Mission Impossible: Trump's Boyish Fantasy Spy Mission and the Embarrassing Conclusion
On April 3rd, 2026, an F-15E Strike Eagle from the 494th Fighter Squadron at RAF Lakenheath, call sign Dude 44, was shot down over Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province in southwest Iran by a shoulder-fired missile, less than 24 hours after CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper had told reporters that Iranian air defenses "had largely been destroyed" and less than 48 hours after Trump himself had declared in a prime-time address that Iran "have no anti-aircraft equipment, their radars 100 percent annihilated." The pilot was recovered quickly by a combat search-and-rescue package near the Persian Gulf coast. The weapon systems officer, a colonel, was not. He landed roughly 30 miles inland, in mountainous terrain crawling with IRGC forces and Basij militia, and he spent the next 50 hours bleeding, climbing, and hiding in a crevice on a 7,000-foot ridgeline in the Zagros Mountains while Iranian state television ran on-screen crawls urging citizens to shoot American personnel on sight and a regional governor posted a $60,000 bounty.
The rescue that followed was real, and the WSO was extracted alive on Easter Sunday by DEVGRU operators flown in on MH-6 Little Birds. The crash site isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is what happened 250 miles away, in southern Isfahan Province, where the United States military built and then destroyed a forward operating base at an abandoned agricultural airstrip 14 miles north of Shahreza, a location that open-source analysts immediately geolocated as sitting adjacent to Iran Air Force's 8th Tactical Fighter Base, within range of the Natanz nuclear facility, surrounded by IRGC missile installations, and, most importantly, close to the underground tunnel complex at Isfahan's nuclear facility where the International Atomic Energy Agency confirms that approximately 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent, enough material for roughly 10 nuclear warheads, remains entombed under rubble from the June 2025 strikes.
Two days before the F-15E was shot down, the Washington Post had published a detailed report by Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, Alex Horton, and Karen DeYoung revealing that Trump had personally requested a military plan to seize that uranium. The plan would require flying in excavation equipment, building a runway, and inserting hundreds of special operations forces for what could be a weeks-long operation at the Isfahan complex. On April 3rd, special operations forces were on the ground in Isfahan.
The Washington Post told you what was going to happen, and then it happened
The WaPo scoop ran on April 1st. Foreign Policy published its own analysis the same day, quoting Mick Mulroy, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East and retired CIA paramilitary operations officer, who said the seizure plan might require "every unit in JSOC" including Delta Force, DEVGRU, the entire 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, "and probably a pretty substantial conventional force to coordinate the area." He warned that Iran could "send mass formations at this issue" and that the force might find itself in "a pretty precarious situation." Richard Nephew, nuclear weapons expert at Columbia and former deputy special envoy for Iran, told Foreign Policy that "you can't just walk in and take the Isfahan stocks, they're in tunnels, the entrances of which are buried, so you'd have to dig them out, and you can't do that while under fire." Jonathan Schroden, chief research officer at CNA, said he didn't "know how you would recover that amount of radioactive material from the rubble of a facility that housed it in a matter of hours" and described it as a "much longer duration mission."
Two days later, the US military established a forward operating base in southern Isfahan Province with MC-130J Commando II transports, MH-6 Little Bird helicopters, specialized vehicles, and Delta Force operators securing the perimeter. Every single unit that Mulroy named as necessary for the uranium seizure plan, Delta, DEVGRU, 160th SOAR, was confirmed present at the Isfahan site during the Easter weekend operation. CIA Director John Ratcliffe told reporters at the White House briefing that the CIA had deployed "human assets and exquisite technologies that no other intelligence service in the world possesses" and emphasized that "covert means exactly that, I'm not going to be able to tell you everything that you want to know."
Al Jazeera reported that Isfahan is more than 480 kilometers inland from the nearest US naval ships. The crash site was 30 miles from the Gulf coast. The FOB was at Isfahan. Cheryl Rofer, former radiochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, warned that the uranium is most likely stored as hexafluoride gas that reacts with water to produce extremely toxic and corrosive chemicals, and that damaged cylinders during transport "could trigger the release of toxic chemicals, posing a radiological hazard to nearby personnel."
155 aircraft to rescue one man
Trump claimed at the White House briefing that the second rescue mission involved 155 aircraft: four bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refueling tankers, 13 rescue aircraft, and more. The Wall Street Journal reported that 21 aircraft were used to recover the first crew member, the pilot, from a location 30 miles from the coast. Nobody has explained what 155 aircraft were doing for one WSO in the Zagros Mountains when 21 had been sufficient for the first rescue in a more accessible location, or why the bulk of the destroyed equipment ended up in Isfahan rather than anywhere near Kohgiluyeh.
The equipment losses alone tell a story that doesn't fit a search-and-rescue mission. Two MC-130J Commando II transports destroyed on the ground at the Isfahan airstrip, officially because they got stuck in soft soil. Four MH-6 Little Bird helicopters destroyed. At least one MQ-9 Reaper drone. One A-10 Thunderbolt II shot down over the first rescue area, with the pilot ejecting over Kuwait. Two UH-60 Black Hawks damaged by ground fire. Robert Inlakesh at MintPress News estimated total equipment losses exceeding $300 million. The War Zone noted that satellite imagery of the Isfahan airstrip showed burned aircraft including Little Birds, and that the presence of those airframes pointed to 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment involvement, placing the mission "at a joint special operations task force level, not a conventional CSAR package." SOFREP's Guy McCardle, a 16-year Army veteran, wrote that the Little Birds were transported inside the MC-130s in pieces, reassembled on the ground in approximately 15 minutes, and then flown to the WSO's ridgeline location, a seven-minute flight. From Isfahan. 250 miles away from the crash site. Through Iranian airspace that was supposedly free of air defenses.
Trump's explanation for the geographic discrepancy was that the US "landed in seven different locations in order to distract the Iranian military" and that "a lot of it was subterfuge, we wanted to have them think he was in a different location." He did not explain why a distraction operation required building a runway, landing two C-130s full of specialized vehicles, and positioning Delta Force operators at a site adjacent to Iran's nuclear infrastructure.
Iran says it was "Tabas II"
Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei stated on April 6th that "the possibility that this was a deception operation to steal enriched uranium should not be ignored at all." The IRGC's Khatam al-Anbiya spokesman Ebrahim Zolfaghari claimed the operation "planned as a deception and escape mission at an abandoned airport in southern Isfahan under the pretext of recovering the pilot of a downed aircraft, was completely foiled." Iranian media branded the entire affair "Tabas II," invoking Operation Eagle Claw, the catastrophic 1980 hostage rescue attempt in the Iranian desert where eight Americans died and the hostages stayed in captivity.
PressTV published what it described as an exclusive intelligence-sourced account claiming that the first C-130 veered off the runway while landing, that the second C-130 carrying specialized vehicles and helicopters was targeted by Iranian forces "before it could land," and that "the White House situation room made a critical decision: the main operation to infiltrate the nuclear site was changed into a desperate rescue operation for the dozens of US commandos trapped under Iranian fire." PressTV also reported that an American officer's identification document was recovered from the site. These are Iranian state media claims, and PressTV has every incentive to portray the IRGC as having foiled an American nuclear raid rather than stumbling onto a search-and-rescue logistics base. Iran's top security official Ali Larijani claimed in early March that "several American soldiers have been taken prisoner," which CENTCOM denied.
But the geographic evidence that PressTV is pointing to is verifiable by anyone with Google Earth. Arash Reisinezhad, visiting assistant professor at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and visiting fellow at the London School of Economics Middle East Centre, posted a mapped analysis on X showing the two distinct operation locations and concluded that "this appears to have been a failed heliborne insertion aimed at locating uranium within Iran." TRT World, Middle East Eye, and Daily Sabah all ran the discrepancy as a serious analytical question rather than Iranian propaganda. The Spectator Australia published a piece called "The Isfahan Discrepancy" that found "no public evidence that fissile material was the actual objective" but argued the distinction may be "operationally irrelevant" because the operation gave US forces on-the-ground reconnaissance of terrain, air defenses, and Iranian response patterns around Isfahan regardless of the immediate mission.
Klippenstein called it before it happened
Ken Klippenstein, the independent journalist who has been the single best-sourced reporter on the covert side of this war, published "Trump Goes Commando" on March 30th, four days before the F-15E was shot down, reporting that military sources told him planning for "small raids onto Iranian soil has taken over as the favored outcome," and listing three options being presented to Trump: taking Kharg Island, an island raid in the Strait of Hormuz, and "most spooky and Maduro-like, a 'black' operation to seize Iran's nuclear materials." He predicted that the public would "only learn about it after the fact" and that "the cycle of disinformation and secrecy ensures that your only job is to discuss what happened after-the-fact, not whether it should have happened at all." His editor William Arkin, who has been reporting on the covert war since its first days, wrote that Trump would "inevitably fall in love with the next seductive briefing involving some slickly produced video that shows jumping and rappelling and shooting all coming together in a cinematic ending."
That is exactly what appears to have happened. Trump was briefed on the sexiest commando operation in American military history: send JSOC's best into the ruins of the nuclear facility he'd already bombed, dig up the uranium the Iranians couldn't use anymore, and bring it home as the ultimate trophy. The kind of plan that looks spectacular in a Pentagon briefing room with a high-production video showing operators rappelling into collapsed tunnels by torchlight. Richard Nephew at Columbia told Foreign Policy the tunnels are buried and you can't dig them out under fire. Mick Mulroy warned that the enemy gets a vote. Jason Campbell, former senior defense official, told Al Jazeera flatly: "I don't see any senior planning military officer pursuing this." Cheryl Rofer at Los Alamos said the uranium itself would poison anyone who mishandled it. And it would have given Trump the one thing he's wanted since this war started, a physical object he could hold up at a press conference and claim proved the whole thing was worth it, so none of those warnings mattered at all.
Trump ordered it anyway, because what Trump wanted was a movie.
From "Easter miracle" to "a whole civilization will die tonight"
Easter Sunday, April 5th. Trump posted to "Truth" Social at 8:03 AM: "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell. Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP." He skipped church. Later that day he celebrated the WSO's extraction as "one of the most challenging and complex missions in the history of U.S. special operations," called it an "Easter miracle," and held a White House press conference on April 6th where he extended his Strait of Hormuz deadline for the fourth time and described a four-hour plan for "complete demolition" of every bridge and power plant in Iran.
Forty-eight hours later, Trump posted: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again."
Consider what that shift looks like if Isfahan went the way the briefing said it would.
If Donald Trump seized 440 kilograms of Iranian uranium he would not threaten to exterminate their civilization. He would hold a press conference and put the canisters on a table next to the American flag and declare total victory and everyone applauds and the war is over and he's a genius.
Instead, his operators got stuck in the mud and had to burn $300 million worth of aircraft to keep them out of Iranian hands, the uranium stayed underground, and by Tuesday morning the only leverage he had left was the threat of killing everyone. Piers Morgan called the April 7th post "a brazen pre-admission of genocide." Alex Jones called it "a war crime." The Intercept ran a headline reading "With Trump Threatening a Genocide, Military Must Disobey His Orders." Ninety minutes before his own deadline, Pakistan brokered a ceasefire that gave Iran everything it asked for, and Trump, who had spent the morning threatening to exterminate a 7,000-year-old civilization, was posting about the "Golden Age of the Middle East!!!" by midnight.
As we wrote in The Most Embarrassing Military and Diplomatic Defeat in US History, both sides claimed victory. Only one side was celebrating in the streets.
The hero story
The corporate media ran the rescue exactly the way the White House wanted them to. The Intercept reported that the administration held "widely attended background briefing calls for large groups of reporters," which explains why CBS, the AP, and Axios all used the identical phrase "needle in a haystack," sourced to a "senior administration official" who told them: "This was the ultimate needle in a haystack but in this case it was a brave American soul inside a mountain crevice, invisible but for CIA's capabilities." CBS called it "a herculean U.S. government effort." The AP called it "a daring rescue." Multiple outlets reported that the airman radioed "God is good" just ahead of Easter Sunday, which The Intercept noted was "a plot point that would make even devotees of the show '24' groan." Not one of the outlets that ran the breathless tick-tock narrative connected the Isfahan FOB to the Washington Post's own reporting from 48 hours earlier about the uranium seizure plan that would require building a runway and inserting hundreds of operators at the Isfahan complex. The WaPo itself, the paper that broke the story, ran its rescue coverage as a separate hero narrative.
The WSO was real. His 50 hours in the Zagros Mountains were real. The rescue was real and it was genuinely extraordinary by any measure, because a colonel spent two days bleeding on a cliff face in enemy territory and the people who came for him did not leave without him. None of that changes the fact that 250 miles away, at a site that the IAEA, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera, and the president's own public statements all identified as the location of Iran's last remaining nuclear leverage, the United States military built an airstrip, flew in assault-grade equipment, positioned its most elite special operations forces, and then burned everything to the ground and left.
The last time the United States landed aircraft on a makeshift strip inside Iran and destroyed them on the ground was Desert One in April 1980. Eight Americans died that night. The hostages stayed in captivity for 269 more days. Forty-six years later, the C-130s got stuck in the mud again, the uranium stayed in the tunnels, the Pentagon burned $300 million in equipment to keep it out of Iranian hands, and the president of the United States went home and threatened to kill everyone in the country because the movie didn't end the way the briefing said it would.
— dingo__dog