My View From Moscow April 1980 – The Failed American Hostage Rescue Mission
I was in Moscow in April 1980 during the failed mission to rescue U.S. hostages held in Iran. I wrote about my reaction when I returned to the U.S. Today a very cold revenge was served by the American and Israeli militaries.
The news today about the stunning surprise attack on the Iranian Mullah regime, including taking out Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, brings forth a wide range of emotions. While it’s not over, and the 7th Century death cult regime likely will try to lash out, this completes a sequence that started on October 7, 2023.
Who could have imagined on October 7 that less than two and one-half years later Hezbollah in Lebanon would be devasted with Nasrallah killed, Hamas in Gaza reduced to a gang of mobsters with Sinwar killed, and Iran’s nuclear and missile programs devasted in June 2025 and again today, with Khamenei killed.
It’s almost biblical in its implications.
But it brought back some very personal memories for me.
The Iranians, led by the prior Ayatollah Khomeini, took American diplomats hostage on November 4, 1979.
I started studying in Moscow in January 1980, during the height of the hostage crisis. They would be held until January 1981.
On April 24, 1980, Jimmy Carter launched a weak hostage rescue attempt that failed miserably through no fault of the soldiers involved. It was under staffed and equipped.
I learned about the failed rescue mission when I turned on my shortwave radio. It was devastating. I wrote about it when I returned to Hamilton College in September 1980. I kept the clipping all these years, it’s below.
Here are some key passages (full article below).
During the Winter and Spring of 1980 I lived and studied in Moscow, USSR. Life in Moscow was neither a disaster nor an unusually difficult experience – for most of my stay, that is. There was, however, a lowpoint which was shared by many others.
My lowpoint came in April. I had been in the Soviet Union for about three months, and – to put it mildly – I was fed up. I was fed up with the lines for food, the pushing in the overcrowded buses, the old ladies who elbowed me during the rush hour metro crunch. I was fed up with waiters who didn’t want to take my order, with mail that arrived opened, with steel teeth. Most of all, I was fed up with the constant, ubiquitous, endless barrage of anti-American, anti-Western propaganda.
My lowpoint came about quite unexpectedly. I woke up at 7 a.m., as I did six mornings a week, and turned on my shortwave radio. My radio was my line to the outside world – my parents, my friends, my sanity. The BBC was my mother, the Voice of America my father, Radio Israel my infrequent but necessary inspiration.
I tuned in to the BBC at the end of the news broadcast. I’ll never forget the words:
“We’ll have more on the unsuccessful American hostage rescue mission after ‘News About Britain’.”
I turned off the radio. I stayed in bed, immobile, devastated, unable to face the Soviet world. I wanted to run and hide, but there was no place to run and certainly no place to hide. Life became very claustrophobic. I wanted to be elsewhere….
Nothing, however, hurt as much as the disappointment of my Soviet friends. That afternoon I stopped by a friend’s apartment. We didn’t say a word. We just sat silently, staring down at the floor, slowly shaking our heads. Finally he blurted out: “How could you do such a thing? How can I have faith in a country which doesn’t have helicopters that work. You put a man on the moon, but your helicopters don’t work!” He was almost in tears. I had no answers. The moon meant nothing. The helicopters simply didn’t work….
For me it was depressing. For my Soviet friends it was the loss of their future. It was the loss of their belief in a better world. A belief which kept them going through years of harassment. For my Soviet friends, the failure of a helicopter was the failure of the Knight in Shining Armor they had so often dreamed about. America cannot defend her own. How is she to defend those who dream about her? ….
I’ve often thought about how my life would have been had the helicopters flown. I would have run through the dormitory screaming, spreading the news to friend and foe alike. I would have screamed and screamed and screamed. People would have cared. People would have understood.
I would have hugged the fat old ladies selling mushrooms. The East Europeans and Third Worlders [in my dorm] would have congratulated me and told me how much they wanted to go to America. I could have taunted the Iranian Communists. My Soviet friends would have celebrated. It could have been so great!
But I had to stay in bed.
It’s actually quite emotional for me to read that for the first time in decades. It made today so much more special, so much more meaningful.
It’s said that revenge is a dish best served cold. Today the militaries of the United States and Israel served a very cold dish.
God bless America and Israel.
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Comments
Carter was such an unbelievable disaster.
First, Carter’s Secretary of State resigned for even ATTEMPTING to rescue the hostages! The morons actually wanted to CONTINUE ‘negotiating’!
The ‘rescue mission’, if it could even be called that, was hamstrung by Carter’s stupidity and incompetence and that of his commanders.
First, it was planned as a stupid photo op with all 4 services ‘participating’, despite the obvious issues with coordination and command.
Then, it was an absolute disaster at every conceivable level of planning, training and execution. Poorly planned, from the start, shoddy equipment and preparation for the environment meant only FIVE of EIGHT helicopters even got to the initial staging point, poor command and control left no clear single commander with the ground commander refusing to proceed with 5 helicopters despite the plan saying that 4 was the abort point. And then after that, poor pilot training for the mission meant one of the freaking helicopters smashed into a refueling C130 on the ground at the staging site, killing 8 servicemen!
Carter should have been instantly impeached over the disaster, but of course the Democrats would never dare.
Is planning a cl$sterf!&k an example of “high crimes and misdemeanors”?
Your CDS ix kinda showing.
No more attractive than TDS.
Special operations command was created after that disastrous mission forever changing the American military and how wars are fought. It was truly a low point for the USA and Carter does go down as one of our weakest presidents. It was interesting to read your reflections from a world away. We celebrate today that the end of an era is at hand ; while Islamist radical beliefs are now uber fashionable across the western world the place they are becoming less stylish and popular is in their seat of power. So much blood has been spilled in Iran and the Middle East for their insane religious beliefs; the Iranian people no longer want to sacrifice themselves and their family for this violent death cult. While Palestinians are still willing to blow themselves up for the “glory” of killing Jews ; we may be witnessing the first cracks in the death cult of radical Islam . Eventually Golda Meir words will ring true that it’s time to love your current more than hate others.
Unfortunately those cracks are only in the Shia 12th Imam cult. The Shiites will take longer.
“Carter does go down as one of our weakest presidents.”
I’m so glad he got to throw away his vote for the Democrat’s weakest presidential candidate EVER before he died. It was good to see him chalking L’s right up until the very end.
do not share your impression of the rescue mission
the one shining light in all of that ordeal was the courage shown by canadian ambassador kenneth taylor and his colleague john sheardown when, at the risk of their own lives and those of their staff, they acted to shelter and conceal our countrymen from the terrorists
my father flew in europe and afterward (and for the rest of his life) he held canadians in high regard–he said of all the fliers there–the brits, the scots, the poles, the russians, the french and even the americans it was the outright steel balls courage of the canuks that humbled them all–truly incredible and inspiring
A lot has changed in 47 years. In the US and in Canada.
We are not who we were – some of that for good, some for ill.
So, we keep working to be what we should be: Americans as the Founders saw us.
Thank you for sharing, Professor Jacobsen. So many Americans have lost or never known how bad conditions are in most other countries, even today.
Yes! God bless Israel and the USA!
It was a horrible disappointment. Particularly to a young man who wanted to be an Air Force pilot. It was very much a “How could you screw this up?”
Years later, I studied it and understood how you could screw that up. And it changed the US military a bit. It focused them better on how to integrate everything, and how to build more complete plans. That was the silver lining.
I’m hoping today initiates something akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With better long-term results, not opportunity squandered. Or, so I pray.
Thank God Trump won.
Amalek is being destroyed. This is of biblical proportions.
Who here can explain the war powers act?
I’ve seen quite a few posts arguing about it.
Thanks
I believe what actually happened at Desert One was covered-up.
After the loss of three helos, the force was one helo short of what was necessary to accomplish the mission, so the rescue was called off. To accomplish the egress, a helo had to be moved in order to refuel it, and in the movement collided with an EC-130 at the site, at the cost of several dead and more seriously injured. At least, this was the story.
Here is what Wikipedia says about the planned egress:
In parallel to the rescue, an Army Ranger company would capture the abandoned Manzariyeh Air Base,[30] (34°58′58″N 50°48′20″E) about 60 miles (100 km) southwest of Tehran, to allow two C-141 Starlifters to arrive from Saudi Arabia. The helicopters would bring all parties from the stadium to the Manzariyeh airbase, and the C-141s would fly them to an airbase in Egypt. The eight helicopters would be destroyed before departure.
Note the bolded text. The helos were supposed to be left behind. I don’t believe they would have risked flying the helos out, because they’re big, fat targets and three had already been disabled (and the pilot of one at the site refused to fly it because he thought it unsafe), so they were not exactly the most reliable transportation in that environment. Why risk the loss of more helos, and possibly their crews (to death or capture), when everyone could have been loaded onto the Starlifters and flown out safely on more reliable, multi-engine aircraft capable of decent speed?
Here’s what I think happened.
Even though they were down to five (only four, if we’re not counting the one the pilot refused to fly as unsafe), and didn’t have enough lift capability to perform the rescue as planned, I believe someone made the decision to continue the mission. This explains why the helos had to be gassed up. They weren’t getting ready to fly home in helos that were to have been abandoned anyway, they were getting ready to attempt the rescue. During the refueling for the attempt, they lost another helo and a major airlift component (an EC-130) that was absolutely necessary. So only then was the rescue abandoned.
Note also that ultimately all the remaining operational helos, were, in fact, abandoned once the mission was definitely off. I believe that is what they would have done with the helos if the mission had been halted at any time after the arrival at Desert One, as that was the most operationally sound thing to do (and they did, eventually, do exactly that). This is the tell that made me believe the official story is a cover-up.
The official story just doesn’t make sense to me. Someone tried something reckless and it didn’t work out, it only compounded the failure. Carter may have taken on the chin to protect the officers in charge, he having been a serviceman himself. I also believe this would have been consistent with his martyr complex and Christian beliefs. He put men into a difficult situation and he didn’t want them to suffer for the mission’s failure.
An interesting and thought provoking analysis.
The helicopters were disabled because no one through to put sand filters in the inlets for the engines. They ran into a sandstorm and it degraded the turbine blades and clogged the burners with sand. The force was a mix of AF, Navy, Marines and Army. It was doomed to failure because at that time there was no unifying Spec Ops command and control. Had they made it to Tehran it would have ended just like Mogadishu. The populace at that time would have swarmed the rescuers and dragged them through the streets. I was stationed in Iran in 1978 to early 79. I was nominally in a training billet. The fear when Khomeni returned was palpable. All of the Iranians civilians and military stopped talking with us. They wanted no part of being near us. My group was pulled out in March. No one I interacted with was spared. They were all labeled as traitors. They and their families were tortured and executed. Those who escaped did so before February 79 or shortly after before the mullahs consolidated their power. The last 47 years of terror is on Jimmy Carter’s appeasement policies. As bad as Biden was Carter is worse. Because he knew better. He was captured by the progressive wing of the demonrats.
A long time coming
What a personal experience Professor
Thank you
Welll Tucker has blown the shoot
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/02/tucker-carlson-slams-president-trumps-disgusting-evil-attack/
I was a 21-year-old college senior when the hostages were taken. I knew nothing, but I knew (and said at the time) this: “Jimmy Carter has to be the world’s worst poker player. Telling the Iranians that the lives of the hostages are his top priority? That will get them released, won’t it? What a moron!”
The failed “rescue mission” was a ridiculous, overcomplicated joke, except it was no joke. It was a shameful disaster. After some years learning reality outside of college, I gave Carter major credit for appointing Volcker to the Fed, having been told that it would mean recession and losing the 1980 election. Really, that’s what he was told.
So he was a rotten commander in chief, but when it came to a truly crucial decision — Volcker’s appointment — he really did put country first. This doesn’t mean that I think he was anything but a failed president, but he did make a selfless decision when it absolutely mattered, and for that I will always give him credit.
But not for how he handled the Iranian revolution and hostage taking. He was an idiot from the start, and all the way to the end.
That definitely was the low point of American prestige and power. We were in a malaise both economically and militarily. We could not even execute a rescue mission against a gaggle of medieval Islamists. Thank God it ushered in 8 years of Reagan and a rebirth of our nation and thr building of our military. The 70s saw Democrat traitors like Ted Kennedy trying to back door negotiate with the Soviets. Sound familar? Weak men lead to hard times , and hard time require strong men, and Trump is clearly is our Ronald Reagan of the 21st century. God Bless America!
“We will burn your country to save it. Or you could just release the hostages”
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