Desert One is a tough look back at the tragically failed 1980 airborne mission to rescue the 52 American hostages held by Iranian revolutionary students for 444 long days over the course of 1979-1980. With the knowledge that this is a Barbara Kopple-directed film (Harlan County USA), one can assume from the get-go that this will not be your average by-the-numbers formulaic ride.
And true to form, Kopple doesn’t pull punches and doesn’t settle for easy patriotic gestures or biased takes on either the long nightmare of the hostage crisis or the tragic accident at the center of the film. We get both the Iranian and American perspectives on this valiant but sadly botched mission: interviewees are, among others, the military survivors of the Desert One fiasco, a few of the former hostages themselves, and some Iranian revolutionaries that stood guard over the American hostages for over a year.
Kopple’s film sets up the Desert One mission as one that had an aura of doom surrounding it from the very beginning. President Carter was reluctant, even in the face of public and political criticism, to make any move that might endanger the lives of the hostages. And with the Desert One operation itself, there was very little preparation and never much confidence that it would work. But it was a freak accident—a helicopter blowing into a transport plane during a sandstorm—that ended with eight American servicemen being burned to death and the mission aborted.
Kopple covers the cruel, medieval Iranian reaction to the incident: they put the charred remains of the American servicemen on public display. Being, of course, a profoundly political filmmaker, Kopple also doesn’t shy away from the often-forgotten controversial political move on the part of the incoming Reagan administration in 1980: it just so happened that the hostages were released on Reagan’s inauguration day—an event that was actually finagled by the Carter administration just before they lost the 1980 election.
As we know, the Iranian revolutionaries were intent on holding the hostages until the Carter administration sent the Shah of Iran, who was being given diplomatic sanctuary in the US, back to Tehran to face punishment for human rights crimes. As it turns out, the big consideration for the new Iranian Ayatollah government wasn’t the Shah so much as a question of cash flow: Iran’s assets had been frozen, and sending back the hostages to the US would ensure they got their money back (“with interest” as one interviewee puts it).
But as fearless as Koppel’s documentary certainly is, there’s one question that puzzlingly never pops up: why was the Shah of Iran, a well-known ruthless despot, so important to America that his ongoing security was worth putting American embassy workers through 444 days of hell, not to mention the sacrifice of eight brave soldiers? Recommended. Aud: C, P.