Delta Force (29 page)

THIRTY-SEVEN

AFTER REFUELING IN
the desert, the location where Delta could hide during the daylight hours before they left on the second night for the embassy was selected. The site lay at the edge of the salt wastes around Garmsar and the southern foothills of the Elburz Mountains. Delta Force would lie up in a secluded wadi about four miles northwest of Garmsar and nearly fifty miles southeast of Teheran. In an area of abandoned salt mines, it was near an improved road. The road was important because of the decision reached earlier that six large 2.5-ton covered trucks would pick Delta up at this site and transport it through Teheran to the compound. A separate hideaway for the Sea Stallions had also been located. After they'd dropped Delta near the wadi, they would fly to a more rugged hill area ten to fifteen miles northeast of our hide-site. There they would wait, concealed under camouflage netting, until summoned that night to the soccer stadium by Delta. Toward this end I assigned two radio operators—equipped with gear that had been designed and built by Delta to interface with specific satellites—to go with the helos and establish a communications link back to the assault team hiding in the wadi. With both hideout locations identified, it became a matter of keeping these areas under surveillance to determine whether they posed any potential risks. A line of the Iranian State Railroad, which lay just to the south of the wadi, worried the Delta planners. How many trains ran here? On what schedule? Only
Bob could tell whether the intel section's fears were real or imagined.

No one, however, could remove the heartburn the fuel blivets gave everyone. The parachute riggers had successfully found a way to drop them to the ground. But even though seven or eight successful rehearsals had been run in January, the feeling lingered that the blivets were trouble. The suspicion that they weren't the answer to our refueling question never went away. No one, however, could come up with anything better than the blivets until Chuck Gillman (pseudonym) had his inspiration.

I'd known Chuck in southeast Asia where he had managed air operations in Laos for the CIA. I felt he knew more about flying in support of special operations than anyone in the Agency at that time. At one of the blivet drills—this particular one was at the largest and most secure of Fort Bragg's four drop zones, the one known as Holland DZ—Chuck was standing near me. The drop went well, and as I began to get ready to return to the Stockade, he walked over to me. He wasn't satisfied with what he'd seen. “Suppose you can't find the buggers or they fall in a gulley and you can't move them? I can see they pump too slowly. What needs to be done, Charlie, is to land fuel-bearing planes in the desert. Get some tankers and refuel the helos from them.”

These aircraft would be EC-130s, which were capable of carrying 3,000 gallons of fuel in gigantic bladders. The argument against this method of refueling had always come from the Air Force staff planners who, without knowing the exact landing site, were afraid the crust of the desert floor would not support an EC-130. Their objection made sense to everyone. Chuck Gillman had the answer. “Let's fly a STOL [Short Takeoff and Landing], 2-engine aircraft from a neighboring country to a carefully selected spot in the area that the planners are considering for Desert One.” In other words, let's get serious about a site, then dispatch a special aircraft with people on board who can confirm that EC-130s can land and take off from there. He continued, “I've flown all over the area and I know it can be done. We'll survey the site, take photographs,
and dig some soil samples, anything that will convince the Air Force they should fly and land fuel birds in there. As a matter of fact, let's get an Air Force officer to go. He'll lend more credibility to anything that's done.”

We ratholed General Vaught in the conference room at the Stockade. He had with him the CIA's liaison officer to the JCS. It was nearly 2200 hours and everyone had had a long day. Chuck Gillman presented his idea. A Harvard man, he was very articulate. Chuck could sell anything. I was told by friends in the Agency that whenever they had a hard brief to sell, they always sent Chuck Gillman. An hour later General Vaught, too, was convinced that this was a sound concept. He said he'd try to sell it to the Chairman, General Jones.

During the next couple of days General Vaught surfaced the idea at the Pentagon, and from his telephone calls to me it sounded like General Jones would try to get White House approval for a STOL flight.

Delta went west again to rehearse with the helos. Some of the men didn't think the pilots had improved very much and began to have second thoughts about them. I didn't think it was as bad as they did. One day the weather turned foul. Dark purple clouds rolled in covering the sky from horizon to horizon. A great thunderstorm developed and the rain fell like Niagara. Because of the electricity in the air, one of the chopper pilots decided it was unsafe to fly. No Lips said, “We got a whole chopper-load of people here, sir. If we're in Iran and it rains and there's lightning, what are we going to do?” But General Gast continued to reassure me the pilots were getting better. Their CO, of course, knew they had improved, yet I wasn't totally convinced about Colonel Seiffert. I have to live with someone for a long time, share a foxhole with him, before I trust him totally.

A new navigation system had recently been pushed on the helo pilots. Called PINS (Palletized Inertial Navigation System), it was to be an alternative to the Omega system they had been using and were familiar with. Every system required a backup, for the same reason a gunfighter wore two guns. It was prudent, but the technicians who were providing PINS
instruction didn't believe the pilots had their hearts and souls in learning it. On the other hand, everyone wanted to have confidence in these leathernecks. If not them, who? If not now, when? The Marines got the benefit of the doubt.

I had one officer at this time, a young man, who I was a little concerned with. He'd never been in combat before but he wasn't ashamed to talk about being scared. We talked for hours. Everyone was scared. Any man who wasn't had to be plumb crazy. If you don't respect fear then there's no way you can handle it. Fear can be damn dangerous, but if you can come to grips with it, wrestle it, understand it, then you've got a chance to work around it. I didn't want to be in a tight spot being shot at and have around me men who were not at least a little scared. I listened a lot to one of my young officers and did some reassuring. When the time came he functioned and he functioned well.

Everyone was leaning forward. Delta was ready to go. They remembered what Moses had said, “If you don't think you've got the edge, say so and you won't go.” No worry about that. Delta had the edge.

The men were especially high the day they learned the planners had finally pinpointed the Desert One location. They'd found a remote site in the vast Dasht-e-Kavir Salt Desert, 265 nautical miles southeast of Teheran. It was ninety miles from any habitation, and that, the small weaving center of Yazd. It was now a matter of determining whether the desert floor there would support EC-130 fuel birds. General Vaught's air planners needed the STOL mission to confirm the choice and the White House continued to be pressed about it.

I also needed to confirm certain aspects of our assault plan on the Embassy and became more and more convinced that it was vital to Delta's success to insert one of our own people in Teheran. It was necessary to look over all the arrangements and examine critical areas through Delta's eyes. I respected Bob, but of course he didn't know anything about Delta. I didn't want to risk the lives of about 120 guys to someone I didn't know. I pressed General Vaught on the idea. After a while he warmed up to it.

When the word got out that we were considering infiltrating a Delta operator into Teheran ahead of the actual rescue, many of the men volunteered. After careful consideration, four operators were selected and began specialized training. This training consisted of learning Iranian customs and taboos, memorizing streets and boulevards in Teheran, studying transportation that moved through the capital, learning some Farsi and the Iranian monetary system, and learning to live under a cover story. Delta received a lot of help in this area. The intelligence services provided instructors and personnel who had lived in the city.

The four Delta operators who had been chosen were all from the right cut of cloth. Any one of them could have performed this mission. Buckshot, however, was something special and he became the primary candidate. As the training proceeded, it was apparent no appropriate cover could be found for Buckshot and he was reluctantly pulled out of the program. His Robert Redford looks didn't help matters. He didn't exactly disappear in a crowd. Moreover, I felt he was needed as my second-in-command. At this moment Dick Meadows stepped forward and I thought this was unusual. Dick had been on the Son Tay raid that had the aim of rescuing our POWs from the North Vietnamese—only to learn its intelligence was outdated and the POWs had been removed to another location. The raid, no matter the outcome, had been carefully planned and skillfully executed. I don't know why Dick volunteered to go to Iran, but I suspect he thought, being a civilian, the mission would go off and leave him behind. After much arguing, the intelligence community reluctantly accepted Dick. They gave him the code name Esquire.

There were three others. They, too, were trained by DOD and went into Iran at the same time as Meadows. Two of these men had Special Forces backgrounds; both spoke fluent German. The last man was in my judgment the bravest. We'd gone through the Defense Department's personnel computer looking for someone with a military background who spoke perfect Farsi. We found the most unexpected hero you could imagine. He was an Air Force sergeant, an E-6, who was leading
a mundane military life. His family had been born and raised in Iran and he spoke the language flawlessly. When he heard what we wanted him to do he volunteered immediately. I was extremely impressed with him. Having had no prior experience in this kind of work, he ran a larger risk than the others. He accepted those risks and stepped forward because his country needed him.

The plan was to infiltrate these four DOD agents into Teheran a few days before the rescue mission and, along with Bob, they would eyeball all the sites, check on the driving arrangements, and identify possible problem areas. There was much that needed to be done and not much time to do it in. The trucks had to be moved, the warehouse where they were going to be stored needed watching, routes had to be gone over and memorized, alternate routes had to be found, someone had to man the radio and both targets—the embassy and Foreign Ministry Building—needed to be watched.

Then something happened which was so stupid I couldn't believe it. Bob was brought back to this country and, astonishingly, he was sent to the
Pentagon
to visit with me. I became very angry with his handlers for having taken this risk. It was against all security rules. They should have known better. Bob was asked to look over the hide-site because photos weren't telling the intelligence people if the nearby railroad line would interfere with the plan. They also asked him to check out routes from the hide-site to the embassy gate, density of traffic flow on the possible routes and location of reaction forces, potential checkpoints and street construction in the neighborhood of the compound. I was concerned about the hide-site.

“Have you been there?”

“Yes, I've been there. When I go back I'll return to the area and reexamine it again to verify that it's the right place.”

“It's important that we pin it down. If we miss it in the darkness we'll never link up.”

I wanted to know everything I could about the site. I wanted to know who lived in the area and what they would think when they heard helicopters flying over their heads.

“They won't hear anything, Colonel, because there's no one there.”

“What will happen if we come in from this other direction?”