Guests of the Ayatollah

America their feat would be cheered in the streets.

The fact that their countrymen would not know who they were made it all the more appealing. It made the heroism pure. They would not be celebrated, only their achievement. None of these men would be in the ticker-tape parades or sitting down for interviews on national TV or have their pictures on the covers of magazines, nor would they be cashing in on fat book contracts. They were quiet professionals. In a world of brag and hype they embodied substance. They would come home and after a few days off go right back to work. Of course, within their own world, they would become legends. For the rest of their lives, behind them knowing soldiers would whisper, “He was on Eagle Claw.” That was honor worth having.

Some men lived for such chances. Burruss was a patriot, first, a man steeped in the rich military history of his native Tidewater, Virginia, and a man blessed with the kind of physical courage and swagger to try anything. As a boy he had talked his cousin into rowing with him in a skiff one and a half miles across the York River to reenact Alexander Hamilton’s successful storming of Redoubt Number Ten at the Yorktown battlefield, then and now a national park. In broad daylight the two boys stormed and retook the fortification, hauled down the vintage British flag, and rowed it back across the river to hang on Burruss’s bedroom wall. He was a rangy, cheerful man with long arms and big hands and an elongated, bony frame, a long straight nose, a mouth that was usually open, and a tendency toward physical belligerence when drunk. Burruss possessed a kind of swagger and playfulness that suggested, despite his size and athleticism, that his most powerful asset was his wit. He had not bothered like some of the men to dye his straight sandy hair, which hung down well over both ears. When they got to Tehran, if they got there, one of his jobs was to coordinate air support from the press box of the soccer stadium. The plan called for him to be one of the last men to leave the stadium, and he had accepted the likelihood that it was where he would die. There wouldn’t be enough helicopters. There were just too many ways for them to fail. He had fought in Vietnam and knew both the beauty and the fragility of those machines. If they managed to get the required six off the ground at Desert One to the hiding places, he felt sure that at least one or two of them wouldn’t restart the next night, and when all hell broke loose in Tehran there was a good chance of losing one or more of those that could fly. Even if the machines had been more reliable, like the other Delta commanders Burruss was wary of the marines piloting them; he was not sure they possessed the calm fatalism that defined this kind of dead-end special ops. A reluctant pilot meant a marginal machine was as good as grounded. At the end of this informed calculation was the probability that they would get only one or two helos into the stadium. If they were fuel-light, that meant they would be able to get all of the hostages aboard, along with a small escort force, but that would leave him and a significant portion of his men behind in the soccer stadium. He and the other men were carrying thousands of dollars worth of cash, most of it in newly minted Iranian rials, and fake passports stamped with fake visas. Burruss had paid strict attention to the E&E (Escape and Evade) classes that taught the men how to hot-wire cars. He had memorized several escape routes out of Tehran. That was the plan. If they were left behind, they would commandeer vehicles and drive like hell toward the border of either Turkey or Afghanistan, a journey of three to four hundred miles, fighting their way out if necessary, possibly calling for air support. The men took this desperate possibility so seriously they had taken the trouble to locate jewelry stores on their way out of the city, where they could grab valuables with which to help bribe their way past roadblocks and border crossings. This could work, but it involved more wishful thinking than a realist like Burruss could summon. In his mind, the more likely scenario was a bloody last stand inside the stadium, where they would take a large number of Iranians with them into the next world. He and his wife had dined with Beckwith and his wife and a few of the other Delta commanders and their wives the night before they departed. Most of them, Beckwith included, had written death letters to be delivered to their spouses in the event they were killed. They were going all the way with this, to victory or to Valhalla.

The level of risk worried the unit commanders, who were concerned that such a generous prospect of not returning might compel men to tell their wives or girlfriends what they were going off to do. Delta Sergeant Major Dave Cheney had broached the sensitive topic with some of his men shortly before they left Fort Bragg.

“What are you guys telling your wives and girlfriends?” he asked.

“Depends,” said Phil Hanson, one of the shooters.

“Depends on what?” Cheney asked.

“Depends on whether she’s giving me any drawers. If she’s giving me drawers, I’ll tell her anything.”

They were by appearance a motley, deliberately nonmilitary-looking bunch of young men; in fact, they looked a lot like the students who had seized the embassy. Most were just a few years older than the hostage takers. They had long hair and had grown mustaches and beards or were just unshaven. The loose-fitting, many- pocketed field jackets they wore, dyed black, were just like the ones favored by young men in Iran. Many with fair hair had dyed it dark brown or black, figuring that might nudge the odds at least minutely in their direction if they were forced to fight their way out of Iran. Under the Geneva Convention, soldiers (as opposed to spies) must enter combat in uniform, so for the occasion the men all wore matching black knit caps and had an American flag on their jacket sleeve that could be covered by a small black Velcro patch. On the streets of Tehran the flag would invite trouble, but inside the embassy compound it would reassure the hostages that they weren’t just being kidnapped by some rival Iranian faction. They wore faded blue jeans and combat boots, and beneath the jacket some wore armored vests. Much of their gear was improvised. They had sewn additional pockets inside the jackets to carry weapons, ammo, and water. Most of the men carried small MP-5 submachine guns with silencers, sidearms, grenades, and various explosive devices. Burruss had a .45, although he wasn’t sure why he’d bothered. He wasn’t on any of the teams taking down buildings, and if a situation arose where he’d have to use it, he doubted a handgun would save him. Beckwith had insisted on a ranger tradition: all the men carried a length of rope wrapped around their waist and clips, in case the need arose to rappel. The men who were to guard the perimeter carried M-60 machine guns and some light antitank weapons. Beckwith himself had the rapelling rope and clips and carried a pistol. With his white stubble, dangling cigarette or cigar, and wild eyes under thick dark eyebrows, he looked like a dangerous vagrant. Before leaving Masirah, the men had been joking about which actors would portray them in the movie version of the raid, and they decided that the hillbilly actor Slim Pickens, who had ridden a nuclear weapon kamikazi-like into doomsday waving his cowboy hat and hallooing in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, would be the perfect choice for the colonel.

With Delta on the planes was an assortment of Farsi-speaking volunteers from various branches of the American military (all of them Iranian-American) and two former Iranian generals. A onetime SAVAK agent who had trained with the group, and who had boasted for months of his eagerness to shoot a few Khomeini fanatics, had gotten cold feet at the last minute. The Farsi-speaking American soldiers would drive the trucks and vans that would carry the assaulters through Tehran to the embassy for the next night’s raid, and the former generals were there to try to talk their way through any contacts with the Iranian military. In such instances, they would attempt to pass themselves off as a secret Iranian force on a training exercise. In fact, the contingency did not arise. Even though the second formation of planes was spotted from the ground as it moved over the coast, and a question about it was broadcast to a military station, the Iranian self-defense forces concluded without inquiring that the planes were Iranian. If the nation was alert to the possibility of an American invasion, they certainly wouldn’t expect it to arrive in a small low-flying formation of propeller-driven planes.

As the lead plane closed in on the desert landing site, its pilots noted curious milky patches in the night sky. They flew through one that appeared to be just haze, not even substantial enough to interfere with the downward-looking radar. They approached a second one as they got closer to the landing site and it was noticed by John Carney, who had come into the cockpit to be ready to activate the landing lights he had buried on his trip weeks earlier. One of the pilots asked him, “What do you make of that stuff out there?”

He looked through the copilot’s window.

“You’re in a haboob,” he said.

The men in the cockpit laughed at the word.

“No, we’re flying through suspended dust,” Carney explained. “The Iranians call it a haboob.”

He had heard about it from the CIA pilots who had flown him in earlier. Shifting air pressure frequently forced the especially fine desert sand straight up thousands of feet, where sometimes it hung like a vertical cloud for hours. It was just a desert curiosity. The dust clouds were too insubstantial to cause a problem for the planes, but Air Force Colonel James H. Kyle, the air commander whose responsibility included all the airborne aspects of the mission, knew that the haboob would create much bigger problems for a helicopter. He noticed that the temperature inside the plane went up significantly when they were passing through them. He