by Ken Follett
Stauffer inquired which U.S. airports did not fluoroscope outgoing baggage: one was Kennedy.
Schwebach bought two Vuitton trunks, deeper than ordinary suitcases, with reinforced comers and hard sides. With Coburn, Davis, and Jackson, he went to the woodwork shop at Perot's Dallas home and experimented with ways of constructing false bottoms in the cases.
Schwebach was perfectly happy about carrying guns through Iranian customs in a false-bottomed case. "If you know how customs people work, you don't get stopped," he said. His confidence was not shared by the rest of the team. In case he did get stopped and the guns were found, there was a fallback plan. He would say the case was not his. He would return to the baggage claim area, and there, sure enough, would be another Vuitton trunk just like the first, but full of personal belongings and containing no guns.
Once the team was in Tehran they would have to communicate with Dallas by phone. Coburn was quite sure the Iranians bugged the phone lines, so the team developed a simple code.
GR meant A, GS meant B, GT meant C, and so on through GZ which meant I; then HA meant J, HB meant K, through HR which meant Z. Numbers one through nine were IA through II; zero was IJ.
They would use the military alphabet, in which A is called Alpha, B is Bravo, C is Charlie and so on.
For speed, only key words would be coded. The sentence "He is with EDS" would therefore become "He is with Golf Victor Golf Uniform Hotel Kilo."
Only three copies of the key to the code were made. Simons gave one to Merv Stauffer, who would be the team's contact here in Dallas. He gave the other two to Jay Coburn and Pat Sculley, who--though nothing was said formally--were emerging as his lieutenants.
The code would prevent an accidental leak through a casual phone tap, but--as computer men knew better than anyone--such a simple letter cipher could be broken by an expert in a few minutes. As a further precaution, therefore, certain common words had special code groups: Paul was AG, Bill was AH, the American Embassy was GC, and Tehran was AU. Perot was always referred to as The Chairman, guns were tapes, the prison was The Data Center, Kuwait was Oil Town, Istanbul was Resort, and the attack on the prison was Plan A. Everyone had to memorize these special code words.
If anyone were questioned about the code, he was to say that it was used to abbreviate teletype messages.
The code name for the whole rescue was Operation Hotfoot. It was an acronym, dreamed up by Ron Davis: Help Our Two Friends Out of Tehran. Simons was tickled by that. "Hotfoot has been used so many times for operations," he said. "And this is the first time it's ever been appropriate."
They rehearsed the attack on the prison at least a hundred times.
In the grounds of the lake house Schwebach and Davis nailed up a plank between two trees at a height of twelve feet, to represent the courtyard fence. Merv Stauffer brought them a van borrowed from EDS security.
Time and time again Simons walked up to the "fence" and gave a hand signal; Poche drove the van up and stopped it at the fence; Boulware jumped out of the back; Davis got on the roof and jumped over the fence; Coburn followed; Boulware climbed on the roof and lowered the ladder into the "courtyard"; "Paul" and "Bill"--played by Schwebach and Sculley, who did not need to rehearse their roles as flanking guards--came up the ladder and over the fence, followed by Coburn and then Davis; everyone scrambled into the van; and Poche drove off at top speed.
Sometimes they switched roles so that each man learned how to do everyone else's job. They prioritized tasks so that, if one of them dropped out, wounded or for any other reason, they knew automatically who would take his place. Schwebach and Sculley, playing the parts of Paul and Bill, sometimes acted sick and had to be carried up the ladder and over the fence.
The advantage of physical fitness became apparent during the rehearsals. Davis could come back over the fence in a second and a half, touching the ladder twice: nobody else could do it anywhere near that fast.
One time Davis went over too fast and landed awkwardly on the frozen ground, straining his shoulder. The injury was not serious, but it gave Simons an idea. Davis would travel to Tehran with his arm in a sling, carrying a beanbag for exercise. The bag would be weighted with Number 2 shot.
Simons timed the rescue, from the moment the van stopped at the fence to the moment it pulled away with everyone inside. In the end, according to his stopwatch, they could do it in under thirty seconds.
They practiced with the Walther PPKs at the Garland Public Shooting Range. They told the range operator that they were security men from all over the country on a course in Dallas, and they had to get their target practice in before they could go home. He did not believe them, especially after T. J. Marquez turned up looking just like a Mafia chieftain in a movie, with his black coat and black hat, and took ten Walther PPKs and five thousand rounds of ammunition out of the trunk of his black Lincoln.
After a little practice they could all shoot reasonably well except Davis. Simons suggested he try shooting lying down, since that was the position he would be in when he was in the courtyard; and he found he could do much better that way.
It was bitterly cold out in the open, and they all huddled in a little shack, trying to get warm, while they were not shooting--all except Simons, who stayed outside all day long, as if he were made of stone.
He was not made of stone--when he got into Merv Stauffer's car at the end of the day he said: "Jesus Christ it's cold."
He had begun to needle them about how soft they were. They were always talking about where they would go to eat and what they would order, he said. When he was hungry he would open a can. He would laugh at someone for nursing a drink: when he was thirsty he would fill a tumbler with water and drink it all straight down, saying: "I didn't pour it to look at it." He showed them how he could shoot, one time: every bullet in the center of the target. Once Coburn saw him with his shirt off: his physique would have been impressive on a man twenty years younger.
It was a tough-guy act, the whole performance. What was peculiar was that none of them ever laughed at it. With Simons, it was the real thing.
One evening at the lake house he showed them the best way to kill a man quickly and silently.
He had ordered--and Merv Stauffer had purchased--Gerber knives for each of them, short stabbing weapons with a narrow two-edged blade.
"It's kind of small," said Davis, looking at his. "Is it long enough?"
"It is unless you want to sharpen it when it comes out the other side," Simons said.
He showed them the exact spot in the small of Glenn Jackson's back where the kidney was located. "A single stab, right there, is lethal," he said.
"Wouldn't he scream?" Davis asked.
"It hurts so bad he can't make a sound."
While Simons was demonstrating, Merv Stauffer had come in, and now he stood in the doorway, openmouthed, with a McDonald's paper bag in either arm. Simons saw him and said: "Look at this guy--he can't make a sound and nobody's stuck him yet."
Merv laughed and started handing round the food. "You know what the McDonald's girl said to me, in a completely empty restaurant, when I asked for thirty hamburgers and thirty orders of fries?"
"What?"
"What they always say--'Is this to eat here or to go?' "
Simons just loved working for private enterprise.
One of his biggest headaches in the army had always been supplies. Even planning the Son Tay Raid, an operation in which the President himself was personally interested, it had seemed as if he had to fill in six requisition forms and get approval from twelve generals every time he needed a new pencil. Then, when all the paperwork was done, he would find that the items were out of stock, or there was a four-month wait for delivery, or--worst of all--when the stuff came it did not work. Twenty-two percent of the blasting caps he ordered misfired. He had tried to get night sights for his Raiders. He learned that the army had spent seventeen years trying to develop a night sight, but by 1970 all they had were six hand-built prototypes. Then
he discovered a perfectly good British-made night sight available from the Armalite Corporation for $49.50, and that was what the Son Tay Raiders took to Vietnam.
At EDS there were no forms to be filled out and no permissions to be sought, at least not for Simons: he told Merv Stauffer what he needed and Stauffer got it, usually the same day. He asked for, and got, ten Walther PPKs and ten thousand rounds of ammunition; a selection of holsters, both left-handed and right-handed, in different styles so the men could pick the kind they felt most comfortable with; shotgun-ammunition reloading kits in twelve-gauge, sixteen-gauge and twenty-gauge; and cold-weather clothes for the team including coats, mittens, shirts, socks, and woolen stocking caps. One day he asked for a hundred thousand dollars in cash: two hours later T. J. Marquez arrived at the lake house with the money in an envelope.
It was different from the army in other ways. His men were not soldiers who could be bullied into submission: they were some of the brightest young corporate executives in the United States. He had realized from the start that he could not assume command. He had to earn their loyalty.
These men would obey an order if they agreed with it. If not, they would discuss it. That was fine in the boardroom, but useless on the battlefield.
They were squeamish, too. The first time they talked about setting fire to a car as a diversion, someone had objected on the grounds that innocent passersby might get hurt. Simons needled them about their Boy Scout morality, saying they were afraid of losing their merit badges, and calling them "you Jack Armstrongs" after the too-good-to-be-true radio character who went around solving crimes and helping old ladies cross the road.
They also had a tendency to forget the seriousness of what they were doing. There was a lot of joking and a certain amount of horseplay, particularly from young Ron Davis. A measure of humor was useful in a team on a dangerous mission, but sometimes Simons had to put a stop to it and bring them back to reality with a sharp remark.
He gave them all the opportunity to back out at any time. He got Ron Davis on his own again and said: "You're going to be the first one over that fence--don't you have some reservations about that?"
"Yeah."
"Good thing you do, otherwise I wouldn't take you. Suppose Paul and Bill don't come right away? Suppose they figure that if they head for the fence they'll get shot? You'll be stuck there and the guards will see you. You'll be in bad trouble."
"Yeah."
"Me, I'm sixty years old. I've lived my life. Hell, I don't have a thing to lose. But you're a young man--and Marva's pregnant, isn't she?"
"Yeah."
"Are you really sure you want to do this?"
"Yeah."
He worked on them all. There was no point in his telling them that his military judgment was better than theirs: they had to come to that conclusion themselves. Similarly, his tough-guy act was intended to let them know that from now on such things as keeping warm, eating, drinking, and worrying about innocent bystanders would not occupy much of their time or attention. The shooting practice and the knife lesson also had a hidden purpose: the last thing Simons wanted was any killing on this operation, but learning how to kill reminded the men that the rescue could be a life-and-death affair.
The biggest element in his psychological campaign was the endless practicing of the assault on the jail. Simons was quite sure that the jail would not be exactly as Coburn had described it, and that the plan would have to be modified. A raid never went precisely according to the scenario--as he knew better than most.
The rehearsals for the Son Tay Raid had gone on for weeks. A complete replica of the prison camp had been built, out of two-by-four timbers and target cloth, at Eglin Air Base in Florida. The bloody thing had to be dismantled every morning before dawn and put up again at night, because the Russian reconnaissance satellite Cosmos 355 passed over Florida twice every twenty-four hours. But it had been a beautiful thing: every goddam tree and ditch in the Son Tay prison camp had been reproduced in the mock-up. And then, after all those rehearsals, when they did it for real, one of the helicopters--the one Simons was in--had landed in the wrong place.
Simons would never forget the moment he realized the mistake. His helicopter was taking off again, having discharged the Raiders. A startled Vietnamese guard emerged from a foxhole and Simons shot him in the chest. Shooting broke out, a flare went up, and Simons saw that the buildings surrounding him were not the buildings of the Son Tay camp. "Get that fucking chopper back in here!" he yelled to his radio operator. He told a sergeant to turn on a strobe light to mark the landing zone.
He knew where they were: four hundred yards from Son Tay, in a compound marked on intelligence maps as a school. This was no school. There were enemy troops everywhere. It was a barracks, and Simons realized that his helicopter pilot's mistake had been a lucky one, for now he was able to launch a preemptive attack and wipe out a concentration of enemy troops who might otherwise have jeopardized the whole operation.
That was the night he stood outside a barracks and shot eighty men in their underwear.
No, an operation never went exactly according to plan. But becoming proficient at executing the scenario was only half the purpose of rehearsals anyway. The other half--and, in the case of the EDS men, the important half--was learning to work together as a team. Oh, they were already terrific as an intellectual team--give them each an office and a secretary and a telephone, and together they would computerize the world--but working together with their hands and their bodies was different. When they had started, on January 3, they would have had trouble launching a row-boat as a team. Five days later they were a machine.
And that was all that could be done here in Texas.
Now they had to take a look at the real-life jail.
It was time to go to Tehran.
Simons told Stauffer he wanted to meet with Perot again.
3____
While the rescue team was in training, President Carter got his last chance of preventing a bloody revolution in Iran.
And he blew it.
This is how it happened ...
Ambassador William Sullivan went to bed content on the night of January 4 in his private apartment within the large, cool residence in the Embassy compound at the comer of Roosevelt and Takht-e-Jamshid avenues in Tehran.
Sullivan's boss, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, had been busy with the Camp David negotiations all through November and December, but now he was back in Washington and concentrating on Iran--and boy, did it show. Vagueness and vacillation had ended. The cables containing Sullivan's instructions had become crisp and decisive. Most importantly, the United States at last had a strategy for dealing with the crisis: they were going to talk to the Ayatollah Khomeini.
It was Sullivan's own idea. He was now sure that the Shah would soon leave Iran and Khomeini would return in triumph. His job, he believed, was to preserve America's relationship with Iran through the change of government, so that when it was all over, Iran would still be a stronghold of American influence in the Middle East. The way to do that was to help the Iranian armed forces to stay intact and to continue American military aid to any new regime.
Sullivan had called Vance on the secure telephone line and told him just that. The U.S. should send an emissary to Paris to see the Ayatollah, Sullivan had urged. Khomeini should be told that the main concern of the U.S. was to preserve the territorial integrity of Iran and deflect Soviet influence; that the Americans did not want to see a pitched battle in Iran between the army and the Islamic revolutionaries; and that once the Ayatollah was in power, the U.S. would offer him the same military assistance and arms sales it had given the Shah.
It was a bold plan. There would be those who would accuse the U.S. of abandoning a friend. But Sullivan was sure it was time for the Americans to cut their losses with the Shah and look to the future.
To his intense satisfaction, Vance had agreed.
So had the Shah. Weary, apathetic, and no longer willing to shed blood in orde
r to stay in power, the Shah had not even put up a show of reluctance.
Vance had nominated, as his emissary to the Ayatollah, Theodore H. Eliot, a senior diplomat who had served as economic counselor in Tehran and spoke Farsi fluently. Sullivan was delighted with the choice.
Ted Eliot was scheduled to arrive in Paris in two days' time, on January 6.
In one of the guest bedrooms at the ambassadorial residence, Air Force General Robert "Dutch" Huyser was also going to bed. Sullivan was not as enthusiastic about the Huyser Mission as he was about the Eliot Mission. Dutch Huyser, the deputy commander (under Haig) of U.S. forces in Europe, had arrived yesterday to persuade Iranian generals to support the new Bakhtiar government in Tehran. Sullivan knew Huyser. He was a fine soldier, but no diplomat. He spoke no Farsi and he did not know Iran. But even if he had been ideally qualified, his task would have been hopeless. The Bakhtiar government had failed to gain the support even of the moderates, and Shahpour Bakhtiar himself had been expelled from the centrist National Front party merely for accepting the Shah's invitation to form a government. Meanwhile, the army, which Huyser was trying futilely to swing to Bakhtiar, continued to weaken as thousands of soldiers deserted and joined the revolutionary mobs in the streets. The best Huyser could hope for was to hold the army together a little longer, while Eliot in Paris arranged for the peaceful return of the Ayatollah.
If it worked it would be a great achievement for Sullivan, something any diplomat could be proud of for the rest of his life: his plan would have strengthened his country and saved lives.
As he went to sleep, there was just one worry nagging at the back of his mind. The Eliot Mission, for which he had such high hopes, was a State Department scheme, identified in Washington with Secretary of State Vance. The Huyser Mission was the idea of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Advisor. The enmity between Vance and Brzezinski was notorious. And at this moment Brzezinski, after the summit meeting in Guadeloupe, was deep-sea fishing in the Caribbean with President Carter. As they sailed over the clear blue sea, what was Brzezinski whispering in the President's ear?