Survive and evade

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Tuesday, the 7th of April. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. 

Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

First up: a daring rescue.

President Trump and the heads of the Department of War and the Central Intelligence Agency yesterday laid out the details of the weekend rescue of two American aviators in Iran.

HEGSETH: In two extraordinary combat search-and-rescue operations deep inside enemy territory in Iran, our warriors executed missions of breathtaking skill, courage, and precision.

MAST: Iranian forces shot down an F-15E Strike Eagle on Friday. The pilot and weapons specialist on board both ejected from the plane, leaving them behind enemy lines.

The rescue of the pilot involved a 7 hour daylight mission over Iran by helicopter.

REICHARD: But the weapons specialist on board landed a significant distance away, and was injured in the process.

TRUMP: Despite the peril, the officer followed his training and climbed into the treacherous mountain terrain and started climbing toward a higher altitude, something they were trained to do in order to evade capture. He scaled cliff faces, bleeding rather profusely, treated his own wounds, and contacted American forces to transmit his location.

MAST: That made getting to him more difficult. But CIA Director John Ratcliffe called it a “no-fail” mission.

RATCLIFFE: The CIA possesses unique capabilities that only the President can deploy. Some of these capabilities fall under covert action authorities. And because covert means exactly that, I’m not going to tell you everything that you want to know.

Even with specialized tools and operators, he compared the task to hunting for a single grain of sand in the desert.

RATCLIFFE: CIA executed a deception campaign to confuse the Iranians who were desperately hunting for our airmen. On Saturday morning, we achieved our primary objective by finding and providing confirmation that one of America's best and bravest was alive and concealed in a mountain crevice, still invisible to the enemy, but not to the CIA.

REICHARD: Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recounted the first message received from the weapons officer:

HEGSETH: “God is good.” In that moment of isolation and danger, his faith and fighting spirit shone through.

A massive rescue mission to retrieve him got underway. The President said it involved 155 aircraft.

TRUMP: 4 bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refueling tankers, 13 rescue aircraft, and more.

Once the weapons officer was found, getting everyone out involved a contingency plan. Planes meant to evacuate the crews got stuck in the wet sand of a rudimentary landing strip. The President said three more were waiting.

TRUMP: 15-minute intervals, one load out. One load out. One load out. It happened. And we were watching and we said "that's amazing." In many ways I was almost more impressed by the contingency that we had than the fact that if we had a runway or decent soil.

MAST: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force General Dan Caine said the planes flew out protected by tactical drones and strike craft. He said the rescue made good on a promise to members of the military…

CAINE: This was an incredibly dangerous mission, an incredibly dangerous undertaking, but a filled promise made to every American warfighter that you will not be left behind.

But he chalked the success up to the aviators’ tenacity.

CAINE: The single most important contributor to a successful rescue operation is the spirit of attack inside the heart of that downed aviator. Their will to survive, their will to evade, their will to recover is everything.

MAST: Joining us now, is Andrew Miller. He’s a retired Lieutenant Colonel from the United States Marines Corps and Air National Guard. He served for over 20 years in roles that included training and instructing. 

Lt. Col. Miller, good morning!

ANDREW MILLER: Good morning, Lindsay.

MAST: This rescue mission sounds incredible. I want to start at the beginning of what you can tell us about what would go through a soldier’s mind when they know they’ve been hit and need to get out. How does one prepare, especially psychologically, for something like this, where apparently this man was separated from the pilot, so he's on his own, having to make life-or-death-or-possible-Prisoner-of-War decisions, all by himself. What does that look like?

MILLER: Well, the first thing that you have in mind is, at least when I was in the service, I had complete confidence that I'd be rescued. I had confidence in my wingman that I was flying with, that he was going to do everything in his power to keep me safe, and then the CSAR rescue teams, the combat search and rescue teams. They're the elite of the elite in the world, and they will do whatever possible and anything possible to get to you. And then finally, I had just confidence in the military writ large. 

So with that in mind, I was going to do my part to make their job as easy as possible.

MAST: I want to talk a little bit about this from the rescuer side. In 1980 the U.S. lost 8 soldiers and some equipment trying to get the American hostages out of Iran. So talk about the attitude and training from that side, because suddenly the mission gets a lot bigger and in many ways exponentially more serious in terms of potential for lives lost.

MILLER: Well, I would imagine—not being a part of the combat search and rescue squadrons, but I would imagine that they train their entire lives on a mission that they hope they never do. And everything has to go right, because much like you see the incident that happened in Iran back in 1980, things can go wrong, go sideways really quick and the entire mission can fall, whether it's an equipment breakdown or bad weather or something along those lines. So you have to be trained to a high level in order that this one person, that all these resources are being provided to, can come home safe.

MAST: The weapons officer was a colonel. With that high of a rank, does that change how much of an imperative it is to rescue him given the level of classified information he might know?

MILLER: I don't think so, because really any member of the United States military that's in that scenario, they are all the same worth in the military's eyes. They all have important information in their head, but also they are important just from the sense of they're an American serviceman. We need to get them back before the enemy gets them.

MAST: Can you speak how unique that is to the American military mindset versus other places, other countries?

MILLER: Well, I think it first starts from the idea that it's an all volunteer force, right? So the idea that if you're going to volunteer to join the military and put yourself in harm's way, then you would want, or at least I did, that if I volunteered for these dangerous missions, that the military is going to support getting me back. So we owe this to him as well.

MAST: What else as you're reading and learning about this rescue mission, what else stands out to you?

MILLER: There's been times in the military's past where, you know, the, you know, we talked about the Iranian mission, the embassy in Iran, where hostages were paraded out in front of the cameras. Or I've seen the video of pilots that were captured and held in the Hanoi Hilton back in the Vietnam War era. 

I think the United States Military and the United States in general has learned from those incidents that that is not a winning strategy for us as a country. If we're going to dedicate our most valuable resource, men and women that are going into these dangerous missions, then we should be equally as willing to dedicate resources to rescuing them as well and not allowing things like that to happen, you know, to allow in the streets of Mogadishu a pilot was dragged through the streets. 

The emotions that go through me just thinking about those items, even though it's been some time since I was in the military, certainly would encourage me to do whatever is possible if I was in that scenario to protect, save, rescue an operator that's on the ground.

MAST: Well, Andrew Miller is a retired Lieutenant Colonel from the United States Marine Corps and Air National Guard. He served for over 20 years in roles that included training and instructing. 

Lieutenant Colonel Miller, thank you so much.

MILLER: Thank you very much.

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