Basic HTML Version
AMERICA'S DISASTER
INIRAN-
WHY IT HAPPENED
Never before in its 204-year history has the United States been so humiliated. Why did a carefully
planned rescue operation end in such tragedy?
E
ARL.Y O
Fr iday, April 25,
Americans were awakcncd
with startling news. A dar–
ing super-sccret, risk-laden raid
to rescue the 50 American hos–
tages held prisoners in l ran had
ended in disaster.
A grim-faced President Carter
told his countrymen over rad io
and television at 7 a.m. that he,
as commander in chief, had been
forced to abort the long planned
and intensively rebearsed mission
when three of the eight helicop–
ters assigned to the operation
malfunct ioned.
June
1
July 1980
by
Gene H. Hogberg
A mm1mum of six craft were
considered essential to proceed
into the besieged U.S. Embassy
compound from a desert rendez–
vous 250 miles from Tehran. T he
crews had already flown 500
mi les undetected over Iranian
ai rspace from the aircraft carrier
Nimitz
in the Arabian Sea.
Compounding the desert deba–
cle, eight
U.S.
military personnel
were killed in a gctaway crash
between a helicopter anda C-130
transport plane. In the haste to
leave the wreckage, the charred
bodies and mill ions of dollars
worth of operable equipment
were abandoncd on the Iranian
desert floor. The crash was the
final episode of the unbelievably
t ragic string of events.
lt
ended
all hopes of keeping the failurc of
the mission a secret so that it
could be tried again.
H
ad t he opera tion sue-
ROTOR BLADES
of burned out helicop·
ter testifies to failure of American com·
mando mission to rescue hostages
imprisoned in /ran. In background is
helicopter left behind when mission
was aborted.
5