Wreckage in the Iranian desert from the disastrous raid to free American hostages in April 1980. General Vaught’s body was found in a pond in Conway, near his home in Myrtle Beach. He drowned, evidently after falling out of his small boat, and an autopsy also revealed signs of cardiac disease, a coroner, Robert Edge, told The Associated Press.
General Vaught, a combat veteran of the Korean and Vietnam Wars and a graduate of the Army’s commando-style Ranger school, was chosen to oversee an unconventional, risky and complex operation to rescue hostages taken by Islamic militants who overran the American Embassy in Tehran in November 1979.
Some 90 commandos from the Army’s Delta Force, who were transported in Air Force planes, and Marines flying eight Navy helicopters from an aircraft carrier were to rendezvous at night in the Iranian desert. The helicopters were to fly the Delta Force troops to a site near Tehran, where they were to be transferred to trucks the following night, sneak into the Iranian capital, extract the hostages from the Embassy and bring them out of Iran aboard the choppers.
General Vaught, who had overseen the training for the mission, was at a base in Egypt to monitor the raid. Commanders from the Army, Air Force and Marines were at the rendezvous site.
The mission, designated Operation Eagle Claw, was months in the planning and had been approved by President Jimmy Carter and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but the raiders never got close to Tehran.
Mechanical and communications failures and an unforeseen sandstorm put three of the eight helicopters out of action, leaving one fewer than the minimum of six needed to fly the Army commandos from the desert to the Tehran area. That caused Mr. Carter to call off the operation. Then one of the helicopters preparing to depart crashed into a parked Air Force transport plane, causing an explosion and fireball that killed eight servicemen.
Mr. Carter took responsibility for the mission’s failure. A report by a Pentagon commission listed numerous problems in the planning and execution of the mission and cited a lack of sufficient coordination among the service branches, though it did not assign blame to General Vaught or the commanders under him.
Ronald Reagan made the failed mission an issue in defeating Mr. Carter in his bid for a second term. The hostages were not released until the day Mr. Reagan was inaugurated, 444 days after they were taken captive.
In an interview with Newsday in 2005, General Vaught touched on inter-service rivalry. He said he had sought to inspect the Navy helicopters while they were being prepared for the mission aboard the aircraft carrier Nimitz, but was turned down by the Joint Chiefs.
“I was told it was the Navy’s job, and it was perfectly capable of preparing and repairing them,” he said. “I had no authority except over the Army guys.”
James Benjamin Vaught was born in Conway on Nov. 3, 1926.
“I am a direct lineal descendant of Francis Marion,” he told the Conway-area news site Grand Strand Daily.com in 2011, referring to the South Carolina militia commander known as the Swamp Fox for waging guerrilla war against the British in the Revolutionary War. “Some of those unconventional warfare genes carried through the years.”
He attended the Citadel in Charleston, S.C., for three semesters before being drafted into the Army and obtaining a lieutenant’s commission. He served in the post-World War II occupation of Germany, was an infantry company commander in the Korean War and a battalion commander of helicopter-borne troops in the Vietnam War, taking part in the liberation of Hue and the relief of Marines who were besieged at their Khe Sanh outpost.
General Vaught held a senior administrative post at the Pentagon when he was assigned by the Army chief of staff, Gen. Edward C. Meyer, to command the Iran rescue operation. Sixteen months after the failed raid, he was promoted from major general to lieutenant general and became commander of American and Korean troops in South Korea. In announcing the appointment, General Meyer called General Vaught “a very confident, very capable general who has been a superb troop leader.”
General Vaught retired from the military in 1983.
He is survived by his wife, Florence; his daughter, Cathryn Vaught; his sons James Jr. and Stephen; a brother, John; a sister, Vina Floyd; his stepdaughters Marian Davis and Lee Glasgow Watson; four grandchildren, three step grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
General Vaught was quoted by The Washington Post on the 25th anniversary of the aborted raid as having been devastated by the feeling he had “let the country down and left the hostages there.” But he called the mission a “successful failure” since it used technology, including satellite communications and night-vision goggles, that proved valuable in future operations.
The fragmented command structure exposed by that failed raid also led to the creation of a multiservice Special Operations Command that included an elite Navy unit focusing on counterterrorism. Thirty-one years after the botched hostage-rescue mission, the men from that unit, SEAL Team 6, killed Osama bin Laden.
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