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The second puzzling question posed by the mission was why the rescue force did not push on to Tehran despite the loss of three helicopters. That still left five out of the original force of eight, and the Pentagon felt that it needed only four to pluck the hostages out of the embassy. But the planners feared they might lose two or more helicopters during the rescue attempt and dip below the minimum. Why not start out with more than eight choppers? The more aircraft in the air, the Pentagon argues, the higher the risk of their being spotted and the greater the chance that some would be forced down. On this point the Pentagon was strongly supported by Shimon Peres, who was Israel's Minister of Defense during the successful Entebbe raid in 1976. Peres told TIME: "On an operation like this, one must be satisfied with the minimum of equipment. If you have too much, you blow the whole thing." Nor could the Nimitz dispatch more helicopters to help out when the three were disabled. There had been only eight on board. Had there been more, the force in the desert would have had to wait the whole night for their arrival, an unacceptable risk.
When the mission was over, Iran's leaders attacked the U.S. with rhetoric but refrained from taking any reprisals against the hostages. Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh sounded threatening enough. Said he: "The U.S. has committed an act of war. We will make the appropriate response."
But, for the moment at least, Khomeini indirectly lowered the likelihood that the hostages would be harmed. "Carter is prepared to resort to any crime and inflame the entire world," the Ayatullah railed. "Carter has reduced his political prestige to zero. He must give up the hope of re-election." Khomeini implied that only if the U.S. tried another such rescue mission would the hostages be punished. Said he: "I warn Carter that should he resort to such foolish things, then it would be impossible for us and the government to control these Muslim, combative and heroic youth who are guarding the spies in the spy nest, that he would be responsible for their lives."
On Saturday the militants took new steps to make sure that no second rescue mission could work any better than had the ill-starred first attempt. They announced that the hostages were being taken out of the compound and sent individually to widely scattered—and undisclosed—new sites.
The wounded Americans were treated at West Germany's Ramstein Air Base, then flown back to the U.S. Following in due course, said President Abolhassan Banisadr, would be the bodies of the eight American servicemen, five from the Air Force and three from the Marine Corps.