When the ‘highly respected colonel’ unclipped his safety harness and raised himself gingerly out of the battered ejector seat, he was taking a terrifying step into the unknown.
Minutes earlier, the senior US Air Force weapons systems officer had been in the cockpit of an F-15 Strike Eagle, cruising at more than 1,500 miles an hour over south western Iran.
Then his aircraft had sustained incoming fire, becoming the first US fighter jet to be shot down since the 2003 Gulf War.
As a result, he’d been left deep behind enemy lines, somewhere in the foothills of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province – a mountainous and sparsely-populated inland region more than 30 miles from the Persian Gulf.
It was Friday afternoon, and this unfortunate man was completely and utterly alone.
His nearest friend was the F-15’s pilot, who’d also pulled the yellow ‘eject’ lever, which fires crewmen of stricken aircraft through the roof of their cockpit. But the pilot had been relatively lucky: having landed on lowland terrain, some distance away, he could be found and rescued by a helicopter crew within a few hours.
The weapons systems officer had been dealt a tougher hand. In addition to being further from civilisation than his colleague, he was, as the White House later put it, ‘seriously wounded’. Bailing out of a fighter jet is a hugely traumatic procedure, which often causes bone fractures and serious spinal damage.
While still able to walk, he’s likely to have been extremely sore, and very shaken indeed. It will have been at this stage that the airman’s training kicked in. All crewmen are experts in sere, a military acronym which stands for ‘survival, evasion, resistance and escape’.
The remains of a US helicopter and two transport planes, which Iran claimed to have shot down amid the search for America’s missing colonel
American officials explained on Sunday that the aircraft were blown up after they hit problems in Iran
Having patched himself up, using a medical kit in the survival vest of his flight suit, his immediate priority was therefore to remove himself from immediate danger.
That meant fleeing the area where onlookers might have seen the ejector seat land. The rule of thumb is to then head to the most secluded nearby terrain. In this instance, that appears to have involved hiking up an elevated ridge towards one of the region’s snow-capped mountain summits.
The airman’s survival vest contained a knife, water-purification tablets, basic provisions and a Sig Sauer M18 pistol, along with a compass and maps of evasion routes that are pre-planned during mission briefing.
Most important was a small device known as a Combat Survivor Evasion Locator, or CSEL. Made by Boeing, this piece of kit – which resembles a sort of walkie talkie – sends short, encrypted updates to mission command with details of a survivor’s location and status, along with simple messages such as ‘injured’ or ‘enemy nearby’, which help top brass to plan a rescue operation.
First communications from the CSEL were received by the US authorities at noon, Washington DC time, which equates to 7.30pm in Iran. After the initial ‘ping’ it went silent for several hours, to help conserve the battery and prevent hostile intelligence forces from intercepting its messages.
By this stage, the US airman was at the centre of a huge manhunt, with Iranian authorities, eager to score a propaganda coup, offering a reward of $60,000 for his capture, and the US anxious to avoid the PR disaster of a serviceman falling into enemy hands.
On Saturday morning, Iranian state TV broadcast footage of an armed militia flooding into the mountains seeking the bounty.
‘This brave warrior was behind enemy lines in the treacherous mountains of Iran, being hunted down by our enemies, who were getting closer and closer’, is how Donald Trump later put it.
President Donald Trump said that the American soldier was being hunted down by enemy troops, who were getting ‘closer and closer’
The Iranian military shared footage appearing to show the F-15E fighter jet being blown out of the sky
Pictured: The ejected seat from the F-15 fighter jet as published in Iranian media
Thankfully, he by now had a decent hiding place. During the hours of darkness, on Friday night, the weapons systems officer is thought to have hiked up to 7,000ft up the ridge, before concealing himself in a remote location where he was confident of being able to evade capture once the sun came back up.
His CSEL then used another ‘ping’ to inform mission control of its new location, which is believed to be high above a village named Mahyar.
According to the president, the airman’s messages at one point left rescuers fearing thet were walking into a trap set by the Iranians. The lieutenant colonel said : ‘Power be to God,’ but it was later confirmed by a US defense official that the exact phrase was: ‘God is good.’
‘What he said on the radio sounded like something a Muslim would say,’ Trump continued, adding that those who know the officer said he is a religious person.
However the CIA was able to determine his exact identity and location, they have not revealed how, and let the rescue mission continue.
The US swiftly sent a fleet of unmanned Reaper drones to patrol the skies around the area. Intelligence sources said yesterday that any fighting-age males who got within three miles of his location were ‘liquidated’.
American A-10 Warthog fighter jets also flew a series of missions in the region to block roads and take out communication towers and approaching vehicles. Iranian authorities say at least four people were killed in various strikes. Back at mission command, top brass spent Saturday plotting an audacious rescue, overseen from the White House situation room.
First, though, they needed to do everything possible to throw the Iranian authorities off the scent.
According to several US news outlets, CIA assets ran a ‘deception campaign’ inside Iran, spreading false rumours that he’d already been located and suggested they were moving him on the ground for ‘exfiltration’ in a different region to his hiding spot.
Whether this succeeded in sowing confusion is unclear. As, for now, are many of the finer details of how exactly the real rescue operation then unfolded.
But early signs are that it involved hundreds of the most fearsome troops in the US military, including Navy Seals, Delta Force operators and Pararescuemen from the 24th Special Tactics Squadron.
A US military plane flying low over Iran on Sunday amid the daring rescue mission
Smoke billows above the two planes which America decided to destroy in Iran after they became stuck in an enemy airbase
They appear to have been ‘inserted’ close to the rescue site on C130J transport aircraft carrying MH-6 Little Bird helicopters from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, a unit known as the ‘Night Stalkers’ who carried out the daring raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.
The Little Bird helicopters flew commados to retrieve the airman from his mountain hideout.
When President Trump was told of the airman’s predicament, he reportedly said ‘we have to get him’ to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. He worried that video footage of a captured US airman in enemy hands would hand Tehran a major propaganda tool.
As the mission closed in on the airman’s position, his CSEL switched modes, allowing comrades to lock on his exact position. At around 4am, explosions were seen in the night sky around Dehdasht, a city on the far side of the mountain range.
Footage purportedly filmed there around this time showed roads blocked with traffic. There has been (as yet unconfirmed) speculation that locals in the region, many of whom are hostile to the Iranian authorities, were seeking to prevent troops from getting to the mountains.
Despite the overwhelming firepower, the US extraction didn’t go entirely according to plan. Shortly after dawn, when in theory a well-planned rescue operation would have already been completed, small-arms fire appears to have been exchanged close to the airman’s hideaway.
‘A firefight broke out. This happened in daylight,’ reported Al Jazeera. ‘Generally, special operations troops would go in for a rescue operation like that, and they would try to extract someone very quickly in the darkness. This went on for hours, we were told.’
Three Iranian revolutionary guards were killed, according to unconfirmed local sources. There was also trouble on the ground for US forces at an abandoned airport on the far side of Mahyar, around 30 miles south-east of the city of Isfahan.
The location appears to have been established overnight as a sort of forward base, which would be used to help with logistics, refuelling and extraction of troops after they had located the missing airman.
Unfortunately, two transport planes which had landed at the site appear to have got stuck in the mud. The aircraft, possibly huge C-130 Hercules which are each worth £100million, were effectively rendered useless, meaning three more planes had to be scrambled to the scene to remove all the troops involved.
It took several hours for the replacements to arrive, during which the rescue team and the airman were left waiting uneasily at the airfield.
In high-stakes military operations, such last-minute developments can lead to disaster, as occurred during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1980, when a daring rescue mission named Operation Eagle Claw to extract diplomats being held at the US embassy in Tehran, had to be abandoned.
Iranian Basij members had only a pair of American underpants to show from the rescue site
During that operation, a sandstorm damaged several helicopters and contributed to a fatal crash at a makeshift airfield outside the Iranian capital which US troops planned to use to mount their raid. The fallout from the PR disaster saw President Jimmy Carter suffer defeat in that year’s election.
While it had some similarities to the 1980 raid, President Trump’s Iranian rescue mission had a luckier outcome: the three new planes were able to do their job, and all troops were removed from the scene without any US casualties.
In order to prevent them from falling into enemy hands, the stricken aircraft were then blown up, alongside a helicopter which had also suffered an engine failure. They were left at the scene. Film of their smoking wreckage has, bizarrely, allowed the Iranian authorities to describe the whole thing as a disaster for the US.
Footage taken yesterday morning tells a different story. It shows one of the Hercules planes disappearing over a mountain top in the direction of Kuwait, where the airman at the centre of one of the most audacious rescues in military history was last night receiving medical treatment.
