Operation Eagle Claw: The failed Iranian Hostage Rescue attempt of 1980

In late 1979, preparations began for what became known as "Operation Eagle Claw" in the spring of 1980. My father was part of that operation during the Carter presidency. This is what I remember

What happened in the late 70’s and early 80’s during the malaise of Jimmy Carter’s (mal-)administration reminds me very much of what is now happening during the Biden regime.

Our world now is arguably far worse off than back then; Communism was a thing that existed “over there” but is now seeping in like a fetid disease everywhere here in the US.

The stinging bite of inflation that we are reeling from is eerily reminiscent. In 1977, gas averaged $0.62 a gallon; by the time Carter left in 1981, gas had more than doubled to $1.31 per gallon.

Under Biden (honorific title purposefully deleted), gas went from a low of $1.69 in April 2020 during President Trump’s admin to a high of $5.01(!) in October of 2022.

Doubling (or tripling) of gas prices seems to be a thing that Biden shares with Carter. (see the end of this post for a chart I made, which I regularly use to battle Democrat politician’s lies on Twitter/X.)

During my most formative years, I grew up on a series US Air Force bases; in the years that Carter was in office, I lived in West Germany. That experience deeply influenced and forever shaped my understanding of our beloved Republic, the United States of America.

In the year in which the United States celebrated its bicentennial—in 1976—my family was stationed at Ramstein Air Force Base: from the time I was in 3rd grade through the end of 8th grade, our family lived off base for five of the six years, spending our final year of the tour living on base.

I was recently thinking about this time in my life, because I had shared a story with some friends in a chat room last week about the time that my 7th grade class visited Normandy in France.

Operation Eagle Claw, 1981

As a 13-year-old boy, I remember seeing and standing inside the mortar craters on the tops of the cliffs at Normandy. I saw the concrete bunkers and pill boxes from which German soldiers fired down on the Allied soldiers who were scaling the cliffs that fateful day of June 6th, 1944.

I recall the feelings I had in those moments; I remember thinking about the raw courage that it took for the soldiers who landed on that beach that day, under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, to claim those beaches under heavy fire and then climb up them, even while being shot at.

Those were real men: they gave their lives so that others might live in freedom. I remember clearly seeing the rows upon rows of crosses at Pont Du Hoc Cemetery—white crosses for Christians and Star of David headstones alike.

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Unlike other 7th graders back in the States, who had a more distant and detached view of things when they studied World War II in US History, I had a more direct connection to that history—because I experienced the places where it took place. I spoke to people with direct, firsthand knowledge of what had transpired.

I saw and felt the terrible sacrifices of those who fought so bravely on D-Day, and as the son of a US Air Force officer, I recognized and respected the work my dad and others like him were doing in the decades after the war.

On other trips during my grade school years, we visited the concentration camps in Dachau, Austria. We saw for ourselves the actual places where the horrors of the holocaust were carried out against the Jews under the Hitler regime.

We walked through a gas chamber. Saw the depressing barracks where so many lived and died. Saw the photos of people with emaciated bodies wearing the striped uniforms assigned to the prisoners; saw photos of the piles of bodies of those killed and placed in mass graves.

One can never forget things like that.

At the time that we lived at Ramstein, the Cold War between the US and the former Soviet Union was in full swing. That Air Force Base would have been ground zero for any attack by the Soviets because of its likely storage of tactical nuclear weapons.

These days, however, the wisdom of being older and having gone through the “Great Awakening” makes me question whether I understand what had really been going on during the “Cold War”.

But at that point in time, the Cold War as it was known was in full swing, and we lived that reality every day. Many times, as I rode the school bus onto the base to attend elementary school, the bus would be stopped in the pre-dawn gloom at the entrance to the base and inspected by armed guards toting M16s.

They would sweep the aisles, checking the ID cards of the kids on the bus. Few today can imagine attending school under those conditions. I remember another time when my teacher took our class on a walk across the base one spring day near the end of the school year to go bowling.

As we were making our way along the sidewalks, a “black alert” horn sounded as part of a drill, and we all had to lie down on the sidewalk for a bit with our hands over our heads until the all clear was given.

Six weeks after our family had returned to the US in 1981, an extremist leftist group known as the Red Army Faction (Communist radicals are almost always the real terrorists in our world—those people were the Antifa of their age) drove a vehicle filled with plastic explosives onto the base and detonated it outside of the former NATO headquarters building. (update: mom clarified that it was the USAFE HQ building, not NATO.)

My mom used to work in that building as a secretary; it was a sort of cross-shaped structure at the time, and my mom used to park and enter the building on the very quadrant where the terrorists parked their vehicle and detonated their bomb.

The blast shattered windows some distance away, including at the school I used to attend. It went off around 7:00am, which would have been the very moment she typically arrived at work. She might have been killed, had we still lived there. But we had returned stateside only a few months prior.

Because we lived “off base” for most of our time at Ramstein, I used to ride the bus to school from 3rd through 7th grade, and once in a while I would have some after- school activities that made me miss the bus.

On those days, my dad would have me walk across the base from my school over to the building where he worked, and I’d catch a ride home with him when his workday was done.

Many times, he’d send me over to the base library while he finished work, which was across the street; I’d spend a few hours reading books until it was time to go.

Other times, I’d stay in a ‘rec room’ in his office building, which doubled as a barracks; the upper floors were used by soldiers as their dormitories, and the bottom floor was offices.

At one end was a sort of a lounge with a TV and some couches, so I’d watch Star Trek episodes on AFN (armed forces network TV) or read while waiting for his day to wind down before we’d head to his car and go home.

On one particular day, I missed the bus and walked over to Dad’s office. Most of the time when I entered the office, I’d hear people chatting and laughing, and smell pipe smoke—my dad’s or others; hear the teletype machines whirring and clacking as they printed up some message; or hear the low, lazy clickity clack of typewriters being used.

The office smelled of printers, carbon paper, ink, pipe smoke, and boredom most of the time.

But this time things were different. There were people buzzing in and out of offices, closets being opened with trunks scattered about, and a palpable tension in the air.

I found my dad, and he nervously said, “go down to the rec room, I’ll come get you later.” I stepped around the chaos, and did what he said, heading for the TV in the rec room.

After a long while, he stopped in to check on me. “Something’s up today, we don’t know what. But one of the guys has to go on an emergency TDY” (temporary duty, in military lingo) “…and we have to pack some stuff up for him to take along.”

And then he disappeared again for a while.

An hour or so later, he was back, but this time visibly distraught. “It turns out that just as we were packing things up for Joe…” (I made up that name, I don’t remember who it was) “…he got a phone call saying that his dad was just taken to a hospital in the US with a heart attack. He’s on a plane back home right now to be with his dad. It turns out… I’m the next one on the list for this assignment, whatever it is.”

He disappeared again, coming back a while later, and drove me home to be with my mom and sister. I could feel the tension at home, and after a short while, someone arrived at our house to take him to the flightline on the base for his flight to … wherever.

We saw him off, hugged and waved goodbye…and then heard nothing from him, or about him, for many months. Christmas came and went, and we visited my German grandmother’s house as usual….but the mood was somber. We were without Dad, and didn’t know where he was, or even if he was OK.

A few months later, my mom, who worked in the NATO [Ed: USAFE HQ, not NATO] building, finally got word from my dad. He was OK, but not allowed to talk about where he was or what he was doing. That lowered our stress levels somewhat, but we still missed him.

And then suddenly one day, he was back. He was 10 or 20 pounds lighter, his skin was tanned and dark, and he was smoking cigarettes nervously.

We had never seen him like that. Still, he couldn’t tell us anything about where he had been, and what he had done.

Time went on, we fell back into our usual routines…and then in the summer of 1981, we returned back to the US for his next assignment, in Indianapolis, Indiana.

As fate would have it, we had lived there before, almost 10 years prior; he was now assigned to be an instructor at the same Defense Information School that he had once attended as a young officer.

More time elapsed, and we settled into a new life back in the US. I started High school as a freshman, and my sister was two years ahead of me. One day, while sitting in his recliner at home, my dad came across a recent copy of Time or Newsweek magazine.

And lo and behold, there was an article talking about something called “Operation Eagle Claw” — which was the failed attempt in 1980 to rescue the American hostages who were held captive for 444 days in Tehran.

The mysterious operation that he had been a part of was now declassified; he could now talk about his experiences on that fateful assignment.

Dad had been a significant part of Operation Eagle Claw; as an Air Force liaison, he had once helped set up and conduct meetings between the operation commander and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

His vice president at the time, Hosni Mubarek, was also in attendance; my dad said that at the time, he thought Mubarek was a bodyguard, given his weapons and tough attitude, rather than the VP of Egypt.

The rescue attempt operation had included the use of an abandoned airfield in Egypt as an alternate support and staging ground to launch the rescue attempt; at the time, the Russians would have considered it a provocation of war had they known we had military forces there.

The rescue attempt failed horribly; and it wasn’t until the day after Ronald Reagan was sworn in that the US hostages were released after 444 days of captivity.

The Iranians knew that Reagan was not to be trifled with; knew he was not the soft incompetent leader that Jimmy Carter, who ordered the operation to help boost his political chances, had been.

On Reagan’s first day in office, Iran’s Mullahs released the hostages.

My dad can’t talk much about those days anymore; in late 2021, he had a brain hemorrhage and stroke, ostensibly caused by the COVID shot that he felt compelled to take just 6 weeks prior.

He didn’t want to take it, but he was afraid that Biden (a weak, incompetent but authoritarian fop much like Carter) would take away his military pension and my parents’ medical benefits if he didn’t comply.

Biden should be kicked out of office and tried for treason merely for what he did to put our military and veterans at risk of injury by his mandated injectables. No one has done more harm to the US military than Biden—at least, not since Carter.

Dad survived the stroke, but he can no longer read and write. If he could, I’d have him co-edit this piece, so that I got all the facts and timelines just right, as he would have done had he written it.

From Grok:
Operation Eagle Claw was a failed rescue mission that took place in April 1980 during the Iran hostage crisis. The operation aimed to rescue 52 American hostages held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran.

The mission was launched on April 24, 1980, but it was aborted after a series of unfortunate events, including a sandstorm, equipment failure, and a fatal collision between a helicopter and a transport aircraft. The operation resulted in the deaths of eight American servicemen and the loss of several aircraft.

The Iran hostage crisis began on November 4, 1979, when Iranian students and militants took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981, after intense diplomatic negotiations and economic sanctions.

Some kids learned about US history from textbooks; the kids like us who grew up on military bases overseas learned about it directly, from the people who made history, and from those with firsthand experience living through it.

I asked ChatGPT once how many people were alive in 1981; the answer is that about 4 billion of the world’s current inhabitants were born after that year.

Of the 4 billion who were alive back then, far too few know the history of the Cold War, and what the world was like.

As time creeps forward, fewer and fewer people will remember our history, or remember what sacrifices so many made to ensure freedom and prosperity for others.

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References:
Here’s a chart I keep updated showing US average gasoline prices over the past 10 years. Feel free to redistribute it.

Biden and his cronies cannot defend this massive increase in gasoline prices; this isn’t the result of “shrinkflation” or “evil greedy corporations”. It’s deliberate policy that fits their “Green” agenda (is green the color of money, or plants, or both?) and also fiscal mismanagement.

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