WI: 1979 US Eagle Claw worked

[CalBear]

The original planning assumed at least three hostage would be killed by Blue on Blue fire. The expectation was that several of the Agency employees and/or a number of the military hostages would go for weapons in an attempt to help and would in turn get smoked by the entry team who was under orders to kill anyone with a weapon (there wasn't going to be time to do much target identification).

It is way more likely that the initial hostage loss would be from 5-10, with most of the rest getting killed during the extraction effort.The plan was, to be kind, somewhat weak on finding the door.

Back then, hostage rescue training and doctrine was a fairly undeveloped field. I'm fairly certain at least one hostage would've been killed in the inevitable shootout.

Still, a mostly successful rescue might've done favors for Carter and his approval rating.

 

[Riain]

Apparently there was a computer programme available at the time that could create a virtual tour of buildings. A team would film the rooms etc, and input a blueprint of the building into the programme and as a result the programme could make a virtual tour of the building from any entry point. It was proposed to build a database of buildings such as emabassies so in an emergency teams could familairise themselves with the buildings layout, ingress and escape routes and the like. There was a proposal to do the Iranian embassy as one of the first buildings to go into the database. But in one of those bizarre political decision Americans make it was vetoed as provocative, or lacking trust or some other bullshit that gets in the way of blindingly obvious prudence. A virtual tour would have made Delta's assault so much easier, but it is typical of the sort of muddle that exsists that such an advantage wasn't available to Delta.

 

[Atreus]

The original planning assumed at least three hostage would be killed by Blue on Blue fire. The expectation was that several of the Agency employees and/or a number of the military hostages would go for weapons in an attempt to help and would in turn get smoked by the entry team who was under orders to kill anyone with a weapon (there wasn't going to be time to do much target identification).

It is way more likely that the initial hostage loss would be from 5-10, with most of the rest getting killed during the extraction effort.The plan was, to be kind, somewhat weak on finding the door.

To be fair, this isn't exactly unusual for the time; most hostage rescue attempts ended in the deaths of at least one of the hostages. 3 I think at Entebbe; one during the Iranian embassy raid. But still, it's a different question if multiple hostages come back in body bags than it is if (almost) all make it out alive.

 

[Riain]

With the threats being received at the time I think that having a few hostages killed in a rescue attempt would be seen as better than having them all killed by the Iranians. Indeed the deaths would be blamed on the Iranians and used afterwards as justification for the rescue and any reprisals afterwards.

 

[TheMann]

With the threats being received at the time I think that having a few hostages killed in a rescue attempt would be seen as better than having them all killed by the Iranians. Indeed the deaths would be blamed on the Iranians and used afterwards as justification for the rescue and any reprisals afterwards.

Yeah, even Carter would probably do things that way, I'd imagine.

 

[John Farson]

The operation was dead from the start.

It involved setting up a base on a major Iranian highway, in a nation already at war and therefore especially alert, in full view of Iranian radar, somehow hoping that the Iranians would never connect the radar reports, the battle in Tehran, the mysterious disappearance of every vehicle on the highway that came in the vicinity of the radar reflections...


Neither was Carter going to win a second term, least of all under terms remotely resembling 1976. That was the year that the Republican Party was crippled by Watergate, by the perception of Ford's ineptness and a major recession yet Carter came within 30,000 votes(Ohio and Hawaii) of losing. One rescue operation was not going to save him from widespread disgust with his administration, least of all in most of the southern states.



TheMann, except Carter and Admiral Turner had already gone far out of the war to offend the Israelis(and the British) so expecting them to suddenly go begging Begin for help doesn't seem very likely.

Actually, although it might not look like it, quite a few of the states that went for Reagan in 1980 were very close. Many of these were southern states such as Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi and the Carolinas. Massachusetts, New York, Delaware and Maine were also close. Remember, in 1976 Carter swept the South (except for Virginia), and I think these close margins were a residual effect from that (lots of southerners voting for a fellow southerner and all that, though the black vote helped too, I'm sure). I'm not saying that Carter would win by a landslide, and my map shows this. I am saying that a successful hostage rescue (leaving aside whether such a rescue would've been possible) would undoubtably boost Carter's ratings. Not the same level like a 9/11 type event would, but it would be quite a significant boost. Reagan would undoubtably whittle it down by Election Day, but the boost would last just long enough for Carter to eke out a win. Also, with a successful rescue the whole campaign is altered. It would be a different presidential campaign from the one we know.

And just to clarify things, a situation where there was no hostage crisis in the first place wouldn't get Carter re-elected, IMHO. Though it would be closer, Reagan would still win by using the economy. A campaign where the rescue has succeeded, however, would produce a rally-around-the-flag effect and a boost for Carter. Everybody would be going all "Yay! We beat the f***in towelheads! USA! USA!"

 

[Berra]

I'm not so sure about the risk of large scale fire fights in downtown Teheran. I'm under the impression it was pretty chaotic. Ross Perots rescue op was a local kid who went into a prison and opened a door IIRC.

 

[Dave Howery]

interestingly, this scenario was my first exposure to alternate history, way back in the day. One of those mini-game companies put out a hurried (and cheap) little board game about 'WI the attempt to rescue the hostages had gone all the way to Tehran'. This came out while the hostage crisis was barely over with and fresh in American's minds, so I doubt the game was a success... who'd play the Iranians? I bought it and solo gamed it, and found it more fun to ignore the hostages and victory conditions, and mercilessly gun down the Iranian students...

 

[Grimm Reaper]

Dave just had to think of the Iranian students as Canadians...

 

[Orville_third]

interestingly, this scenario was my first exposure to alternate history, way back in the day. One of those mini-game companies put out a hurried (and cheap) little board game about 'WI the attempt to rescue the hostages had gone all the way to Tehran'. This came out while the hostage crisis was barely over with and fresh in American's minds, so I doubt the game was a success... who'd play the Iranians? I bought it and solo gamed it, and found it more fun to ignore the hostages and victory conditions, and mercilessly gun down the Iranian students...

The game in question was "Raid on Iran" made by the Austin, Texas company "Metagaming", which (after going bankrupt) reemerged as Steve Jackson Games.