Follett, Ken - On Wings of Eagles.txt
Page 2
over.
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 17
Coburn had tried to persuade Liz to take the kids back to the States, not
just for their safety, but because the time might come when he would have
to evacuate some 350 people all at once, and he would need to give that job
his complete undivided attention, without being distracted by private
anxiety for his own family. Liz had refused to go.
He sighed when he thought of Liz. She was funny and feisty and everyone
enjoyed her company, but she was not a good corporate wife. EDS demanded a
lot from its executives: if you needed to work all night to get the job
done, you worked all night. Liz resented that. Back in the Stite~, working
as a recruiter, Coburn had often been away from home Monday to Friday,
traveling all over the country, and she had hated it. She was happy in
Tehran because he was home every night. If he was going to stay here, she
said, so was she. The children liked it here, too. It was the first time
they had lived outside the United States, and they were intrigued by the
different language and culture of Iran. Kim, the eldest at eleven, was too
full of confidence to get worried. Kristi, the eight-year-old, was somewhat
anxious, but then she was the emotional one, always the quickest to
overreact. Both Scott, seven, and Kelly, the baby at four, were too young
to comprehend the danger. ,
So they stayed, like everyone else, and waited for things to get better--or
worse.
Coburn's thoughts were interrupted by a tap at the door, and Majid walked
in. A short, stocky man of about fifty with a luxuriant mustache, he had
once been wealthy: his tribe had owned a great deal of land and had lost it
in the land reform of the sixties. Now he worked for Coburn as an
administrative assistant, dealing with the Iranian bureaucracy. He spoke
fluent English and was highly resourceful. Coburn liked him a lot: Majid
had gone out of his way to be helpful when Coburn's family arrived in Iran.
"Come in," Coburn said. "Sit down. What's on your mind?"
"It's about Fara."
Coburn nodded. Fara was Majid's daughter, and she worked with her father-
Her job was to make sure that all American employees always had up-to-date
visas and work permits. "Some problem?" Coburn said.
"The police asked her to take two American passports from our files without
telling anyone."
Coburn frowned. "Any passports in particular?"
18 Ken Follett
"Paul Chiapparone's and Bill Gaylord's.-
Paul was Coburn's boss, the head of EDS Corporation Iran. Bill was
second-in-command and manager of their biggest project, the contract with
the Ministry of Health. "What the hell is going on?" Coburn said.
"Fara is in great danger," Majid said. "She was instructed not to tell
anyone about this. She came to me for advice. Of course I had to tell you,
but I'm afraid she will get into very serious trouble."
"Wait a minute, let's back up," Coburn said. "How did this happen?"
"She got a telephone call this morning from the Police Department,
Residence Permit Bureau, American Section. They asked her to come to the
office. They said it was about James Nyfeler. She thought it was routine.
She arrived at the office at eleven-thirty and reported to the head of the
American Section. First he asked for Mr. Nyfeler's passport and residence
permit. She told him that Mr. Nyfeler is no longer in Iran. Then he asked
about Paul Bucha. She said that Mr. Bucha also was no longer in the
country."
'Did she?"
'Yes. 11
Bucha was in Iran, but Fara might not have known that, Coburn thought.
Bucha had been resident here, had left the country, and had come back in,
briefly: he was due to fly back to Paris tomorrow.
Majid continued: "The officer then said, 'I suppose the other two are gone
alsoT Fara saw that he had four files on his desk, and she asked which
other two. He told her Mr. Chiapparone and Mr. Gaylord. She said she had
just picked up Mr. Gaylord's residence permit earlier this morning. The
officer told her to get the passports and residence permits of both Mr.
Gaylord and Mr. Chiapparone and bring them to him. She was to do it
quietly, not to cause alarm."
"What did she say?" Coburn asked.
"She told him she could not bring them today. He instructed her to bring
them tomorrow morning. He told her she was officially responsible for this,
and he made sure there were witnesses to these instructions."
"This doesn't make any sense," Coburn said.
"If they learn that Fara has disobeyed them-"
"We'll think of a way to protect her," Coburn said. He was
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 19
wondefing whether Americans were obliged to surrender their passports on
demand. He had done so, recently, after a minor car accident, but had later
been told he did not have to. "They didn't say why they wanted the
passports?"
"They did not. "
Bucha and Nyfeler were the predecessors of Chiapparone and Gaylord. Was
that a clue? Coburn did not know.
Coburn stood up. "The first decision we have to make is what Fara is going
to tell the police tomorrow morning," he said. "I'll talk to Paul
Chiapparone and get back to you."
On the ground floor of the building Paul Chiapparone sat in his office. He,
too, had a parquet floor, an executive desk, a picture of the Shah on the
wall, and a lot on his mind.
Paul was thirty-nine years old, of middle height, and a little overweight,
mainly because he was fond of good food. With his olive skin and thick
black hair he looked very Italian. His job was to build a complete modem
social-security system in a primitive country. It was not easy.
In the early seventies Iran had had a rudimentary socialsecurity system,
which was inefficient at collecting contributions and so easy to defraud
that one man could draw benefits several times over for the same illness.
When the Shah decided to spend some of his twenty billion dollars a year in
oil revenues creating a welfare state, EDS got the contract. EDS ran
Medicare and Medicaid programs for several states in the U.S., but in Iran
they had to start from scratch. They had to issue a social-security card to
each of Iran's thirty-two million people, organize payroll deductions so
that wage earners paid their contributions, and process claims for
benefits. The whole system would be nin by computers-EDS's specialty.
The difference between installing a data-processing system in the States
and doing the same job in Iran was, Paul found, like the difference between
making a cake from a packaged mix and making one the old-fashioned way with
all the original ingredients. It was often frustrating. Iranians did not
have the can-do attitude of American business executives, and often seemed
to create problems instead of solving them. At EDS headquarters back in
Dallas, Texas, not only were people expected to do the impossible, but it
was usually due yesterday. Here in Iran everything was impossible and in
any case not due until fardah--usually translated "tomorrow," in practice,
"some t
ime in the future."
20 Ken Follett
Paul had attacked the problems in the only way he knew: by hard work and
determination. He was no intellectual genius. As a boy he had found
schoolwork difficult, but his Italian father, with the immigrant's typical
faith in education, had pressured him to study, and he had got good grades.
Sheer persistence had served him well ever since. He could remember the
early days of EDS in the States, back in the sixties, when every new
contract could make or break the company; and he had helped build it into
one of the most dynamic and successful corporations in the world. The
Iranian operation would go the same way, he had been sure, particularly
when Jay Coburn's recruitment and training program began to deliver more
Iranians capable of top management.
He had been all wrong, and he was only just beginning to understand why.
When he and his family arrived in Iran, in August 1977, the petrodollar
boom was already over. The government was running out of money. That year
an anti-inflation program increased unemployment just when a bad harvest
was driving yet more starving peasants into the cities. The tyrannical rule
of the Shah was weakened by the human-rights policies of American President
Jimmy Carter. The time was ripe for political unrest.
For a while Paul did not take much notice of local politics. He knew there
were rumblings of discontent, but that was true of just about every country
in the world, and the Shah seemed to have as firm a grip on the reins of
power as any ruler. Like the rest of the world, Paul missed the
significance of the events of the first half of 1978.
On January 7 the newspaper Eteldat published a scurrilous attack on an
exiled clergyman called Ayatollah Khomemi, alleging, among other things,
that he was homosexual. The following day, eighty miles from Tehran in the
town of Qom---the principal center of religious education in the
country---outraged theology students staged a protest sit-in that was
bloodily broken up by the military and the police. The confrontation
escalated, and seventy people were killed in two more days of disturbances.
The clergy organized a memorial procession for the dead forty days later in
accordance with Islamic tradition. There was more violence during the
procession, and the dead were commemorated in another memorial forty days
later.... The processions continued, and grew larger and more violent,
through the first six months of the year.
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 21
With hindsight Paul could see that calling these marches "funeral
processions" had been a way to circumvent the Shah's ban on political
demonstrations. But at the time he had had no idea that a massive political
movement was building. Nor had anyone else.
In August 1978 Paul went home to the States on leave. (So did William
Sullivan, the U.S. Ambassador to Iran.) Paul loved all kinds of water
sports, and he had gone to a sports fishing tournament in Ocean City, New
Jersey, with his cousin Joe Porreca. Paul's wife, Ruthie, and the children,
Karen and Ann Marie, went to Chicago to visit Ruthie's parents. Paul was a
little anxious because the Ministry of Health still had not paid EDS's bill
for the month of June; but it was not the first time they had been late
with a payment, and Paul had left the problem in the hands of his
second-in-command, Bill Gaylord, and he was fairly confident Bill would get
the money in.
While Paul was in the U.S. the news from Iran was bad. Martial law was
declared on September 7, and the following day more than a hundred people
were killed by soldiers during a demonstration in Jaleh Square in the heart
of Tehran.
When the Chiapparone fan-dly came back to Iran the very air seemed
different. For the first time Paul and Ruthie could hear shooting in the
streets at night. They were alarmed: suddenly they realized that trouble
for the Iranians meant trouble for them. There was a series of strikes. The
electricity was continually being cut off, so they dined by candlelight and
Paul wore his topcoat in the office to keep warm. It became more and more
difficult to get money out of the banks, and Paul started a check-cashing
service at the office for employees. When they got low on heating oil for
their home Paul had to walk around the streets until he found a tanker,
then bribe the driver to come to the house and deliver.
His business problems were worse. The Minister of Health and Social
Welfare, Dr. Sheikholeslamizadeh, had been arrested under Article 5 of
martial law, which permitted a prosecutor to jail anyone without giving a
reason. Also in jail was Deputy Minister Reza Neghabat, with whom Paul had
worked closely. The Ministry still had not paid its June bill, nor any
since, and now owed EDS more than four million dollars.
For two months Paul tried to get the money. The individuals he had dealt
with previously had all gone. Their replacements usually did not return his
calls. Sometimes someone would promise to look into the problem and call
back: after waiting a
22 Ken Follett
week for the call that never came, Paul would telephone once again, to be
told that the person he had spoken to last week had now left the Ministry.
Meetings would be arranged, then canceled. The debt mounted at the rate of
$1.4 million a month.
On November 14 Paul wrote to Dr. Heidargholi Emrani, the Deputy Minister in
charge of the Social Security Organization, giving formal notice that if
the Ministry did not pay up within a month EDS would stop work. The threat
was repeated on December 4 by Paul's boss, the president of EDS World, at
a personal meeting with Dr. Emrani.
That was yesterday.
If EDS pulled out, the whole Iranian social-security system would collapse.
Yet it was becoming more and more apparent that the country was bankrupt
and simply could not pay its bills. What, Paul wondered, would Dr. Emrani
do now?
He was still wondering when Jay Coburn walked in with the answer.
At first, however, it did not occur to Paul that the attempt to steal his
passport might have been intended to keep him, and therefore EDS, in Iran.
When Coburn had given him the facts he said: "What the hell did they do
that for?"
"I don't know. Majid doesn't know, and Fara doesn't know."
Paul looked at him. The two men had become close in the last month. For the
rest of the employees Paul was putting on a brave face, but with Coburn he
had been able to close the door and say, Okay, what do you really think?
Coburn said: "The first question is, What do we do about Fara? She could be
in trouble."
"She has to give them some kind of an answer."
"A show of cooperationT I
"She could go back and tell them that Nyfeler and Bucha are no longer
resident . . . "
"She already told them."
"She could take their exit visas as proof."
"Yeah," Coburn said dubiously. "But it's you and Bill they're really
interested in now."
"She could say that the passports aren't kept in the offic
e."
"They may know that's not true-Fara may even have taken passports down
there in the past."
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 23
"Say senior executives don't have to keep their passports in the office."
"'Mat might work."
"Any convincing story to the effect that she was physically unable to do
what they asked her."
"Good. I'll discuss it with her and Majid.- Coburn thought for a moment.
"You know, Bucha has a reservation on a flight out tomorrow. He could just
go. "
"He probably should--they think he's not here anyway."
"You could do the same."
Paul reflected. Maybe he should get out now. What would the Iranians do
then? They might just try to detain someone else. "No, " he said. " If
we're going, I should be the last to leave.
"Are we going?" Coburn asked.
"I don't know." Every day for weeks they had asked each other that
question. Coburn had developed an evacuation plan that could be put into
effect instantly. Paul had been hesitating, with his finger on the button.
He knew that his ultimate boss, back in Dallas, wanted him to evacuate-but
it meant abandoning the project on which he had worked so hard for the last
sixteen months. "I don't know," he repeated. "I'll call Dallas."
That night Coburn was at home, in bed with Liz, and fast asleep when the
phone rang.
He picked it up in the dark. "Yeah?"
"This is Paul."
"Hello." Coburn turned on the light and looked at his wristwatch. It was
two A.M.
"We're going to evacuate," Paul said.
"You got it.-
Coburn cradled the phone and sat on the edge of the bed. In a way it was a
relief. There would be two or three days of frantic activity, but then he
would know that the people whose safety had been worrying him for so long
were back in the States, out of reach of these crazy Iranians.
He ran over in his mind the plans he had made for just this moment. First
he had to inform 130 families that they would be leaving the country
within. the next 48 hours. He had divided the city into sectors, with a
team leader for each sector: he would call the leaders, and it would be
their job to call the families. He had drafted leaflets for the evacuees
telling them where to go and