On Wings of Eagles Page 10

  "We'll get on it right away," Sculley said enthusiastically.

  The phone rang and Coburn picked it up. "Hi, Keane! Where are you? ... Hold on a minute."

  Coburn covered the mouthpiece with his hand and looked at Perot. "Keane Taylor is in Frankfurt. If we're going to do something like this, he ought to be on the team."

  Perot nodded. Taylor, a former marine sergeant, was another of his eagles. Six foot two and elegantly dressed, Taylor was a somewhat irritable man, which made him the ideal butt for practical jokes. Perot said: "Tell him to go back to Tehran. But don't explain why."

  A slow smile spread across Coburn's young-old face. "He ain't gonna like it."

  Sculley reached across the desk and switched on the speaker so they could all hear Taylor blow his cool.

  Coburn said: "Keane, Ross wants you to go back to Iran."

  "What the hell for?" Taylor demanded.

  Coburn looked at Perot. Perot shook his head. Coburn said: "Uh, there's a lot we need to do, in terms of tidying up, administratively speaking--"

  "You tell Perot I'm not going back in there for any administrative bullshit!"

  Sculley started to laugh.

  Coburn said: "Keane, I have somebody else here who wants to talk to you."

  Perot said: "Keane, this is Ross."

  "Oh. Uh, hello, Ross."

  "I'm sending you back to do something very important."

  "Oh."

  "Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  There was a long pause, then Taylor said: "Yes, sir."

  "Good."

  "I'm on my way."

  "What time is it there?" Perot asked.

  "Seven o'clock in the morning."

  Perot looked at his own watch. It said midnight.

  Nineteen seventy-nine had begun.

  Taylor sat on the edge of the bed in his Frankfurt hotel room, thinking about his wife.

  Mary was in Pittsburgh with the children, Mike and Dawn, staying at Taylor's brother's house. Taylor had called her from Tehran before leaving and told her he was coming home. She had been very happy to hear it. They had made plans for the future: they would return to Dallas, put the kids in school ...

  Now he had to call and tell her he would not be coming home after all.

  She would be worried.

  Hell, he was worried.

  He thought about Tehran. He had not worked on the Ministry of Health project, but had been in charge of a smaller contract, to computerize the old-fashioned manual bookkeeping systems of Bank Omran. One day about three weeks ago, a mob had formed outside the bank--Omran was the Shah's bank. Taylor had sent his people home. He and Glenn Jackson were the last to leave. They locked up the building and started walking north. As they turned the corner onto the main street, they walked into the mob. At that moment the army opened fire and charged down the street.

  Taylor and Jackson ducked into a doorway. Someone opened the door and yelled at them to get inside. They did--but before their rescuer could lock it again, four of the demonstrators forced their way in, chased by five soldiers.

  Taylor and Jackson flattened themselves against the wall and watched the soldiers, with their truncheons and rifles, beat up the demonstrators. One of the rebels made a break for it. Two of his fingers were almost torn off his hand, and blood spurted all over the glass door. He got out but collapsed in the street. The soldiers dragged the other three demonstrators out. One was a bloody mess but conscious: the other two were out cold, or dead.

  Taylor and Jackson stayed inside until the street was clear. The Iranian who had saved them kept saying: "Get out while you can."

  And now, Taylor thought, I have to tell Mary that I've just agreed to go back into all that.

  To do something very important.

  Obviously it had to do with Paul and Bill; and if Perot could not talk about it on the phone, presumably it was something at least clandestine and quite possibly illegal.

  In a way Taylor was glad, despite his fear of the mobs. While still in Tehran he had talked on the phone with Bill's wife, Emily Gaylord, and had promised not to leave without Bill. The orders from Dallas, that everyone but Briggs and Gallagher had to get out, had forced him to break his word. Now the orders had changed, and perhaps he could keep his promise to Emily after all.

  Well, he thought, I can't walk back, so I'd better find a plane. He picked up the phone again.

  Jay Coburn remembered the first time he had seen Ross Perot in action. He would never forget it as long as he lived.

  It happened in 1971. Coburn had been with EDS less than two years. He was a recruiter, working in New York City. Scott was born 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 born, 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."

  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?"

  "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? "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 fro
m 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, tree-climbing, 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 weird. So the guy left the company--so 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.

  "Mr. 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 failed?

  "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 free. 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 Iranian employees was outside the jail. As soon as Paul and Bill appeared, the Iranian would call Bucharest and Briggs would call Perot.

  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, Western-oriented Iran presented excellent opportunities. He had not perceived the strains beneath the surface, he knew nothing about the Ayatollah 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 Force jet.

  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 government 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 ... 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 sign, 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 disgusted 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 treat 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. Still 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 the bail, I'll have spent thirteen million dollars an
d 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--that 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 goodbye 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 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 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."