On Wings of Eagles (52 page)

    company should turn them in and post the lower bail. The Americans should

    realize that it would be hopeless for Paul and Bill to try to leave Iran by

    regular means and very dangerous for them to leave otherwise.

    Howell took that to mean that Paid and Bill would not have been allowed to

    get out on an Embassy evacuation flight. He wondered again whether the

    Clean Team might be in more danger than the Dirty Team. Bob Young felt the

    same. While they were discussing it, they heard shooting. It seemed to be

    coming from the direction of the U.S. Embassy.

The National Voice of Iran, a radio station broadcasting from Baku moss the

border in the Soviet Union, had for several days been issuing "news"

bulletins about clandestine American plans for a counterrevolution. On

Wednesday the National Voice announced that the files of SAVAK, the Shah's

hated secret police force, had been transferred to the U.S. Embassy. The

story was almost certainly invented, but it was highly plausible: the CIA

had created SAVAK and was in close contact with it, and everyone knew that

U.S. embassies-4ike all embassies-were fall of spies thinly disguised as

diplomatic attaclids. Anyway, some of the revolutionaries in Tehran believed

the story, and -without consulting any of the Ayatollah's aides-decided to

take action.

318 Ken Follett

    During the morning they entered the high buildings surrounding the Embassy

    compound and took up position with automatic weapons. They opened fire at

    ten-thirty.

Ambassador William Sullivan was in his outer office, taking a call at his

secretary's desk. He was speaking to the Ayatollah's Deputy Foreign

Minister. President Carter had decided to recognize the new, revolutionary

government in Iran, and Sullivan was making arrangements to deliver an

official note.

    When he put the phone down, he turned around to see his press attaclid,

    Barry Rosen, standing there with two American journalists. Sullivan was

    furious, for the White House had given specific instructions that the

    decision to recognize the new goveminent was to be announced in Washington,

    not Tehran. Sullivan took Rosen into the inner office and chewed him out.

    Rosen told him that the two journalists were there to make arrangements for

    the body of Joe Alex Morris, the Los Angeles Times correspondent who had

    been shot during the fighting at Doshen Toppeh. Sullivan, feeling foolish,

    told Rosen to ask the journalists not to reveal what they had learned in

    overhearing Sullivan on the phone.

    Rosen went out. Sullivan's phone rang. He picked it up. There was a sudden

    tremendous crash of gunfire, and a hail of bullets shattered his windows.

Sullivan hit the floor.

    He slithered across the room and into the next office, where he came

    nose-to-nose with his deputy, Charlie Naas, who had been holding a meeting

    about the evacuation flights. Sullivan had two phone numbers that he could

    use, in an emergency, to reach revolutionary leaders. He now told Naas to

    call one, and the army attach6 to call the other. Still lying on the floor,

    the two men pulled telephones off a desk and started dialing.

    Sullivan took out his walkie-talkie and called for reports from the marine

    units in the compound.

    The machine-gun attack had been covering fire for a squad of about

    seventy-five revolutionaries who had come over the front wall of the

    Embassy compound and were now advancing on the ambassadorial residence.

    Fortunately most of the staff were with Sullivan in the chancery building.

    Sullivan ordered the marines to fall back, not to use their rifles, and to

    fire their sidearms only in self-defense.

    ON WINGS OF EAGLES 319

    Then he crawled out of the executive suite and into the corridor.

    During the next hour, as the attackers took the residence and the cafeteria

    building, Sullivan got all the civilians in the chancery herded into the

    communications vault upstairs. When he heard the attackers breaking down

    the steel doors of the building, he ordered the marines inside to join the

    civilians in the vault. There he made them pile their weapons in a comer,

    and ordered everyone to surrender as soon as possible.

    Eventually Sullivan himself went into the vault, leaving the army attach6

    and an interpreter outside.

    When the attackers reached the second floor, Sullivan opened the vault door

    and walked out with his hands over his head.

The othem-about a hundred people-followed him.

    They were all herded into the waiting room of the executive suite and

    frisked. There was a confused dispute between two factions of Iranians, and

    Sullivan realized that the Ayatollah's people had sent a rescue

    force-presumably in response to the phone calls by Charlie Naas and the

    army attach6--wW the rescuers had arrived on the second floor at the same

    time as the attackers.

Suddenly a shot came through the window.

    All the Americans dropped to the floor. One of the Iranians seemed to think

    the shot had come from within the room, and he swung his AK-47 rifle wildly

    at the tangle of prisoners on the floor-, then Barry Rosen, the press

    attach6, yelled in Farsi: "It came from outside! It came from outside!" At

    that moment Sullivan found himself lying next to the two journalists who

    had been in his outer office. "I hope you're getting all this down in your

    notebooks," he said.

    Eventually they were taken out into the courtyard, where Ibrahim Yazdi, the

    Ayatollah's new Deputy Prime Minister, apologized to Sullivan for the

    attack.

    Yazdi also gave Sullivan a personal escort, a group of students who would

    henceforth be responsible for the safety of the U.S. Ambassador. The leader

    of the group explitined to Sullivan that they were well qualified to guard

    him. They had studied him, and were familiar with his routine, for until

    recently their assignment had been to assassinate him.

Late that afternoon Cathy Gallagher called from the hospital. She had been

given some medication that solved her problem, at

320 Ken Follett

least temporarily, and she wanted to rejoin her husband and the others at

Lou Goetz's house.

    Joe Poch6 did not want any more of the Clean Team to leave the house, but

    he also did not want any Iranians to know where they were; so he called

    Gholarn and asked him to pick up Cathy at the hospital and bring her to the

    comer of the street, where her husband would meet her.

    She arrived at around seven-thirty that evening. She was feeling better,

    but Gholam had told her a horrifying story. "They shot up our hotel rooms

    yesterday," she said.

    Gholam had gone to the Hyatt to pay EDS's bill and pick up the suitcases

    they had left behind, Cathy explained. The rooms had been wrecked, there

    were bullet holes everywhere, and the luggage had been slashed to ribbons.

"Just our rooms?" Howell asked.

. 'Yes. 11

"Did he find out how it happened?"

    When Gholarn went to pay the bill, the hotel manager had said to him: "Who

    the heU were those people-the CIAT' Apparently, on Monday morning, shortly

    after all the EDS people left the hotel, the revolutionaries had taken it

    over. They had harassed all the Americans, demanding their passports, and

    had shown pictures of two men whom they were seeking. The manager had not

    recognized the men in the photographs. Nor had anyone else.

    Howell wondered what had so enraged the revolutionaries that they had

    smashed up the rooms. Perhaps Gayden's well-stocked bar offended their

    Muslim sensibilities. Also left behind in Gayden's suite were a tape

    recorder used for dictation, some suction microphones for taping phone

    conversations, and a child's walkie-talkie set. The revolutionaries might

    have thought this was CIA surveillance gear.

    Throughout the day, vague and alarming reports of what was happening at the

    Embassy reached Howell and the Clean Team through Goe1z's houseman, who was

    calling friends. But Goelz returned as the others were having dinner, and

    after a couple of stiff drinks he was none the worse for his experience. He

    had spent a good deal of time lying on his ample belly in a corridor. The

    next day he went back to his desk, and he came home that evening with good

    news: evacuation flights would start on Saturday, and the Clean Team would

    be on the first.

Howell thought: Dadgar may have other ideas about that.

    ON WINGS OF EAGLES 321

    4

In Istanbul, Ross Perot had a dreadful feeling that the whole operation was

slipping out of control.

    He heard, via Dallas, that the U.S. Embassy in Tehran had been overrun by

    revolutionaries. He also knew, because Tom Walter had talked to Joe Pochd

    earlier, that the Clean Team had been planning to move into the Embassy

    compound as soon as possible. But after the attack on the Embassy, almost

    all telephone lines to Tehran had been disconnected, and the White House

    was monopolizing the few lines left. So Perot did not know whether the

    Clean Team had been in the Embassy at the time of the attack, nor did he

    know what kind of danger they might be in even if they were still at

    Goelz's house.

    'Me loss of phone contact also meant that Merv Stauffer could not call

    Gholam to find out whether the Dirty Team had sent "a message for Jim

    Nyfeler" saying either that they were okay or that they were in trouble.

    The whole seventh-floor crew in Dallas was at work pulling strings to get

    one of the few remaining lines so they could talk to Gholam. Tom Walter had

    got on to A.T.&T. and spoken to Ray Johnson, who handled the EDS phone

    account. It was a very big account-EDS,'s computers in different parts of

    the U.S.A. talked to one another along telephone lines--and Johnson had

    been keen to help a major customer. He had asked whether EDS's call to

    Tehran was a matter of life and death. You bet it is, said Tom Walter.

    Johnson was trying to get them a line. At the same time, T. 1. Marquez was

    sweet-talking an international operator, trying to persuade her to break

    the rules.

    Perot had also lost touch with Ralph Boulware, who was supposed to meet the

    Dirty Team on the Turkish side of the border. Boulware had last been heard

    from in Adana, five hundred miles from where he was supposed to be. Perot

    presumed he was now on his way to the rendezvous, but there was no way of

    telling how far he had got or whether he would make it on time.

    Perot had spent most of the day trying to get a light plane or a helicopter

    with which to fly into Iran. The Boeing 707 was no use for that, because

    Perot would need to fly low and search for

322 Ken Follett

the Range Rovers with -X- or "A" on their roofs, then land on tiny, disused

airfields or even on a road or in a meadow. But so far his efforts had only

confirmed what Boulware had told him at six o'clock that morning: it was not

going to happen.

    in desperation Perot had called a friend in the Drug Enforcement Agency and

    asked for the phone number of the agency's man in Turkey, thinking that

    narcotics people would surely know how to get hold of light planes. The DEA

    man had come to the Sheraton, accompanied by another man who, Perot

    gathered, was with the CIA; but if they knew where to get a plane they

    weren't telling.

    In Dallas, Merv Stauffer was calling all over Europe looking for a suitable

    aircraft that could be bought or rented immediately and flown into Turkey:

    he, too, had failed so far.

    Late in the afternoon Perot had said to Pat Sculley: "I want to talk to the

    highest-ranking American in Istanbul."

    Sculley had gone off and raised a little hell at the American Consulate,

    and now, at ten-thirty P.m., a Consul was sitting in Perot's suite at the

    Sheraton.

    Perot was leveling with him. "My men aren't criminals of any kind," he

    said. "They're ordinary businessmen who have wives and children worrying

    themselves to death back home. The Iranians kept them in jail for six weeks

    without bringing any charges or finding any evidence against them. Now

    they're free and they're trying to get out of the country. If they're

    caught, you can imagine how much chance they'd have of justice: none at

    all. The way things are in Iran now, my men may not get as far as the

    border. I want to go in and get them, and that's where I need your help. I

    have to borrow, rent, or buy a small aircraft. Now, can you help me?"

    "No," said the Consul. "In this country it's against the law for private

    individuals to have aircraft. Because it's against the law, the planes