Read On Wings of Eagles Online
Authors: Ken Follett
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Military, #Espionage, #General, #History, #Special Forces, #Biography & Autobiography
It happened in 1971. Coburn had been with EDS less than two years. He was
a recruiter, working in New York City. Scott was bom that year at a little
Catholic hospital. It was a normal birth and, at first, Scott appeared to
be a normal, healthy baby.
The day after he was bom, when Coburn went to visit, Liz said Scott had not
been brought in for his feeding that Morning. At the time Coburn took no
notice. A few minutes later a woman came in and said: "Here are the
pictures of your baby."
"I don't remember any pictures being taken," Liz said. The woman showed her
the photographs. "No, that's not my baby."
88 Ken Follett
The woman looked confused for a moment, then said: "Oh! That's right, yours
is the one that's got the problem."
It was the first Coburn and Liz had heard of any problem.
Coburn went to see the day-old Scott, and had a terrible shock. The baby
was in an oxygen tent, gasping for air, and as blue as a pair of jeans. The
doctors were in consultation about him.
Liz became almost hysterical, and Coburn called their family doctor and
asked him to come to the hospital. Then he waited.
Something wasn't stacking up right. What kind of a hospital was it where
they didn't tell you your newborn baby was dying? Coburn became distraught.
He called Dallas and asked for his boss, Gary Griggs. "Gary, I don't know
why I'm calling you, but I don't know what to do." And he explained.
"Hold the phone," said Griggs
A moment later there was an unfamiliar voice on the line. 'Jay? 11
'Yes.
"This is Ross Perot."
Coburn had met Perot two or three times, but had never worked directly for
him. Coburn wondered whether Perot even remembered what he looked like; EDS
had more than a thousand employees at that time.
"Hello, Ross."
"Now, Jay, I need some information." Perot started asking questions: What
was the address of the hospital? What were the doctors' names? What was
their diagnosis? As he answered, Coburn was thinking bemusedly: does Perot
even know who I am?
"Hold on a minute, Jay." There was a short silence. "I'm going to connect
you with Dr. Urschel, a close friend of mine and a leading cardiac surgeon
here in Dallas." A moment later Coburn was answering more questions from
the doctor.
"Don't you do a thing," Urschel finished. "I'm going to talk to the doctors
on that staff. You just stay by the phone so we can get back in touch with
you."
"Yes, sir," said Coburn dazedly.
Perot came back on the line. "Did you get all that? How's Liz doing?"
Coburn thought: How the hell does he know my wife's name?
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 89
"Not too well," Coburn answered. "Her doctor's here and he's given her some
sedation . - - "
While Perot was soothing Coburn, Dr. Urschel was animating the hospital
staff. He persuaded them to move Scott to New York University Medical
Center. Minutes later, Scott and Coburn were in an ambulance on the way to
the city.
They got stuck in a traffic jam in the Midtown Tunnel.
Coburn got out of the ambulance, ran more than a mile to the toll gate, and
persuaded an official to hold up all lanes of traffic except the one the
ambulance was in.
When they reached New York University Medical Center there were ten or
fifteen people waiting outside for them. Among them was the leading
cardiovascular surgeon on the East Coast, who had been flown in from Boston
in the time it had taken the ambulance to reach Manhattan.
As baby Scott was rushed inside, Coburn handed over the envelope of X rays
he had brought from the other hospital. A woman doctor glanced at them.
"Where are the rest?"
"That's all," Coburn replied.
"That's all they took?"
New X rays revealed that, as well as a hole in the heart, Scott had
pneumonia. When the pneumonia was treated, the heart condition came under
control.
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 and 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