Email this page to friends About the Author Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist. One of America's preeminent war correspondents, with more than four decades as a reporter and writer, he recently concluded an assignment as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell at the State Department. Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent 22 years as a foreign and war correspondent and bureau chief for United Press International, and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and senior writer for U.S. News & World Report magazine. His overseas postings include tours in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow in the former Soviet Union. During the course of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War and half a dozen other combat operations. In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division (Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The finest combat correspondent of our generation -- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend." Special Feature: "Discharged and Dishonored" This special report looks at the plight of our nation's veterans, and their battle to claim their benefits. Full Joe Galloway Bio Joe Galloway Archives Special Report: Read Joe Galloway's new column for Knight Ridder Newspapers on Echo Company. Sound Off! -- Have an opinion about this article? Visit the Joe Galloway discussion forum. Military Opinions Index Your Two Cents Submit your stories, news items, or a benefits update -- and help Military.com bring the best, most important stories to your fellow servicemembers, veterans, and family members. Contribute here

WASHINGTON - It was a quarter-century ago this month, April 24, 1980, that the secret American raid into Iran to rescue 53 hostages from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran collapsed in disaster on a make-shift airstrip in the middle of the Iranian desert.

The embarrassingly public failure of the raid, code-named Operation Eagle Claw, was a low-water mark for the Carter administration and for our military as well, still struggling to get back on its feet in the wake of the debacle in Vietnam just five years before.

Eight American servicemen died when the raid came apart with the fiery collision of a Marine RH-53 helicopter and an Air Force EC-130 on the ground. President Jimmy Carter had already ordered the mission aborted when too few helicopters were still usable after a low-level flight into Iran from an American aircraft carrier out to sea.

With the raid the world also got its first partial look at a super-secret U.S. Army Special Operations force known as Operational Detachment-Delta and its legendary founding commander, Col. Charlie Beckwith, a Special Forces and 101st Airborne Division veteran of two tours in Vietnam.

Carter announced the failure and, appropriately, took full responsibility for it. He had micro-managed the operation from the White House and bent to pressure from all the services for a piece of the action and the glory.

Beckwith's forces did not own their own transportation, so the Air Force would haul the raiders into the staging and refueling area deep in the Iranian desert by C-130 turboprop transport planes, while Marine helicopters that would ferry the Delta operators from the airstrip to Tehran came in from the sea.

The helicopter crews had to be cobbled together from Marine, Navy and Air Force pilots at the last minute when it was discovered that some of the Marine pilots lacked the skills needed to fly such a mission.

A number of Operation Detachment-Delta operators and agents had already infiltrated into Tehran to help conduct the strike to rescue the 53 diplomats and Marine guards who were taken hostage when a mob seized the U.S. Embassy on Nov. 4, 1979.

Beckwith and higher-ranking supporters in the Pentagon had lobbied for the rescue mission to be carried out by the hostage-rescue experts of Delta, and had begun planning a rescue within hours of the seizure of the Americans.

But all that planning and hard work had come apart so disastrously. The raiders and the air crews, their secret airstrip now marked by the towering flames of burning aircraft, packed up and flew out on the remaining C-130s. Orders were given to destroy the helicopters but in the confusion they weren't carried out. The secret plans fell into the hands of the Iranians, and the Tehran agents working for the United States narrowly escaped capture themselves.

Some say the failure paralyzed the administration and led directly to Carter's defeat by Ronald Reagan the following November. The Iranians finally freed the hostages on the day Reagan was inaugurated, 444 days after they were seized.

Not long afterward Beckwith quietly retired from the Army. He never tried to put the blame on Carter then, or ever. He died nearly 15 years later, convinced that most of the blame lay with inter-service rivalry.

What grew out of that failure was a determination by some powerful members of Congress, as well as those who believed in and nurtured the small special operations community, that this would never happen again, that a command designed to ensure the success of such secret missions was needed and it needed to be totally self-sufficient in everything, including aircraft, helicopters and pilots.

Against stubborn opposition in the Pentagon, such a command was born. It is today's U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Base, Fla., headed by a four-star flag officer -- general or admiral -- and has come into its own since 9/11.

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