The Carter Conspiracy

25 April 1980 – “Desert-1” West of Tabas Central Iran

25 April 1980 – “Desert-1” West of Tabas Central IranThe RH-53D Sea Stallion was the workhorse of the US Navy. It had two essential strengths for the mission known as “Eagle Claw”. Firstly, it had a range of 750 miles when auxiliary tanks were fitted. Secondly, the rotor blades and tail folded so that it could be stored and moved around an aircraft carrier. Desert One was approximately 700 miles from the USS Nimitz, from which the helicopters had launched.

The Sea Stallion also had an Achilles Heel. Due to its bulk, especially when fully laden, the helicopter was best suited to take-off from a “ground taxiing” manoeuvre. This involved the ‘copter starting off by accelerating across the ground, like an aircraft on a runway to boost the insufficient lift produced by the aluminium rotor blades. However, ground taxiing is not easy on sand, even the compacted kind that lay beneath the wheels of Helios 3, the code name of the Sea Stallion piloted by Marine Major Jim Schaefer.

Schaefer was unable to coax the helicopter into rolling forward. This did not cause him any real concern; he simply elected to lift off vertically and “air-taxi”. In this manoeuvre, the engines produce enough thrust to haul the helicopter off the ground up to about twenty feet but no more. You need forward movement to climb higher.

As Schaefer applied the power, Helios 3 lifted off the ground. No one is certain about what happened in the next few seconds – except that the take-off produced a mini-sandstorm that blurred the vision of those on the ground.

Col. Charlie Beckwith had the clearest view.

He was commander of Delta Force, the elite counter-terrorist unit formed by the US military at his urging. His recollection is that instead of moving forwards and upwards, the Sea Stallion drifted horizontally, slightly backwards and to the right where it crashed down onto the left wing of a parked C-130 Hercules transport plane. As the wing buckled, the fuel stored within ignited. The resulting explosion had two memorable characteristics. The first of these was the noise – a huge thump that rocked the desert floor. The second was the fireball, the flames reaching three or four hundred feet up into the sky.

In the resulting blaze, the 0.50-calibre ammunition from the helicopter started to explode, joined shortly after by the missiles, grenades and combat ammunition stored on the plane.

Aboard the Hercules, the fourteen crew members and the Delta Force soldiers scrambled to escape. The plane had arrived at Desert One with a huge rubber bladder fitted inside its cargo bay containing the fuel to refill the helicopters that had rendezvous’d on their way to Teheran. Because only six of the expected eight ‘copters had arrived, the bladder was still far from empty – and it was on this perilous “floor lining” that the Delta men were standing as the plane began to burn.

Major Logan Fitch, Commander of “Delta White”, was the senior officer in the hold.

“My men shouted, staggered, stumbled onto the hot bladder. They fell over and clawed one another in their desperation to escape.”

These were not men one would expect to panic. But with gallons of highly flammable fuel under their feet and little prospect of escape, panic they did. The left side door led straight into the inferno. The only way out was through the right hand door in agonisingly slow single file. Even Fitch was infected by the hysteria.

“I had figured to be the last off – but changed my mind. If I was going to stay alive, I was gonna have to move. I entered the stream of men moving toward the door. I pulled myself up, after being knocked down, then was flat on the floor again. Then at last I was out and on the ground, this time knocked flat by the men jumping down after me.”

As they exited, many of the soldiers had to roll in the desert sand to put out the fires on their clothing.

Despite the cacophony of the explosions, one of the men from Delta Force heard bloodcurdlingly anguished screams for help. They came from the aircraft’s radio operator too badly burned to move, let alone get out of the plane. Sergeant Paul Lawrence turned back. Using discarded uniforms to shield himself from the flames, he dashed back into the cargo hold, ignoring the threat to his life that lay in every ammunition box on the floor of the plane, and hauled the screaming man out of the plane.

The Sea Stallion had come to rest on top of the Hercules’ flight deck. While the tail section of the ‘copter burned with the combination of its own fuel and that from the wing of the plane, the cockpit remained momentarily intact enabling Schaefer and his co-pilot to scramble to safety through the cockpit window, tumbling down the curved nose of the burning Hercules like children playing on a slide. For the other three crew members, further back in the helicopter, there was no hope and they perished in the flames.

The ‘copter’s final resting position was a death sentence for the Hercules Commander, his co-pilot, two navigators and the flight engineer. They had all been on the flight deck preparing for take-off. The impact of the crash caused the stairs from the deck to the exit to collapse, sealing them in. They too burned to death.

Operation Eagle Claw had become a fiasco, one that would bring down the President of the USA.