The Omaha pilot circled above the Iranian desert, his adrenaline still crackling after an all-night flight to the rendezvous point.

Warren Weaver had practiced this moment for five months, trained for a mission so secret he didn't know where he would be going until hours before he left.

Everything is good, he thought on April 24, 1980. Everything is going according to plan.

Another Omaha pilot readied for takeoff.

David Valenta had already hidden his nametag, his Strategic Air Command badge and $1,000 in cash in his sleeping bag at an Egyptian airfield.

Now he mentally prepared to join “Operation Eagle Claw,” a mission so daunting that one officer compared it to the Alamo except this time Davy Crockett would have to fight his way in.

This is really happening, Valenta thought as he strapped himself in.
The plan: Drop 132 Delta Force soldiers on a spot in the Iranian desert. Lift them by helicopter to hiding spots sprinkled around the hostile capital city.

Then storm the American Embassy, rescue 53 American hostages held at gunpoint by followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and fly everyone to safety.

It was historic the first time Delta Force, the elite Army counterterrorism unit, would spring into action.

It was harrowing a two-night mission smack-dab into the center of Iran, a country seething with revolutionary, anti-American anger.

And it involved at least four Omahans two pilots, an Air Force navigator and a Navy sailor and many more affiliated with the Bellevue-based SAC, now U.S. Strategic Command.

Those four Omahans recently gathered for the first time to talk about the Iranian hostage rescue mission. They remembered the intense training. They reminisced about the dramatic rescue plan.

And they bemoaned the mission's bad decisions, bad weather and bad luck.

That bad combination led to the radio transmission that Weaver and Valenta received the night of April 24, 1980, as one circled Iran and the other prepared to take off toward it.

“Red Barn, Red Barn, Black Beard, Black Beard. RTB,” crackled a voice on the radio.

RTB meant “return to base.” The Iranian hostage rescue mission had been aborted, mere hours after beginning.

“That day was probably the proudest day in my military career,” said Lt. Col. Valenta, now retired. “It was the most disappointing day, too.”

Thirty years ago, the United States was mired in the Iranian hostage crisis, a crisis that eventually stretched to 444 days, dismayed the American public and likely cost Jimmy Carter the presidency.

Unbeknownst to the public, a military rescue plan had begun to take shape just days after Iranian students overran the American Embassy Nov. 4, 1979, and took the staff hostage.

By Nov. 6, Weaver and Valenta, experienced KC-135 tanker pilots, found themselves practicing a strange new way to refuel the Hercules, an Air Force transport airplane.

The Air Force sent these pilots and crew members, including Omahan John Witzel, to far-flung locales such as Guam and Diego Garcia, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean.

There, pilots of the tanker plane and the Hercules practiced midair refueling the tanker giving the fuel and the Hercules taking it at far lower altitudes than the tankers were designed for.

They practiced refueling without using any radio communication. They practiced with no radar beacons. They refueled with night-vision goggles after crews turned off both planes' interior and exterior lights.

The fact that the tanker plane had a jet engine, and the Hercules an old-fashioned prop engine, further complicated the midair fill-ups.

To accommodate the two planes' difference in speed, the pilots had to use a complicated maneuver called a toboggan in order to get the tanker and the transport plane close enough to refuel.

“It was like a Ford Fiesta drafting behind a NASCAR,” Valenta said.
As the weeks of practice became months, the pilots and crew members speculated wildly about why they spent most of their time practicing new and inventive refueling techniques.

The same type of speculation was happening on the USS Nimitz, where young sailor Manny Jasso, now a Bellevue-based StratCom officer, was stationed.

The Nimitz's crew watched as Marine helicopters called Sea Stallions were loaded onto the aircraft carrier in the spring of 1980.

Some of the Omaha pilots and sailors thought they were preparing for an invasion of North Korea. Others believed Iran.

In reality, Col. Charlie Beckwith was convincing President Carter that Beckwith's newly created Delta Force unit could pull off a daring hostage rescue.

And Carter was coming around to a rescue plan that he had once viewed as preposterous, according to author and historian Mark Bowden's book on the crisis. By now, round after round of secret negotiations with the Iranians had fallen apart. The president's approval rating and patience were plummeting.

By mid-April, the president generally OK'd the idea, setting into motion the final preparations needed to fly 132 men and equipment into the desert.
Jasso, the Omaha sailor, watched as the Sea Stallion helicopters were fine-tuned, as if they were about to be flown.

Valenta and Witzel flew to a deserted airfield in Egypt, where they finally learned the mission: Their tanker planes would take off for Iran and refuel transport planes and helicopters during the second night of the rescue and escape.

“Oh, my gosh,” Witzel thought. “We're really going in.”
On the morning of April 24, Weaver and hiscrew took off, bound for Desert One, the rendezvous spot south of Tehran.

Also in the air: the eight Sea Stallion helicopters, two transport planes carrying 132 servicemen and several other “bladder planes” carrying fuel and equipment.

They flew low into Iran, exploiting a hole in the country's radar defense system, and proceeded undetected toward Desert One.

Everything went smoothly until the helicopters smacked into a sandstorm.
The planes, including Weaver's, navigated two “haboobs” clouds of fine desert sand sitting motionless in the air with little problem, but they couldn't warn the more vulnerable helicopters of the looming danger.
They were under strict orders to use no radio communication.

A post-operation report, which Weaver helped write, later criticized these orders as unnecessarily harmful to the mission. The report also found fault with the compartmentalization of the operation's training. The Air Force pilots, Marine helicopter pilots and Army's Delta Force soldiers had no joint training before April 24, Weaver said.

These weaknesses in the rescue mission might have remained hidden if they hadn't been exposed by the unexpected Iranian sand.
One helicopter cracked a rotor blade, landed and was deserted just across the Iranian border. A second helicopter entered one of the sand clouds, lost the ability to use its compass and other navigation equipment and turned back.

The pilots of the six remaining helicopters made their way through the two sand clouds, despite the unbearable heat they caused and the nearly zero-visibility conditions.

But when they landed at Desert One, a post-flight check showed that one helicopter needed to be shut down because of sand-related hydraulic problems.

The mission had only five working helicopters left. They needed six to fly into Tehran.

Weaver, circling above Desert One, couldn't see the scene below.
He didn't know that Beckwith, after a series of arguments with Air Force officers on the ground, had radioed the White House and said he planned to call off the mission.

And, since Weaverwas flying above the sandstorm, he couldn't watch as a helicopter attempted to take off. Its rotors kicked up sand, momentarily blinded the pilot and the helicopter bumped into a fuel plane parked on the desert floor.

Both the helicopter and the fuel plane burst into flames. Eight service members died in the blaze.

Hours later, when the news broke in the United States, the wives of Weaver and Valenta would both assume their husbands were dead. It would be a full day before they would learn otherwise.

Weaver didn't know any of that. What he knew was what he heard over the radio the RTB abort message, loud and clear.

When the Omaha pilot heard the message, he did a curious thing. He and his crew continued to circle Desert One, even after the Delta Force unit left the area in the remaining, undamaged planes.

He circled as Air Force leaders considered a plan to blow up the crash site, then decided against it.

He circled when the only option was to return to base.
Thirty years later, Weaver says he still isn't sure why he was the last pilot to abandon the failed attempt to rescue America's hostages in Iran.

“We just kind of lingered there,” he said this week. “I think we just didn't want to go home.”

Here is a prospective from someone in the CIA:

http://m.aljazeera.net/?i=4360&artId=144983&showonly=1

Excellent article!

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1999 SL500
1969 280SE
2023 Ram 1500
2007 Tiara 3200

Several things are missing from both these stories. It might take a bit of research to find these things out, but I remember them very well.

The helicopters had the wrong air filters for the type of dust being blown around. I don't remember if they were too fine and clogged off all the air or too course and let too much sand into the engines, but one of the first things that took place when they landed there was a total cleaning of the filters.

They had landed next to a road since Plan B was to drive the Americans to the site if the aircraft could not be flown into town. This road had been watched by a spy satillite for weeks and not one car had come down it. But during the filter cleaning a car drove by, clearly saw the aircraft, and speeded away into the dust cloud. Several people opened fire on the car, but it's driver got away.

Next, a bus pulled up and was stopped at a now set up road block. Thirty people (more or less) got off and no one knew what to do with them.

Then one helicoptor was too far away for a refuling hose to reach so the pilot lifted off and floated over a few feet towards the tanker. A rotor blade hit something and the helicoptor blew up.

Between not having enough aircraft to carry everyone out, at least one person who could call in their location, and a bus load of people to worry with the Commander on the Ground gave the word to pack it in.

I also remember that when they were let go it was at the same time as Reagan's swearing-in because the news directors kept cutting back and forth between DC and Tehran.

That was the best day I can remember during my lifetime, so far. Ronald Reagan as President of the United States put the pragmatic fear of god - whoever theirs is - into the Iranians. It was a great day for America to once again be strong for several years after that day around the world.

The article I cut 'n pasted wasn't in any way meant to be an article covering the entire mission - it was clearly an interview of the former (SAC) Stategic Air Command pilots involved in the mission at a re-union.

If that was the best day of your live I feel sorry for you.

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1979 Black on Black, 300CD (sold), 1990 Black 300SE, Silver 1989 Volvo 780, 1988 300CE (vanished by the hands of a girlfriend), 1992 300CE (Rescue).

wrong again. arms for hostages. revisionist history. or bulls*&*, to be blunt.

and, a few years later, more arms for hostages, and money for the contras. but, keep building that myth. as p.t.barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute.

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"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

A special forces classmate of mine at the time said Carter forced the mission to be joint-service, and they had never trained together. Result: failure.

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MB-less