A Lesson Learned in Joint Operations; A Lesson Fought in Joint Intelligence

By Reva Bhalla

It would be difficult to label Operation Eagle Claw, a Special Forces-led attempt to

rescue American hostages held in the U.S. embassy in Tehran, as anything but an
immense U.S. military debacle. The ill-fated mission suffered from inadequate planning,
inter-service rivalry, misdirected passions and a severe paucity of intelligence.
Yet great failures can also give rise to great successes. The American psyche is
characterized by a tendency to respond rapidly to failures, and the feverish response to
Operation Eagle Claw was no exception. Within seven years of the operation, U.S.
military doctrine underwent a major transformation with the Goldwater-Nichols and
Cohen-Nunn Acts of 1986. These two pieces of legislation tore down walls between
military services and entrenched the principle of joint operations through the creation of
U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). Two decades after the debacle in the
Iranian desert, U.S. Special Forces are displaying an unparalleled level of interoperability
across services in the war on terrorism, providing the White House with an invaluable
tool to attack problems for which conventional political and military answers are few and
far between. But while the U.S. military has filled a strategic void in embracing joint
operations, the concept of joint intelligence remains a fundamental challenge moving
forward.

“I Thought This Was a Job for the Diplomats”

As the sun was beginning to set over the Potomac on Nov. 4, 1979, a recently
promoted Army Colonel checked in as duty officer for that evening at the Pentagon
before making his way to a cocktail party. The Colonel was still adjusting to life back in
the Beltway. He had spent the past 17 years serving amongst a little known, elite group of
Special Forces in missions that ranged from hunt-and-kill jungle operations against Viet
Cong to training Bolivian Special Forces on how to take down Che Guevara and his
Bolivarian revolution. As Cold War dynamics gave rise to an upsurge of terrorist attacks
in the 1970s, the Colonel joined U.S. Army Colonel Charles Beckwith in 1977 in creating
the Army’s 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (SFOD-D), a 120-strong top
secret and highly trained all-purpose counterterrorism unit that was to serve as the Army’s
first response to crises breaking out across the globe.
While Beckwith commanded Delta Force from Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the
Colonel, designated as Beckwith’s Executive Officer and No. 2 man, served as the
primary liaison between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the newly-created Delta Force from
the Pentagon. Less than 24 hours before the first dispatch came through that Iranian
students had overrun the US embassy in Tehran, a ceremony had taken place at Fort
Bragg where Delta Force was endowed with a certificate of Operational Readiness.
Beckwith was more than eager to show the DC bureaucrats what his men were capable
of, but the Iranian hostage crisis proved to be a challenge far too great at the time for
even this fledgling Special Forces group.
The colonel, like many around him, expected the crisis to be resolved by
diplomats. So-called “punishment operations,” in which the US military would launch
conventional attacks against Iranian economic targets to pressure Tehran into releasing
the hostages, were proposed and promptly shot down as the administration struggled in
elusive backchannel negotiations with Iranian diplomats. As the options narrowed and
political pressure escalated, U.S. President Jimmy Carter gave Beckwith the go-ahead to
piece together a clandestine hostage-rescue operation.

The Plan

The operation was fraught with complications from its inception. Fifty-three hostages
were to be extracted from a heavily guarded embassy compound for which the only
blueprints were sitting in a drawer within the embassy itself. Though Beckwith had
confidence in the Army’s Delta Force, Carter insisted on the inclusion of all the armed
services in the operation in order to avoid exacerbating deep rivalries that existed among
the army, navy and air force.
The first part of the plan called for eight RH-53D navy helicopters to fly 600
miles from the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea to an improvised airstrip in
the Iranian desert code-named Desert One. Despite their inexperience with the RH-53Ds,
Marines were chosen to pilot the these helicopters as opposed to the less-advanced CH-
53s that they were accustomed to since the RH-53ds provided longer range, and because
the Marines had more experience in flying long distances overland.
C-130s taking off from Masirah Island in Oman, where the Colonel would be
based during the operation, would carry the Delta Force and giant fuel bladders to Desert
One. Once the helicopters were refueled, the Delta Force would travel by the RH-53Ds to
a rendezvous 50 miles southeast of Tehran. From there, Delta Force would travel by truck
in the dead of the second night to the embassy in Tehran for the assault while the
helicopters made their way to a nearby soccer stadium. AC-130 gunships would provide
air cover from above during the hostage retrieval. Meanwhile, the Rangers would occupy
an abandoned airstrip southwest of Tehran at Manzariyeh, where the helicopters carrying
the Special Forces and hostages would land. From there, the helicopters would be
destroyed while the Special Forces and hostages would be loaded onto C-141 transport
aircraft and evacuated to Egypt.
 Without a Joint Doctrine to effectively integrate the capabilities of the services
into a combined effort, the ad hoc command structure for Eagle Claw was split among
Joint Task Force commander US Army Gen. James B. Vaught operating from Wadi Qena
base in Egypt, Desert One Zone commander Colonel James H. Kyle, helicopter
commander Marine Lt. Col Edward R. Seiffert and Beckwith, who would lead the Delta
Force assault team from Desert One. The commanders were given strict orders by Carter
and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski to maintain absolute secrecy in the
planning and execution of the mission, protect the lives of the hostages, minimize Iranian
casualties and damages and minimize the size of the planning group and the assault force.
The extreme secrecy surrounding the mission was not ordered solely for the safety of the
hostages. Indeed, there was a deep fear that those with access in Washington who were
already vehemently against any military action against Iran could deliberately leak the
plan to scuttle the entire operation and bring an early end to the Carter presidency. The
obsession with secrecy resulted in over-compartmentalization and a lack of coordination
between the disparate services. The teams practiced their part of the plan independently,
but the joint operation was not once rehearsed in full. Meanwhile, the military’s regional
commands who could have provided valuable insight on the desert terrain these forces
were about to encounter, were kept in the dark.

“All the Spooks Were in the Embassy!”

As if the operation were not already complex enough in the conceptual phase, Eagle
Claw was also planned with an extreme dearth of intelligence. Most important to the
planners was an understanding of the internal layout of the embassy compound itself.
Details such as the exact location of the hostages, which direction the doors swung open
and the locations of the buildings circuit breakers were essential to the success of the
mission. The Delta assault team, after all, would be operating in darkness, under severe
time constraints and under hostile fire while trying to both protect the lives of the
hostages and minimize Iranian casualties.
The CIA was assigned the task of providing up-to-date intelligence on the hostage
situation and the embassy layout, along with making arrangements for the trucks and
drivers to transport Delta Force from the second desert rendezvous to the embassy. But as
the Colonel put it, all the CIA spooks, along with the blueprints of the compound, were
locked up in the embassy. The CIA was already at a severe disadvantage since its human
intelligence capabilities in Tehran were dried up with the fall of the Shah in 1979, leaving
them nearly blind to the building Islamic revolution in the country.
Instead, the Eagle Claw planning committee relied heavily on AAA maps of
Tehran former army and air force attaches, such as Gen. Philip C. Gast, who had served
in Tehran during the Shah’s rule and were thus intimately familiar with the Iranian
military’s capabilities. Thanks to the expertise of the former defense attaches and satellite
imagery, the planners were relatively confident in the intelligence they had on Iran’s radar
capabilities and order-of-battle. It was the lack of on-ground intelligence needed for the
actual rescue mission that led them to question the overall success rate of the mission.
Gast and his old colleagues attempted to piece together the internal layout of the
embassy from memory and old office photos. A life-size model of the embassy was
reconstructed out of plywood in the middle of the Arizona desert for Delta Force
rehearsals, but the planners got so many contradicting answers to questions like “what
happens when you turn right?” that none of the planners were ever certain that they got
the internal layout of the compound correct.
Unable to place full trust in his AAA maps and CIA-produced intelligence, the
colonel led a small team into Tehran three weeks before the launch of the operation to get
a feel of what their men would be getting themselves into and to verify crucial details,
such as what streets led up to the embassy and the security presence on the streets. Posing
as card-carrying European journalists of the Allied Communications Corporation, the
colonel made his way through a city that was teeming with Anti-American rage and
snapped pictures of everything he could around the perimeter of the embassy.
When the colonel returned to the Pentagon in the final days leading up to the
operation, he came face to face with Gast, who, with tears in his eyes, confided to him
that the mission is likely to fail. The doubts were hanging low and heavy, but the
emotional urge to do something and finish what they started carried the operation to its
launch date: April 24, 1980.

“A Nightmare Unfolding Over the Radio Waves”

The colonel watched in doubtful anticipation as the three C-130s took off from base at
Masirah, Oman. Thanks to the infrared lights buried beneath the sand by a team days in
advance of the operation, the transport aircraft successfully made their way to the
makeshift runway. But as the first C-130 was landing, it caught sight of a trunk hurtling
across the desert. Rangers aboard the C-130 immediately took off in a Jeep and
motorcycle to chase down the truck with an Anti-Tank weapon The Rangers hoped to
eliminate a potential leak to their operation, but they failed to realize that the vehicle was
a fuel truck. A giant fire ball consequently rose to the sky, announcing the presence of US
Special Forces in the middle of the Iranian desert to any nearby observers, including a
bus of Iranian passengers who had to be stopped, searched and flown out of the country
on one of the C-130s until the mission could be completed.
Unaware of the drama unfolding at Desert One, eight helicopters took off from
the Nimitz. In preparation for the operation, the helicopters were hosed down with water
to remove some of the salt-build-up for better performance. As the Colonel explained
later, however, the helicopters were accidentally hosed off with salt water instead of fresh
water, thus compounding the corrosive effect. In what would be another fateful mistake,
the Nimitz personnel had also removed the dust filters of the RH-53Ds to improve their
mileage, disregarding the fact that the helicopters would soon be traveling through heavy
dust storms in the desert that would render them blind.
The Marines flying one of the RH-53Ds abandoned their aircraft in the Iranian
desert after receiving a warning on the pressurization of a rotor blade. The rest of the
helicopters making their way to Desert One then encountered a sand cloud weather
phenomenon called a haboob that they were not anticipating. Since the helicopters lacked
secure communication, there was no way for the other Marine pilots, already flying in
extremely low visibility and unaccustomed to their night vision gear and aircraft, to be
warned of the haboobs. One of the Marine pilots decided to turn back after getting caught
in the haboob, reducing the flight team to six.
When the rest of the helicopters reached Desert One, a problem was detected in
one of the RH-53D’s second hydraulic system, taking it out of commission. Before the
operation could even reach its second phase, Beckwith had no choice but to abort the
mission. Had he proceeded with five helicopters, he would have had to reduce his Delta
Force by 20 men, a loss that would have likely compromised the rescue mission. When
the helicopters began to evacuate, sand was kicked up, severely reducing visibility again.
In a tragic conclusion to the operation, one of the helicopters accidently crashed into a
fuel-loaded C-130, creating an explosion that sent the entire aircraft up in flames and
killed eight soldiers.
Back in Masirah, the Colonel listened in horror as the “nightmare unfolded over
the radio waves.” As shocked as he was by the utter disaster of the operation, he could
not claim to be surprised. This was a nightmare he had replayed in his head countless
times before.

Shock Therapy in Joint Operations

It didn’t take long for the U.S. Department of Defense to recognize and correct its
structural deficiencies following the Desert One fiasco. An investigative panel, chaired
by the former Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral James L. Holloway, issued a report in
1980 that exposed the fatal errors that were made in command and control, inter-service
operability and planning in Operation Eagle Claw. The Holloway commission also made
two key recommendations: the creation of a counterterrorism joint task force under the
direct orders of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the creation of a Special Advisory Panel on
special operations comprised of active and retired senior officers that would also report to
the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Those recommendations led to a major overhaul in U.S. military doctrine. The

first step was the creation of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in 1980. JSOC
was designed to pull the Special Forces together and was given a mandate to study and
develop special operations requirements and techniques, ensure interoperability and
provide a unified command structure for conducting joint special operations and
exercises. Today, JSOC also commands and controls the elite counterterrorism Special
Mission Units (including Delta Force, Navy’s SEAL Team 6 and the Air Force ’s 24 th
Special Tactics Squadron.)

The real sea change came in the form of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols and Cohen-
Nunn acts, both of which institutionalized the concept of joint operations. Goldwater
Nichols ended the independence of the Army Navy and Air Force and bolstered the role
of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, while Cohen-Nunn regrouped the Special
Forces of all three services under a single command, the United States Special Operations
Command (USSOCOM), based in Tampa, Florida.

“It’s All Purple, All The Time”

Nearly two and a half decades later, the concept of joint operations is second nature to the
U.S. Special Forces now operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would be an exaggeration
to claim that the issue of inter-service rivalry in the military has been resolved, but
Special Forces are no longer segregated between services to the detriment of the overall
mission. As one Navy SEAL put it, “it’s all purple, all the time.”

It speaks volumes that in a military culture long dominated by the army, both the
current JSOC and USSOCOM commanders are both Navy Admirals. But even with these
reforms, inter-service operability does not always come easy. Indeed, in the early days of
the Iraq War, Special Forces from different services had many kinks to work out in
understanding how to work with each other on a strategic level in planning a mission, as
well as on the tactical level in simply learning how to sync up each other’s radios.
According to one operator, however, these issues have more or less been resolved over
the course of the past nine years and the “finished piece”, or the actual execution of the
operation, is considered the “easy part” by many in the community.

“The Systems Don’t Speak to Each Other”

The U.S. military may be able to declare “mission accomplished” in institutionalizing the
concept of joint operations, but it cannot yet declare the same for the concept of joint
intelligence. US Special Forces are a rare and specialized commodity in the US military,
who possess the speed, flexibility and precision to operate in extremely high risk
environments. Their success depends on the rapid collection and dissemination of reliable
intelligence. Though some progress has been made, many basic problems in intelligence
sharing have endured since the days even preceding Eagle Claw.
The most basic issue is the fact that different communities are working on
different operating systems. For example, the CIA has its own methods of cataloguing,
classifying and sharing information, while USSOCOM is on the ASOMS communication
system that uses an entirely different classification, cataloguing and sharing method. If a
Special Forces operator is out in the middle of Kandahar province trying to relay
information to the CIA, for example, he would need an agency liaison at the base to
approve distribution to the CIA. If the Special Forces collector is off base, which is more
likely to be the case given the conditions under which they operate, he won’t know
whether the agency is cleared to see the information he’s collecting. As a result, he hits a
wall when it comes time to drop click and select the distribution channel under the
ASOMS system, the agency is left in the dark and the likelihood of error and redundancy
in the overall mission rises substantially. The intelligence flow should not only be
directed from the top-down, but should also allow for operators on the ground to quickly
relay information back to the intelligence community so that all eyes and ears on the
ground, in the sky or in a cubicle at Langley are able to see the full intelligence picture
and thus provide the best support possible to the war fighter on the ground.
When asked whether he feels he usually has the intelligence he needs to lead an
action force on a mission, a Navy SEAL replied “yes,” with the substantial caveat that
that is only the case because they go out of the way to collate that information
themselves. In other words, the information is not made readily available to his team and
a number of roundabout communications typically have to be pursued before they receive
the intelligence they need prior to parachuting into a certain village or kicking in a certain
door. The operator described a situation in which his team was getting ready to drop from
the air into a certain sector of southern Iraq, but lacked a reliable situation report to
understand what exactly he and his men would encounter once they hit ground. After
struggling to find the right contact information for the appropriate Forward Operating
Base (FOB), he received a completely different description of the situation in the area
from the ill-informed staff officer at the FOB than the one he later received from the
Captain in charge of patrols in the target area. Special Forces should not have to walk (or
drop) into a mission blind due to a simple failure of a Captain to communicate with his
staff at base.
The politicization of intelligence has also become an issue for Special Forces.
One operator described how a certain area of a city where an action force was preparing
to deploy was falsely deemed “stable” for political purposes. That inaccurate description
was reflected in intelligence reports that were disseminated to his team, resulting in
several unpleasant surprises that could have easily been avoided with unpoliticized and
reliable intelligence.
Fundamental issues remain between the CIA and military when it comes to
sharing intelligence. This enduring phenomenon is the result of basic civil-military
cultural and operational differences, power politics and a legacy of distrust between the
two communities. Just as the colonel in Eagle Claw went on a mission three weeks prior
to the launch of the operation to verify the intelligence he had received from the CIA out
of fear that the information could not be trusted, a number of Special Forces find
themselves in similar situations today. A Navy SEAL described how his community has
learned to accept that information coming from the CIA on something as critical as a
target location on a map will often be wrong and needs to be verified by the team itself
before launching an operation. This practice may save lives, but it also exacerbates the
redundancy issues and distrust between the CIA and Special Forces.
The CIA, on the other hand, largely views the military as too structured in their
chain of command and too reliant on technology, ie. drones, satellites and electronic
intercepts, for intelligence collection. HUMINT, which is the key “INT” in
counterterrorism missions, is a much more time-consuming and arduous process than
processes involving TECHINT, but it is a practice that the CIA and Special Operations
forces are well accustomed to in theaters like Afghanistan. The CIA and Special Forces
share a love and need for operational flexibility, and should recognize this area of
compatibility to further their cooperation. But overcoming this distrust between the two
communities will undoubtedly require a hard discussion over budget, the lion’s share of
which is held by the DoD, to the resentment of the CIA. That can only be made possible
with a strong leader with budget authority in the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, a reality that does not exist today.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to joint intelligence is the fear of being wrong. With
rivalries running deep across the U.S. intelligence community, a culture has developed in
which the withholding of information is often done in the interest of preserving the
reputation of a single agency, or more frequently, a single career. This practice runs
directly against the national security interests of the United States and puts in danger the
US Special Forces who are risking their lives for the lives of every American. In
counterterrorism theaters like Afghanistan, the US military may have the supreme
advantage in firepower, but the enemy has the intelligence edge. In these wars of
intelligence, the United States will rely increasingly on Special Forces and the
intelligence agencies that support them. The need for greater intelligence cooperation has
thus never been greater. If US policymakers believe joint intelligence to be an impossible
challenge, they only need to look back to that fateful spring night in the Iranian desert
three decades ago, where a great failure ended up revolutionizing U.S. military doctrine.
In making the case for joint intelligence, however, it would be foolish to wait for another
failure to spur real change.

Bibliography

1. The Colonel and former Delta Force commander interviewed about his experience in
planning and executing Operation Eagle Claw is a colleague of the writer who works
currently at STRATFOR.

2. Insight on Special Forces experience with joint operations and joint intelligence in the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was collected primarily from an interview with a Navy
SEAL officer, but also includes insight relayed by former Delta Force commander LTC
Jimmy Reese.

3. Cogan, Charles G. “Desert One and its Disorders,” The Journal of Military History,
Issue 67, January 2003.

4. Holloway Commission report, 1980.

5. Williams, Linda B., “Intelligence Support to Special Operations in the Global War on
Terrorism.” UNCLASSIFIED US Strategy Research Project, U.S. Army War College
in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, May 3, 2004.

6. “Doctrine for Joint Special Operations” from the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Dec. 17, 2003.

7. Bowden, Mark. “The Desert One Debacle,” The Atlantic, May 2006. (The Colonel
interviewed for this paper who was also the primary (unnamed) source for the Bowden
article)