himself feel better than out of any realistic hope it would save him if he were discovered. The pistol would do about as much good as his lame cover story, that he and the pilots were geologists. To make that work he’d have to quickly ditch the gun. Carney was stretched out in the back of the plane on a metal fuel tank that provided extra gas for the long flight—four hours in and four hours out—and between that and his Kawasaki dirt bike there was barely room for him to sit up. Beckwith had never even asked Carney about undertaking this mission; he had just volunteered him. The veteran air force man would not have turned it down, but he was surprised not to have been consulted about it. That was Beckwith’s way. Carney saw it in football terms. The colonel was the kind of man who figured if you showed up with a helmet, you’d damn well be ready to play.
They landed in an empty quadrant of the vast emptiness of the Dasht-e Kavir salt desert. The nearest town, Yazd, was more than ninety miles away. There was a “road,” more like a well-worn path, used very occasionally by trucks and buses traveling north from Qom to Meshad, a town on the northeastern border of Iran and Afghanistan. Ninety days of satellite surveillance had observed only two vehicles. It was here that six C-130 transports carrying fuel blivits and Beckwith’s men—now nearly a hundred—would land on the first night of the two-day mission. The eight Sea Stallion helicopters from the aircraft carrier
Carney nervously disembarked into darkness suffused with moonlight, unloaded his dirt bike, and went to work. The ground seemed plenty firm enough; it was hard-packed sand as smooth and solid as a pool table. He drilled several soil samples that he would carry back to Washington for more detailed analysis. Then Carney measured out a runway and painstakingly dug holes with his K-bar knife to chip away at the soil and bury small infrared beacons at intervals to define it from the air. He set up four lights to outline the box into which the plane would land, and then planted another about three thousand feet farther on to mark the end of the runway. The beacons were virtually invisible to the naked eye but showed up brightly through night-vision goggles. He connected the lights to batteries, and attached them to a trigger he had removed from a garage-door opener he had picked up at Sears. With the garage-door remote, one of the pilots would be able to turn on the runway lights on his approach on the night of the mission. He also paced off the ground inside the lights to make sure there was no debris, stumps, dips, or bumps big enough to damage a wing or harm the plane’s landing gear.
Because he had some difficulty at first orienting himself, the work took fifty minutes, ten more than he had estimated. Twice while he worked vehicles came roaring past. The landscape was so flat that he could see the headlights coming from a long way off, and Carney just lay flat, pressing himself to the ground. They passed so close by that Carney watched the truck driver casually light a cigarette as he passed. One of the pilots, Bud McBroom, had come out to help Carney align the runway lights, and as they lay flat he told a long joke about Roy Rogers, concluding with a silly punch line he sang to the tune of “The Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” “Pardon me, Roy, is that the cat that chewed your new shoes?” It made Carney laugh.
Both men and the other pilot were armed, but the last thing they wanted was a confrontation in the middle of the desert. It could scotch the whole mission. Apparently neither passing vehicle had spotted them or the plane. When, exhausted and relieved, they returned to the plane with the soil samples, tools, and motorcycle, they found the other pilot, Jim Rhyne, standing at the nose of the plane with his M-16.
On the long flight out of Iran, the pilots noted an electronic indication that the plane had been picked up by radar. They were near the southern coastline, just minutes from the Persian Gulf, and fearing that one of the country’s defense radar stations might have spotted them, the pilot changed his course and the indicator went off. Later analysis showed that the radar had come from a commercial vessel in the gulf, not from Iranian defenses. When they landed back in Oman, Carney immediately boarded another plane for London, where he was met at Gatwick Airport by two CIA agents who escorted him to the Concorde lounge. Feeling out of place in his dirty jeans and sweater, still ripe from his days of travel and night of work in the Iranian desert, with traces of camouflage paint still on his face and hands, he passed on the complimentary champagne and asked for a beer. Later that same day he was in the office of General James B. Vaught, the mission commander. His soil samples, analyzed at nearby Fort Belvoir, showed that the “Desert One” location was suitable. There was some concern over the trucks that had rolled past; it indicated a much busier road than surveillance had led mission planners to believe, but that was dismissed as an anomaly.
Carney’s bold scout mission did more than test the soil and lay out a runway. It confirmed that it was possible to slip into and out of Iran without detection. Satellites watched Desert One carefully for several more days until wind had erased all traces of the marks left by the Twin Otter and Carney’s dirt bike.
Over the same days, Beckwith’s operatives had slipped separately into Tehran. Led by Major Dick Meadows, they were the Iranian-born U.S. airman and several special forces soldiers who spoke fluent German, posing as German businessmen. Meadows went under an Irish passport and had apparently summoned enough of a brogue to satisfy the customs officer at Mehrabad Airport.
Over the next few days, Meadows and the rest of the team double-checked all the arrangements put in place by “Bob,” the CIA agent Beckwith didn’t completely trust. They checked the hide sites and spent time observing the embassy from outside, noting the number of guards and the kinds of weapons they carried and also their habits. Nights were still cold in Tehran at the end of March, and the guards could be seen leaving their posts to duck periodically into shelter.
The German-speaking team managed to pay a visit to the Foreign Ministry building where Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland were being held. Their assessment of the security precautions there prompted mission planners to increase the size of the separate force planning to rescue the diplomats from their gilded cage on the third floor.
Confidence in the mission was now high. The planes and choppers and Delta had conducted their sixth full-dress rehearsal at Twenty-nine Palms, the Marine Corps base in California, in the last week of March, and it had gone well. Delta’s operators knew their moves so well they could practically do them in their sleep. Yet Beckwith still fretted over the unforeseen. There were so many things that could go wrong that, if you let yourself think about it for too long, it induced paralysis. His men were trained to quickly scan hands when they entered a room, and to direct their fire at those with weapons. What if, in the confusion, some of the hostages jumped guards and seized their rifles? He worried about what would happen if, after his men had taken down the embassy and herded the hostages into Amajadieh soccer stadium across the street, the Iranian police or army counterattacked with armor. Delta was strictly light infantry. They could not hold out long against tanks or any kind of armored assault vehicles. The answer to those worries were the AC-130 gunships that would be flying that night over the city. They would destroy any Iranian armor that moved toward the rescue operation as well as any Iranian fighters on the runway at Mehrabad Airport.
By the beginning of April the colonel was convinced Delta Force was as ready as it was going to be. His men had been sequestered for months, training endlessly. Major Pete Schoomaker, one of the squadron leaders, had simply vanished from his fiancee’s life. He had not been allowed to tell her or anyone else what he was doing, where he was going, or when he might be back. She canceled their wedding several months after he left, having heard nothing from him. At night the men would watch Ted Koppel’s new program on TV,
General David Jones, chairman of the joint chiefs, visited Fort Bragg not long after these secret surveillance trips were completed. He and Beckwith pulled off on a muddy trail near one of Delta’s practice sites and had a long conversation in the car. Beckwith looked Jones in the eye and told him his men were ready.
“We’ve got to do it,” he said.
The colonel explained how many times his men had practiced, and how often they had been told to get ready to go only to be stood down.
“Sir, I can’t get these troops up one more time,” Beckwith said. “If we’re going to go, this has got to be it.”
“I would agree with you,” said Jones. “I think we’re ready.”
