And Scott survived. He turned into a soccer-playing, treeclimbing,
creek-wading, thoroughly healthy little boy. And Coburn began to understand
the way people felt about Ross Perot.
Perot's single-mindedness, his ability to focus narrowly on one thing and
shut out distractions until he got the job done, had its disagreeable side.
He could wound people. A day or two after Paul and Bill were arrested, he
had walked into an office where Coburn was talking on the phone to Lloyd
Briggs in Tehran. It had sounded to Perot as though Coburn was giving
instructions, and Perot believed strongly that people in the head office
should not give orders to those out there on the battlefield who knew the
situation best. He had given Coburn a merciless telling-off in front of a
room full of people.
Perot had other blind spots. When Coburn had worked in recruiting, each
year the company had named someone "Recruiter of the Year. " The names of
the winners were engraved on a plaque. The list went back years, and in
time some of the winners left the company. When that happened Perot wanted
to erase their names from the plaque. Coburn thought that was
90 Ken Folleu
weird. So the guy left the company--w what? He had been Recruiter of the
Year, one year, and why try to change history? It was almost as if Perot
took it as a personal insult that someone should want to work elsewhere.
Perot's faults were of a piece with his virtues. His peculiar attitude
toward people who left the company was the obverse of his intense loyalty
to his employees. His occasional unfeeling harshness was just part of the
incredible energy and determination without which he would never have
created EDS. Coburn found it easy to forgive Perot's shortcomings.
He had only to look at Scott.
-hft. Perot?" Sally called. "It's Henry Kissinger."
Perot's heart missed a beat. Could Kissinger and Zahedi have done it in the
last twenty-four hours? Or was he calling to say he had faded?
"Ross Perot."
"Hold the line for Henry Kissinger, please."
A moment later Perot heard the familiar guttural accent. "Hello, Ross?"
"Yes." Perot held his breath.
"I have been assured that your men will be released tomorrow at ten A.M.,
Tehran time."
Perot let out his breath in a long sigh of relief. "Dr. Kissinger, that's
just about the best news I've heard since I don't know when. I can't thank
you enough."
"The details are to be finalized today by U.S. Embassy officials and the
Iranian Foreign Ministry, but this is a formality: I have been advised that
your men will be released."
:'It's just great. We sure appreciate your help."
'You're welcome."
It was nine-thirty in the morning in Tehran, midnight in Dallas. Perot sat
in his office, waiting. Most of his colleagues had gone home, to sleep in a
bed for a change, happy in the knowledge that by the time they woke up, Paul
and Bill would be fkee. Perot was staying at the office to see it through to
the end.
In Tehran, Lloyd Briggs was at the Bucharest office, and one of the hanian
employees was outside the jail. As soon as Paul and Bill appeared, the
Iranian would call Bucharest and Briggs would call Perot.
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 91
Now that the crisis was almost over, Perot had time to wonder where he had
gone wrong. One mistake occurred to him immediately. When he had decided,
on December 4, to evacuate all his staff from Iran, he had not been
determined enough and he had let others drag their feet and raise
objections until it was too late.
But the big mistake had been doing business in Iran in the first place.
With hindsight he could see that. At the time, he had agreed with his
marketing people--and with many other American businessmen--that oil-rich,
stable, Westem-oriented Iran presented excellent opportunities. He had not
perceived the strains beneath the surface, he knew nothing about the
AyatoUah Khomeini, and he had not foreseen that one day there would be a
President naive enough to try to impose American beliefs and standards on
a Middle Eastern country.
He looked at his watch. It was half past midnight. Paul and Bill should be
walking out of that jail right now.
Kissinger's good news had been confirmed by a phone call from David Newsom,
Cy Vance's deputy at the State Department. And Paul and Bill were getting
out not a moment too soon. The news from Iran had been bad again today.
Bakhtiar, the Shah's new Prime Minister, had been rejected by the National
Front, the party that was now seen as the moderate opposition. The Shah had
announced that he might take a vacation. William Sullivan, the American
Ambassador, had advised the dependents of all Americans working in Iran to
go home, and the embassies of Canada and Britain had followed suit. But the
strike had closed the airport, and hundreds of women and children were
stranded. However, Paul and Bill would not be stranded. Perot had had good
friends at the Pentagon ever since the POW campaign: Paul and Bill would be
flown out on a U.S. Air Forcejet.
At one o'clock Perot called Tehran. There was no news. Well, he thought,
everyone says the Iranians have no sense of time.
The irony of this whole thing was that EDS had never paid bribes, in Iran
or anywhere else. Perot hated the idea of bribery. EDS's code of conduct
was set out in a twelve-page booklet given to every new employee. Perot had
written it himself. "Be aware that federal law and the laws of most states
prohibit giving anything of value to a goverm-nent official with the intent
to influence any official act ... Since the absence of such intent might be
difficult to prove, neither money nor anything of value should be given to
a federal, state, or foreign government official
92 Ken FoUeu
... A determination that a payment or practice is not forbidden by law does
not conclude the analysis . . . It is always appropriate to make further
inquiry into the ethics ... Could you do business in complete trust with
someone who acts the way you do? The answer must be YES. - The last page of
the booklet was a form that the employee had to sip, acknowledging that he
had received and read the code.
When EDS first went to Iran, Perot's puritan principles had been reinforced
by the Lockheed scandal. Daniel J. Haughton, chairman of the Lockheed
Aircraft Corporation, had admitted to a Senate committee that Lockheed
routinely paid millions of dollars in bribes to sell its planes abroad. His
testimony had been an embarrassing performance that dispsted Perot:
wriggling on his seat, Haughton had told the committee that the payments
were not bribes but "kickbacks. - Subsequently the Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act made it an offense under U.S. law to pay bribes in foreign
countries.
Perot had called in lawyer Tom Luce and made him personally responsible for
ensuring that EDS never paid bribes. During the negotiation of the Ministry
of Health contract in Iran, Luce had offended not a few EDS executives by
the thoroughness a
nd persistence with which he had cross-examined them
about the propriety of their dealings.
Perot was not hungry for business. He was already making millions. He did
not need to expand abroad. If you have to pay bribes to do business there,
he had said, why, we just won't do business there.
His business principles were deeply ingrained. His ancestors were Frenchmen
who came to New Orleans and set up trading posts along the Red River. His
father, Gabriel Ross Perot, had been a cotton broker. The trade was
seasonal, and Ross Senior had spent a lot of time with his son, often
talking about business. "There's no point in buying cotton from a farmer
once, - he would say. "You have to beat him fairly, earn his trust, and
develop a relationship with him, so that he'll be happy to sell you his
cotton year after year. Then you're doing business.
Bribery just did not fit in there.
At one-thirty Perot called the EDS office in Tehran again. SUB there was no
news. "Call the jail, or send somebody down there," he said. "Find out when
they're getting out."
He was beginning to feel uneasy.
What will I do if this doesn't work out? he thought. If I put up
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 93
the bail, I'll have spent thirteen million dollars and still Paul and Bill
will be forbidden to leave Iran. Other ways of getting them out using the
legal system came up against the obstacle raised by the Iranian lawyers-4hat
the case was political, which seemed to mean that Paul's and Bill's
innocence made no difference. But political pressure had failed so far:
neither the U.S. Embassy in Tehran nor the State Department in Washington
had been able to help; and if Kissinger should fail, that would surely be
the end of all hope in that area. What, then, was left?
Force.
The phone rang. Perot snatched up the receiver. "Ross Perot.
"This is Lloyd Briggs."
"Are they out?"
"No."
Perot's heart sank. "What's happening?"
"We spoke to the jail. They have no instructions to release Paul and Bill."
Perot closed his eyes. The worst had happened. Kissinger had failed.
He sighed. "Thank you, Lloyd."
"What do we do next?"
"I don't know," said Perot.
But he did know.
He said good-bye to Briggs and hung up the phone.
He would not admit defeat. Another of his father's principles had been:
take care of the people who work for you. Perot could remember the whole
family driving twelve miles on Sundays to visit an old black man who had
used to mow their lawn, just to make sure that he was well and had enough
to eat. Perot's father would employ people he did not need, just because
they had no job. Every year the Perot family car would go to the county
fair crammed with black employees, each of whom was given a little money to
spend and a Perot business card to show if anyone tried to give him a hard
time. Perot could remember one who had ridden a freight train to California
and, on being arrested for vagrancy, had shown Perot's father's business
card. The sheriff had said: "We don't care whose nigger you are, we're
throwing you in jail. " But he had called Perot Senior, who had wired the
train fare for the man to come back. "I been to California, and I'se back,"
the man said when he reached Texarkana; and Perot Senior gave him back his
job.
Perot's father did not know what civil rights were: this was
94 Ken Follett
how you treated other human beings. Perot had not known his parents were
unusual until he grew up.
His father would not leave his employees in jail. Nor would Perot.
He picked up the phone. "Get T. J. Marquez."
It was two in the morning, but T.J. would not be surprised: this was not
the first time Perot had woken him up in the middle of the night, and it
would not be the last.
A sleepy voice said: "Hello?"
:'Tom, it doesn't look good."
1"Y? I I
"They haven't been released and the jail says they aren't going to be."
:'Aw, damn."
'Conditions are getting worse over there--did you see the news?"
"I sure did."
:'Do you think it's time for Simons?"
'Yeah, I think it is."
:'Do you have his number?"
'No, but I can get it. "
"Call him," said Perot.
3
Bull Simons was going crazy.
He was thinking of burning down his house. It was an old woodframe
bungalow, and it would go up like a pile of matchwood, and that would be
the end of it. The place was hell to him--but it was a hell he did not want
to leave, for what made it hell was the bittersweet memory of the time when
it had been heaven.
Lucille had picked the place. She saw it advertised in a magazine, and
together they had flown down from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to look it
over. At Red Bay, in a dirt-poor part of the Florida Panhandle, the
ramshackle house stood in forty acres of rough timber. But there was a
two-acre lake with bass in it.
Lucille had loved it.
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 95
It was 1971, and time for Simons to retire. He had been a colonel for ten
years, and if the Son Tay Raid could not get him promoted to general,
nothing would. The truth was, he did not fit in the Generals' Club: he had
always been a reserve officer, he had never been to a top military school
such as West Point, his methods were unconventional, and he was no good at
going to Washington cocktail parties and kissing ass. He knew he was a
goddain fine soldier, and if that was not good enough, why, Art Simons was
not good enough. So he retired, and did not regret it.
He had passed the happiest years of his life here at Red Bay. All their
married life he and Lucille had endured periods of separation, sometimes as
much as a year without seeing one another, during his tours in Vietnam,
Laos, and Korea. From the moment he retired they were together all day and
all night, every day of the year. Simons raised hogs. He knew nothing about
farming, but he got the information he needed out of books, and built his
own pens. Once the operation was under way he found there was not much to
do but feed the pigs and look at them, so he spent a lot of time fooling
around with his collection of 150 guns, and eventually set up a little
gunsmithing shop where he would repair his and his neighbors' weapons and
load his own ammunition. Most days he and Lucille would wander, hand in
hand, through the woods and down to the lake, where they might catch a
bass. In the evening, after supper, she would go to the bedroom as if she
were preparing for a date, and come out later, wearing a housecoat over her
nightgown and a red ribbon tied in her dark, dark hair, and sit on his lap
...
Memories like these were breaking his heart.
Even the boys had seemed to grow up, at last, during those golden years.
Harry, the younger, had come home one day and said: "Dad, I've got a heroin
habit and a cocaine habit and I need your help. " Simons knew little about
drugs. He had smoked marijuana o
nce, in a doctor's office in Panama, before
giving his men a talk on drugs, just so that he could tell them he knew
what it was like; but all he knew about heroin was that it killed people.
Still, he had been able to help Harry by keeping him busy, out in the open,
building hog pens. It had taken a while. Many times Harry left the house
and went into town to score dope, but he always came back, and eventually
he did not go into town anymore.
The episode had brought Simons and Harry together again.
96 Ken Follett
Simons would never be close to Bruce, his elder son; but at least he had
been able to stop worrying about the boy. Boy? He was in his thirties, and
just about as bullheaded as . . . well, as his father. Bruce had found Jesus
and was detennined to bring the rest of the world to the Lord-starting with
Colonel Simons. Simons had practically thrown him out. However, unlike
Bruce's other youthful enthusiasms--dnigs, I Ching, back-to-nature
communes--Jesus had lasted, and at least Bruce had settled down to a stable
way of life, as pastor of a tiny church in the frozen northwest of Canada.
Anyway, Simons was through agonizing about the boys. He had brought them up
as well as he could, for better or worse, and now they were men and had to
take care of themselves. He was taking care of Lucille.
She was a tall, handsome, statuesque woman with a penchant for big hats.
She looked pretty damn impressive behind the wheel of their black Cadillac.
But in fact she was the reverse of formidable. She was soft, easygoing, and
lovable. The daughter of two teachers, she had needed someone to make
decisions for her, someone she could follow blindly and trust completely;
and she had found what she needed in Art Simons. He, in turn, was devoted
to her. By the time he retired they had been married for thirty years, and
in all that time he had never been in the least interested in another
woman. Only his job, with its overseas postings, had come between them; and
now that was over. He had told her: "My retirement plans can be summed up
in one word: you."
They had seven wonderful years.
Lucille died of cancer on March 16, 1978.
And Bull Simons went to pieces.
Every man has a breaking point, they said. Simons had thought the rule did
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