Not only was the landing zone, codenamed DESERT ONE, apparently not remote enough to avoid drawing Iranian civilian attention, but several mechanical failures in the helicopters proved to be the operation’s undoing. When Carter refused to acquiesce to his urgent entreaties to cancel the mission, the nation’s top diplomat tendered his resignation, regardless of how the mission went. Shockingly, rather than calling Vance immediately after the meeting, Christopher waited until his boss returned to brief him on the decision. Although Warren Christopher, the acting Secretary of State, attended, his role was largely symbolic, as Brzezinski drove the meeting’s decision to go forward with the mission. At this point, Brzezinski was gung-ho on the idea. The very next day, Carter and Brzezinski called a National Security Council (NSC) meeting to discuss the question of a rescue mission. He suffered from gout and the general and acute stresses of being Secretary of State, and needed a break.
Two weeks before the operation, Vance went to Florida for a long weekend, in hopes of getting some much-needed rest. Vance and Brzezinski had a tenuous relationship while historians have debated the extent to which Carter’s top two foreign policy officials actually clashed, their disagreements came to a head over Operation EAGLE CLAW. Vance later recalled that he “was convinced that as time passed the chances of physical harm to the hostages diminished.” Even if that were not the case, he reasoned, the very idea of extracting so many hostages from the center of a large city of Tehran struck him as preposterous. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, on the other hand, consistently and vehemently opposed such an idea. For example, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski waffled on the question of a military operation against Iran: he initially endorsed harsh measures against the Khomeini regime, then backed off the idea of military action after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and finally came back around to push for a rescue mission. Operation EAGLE CLAW grew out of this rationale.īut not all members of the Carter administration agreed that military action was the best course of action. “An attempt by any outside force to gain control” of the region, he warned, would be countered by “any means necessary, including military force.” Carter explicitly stated that the United States considered the Persian Gulf region to be part of its national interests. His solution was the Carter Doctrine, set forth in his 1980 State of the Union address. With Ted Kennedy challenging him for the Democratic presidential nomination and a surge in criticism of his foreign policy-especially from conservatives-Carter felt the need to toughen his foreign policy stance.
Coupled with attacks on other American embassies in the Muslim world and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, the hostage crisis made him look weak in the eyes of not only Americans, but also the rest of the world.
The Iran Hostage Crisis was a disaster for President Jimmy Carter’s image both domestically and abroad. Thus began Operation EAGLE CLAW, which aimed to rescue the fifty-two American diplomats and expatriates held hostage by Iranian student protestors since November 4, 1979. On April 24, 1980, eight RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters took off from the USS Nimitz, an American aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea.