The Dvoranchiks were kind. They were trying to take her mind off her worries.
"What did you do today?" Toni asked.
"I went shopping," Liz said.
"Did you buy anything?"
"Yes." Liz started to cry. "I bought a black dress. Because Jay isn't coming home."
During those days of waiting, Jay Coburn learned a good deal about Simons.
One day Merv Stauffer called from Dallas to say that Simons's son Harry had been on the phone, worried. Harry had called his father's house and spoken to Paul Walker, who was minding the farm. Walker had said he did not know where Simons was, and had advised Harry to call Merv Stauffer at EDS. Harry was naturally worried, Stauffer said. Simons called Harry from Tehran and reassured him.
Simons told Coburn that Harry had had some problems, but he was a good boy at heart. He spoke of his son with a kind of resigned affection. (He never mentioned Bruce, and it was not until much later that Coburn realized Simons had two sons.)
Simons talked a lot about his late wife, Lucille, and how happy the two of them had been after Simons retired. They had been very close during the last few years, Coburn gathered, and Simons seemed to regret that it had taken him so long to realize how much he loved her. "Hold on to your mate," he advised Coburn. "She's the most important person in your life."
Paradoxically, Simons's advice had the opposite effect on Coburn. He envied the companionship Simons and Lucille had had, and he wanted that for himself; but he was so sure he could never achieve it with Liz that he wondered if someone else would be his true soul mate.
One evening Simons laughed and said: "You know, I wouldn't do this for anyone else."
It was a characteristically cryptic Simons remark. Sometimes, Coburn had learned, you got an explanation; sometimes you did not. This time Coburn got an explanation: Simons told him why he felt indebted to Ross Perot.
The aftermath of the Son Tay Raid had been a bitter experience for Simons. Although the Raiders had not brought back any American POWs, it had been a brave try, and Simons expected the American public to see it that way. Indeed, he had argued, at a breakfast meeting with Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, in favor of releasing the news of the raid to the press. "This is a perfectly legitimate operation," he had told Laird. "These are American prisoners. This is something Americans traditionally do for Americans. For Christ's sake, what is it we're afraid of here?"
He soon found out. The press and public saw the raid as a failure and yet another intelligence foul-up. The banner headline on the front page of the next day's Washington Post read: U.S. RAID TO RESCUE POWS FAILS. When Senator Robert Dole introduced a resolution praising the raid and said: "Some of these men have been languishing in prison for five years," Senator Kennedy replied: "And they're still there!"
Simons went to the White House to receive the Distinguished Service Cross for "extraordinary heroism" from President Nixon. The rest of the Raiders were to be decorated by Defense Secretary Laird. Simons was enraged to learn that over half of his men were to get nothing more than the Army Commendation Ribbon, only slightly better than a Good Conduct Ribbon, and known to soldiers as a "Green Weenie." Mad as hell, he picked up the phone and asked for the Army Chief of Staff, General Westmoreland. He got the Acting Chief, General Palmer. Simons told Palmer about the Green Weenies and said: "General, I don't want to embarrass the army, but one of my men is just likely to shove an Army Commendation Ribbon up Mr. Laird's ass." He got his way: Laird awarded four Distinguished Service Crosses, fifty Silver Stars, and no Green Weenies.
The POWs got a huge morale boost from the Son Tay Raid (which they heard about from incoming prisoners). An important side effect of the raid was that the POW camps--where many prisoners had been kept permanently in solitary confinement--were closed, and all the Americans were brought into two large prisons where there was not enough room to keep them apart. Nevertheless, the world branded the raid a failure, and Simons felt a grave injustice had been done to his men.
The disappointment rankled with him for years--until, one weekend, Ross Perot threw a mammoth party in San Francisco, persuaded the army to round up the Son Tay Raiders from all over the world, and introduced them to the prisoners they had tried to rescue. That weekend, Simons felt, his Raiders had at last got the thanks they deserved. And Ross Perot had been responsible.
"That's why I'm here," Simons told Coburn. "Sure as hell, I wouldn't do this for anyone else."
Coburn, thinking of his son Scott, knew exactly what Simons meant.
4___
On January 22 hundreds of homafars--young air force officers--mutinied at bases in Dezful, Hamadan, Isfahan, and Mashad, and declared themselves loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini.
The significance of the event was not apparent to National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who still expected the Iranian military to crush the Islamic revolution; nor to Premier Shahpour Bakhtiar, who was talking about meeting the revolutionary challenge with a minimum of force; nor to the Shah, who instead of going to the United States was hanging on in Egypt, waiting to be summoned back to save his country in its hour of need.
Among the people who did see its significance were Ambassador William Sullivan and General Abbas Gharabaghi, the Iranian Chief of Staff.
Sullivan told Washington that the idea of a pro-Shah countercoup was moonshine; the revolution was going to succeed and the U.S. had better start thinking about how it would live with the new order. He received a harsh reply from the White House suggesting that he was disloyal to the President. He decided to resign, but his wife talked him out of it: he had a responsibility to the thousands of Americans still in Iran, she pointed out, and he could hardly walk out on them now.
General Gharabaghi also contemplated resigning. He was in an impossible position. He had sworn his oath of loyalty, not to the Parliament or the government of Iran, but to the Shah personally; and the Shah was gone. For the time being Gharabaghi took the view that the military owed loyalty to the Constitution of 1906, but that meant little in practice. Theoretically the military ought to support the Bakhtiar government. Gharabaghi had been wondering for some weeks whether he could rely on his soldiers to follow orders and fight for Bakhtiar against the revolutionary forces. The revolt of the homafars showed that he could not. He realized--as Brzezinski did not--that an army was not a machine to be switched on and off at will, but a collection of people, sharing the aspirations, the anger, and the revivalist religion of the rest of the country. The soldiers wanted a revolution as much as the civilians. Gharabaghi concluded that he could no longer control his troops, and he decided to resign.
On the day that he announced his intention to his fellow generals, Ambassador William Sullivan was summoned to Prime Minister Bakhtiar's office at six o'clock in the evening. Sullivan had heard, from U.S. General "Dutch" Huyser, of Gharabaghi's intended resignation, and he assumed that this was what Bakhtiar wanted to talk about.
Bakhtiar waved Sullivan to a seat, saying with an enigmatic smile: "Nous serons trois." There will be three of us. Bakhtiar always spoke French with Sullivan.
A few minutes later General Gharabaghi walked in. Bakhtiar spoke of the difficulties that would be created if the general were to resign. Gharabaghi began to reply in Farsi, but Bakhtiar made him speak French. As the general talked, he toyed with what seemed to be an envelope in his pocket: Sullivan guessed it was his letter of resignation.
As the two Iranians argued in French, Bakhtiar kept turning to the American Ambassador for support. Sullivan secretly thought Gharabaghi was absolutely right to resign, but his orders from the White House were to encourage the military to support Bakhtiar, so he doggedly argued, against his own convictions, that Gharabaghi should not resign. After a discussion of half an hour, the general left without delivering his letter of resignation. Bakhtiar thanked Sullivan profusely for his help. Sullivan knew it would do no good.
On January 24 Bakhtiar closed Tehran's airport to stop Khomeini from entering Iran. It was like o
pening an umbrella against a tidal wave. On January 26 soldiers killed fifteen pro-Khomeini protestors in street fighting in Tehran. Two days later Bakhtiar offered to go to Paris for talks with the Ayatollah. For a ruling Prime Minister to offer to visit an exiled rebel was a fantastic admission of weakness, and Khomeini saw it that way: he refused to talk unless Bakhtiar first resigned. On January 29, thirty-five people died in the fighting in Tehran and another fifty in the rest of the country. Gharabaghi, bypassing his Prime Minister, began talks with the rebels in Tehran, and gave his consent to the return of the Ayatollah. On January 30 Sullivan ordered the evacuation of all nonessential Embassy personnel and all dependents. On February 1 Khomeini came home.
His Air France jumbo jet landed at 9:15 A.M. Two million Iranians turned out to greet him. At the airport the Ayatollah made his first public statement. "I beg God to cut off the hands of all evil foreigners and all their helpers."
Simons saw it all on TV; then he said to Coburn: "That's it. The people are going to do it for us. The mob will take that jail."
Nine
1_____
At midday on February 5 John Howell was on the point of getting Paul and Bill out of jail.
Dadgar had said that he would accept bail in one of three forms: cash, a bank guarantee, or a lien on property. Cash was out of the question. First, anyone who flew into the lawless city of Tehran with $12,750,000 in a suitcase might never reach Dadgar's office alive. Second, Dadgar might take the money and still keep Paul and Bill, either by raising the bail or by rearresting them on some new pretext. (Tom Walter suggested using counterfeit money, but nobody knew where to get it.) There had to be a document that gave Dadgar the money and at the same time gave Paul and Bill their freedom. In Dallas Tom Walter had at last found a bank willing to issue a letter of credit for the bail, but Howell and Taylor were having trouble finding an Iranian bank to accept it and issue the guarantee Dadgar required. Meanwhile, Howell's boss Tom Luce thought about the third option, a lien on property, and came up with a wild and wacky idea that just might work: pledging the U.S. Embassy in Tehran as bail for Paul and Bill.
The State Department was by now loosening up, but was not quite ready to pledge its Tehran embassy as bail. However, it was ready to give the guarantee of the United States government. That in itself was unique: the U.S.A. standing bail for two jailed men!
First, Tom Walter in Dallas got a bank to issue a letter of credit in favor of the State Department for $12,750,000. Because this transaction took place entirely within the U.S., it was accomplished in hours rather than days. Once the State Department in Washington had the letter, Minister Counselor Charles Naas--Ambassador Sullivan's deputy--would deliver a diplomatic note saying that Paul and Bill, once released, would make themselves available to Dadgar for questioning; otherwise, the bail would be paid by the Embassy.
Right now Dadgar was in a meeting with Lou Goelz, Consul General at the Embassy. Howell had not been invited to attend, but Abolhasan was there for EDS.
Howell had had a preliminary meeting with Goelz yesterday. Together they had gone over the terms of the guarantee, with Goelz reading the phrases in his quiet, precise voice. Goelz was changing. Two months ago Howell had found him maddeningly correct: it was Goelz who had refused to give back Paul's and Bill's passports without telling the Iranians. Now Goelz seemed ready to try the unconventional. Perhaps living in the middle of a revolution had made the old boy unbend a little.
Goelz had told Howell that the decision to release Paul and Bill would be made by Prime Minister Bakhtiar, but it must first be cleared with Dadgar. Howell was hoping Dadgar would not make trouble, for Goelz was not the type of man to bang the table and force Dadgar to back down.
There was a tap at the door and Abolhasan walked in.
Howell could tell from his face that he brought bad news.
"What happened?"
"He turned us down," Abolhasan said.
"Why?"
"He won't accept the guarantee of the United States government."
"Did he give a reason?"
"There's nothing in the law that says he can accept that as bail. He has to have cash, a bank guarantee--"
"Or a lien on property, I know." Howell felt numb. There had been so many disappointments, so many dead ends, he was no longer capable of resentment or anger. "Did you say anything about the Prime Minister?"
"Yes. Goelz told him we would take this proposal to Bakhtiar."
"What did Dadgar say to that?"
"He said it was typical of the Americans. They try to resolve things by bringing influence to bear at high levels, with no concern for what is happening at lower levels. He also said that if his superiors did not like the way he was handling this case, they could take him off it, and he would be very happy, because he was weary of it."
Howell frowned. What did all this mean? He had recently concluded that what the Iranians really wanted was the money. Now they had flatly turned it down. Was this genuinely because of the technical problem that the law did not specify a government guarantee as an acceptable form of bail--or was that an excuse? Perhaps it was genuine. The EDS case had always been politically sensitive, and now that the Ayatollah had returned, Dadgar might well be terrified of doing anything that could be construed as pro-American. Bending the rules to accept an unconventional form of bail might get him into trouble. What would happen if Howell succeeded in putting up bail in the legally required form? Would Dadgar then feel he had covered his rear, and release Paul and Bill? Or would he invent another excuse?
There was only one way to find out.
The week the Ayatollah returned to Iran, Paul and Bill asked for a priest.
Paul's cold seemed to have turned to bronchitis. He had asked for the prison doctor. The doctor did not speak English, but Paul had no trouble explaining his problem: he coughed, and the doctor nodded.
Paul was given some pills that he assumed were penicillin, and a bottle of cough medicine. The taste of the medicine was strikingly familiar, and he had a sudden, vivid flashback: he saw himself as a little boy, and his mother pouring the glutinous syrup from an old-fashioned bottle onto a spoon and dosing him with it. This was exactly the same stuff. It eased his cough, but he had already done some damage to the muscles in his chest, and he suffered a sharp pain every time he breathed deeply.
He had a letter from Ruthie that he read and reread. It was an ordinary, newsy kind of letter. Karen was in a new school, and having some trouble adjusting. This was normal: every time she changed schools, Karen would be sick to her stomach for the first couple of days. Ann Marie, Paul's younger daughter, was much more happy-go-lucky. Ruthie was still telling her mother that Paul would be home in a couple of weeks, but the story was becoming implausible, for that two-week deadline had now been stretched for two months. She was buying a house, and Tom Walter was helping her with the legal processes. Whatever emotions Ruthie was going through, she did not put them in the letter.
Keane Taylor was the most frequent visitor to the jail. Each time he came, he would hand Paul a pack of cigarettes with fifty or a hundred dollars folded inside. Paul and Bill could use the money in jail to buy special privileges, such as a bath. During one visit the guard left the room for a moment, and Taylor handed over four thousand dollars.
On another visit Taylor brought Father Williams.
Williams was pastor of the Catholic Mission where, in happier times, Paul and Bill had met with the EDS Tehran Roman Catholic Sunday Brunch Poker School. Williams was eighty years old, and his superiors had given him permission to leave Tehran, because of the danger. He had preferred to stay at his post. This kind of thing was not new to him, he told Paul and Bill: he had been a missionary in China during World War II, when the Japanese had invaded, and later, during the revolution that brought Mao Tse-tung to power. He himself had been imprisoned, so he understood what Paul and Bill were going through.
Father Williams boosted their morale almost as much as Ross Perot had. Bill, who was more d
evout than Paul, felt deeply strengthened by the visit. It gave him the courage to face the unknown future. Father Williams granted them absolution for their sins before he left. Bill still did not know whether he would get out of the jail alive, but now he felt prepared to face death.
Iran exploded into revolution on Friday, February 9, 1979.
In just over a week Khomeini had destroyed what was left of legitimate government. He had called on the military to mutiny and the members of Parliament to resign. He had appointed a "provisional government" despite the fact that Bakhtiar was still officially Prime Minister. His supporters, organized into revolutionary committees, had taken over responsibility for law and order and garbage collection, and had opened more than a hundred Islamic cooperative stores in Tehran. On February 8 a million people or more marched through the city in support of the Ayatollah. Street fighting went on continually between stray units of loyalist soldiers and gangs of Khomeini men.
On February 9, at two Tehran air bases--Doshen Toppeh and Farahabad--formations of homafars and cadets gave a salute to Khomeini. This infuriated the Javadan Brigade, which had been the Shah's personal bodyguard, and they attacked both air bases. The homafars barricaded themselves in and repelled the loyalist troops, helped by crowds of armed revolutionaries milling around inside and outside the bases.
Units of both the Marxist Fedayeen and the Muslim Mujahedeen guerrillas rushed to Doshen Toppeh. The armory was broken open and weapons were distributed indiscriminately to soldiers, guerrillas, revolutionaries, demonstrators, and passersby.
That night at eleven o'clock the Javadan Brigade returned in force. Khomeini supporters within the military warned the Doshen Toppeh rebels that the Brigade was on its way, and the rebels counterattacked before the Brigade reached the base. Several senior officers among the loyalists were killed early in the battle. The fighting continued all night, and spread to a large area around the base.