On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

'You can't make them come home if they don't want to,' Gayden said.

'Who'll want to stay?'

'Rich Gallagher. His wife--'

'I know. Okay, Briggs and Gallagher stay. Nobody else.' Perot stood up. 'I'll get started on those calls.'

He took the elevator to the seventh floor and walked through his secretary's office. Sally Walther was at her desk. She had been with him for years, and had been involved in the prisoners-of-war campaign and the San Francisco party. (She had come back from that weekend with a Son Tay Raider in tow, and Captain Udo Walther was now her husband.) Perot said to her: 'Call Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and Richard Helms.'

He went through to his own office and sat at his desk. The office, with its paneled walls, costly carpet, and shelves of antiquarian books, looked more like a Victorian library in an English country house. He was surrounded by souvenirs and his favorite art. For the house Margot bought Impressionist paintings, but in his office Perot preferred American art: Norman Rockwell originals and the Wild West bronzes of Frederic Remington. Through the window he could see the slopes of the old golf course.

Perot did not know where Henry Kissinger might be spending the holidays: it could take Sally a while to find him. There was time to think about what to say. Kissinger was not a close friend. It would need all his salesmanship to grab Kissinger's attention and, in the space of a short phone call, win his sympathy.

The phone on his desk buzzed, and Sally called: 'Henry Kissinger for you.'

Perot picked it up. 'Ross Perot.'

'I have Henry Kissinger for you.'

Perot waited.

Kissinger had once been called the most powerful man in the world. He knew the Shah personally. But how well would he remember Ross Perot? The prisoners-of-war campaign had been big, but Kissinger's projects had been bigger : peace in the Middle East, rapprochement between the U.S. and China, the ending of the Vietnam War ...

'Kissinger here.' It was the familiar deep voice, its accent a curious mixture of American vowels and German consonants.

'Dr. Kissinger, this is Ross Perot. I'm a businessman in Dallas, Texas, and--'

'Hell, Ross, I know who you are,' said Kissinger.

Perot's heart leaped. Kissinger's voice was warm, friendly, and informal. This was great! Perot began to tell him about Paul and Bill: how they had gone voluntarily to see Dadgar, how the State Department had let them down. He assured Kissinger they were innocent, and pointed out that they had not been charged with any crime, nor had the Iranians produced an atom of evidence against them. 'These are my men, I sent them there, and I have to get them back,' he finished.

'I'll see what I can do,' Kissinger said.

Perot was exultant. 'I sure appreciate it!'

'Send me a short briefing paper with all the details.'

'We'll get it to you today.'

'I'll get back to you, Ross.'

'Thank you, sir.'

The line went dead.

Perot felt terrific. Kissinger had remembered him, had been friendly and willing to help. He wanted a briefing paper: EDS could send it today--

Perot was struck by a thought. He had no idea where Kissinger had been speaking from--it might have been London, Monte Carlo, Mexico ...

'Sally?'

'Yes, sir?'

'Did you find out where Kissinger is?'

'Yes, sir.'

Kissinger was in New York, in his duplex at the exclusive River House apartment complex on East Fifty- second Street. From the window he could see the East River.

Kissinger remembered Ross Perot clearly. Perot was a rough diamond. He helped causes with which Kissinger was sympathetic, usually causes having to do with prisoners. In the Vietnam War Perot's campaign had been courageous, even though he had sometimes harassed Kissinger beyond the point of what was doable. Now some of Perot's own people were prisoners.

Kissinger could readily believe that they were innocent. Iran was on the brink of civil war: justice and due process meant little over there now. He wondered whether he could help. He wanted to: it was a good cause. He was no longer in office, but he still had friends. He would call Ardeshir Zahedi, he decided, as soon as the briefing paper arrived from Dallas.

Perot felt good about the conversation with Kissinger. Hell, Ross, I know who you are. That was worth more than money. The only advantage of being famous was that it sometimes helped get important things done.

T. J. came in. 'I have your passport,' he said. 'It already has a visa for Iran, but, Ross, I don't think you should go. All of us here can work on the problem, but you're the key man. The last thing we need is for you to be out of contact--in Tehran or just up in a plane somewhere--at a moment when we have to make a crucial decision.'

Perot had forgotten all about going to Tehran. Everything he had heard in the last hour encouraged him to think it would not be necessary. 'You might be right,' he said to T. J. 'We have so many things going in the area of negotiation--only one of them has to work. I won't go to Tehran. Yet.'

4____

Henry Precht was probably the most harassed man in Washington.

A long-serving State Department official with a bent for art and philosophy and a wacky sense of humor, he had been making American policy on Iran more or less by himself for much of 1978, while his superiors--right up to President Carter--focused on the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel.

Since early November, when things had really started to warm up in Iran, Precht had been working seven days a week from eight in the morning until nine at night. And those damn Texans seemed to think he had nothing else to do but talk to them on the phone.

The trouble was, the crisis in Iran was not the only power struggle Precht had to worry about. There was another fight going on, in Washington, between Secretary of State Cyrus Vance--Precht's boss--and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the President's National Security Advisor.

Vance believed, like President Carter, that American foreign policy should reflect American morality. The American people believed in freedom, justice, and democracy, and they did not want to support tyrants. The Shah of Iran was a tyrant. Amnesty International had called Iran's human-rights record the worst in the world, and the many reports of the Shah's systematic use of torture had been confirmed by the International Commission of Jurists. Since the CIA had put the Shah in power and the U.S.A. had kept him there, a President who talked a lot about human rights had to do something.

In January 1977 Carter had hinted that tyrants might be denied American aid. Carter was indecisive--later that year he visited Iran and lavished praise on the Shah--but Vance believed in the human-rights approach.

Zbigniew Brzezinski did not. The National Security Advisor believed in power. The Shah was an ally of the United States, and should be supported. Sure, he should be encouraged to stop torturing people--but not yet. His regime was under attack: this was no time to liberalize it.

When would be the time? asked the Vance faction. The Shah had been strong for most of his twenty-five years of rule, but had never shown much inclination toward moderate government. Brzezinski replied: 'Name one single moderate government in that region of the world.'

There were those in the Carter administration who thought that if America did not stand for freedom and democracy there was no point in having a foreign policy at all; but that was a somewhat extreme view, so they fell