On Wings of Eagles Read online

  "Get Tom Luce into the office," Perot said. "Call the State Department in Washington. This takes priority over everything else. I don't want them to stay in that jail another damn minute!"

  Margot pricked up her ears when she heard Ross say damn: it was most unusual for him to curse, especially in front of the children. He came in from the kitchen with his face set. His eyes were as blue as the Arctic Ocean, and as cold. She knew that look. It was not just anger: he was not the kind of man to dissipate his energy in a display of bad temper. It was a look of inflexible determination. It meant he had decided to do something and he would move heaven and earth to get it done. She had seen that determination, that strength, in him when she had first met him, at the Naval Academy in Annapolis ... could it really be twenty-five years ago? It was the quality that cut him out from the herd, made him different from the mass of men. Oh, he had other qualities--he was smart, he was funny, he could charm the birds out of the trees--but what made him exceptional was his strength of will. When he got that look in his eyes you could no more stop him than you could stop a railway train on a downhill gradient.

  "The Iranians put Paul and Bill in jail," he said.

  Margot's thoughts flew at once to their wives. She had known them both for years. Ruthie Chiapparone was a small, placid, smiling girl with a shock of fair hair. She had a vulnerable look: men wanted to protect her. She would take it hard. Emily Gaylord was tougher, at least on the surface. A thin blond woman, Emily was vivacious and spirited: she would want to get on a plane and go spring Bill from jail herself. The difference in the two women showed in their clothes: Ruthie chose soft fabrics and gentle outlines; Emily went in for smart tailoring and bright colors. Emily would suffer on the inside.

  "I'm going back to Dallas," Ross said.

  "There's a blizzard out there," said Margot, looking out at the snowflakes swirling down the mountainside. She knew she was wasting her breath: snow and ice would not stop him now. She thought ahead: Ross would not be able to sit behind a desk in Dallas for very long while two of his men were in an Iranian jail. He's not going to Dallas, she thought; he's going to Iran.

  "I'll take the four-wheel drive," he said. "I can catch a plane in Denver."

  Margot suppressed her fears and smiled brightly. "Drive carefully, won't you," she said.

  Perot sat hunched over the wheel of the GM Suburban, driving carefully. The road was icy. Snow built up along the bottom edge of the windshield, shortening the travel of the wipers. He peered at the road ahead. Denver was 106 miles from Vail. It gave him time to think.

  He was still furious.

  It was not just that Paul and Bill were in jail. They were in jail because they had gone to Iran, and they had gone to Iran because Perot had sent them there.

  He had been worried about Iran for months. One day, after lying awake at night thinking about it, he had gone into the office and said: "Let's evacuate. If we're wrong, all we've lost is the price of three or four hundred plane tickets. Do it today."

  It had been one of the rare occasions on which his orders were not carried out. Everyone had dragged their feet, in Dallas and in Tehran. Not that he could blame them. He had lacked determination. If he had been firm they would have evacuated that day; but he had not been firm, and the following day the passports had been called for.

  He owed Paul and Bill a lot anyway. He felt a special debt of loyalty to the men who had gambled their careers by joining EDS when it was a struggling young company. Many times he had found the right man, interviewed him, got him interested, and offered him the job, only to find that, on talking it over with his family, the man had decided that EDS was just too small, too new, too risky.

  Paul and Bill had not only taken the chance--they had worked their butts off to make sure their gamble paid. Bill had designed the basic computer system for the administration of Medicare and Medicaid programs that, used now in many American states, formed the foundation of EDS's business. He had worked long hours, spent weeks away from home, and moved his family all over the country in those days. Paul had been no less dedicated: when the company had too few men and very little cash, Paul had done the work of three systems engineers. Perot could remember the company's first contract in New York, with Pepsico; and Paul walking from Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge in the snow, to sneak past a picket line--the plant was on strike--and go to work.

  Perot owed it to Paul and Bill to get them out.

  He owed it to them to get the government of the United States to bring the whole weight of its influence to bear on the Iranians.

  America had asked for Perot's help, once; and he had given three years of his life--and a bunch of money--to the prisoners-of-war campaign. Now he was going to ask for America's help.

  His mind went back to 1969, when the Vietnam War was at its height. Some of his friends from the Naval Academy had been killed or captured: Bill Leftwich, a wonderfully warm, strong, kind man, had been killed in battle at the age of thirty-nine; Bill Lawrence was a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. Perot found it hard to watch his country, the greatest country in the world, losing a war because of lack of will, and even harder to see millions of Americans protesting, not without justification, that the war was wrong and should not be won. Then, one day in 1969, he had met little Billy Singleton, a boy who did not know whether he had a father or not. Billy's father had been missing in Vietnam before ever seeing his son: there was no way of knowing whether he was a prisoner, or dead. It was heartbreaking.

  For Perot, sentiment was not a mournful emotion but a clarion call to action.

  He learned that Billy's father was not unique. There were many, perhaps hundreds, of wives and children who did not know whether their husbands and fathers had been killed or just captured. The Vietnamese, arguing that they were not bound by the rules of the Geneva Convention because the United States had never declared war, refused to release the names of their prisoners.

  Worse still, many of the prisoners were dying of brutality and neglect. President Nixon was planning to "Vietnamize" the war and disengage in three years' time, but by then, according to CIA reports, half the prisoners would have died. Even if Billy Singleton's father were alive, he might not survive to come home.

  Perot wanted to do something.

  EDS had good connections with the Nixon White House. Perot went to Washington and talked to Chief Foreign Policy Advisor Henry Kissinger. And Kissinger had a plan.

  The Vietnamese were maintaining, at least for the purposes of propaganda, that they had no quarrel with the American people--only with the U.S. government. Furthermore, they were presenting themselves to the world as the little guy in a David-and-Goliath conflict. It seemed that they valued their public image. It might be possible, Kissinger thought, to embarrass them into improving their treatment of prisoners, and releasing the names, by an international campaign to publicize the sufferings of the prisoners and their families.

  The campaign must be privately financed, and must seem to be quite unconnected with the government, even though in reality it would be closely monitored by a team of White House and State Department people.

  Perot accepted the challenge. (Perot could resist anything but a challenge. His eleventh-grade teacher, one Mrs. Duck, had realized this. "It's a shame," Mrs. Duck had said, "that you're not as smart as your friends." Young Perot insisted he was as smart as his friends. "Well, why do they make better grades than you?" It was just that they were interested in school and he was not, said Perot. "Anybody can stand there and tell me that they could do something," said Mrs. Duck. "But let's look at the record: your friends can do it and you can't." Perot was cut to the quick. He told her that he would make straight A's for the next six weeks. He made straight A's, not just for six weeks, but for the rest of his high school career. The perceptive Mrs. Duck had discovered the only way to manipulate Perot: challenge him.)

  Accepting Kissinger's challenge, Perot went to J. Walter Thompson, the largest advertising agency in the world, and told t
hem what he wanted to do. They offered to come up with a plan of campaign within thirty to sixty days and show some results in a year. Perot turned them down: he wanted to start today and see results tomorrow. He went back to Dallas and put together a small team of EDS executives who began calling newspaper editors and placing simple, unsophisticated advertisements that they wrote themselves.

  And the mail came in truckloads.

  For Americans who were pro-war, the treatment of the prisoners showed that the Vietnamese really were the bad guys; and for those who were antiwar the plight of the prisoners was one more reason for getting out of Vietnam. Only the most hard-line protesters resented the campaign. In 1970 the FBI told Perot that the Viet Cong had instructed the Black Panthers to murder him. (At the crazy end of the sixties this had not sounded particularly bizarre.) Perot hired bodyguards. Sure enough, a few weeks later a squad of men climbed the fence around Perot's seventeen-acre Dallas property. They were chased off by savage dogs. Perot's family, including his indomitable mother, would not hear of him giving up the campaign for the sake of their safety.

  His greatest publicity stunt took place in December 1969, when he chartered two planes and tried to fly into Hanoi with Christmas dinners for the prisoners of war. Of course, he was not allowed to land; but during a slow news period he created enormous international awareness of the problem. He spent two million dollars, but he reckoned the publicity would have cost sixty million to buy. And a Gallup poll he commissioned afterward showed that the feelings of Americans toward the North Vietnamese were overwhelmingly negative.

  During 1970 Perot used less spectacular methods. Small communities all over the United States were encouraged to set up their own POW campaigns. They raised funds to send people to Paris to badger the North Vietnamese delegation there. They organized telethons, and built replicas of the cages in which some of the POWs lived. They sent so many protest letters to Hanoi that the North Vietnamese postal system collapsed under the strain. Perot stumped the country, giving speeches anywhere he was invited. He met with North Vietnamese diplomats in Laos, taking with him lists of their prisoners held in the south, mail from them, and a film of their living conditions. He also took a Gallup associate with him, and together they went over the results of the poll with the North Vietnamese.

  Some or all of it worked. The treatment of American POWs improved, mail and parcels began to get through to them, and the North Vietnamese started to release names. Most importantly, the prisoners heard of the campaign--from newly captured American soldiers--and the news boosted their morale enormously.

  Eight years later, driving to Denver in the snow, Perot recalled another consequence of the campaign--a consequence that had then seemed no more than mildly irritating, but could now be important and valuable. Publicity for the POWs had meant, inevitably, publicity for Ross Perot. He had become nationally known. He would be remembered in the corridors of power--and especially in the Pentagon. That Washington monitoring committee had included Admiral Tom Moorer, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Alexander Haig, then assistant to Kissinger and now the commander in chief of NATO forces; William Sullivan, then a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and now U.S. Ambassador to Iran; and Kissinger himself.

  These people would help Perot get inside the government, find out what was happening, and promote help fast. He would call Richard Helms, who had in the past been both head of the CIA and U.S. Ambassador to Tehran. He would call Kermit Roosevelt, son of Teddy, who had been involved in the CIA coup that put the Shah back on the throne in 1953 ...

  But what if none of this works? he thought.

  It was his habit to think more than one step ahead.

  What if the Carter administration could not or would not help?

  Then, he thought, I'm going to break them out of jail.

  How would we go about something like that? We've never done anything like it. Where would we start? Who could help us?

  He thought of EDS executives Merv Stauffer and T. J. Marquez and his secretary Sally Walther, who had been key organizers of the POW campaign: making complex arrangements halfway across the world by phone was meat and drink to them, but ... a prison break? And who would staff the mission? Since 1968 EDS's recruiters had given priority to Vietnam veterans--a policy begun for patriotic reasons and continued when Perot found that the vets often made first-class businessmen--but the men who had once been lean, fit, highly trained soldiers were now overweight, out-of-condition computer executives, more comfortable with a telephone than with a rifle. And who would plan and lead the raid?

  Finding the best man for the job was Perot's specialty. Although he was one of the most successful self-made men in the history of American capitalism, he was not the world's greatest computer expert, or the world's greatest salesman, or even the world's greatest business administrator. He did just one thing superbly well: pick the right man, give him the resources, motivate him, then leave him alone to do the job.

  Now, as he approached Denver, he asked himself: who is the world's greatest rescuer?

  Then he thought of Bull Simons.

  A legend in the U.S. Army, Colonel Arthur D. "Bull" Simons had hit the headlines in November 1970 when he and a team of commandos raided the Son Tay prison camp, twenty-three miles outside Hanoi, in an attempt to rescue American prisoners of war. The raid had been a brave and well-organized operation, but the intelligence on which all the planning was based had been faulty: the prisoners had been moved, and were no longer at Son Tay. The raid was widely regarded as a fiasco, which in Perot's opinion was grossly unfair. He had been invited to meet the Son Tay Raiders, to boost their morale by telling them that here was at least one American citizen who was grateful for their bravery. He had spent a day at Fort Bragg in North Carolina--and he had met Colonel Simons.

  Peering through his windshield, Perot could picture Simons against the cloud of falling snowflakes: a big man, just under six feet tall, with the shoulders of an ox. His white hair was cropped in a military crewcut, but his bushy eyebrows were still black. On either side of his big nose, two deep lines ran down to the corners of his mouth, giving him a permanently aggressive expression. He had a big head, big ears, a strong jaw, and the most powerful hands Perot had ever seen. The man looked as if he had been carved from a single block of granite.

  After spending a day with him, Perot thought: in a world of counterfeits, he is the genuine article.

  That day and in years to come Perot learned a lot about Simons. What impressed him most was the attitude of Simons's men toward their leader. He reminded Perot of Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers: he inspired in his men emotions ranging from fear through respect and admiration to love. He was an imposing figure and an aggressive commander--he cursed a lot, and would tell a soldier: "Do what I say or I'll cut your bloody head off!"--but that by itself could not account for his hold on the hearts of skeptical, battle-hardened commandos. Beneath the tough exterior there was a tough interior.

  Those who had served under him liked nothing better than to sit around telling Simons stories. Although he had a bull-like physique, his nickname came not from that but, according to legend, from a game played by Rangers called The Bull Pen. A pit would be dug, six feet deep, and one man would get into it. The object of the game was to find out how many men it took to throw the first man out of the pit. Simons thought the game was foolish, but was once needled into playing it. It took fifteen men to get him out, and several of them spent the night in the hospital with broken fingers and noses and severe bite wounds. After that he was called "Bull."

  Perot learned later that almost everything in this story was exaggerated. Simons played the game more than once; it generally took four men to get him out; no one ever had any broken bones. Simons was simply the kind of man about whom legends are told. He earned the loyalty of his men not by displays of bravado but by his skill as a military commander. He was a meticulous, endlessly patient planner; he was cautious--one of his catchphra
ses was: "That's a risk we don't have to take"; and he took pride in bringing all his men back from a mission alive.

  In the Vietnam War Simons had run Operation White Star. He went to Laos with 107 men and organized twelve battalions of Mao tribesmen to fight the Vietnamese. One of the battalions defected to the other side, taking as prisoners some of Simons's Green Berets. Simons took a helicopter and landed inside the stockade where the defecting battalion was. On seeing Simons, the Laotian colonel stepped forward, stood at attention, and saluted. Simons told him to produce the prisoners immediately, or he would call an air strike and destroy the entire battalion. The colonel produced the prisoners. Simons took them away, then called the air strike anyway. Simons had come back from Laos three years later with all his 107 men. Perot had never checked out this legend--he liked it the way it was.

  The second time Perot met Simons was after the war. Perot virtually took over a hotel in San Francisco and threw a weekend party for the returning prisoners of war to meet the Son Tay Raiders. It cost Perot a quarter of a million dollars, but it was a hell of a party. Nancy Reagan, Clint Eastwood, and John Wayne came. Perot would never forget the meeting between John Wayne and Bull Simons. Wayne shook Simons's hand with tears in his eyes and said: "You are the man I play in the movies."

  Before the ticker-tape parade Perot asked Simons to talk to his Raiders and warn them against reacting to demonstrators. "San Francisco has had more than its share of antiwar demonstrations, " Perot said. "You didn't pick your Raiders for their charm. If one of them gets irritated he might just snap some poor devil's neck and regret it later."

  Simons looked at Perot. It was Perot's first experience of The Simons Look. It made you feel as if you were the biggest fool in history. It made you wish you had not spoken. It made you wish the ground would swallow you up.

  "I've already talked to them," Simons said. "There won't be a problem."