Hello and welcome to the Battleground Special Forces series with me, Saul David and Patrick Bishop.

Today we're talking about the American Special Operations Unit

Delta Force and its very first mission Operation Eagle Claw, the disastrous attempt to rescue

the 66 American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, which took place on the 24th and

the 25th of April 1980. To set the scene, it's worth remembering that in the late 1960s, as we mentioned

in our earlier two-parter on Cyret MacKarl and the Entebbe raid, that the new phenomenon of

global terrorism was marked by a series of spectacular attacks on Western targets,

particularly plane hijackings, airport assaults and the kidnapping of diplomats.

The attacks were pioneered by Palestinian terror groups, who, in the wake of Israel's defeat of the Arab armies in the Six-Day War of 1967, needed a new tactic to get the

Israeli boot off the back of the Arab neck. They were soon emulated by extreme left-wing

terrorists in Europe and the Far East, like the Bada-Mainhof gang, the Japanese Red Army, and the Red Brigades, who sympathised with the Palestinians

anti-capitalist and anti-Zionist cause and were determined to bring about world revolution

and the end of the capitalist imperialist system. Yes, and at first, as we also mentioned in the Intebbe episode, only Israel

responded to this new threat by training its elite special operations force, Syriot Matt Kahl,

which translates as the unit simply, and they're training them in hostage, rescue, counterterrorism

techniques, but much of the West followed suit,

particularly after the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes

by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Summer Olympics of 1972.

Now, two Israelis were killed during the initial assault on the Athletes Village

on the 4th of September,

and the remaining nine after a bungled hostage rescue by West German police a day later,

a fiasco that also resulted in the death of five terrorists and policemen.

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