1 - The Black Vault

THE IRANIAN RESCUE MISSION
were other courses of action briefed to General
Meyer that included operations from Kuwait,
Bahrain, or Saudi Arabia, but all of these options,
including Turkey, were ruled out for both security
and political reasons. As other options were proposed
during the ensuing days, Egypt and Diego
Garcia emerged as the only two staging bases acceptable
to Jones and the Joint Staff. These two
staging bases were 5,000–7,000 miles from Tehran
and required a 24-hour round-trip flight by way of
C-130 aircraft with two to three air refuelings en
route. To get Delta Force to an undetected position
near the embassy, and then to extract the
force with the hostages in tow, required rotarywing
aircraft. The process of identifying the
proper helicopter for the operation would prove to
be challenging for mission planners. One concession
that Jones offered to planners was the utilization
of Saudi Arabian airspace during either ingress
or egress, thus reducing flight time from
Egypt to Tehran to approximately 12 hours. For
planning purposes, Turkish airspace was also approved
for egress after the hostages had been rescued.
To avoid transiting Saudi airspace twice on
successive nights, which could compromise the
mission, the long 24-hour flight around the kingdom
was still facing planners for the ingress
route. With these restrictions foremost in mind,
SOD set about to identify forces that were capable
of accomplishing the mission. To get Delta Force
into Iran over such vast distances was clearly in
the USAF’s area of responsibility.
* * * * * *
It was surprising that the United States had
not developed a joint counterterrorist capability
by late 1979. Three years before the embassy
takeover in Iran, on 3 and 4 July 1976, Israeli
commandos had conducted a raid on Entebbe International
Airport in Kampala, Uganda, to rescu e
105 Israelis taken when an Air France jetliner
was hijacked. The terrorists were sym pathetic to
the Palestine Liberation Organization and had
threatened to kill the hostages if Israel failed to
meet their demands. Operation Jonathan, the
code name for the rescue, relied upon a highly
specialized commando force supported by Israeli
air force C-130 aircrews. During the operation,
six terrorists were killed while the Israelis lost
two commandos and four civilian hostages. The
following year, on 18 October 1977, West German
GSG-9 counterterrorist forces killed four Arab
terrorists when they stormed a hijacked
Lufthansa airliner at the airport at Mogadishu,
Somalia. 10 Each rescue was considered a tactical
success.
As international terrorism increased, visionaries
in the US Army realized that it was only a matter
of time before the United States would become a
terrorist target. Accordingly, on 19 November
1977, with chief of staff of the Army (CSA) Gen
Bernard W. Rogers’s support, Delta Force was activated
at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The activa -
tion order described the unit’s mission, its basic
structure, and its high priority for obtaining
equipment and personnel to bring it to missionready
status. The man chosen to head the new
unit was Colonel Beckwith, a seasoned Vietnam
veteran who had also completed an exchange tour
with the British Special Air Service. 11 From the
time of activation and throughout its first two
years of operation, Beckwith and Delta Force
fought an uphill battle for funds and personnel,
even though the activation order clearly provided
US Army priority in both areas. By the summer of
1978, Delta Force was still only partially mission
capable. At the direction of General Meyer, the
US Army deputy chief of staff for operations at
the time, and with the support of General Rogers,
an initial evaluation and validation of the unit
was conducted. Although Beckwith and his men
passed the limited evaluation, those closely associated
with Delta Force at that time felt that many
areas of the evaluation were unfair and did not adequately
measure Delta Force’s capabilities.
Throughout the remainder of 1978, Delta Force
continued to field special equipment and recruit
top personnel for the unit. By 1979 the unit began
to do some advanced training activities outside
the United States. A typical European training
mission would include deploying a Delta Force
member to West Germany, who would be met by
a member of the 10th Special Forces Group and
then briefed on a notional mission involving a terrorist
attack on a US citizen. The Delta Force
operator would have a strict timetable to complete
his mission, which usually involved in-depth target
research and reconnaissance of the notional
target and development of a course of action to
free the hostage. Once the mission was complete,
the operator returned to Fort Bragg, where he
was debriefed and evaluated regarding the mission.
In addition to these overseas deployments for
training, Delta Force began an exchange program
in 1979 with the British Special Air Service. Representatives
from the Special Air Service visited
Delta Force at Fort Bragg and provided training in
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