THE MISSING LINK

摘要

By the time anybody realized something was wrong, they were already dead. The fireball that exploded upward and outward had claimed the lives of eight American servicemen, operating on a mission the world knew was coming, but not when or how. The operation was christened Eagle Claw, and today, 35 years later, it is remembered as one of the largest botched hostage-rescue attempts in the history of the U.S. military. More often referred to as "the Debacle at Desert One" (the code name for the rendezvous point where the incident occurred), Operation Eagle Claw was the April 1980 American effort to free the hostages that had been held by Iranian revolutionaries at the American Embassy in Tehran, Iran, since 4 November 1979. Yet, as the ad hoc team of U.S. Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps assets were secretly staging in the desert outside of Tehran, calamity struck. A Marine pilot flying an RH-53 Sea Stallion collided with an Air Force EC-130 parked at Desert One as they were preparing for the rescue attempt. The EC-130 was loaded down with fuel bladders, and the entire operation, literally and figuratively, "went up in flames."