Showing posts with label embassy staff or spies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label embassy staff or spies. Show all posts

Saturday 27 April 2019

Iran terms 1980 Tabas Desert operation 'historic US failure'


On 25th April, Iran marked 39th anniversary of a failed US military operation to free its embassy staff held in Tehran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The military operation on April 25, 1980, had proved a fiasco for Washington, at that time Jimmy Carter was president of the United States. Iran commemorates the event every year as a symbol of the failure of US plots against the Islamic Republic.
A sandstorm hit and brought down the group of US military aircrafts in the Tabas Desert, killing eight American servicemen and resulting in the failure of the mission. Inspections showed a helicopter crashed into a C-130 Hercules transport plane as five other choppers were stranded in the storm. The units involved in the operation were from the US Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps.
President Rouhani pointed to Washington’s repeated failures against Iran over the past four decades, saying the historic US failure in Tabas was a divine miracle. He also said, “The Tabas incident was a great miracle from God which led to the failure of the Americans’ complicated military plot”.
“Every day over the last 40 years, the U.S. officials have been hatching a new plot against the Iranian people, but they have always failed and will fail again,” he stressed.
During the takeover of the embassy, documents were discovered that proved some of the American embassy staff had been working with US intelligence agencies, meaning they were spies. Some 52 Americans were held in Tehran for 444 days, but later released unharmed.