the primary responsibility for the mission’s failure on the marine pilots, whom he called “cowards.” He was particularly scornful of Colonel Chuck Pittman, the ranking officer on board the relatively undamaged chopper that had given up in the second
Dick Meadows, the courageous Delta point man in Tehran, weighed his options the day after the mission failed. He could try to drive across the Turkish border, or drive down to Abadan on the Persian Gulf coast and use his satellite radio to request pickup by helicopter. He chose a third, less dramatic course. He simply drove to Tehran’s international airport on Sunday, the same day as the Timms’ departure, and while the country was still in an uproar over the American “invasion,” he presented his Irish credentials, fully expecting at any moment to be stopped. He was allowed to board a commercial flight to Ankara. The false passports of the other agents also held up; they were able to fly out of the country in the days after the disaster—one, the young Iranian-American airman code-named “Fred,” slipped out weeks later.
Given the uproar in the media at home, it was decided to fly the rest of Delta Force from Egypt to the Farm in Virginia, keep them sequestered there for a few days, and then allow them to fly home to Fayetteville and enjoy a vacation. Alert reporters spotted some of the men arriving at the airport in North Carolina days later, but the only public comment they got was one from an unnamed arriving passenger, probably not a member of the rescue force, who grumbled about not being allowed to “finish the job.”
The men who had taken part knew that “finishing the job” had not been an option. Their humiliation had already felt complete when, before they departed Egypt, Beckwith gathered both squadrons in a hangar. Apparently drunk, at first it seemed he had just wanted to console them and buck up their spirits. He began by telling them how proud of them he was, and how professionally they had prepared for the mission, and how in his mind no part of the blame was theirs for the debacle.
As he spoke he grew more and more worked up and emotional, and his remarks began to wander, until he was telling the men that he was disappointed in them for only one thing, for having left their weapons behind when they scrambled out of the burning C-130. Technically, of course, he was correct. A soldier is taught from day one that his weapon is his life, that to lose it or misplace it or leave it behind is a cardinal sin in soldiering. Most of the men had left their weapons and their gear, including the thousands of dollars in American and Iranian cash they had been issued in case they had to find their own ways out of Iran. But given the circumstances—some of the men had been asleep when the accident happened, and had only seconds to evacuate in an inferno—it was certainly understandable.
“You guys, as you came off, should have reached up and grabbed something,” Beckwith said angrily. “Goddamn, a lot of money burned up in there.”
The men took it badly. They were just getting used to this disappointment, one that they knew well they’d wear for the rest of their lives, which many had escaped with only narrowly. They had felt the flames and had seen men on fire. Many were injured. They were in no mood to be chastised by someone who had watched the inferno from a safe distance. A sergeant major interrupted Beckwith.
“Sir, we were lucky to get off with our asses,” he said.
“Well, some of you picked up your weapons. Why in the hell didn’t all of you?” Beckwith asked.
The sergeant major began, “Sir—,” but the colonel lost it. “Shut up!” he shouted. “You’re all just a bunch of goddamn cowards.”
“That’s not true, sir,” Fitch said sharply, grabbing the colonel by the arm and hustling him out of the hangar before things got uglier.
Beckwith would later regret this outburst and asked Fitch to convey an apology to the men, but he never softened his assessment of the other service branches involved in the fiasco.
The mood had been glum on the long flight home. When Fitch’s squadron landed at an airport outside Washington, they transferred to a C-130 for a short flight to Virginia. Welcoming them into the plane was a veteran air force sergeant who, having no idea who this motley assortment of hairy apparent civilians were, assumed that they were unfamiliar with the C-130 and so, upon takeoff, launched into an especially spirited performance of the standard safety briefing for passengers—something ordinarily abbreviated or forgone entirely for military passengers. The plane was virtually identical to the one the mission members had flown into Iran just days before. They sat obediently through the meticulous and thorough safety presentation, then stood up (against instructions) and gave the bewildered sergeant a spirited ovation.
3. S-E-N-D-N-E-W-S
After the rescue attempt, Bruce Laingen noticed a change in his keepers on the third floor of the Foreign Ministry building. Gone was the easy banter that had characterized his relationship with most of them, and some of the guards had become outright hostile. There were accusations that the charge and his roommates, Mike Howland and Vic Tomseth, had known in advance about the mission, given their occasional phone calls and telex contacts with Washington and visits from foreign ministers. In the garden below their balcony, the army unit assigned to the ministry still spent every spare moment playing pickup games of soccer, but they no longer waved and joked with the Americans looking down from the high windows. Some glared up at them with what was clearly hatred.
Unlike the other hostages, the three in the Foreign Ministry learned of the rescue mission in breathless local press reports as soon as the rest of Iran did. Laingen wrote in his diary on the evening of April 27:
Our minds and hearts are filled with thoughts and emotions that leave us confused and perplexed. Had there been no mechanical failure, where would we be now? On board an aircraft carrier, stranded in the desert, still here in the ministry, injured, or even dead? Who can say? And who can say now what might have happened to our colleagues, to their captors, and to personnel guarding us in this ministry? In a sense, we are, in the aftermath, less fortunate than our 50 colleagues, since they will not know, presumably, what happened, while we do and must now live with the emotions and frustrations that are the consequence…. So we are filled with an enormous sense of sadness. Grief for those eight courageous men who volunteered and were ready to give their lives for their country and for the principle we represent here—the nation should be forever grateful to them. A sense of compassion for a president who made this difficult and lonely decision and who now suffers this bitter disappointment and must bear the full responsibility of failure. Concern for the hostage families whose worries are now deepened. Regret for our country that it should suffer this blow to its self-esteem and pride. Sorrow for the Iranian people whose future is so jeopardized by the continuation of this whole tragic affair. Anger at those who perpetrate this crisis here, when the simple act of decency of releasing the hostages would turn this whole thing around…and finally, pride in our country for this demonstration of resolve in our efforts to get the hostages released.
It was galling for the three to watch the gleeful press coverage in Tehran, where the failure of the rescue mission was seen as nothing less than divine intervention and a heavenly blessing on the
Laingen spent long portions of his days now watching the pigeons that roosted in small gaps in the brickwork of the ministry garden walls. They lived on the ledges of the windows outside the third floor and roof, periodically swooping down to the large fountain in the middle of the courtyard and then back. He also watched the swallows, which appeared at dusk to flit crazily around the sky catching bugs. They reminded him of the barn swallows he had watched as a boy on the family farm in Minnesota. He worried about becoming lazy, after so many months of idleness. Laingen was an energetic and ambitious man, and having little to do besides eat, sleep, read, and work crossword puzzles ate away at his sense of himself. He worried that he would find it hard to resume the pace of work and family and wondered admiringly at the industry of his wife Penne, who had for so long now managed everything at home by herself and yet had emerged as a leading activist and voice of the
