Debacle in The Desert

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Carter's mission to rescue the hostages goes down in flames

Two lines of blue lights etched the outlines of the remote landing strip. Suddenly flames illuminated the night sky, then gradually flickered out. On the powdery sands of Dasht-e-Kavir, Iran's Great Salt Desert, lay the burned-out hulk of a lumbering U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules aircraft. Nearby rested the scorched skeleton of a U.S. Navy RH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter. And in the wreckage were the burned bodies of eight American military air crewmen.

A few hours later, in a display of whipped-up outrage, the Iranian air force dispatched American-made F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers to blast the ruins of the charred aircraft and to disable four other undamaged Sea Stallions abandoned by the U.S. Ironically, as the rubble bounced, one Islamic Guard patrolling the site was killed and two others wounded.

The fire and the fury dramatized the dimensions of a new American tragedy—the inability of the U.S. to extricate 53 American hostages held by Iranian militants and the unstable, faction-torn government of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. In a startlingly bold but tragic gamble, President Jimmy Carter had ordered a courageous, specially trained team of American military commandos to try to pluck the hostages out of the heavily guarded U.S. embassy in Tehran. The supersecret operation failed dismally. It ended in the desert staging site, some 250 miles short of its target in the capital city. And for the world's most technologically sophisticated nation, the reason for aborting the rescue effort was particularly painful: three of the eight helicopters assigned to the mission developed electrical or hydraulic malfunctions that rendered them useless.

For Carter in particular, and for the U.S. in general, the desert debacle was a military, diplomatic and political fiasco. A once dominant military machine, first humbled in its agonizing standoff in Viet Nam, now looked incapable of keeping its aircraft aloft even when no enemy knew they were there, and even incapable of keeping them from crashing into each other despite four months of practice for their mission.

That was embarrassing enough, but the consequences of the mission that failed were far more serious; they affected everything from the future of Jimmy Carter to the future of U.S. relations with its European allies and Japan. While most of Carter's political foes tactfully withheld criticism, his image as inept had been renewed. Already hurt by mounting economic difficulties at home, the President now had a new embarrassment abroad. The failure in the desert could prove to be a blow to his re-election hopes.