They were not kept blindfolded or tied, and one of the students guarding them offered cigarettes. Daugherty had not smoked in months. He had picked up the habit as a teenager and had all but given it up when he went to Vietnam, where he had resumed it, figuring tobacco couldn’t be any more dangerous than the missions he was flying. He had since, after considerable effort, at last given it up. But somehow these circumstances seemed to demand a cigarette, and he smoked one after another for an hour or so until he and the others were ordered to get up off their chairs and onto the floor to sleep.
Daugherty curled up around the foot of his chair, and awoke with his head throbbing, sick to his stomach. He asked to be taken to the toilet and retched up what little he had in his stomach. His head was pounding, and the taste of the tobacco was in his mouth and throat. All their captors would say was that they would be released “when the shah is returned.” That and “Don’t speak.” The mobs outside still sounded as if they numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and kept up a constant, bloodthirsty din. However this embassy takeover would play in the rest of the world, in this city it was clearly a hit. He fell asleep eventually, even though his butt hurt from sitting in the same position for so long. He woke up some hours later feeling slightly better but foolish. What if he was taken for interrogation again, or saw an opportunity to escape? Had he weakened himself by his own stupidity? As the world awoke to the second day of a crisis in Tehran, Daugherty sat on a chair feeling stiff, sore, and ill, one of sixty-three Americans at the eye of an international storm, furious with himself for smoking cigarettes.
15. An Island of Stability
Across a continent and a wide ocean, at roughly the same time that Iranian students had gathered in the Tehran morning rain for their bold intrusion, a different and more professional assault was being launched on a dark runway in a remote corner of Fort Stewart, a sprawling preserve of Georgia forest immediately west of Savannah. A parked Boeing 727 and a fortified building nearby were loudly and violently raided by two squadrons of seasoned, handpicked American soldiers. The exercise featured “hostages” and “hijackers,” played by volunteers from the FBI and military intelligence units. On both sides of the plane, from padded ladders that had been stealthily leaned against the outer frame, the raiders blew off aircraft doors from the outside, tossed flashbang grenades, and then invaded, while at the same time across the tarmac others burst through doors and windows of the building. In a sudden crescendo of noise and confusion, the hostage takers were confused and overwhelmed by agile men moving with practiced speed and expert violence. The takedowns were the final and most dramatic exercise in a days-long official demonstration by Delta Force, a new army special operations unit. Observing the exercises were top government and military officials, including Army Chief of Staff General Edward C. Meyer and emissaries from the equivalent special forces units in England, France, and West Germany. Delta Force hadn’t just passed the test, it had wowed the panel. The American military officially had a new tool in its arsenal.
That success had crowned two years of hard work by Colonel Charlie Beckwith, the unit’s founder, his operations officer Major Lewis H. “Bucky” Burruss, squadron commanders Logan Fitch and Pete Schoomaker, and their approximately eighty men. The colonel and his top officers sat up until after midnight at the motel in Hinesville with several visiting generals, reviewing the exercise, drinking, unwinding, and celebrating. These were men who worked hard and drank hard, and they shared a strong feeling of accomplishment. They were eager to put their rough talent to work in the real world. At about half past two in the morning the group went out together for an early breakfast, and then at last came back to the motel to sleep. Many of them had been up for several days.
For Beckwith this was the capstone of his military career. A gruff, take-charge man, he had been preaching the virtues of a small, secret, unorthodox team of operatives for more than fifteen years, a force that could be deployed quickly in small numbers for very specific, difficult, and often dangerous tasks. The idea was at first a nonstarter in the army, in part because it created a privileged corps outside the normal chain of command that would get all the most daring and interesting missions, the kinds of missions that made and advanced ambitious officers’ careers. Beckwith’s personality hadn’t helped. He was a difficult man, proud, tough, and at times arrogant and capricious, traits aggravated when he drank, which was often. A chain-smoker, he had mastered the art of keeping a cigarette dangling from his lips with up to an inch and a half of ash hanging precariously. Trailing the colonel around was an obsequious adjutant, a captain who smoothed his path and flattered him constantly, much to the annoyance of the men who worked most closely with him, who didn’t feel Beckwith’s ego needed encouragement. He disdained the often necessary rigmarole of army life, and his personal arrogance showed itself in constant run-ins with regular army officers, those who ranked above him and below, whom he tended to consider idiots until proven otherwise. Beckwith believed he and his men were engaged in the nation’s most serious and important work, and even though it was entirely secret, anyone who failed to immediately recognize their claims to priority was considered a boob, an incompetent, or worse. If an army officer in Germany with the job of getting the colonel’s possessions shipped back to the States persisted in trying to locate him—after Beckwith had mysteriously disappeared—his efforts made him, to the colonel, not annoyingly efficient but a “numb nuts.” And God help the MP at Fort Bragg who failed to recognize Beckwith—he rarely wore uniform or insignia—and refused to let him immediately pass; the colonel would threaten to bust the man’s rank.
He had the bureaucratic finesse of a middle linebacker. He looked like one, too, a broad, thick, active man whose short hair had gone white but whose dramatic, expressive eyebrows had not. The colonel was impulsive, demanding, fearless, and legendarily tough—as an officer in Vietnam he had survived being shot in the gut with a .51 caliber round, large enough to poke a hole the size of a grapefruit in cinder block. He was also breathtakingly impolitic. A year before this final Delta evaluation, at a time when the concept of such a force was still controversial, the newly assembled teams were forced by skeptical brass to take a proficiency test that they easily passed. Instead of leaving well enough alone, the surly colonel had taken the occasion to lambaste the generals who had demanded the exercise, accusing them of trying to undermine him. He had only one method and one speed. He was the kind of officer who everybody knew was important, but who was destined to retire as a colonel. And despite his down-home, just-folks manner, he was a determined elitist. He considered himself to be the best, and wanted a force composed of men just like himself. This was neither a man nor a dream calculated to win allies, especially in an organization as tradition-bound and formally hierarchical as the U.S. Army.
But events had finally caught up to Beckwith’s fixed idea. The rash of airplane hijackings, the successful Israeli hostage-rescue missions at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, and the successful takedown of a hijacked airliner in Somalia by German special forces in the following year had all combined to make the case for a hostage-rescue force. After the Somalia rescue, President Carter had written a note to the joint chiefs asking, “Do we have the same capability as the West Germans?”
It turned out the American military did not. Patterned after the British Special Air Service (SAS), considered the premier counterterrorism force in the world, Beckwith and his staff had handpicked skilled, experienced soldiers, many of them Vietnam veterans, and had put them through a grueling selection process. The men chosen had demonstrated not only superior physical, mental, and basic soldiering talent, but had passed psychological tests and rigorous interviews designed specifically to weed out the macho supersoldiers such an elite, secret force might be expected to attract, what would eventually be called “Rambo types.” Field testing for the army’s special forces typically involved assessing a candidate’s endurance and ability to handle stress. Delta deliberately added elements of confusion and uncertainty designed to break down a candidate’s self-confidence. He would be dropped off in a remote area with directions to proceed cross-country alone and on foot to a distant point on the map, carrying a heavy rucksack. Without a time frame, only “Get there quickly,” he was left to work against the clock without knowing what standard he was expected to meet. On arrival, hours later, he was curtly given a new destination. This went on for as long as the selection staff wished. For the candidate, there was no finish line; he kept going until he was told to stop. He would be deliberately driven to physical exhaustion, a point that marathon runners recognize as the place where a body has used up all of its fuel and begins feeding on itself. Yet unlike the marathon runner, who begins the race knowing where the finish line is and what time he wants to beat, the Delta candidate just kept going. They were never given an indication they were doing well; in fact, often they were deliberately led to believe that they were failing, just to make continuing that much more difficult.
After Logan Fitch, a tall, taciturn Texan, had hiked from rendezvous point to rendezvous point for days, he was finally told, “Get on the truck,” and driven back to the unit’s camp. He was left there without a word of
