The risky, multiday mission to rescue two American airmen whose fighter jet was shot down, stranding them in Iranian territory, involved more than 150 aircraft, a close-range gunfight and a complex CIA-led deception campaign, according to President Donald Trump and administration officials.
The operation to rescue the plane’s wounded backseat officer from a cliff crevice in Iran, where he’d been hiding for nearly 48 hours, involved 155 aircraft and hundreds of personnel, Trump told reporters at a White House news briefing on April 6.
Locating the officer, Trump said, was “like finding a needle in a haystack.”
The F-15E fighter jet was shot down in Iran in the predawn hours of April 3, local time, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the briefing. Trump said the U.S. plane was hit by a shoulder-mounted, heat-seeking missile.
Both airmen on board – a pilot and a weapon systems officer – ejected, landing in Iranian territory miles apart.
The U.S. military deployed 21 aircraft “within hours” of the fighter jet’s crash, Trump said. The planes flew at low altitude over Iran for seven hours in the daylight before narrowing in on the pilot, “facing very, very heavy enemy fire,” Trump said.
Caine said a “close-in gunfight” ensued as a search and rescue team comprised of A-10 Warthog planes, personnel recovery planes, helicopters and more entered Iran’s airspace. Iranians on the ground shot at the low-flying aircraft as a helicopter scooped up the pilot.
“We have a helicopter that’s got a lot of bullets in it,” Trump said.
An A-10 plane was hit during that operation, and its pilot flew into the airspace of a U.S.-allied country, ejected from the plane, and was later recovered safely, Caine said.
The weapon systems officer, who sits in the seat behind the pilot in the two-person F-15E plane, landed a “significant distance away,” and was alone on the ground in Iran, according to Trump.
The stranded officer, an Air Force colonel, scaled a cliff face and sheltered in a crevice, Trump said. The colonel was “bleeding rather profusely” and “treated his own wounds.”
“He was injured quite badly and stranded in an area teeming” with Iranian military and local authorities, Trump said.
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said the colonel’s first message when he was able to activate his emergency transponder on the ground was, “God is good.”
After the CIA had located the officer, officials “executed a deception campaign,” the agency’s director, John Ratcliffe, told reporters at Trump’s briefing. That campaign involved spreading false information that the officer had already been rescued while he was still stranded in the country, according to a New York Times report.
The “daunting challenge” of finding the officer was “comparable to hunting for a single grain of sand in the middle of the desert,” Ratcliffe said.
Trump explained that 155 aircraft, including four bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refueling tankers and 13 rescue aircraft, took part in the mission to pull the officer out of Iran. At one point, the military blew up two older planes involved in the operation that had gotten stuck in the sand in Iranian territory so that Iran could not recover them or access the equipment inside, he said.
Under the protection of an “air armada” that included tactical drones and strike aircraft, the weapon systems officer reached safe territory at midnight on Easter Sunday, more than 50 hours after the operation began, Caine said.
By midnight exactly three days after that rescue, Iranians will face “complete demolition” if their government does not open the Strait of Hormuz, Trump said at the briefing. “Every bridge in Iran will be decimated,” and “every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again,” he said.
Striking power plants and water infrastructure in Iran, as Trump has also threatened to do, would take a deep toll on Iran’s civilians and likely constitute war crimes, experts say. More than 1,300 Iranians have been killed since the war started on Feb. 28, according to estimates.
“They would be willing to suffer that in order to have their freedom,” Trump said.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: CIA deception, gun fights. How 2 stranded airmen were rescued in Iran
Reporting by Cybele Mayes-Osterman, USA TODAY Network via Reuters
