The Most Successful Failure: Operation Eagle Claw and the Birth of Modern Special Operations Forces

Summary

On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took the entire diplomatic staff hostage. While President Jimmy Carter initially pursued a diplomatic solution to the crisis, he authorized the military to begin planning a rescue mission.

Still, planners slowly assembled a team and formulated a plan to insert a raiding force directly into the U.S. embassy compound in Tehran and get the hostages out. But launch they did on April 24, 1980, on a mission dubbed Eagle Claw. It ended in disaster when two aircrafts collided in the dark in the confusion of a hasty withdrawal in the middle of the Iranian desert. Eight American servicemen died.

The lessons learned from that debacle in the desert would be used over a period of less than twenty years to craft a special operations capability second to none and would culminate in a near-perfect raid in May 2011 to kill the architect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Osama bin Laden.

Much has been written about this operation, but this new, comprehensive account incorporates information from thousands of recently declassified documents that provide additional detail and never-before-told stories.