Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (13 page)
Finally, Beckwith issued the execute code word: jasmine.
F-1 swept across the tarmac like a silent black tide. I was near the rear of the formation, just ahead of Mike and his radio. The belly of the plane stood about five feet off the ramp. Bending slightly to fit, we edged underneath, dropping lower as the tail sloped toward the concrete. Suddenly, behind me, a loud scrape echoed off the Connie’s metal skin. It was the PRC-77 antenna sticking up off Mike’s back. Instantly, I spun around, wrapped the big Samoan in my right arm, and took him to the ground. F-1 froze. Seconds passed as I lay nose to nose with Mike. Even though his balaclava covered all but his eyes, I could see he had
I’m sorry, Boss!
written all over his face. I felt bad for him.
We listened for the telltale pop-pop of blank rounds, the sign that hostages were dying. But there was only quiet, overlaid with the noise of the auxiliary power unit. At this distance, its steady hum had been enough to mask our error. When our snipers reported no change in activity inside the plane, the op was still a go.
Lightning-quick, an assault team of a dozen operators laid ladders below the main door and against the wings. Popeye moved to the nose of the aircraft and waited underneath. Once they were in position, I made a quick radio check with Charlie to make sure Pete’s team was in position for the building assault.
Then I keyed my mike, and the order filtered into each man’s ear: “Execute.”
The assaulters flowed up the ladders and breached the doors.
Five seconds passed.
Above us, pistol reports rang out. Muffled voices from the plane’s interior. “Remain calm! We’re here to get you out! Everybody place your hands on your head.”
Since the hostage takers were supposed to be Latin American, Dave Cheney repeated the last command in Spanish.
“Manos en las cabezas!”
Ten seconds gone.
Jack sprinted away, off the Connie’s port side, to set up his treatment area. Popeye moved out from under the aircraft’s nose and began laying his Chem-Light path. More shots.
The snipers kept their scopes trained on the breached hatches.
“All secure,” Dave reported. “Ready to evacuate.”
Time elapsed: fifteen seconds.
Pete’s team was just as effective. The after-action report showed that the speed and violence of their assault on the building stunned the terrorist/actors, immobilizing them like headlight-speared rabbits on a country road.
After the exercise, we immediately trucked back to the isolation site at Bragg. Tired, dirty, and still in our assault gear, Delta gathered in the conference room. The FORSCOM evaluators were there: General Volney Warner, General Guy S. “Sandy” Meloy, a couple of colonels. The room was packed. By then, Delta’s tactical teams had been twenty-four hours with no sleep and forty-eight with little. It was clear we’d executed the dual takedown scenario with stunning efficiency. But how would the evaluators balance that with our earlier performance in the individual skills tests?
General Warner was the on-scene observer with F-1. “That was the most professional cross-country movement I have ever seen,” he said of our approach to the Connie. “Never heard a person say a word.”
When Meloy spoke up, he was less effusive, but still gave us pretty decent marks overall.
But that wasn’t the way Charlie saw it. He was still pissed off about the individual tests, and still stinging from the clear indications that no one had bothered to read his letter detailing Delta’s training. Also, he was dead certain this entire early eval was a set-up, designed to dismantle Delta and clear the way for Mountel and Blue Light.
Colonel Beckwith stood and faced the generals. And when he opened his mouth, he said, “I never knew there were so [expletive] many counterterrorism experts in the Army.”
Inwardly, I rolled my eyes.
There’s going to be one hell of a fight before we get out of here tonight
.
CHARLIE HAD HIS SAY and so did a couple of the generals. But in the end, Delta’s performance on the evaluation proved that Blue Light was redundant. Mountel’s rival force was disbanded.
Delta went back into training, now focused on upgrading equipment and improving strategies. Pete and I devised more complex training scenarios, and Charlie and Bucky encouraged all of us to innovate. Staff Sergeant Terry Hall improved the efficiency of the grease guns, developing a quick-operating thumb safety. Pat Hurley, the guy who slept with his boney butt in my back during the Delta selection course, invented battery-operated pop-up targets we could take to remote sites for training. Delta became the counterterrorism equivalent of a brain trust as all the guys worked on new concepts and techniques.
We also began a kind of foreign exchange program with the other elite counterterrorist units: West Germany’s GSG-9, France’s GIGN, and the predecessor to us all, the British SAS. Those units also sent observers when, on November 1, 1979, our final evaluation began. This was the real deal, finally, with representatives from CIA, FBI, the Secret Service, Treasury, and Justice in attendance. The State Department sent Ambassador Anthony Quainton. The three-day test was rigorous. In addition to the individual skills tests, we had to plan and perform another dual takedown scenario, this time on a building and a Boeing 727. Apparently, we were moving up in the world.
Delta wowed the evaluators in every phase. Oohs and aahs all around. We finally wrapped up at around 2 a.m. on November 4. A lot of folks piled into vehicles and drove into Hinesville to grab some Waffle House breakfast. But I hadn’t slept in more than forty-eight hours. Somehow, I managed to drape my six-one frame across a little loveseat in an office somewhere and drop into the deathlike sleep of total exhaustion.
“Jerry . . .”
Am I dreaming?
“Jerry, wake up.” Someone was shaking my shoulder, trying to rouse me out of my deep stupor.
I cracked my eyes and could see daylight.
“Hey, get your stuff packed,” Bucky Burruss said. “We’re going back to Bragg. The American Embassy in Tehran has just been seized.”
Iran Hostage Crisis 1979–1980
IN 1978 IRAN, REVOLUTION WAS IN THE AIR. For thirty years, the Americans and the Soviets had been locked in nuclear standoff, playing out a game of trench-coat chess, each side working to block the other from gaining control of the Islamic third world and its oil resources. America allied itself with mainly Sunni Islamic powers who held to the concept of civil government—their version of separation of church and state. But beneath the surface, the anger of Shia fundamentalists simmered, then boiled up into rage. To them, America was a greedy and power-mad infidel, not an ally but the “Great Satan” that must be driven from Islamic lands. In place of Iran’s whorish foreign alliances, the Shias envisioned a glorious government under Sharia—or Koranic—law, led by fundamentalist clerics, an order author Mark Bowden would later call “totalitarianism rooted in divine revelation.” In 1978, led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, this Islamist revolution swept aside the government of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, forcing him into exile.
As it had in the U.S. for the previous ten years, the intoxicating scent of revolution seized university campuses in the Iranian capital, and many students embraced the spiritual and political fervor. With the shah gone, the dream of Islamist utopia was within reach, they felt. But in the heart of Tehran sat a cancer: the American embassy. Certain the diplomats there were actually counterrevolutionaries working to overthrow the new regime, a small inner circle of Islamist students hatched a plan. They would overrun the embassy, seize it, and occupy it for three days.
During that time they would broadcast a series of communiqués denouncing the United States. Khomeini, in a speech he gave a few days after the students discussed their plan, urged “all grade-school, university, and theological students to increase their attacks against America.” The student revolutionaries rejoiced. The Ayatollah had surely heard of their plan and was with them!
It wasn’t true. Khomeini knew nothing of them.
On November 4, 1979, hundreds of Iranian students, led by a small hardcore group, poured over the embassy walls, breached the buildings, and took sixty-six Americans hostage. Ordered to stand down by their diplomatic superiors, Marine Corps embassy guards never fired a shot.
Bowden’s 2006 account of the embassy seizure,
Guests of the Ayatollah
, revealed that though this brief occupation was supposed to be peaceful, at least one of the students, Mohammed Hashemi, “prepared himself to die.” Following Islamic instruction for
jihadi
martyrs, Hashemi performed the same ritual washing and prayers that nineteen hijackers would perform two decades later, on September 11, 2001, before murdering nearly three thousand Americans on U.S. soil. By the time Delta got news of the embassy takeover, reports had begun trickling in that the students were armed. Some hostages had been threatened at gunpoint and others severely beaten.
And so, on November 4, 1979, literally within hours of Army and intel evaluators certifying Delta ready for action, we loaded up in C-130s and flew from Georgia back to Bragg to launch our first mission.
Logan had been planning to take his squadron to Colorado for “winter warfare training” after the final eval. It was actually a ski trip to celebrate Delta’s official inauguration. Bucky recalled them immediately. Most of Delta redeployed to the Farm, a secure CIA isolation site. I didn’t go with them. Instead I went to Washington, D.C., joining Charlie and a Delta colonel named Chuck Whittle to meet with Pentagon brass and begin planning a rescue operation. That was how quickly it happened. Though the hostages’ captivity stretched into weeks, then months, and Americans clamored for their government to storm in and get them back, the rescue planning actually began within days of the attack.
On November 8, I arrived for the first time on the Pentagon’s innermost “E Ring,” just past the offices of the Joint Chiefs. I was a little in awe just being there and felt a sense of history as I passed the portraits of past JCS chairmen, including General Omar Nelson Bradley, an officer who had such compassion for his men during World War II they called him “the soldiers’ general.” I admired that.
Normal wooden doors punctuated the walls of Corridor 8 until the end. There stood a steel door secured with a spin-dial cipher lock. I pressed a button and an Air Force sergeant opened the door then escorted me into another smaller interior hallway with a second steel door. Behind that door was Room 2C840.
I half expected to step into a sleek secret-agent kind of space. Instead, I found a tiny, cramped room with exposed pipes running along the ceiling, mismatched government-issue furniture, and filing cabinets crammed into every possible space. On the wall, a row of white clocks announced the time in strategic locations around the world. The center of the room held a warren of desks and a small conference table. A secure telephone sat in the corner. The stale cigarette smell of a thousand planning sessions hung in the air.
I had just taken a seat at the conference table when the service chiefs began streaming into the room, including Joint Chiefs chairman General David Jones and Harold Brown, the Secretary of Defense.
With everyone seated, Secretary Brown spoke first. “What do we know? What kind of intel do we have?”
The answer was, very little. But CIA was working the problem. The U.S. had three CIA agents stationed inside the American embassy in Tehran. But since all three were now hostages, very little intel was coming out of Iran. We did not know, for example, that the students who seized the embassy originally meant to stage only a three-day sit-in. Nor did we know one of the students may have been Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who in 2005 would be elected president of Iran. But some embassy officials, off-site at the time of the takeover, spoke with embassy employees by phone before they were overrun and communications cut off. From that, we did know of the violence against the Americans.
Brown then asked who, exactly, the hostage takers were and what it was they wanted.
“Iranian students of some kind, sir,” an intel officer said. “Loyal to Khomeini. Their demands are unclear at this point.”
Brown scowled, unsatisfied with the vague answer.
“Has the Iranian government made any public statements?” Chairman Jones said.
“Nothing of substance,” the same intel officer answered.
Then Jones asked the money question: “What do we have in terms of capabilities?”
“We’ve put Delta in isolation at the Farm and they’re starting to do the tactical planning,” a Special Ops colonel said. “We’re looking at going in on Air Force helos. Spec Ops has CH-53s, so we’re looking at those and Army Chinooks to see if they can play a role.”
These planning considerations were aimed at two problems that, on a difficulty scale of one to ten, made this mission a fifty. First, this was not like the hostage scenarios that played out in Entebbe or Mogadishu, with not only a friendly host city, but also a handy beach perfect for a coastal insertion. Tehran was tucked away in the dry heart of Iran. A thousand miles of desert waste separated the city from the nearest coastline, which lay south. To the north was central Asia, the gateway to the Soviet Union. Afghanistan and Pakistan formed Iran’s eastern border, and to the west sat Turkey and Iraq. The Soviets weren’t going to help, of course, except maybe to cheer for Iran. And while America had friends in Iraq, involving other Islamic governments was, from a security standpoint, out of the question. The only regional allies willing to support us were Egypt and Oman.
This dovetailed with the second problem: Delta trained for operations in permissive environments with the support of local government, military, and police. Now, suddenly, we found our first mission was not only in a
non
permissive environment with no support, but also the local government was going to be the enemy. Not only that, but the embassy itself was buried in a city of five million people who hated America. We would face either informants or outright armed resistance at every corner.
