(at the Desert One) site was a couple of thousand feet. The quality of the air is very different--dry as a bone in the desert, moist and dense by the sea. And sand is a Very Bad Thing out there, and you don't need a sandstorm to know that, either.
The good thing about Desert One (if there was a good thing to come out of that ghastly mess) was that DOD learned to work together, for once. The rivalries had to be put aside. You had too many branches of service with radios that couldn't even talk to one another on that clusterfuck. You had people prepping helos who had never worked in or around Teheran--when there were THOUSANDS of recently laid-off ex-Vietnam former military/military reservists/retirees who had left that country in the last six months, knew the terrain intimately as a consequence of selling and repairing and test flying both Bell and Sikorsky products for the Shah, knew how to configure the aircraft to compensate for peculiarities of climate, and who could have and would have made that mission a success.
There was also a shitload of (many of them unemployed) HUMINT out there, with pictures, film, and recent personal experience who knew where stuff was that one couldn't find on any ordnance map of the country. That, though, was back in the day when the military had a fixation on ACDU-first, reserves last, and Recalls to ACDU? Fuggedaboutit.
In special circumstances, though, people with special knowledge are the ones to look to when formulating a plan. They never asked the right people for advice, and that's what doomed them.
You have to blame Carter, though it pains me to so do, because he was the CinC. That said, I do not think the JCS staff served him well at all, I think the service chiefs, egged on by the politically minded service secretaries, were far more interested in sticking their thumbs into the pie than ensuring that the pie was properly baked or tasty. The CIA was no fucking help, either. At the end of the day, the pie tasted like shit, and they all got busy pointing fingers at one another and trying to assign blame.
I would have done it as a joint USN-USA effort, frankly. USAF was never "present" in Iran during the Shah days when it came to helos, so why start now? They don't have many pilots who can even land on a carrier--they were just not needed, unless they were circling up above in an AWACS or coming in from elsewhere to provide air cover--but really, all that could have come from Nimitz just as easily, and the coordination would have been easier. There was certainly room for USMC doing some perimeter work at the rescue site (and they're DON anyway), but it should have been USN to the shore, USA in the helos (because the helos most commonly used in Iran, by Iranians, were very similar to USA helos and they were frequently seen in the skies during--and even for some time after, before they broke them all-- the Shah era) and "pick your favorite" Special Forces (Delta, Seals, who cares) to do the extraction and go in and get those hostages. If it were my game to play, I would have put them all in chadors on a bus with lace curtains (not uncommon at all) that said "Pilgrimage to Fatima's Tomb!" on a big banner on the side (she was the sister of Imam Reza and her tomb in Qom, south of Teheran, is a pilgrimage site and a Big Deal) and gotten both in and out of town that way. Once out on the Qom road, there's all kinds of desert out there--you can leave the road on jeeps, ATVs or even dirt bikes and never be found--it's a wasteland and very easy to get lost/hide from authorities.
If they wanted to be real sneaky, they'd bomb a few fuel farms on the way to the Turkish border--that might make them believe that they were headed for freedom by way of Lake Van instead of going back the way they came.
The whole thing was a crying shame and I am the first to concede that it's way too easy to second-guess. I would have hated being a planner on that evolution, though--that's something no one wanted to have on their resume. The distancing began almost immediately after the failure became evident...
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