Update: Looks like I was on the same page as Robert Gates. The New Yorker’s revealing –but opaquely sourced— account of the Bin Laden raid states that Gates had Operation Eagle Claw on his mind.
“On March 29th, McRaven brought the plan to Obama. The President’s military advisers were divided. Some supported a raid, some an airstrike, and others wanted to hold off until the intelligence improved. Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, was one of the most outspoken opponents of a helicopter assault. Gates reminded his colleagues that he had been in the Situation Room of the Carter White House when military officials presented Eagle Claw—the 1980 Delta Force operation that aimed at rescuing American hostages in Tehran but resulted in a disastrous collision in the Iranian desert, killing eight American soldiers. ‘They said that was a pretty good idea, too,‘ Gates warned. He and General James Cartwright, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs, favored an airstrike by B-2 Spirit bombers.”
The New Yorker article also quotes a “senior Defense Department official” who claimed Operation Geronimo was less difficult than Operation Eagle Claw. The anonymous official stated, “This was one of almost two thousand missions that have been conducted over the last couple of years, night after night” and described it as, “mowing the lawn.”
The piece also confirms that President Obama, unlike President Carter, ordered additional helicopters to hover just outside Pakistan. “He wanted to feel assured that the Americans could ‘fight their way out of Pakistan.’ Twenty-five additional SEALs from DEVGRU, pulled from a squadron stationed in Afghanistan, sat in the Chinooks that remained at the border; this ‘quick-reaction force’ would be called into action only if the mission went seriously wrong.” Two additional Chinooks landed at a “hide spot” in Pakistani territory. It was a smart move. After one of the Blackhawk helicopters crashed, the SEALs boarded a Chinook sent from the “hide spot” to pick them up. After refueling inside Pakistan, every US soldier made it home safely.
A few more updates below.
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On 2 May 2011, President Barack Obama announced, “Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”
Almost 30 years earlier, on 25 April 1980, President Jimmy Carter gave a much different speech. He announced that he had “canceled a carefully planned operation which was underway in Iran” to rescue the 52 American hostages, held since 4 November 1979. As the elite team of Delta Force troops aborted and returned to aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean, “two of our American aircraft collided on the ground following a refueling operation in a remote desert location in Iran….To my deep regret, eight of the crewmen of the two aircraft which collided were killed, and several other Americans were hurt in the accident.”
Operation Eagle Claw was one of the most disastrous covert operations in American history. Operation Geronimo was one of the most successful. Months after Operation Eagle Claw, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drafted the Holloway Report, “a broad examination of the planning, organization, coordination, direction, and control of the Iranian hostage rescue mission, as a basis for recommending improvement in these areas for the future.”
My immediate reaction to reading the Holloway Report in the aftermath of the Abbottabad raid was that the military and intelligence officers who had conducted Operation Geronimo had done their homework and read their history. Many of the specific recommendations made by the Holloway Report were followed in the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. (more…)
