travel from Egypt to Desert One on the Air Force’s C-l3Os, while the helicopters would fly a different route from a carrier in the Sea of Oman: After refueling and taking on the commandos, the helicopters would fly to a second hideoutDesert Tho--50 miles outside Teheran...
...Perhaps 70 were needed...
...All the hostages were being held in the chancellory, and the cook described how they were guarded...
...That decision became moot with the failure of one of the six helicopters that managed to get to Desert One...
...he eventually volunteered for undercover service in Iran and had to flee the country when the abandoned documents at Desert One blew his cover...
...How lucky that neither was immersed in a flight magazine...
...Delta Dawn Both these reasons are worth closer examination, for the institutional defects they illustrate still exist...
...By the same token, the estimates of American casualties were unrealistically light...
...No way Delta was going to be pinned down and not be able to get the hostages out...
...Soldiers obviously aren’t paid to worry about politics...
...The second reason far overshadows the first...
...There was simply too much to do...
...The element of surprise was crucial, not just to get a jump on the student militants, but to get the 53 hostages out safely...
...Yet by early 1980 intelligence analysts had narrowed the number down to four...
...They felt Delta Force was redundant, that the Green Berets and Rangers could handle counterterrorist operations...
...Though the tough-guy pose he assumes in the book is annoying, Beckwith is clearly a man of courage, as demonstrated by his years as a Green Beret in Vietnam, which he recounts here...
...But the biggest unknown in the mission lay in how much time it would take to free the hostages...
...The top brass can also avoid the typical chain of command completely-for example, by calling in a few retired officers familiar with special operations...
...I suspect that few readers will seriously quarrel with Beckwith’s decision...
...But assume, finally, that the raid had actually worked, that all the thousand details had meshed together into a smoothly running machine...
...The rescue mission was his chance to establish Delta Force’s rightful place in the Army’s hierarchy...
...weapons that had been given to the Shah, including such helicopter nemeses as the SO-caliber machine gun and the 76mm cannon...
...Generals will rarely tell you they can’t do something:’ Vance told Jordan before the raid...
...After filtering out the objections he thought were motivated by spite, Roosevelt could feel confident that most of the hard questions had been raised...
...In all fairness, Beckwith had made these two decisions in an atmosphere of eerie chaos that had reigned almost from the first moment the commandos arrived at Desert One...
...Beckwith’s charm and reputation for toughness also impressed many people outside of uniform...
...Beckwith’s response to this information is revealing, for it illustrates the inflexibility of large operations to respond to sudden changes...
...It was Beckwith’s superiors who had ultimate responsibility for the raid, and it was their mistakes that almost guaranteed that if the raid hadn’t failed at Desert One, it would have failed somewhere else...
...In describing the events of January, Beckwith refers to a “new figure of nearly 120 men:’ including separate drivers for the trucks and six Farsi translators...
Vol. 15 • December 1983 • No. 9
