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It looked good on paper, but what started off as Operation Eagle Claw ended in disaster somewhere in the middle of the Iranian desert.
Jimmy Carter, his deeply lined face showing the strain of a bitter disappointment, told the nation in the morning that he took full responsibility for ordering and then canceling the effort to rescue American hostages in Iran. “The responsibility is fully my I own,” Carter said in a five-minute radio address from his White House office. He expressed deep regret for the deaths of eight servicemen in the mission and praised their courage. In an apparent effort to ward off retaliation against the hostages, the I president said the rescue effort was a ‘humanitarian mission” that was not directed against Iran or its people. The United States, he said, “has no hostility against the people of Iran.” Carter said the purpose of the mission was to put U.S. military forces and aircraft in position for a later effort to rescue the hostages. Until “mechanical difficulties” forced its cancellation, he said, it was believed to have “an excellent chance of success.” Carter repeated his earlier statements that the United States holds the government of Iran responsible for the safety of the hostages. And he said that the United States continued to hope 1 that the crisis would be resolved peacefully. “We have been disappointed before,” the president said. “We will ‘not give up our efforts.” Carter’s speech, which climaxed a night of crisis and tension at the White House, added little detail to an early-morning statement in which press secretary Jody Powell announced that the rescue operation had been terminated “because of equipment failure.”
In Tehran today, Iran’s strongman, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the militant captors holding the U.S. Embassy today threatened to kill the 50 hostages at the embassy if President Jimmy Carter tried another “silly maneuver” like the aborted mission. There was this immediate reaction: The Soviet Union called the mission an “armed provocation” in defiance of international law and warned that Washington was running the risk of starting a war in the Persian Gulf region. Officials of NATO, Japan and other U.S. allies said they had not been given advance notice of the operation and appeared bitter.
Families of the American hostages registered shock, bewilderment and confusion, and many members of Congress accused President Jimmy Carter of violating the War Powers Act.
Meanwhile, thousands of jubilant Iranians poured into the streets around the U.S. Embassy today is the Moslem Sabbath when they got word of the failed mission, celebrating with shouts and cheers. They flashed victory signs, clenched their fists and screamed, “Down With Carter I” and “Carter’s Finished I” Secretary of Defense Harold Brown said today that the rescue attempt was aborted at a refueling stop in the Iranian desert when three of eight helicopters failed, and American forces withdrew, leaving eight men dead in the burning wreckage of a helicopter.
The American hostages were seized Nov. 4 when a mob attacked the 27-acre U.S. compound in downtown Tehran. The Militants who took over the embassy in order to demand the “extradition of the deposed shah then in the United States freed 13 persons, mostly blacks and women, shortly before Thanksgiving.” There are 50 hostages in the U.S. Embassy, and three more in the Iranian Foreign Ministry.
Here is Jimmy Carter’s early morning address as heard in Los Angeles at 4 in the morning on April 25, 1980 over KNX Newsradio.
