Browsing some of the online documents available on DoD's website, some interesting reading is available in the declassified files.

After the abortive Iranian hostage rescue attempt in April 1980, planning immediately began for a follow-up effort. This was known by the classified name "Snowbird" and the (apparently) less sensitive name of "Honey Badger". Planning went through several iterations and (presumably) the best option appeared to be the use of the C-5A Galaxy transport aircraft in a somewhat direct-action role.

Under plan "Snowbird XII", C-5A's would launch directly from the US, carrying a strike force. Included were the then-new UH-60A Blackhawks. I've also seen reference to the OH-58C and OH-6A but I don't know if they were part of this particular version of "Snowbird". The C-5's would infiltrate Iranian airspace and land at an LZ inside the country. Their off-pavement performance was analyzed and apparently seen as satisfactory. From the LZ, the rest of the plan would unfold, but it's unclear as to the exact details.

Some points on the C-5A's mission profile (from the document):

Timing factors- Airborne

Cruise speed - 350 knots

Altitude - 5000 feet or higher

Fly in from southern Iranian coast to SUSAN - 720 nautical miles

Flight time - 2 hours



Timing factors - ground

Taxi - 10 minutes

Kneel - 20 minutes

Offload - 45 minutes

Landing interval - 10 minutes

80 minutes required to land eight C-5A's

Total C-5A exposure time (first aircraft in to last aircraft out) - 7 hours 40 minutes


One can imagine the disaster if one or more aircraft was to crash on landing, be shot down, etc. but the chance of success was apparently seen as reasonable. Thoughts/opinions?

http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/reading_room/533.pdf

I always thought they'd have been much better off going downtown with what amounted to an Air Cav CA team (with Deltas' shooters) than obsessing over all the "low profile" crap. Once you've crossed the border, the soverignty issues are moot anyway, so make sure you go big enough to insure success. I probably have some bias in there, but your basic VN Air Cav Troop was functionally equipped for this mission...and the UH-60's would have just made it mo' betta'. Equip the OH-6a's with mini's and few rockets, that should keep the streets swept.

Thats the first I've heard of Snowbird, the name normally associated with Honey Badger was Credible Sport which was the YMC130 development (Forward firing JATO rockets for extreme short landings)



The problem is to reach Tehran in 1979 you needed to refuel somewhere within Iran, which necessitates some form of airfield seizure or makeshift airfield, which is naturally going to have a degree of low-profile before you hit Tehran, and you aren't going to want to be fast roping everyone out of a hovering CH53 into the embassy grounds. (The students put up anti-helo obstacles onto the tennis-court)
Which means you're either going to need something small like an OH6 or OH-58 and some seriously sierra-hotel pilots (of which no organization then existed) which is going to necessitate either a closer airfield than Desert One and/or some sort of carrier-aircraft like in this Snowbird idea as they couldn't self deploy.
Then there is also the issue of getting enough small helo's to carry two hundred guys to Tehran, and then somehow get them and the hostages out of Tehran.
It just increases the number of critical points for failure in an already overly-complex plan. That leaves the sneaky-squirrel plan to get the delta guys into Tehran the primary option.

As it was the plan for once they were refueled and on their way was pretty gung-ho stuff, Rangers seizing Mehrabad airport and the footy stadium and the likes wouldn't be likely to go unopposed.
I always thought the plan to load everyone on trucks and drive from the embassy grounds seemed like pure fantasy and would've ended up like a scene from a Call of Duty game.

After Eagle Claw the whole plan was moot as the hostages were spread out all across Iran.

Regarding the code names, after sifting through some of the documents this is explained further. The names HONEY BADGER, ELEGANT LADY, and ELITE GUARD when used alone were evidently unclassified. When used in conjunction with the JTF 1-79 mission they were classified Top Secret. The name SNOWBIRD when used alone was classified Secret, but when associated with JTF 1-79, EC-79, or other hostage rescue designations was then coded Top Secret.

Other names connected with this mission were POWDER KEG, NITE FITE, and POTENT CHARGE.

Yes, I fully recognize the range issue, which, if you read the document referred to, envisioned taking the rotary wing component in-country on the Galaxy's. Refueling is provided for, I believe, even with the insertion/extraction plan (from what I can make of it).

OH-6A's and OH-58's were very much a part of the inventory (though the OH-6 was passed out of service in favor of the latter).
I'm suggesting that a mix of A/C such was was typical of an Air Cav unit would get you in town and hold the streets, the big birds take out the hostages and security teams. And small birds are relatively expendable (which is not to say the crews are). I'd expect to lose some helicopters, but in the event, that happened anyway. Leave what you can't take out behind and bring out the people (and destroy what you leave behind, if possible).

It was this artificially limited/limiting concept of helicopter numbers that made no sense to me. Once you're committed, who's counting?

Why rely on helicopters for insertion into Tehran? Why not just paradrop in? Seems to me that if you land sufficient forces in/near the Embassy you can control the area for long enough to fly in helicopters and extract the hostages. Of course, you'd need to be prepared to accept heavy casualties. Say drop a Battalion?

The reasons are legion. From the issues of parachuting ~100 guys into an urban area (city streets, alleys, rooftops, powerlines, etc.) into few enough city blocks that they can even find each other quickly, to the need to approach at an unacceptable altitude guaranteed to get your drop ships shredded, to insufficient supply that can be concentrated where it's useful. Plus, no immediate extraction or gunship support (which the first plan excluded as well).

In Mogadishu, wheeled columns became disoriented and they went in together as a group in sight of each other.

I can't offhand think of a better way to get the entire team killed. Makes one wonder why nobody parachuted a company of infantry into Berlin to kill Hitler.

The thing is still going to be getting the hostages out - there was nowhere for the helicopters to land which was the reason for the perilous drive to the football stadium all the way out near azadi.
The embassy grounds are actually quite small in reality, and going by pictures was just as wooded as it is today. The other thing maps don't show it how steep the incline of Ferdosi st is, the back wall of the embassy is probably two stories higher than the front gate at least, with tallish buildings all the way around. I can't imagine getting a UH1/UH60 in those confines without some truly well selected pilots (which is what I was reffering to as the organization that didn't exist.) As it was with Eagle claw they made do with what they had. The original Navy pilots all got switched for Marines. it was a very hodge podge operation and thats why organizations like TF160 exist today.
The other thing is the students weren't aware of the helo's range issue and were fully expecting US helicopters to come in and launch a rescue operation from a carrier or Turkey at any minute, many of them state it was their main concern and was why they took a lot of steps to defend against heliborne insertion.
Plus in any sort of 'Achmed Don't Surf' operation you still have to factor in the Iranian airforce so you couldn't rely on aerial control for very long. It was a major concern during the real operation.
The rest of the plan you outline is pretty much reality.



Where do you drop them? Everyone will take about two-seconds to clue in on a C-130 flyover and 50 paratroopers dropping within a few city blocks, and by the time they land, the bad guys will have a considerable head start before they Good Guys are even organized.
Then there is the issue of where do you land them in a high-rise area of town on a 25*+ slope to bust into a barricaded, walled compound designed to keep out people who wanted to break in.
At least with Eagle Claw the first the bad guys would know of the operation was then guys start streaming over the back wall and shooting them with silenced weapons.



I don't think gunship support was an issue really, as it was there were plans to have AC130's from Turkey fly in but I can't recal if that idea was shit-canned. Just an extra area for things to go wrong. I also have a hard time believing that flying in packed up helo's and trying to reassemble them in a makeshift FARP is anything other than just asking for disaster.
As it was I think Eagle Claw was probably about as simple and well oiled as they could've made it at the time with what they had. Probably the only part of the plan I can imagine being practibaly different would be the exfil from the football stadium to the C141's, that plaart cold probably have been just using the C130's they flew in on. If things went differently we would speak of it as the American Entebbe (Which was arguably more complex yet again) but they didn't and friction came into the system. It was a high risk operation that failed. I often wonder if it could even be done today with a whole host of organizations equipped and designed from the outset for the very scenario

There's been volumes written about the mission, with hindsight obviously being 20/20.

Cols. Beckwith and Jim Kyle (the USAF officer in charge of the air component) both came down pretty hard on the Marine pilots. Beckwith called them "cowards" and Kyle was a bit kinder, merely "questoning their motivation". Of course, Beckwith wasn't one to suppress his feelings.

I don't know. I would imagine that one had to be a better than average helo pilot just to fly an RH-53 through a raging dust storm for a couple hours, at night, on the deck. From reading Kyle's account, that part really shook up some of the Marine pilots as they hadn't really prepared for that possibility. The helos were the weak link in the chain as far as mechanical reliability (discounting personnel issues), and the Holloway Report questioned why more weren't used. Kyle stated that "never in his wildest dreams" did he figure on the number of helos that became unserviceable.

They made do with what they had. The original Navy pilots were dismissed because of a combination of unwillingness and inability at overland navigation.
With hindsight you could probably have introduced an extra two helo's into the plan for added redundancy but the weak parts of the plan were never even carried out, and there are probably a lot of people alive today because a stroke of dumb (bad) luck at Desert One.

We'll never know (possibly thankfully, as previously noted) whether the plan would have worked in it's entirety had the helo portion been trouble-free. Beckwith has stated that he felt quite confident that his SFOD-D personnel could have successfully accomplished their role had they been given the chance. In his book, he remarked that when questioned by the SECDEF and Secretary of State (in a mission briefing)about how he planned to handle any Iranian guards that may have been encountered, he replied "We're going to put two .45 caliber bullets right between their eyes". This made some of the higher ranking types uncomfortable.

A whole lot of things had to go right for this to work.

Since they never made it beyond Desert One, I don't either...but then then we'll never know, will we?

I think the problems would be after they had secured the embassy and the hostages though.
By all accounts of those in the embassy the students were The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight to the point of often not knowing how to use the weapons they carried.
The problems would be trying to get from the embassy to the footy stadium in civilian vehicles, then getting everyone onboard a waiting CH43, flying them to the airfield then hoping the Rangers could hold the airport and keep the helos and C141's safe on the flight out of Iran.

I would love to know if even with dedicated organizations like TF160 it could be done even today.

A statistics teacher of mine believed that an error in calculating joint probabilities for mechanical failures led to too few helicopters being assigned to the mission. He took it as given that fairly sophisticated quantitative analysis techniques were used in mission planning.

According to the Holloway Commission report:

"The JTF decision on helicopter requirements was based on the collective professional judgment of highly experienced helicopter pilots participating in rescue mission planning. A risk analysis based on fleet-wide RH-53D statistical data for an 18-month period from 1 July 1978 to 31 December 1979 seemed to support the planners' concluson that eight RH-53D helicopters aboard the NIMITZ provided an acceptable degree of risk. Moreover, the always-primary OPSEC concern apparently influenced the planners' rationale, driving them to seek minimum practical force levels. In hindsight it is clear that the eight helicopters put aboard NIMITZ provided adequate redundancy to airlift the initial assault force. However, as personnel and equipment grew in response to evolving intelligence, the minimum airlift requirement at Desert One increased."

..and the Commission's view:

"The review group concluded that additional helicopters and crews would have reduced the risk of abort due to mechanical failure, were operationally feasible, and could have been made available until quite late in the planning evolution. An unconstrained planner would more than likely have initially required at least 10 helicopters, 11 under the most likely case, and up to 12 using peacetime historical data. NIMITZ was capable of onloading a few more helicopters with little or no impact on other missions. Aircrew availability did not limit the force. By reducing the contingency margin, fuel available at Desert One was sufficient to accomodate at least 10 helicopters. In sum, aside from OPSEC, no operational or logistic factors prohibited launching 11 from NIMITZ and continuing beyond the halfway point to Desert One with 10 helicopters."

Jim Kyle's view (IIRC) was that going much beyond 8 helos risked being unwieldy, plus the fact that 6 flyable helos at Desert One were required to complete the mission ,so there were 2 spares (in theory).

They also played around with using JATO assisted Hercs to land in the stadium using Jato's to brake the aircraft on landing, tryout ended with the aircraft catching fire.

That was Credible Sport which was to be part of the planned second rescue attempt Operation Honey-Badger.
After Eagle Claw the hostages were spread out across not just Tehran but all of Iranand they weren't consolidated again in one place until until the winter which made any rescue attempt completely impossible.