Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her by Rowland White

Author:Rowland White [White, Rowland]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2016-04-19T06:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-EIGHT

Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, 1980

While NASA struggled to return American astronauts to space, the Air Force unmanned space program was thriving. The first year of the new decade saw Department of Defense spending on space exceed that of NASA for the first time since 1960. And on February 7, a third KH-11 KENNEN reconnaissance satellite was launched from Vandenberg. Following the de-orbit of the first of the big digital spy satellites a year earlier after 770 days on station, the spy agency once again had two of the big reconnaissance birds operational. On essentially the same orbit, they were separated by a period of around twelve hours. Between them, every day, they could take advantage of the long shadows at dawn and dusk to give greater depth and perspective to their images. They were about to prove their worth.

In the spring of 1979, a small, chaotic group of Iranian Marxist revolutionaries had managed to seize the US embassy in Tehran. They were quickly thrown out by supporters of the country’s new leader, the radical cleric Ayatollah Khomeini. In the aftermath of the attack, the CIA’s Iran branch chief in Langley contacted the head of the Tehran station to reassure him that another incursion was unlikely. “The only thing that could trigger an attack,” he said, “would be if the shah was let into the United States—and no one in this town is stupid enough to do that.”

On October 21, the exiled Shah of Iran was admitted to a New York hospital for cancer treatment. Two weeks later, three thousand angry supporters of the ayatollah swarmed over the walls of the US embassy in the Iranian capital, overpowering the Marine guards to take hostage more than sixty embassy staff. The sight of American diplomats blindfolded and handcuffed while crowds outside burned the Stars and Stripes and chanted for the shah’s return shocked America. Before the end of the month, Ayatollah Khomeini had released all the women and African American hostages, but a warning was to follow: if America attacked his country, the remaining fifty-three hostages would die “on the spot.”

Work on a rescue attempt, however, had already begun. The foundation upon which the US Army’s Delta Force planned their operation was overhead photography from the two KH-11 satellites. While a CIA agent on the ground was able to supply detail about what was going on inside the embassy, augmented by increased signals intelligence monitoring Iranian communications, no military option was possible without detailed information about the physical layout of the compound and its surroundings. The KENNEN images were able to reveal changing daily patterns of activity with a degree of fidelity that had a member of the ninety-three-strong Special Forces assault team talking about the tiles on the roof and the grass in the gardens. More importantly, the pictures revealed that large numbers of poles had been erected around the 27-acre grounds of the embassy to prevent the possibility of any helicopter being able to put down. At the same

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