– E –
EAGLE CLAW (OPERATION). Operation Eagle Claw was a military
operation to rescue the American hostages from the U.S. Embassy in
Tehran, Iran, on 24 April 1980. Planned as Operation Rice Bowl, the
covert actionwas designed as a complex two-night mission with a
small staging site established inside Iran, called Desert One, that pro-
vided a base for the transport planes and helicopters for the actual res-
cue operation. The plan called for using helicopters to evacuate the
hostages, who would then be brought to an air base outside of Tehran
and flown out of the country. The role of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) was primarily in support, as former Air Americaspe-
cialists provided logistics. In addition, the CIA’s paramilitary staff
furnished and installed navigational devices at Desert One.
The action aborted when a helicopter collided with an air force
plane at Desert One. Postmortem evaluations showed that the opera-
tion failed because the various services worked independently of
each other and did not coordinate their actions. As a result of this fail-
ure, the Pentagon established the U.S. Special Operations Command
(USSOCOM) in 1988 to overcome fragmentation and get the military
services to work closer together by inducing them to engage in joint
operations, an effort that was mandated by the Goldwater-Nichols
Act of 1986. The hostages were released after 444 days of captivity
on 20 January 1981, the day that President Jimmy Carterleft office.ECONOMIC ESPIONAGE ACT OF 1996. Signed by President
William J. Clintonon 11 October 1996, this amendment to the Na-
tional Security Act of 1947makes it a crime to wrongfully copy or
otherwise control trade secrets, if done with the intent either to bene-
fit a foreign government, instrumentality, or agent or to disadvantage
the rightful owner of the trade secret and for the purpose of benefiting
another person. Congress passed the law because economic espionage
conducted against the United States had become a national priority af-
ter the end of the Cold War, and various sectors of the American busi-
ness community believed the law regarding corporate trade secrets
was inadequate and did not address new economic realities. In study-
ing the matter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) found that
in the early 1990s, over 100 countries had financed operations to ac-62 • EAGLE CLAW (OPERATION)05-398 (2) Dictionary.qxd 10/20/05 6:27 AM Page 62