Read On Wings of Eagles Online
Authors: Ken Follett
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Military, #Espionage, #General, #History, #Special Forces, #Biography & Autobiography
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