Operation Eagle Claw was the attempt on April 24-25, 1980 to rescue hostages held at the American Embassy in Tehran in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. This was to be the US Army’s Delta Force’s, SFOD-D, first mission, where they would comprise most of the assault teams for freeing the hostages at the embassy. The plan involved setting up a temporary air base at Desert One, a salt flat 200km south of Tehran in Khorasan Province, then moving the assault elements to Desert Two, a site closer to Tehran, where they would launch the raid, with air support from Desert One. After rescuing the hostages, the Americans would be extracted at Manzariyeh Air Base, which was to be secured by Army Rangers during the raid. Due to mechanical failures from an unexpected haboob sand storm interfering with the helicopters’ systems, the raiders only got as far as Desert One, and the mission was aborted since not enough functioning helicopters were available. During the withdrawal from the Desert One site during the sand storm, one of the helicopters crashed into a C-130 transport plane, killing 8 air crew members (5 USAF and 3 USMC), the only casualties of the mission. While Eagle Claw was a failure, techniques developed for the mission as well as planned re-attempts became the basis for modern Special Operations techniques and procedures still used today. [1]
The photos on this page were taken during staging at Wadi Qena airfield in Egypt. Most of them show Delta Force members. They were gathered from a variety of sources, some of which are no longer online, and have been deposited here for historical archival purposes. [2][3]
I encourage you to download a local copy of the photos for yourself. Feel free to cite this page as a resource.
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This .zip archive contains all photos shown above in high resolution TIF format.