A Phoenix Rises

It was a late summer afternoon in 1980, and America's most powerful men in uniform filed into "the Tank," the Joint Chiefs of Staff's soundproofed conference room in the Pentagon, for a briefing that would mark a turning point in U.S. military history.

Already in the room, waiting patiently beside his flip chart stand, was Army Lieutenant Colonel Keith Nightingale, whose briefing the generals and admirals were there to attend. Nightingale was a staff officer for a top secret task force, and his charts and viewgraphs consisted largely of schematics, budget minutiae, and the other dry details involved in the establishment of a new organization. But together they represented an attempt to conjure a phoenix from the ashes of bitter defeat.

America's mood that summer was grim. On April 24 the United States had launched Operation Eagle Claw, a bold attempt to rescue the fifty-two U.S. hostages held by Iranian revolutionaries in Tehran. The effort had been an ignominious disaster. With the assault force already deep inside Iran at a remote staging area called Desert One, President Jimmy Carter had aborted the mission at the commander's request because only five of the original eight helicopters critical to the mission were still in flying condition. Then, as the force was preparing to return to its base on the Omani island of Masirah, and perhaps try again twenty-four hours later, catastrophe struck. A helicopter crashed into a plane full of fuel and Delta Force soldiers. Eight servicemen and all hopes of merely postponing the rescue attempt until the next night died in the resulting fireball. By the time the force had made it home, pictures of the charred bodies and burned-out airframes at Desert One were all over the world's newscasts. The United States was humiliated.

Most Americans, including many in the Carter administration, had despaired of rescuing the hostages in the wake of the Desert One fiasco. But the men at the heart of Eagle Claw had not given up; nor had their president. Within seventy-two hours of the catastrophe, Carter told Army Major General Jim Vaught, the task force commander, to be prepared to launch again within ten days, in the in extremis case that the hostages' lives appeared in immediate danger. Such a swift turnaround had not been necessary, and the men spent the summer preparing for a second attempt, armed with the knowledge of what had gone wrong previously. In the process, they were hoping to help the United States regain not only its self-respect, but also its faith in the U.S. military and, in particular, its long-neglected special operations forces.

The new effort was code-named Snowbird. Separated from their families, who knew next to nothing about where their husbands and fathers were, the men gave serious thought to what had to be different this time around. Some of these things were tactical details, but others were larger concepts. Eagle Claw had been a pickup game, with each armed service claiming a role: the Army provided Delta Force and the Rangers as the ground rescue force; the Air Force contributed MC-130 Combat Talon transports, AC-130 Spectre gunships, and a small ground element called BRAND X; the Navy proffered an aircraft carrier from which the eight Navy RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters launched; the Marine Corps, keen not to be excluded, provided the helicopter pilots. These forces were not used to working together. The headquarters that ran the operation was a similarly ad hoc organization commanded by Vaught.

The Eagle Claw veterans knew all that had to change, none more so than Colonel "Chargin'" Charlie Beckwith, the hard-bitten Delta commander. In the run-up to Eagle Claw, Beckwith had opposed the creation of any headquarters that might interfere with the direct line to the White House he desired for Delta. But after the trauma of Desert One, his resistance softened. Like others in Delta, he realized that having no specialized headquarters above the unit left it at the mercy of ad hoc arrangements in which it would have no say, for instance, in who provided its air support. Within a few weeks of returning, a group of senior Delta figures had sketched a design for what Beckwith called "a tier-type organization" — a command that encompassed all the units required for special operations missions of strategic importance, in which failure was not an option. In mid-May, Beckwith's main bureaucratic supporter, Army Chief of Staff General Edward "Shy" Meyer, ordered him to bring his proposed design for such a headquarters to Washington.

A more formal and high-powered review of the Eagle Claw fiasco would soon reach much the same conclusion. On August 23 the Special Operations Review Group — six active and retired senior officers commissioned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to examine Eagle Claw — released an unclassified version of its findings and recommendations. Led by retired Admiral James L. Holloway III, the group recommended "that a Counterterrorist Joint Task Force (CTJTF) be established as a field agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with permanently assigned staff personnel and certain assigned forces."

The military brass put up fierce resistance. With the exception of Meyer, the service chiefs were very concerned that the creation of such a force would give the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff his own private intervention force. The commanders of the military's regional commands around the world, called commanders-in-chief, or "CinCs" (pronounced "sinks"), feared that such a permanent task force would deploy to and conduct missions in their own areas of operations without them even knowing about, let alone approving, such actions. It was that venomous atmosphere in the Tank into which Nightingale, who served on Vaught's staff, walked a matter of...