Delta Force (25 page)

In late November, when the thirteen released hostages returned home, we learned that three Americans were being confined outside the embassy. On the day of the takeover the Chargé d'Affaires, L. Bruce Laingen, the Political Officer, Victor Tomseth, and a security officer, Michael Howland, were doing business in the Iranian Foreign Ministry building. They were still there, being held captive on the third floor. Therefore, as Delta would have its hands full with the fifty hostages held in the embassy compound, another force would have to be found to attack that second location.

In the evenings, we watched all the network television coverage. The Iranian segments were taped, and screened over and over. They carried much valuable information: how the gates were secured (the motor pool gate, for example, was chained and padlocked); types of weapons (the Pasdaran revolutionary guards outside carried G3 rifles, while the militants inside carried a variety of handguns, Uzi submachine guns, M3 carbines, and G3 rifles). We watched to find out if the guards handled their weapons like well-trained professionals, or like amateurs—we decided the latter. Were grenades or extra bandoliers of ammunition in evidence? (Grenades were never seen, but there were instances when more than one magazine to a guard was visible.) The amount of business going on in the streets (streets were usually crowded) indicated the Pasdaran's unwillingness or inability to control the situation outside the walls. The nature of the buildings facing the
wall was important. The compound, obviously, was in a commercial district; and many of the surrounding buildings were high enough to look into the embassy grounds, particularly a nearby twenty-story building and a fourteen-story building west of the main gate. We checked from the broadcasts whether there were obstacles placed in the roads to control crowds during demonstrations. The width of streets and alleys (the two main avenues, Roosevelt and Takht-E-Jamshid, were four lanes and the alleys two lanes) was measured. We checked where covering fire could be placed (machine guns at any intersection would control access in either direction). We guessed at the number of people who lived in the area. It was low to medium density except to the north on Roosevelt Avenue, which showed upper-middle-class apartment buildings.

Television made everything real. There, for example, was Roosevelt Avenue, not lines on a map or fuzzy dots on an old black-and-white file photo; rather, in living color, just the way it had actually been several hours before when filmed.

Between the model, the television network pictures, and discussions with people who had recently returned from an assignment in the embassy or to Teheran, the planners began to color in the black-and-white sketch they had carried in their mind's eye.

In Washington, where I had flown to attend another brainstorming session, I was introduced to Air Force Col. James Kyle. General Vaught had added him to the Joint Task Force (JTF) staff as his deputy to supervise the planners responsible for getting Delta in and out. Jim Kyle impressed everyone. As a former air commando, he obviously knew his business.

When Kyle left his permanent duty station, which was in Hawaii, to join the JTF, having no idea how long it would be necessary for him to stay, he arrived with one change of clothes and the blue blazer he wore on his back. Months later, still in Washington, he continued to wear the same blazer. The lining, through numerous dry cleanings, became frayed and hung below the bottom of the coat. It was sort of a joke. Eventually, Buckshot loaned him another jacket and some ties.

Our mission flushed a covey of would-be helpers out of the offices of the JCS. There were some people who began to stick their noses into our business, trying to find out what was going on. Rubberneckers, all very interested and very official, continued to run in and out of the meetings. Some officers tried to get more involved than they needed to. They showed more curiosity than expertise. There was a lot of I-wish-I-was-more-involved-itis going around. The straphangers never seriously interfered with Rice Bowl, but at briefings they ate up a lot of time. There was also the problem of security. The more people involved, the more critical the problem. It was a matter of trying to determine who truly had a “need to know.” General Vaught tried to deal with it, but he never really found a way to make it go away.

One officer who was never a problem was Air Force Maj. Gen. Philip C. Gast. He had been in Iran several months earlier as the senior military advisor. General Gast became an important part of the team. He said, “I know nothing about Special Operations, but I do know something about Iran and I can help there.” He came down to Camp Smokey where the intelligence types like Wade Ishimoto picked his brain. He identified people who had recently worked in the embassy. He also knew which people worked in what office and in what building. These people, when tracked down through the Department of Defense, were brought on board and began answering some basic questions. General Gast also made every effort to take some of the load off General Vaught, whom, incidentally, he outranked by seniority.

THIRTY-THREE

FOR DELTA FORCE
a typical day at Camp Smokey in late November 1979 would begin with the lights coming on in the headquarters area occupied by the intelligence shop.

Wade Ishimoto would be up at 7:00
A.M
. in order to watch the early-morning network news programs. Messages that had come in during the four hours he had been asleep would also need to be read.

Around 9:00 o'clock, Ish or one of the other staffers would call the Pentagon to talk to Ron Killeen about the most recently received situation reports and intelligence estimates.

With the aid of an Air Force officer, Maj. Harry Johnson, who had recently been the assistant air attaché in Teheran, Ish tried to figure out how all the doors in the chancellery worked, which way they opened, how they were constructed, what kind of locks closed them, where were the keys or—in the case of electronic locks—the controls. Which doors could be breached without high explosives and which ones would require it?

That was the little picture. The big picture also needed to be attended to. For example, where were the Iranians positioning their Russian-built ZSU-23-4s? Those mechanized gun mounts posed a threat to any planes or helicopters Delta might use. They also threatened Delta on the ground. Capable of firing 6,000 rounds a minute, they could eat a wall whole. Nobody knew in late November where they were and much time was put in at Camp Smokey trying to figure this out.

Sometime during the morning Ishimoto would get up from
the stacks of paper he had on his desk and give an updated situation brief to the two squadron commanders.

In mid-November squadron commanders believed the staff might do something without telling them about it. They would, therefore, come and go at their convenience, playing the good ol' boy game, asking questions and interrupting the systems and schedules the intelligence staff were trying to establish. Having to stop to answer questions all day long ate into the hours the staff needed to analyze the reams of data coming to the headquarters. There was just no way Ishimoto or the other members of the overworked intel staff could answer each squadron or troop commander.

Buckshot and I clearly saw this as a problem and on at least three different occasions Buckshot pissed the troops off by ordering them to get the hell out of the office and leave Ishimoto alone. The problem was solved by giving the squadron commanders, and others who needed to know, daily scheduled briefings where, once the dump of raw information had been sorted through and interpreted, it was presented in a clear and concise manner.

One of the two big intel dumps that came in each day would arrive before lunch.

In the afternoon Ishimoto and the others would go through the tedious process of reading each report and studying each photograph, trying to decide what could be directly used, what was peripheral, and what was no use at all. In this last category would be a report, say, that came from a Swiss businessman who, while visiting Kerman five days earlier, had noticed tougher travel restrictions. Kerman was a long way south of Teheran. But then, a West German who had recently gone through Mehrabad International Airport had noticed arrival procedures, and his information was carefully filed.

At this stage, options for Delta going into and out of Teheran were still open. Every means was studied—everything from parachutes to trucks, buses to commercial airplanes—everything but submarines coming through the Caspian Sea. There were dozens of workbooks, filled with information concerning possible drop zones and landing zones, road conditions
in and around Teheran, the roads and checkpoints coming from Turkey, Iraq, and Pakistan, conditions at Mehrabad affecting arrivals and departures of international flight, the kinds of delays being encountered by these flights and the nature of the delays, whether custom checks were being handled by the tough Pasdaran or the easier gendarmerie, the presence of barricades on any of the runways and which runways were being used and which ones were closed down?

Even with the scheduled briefing in the morning, Ish would be interrupted probably ten to twenty times during the afternoon. Logan Fitch, whose squadron was running an exercise that night, needed more precise information. “Hey, Ish, what's the distance between the DCM [Deputy Chief of Mission] residence and [the warehouse called] ‘the Mushroom'?” Ish would stop what he was doing, go over to another workbook, the one dealing with the physical properties of the compound, and dig out that piece of information.

The workbooks were bibles. From early afternoon to 1900 hours, when dinner was served, Ish read, studied, filed, analyzed, and was interrupted. He could never catch up with the new material, which was unending.

After dinner he'd corner me and begin bitching about the lack of time he had. He'd get emotional. “Boss, I couldn't get my workbooks finished today. I got interrupted 900 times. Fitch needed to know something I think I'd already given him. That visitor from the JTF took some more time. Vaught took a half hour wanting to be briefed about the doors in the chancellery. God, I hope nothing comes in tonight.”

Around 11:00
P.M
. the teletypes would begin hammering away and the second large dump of IRs (intelligence reports) would come pouring in. Ish and the other staffers would pore over it until 3:00
A.M
., when they went to bed and tried to get some sleep. The network newscasts were scheduled to begin in four hours.

My days were never the same. Too many fires needed to be put out. A big problem was to keep as many people as I could away from the intel shop. Because the tactical plan to assault the compound depended largely on what they knew, it
was important that those analysts have as much time as possible.

There were the visitors who flowed into Delta as regularly as the Potomac flows into Chesapeake Bay. Trips had to be made to Washington. And the problems surfacing at Fort Bragg were communicated to me by Dick Potter.

Every day wasn't that way. Just most. There were those days when things would quiet down, particularly those days after a big meeting like the one after Thanksgiving. Then maybe the next day I could play catch-up. But normally it was a fast train. I spent most days in late November fighting fires, overseeing the training schedules, smoothing frayed tempers—and most important, trying to keep everything in perspective.

On a normal day I'd go down after breakfast to where the squadrons were billeted, which was about a mile from headquarters. Buckshot and I tried to do this often because the troops, not just our men but any men who are under stress, are curious about the larger picture. “What's the Old Man doing up there? He had a lot of visitors from Washington with him yesterday. I wonder what they wanted? Do we have a go ahead yet? I wonder…” No sooner had a plane landed than one of the squadron commanders would magically appear, “Hey, Boss, who's here?”

In combat there's never a rifle squad that doesn't want to know what its platoon is doing, or a platoon that doesn't want to know what its company is doing. When men are going to risk their lives in combat they're going to be curious about the circumstances that might cost them their lives. Fact is better than rumor. I tried to keep the squadrons in the picture.

Visitors were a constant problem. Ish wanted to know about the doors in the chancellery. He'd call Washington. Up there they would bust their butts finding people who knew about these doors. I'd get a message a day or so later. “We found Smith and Jones who were in the embassy three months ago. They know all about the doors. We're sending them down.”

Early afternoon a plane arrives and Smith and Jones ditty-bop in. They're curious about everything and they rubberneck and ask questions. You stop whatever you're doing
and talk to them. After all, they're here trying to help. Sometimes Smith and Jones are helpful—they did know how the doors work, so you don't mind spending time with them. Other times Smith and Jones contradict themselves on every detail and to be perfectly frank about it, are no fucking help at all.

Jim Kyle, wearing his blue blazer, would come down to Smokey. He had the job of getting Delta in and out of Iran. So we've got time for Kyle. He asks, “How are we going to get in?” He's dead serious. The workbooks fall further behind. I have a memo I must send to General Vaught about a training exercise. All is delayed because of the question: how will we come in, and go out?

I often received calls from General Vaught. A normal call for this time: The JTF has an exercise they want Delta to participate in. In seven days they want the squadrons to fly west and do some desert training, and they want our recommendation on how we see this going.

Buckshot says, “They don't know how to do a damn thing. We're going to have to send somebody out there to make sure that sonovabitch gets set up correctly. They don't even know how to get approval to use the exercise land.”

It wasn't that the JTF planners were stupid. Rather, it was that they had never done anything like this before. Special Ops is a rare and exotic bird.

I'd get back on the telephone with General Vaught, “Look, sir. Why don't you let us set this thing up? It will save time. We know who we have to contact.” “Fine, Charlie. You do it. I'll send a guy with you.”

The squadrons had a more straightforward day. Their routine was more structured—whether developing better ways to carry all their equipment or rehearsing soundless wall climbing—and a little simpler than, say, Ishimoto's. The skills they were required to master, however, were very sophisticated.

They'd take a weapons system and make sure everyone was qualified on it. The M79 grenade launcher, for example. Both squadrons would go out to the range and they'd fire the M79 all day. The air would be heavy with POPs as the launchers were fired and KARUMPs as the missiles landed. That night
they'd go back and shoot at more sophisticated targets in more realistic settings. The next two days they'd get checked out on the other launcher, the M203.

Logan Fitch, B Squadron's CO, would give Allen, one of his troop sergeants, an assignment. “Your troop is responsible for locating hostages in, and clearing, the Ambassador's residence.”

Allen would then take his morning and go up to the headquarters and begin to study the model of the compound and the model of the Ambassador's residence. “Ish, the leaded door which leads into the safe. Can we get it open if we have to or will we need to blow it?”

From his observations and the responses to his queries he would design tasks and exercises for his troop. Then, with his answers and with blueprints, the model and maps, Allen will coordinate his tasks with other troop commanders in B Squadron and begin to solve the riddle of how he will storm the residence and free the hostages. It wouldn't do to blow a door when another troop has at that moment to move past this area. Create and coordinate. Allen is kept very busy.
And
he must also qualify on all weapons systems and climb as swiftly and silently as his mates.

Fast Eddie has another kind of trouble. The embassy compound's wall. He was given the task in mid-November of designing a charge that will slice the wall in two.

Fast comes bouncing in on Ish, “Hey, partner, what's the thickness of the wall between the DCM's residence and the Ambassador's home?” Without this data he can't begin to work on his explosion formula. A workbook produces the correct information and Fast is off.

He first has to find somewhere in Smokey where he can build a wall of the same height and thickness as the one surrounding the compound between the DCM's and Ambassador's residences. Then he has to blow it down without knocking out every window in the camp. He will do it until he does it perfectly. He'll do all the scrounging and building himself, including finding a cement mixer to mix the mortar which goes between the bricks.

His attitude is, “I'm the only man here who has a mission. Everyone, out of my way. No one's job is more important than mine.” He'll interrupt everyone, in good conscience, so he can get his job done. And, he'll eventually blow that wall down as well as anyone since Joshua at Jericho.