He Fell From an F-15 With a Shredded Parachute, Broke His Back and Climbed a 7,000-Foot Ridge. 60 Minutes Just Aired the Declassified Video of His Rescue.

The infrared footage is grainy and silent. Two Air Force pararescuers move up a ridgeline in the dark, reach a figure lying on the rock, and half-carry him toward a waiting helicopter. The man they are carrying has a broken back, a broken arm and a broken shoulder. He has been alone in the mountains south of Isfahan, Iran, for roughly 50 hours. His first words to the men who found him, he says, were "Let's go."

That video, newly declassified and obtained first by CBS News, anchored the season premiere of "60 Minutes" on Sunday night, along with the first interview given by the officer at its center. He is identified only by his call sign, "Bravo," for security reasons. He was the weapons systems officer in the back seat of an F-15E Strike Eagle, mission call sign Dude 44, when a shoulder-fired Iranian missile hit the jet on April 2 during a strike on industrial facilities tied to Iran's drone and missile program. The pilot, "Alpha," ejected cleanly. Bravo did not. The missile had damaged his parachute, and he told correspondent Norah O'Donnell he fell to the ground at somewhere between 70 and 100 miles an hour. "At one point when I looked up and saw no parachute, that was the most terrifying thing I've ever seen," he said.

The two men landed about five miles apart, with Iranian forces hunting them and bounties on their heads. Alpha was recovered first, in a daylight raid launched within hours of the shootdown; CBS reported the extraction required 21 aircraft. "Anytime you go behind enemy lines in daylight, it's gonna be dicey," Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the program. "But given the threat to 44 Alpha, the decision was taken to boldly go behind enemy lines in daylight to make sure that we could get to him before anybody else could." Bravo was harder to reach. Despite his injuries, he climbed to a ridgeline 7,000 feet above sea level with little more than a pistol, a radio and a tracking beacon, and sent a message home: "God is good." At one point, armed Iranian ground forces came within a few hundred meters of his position.

The operation that finally reached him at sunrise on Easter Sunday was, by the Pentagon's account, one of the largest personnel recoveries in decades. More than 90 U.S. service members went in on the ground, the first American boots inside Iran in 46 years, with several hundred more in the air and several thousand in support roles. Two large search-and-rescue planes landed on a makeshift desert airstrip while "Little Bird" helicopters worked the ridgeline and American bombers and drones struck nearby Revolutionary Guard positions. The CIA ran a deception campaign to draw Iranian attention elsewhere. When the rescue planes' landing gear bogged down in the sand, the crews destroyed both aircraft, each valued at roughly $100 million, along with the Little Birds, rather than leave the technology behind. Bravo called the outcome "a modern-day miracle." "It's a story of the teamwork, the training, of the faith, of the decisions and the leadership," he said.

The broadcast arrived under a cloud of its own. On Saturday, CNN reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and political appointees in his office had pushed for both crewmen to sit for the interview, and that both initially had reservations, with one raising the prospect that he could be ordered to participate. Uniformed officials, according to CNN's sources, worried that the segment could expose classified details of a rescue conducted while U.S. forces are still fighting Iran, and Caine himself shared some of those concerns before agreeing to take part. After hearing the airmen out, Hegseth met with them privately and asked whether they wanted to do it. Bravo said yes; Alpha declined. Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell called CNN's account "a complete lie." "The decision to participate in the interview was each pilot's alone, because it is their story," he said, adding that the department "took great care to ensure operational security, sources, and methods were protected."

CNN also described a monthslong campaign by CBS to land the interview, with editor in chief Bari Weiss personally lobbying Hegseth for exclusive access and the network's new "60 Minutes" leadership, under pressure after a summer of firings, treating the story as the centerpiece of its Sept. 13 season premiere. The sit-down was taped in mid-August. Whatever the politics of how it reached the air, the footage itself is now public, and it shows two pararescuers on a mountain in Iran picking up a man who had every reason to believe no one was coming, and taking him home.