Ashvazdanghe

Salam Saudi Arabia's PIF-led consortium buys Electronic Arts (EA) for $55 billion Landmark gaming deal marks PIF’s biggest global tech play amid GCC digital ambitions https://gulfnews.com/business/markets/saudi-arabias-pif-led-consortium-buys-electronic-arts-ea-for-55-billion-1.500287836 Jared Kushner, Saudi Arabia, more backers to buy EA in $55B deal. What this means for gamers. President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Saudi Arabia's government and other backers are closing in on a $55 billion deal to purchase the video game company responsible for developing and publishing popular game franchises like The Sims, Madden NFL and Battlefield. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/09/29/ea-electronic-arts-aquired-jared-kushner-saudi-arabia/86417253007/

Hi respectfully you totally misunderstood the point due to your biased mindset which it has been multiple times mentioned that Paul in shia Islam has been considered as the evil villain due to distortion of original christianity & turning it to a pagan mixed religion which number of followers has not been the case ; also according to Shia Islam only following truth has value even if followers of truth will be in too small numbers ; which you always like to compare apples with oranges by making accusation from thin air based on your biased mindset while you have total ignorance about Islam. Even according to christianit theology Paul never worked together with Jesus which he has been totally against teachings of prophet Isa/Jesus (عليه السلام) which suddenly changed his mind so then initiated his deviations in original Christianity .

Salam respectfully it's wrong which although you are right about restriction of migration in Iran & Iraq however even if both of them have allowed unrestricted migration of Shias so then some shias would go to west which even some Iranian shias although are supporters of regime but they have migrated to west in hope of better income & welfare system or higher education & saving more money for having better retirement in Iran .

Hi Paul has no place in Islam which Islam only considers prophet Isa/Jesus (عليه السلام) as greatest prophet before prophet Muhammad (pbu) which in shia Islam Paul has been cursed for causing deviation in original Christianity so then creating Pauline Christianity based on pagan beliefs . You clearly have mentioned that Paul has been greater than Jesus so therefore logically according to your theology which duty of Jesus has been promotion of Paul by doing miracles according to your theology which rationally if Paul has done greater work than Jesus so therefore as you consider Jesus as a godlike figure so then Paul has been greater god than both of Jesus father god according to your theology .

Salam America & zionist israel have tried to fool Iran which zionist agents have made contact with Iran with American identity under cover pretending to be a part of group of American diplomats which Iran just wanted to acquire american weapons because it's army has been totally dependant to american weapons but when Iran has received weapon so then it has been exposed that all weapons have been provided from zionist Israel with exclusive serial numbers for Israel which if saddam could acquire those guns from Iranian war prisoners so then could use Israeli serial number of weapons for accusing Iran to cooperation with Israel so therefore Iran has not accepted weapons & not used previously received weapons in war ; which Mr Rafsanjani has exposed their dirty plan for fooling him & his party to people of Iran with all details by order of Imam Khomeini (رضي الله عنه) but still it has remained a conspiracy theory against Iran .

Salam respectfully this is just far fetch wishful thinking which never won't happen which zionist Israel has strong ties with Turkey & so called Azerbaijan but never allows them to become powerful in extent that them can be become a treat for it ; which also neo-ottomanism is a zionist project which Qatar won't have any militaristic power which it's procedure is becoming in similar fashion of Swiss of west Asia in its rivalry with Oman . Syrian Druze only are pro themselves which they are under influence of Israeli Druze which their want independent state as friend of zionist Israel ; which colonizer britain has used them insimilar fashion for weakening Ottomans through making contact & alliance with them through Gertrude Bell as it's secret agent by giving promise to make an independent state for them .

Salam respectfully Iran has never committed such crimes whether before or after Islam so therefore when Iran has not committed any oppression so therefore there is no need for doing apology. Only oppressor westerner colonizers have done it . Apologizing & accommodation by oppressor westerner colonizers has been a void action which it has not fixed any problem ; which doing it symbolic just has been insulting to oppressed nations again by them ; which everyone agrees that "welfare state benefits to native Americans and AA" is just a dark joke which until now it has not fixed any problem of them . minority Immigrants come to America for having better outcome although they have faced all types of oppression by America which everyone is aware of brutality & oppression of America against them ; which they nver have receive any approriate social service from America ; which you have just tried to fool yourself by believing to American propaganda so then justifying atrocities of oppressor westerner colonizers based on you fake patriotism.

Hi , maybe it will be aligned with hadith although it's a minor sign which it can't be correlated to timing of reappearance of Imam Mahdi (aj) . Solar and lunar eclipses in the month of Ramadan https://alvadossadegh.com/خورشید-گرفتگی-و-ماه-گرفتگی-در-ماه-رمضان/

Salam related thread to India

Salam a threat which contains everything about India.

Salam a threat which contains everything about India.

Addendum According to Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi: https://www.mashreghnews.ir/news/612073/حکم-شرعی-گرفتن-سود-از-بانک-غیر-اسلامی-چیست

Salam Grand Ayatollah Sistani: A father and a son, and a husband and wife, can take usury from each other. A Muslim can also take usury from a non-Muslim who is not under the protection of Islam, but it is forbidden to make a usury transaction with a non-Muslim who is under the protection of Islam. Of course, after the transaction is completed, if usury is permissible in his Sharia, he can take the excess from him.[2] https://www.islamquest.net/fa/archive/fa1118

.سلام به طور قطع امام خامنه ای مرجع هست . .آیت الله سیستانی براساس داشتن دانش کافی به مرجعیت ارتقا یافت که این در مورد امام خامنه ای هم صدق می کند . مرجع تقلید با سلام چند سوال در مورد مرجعیت دارم 1-از آنجا که مقلد مقام معضم رهبری هستم خرفههایی میشنوم که آقای خامنه ای مرجع نمیباشد آیا درست است یا خیر اگر مرجع میباشد چرا مانند امام یا آیت... سیستانی توضیح المسائل ندارد؟ 2-من خیلی دوس دارم مقلد امام باشم از آنجا که سنم به زمان امام قد نمیدهد که مقلد {ز}رمان حیاتش باشم و مرجع فعلی من آقای خامنه ای تقلید از مرده را جایز نمیداند من چه کنم؟ لطفا تا جایی که امکان هست واضح به سوالات پاسخ دهید پرسشگر گرامي، با سلام و سپاس از ارتباط­تان با مرکز ملی پاسخگویی به سوالات دینی و مذهبی تقلید ابتدایی از مرجعی که فوت شده جایز نیست؛ بنا بر این شما که در زمان حضرت امام خمینی (ره) از ایشان تقلید نمی کرده اید و سن و سالتان کم بوده الان نمی توانید از ایشان تقلید بکنید و راجع به این که آیت الله خامنه ای رساله ندارند باید به عرض برسانیم : رساله داشتن و نداشتن از شرایط مرجعیت و از شرایط تقلید نیست. اگر مرجعی را اعلم تشخیص دادید ، باید از او تقلید کنید، گرچه رساله نداشته باشد . ظاهرا ایشان از این که خیلی مطرح بشوند، از چاپ رساله ممانعت می کنند. نظرشان این است که مراجع دیگر هستند لذا با اینکه از ایشان درخواست های فراوان نسبت به چاپ رساله شده اما اقدام به چاپ رساله نکرده اند. گذشته از این آیت الله خامنه ای رساله اجوبه الاستفتاات دارند. گرچه به طور کامل همه مسایل در آن نیست، ولی می توانید از این رساله به اضافه توضیح المسایل حضرت امام خمینی (ره) استفاده کنید. مرجع و اعلم را از سه‌ راه مى توان شناخت: اول، آن كه خود انسان يقين كند؛ مثل آن كه از اهل علم باشد و بتواند مجتهد و اعلم را بشناسد. دوم، آن كه دو نفر عالم عادل كه مى توانند مجتهد و اعلم را تشخيص دهند و مجتهد بودن يا اعلم بودن كسى را تصديق كنند؛ به شرط آن كه دو نفر عالم عادل ديگر، با گفته آنان مخالفت ننمايند. سوم، آن كه عده‌اى از اهل علم كه مى توانند مجتهد و اعلم را تشخيص دهندو از گفته آنان اطمينان پيدا مى شود، مجتهد بودن يا اعلم بودن كسى را تصديق كنند. (1) بنا بر این اگر شما از راه شرعی مرجع خود را انتخاب نکرده باشید باید تحقیق کنید و مرجع خود را انتخاب کنید اما اگر انتخاب شما شرعی باشد و در حال حاضر آیت الله خامنه ای را اعلم بدانید نمی توانید مرجع خود را تغییر بدهید. و نداشتن رساله دلیل عوض کردن مرجع نیست. برای اطلاع از فتاوای آیت الله خامنه ای می توانید رساله اجوبه الاستفتائات فارسی ایشان را مطالعه کنید؛ اگر جواب پرسش خود را نیافتید، به کتاب راهنمایی فتاوا ، نوشته آقای فلاح زاده که اختلاف فتواهایی مقام معظم رهبری و حضرت امام در آن آمده است، مراجعه کنید؛ همچنین می توانید به سایت آیت الله خامنه ای به نشانی (http://www.leader.ir) مراجعه کرده و مسئله خود را پیدا کنید و یا از آن سایت سوال کنید. (2) همچنین می توانید نظرات ایشان را از مراکزی مانند (مرکز ملی پاسخ گویی به سئوالات دینی به شماره 09640) بپرسید ؛ از طریق اینترنت با همین سایت و همچنین با تماس تلفنی 0251774666 اگر از هیچ کدام از این راه ها به نتیجه نرسیدید، می توانید به رساله حضرت امام عمل کنید. پی نوشت ها: 1. امام خمینی، توضیح المسایل، م 9 و 3 و آیت الله خامنه ای ، اجوبه استفتائات ، س 25 و س 31. 2. سوال تلفنی از دفتر آیت الله خامنه ای. (7746666-0251). https://www.pasokhgoo.ir/node/48892 .توضیح :"رمان" اشتباه تایپی است و "زمان" صحیح می باشد

Hi there is no evidence which prophet Jesus/Isa (عليه السلام) has affirmed it which it's only misinterpretation of Luther from Paul's fabrication which there is a great contradiction in words of Paul about it . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_fide Prophet Isa/Jesus (عليه السلام) has not been only prophet which has been sent by God which he has been sent in similar fashion of other prophets so therefore all prophets will have eternal life in Paradise so therefore it's not exclusive to prophet Isa/Jesus (عليه السلام) which in similar fashion all prophets have been way & truth which only difference between muslims & christians is that the Christian based on Paul's deviation have considered Prophet Isa/Jesus (عليه السلام) as God like being who has been a god besides of the God in similar fashion of all pagan beliefs . This is your confession which you have followed Paulism not original Christianity of Prophet Isa/Jesus (عليه السلام) which according to you a fallible person as Paul has greater status for you than Jesus so therefore he is the fourth god who is greater god than Jesus which because according to you Jesus has had equivalent status to the father god so therefore Paul is the greater god than both of them for you .

Salam respectfully only definition of Conservative & Radical is true ; but on the other hand minorities are not out of control but on the other hand they have opposed oppression which tyrants & suppressors have considered it as getting out of control ; taming wild continent & civilizing it is just a colonialism westerner slogan which they have destroyed culture & civilization of minorities so then have tried to force them follow their way of life under guise of civilizing them .

Salam respectfully "Burning incense to remove jinn is not shirk" because it has no correlation to worshiping Allah which also it's just a tool which has been created by Allah which as you have mentioned using incense for having a nice or clean smell which helps removing harmful elements is okay . In a hadith, Imam Ali (عليه السلام) says: “In the root of the Esfand is Nahreh نشره[16] and in its trunk is a cure for seventy-two diseases.”[17] However, the narration is not reliable in terms of chain of transmission. [۱۶] یعنی دور کردن حسد. [16] It means removing envy. [17] Da'a'im al-Islam V2 , p 150 [is a book concerning religious beliefs and the rulings of shari'a on the basis of Isma'ili jurisprudence.] Mustadrak al-wasa'il , V 16 , P460 https://en.wikishia.net/view/Da'a'im_al-Islam_(book) https://en.wikishia.net/view/Mustadrak_al-wasa'il_(book) As a result, there is no narration in which Esfand is directly considered effective in preventing or treating the evil eye. https://hadana.ir/اسپند-دود-كردن-از-منظر-روایات/

Salam Dua’a No.39 For recovery of misplaced or lost thing. Sometimes it so happens that something is lost or misplaced, and then because one cannot find it one gets perplexed. In case something is lost or misplaced, and one has to search it before mid-day, one should recite the following Dua’a thrice, and after each recitation all the thing will be found out. Transliteration: BISMILLA HIR RAHMAN NIR RAHIM. AS-BAH TO FEE AMANIL-LAHE WA AMSAITO FEE JAVARFIL-LAHE Transliteration: BISMILLA HIR RAHMA NIR RAHIM AMSAITO FEE AMANIL - LAHE WA AS-BAH-TO-FEE JAVARIL-LAHE In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. I have entered upon the morning in the protection of Allah, and I shall enter into the evening in the refuge of Allah. If the search is to be made after mid-day the following Dua’a is to be recited 3 times, clapping each time. In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. I have entered into the evening in the protection of Allah of Allah, and I shall enter upon the morning in the refuge of Allah. https://www.duas.org/1014.html

Hi Salam probably it has been an statement which accustomed to Harold Brown an American nuclear physicist who served as United States Secretary of Defense from 1977 to 1981, under President Jimmy Carter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Brown_(Secretary_of_Defense) Brzezinski (Jimmy Carter's National Security adviser), who had been adamant about attacking Iran and rescuing the hostages, called the failure his bitterest disappointment during his four years in the White House. When asked how the rescue operation had failed, the US Secretary of Defense said: “Ayatollah Khomeini has been standing on the balcony of his house, and with every movement of his hand, a plane has been falling to the ground.” http://www.imam-khomeini.ir/fa/c504_2661/زندگی_نامه/رهبری/واقعه_طبس

Salam unfortunately it's exaggeration of event by Indo Pak Clergerie by forging the real story. It's still famous in Iran which it's been remembered every year until now in Iran as miraculous event in similar fashion of defeating of army of elephants by Allah for protection of Kaaba when everyone specially Imam Khomeini (رضي الله عنه) has been unaware of it until next day after foiling of the American operation of eagle claw . In his Friday prayer sermon on 12/02/1359 (Friday - May 02, 1980), Seyyed Ali Khamenei, the Imam of Friday prayer of Tehran, spoke to the worshippers about his observations of America's defeat in the Tabas Desert. Reciting the verse of the Holy Quran, "Have you not seen how your Lord dealt with the companions of the elephant?", he likened America's defeat to the defeat of the companions of the elephant in destroying the Kaaba. He promised the people that oppressive civilizations are on the verge of destruction, and the nose of the oppressor and aggressor will be rubbed in the dust. Just as the Tabas Desert became the burial ground for steel elephants, the entire Middle East region will become the burial ground for America's war machine. On 12 Ordibehesht (Friday - May 02, 1980) , Imam Khomeini (عليه السلام) also reminded the commanders of the Revolutionary Guards, referring to the US defeat in Tabas, that the US violated international law by militarily invading Iran and did not achieve its goal, and despite all that propaganda and equipment, it suffered a severe psychological and political blow. He continued by reminding them that Muslim Iranians, believing in life after death and the existence of young people seeking martyrdom, are not afraid of great powers. If America ever again desires to invade Iran, the young people seeking martyrdom will destroy them. On 14 khordad (June 04, 1980), in the presence of delegations participating in the "International Conference on the Study of American Interventions," he reminded them that in the past, Iranian governments listened to the orders of foreigners, and that they, especially the US, had committed countless crimes in Iran, and that the Pahlavi regime had responded to the people's protests from 15 Khordad (June 04, 1978) until the victory of the revolution by killing and torturing thousands of people. He spoke about the widespread propaganda of foreigners against Iran and the creation of obstacles, and added that Allah, just as He destroyed the people of Aad by means of the wind, will also destroy enemies by creating fear and terror in the hearts of the enemies. He further asked the participants in the conference to observe the documents and evidence of the crimes committed by American agents in Iran and to realize that the American embassy does not resemble an embassy. On 20 Tir 1359 (July 11, 1980), he also spoke about the mission of wind and sand to destroy the enemies of Islam, and on 24 Esfand 1360 (March 15, 1982) , in the gathering of the families of the martyrs of the Amol incident, he referred to the unseen help of Allah for the people of Iran, referring to the power of faith and unity of the word, and referring to the Tabas incident, he noted that the Americans came to seize Iran under the pretext of releasing the hostages, and Allah defeated them by sending sand and wind. the origin of narration & story is Iran which it has been recorded well so therefore there is no need to exaggerate about it in similar fashion of Indo Pak Clergerie . http://www.imam-khomeini.ir/fa/c504_2661/زندگی_نامه/رهبری/واقعه_طبس

Hi @Jeffrey-N your rhetoric about torturing diplomats has no evidence or document which you have parroted nonsense based on baseless accusation of anti Iran propaganda which your nonsense have been refuted many times which even american officials during hostage crisis have not mentioned anything about torturing or even humiliation which only you have parroted it based on your whims & anti Iran propaganda without having any evidence for your nonsense . you have just tried to downplay everything through alternation of history & facts by parroting baseless nonsense based on your biased fake patriotism due to fooling yourself by American propaganda against Iran .

Disaster in the Desert: Forty Years after Operation EAGLE CLAW https://www.faithandfreedom.com/disaster-in-the-desert-forty-years-after-operation-eagle-claw/

Operation Eagle Claw, a Plot Foiled by God @Jeffrey-N Yeah it has been bad for great Satan so then has been good for friends of God The operation was doomed for failure when a strong dust storm facilitated the path towards a total debacle for the Carter administration. After the three helicopters dropped out of the mission, Helicopter Number Six underwent rotor blade failures and had to be abandoned. Helicopter Number Five entered a blinding dust-storm and had less than twenty-five minutes to clear conditions and less than an hour from Desert One, they had no option but to reverse course and return to the mother ship. Helicopter Number Two had reached Desert One, but due to hydraulic leaks the craft was crippled for the rest of the mission (14). At this point, the operation was cancelled due to many events which rendered the operation under-equipped. In order to return, one of the C-130 planes and one helicopter needed refueling. The helicopter began its attempt to “hover taxi” (to fly low and slow for a short distance), at this position the blades caused more sand to bluster which confused the pilot, causing him to crash into the airplane which was in line for refueling. Both aircrafts exploded. Eight men died, thus five helicopters were left behind as the remaining personnel managed to return to nearby airfields. In the aftermath of this failed operation, Imam Khomeini condemned Carter for his military intervention in Iran, and pointed to the fact that it was,”God who foiled this plot” (16). https://english.khamenei.ir/news/2167/Operation-Eagle-Claw-a-Plot-Foiled-by-God

Salam respectfully this story has no basis which for first time I have seen it here although Imam Sayyid Khumanyi (رضي الله عنه) has used to pray night prayer every night but there is no confirmed report about doing this just for sandstorm & fighting with America. Tabas Desert: When angel overcame the eagle claw https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/483963/Tabas-Desert-When-angel-overcame-the-eagle-claw Jimmy Carter says his future ‘in the hands of God’ Carter, 90, who announced Aug. 12 that recent liver surgery indicated he has cancer that has spread to other parts of his body, told reporters when he first heard the word cancer “I thought I just had a few weeks left.” https://baptistnews.com/article/jimmy-carter-says-his-future-in-the-hands-of-god/

Hi , according to confirmed reports three helicopters have been destroyed which destruction of a C-130 plane is obvious in official reports ; which as usual you have repeated your baseless nonsense just based on your whims not facts . Overview of the wreckage at the Desert One landing field in Iran The operation, one of Delta Force's first, encountered many obstacles and failures and was subsequently aborted.[1] Eight helicopters were sent to the first staging area called Desert One, but only five arrived in operational condition. One had encountered hydraulic problems, another was caught in a sand storm, and the third showed signs of a cracked rotor blade As the US forces prepared to withdraw from Desert One, one of the remaining helicopters crashed into a transport aircraft that contained both servicemen and jet fuel. The resulting fire destroyed both aircraft and killed eight servicemen.[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Claw https://www.faithandfreedom.com/disaster-in-the-desert-forty-years-after-operation-eagle-claw/ you have been right . Angels of God The founder of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (رضي الله عنه) in a speech after the incident, condemned Jimmy Carter’s order for military intervention in Iran and said the mission had been stopped by an act of God ("angels of God") who had foiled the U.S. mission. “Who crushed Mr. Carter's helicopters? We did? The sands did! They were God's agents. Wind is God's agent ... These sands are agents of God. They can try again.” https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/483963/Tabas-Desert-When-angel-overcame-the-eagle-claw Jimmy Carter says his future ‘in the hands of God’ Carter, 90, who announced Aug. 12 that recent liver surgery indicated he has cancer that has spread to other parts of his body, told reporters when he first heard the word cancer “I thought I just had a few weeks left.” https://baptistnews.com/article/jimmy-carter-says-his-future-in-the-hands-of-god/ https://www.bostonherald.com/2015/08/21/jimmy-carter-cancer-is-in-the-hands-of-god/ The Desert One Debacle In April 1980, President Jimmy Carter sent the Army’s Delta Force to bring back fifty-three American citizens held hostage in Iran. Everything went wrong. The fireball in the Iranian desert took the Carter presidency with it. By Mark Bowden Beckwith’s long crusade to create Delta Force had been a rebellion against the mechanization and bureaucratization of modern warfare. He held to an old and visceral conviction: that war was the business of brave men. He loved soldiers and soldiering, and his vision was of a company of men like himself: impatient with rank, rules, and politics, focused entirely on mission. He had created such a force, choosing the best of the best and training them to perfection. They were not just good, they were magnificent. As the C-130 approached the landing area, Carney activated his runway lights, but just then the plane’s newfangled FLIR (forward-looking infrared radar) detected something moving, His team had nothing to do at Desert One except wait to offload camouflage netting and other equipment from the second C-130 when it arrived, then board helicopters for the short trip to the hiding places. Fitch mounted the steps and asked a Ranger sergeant, “What the hell is going on?” “I’m trying to get these people off the bus, but they won’t move,” the sergeant said. The passengers were clearly bewildered. “Should I fire a shot over their heads?” he asked. “No,” Fitch said. “Why don’t you just get off the bus, and I’ll get my people in here.” Shortly after midnight things grew louder and busier as the second C-130 roared in for a landing, right on schedule, and taxied to a stop. Behind it were the three fuel tankers and the communications plane. As Burruss and his men came down the lowered ramp of their plane, they gaped at the ball of flame, the bus, and the passengers sitting on the sand. “Welcome to World War Three!” Fitch greeted them. As the lead plane pushed on into Iran, Major Bucky Burruss, Beckwith’s deputy, was on the second C-130, sprawled on a mattress near the front of the plane.The Desert One Debacle In April 1980, President Jimmy Carter sent the Army’s Delta Force to bring back fifty-three American citizens held hostage in Iran. Everything went wrong. The fireball in the Iranian desert took the Carter presidency with it. By Mark Bowden May 2006 Issue Share Save Washington, D.C., April 11, 1980, Noon The meeting began with Jimmy Carter’s announcement: “Gentlemen, I want you to know that I am seriously considering an attempt to rescue the hostages.” Desert One, April 24, Late Evening As the lead plane closed in on the landing site, its pilots noted curious milky patches in the night sky. They flew through one that appeared to be just haze, not even substantial enough to interfere with the downward-looking radar. They approached a second one as they got closer to the landing site. John Carney, who had come into the cockpit to be ready to activate the landing lights he had buried on his trip weeks earlier, was asked, “What do you make of that stuff out there?” He looked through the co-pilot’s window and answered, “You’re in a haboob.” Inside the Haboob, April 24, Midnight Already, the Sea Stallions were down to six. The original formation of eight had crossed into Iran flying at 200 feet and then moved down to 100 feet. Two of the choppers were having difficulty with their navigation equipment, but flying that close to the ground they could steer by using landmarks and by staying with the formation. They were not allowed to communicate over their non-secure radios, Desert One, April 25, 1:00 A.M. At the landing strip, Delta Force waited anxiously as precious minutes of darkness continued to slip away. It was an enormous relief when the men heard the distinctive whoop-whoop-whoop of the first two helicopters. Schaefer, in the lead chopper, saw a giant pillar of flame, and his first thought was that one of the C-130s had crashed and exploded. He flew over Desert One and counted four planes on the ground, exactly what he expected to find. Thank you, Lord, he said to himself. Schaefer had refueled behind that tanker, and he now had enough fuel to fly back to the Nimitz, but first the C-130s needed to get off the ground. Haney was still inside the burning plane, near the end of the line of men trying to get out. He and those around him had been jarred alert by the noise and impact of the crash, and Haney had seen blue sparks overhead toward the front. Then the galley door at the front of the plane blew in, and flames blasted in behind it. “Haul ass!” shouted the man next to him, leaping to his feet. As Burruss headed back to his C-130, he took one last look at the flaming ruins of the plane and the chopper and felt a stab of remorse over leaving the dead behind. But nothing could be done about it. Full story with all details They had flown from Wadi Kena to Masirah, where they had hunkered in tents through a bright and broiling afternoon, fighting off large stinging flies and waiting impatiently for dusk. They would make a four-hour flight over the Gulf of Oman and across Iran to Desert One. The route had been calculated to exploit gaps in Iran’s coastal defenses, and to avoid passing over military bases and populated areas. Major Wayne Long, Delta’s intelligence officer, was at a console in the telecommunications plane with a National Security Agency linguist, who was monitoring Iranian telecommunications for any sign that the aircraft had been discovered and the mission compromised. None came. Not long after the lead plane departed Masirah, eight Sea Stallions left the Nimitz and moved out over the gulf in order to make landfall shortly after sunset. The choppers took their own route, crossing into Iran between the towns of Jask and Konarak, and flying even closer to the ground than the planes. Word of the successful helicopter launch—“Eight off the deck”—reached those in the lead plane as especially welcome news, because they had expected only seven. Earlier reports had indicated that the eighth was having mechanical problems. Eight widened the margin of error. The men expected breakdowns. In their many rehearsals, they had determined that six choppers were essential for carrying all the men and equipment from Desert One to the hide sites. The load was finely calibrated; every assaulter had an assigned limit and was weighed to make sure he met it. Not all six choppers would be needed to haul the hostages and assaulters from the stadium the next night (two would do in a pinch), but some of the aircraft that made it to the hideouts were expected to fail the next morning. If seven were enough, eight provided comfort. The final decision to launch had come earlier that day, after Dick Meadows, Delta’s advance man, broadcast a signal from Tehran that all was ready. He had returned to the city disguised as an Irish businessman, and had met up with “Fred,” his Iranian-American guide and interpreter, and with two U.S. soldiers who had themselves entered Iran as Irish and West German businessmen. They had spent that day reconnoitering all of the various hide sites, the embassy, the foreign ministry, and the soccer stadium. As the lead plane pushed on into Iran, Major Bucky Burruss, Beckwith’s deputy, was on the second C-130, sprawled on a mattress near the front of the plane. Burruss was still somewhat startled to find himself on the actual mission, although there was still no telling if they were really going to go through with it. One thing President Carter had insisted on was the option of calling off the raid right up to the last minute: right before they were to storm the embassy walls. To make sure they could get real-time instructions from Washington, a satellite radio and relay system had been put in place at Wadi Kena. Another presidential directive concerned the use of nonlethal riot-control agents. Given that the shah’s occasionally violent riot control during the revolution was now Exhibit A in Iran’s human-rights case against the former regime and America, Carter wanted to avoid killing Iranians, so he had insisted that if a hostile crowd formed during the raid, Delta should attempt to control it without shooting people. Burruss considered this ridiculous. He and his men were going to assault a guarded compound in the middle of a city of more than 5 million people, most of them presumed to be aggressively hostile. It was unbelievably risky; everyone on the mission knew there was a very good chance they would not get home alive. Wade Ishmoto, a Delta captain who worked with the unit’s intelligence division, had joked, “The only difference between this and the Alamo is that Davy Crockett didn’t have to fight his way in.” And Carter had the idea that this vastly outnumbered force was first going to try holding off the city with nonviolent crowd control? Burruss understood the president’s thinking on this, but with their hides so nakedly on the line, shouldn’t they be free to decide how best to defend themselves? He had complained about the directive to General Jones, who had said he would look into it, but the answer had come back “No, the president insists.” So Burruss had made his own peace with it. He had with him one tear-gas grenade—one—which he intended to throw as soon as necessary; he would then use its smoke as a marker to call in devastatingly lethal 40 mm AC-130 gunship fire. Delta was made up of men who would have felt crushed to be excluded from this mission. They were ambitious for glory. They had volunteered to serve with Beckwith and had undergone the trials of a grueling selection process precisely to serve in improbable exploits like this. Some of the men had read about wildly heroic feats in history and longed to have taken part; here was such a moment. If they pulled it off, it would go down as one of the boldest maneuvers in military history. They would snatch the innocent Americans from the jaws of the Islamist dragon. Their nation would cheer them in the streets! The fact that people wouldn’t know exactly whom they were toasting made it all the more appealing. The heroism would be pure. They as individuals would not be celebrated—only their achievement. None of these men would be in ticker-tape parades, or sitting down for interviews on national TV, or having their pictures on the covers of magazines, or cashing in on fat book contracts. They were quiet professionals. In a world of brag and hype, they embodied substance. They would come home and, after a few days off, go right back to work. Of course, within their own world they would not just be respected; they would be legends. For the rest of their lives, knowing soldiers would murmur, “He was on Eagle Claw.” They were a motley, deliberately unmilitary-looking bunch of young men. In fact, they looked a lot like the students who had seized the embassy. Most were just a few years older than the hostage-takers. They had long hair and had grown moustaches and beards, or at least gone unshaven. Many of those with fair hair had dyed it dark brown or black, figuring that might nudge the odds at least slightly in their favor if they were forced to fight their way out of Iran. The loose-fitting, many-pocketed field jackets they wore, also dyed black, were just like the ones favored by young men in Iran. Under the Geneva Conventions, soldiers (as opposed to spies) must enter combat in uniform, so for the occasion the men all wore matching black knit caps and on their jacket sleeves had American flags that could be covered by small black Velcro patches. On the streets of Tehran the flags would invite trouble, but inside the embassy compound they would reassure the hostages that they weren’t just being kidnapped by some rival Iranian faction. The men wore faded blue jeans and combat boots, and beneath their jackets some wore armored vests. Much of their gear was improvised. They had sewn additional pockets inside the jackets to carry weapons, ammo, and water. Most of the men carried sidearms, grenades, small MP-5 submachine guns with silencers, and various explosive devices. Beckwith had insisted on a Ranger tradition: each man carried clips and a length of rope wrapped around his waist, in case the need arose to rappel. With his white stubble, dangling cigarette or cigar, and wild eyes under thick dark eyebrows, Beckwith himself looked like a dangerous vagrant. Before leaving Masirah, the men had joked about which actors would portray them in the movie version of the raid, and they decided that the hillbilly actor Slim Pickens, who in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove had ridden a nuclear weapon down into doomsday waving his cowboy hat and hallooing, would be the perfect choice for the colonel. Desert One, April 24, Late Evening As the lead plane closed in on the landing site, its pilots noted curious milky patches in the night sky. They flew through one that appeared to be just haze, not even substantial enough to interfere with the downward-looking radar. They approached a second one as they got closer to the landing site. John Carney, who had come into the cockpit to be ready to activate the landing lights he had buried on his trip weeks earlier, was asked, “What do you make of that stuff out there?” He looked through the co-pilot’s window and answered, “You’re in a haboob.” The men in the cockpit laughed at the word. “No, we’re flying through suspended dust,” Carney explained. “The Iranians call it a haboob.” He had learned this from the CIA pilots who had flown him in earlier. Shifting air pressure sometimes forced especially fine desert sand straight up thousands of feet, where it hung like a vertical cloud for hours. It was just a desert curiosity, nothing that could cause a problem for the planes. But Air Force Colonel James H. Kyle, whose responsibility included all airborne aspects of the mission, knew that the haboob would be trouble for a helicopter. He had noticed that the temperature inside the plane went up significantly when they passed through the first haboob. He conferred with the plane’s crew, and suggested they break radio silence and call “Red Barn,” the command center at Wadi Kena, to warn the helicopter formation behind them. The chopper pilots might want to break formation or fly higher to avoid the stuff. It took the lead plane about thirty minutes to fly through this second patch, indicating that it extended about a hundred miles. As the C-130 approached the landing area, Carney activated his runway lights, but just then the plane’s newfangled FLIR (forward-looking infrared radar) detected something moving, which proved to be a truck hurtling along the dirt road that ran through the landing site. The pilots passed over the spot and then circled back around. On the second pass the stretch of desert was clear. They circled around for the third time and touched down—Logan Fitch, a tall Texan and one of Delta’s squadron leaders, was amazed by how smoothly. The plane coasted to a stop, and when the back ramp was lowered, the Rangers roared off in the Jeep and on a motorcycle to give chase to the truck. Word that an American plane had landed in the desert, relayed promptly to the right people, could defeat the whole effort. The hard-packed surface of three weeks prior was now coated with a layer of sand the consistency of baby powder—ankle-deep in some places—that accounted for the extraordinary softness of their landing. This fine sand made it more difficult to taxi the plane, and the backwash from the propellers kicked up a serious dust storm. Fitch followed with his men, walking down the ramp and stepping into a cauldron of noise and dust. His team had nothing to do at Desert One except wait to offload camouflage netting and other equipment from the second C-130 when it arrived, then board helicopters for the short trip to the hiding places. The big plane’s propellers were still roaring and kicking up sand. Shielding his eyes with an upraised arm, Fitch turned to his right and was shocked to see, coming straight toward him, a bus! Literally out of nowhere. The odds that the plane would encounter one vehicle at midnight on such an isolated desert road were vanishingly small, but there it was, honoring an absolute law of military operations: the inevitability of the unexpected. This second vehicle was a big Mercedes passenger bus, piled high with luggage, lit up like midday inside, and filled with more than forty astonished Iranian passengers. Suddenly the night desert flashed as bright as daylight and shook with an explosion. In the near distance, a giant ball of flame rose high into the darkness. One of the Rangers had fired an anti-tank weapon at the fleeing truck, which turned out to have been loaded with fuel. It burned like a miniature sun. So much for slipping quietly into Iran. This clandestine rendezvous spot, this patch of desert in the middle of nowhere, was lit up like a Friday-night football game in Texas. The men with night-vision goggles removed them. At least one of the truck’s occupants had bailed out, climbed into a trailing pickup truck (three vehicles!), and escaped at high speed. A Ranger gave chase on the motorcycle but couldn’t catch up. In this sudden glow the bus now rolled to a stop with a leaking radiator and a flat right-front tire. Rangers had fired their weapons to disable it. Fitch, still confused, sent Delta machine-gun teams to both sides of the stalled, steaming vehicle, and led a group of his men to the front. Some Rangers were already aboard. Fitch mounted the steps and asked a Ranger sergeant, “What the hell is going on?” “I’m trying to get these people off the bus, but they won’t move,” the sergeant said. The passengers were clearly bewildered. “Should I fire a shot over their heads?” he asked. “No,” Fitch said. “Why don’t you just get off the bus, and I’ll get my people in here.” One of Delta’s specialties was handling hostages—herding them, searching them, securing them. In the next few minutes, Fitch’s men firmly and efficiently emptied the bus and searched the passengers for weapons. They then stripped the baggage off the top of the bus and searched it, finding no weapons. The passengers appeared to be poor Iranians, simply traveling through the night from Yazd to Tabas. The bus was decorated with placards and posters of the Ayatollah Khomeini. It had rolled into the wrong place at the wrong time. The question of what to do with the passengers was relayed all the way to the White House. The president and his staff were deliberately going through the late-afternoon motions of a typical workday but secretly hanging on every update from the desert. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national-security adviser, relayed the unexpected problem of the bus to the president, and Carter agreed that the only thing to do was to fly all the Iranians out that night on one of the C-130s and then return them to Iran when the mission was complete. Shortly after midnight things grew louder and busier as the second C-130 roared in for a landing, right on schedule, and taxied to a stop. Behind it were the three fuel tankers and the communications plane. As Burruss and his men came down the lowered ramp of their plane, they gaped at the ball of flame, the bus, and the passengers sitting on the sand. “Welcome to World War Three!” Fitch greeted them. Desert One was now looking more like an airport, and Carney’s men were busy directing traffic, preparing for the arrival of the helicopters. Within the hour, all three C-130 bladder planes were positioned and parked, along with the communications plane. The first two C-130s would return to Masirah before the arrival of the helicopters, clearing space at the landing site. The unloading had gone pretty much as planned, with one exception: the second C-130 had landed a few thousand feet farther away from the landing zone than expected, so the job of transferring the camouflage netting from it to the choppers was correspondingly bigger. The netting would be draped over the helicopters at their hiding places at daylight. It was not an especially warm night in the desert, but all the men were overdressed in layers of clothing, and they were sweating heavily with exertion. Moving through the loose sand made the task even more difficult. The Air Force crews struggled to unfurl hundreds of pounds of hoses from the parked tankers, for fueling the choppers. The bus would have to be moved, so all the passengers were herded back on. “What is the status of the choppers?” Beckwith asked over a secure satellite radio. The command station at Wadi Kena responded by relaying a request from the lead chopper for conditions at Desert One. “Visibility five miles with negative surface winds,” reported Colonel Kyle, who was with Beckwith. Then they heard from the lead chopper, which had a secure satellite radio similar to Beckwith’s at Desert One: “Fifty minutes out and low on fuel.” The fuel crews were poised. They were capable of working like pit crews at the Indy 500. It would take only ten minutes to refill a landed chopper and send it on its way, but everything was behind schedule, which meant that even if the refueling and loading were done perfectly, the choppers would not get to their hiding places before dawn. That posed only a small risk, as the sites were in mountains outside the city, the choppers had been painted the same colors as the Iranian army’s helicopters, and it would still be fairly dark when they arrived. Still, if they didn’t land at Desert One soon, they would be getting to their hiding places in broad daylight. There was nothing to do but wait. Most of the force had been on the ground for more than two hours. Stirred by the idling aircraft, sand whipped around the men, stinging their faces and making it difficult to see. The choppers were late and getting later. But they had been late in every one of the rehearsals, so no one was surprised. Inside the Haboob, April 24, Midnight Already, the Sea Stallions were down to six. The original formation of eight had crossed into Iran flying at 200 feet and then moved down to 100 feet. Two of the choppers were having difficulty with their navigation equipment, but flying that close to the ground they could steer by using landmarks and by staying with the formation. They were not allowed to communicate over their non-secure radios, lest they be overheard by Iranian defenses, but they had practiced flashing lights as signals. They flew in a staggered line of four pairs. Not far inside Iran, the helicopter crews spotted part of the trailing formation of C-130s, which confirmed that the Sea Stallions were going the right way. Lieutenant Colonel Ed Seiffert, the flight leader and pilot of the first chopper, felt relaxed enough to take a break and have something to eat. But the formation got only 140 miles into Iran before one of the choppers had trouble. In the cockpit of the sixth one in formation a warning light indicated that one of its blades had been hit by something or had cracked—a potentially fatal problem. That chopper immediately landed, followed by the one just behind it, and after determining that a rotor blade was in fact badly cracked, the pilots abandoned the damaged aircraft, removing all the classified documents inside, and climbed into chopper No. 8. It lifted off, gave chase, and eventually caught up with the others. As they burned off fuel, the choppers picked up speed. They were closing in on Desert One. About 200 miles into Iran they saw before them what looked like a wall of whiteness: the first haboob. They flew right into it. Seiffert realized that it was suspended dust only when he tasted it and felt it in his teeth. If it was penetrating his cockpit, it was penetrating his engines. The temperature inside rose to 100 degrees. But then they were out of the cloud as suddenly as they had entered it. They had flown right through it. Looming ahead was the second, much larger haboob, but Seiffert didn’t know that. No warning from the lead C-130 had been relayed; the need to maintain radio silence, and to communicate in code if it was broken, had ultimately led Kyle to decide against making a report. So the chopper formation passed into the second cloud assuming that it was no bigger than the first. But the haboob grew thicker and thicker, until Seiffert could no longer see the other choppers or the ground. The helicopters had turned on their outside safety lights, and off in the haze indistinct halos of red were strung out at varying distances. When the fuzzy beacons also vanished, Seiffert and his wingman made a U-turn, flew back out of the cloud, and landed. None of the other five choppers had seen them land. Seiffert had hoped they would all follow him to the ground, where they could confer and decide on a strategy. Now he and his wingman had no choice but to take off and fly back into the soup, trying to catch up. Major Jim Schaefer was now flying lead. One moment Seiffert’s aircraft had been in front of him, and the next it was gone. One by one the indistinct red blobs in the milky haze had grown dimmer and dimmer, and then they, too, were gone. How could I lose them? Schaefer thought. He could see nothing, and he heard nothing but the sounds of his own engines. All around him was a smothering cloak of whiteness. He executed a “lost plane” maneuver, turning fifteen degrees off course for a few minutes, and then turning back on course, hoping to pick up the formation again. Even from as low as 200 feet, he could not see the ground. He climbed to 1,000 feet and was still in the cloud. Inside the chopper it was hot and getting hotter. He descended, this time below 200 feet. Schaefer could see the ground only intermittently. For three hours they flew like this, on nerves and instruments. The cockpit was overheated, and the men in it were increasingly tense. “Is there anything in front of us?” Schaefer asked his co-pilot, Les Petty. “Well, there’s a six-thousand-foot mountain in front of us,” Petty replied. “How soon?” Schaefer asked. “I don’t trust the machine,” Petty said, “and I don’t trust my map. I ain’t seen the ground in three hours. I’d say right now.” So they started to climb. They climbed to 6,000 feet, and abruptly the dust cloud broke. Inside the chopper it was suddenly very cold. Off to one side Schaefer saw the peak of a mountain. “Good job, Les,” he said. “I love you.” Desert One was still about an hour away, so they plunged back into the haboob. This time Schaefer leveled off at 600 feet. He didn’t know it, but the remaining six choppers were doing the same. The lack of visibility had made all the crews woozy. It was especially hard on the pilots, whose night-vision goggles distorted depth perception and intensified feelings of vertigo. The men were becoming thirsty in the extreme heat. They knew that more tall peaks lay between them and Desert One, and they could only hope that visibility improved in time for them to steer around or over them. It was a struggle for all of them, and finally one pilot gave up. Lieutenant Commander Rodney Davis had watched the control lights in his cockpit indicate a number of equipment failures. His compass was not working, and his other navigation devices were being affected by the heat. His co-pilot was feeling sick. When he lost sight of the nearest chopper, Davis was alone in the haboob. He tried spiraling downward, a maneuver for relocating his wingman, but he couldn’t see the other chopper and couldn’t get a clear fix on anything below that would give him his exact position. Davis took his aircraft up to 9,000 feet and was still in the cloud. He was at a critical point in the flight. To press on meant he’d have no chance of making it back to the carrier, for lack of fuel. Because he couldn’t see ahead or down, he might steer off course or collide with a mountain on the way to Desert One. He conferred with Colonel Chuck Pitman, the ranking officer of the entire formation, who was riding in back. They assumed that with the other seven choppers still en route (they did not know that one had already been lost), they would not fatally compromise the mission by turning back. So they turned around. Desert One, April 25, 1:00 A.M. At the landing strip, Delta Force waited anxiously as precious minutes of darkness continued to slip away. It was an enormous relief when the men heard the distinctive whoop-whoop-whoop of the first two helicopters. Schaefer, in the lead chopper, saw a giant pillar of flame, and his first thought was that one of the C-130s had crashed and exploded. He flew over Desert One and counted four planes on the ground, exactly what he expected to find. Thank you, Lord, he said to himself. He turned to land on a second pass, and as he came down he clipped a rut so hard that he knew he had damaged his aircraft. The tires on his landing gear were blown and knocked off the rims. He had been in the air for five hours. He was tired and relieved and had to [edited out]. Like the planes, the choppers kept their engines running to lower the risk of a mechanical failure; most problems showed up after stopping and restarting. Schaefer and most of his crew got out and walked around behind their chopper to urinate, and there Schaefer was confronted by the eager Beckwith, trailed by Burruss, Kyle, and the other commanders. “What the hell’s going on?” the colonel asked. “How did you get so goddamn late?” “First of all, we’re only twenty-five minutes late,” Schaefer said. “Second of all, I don’t know where anyone else is, because we went into a big dust cloud.” “There’s no goddamn dust cloud out here,” Beckwith said, gesturing at the open sky. He had not been told about the haboobs on the way in. “Well, there is one,” Schaefer said. He told Beckwith that the conditions coming in had been the worst he had ever flown through. His men were badly shaken. His chopper still flew but had been damaged. He wasn’t sure they could go on. This was not what Beckwith wanted to hear. “I’m going to report this thing,” he said angrily. He thought the pilot looked shattered, as if the pressure had completely broken him down. He slapped Schaefer on the back and told him that he and the others were going to have to suck it up. Two more choppers arrived, and one of them was having a problem. Captain B. J. McGuire’s helicopter had been flying with a warning light on in the cockpit that indicated trouble with one of the hydraulic systems. Fitch was the first person to reach McGuire on landing. “I’m so happy you are here!” Fitch said, shouting to be heard. “Where are the rest of the guys?” “I don’t know,” McGuire said. “We don’t have any communication.” McGuire told Fitch about the problem with his helicopter. He said he thought the working hydraulic system was sufficiently trustworthy for him to continue. When the last two choppers finally landed, it was cause for quiet celebration. It was now 1:30 in the morning, which gave the men just enough time to get everything done and hidden before full daylight. They had the required six helicopters. Some members of the assault force exchanged high fives. Seiffert soon had his pilots maneuvering their empty choppers into position behind the four tankers to refuel. Their wheels made deep tracks in the fine sand, and the turning rotors whipped up violent dust storms. The rotors and propellers were deafening, and all around the aircraft were fierce little sand squalls. The truck fire was still burning brightly. Beckwith, impatient to get his men aboard the choppers and be off, climbed into the last one to land and tried to get the attention of Seiffert, who was coordinating these maneuvers from his cockpit. “Request permission to load, Skipper,” Beckwith said. “We need to get with it.” Seiffert either didn’t hear him or ignored him. “Hey, remember me?” Beckwith asked. He then slapped the pilot’s helmet. Seiffert took off his helmet and confronted Beckwith angrily. “I can’t guarantee we’ll get you to the next site before first light.” “I don’t care,” Beckwith said. Seiffert told him to go ahead and load his men. Beckwith was moving from chopper to chopper, urging things forward, when another of the helicopter pilots stepped out and said, “The skipper told me to tell you we only have five flyable helicopters. That’s what the skipper told me to tell you.” Looking around, the colonel could see that the rotor on one of the Sea Stallions had stopped turning. Someone had shut it down. It was precisely what he had feared: these pilots were determined to scuttle his mission. It had not been lost on the other commanders, most of whom outranked Beckwith, that the pugnacious colonel regarded them all as inferiors, as supporting players. The pilots, the navigators, the air crews, the fuel-equipment operators, the Rangers, the combat controllers, the spies in Tehran, even the generals back at Wadi Kena—they were all ordinary mortals, squires, spear carriers, water boys. Their job was to serve Delta, to get the colonel and his magnificent men into place for their rendezvous with destiny. All along, Beckwith had been impatient with and suspicious of the other services and units involved; in his eyes, they all lacked experience, nerve, and skill. So now, when things began to go sour, Beckwith felt not just disappointment and anger but contempt. When he found Kyle, he bellowed, “That goddamn number-two helo has been shut down! We only have five good choppers. You’ve got to talk to Seiffert and see what he says. You talk their language—I don’t.” Beckwith didn’t see mechanical problems with the helicopters; he saw faltering courage in the men who flew them. He said as much to Kyle, grumbling that the pilots were looking for excuses not to go. The comment burned the Air Force officer, who had been contending with Beckwith for months. He knew better than to argue with him. The chopper captains had the same kind of responsibilities that Beckwith had, and they were responsible for getting their own crews in and out safely. No one knew their machines better than they did, because they literally bet their lives on them every time they flew. Seiffert had made his decision. One of the hydraulic pumps on McGuire’s chopper was shot, and they had no way to fix it. Kyle asked if it would be possible to fly using just the remaining pump, and Seiffert told him emphatically, “No! It’s unsafe! If the controls lock up, it becomes uncontrollable. It’s grounded!” When Fitch returned from rounding up the rest of his men, he was surprised to find that his second-in-command, Captain E. K. Smith, was still waiting with his squadron in the dust. He told Smith to get the men on the choppers. “The mission is an abort,” Smith said. “What do you mean, it’s an abort?” “Colonel Beckwith said it’s an abort,” Smith said. He explained that McGuire’s chopper couldn’t fly. This contradicted what Fitch had heard from McGuire—that the chopper was damaged but flyable. Fitch knew his commander was such a hothead that it was entirely possible Beckwith had said something like that knowing only half the story. “E.K., I’m not doubting your word, but I’m going to see Beckwith about this,” he said. The abort scenario, which they had rehearsed, called for Fitch and his men to board not the helicopters but one of the tankers. The choppers would fly back to the carrier, and the planes would return to Masirah. Fitch told Smith to prepare the men to board the plane, but said they should wait until he returned. Finding Colonel Beckwith in the noise and swirling dust wasn’t easy; one of the things the plan lacked was a clearly defined rallying point, or command center. So it took some wandering, but Fitch eventually found Beckwith, Burruss, Kyle, and the other mission commanders huddled outside one of the C-130s with a secure satellite radio. “What’s going on?” he shouted over the din. “Well, Seiffert said that helicopter can’t fly—that it’s not mission capable—and we’re down to five,” Beckwith said, disgusted. Kyle and the chopper crews said they were ready to proceed with five helicopters, but that would require trimming the assault force by twenty men. Beckwith refused. “We all go or nobody goes,” he said. The question was passed up the chain to Washington, where Secretary of Defense Harold Brown relayed the situation to Brzezinski in the White House. The national-security adviser, who only minutes earlier had been told that all six choppers were refueling and that the mission was proceeding as planned, was stunned. He quickly assessed what he knew, and engaged in a little wishful thinking. He imagined Beckwith, who had been so gung-ho in his visit to the White House, fuming in the desert, eager to proceed but stymied by more-cautious generals in the rear. So he directed Brown to tell the commanders on the ground that if they were prepared to go ahead with only five choppers, they had White House approval. He then left to find Carter. In the din of Desert One the mission commanders received Brzezinski’s message and reconsidered. It angered Beckwith to even be asked; he felt his judgment and commitment were being questioned. Nevertheless, he said, “Can we make it with fewer aircraft?” “Sir, we have been through this in rehearsals,” Fitch said. “Who are we going to leave behind?” Some felt that they could trim the package and proceed. Shortly before lifting off on the mission, they had received new and reliable intelligence about the location of the hostages in the embassy compound, which would eliminate the need for some of the searching they had planned to do. Perhaps they could do it with fewer men. But Beckwith was more cautious. Which men would they leave behind? If they left the interpreters, who would talk them past the roadblocks in the city? If they got five choppers to the hide sites, how likely was it that all five would restart the next day? If one or two failed to start, and another got hit—likely scenarios that had been built into the plan—how were they going to airlift out all the hostages and Beckwith’s men? The plan was finely wrought, with such a delicate balance between risk and opportunity that asking Beckwith to omit any piece was too much. It meant shifting the odds too greatly against his men and his beautiful creation, which he was not prepared to do. That was the conclusion the mission planners had reached in advance, after calm, careful deliberation. These automatic-abort scenarios had been predetermined precisely to avoid life-and-death decisions at the last minute. This was clearly an abort situation. On the mission schedule, just after the line “less than six helos,” was the word “ABORT,” and it was the only word on the page in capital letters. “I need every man I’ve got and every piece of gear,” Beckwith said finally. “There’s no fat I can cut out.” The decision was relayed to Wadi Kena and to Washington, where Brzezinski broke the news of the setback to Carter. Standing in a corridor between the Oval Office and the president’s study, Carter muttered, “Damn. Damn.” He and Brzezinski were soon joined by a larger group of advisers, including Walter Mondale, Hamilton Jordan, Warren Christopher, and Jody Powell. Standing behind his desk, his sleeves rolled up and hands on his hips, the president told them, “I’ve got some bad news … I had to abort the rescue mission … Two of our helicopters never reached Desert One. That left us six. The Delta team was boarding the six helicopters when they found out that one of them had a mechanical problem and couldn’t go on.” “What did Beckwith think?” Jordan asked. Carter explained that they had consulted with Beckwith, and that the decision had been unanimous. “At least there were no American casualties and no innocent Iranians hurt,” Carter said. On the Runway, April 25, 2:00 A.M. At Desert One there wasn’t time to dwell on the abort decision. Fitch directed his men to board one of the fuel planes. They piled in on top of the nearly emptied fuel bladders, which rippled like a giant black water bed. Everyone was weary and disappointed. Delta officer Eric Haney stripped off his gear and his black field jacket, balling it up behind him to form a cushion against the hard metal angles of the plane’s inner wall. He and some of the other men wedged their weapons snugly between the bladder and the wall of the plane to keep them secure and out of the way. Some of the men immediately fell asleep. “We’re all set—let’s go,” Fitch told the plane’s crew chief. Just behind their tanker, a combat controller in goggles, one of Carney’s crew, appeared outside the cockpit of Major Schaefer’s chopper and informed the pilot that he had to move his aircraft out of the way. Schaefer had refueled behind that tanker, and he now had enough fuel to fly back to the Nimitz, but first the C-130s needed to get off the ground. So Schaefer lifted the front end of his craft. His crew chief hopped out to straighten the nose wheels, which had been bent sideways when they landed. Straightened, they could be retracted so that they wouldn’t cause drag in flight. The crew chief climbed back in, and Schaefer lifted the chopper to a hover at about fifteen feet and held it, kicking up an intense storm of dust that whipped around the combat controller on the ground. The combat controller was the only thing Schaefer could see below, a hazy black image in a cloud of brown, so the pilot fixed on him as a point of reference. To escape the cloud created by Schaefer’s rotors, the combat controller retreated toward the wing of the parked C-130. Concentrating on his own aircraft, Schaefer didn’t notice that his blurry reference point on the ground had moved. He kept the nose of his blinded chopper pointed at the man below, and as the combat controller moved, the helicopter turned in the same direction, drifting to a point almost directly above the plane. “How much power do we have, Les?” Schaefer asked, performing his usual checklist. “Ninety-four percent,” Petty said. Then Schaefer heard and felt a loud, strong, metallic whack! It sounded like someone had hit the side of his aircraft with a large aluminum bat. Others heard a cracking sound as loud as an explosion, but somehow sharper-edged, more piercing and particular, like the shearing impact of giant industrial tools. The Marine pilot’s rotors had clipped the top of the plane, metal violently smashing into metal in a wild spray of sparks, and instantly the helicopter lost all aerodynamics, was wrenched forward by the collision, its cushion of air whipped out from beneath, and it fell with a grinding bang into the C-130’s cockpit, an impact so stunning that Schaefer briefly blacked out. Both aircraft were carrying a lot of fuel—Shaefer had just filled his tanks, and the C-130 still had fuel in the bladder in its rear. And the sparks from the collision immediately ignited both of them with a powerful, lung-emptying thump that seemed to suck all the air out of the desert. A huge blue ball of fire formed around the front of the C-130, and a pillar of white flame rocketed 300 feet or more into the sky, turning the scene once more from night into day. Beckwith pivoted the moment he felt and heard the crash, and started running toward it. He pulled up short, a football field away, stopped by the intense heat, and thought with despair of his men: Fitch’s entire troop, trapped. Inside the C-130, Fitch had felt the plane begin to shudder, as though the pilots were revving the engines for takeoff. The hold had no windows, and he couldn’t tell if they were moving yet. Then he heard two loud, dull thunks. He thought maybe the nose gear or the landing gear had hit a rock, but when he looked toward the front of the aircraft he saw flames and sparks. He thought they were under attack. He had removed his rucksack, and leaning against it was his weapon, an M203 grenade launcher. He grabbed it and stood, in a single motion. Beside him the plane’s load master, responding wordlessly to the same sight, pulled open the troop door on the port side of the plane. It revealed a solid wall of flame. Fitch helped the load master slam the door down and push the handle in to lock it. He and the men were perched on a thousand gallons of fuel, and they appeared to be caught in an inferno. “Open the ramp!” Fitch shouted, but lowering it revealed more flames. The plane was going to explode. It was an enormous bomb on a short fuse, and the fuse was lit. The only other way out was the starboard troop door, which had been calmly opened by three of the plane’s crewmen. That way proved blessedly free of flames. Men started piling out of it before it was completely open. Still inside, Sergeant Major Dave Cheney, a bull of a man with a big deep voice, kept shouting, “Don’t panic! Don’t panic!” as the men crowded toward the only escape. Flames were spreading fast along the roof, wrapping down the walls on both sides, and igniting in each man a primitive flight instinct that none of them could control. One of the junior Air Force crewmen fell and was being trampled by fleeing Deltas when Technical Sergeant Ken Bancroft fought his way to the man, picked him up, and carried him to the doorway and out. Cheney’s natural authority and clarity helped prevent an utterly mad scramble, and kept the men in a steady flow out the door. They were used to filing out this way on parachute jumps, so the line moved fast. Still, it was torture for the men at the rear. Ray Doyle, a load master on one of the other tankers, more than a hundred feet away, was knocked over by the force of the initial explosion. Jessie Rowe, a crewman on another tanker, felt his plane shake and the temperature of the air suddenly shoot up. Burruss saw the plane erupt as he stepped off the back of his C-130. He was carrying incendiary explosives down the ramp, to destroy the disabled Sea Stallion, and the sight buckled him. He sat down and watched the tower of flame engulfing the plane, the downed chopper perched on top of it like a giant metal dragonfly, thinking, Man, Fitch and his whole squadron gone, those poor [Edited Out]s. But then he saw men running from the fireball. Pilots of the other craft quickly spread the word to their crews that they had not been attacked. Haney was still inside the burning plane, near the end of the line of men trying to get out. He and those around him had been jarred alert by the noise and impact of the crash, and Haney had seen blue sparks overhead toward the front. Then the galley door at the front of the plane blew in, and flames blasted in behind it. “Haul ass!” shouted the man next to him, leaping to his feet. Captain E. K. Smith, who had dozed off right after boarding the plane, woke up to see men trying to gain their footing on the shifting surface of the fuel bladder and thought it was amusing—until he saw the flames. He and the men around him scrambled toward the door as best they could, fearing they would never outrace the flames. Ahead, men were jammed in the doorway. When Haney finally reached the door, he threw himself out, dropping down hard on the man who had jumped before him. They picked themselves up and ran until they were about fifty yards away. Then they turned to watch with horror. Fitch felt it was his duty to stay in the plane until all the men were off, but it was hard. As the flames rapidly advanced, he realized that not everyone was going to make it. Instinct finally won out, and both he and Cheney leaped out the door, falling when they hit the ground. Other men crashed on top of them. They helped one another up and over to where the others were now watching, brightly illuminated by the growing fire. Fitch ran to what seemed a safe distance and then turned around, still assuming they were under attack, and lifted his weapon. He looked for the enemy and saw instead the awesome and ugly sight: the chopper, its rotors still turning, had clearly crashed down on the front of the plane. It wasn’t an attack; it was an accident. He saw two more men jump out—one of them Staff Sergeant Joe Beyers, the plane’s radio operator, whose flight suit was burning. Other men rushed to put out the flames and drag him clear. Then ammunition started “cooking off,” all the grenades, missiles, explosives, and rifle rounds on both aircraft, causing loud, cracking explosions and throwing flames and light. The Redeye missiles went off, drawing smoke trails high into the sky. Finally the fuel bladders ignited, sending a huge pillar of flame skyward in a loud explosion that buckled the fuselage. All four propellers dropped straight down into the sand and stuck there, as if somebody had planted them. In the chopper, Schaefer at last came to. He was sitting crooked in his seat, the chopper was listing to one side, and flames engulfed the cockpit. “What’s wrong, Les, what’s wrong?” he asked, turning to his co-pilot. But Petty was already gone. He had jumped out the window on his side. Schaefer shut down the engines and sat for a moment, certain he was about to die. Then, for some reason, an image came into his mind of his fiancée’s father—who had never seemed much impressed by his future son-in-law—commenting a few days hence on how the poor sap had been found roasted like a holiday turkey in the front seat of his aircraft. Something about that horrifying image motivated him. His body would not be found like a blackened Butterball; he had to at least try to escape. He ejected the window on his side, and as fire closed over him, badly burning his face, he dropped hard to the ground and then ran from the erupting wreckage. The exploding aircraft and ammo sent flaming bits of hot metal and debris spraying across the makeshift airport, riddling the four remaining working helicopters, whose crews jumped out and moved to a safe distance. Most of the men had no idea what was going on; they knew only that a plane and a chopper had been destroyed. The air over the scene was heavy with the odor of fuel, so it wasn’t hard to imagine that all the other aircraft might burst into flames as well. The remaining C-130s began taxiing in different directions away from the conflagration. Word of the calamity reached the command center in Wadi Kena in a hurried report: “We have a crash. A helo crashed into one of the C-130s. We have some dead, some wounded, and some trapped. The crash site is ablaze; ammunition is cooking off.” The only course now was to clear out, and fast. Some thought was given to retrieving the bodies of the dead, but the fire was raging, and there wasn’t time. Reached by radio at Wadi Kena, Major General James Vaught, the mission’s overall commander, instructed Burruss to turn loose the Iranian bus passengers. The Delta officer ordered one of his men to disable the bus by ripping some wires from its engine. As Burruss headed back to his C-130, he took one last look at the flaming ruins of the plane and the chopper and felt a stab of remorse over leaving the dead behind. But nothing could be done about it. Washington, D.C., April 24, 6:00 P.M. Word of the catastrophe reached the White House just before the force left the ground in retreat. The president was in his study, surrounded by his advisers, still absorbing the shock of the abort decision. He received a call from General Jones. “Yes, Dave.” Jordan watched the president close his eyes, and then Carter’s jaw fell and his face went pale. “Are there any dead?” Carter asked. The room was silent. Finally the president said softly, “I understand,” and hung up the phone. He calmly explained to the others what had happened. The men took in the awful news quietly. Then Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who had submitted his resignation earlier that day because he objected to the mission, said, “Mr. President, I’m very, very sorry.” Jordan ducked into the president’s bathroom and vomited. America’s elite rescue force had lost eight men, seven helicopters, and a C-130, and had not even made contact with the enemy. It was a debacle. It defined the word “debacle.” This is your last free article. About the Author Mark Bowden Mark Bowden is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. His many books include Black Hawk Down, Huế 1968, and The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/05/the-desert-one-debacle/304803/