Killer Elite

Chapter 1 Sitting in the forward operations center in a filthy Egyptian Air Force hangar at the Wadi Qina air base, 300 miles south of Cairo, Colonel Jerry King was powerless to prevent the debacle at Desert One. As chief of staff to Major General James "Hammer" Vaught, the man in charge of the Delta Force attempt to rescue 53 American hostages held captive in Tehran, King could only listen with mounting anger to the frantic satellite radio messages coming out of Iran in the early hours of 25 April 1980. Not that anyone out there at the Desert One staging post, 250 miles southeast of the Iranian capital in the Dasht-e-Kavir desert, could do any better. Even Chargin' Charlie Beckwith, the former Green Beret colonel who set up Delta and was leading Operation Eagle Claw on the ground, couldn't prevent what was by any measure "a total goat-fuck" that left eight US servicemen dead. The operation had been called off after three of the eight US Navy helicopters taking part in the mission developed technical problems that left the joint task force with too few to get both the hostages and the rescue team out. One was abandoned in the desert after an indicator light warned a rotor blade might snap, a second had to pull out of the mission when its gyroscope malfunctioned and the third was declared unserviceable after landing at Desert One. After some argument among the task force commanders over whether or not to go ahead, the mission was called off. It was then that a helicopter and one of the C130s collided, killing the eight US servicemen. There was a whole bunch of reasons why they died and why the task force failed in its missionthe interservice rivalry that meant every one of the four armed services wanted some involvement in the mission regardless of the fact that they had never worked together before, and all used different operating procedures; the decision to fly the helicopters off an aircraft carrier rather than in from a neighboring country; the navy's poor maintenance of its helicopters; and the strange decision not to have air force pilots with experience of special ops fly all the aircraft, a move that would have at least ensured the mission got beyond Desert One. But even if it had, there was another major problem that could have led to the mission failing at its most dangerous point, inside Tehran itself, and afterward Jerry King, a straight-talking veteran of Army Special Forces operations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, was not slow to make his views known. The CIA had fucked up big time. It had claimed, falsely as it later turned out, to have no one in Tehran who could help Delta prepare for what was always going to be a tricky task. King's disparaging view of the Agency's contribution was shared by virtually everyone else involved in Eagle Claw, not least the task force commander General Vaught. "Intelligence from all sources was inadequate from the start and never became responsive," he said. "The CIA did not, would not or could not provide sufficient agents to go in country and get the information we needed."1 whatever the reasons for the failure of Eagle Claw, it certainly wasn't a lack of detailed planning. Preparations for the raid had begun six months earlier on 4 November 1979, the very day a mob of Iranian Revolutionary Guards and militant students, supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini, forced their way into the US embassy in Tehran and seized the hostages. Jerry King, who was then chief of unconventional warfare for special operations in the Joint Chiefs of Staff operations directorate, was called in by Air Force General David C Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, together with the chief of current operations, Brigadier General Johnson. "We were told about the emSmith, Michael is the author of 'Killer Elite', published 2008 under ISBN 9780312378264 and ISBN 0312378262.