Reaper drones, hundreds of crack troops, two £100m aircraft obliterated and a furious firefight… GUY ADAMS on one of the most daring rescues in military history

The ‘highly respected colonel’ was taking a fearful step into the unknown as he unclasped his seatbelt and gingerly rose from the battered ejection seat.

Moments earlier, the U.S. Air Force’s senior weapons systems officer was in the cockpit of an F-15 Strike Eagle cruising at more than 1,500 miles per hour over southwestern Iran.

His plane then came under incoming fire, becoming the first US warplane to be shot down since the 2003 Gulf War.

As a result, he was left deep behind enemy lines somewhere on the outskirts of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province, a mountainous and sparsely populated hinterland more than 30 miles from the Persian Gulf.

It was Friday afternoon and this unfortunate man was completely alone.

His best friend was the pilot of the F-15, and he too had pulled the yellow ‘ejection’ lever that ejected the crashed plane’s crew from the roof of the cockpit. However, the pilot was relatively lucky: Since he landed in a lowland area some distance away, he was found and rescued by a helicopter crew within a few hours.

The weapons systems officer had been dealt a harsher hand. In addition to being further from civilization than his colleague, he was, as the White House later said, ‘seriously injured’. Surviving a fighter jet is a highly traumatic procedure and often results in bone fractures and serious spinal damage.

Even though he can still walk, he’s probably extremely sore and really shaken up. The training of the airman will come into play at this stage. The entire crew are experts in sere, a military acronym meaning ‘survival, evasion, resistance and escape’.

The plane was blown up after encountering problems in Iran, American officials said Sunday.

President Donald Trump said American soldiers were being hunted by enemy troops that were ‘getting closer and closer’.

After repairing himself using the medical kit inside his flight suit survival vest, his immediate priority was to get himself out of immediate danger.

This meant avoiding the area where spectators could see the ejection seat descending. The rule of thumb is then to head for the most secluded land nearby. In this example, it appears that it involves hiking up a high ridge towards one of the region’s snow-capped mountain peaks.

The airman’s survival vest contained a knife, water purification tablets, basic supplies and a Sig Sauer M18 pistol, as well as a compass and maps of previously planned escape routes during the mission briefing.

The most important was a small device known as the Combat Survivor Evasion Finder, or CSEL. This piece of kit, manufactured by Boeing and resembling a type of walkie-talkie, helps senior managers plan a rescue operation by sending short, encrypted updates to mission command with details about the location and condition of survivors, as well as simple messages such as “casualty” or “enemy nearby.”

The first communication from CSEL was received by US officials at noon Washington DC time, or 7:30 pm in Iran. After the initial ‘ping’, it remained silent for several hours to help protect the battery and prevent enemy intelligence forces from intercepting its messages.

By this stage, the US airman was at the center of a massive manhunt; Iranian officials were eager to stage a propaganda coup, offering a $60,000 reward for his capture, and the United States was anxious to avoid a public relations disaster such as a soldier falling into enemy hands.

On Saturday morning, Iranian state television broadcast footage of armed militias flocking to the mountains to claim rewards.

Donald Trump later stated: “This brave warrior was behind enemy lines in the treacherous mountains of Iran, hunted by our ever-closer enemies.”

The Iranian army had previously shared images showing the F-15E fighter jet being launched from the sky.

Picture: Seat ejected from F-15 fighter jet published in Iranian media

Luckily he had a good hiding place now. During the dark hours on Friday night, the weapons systems officer is thought to have climbed up to 7,000ft up the ridge before disguising himself at a remote location where he was confident he could evade capture when the sun rose again.

He then used another ‘ping’ to alert CSEL to mission control of his new location, believed to be above a village called Mahyar.

The US quickly dispatched a fleet of unmanned Reaper drones to patrol the skies in the region. Intelligence sources said yesterday that men of fighting age had been ‘liquidated’ within three miles of his location.

American A-10 Warthog fighter jets also flew a series of missions in the area to block roads and destroy communications towers and approaching vehicles. Iranian officials say at least four people were killed in various attacks. Back at mission command, senior officials spent Saturday crafting a bold rescue plan that would be overseen from the White House situation room.

But first, Iranian officials had to do everything possible to distance themselves from the incident.

According to multiple news outlets in the US, CIA assets conducted a ‘deception campaign’ in Iran, spreading false rumors that he had already been located and suggesting they had transported him to the ground to ‘infiltrate’ his hideout in a different region.

It is unclear whether this was successful in creating confusion. For now, there are still a lot of fine details about how exactly the actual rescue operation took place.

But early signs point to the involvement of hundreds of the U.S. military’s most formidable soldiers, 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 daring rescue mission

Smoke rises over two planes that America decided to destroy in Iran after they got stuck at an enemy air base

They appear to have been ‘positioned’ near the rescue site via MH-6 Little Bird helicopters belonging to the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the ‘Night Hunters’, which carried out the daring raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.

As the mission approached the airman’s location, the CSEL switched modes, allowing companions to lock onto his exact location. At around 4 a.m., explosions were seen in the night sky around the city of Dehdasht on the far side of the mountain range.

In the images claimed to have been shot there around this time, roads were seen closed due to traffic. There is speculation (as yet unconfirmed) that locals in the area, many of whom are hostile to Iranian authorities, are trying to prevent troops from ascending to the mountains.

Despite overwhelming firepower, the US landing did not go entirely as planned. Shortly after dawn, small arms fire appears to have opened near the airman’s hiding place, when in theory a well-planned rescue operation should have already been completed.

‘The fire brigade came out. This happened in broad daylight,” Al Jazeera reported. ‘Usually special operations troops would go into a rescue operation like this and try to extract someone very quickly in the dark. We were told this went on for hours.’

According to unconfirmed local sources, three Iranian revolutionary guards were killed. There were also problems on the ground for U.S. forces at an abandoned airfield at the far end of Mahyar, about 30 miles southeast of the city of Isfahan.

The location appears to have been set up overnight as a sort of forward base that would be used to assist with logistics, refueling, and troop extraction once the missing airman was located.

Unfortunately, it appears that two transport planes that landed in the area got stuck in the mud. The huge C-130 Hercules aircraft, probably worth £100 million each, were effectively rendered unusable; This meant that three more aircraft had to be scrambled to the scene to remove all troops involved.

It took several hours for backups to arrive, during which the rescue team and the airman waited uneasily at the airport.

In high-risk military operations, such last-minute developments can lead to disaster, as in the Iran hostage crisis of 1980, when a daring rescue mission called Operation Eagle Claw to extract diplomats held at the US embassy in Tehran had to be abandoned.

Iranian Basij members had only one pair of American underpants to show off at the rescue site

During this operation, a sandstorm damaged many helicopters and caused a fatal crash at a makeshift airfield outside Iran’s capital that US troops planned to use for a raid. The fallout from the public relations disaster led to President Jimmy Carter’s defeat in that year’s election.

While it had some similarities with the 1980 raid, President Trump’s Iran rescue mission had a luckier outcome: Three new planes were able to do their job, and all troops withdrew from the scene without sustaining any U.S. casualties.

To prevent them from falling into enemy hands, the stricken aircraft was blown up together with a helicopter whose engine had failed. They remained at the scene. Film of the smoking wreckage oddly allowed Iranian officials to portray the whole thing as a disaster for the United States.

Images taken yesterday morning tell a different story. It shows one of the Hercules planes disappearing on a mountaintop towards Kuwait, where the airman at the center of one of the most daring rescue operations in military history was receiving medical treatment last night.