attached a phosphorus match to the striker and substituted a piece of sandpaper for the bell, to ignite the match. The match in turn would light a mechanical fuse.
The system was unreliable, and caused great hilarity among the rest of the team, who jeered and laughed every time the match failed to ignite.
In the end Schwebach settled on the oldest timing device of all: a candle.
He test-burned a candle to see how long it took to burn down one inch; then he cut another candle off at the right length for fifteen minutes.
Next he scraped the heads off several old-fashioned phosphorous matches and ground up the inflammable material into a powder. This he packed tightly into a piece of aluminum kitchen foil. Then he stuck the foil into the base of the candle. When the candle burned all the way down, it heated the aluminum foil and the ground-up match heads exploded. The foil was thinner at the bottom so that the explosion would travel downward.
The candle, with this primitive but reliable fuse in its base, was set into the neck of a plastic jar, about the size of a hip flask, full of jellied gasoline.
'You light the candle and walk away from it,' Schwebach told them when his design was complete. 'Fifteen minutes later you've got a nice little fire going.'
And any police, soldiers, revolutionaries, or passersby--plus, quite possibly, some of the prison guards--would have their attention fixed on a blazing automobile three hundred yards up the street while Ron Davis and Jay Coburn were jumping over the fence into the prison courtyard.
That day they moved out of the Hilton Inn. Coburn slept at the lake house, and the others checked into the Airport Marina--which was closer to Lake Grapevine--all except Ralph Boulware, who insisted on going home to his family.
They spent the next four days training, buying equipment, practicing their shooting, rehearsing the jailbreak, and further refining the plan.
Shotguns could be bought in Tehran, but the only kind of ammunition allowed by the Shah was birdshot. However, Simons was expert at reloading ammunition, so they decided to smuggle their own shot into Iran.
The trouble with putting buckshot into birdshot slugs would be that they would get relatively few shot into the smaller slugs: the ammunition would have great penetration but little spread. They decided to use Number 2 shot, which would spread wide enough to knock down more than one man at a time, but had enough penetration to smash the windshield of a pursuing car.
In case things turned really nasty, each member of the team would also carry a Walther PPK in a holster. Merv Stauffer got Bob Snyder, head of security at EDS and a man who knew when not to ask questions, to buy the PPKs at Ray's Sporting Goods in Dallas. Schwebach had the job of figuring out how to smuggle the guns into Iran.
Stauffer inquired which U.S. airports did
Schwebach bought two Vuitton trunks, deeper than ordinary suitcases, with reinforced comers and hard sides. With Coburn, Davis, and Jackson, he went to the woodwork shop at Perot's Dallas home and experimented with ways of constructing false bottoms in the cases.
Schwebach was perfectly happy about carrying guns through Iranian customs in a false-bottomed case. 'If you know how customs people work, you don't get stopped,' he said. His confidence was not shared by the rest of the team. In case he did get stopped and the guns were found, there was a fallback plan. He would say the case was not his. He would return to the baggage claim area, and there, sure enough, would be another Vuitton trunk just like the first, but full of personal belongings and containing no guns.
Once the team was in Tehran they would have to communicate with Dallas by phone. Coburn was quite sure the Iranians bugged the phone lines, so the team developed a simple code.
GR meant A, GS meant B, GT meant C, and so on through GZ which meant I; then HA meant J, HB meant K, through HR which meant Z. Numbers one through nine were IA through II; zero was IJ.
They would use the military alphabet, in which A is called Alpha, B is Bravo, C is Charlie and so on.
For speed, only key words would be coded. The sentence 'He is with EDS' would therefore become 'He is with Golf Victor Golf Uniform Hotel Kilo.'
Only three copies of the key to the code were made. Simons gave one to Merv Stauffer, who would be the team's contact here in Dallas. He gave the other two to Jay Coburn and Pat Sculley, who--though nothing was said formally--were emerging as his lieutenants.
The code would prevent an accidental leak through a casual phone tap, but--as computer men knew better than anyone--such a simple letter cipher could be broken by an expert in a few minutes. As a further precaution, therefore, certain common words had special code groups: Paul was AG, Bill was AH, the American Embassy was GC, and Tehran was AU. Perot was always referred to as The Chairman, guns were tapes, the prison was The Data Center, Kuwait was Oil Town, Istanbul was Resort, and the attack on the prison was Plan A. Everyone had to memorize these special code words.
If anyone were questioned about the code, he was to say that it was used to abbreviate teletype messages.
The code name for the whole rescue was Operation Hotfoot. It was an acronym, dreamed up by Ron Davis: Help Our Two Friends Out of Tehran. Simons was tickled by that. 'Hotfoot has been used so many times for operations,' he said. 'And this is the first time it's ever been appropriate.'
They rehearsed the attack on the prison at least a hundred times.
In the grounds of the lake house Schwebach and Davis nailed up a plank between two trees at a height of twelve feet, to represent the courtyard fence. Merv Stauffer brought them a van borrowed from EDS security.
Time and time again Simons walked up to the 'fence' and gave a hand signal; Poche drove the van up and stopped it at the fence; Boulware jumped out of the back; Davis got on the roof and jumped over the fence; Coburn followed; Boulware climbed on the roof and lowered the ladder into the 'courtyard'; 'Paul' and 'Bill'--played by Schwebach and Sculley, who did not need to rehearse their roles as flanking guards--came up the ladder and over the fence, followed by Coburn and then Davis; everyone scrambled into the van; and Poche drove off at top speed.
Sometimes they switched roles so that each man learned how to do everyone else's job. They prioritized tasks so that, if one of them dropped out, wounded or for any other reason, they knew automatically who would take his place. Schwebach and Sculley, playing the parts of Paul and Bill, sometimes acted sick and had to be carried up the ladder and over the fence.
The advantage of physical fitness became apparent during the rehearsals. Davis could come back over the fence in a second and a half, touching the ladder twice: nobody else could do it anywhere near that fast.
One time Davis went over too fast and landed awkwardly on the frozen ground, straining his shoulder. The injury was not serious, but it gave Simons an idea. Davis would travel to Tehran with his arm in a sling, carrying a beanbag for exercise. The bag would be weighted with Number 2 shot.
Simons timed the rescue, from the moment the van stopped at the fence to the moment it pulled away with everyone inside. In the end, according to his stopwatch, they could do it in under thirty seconds.
They practiced with the Walther PPKs at the Garland Public Shooting Range. They told the range operator that they were security men from all over the country on a course in Dallas, and they had to get their target practice in before they could go home. He did not believe them, especially after T. J. Marquez turned up looking just like a Mafia chieftain in a movie, with his black coat and black hat, and took ten Walther PPKs and five thousand rounds of ammunition out of the trunk of his black Lincoln.
After a little practice they could all shoot reasonably well except Davis. Simons suggested he try shooting lying down, since that was the position he would be in when he was in the courtyard; and he found he could do much better that way.
It was bitterly cold out in the open, and they all huddled in a little shack, trying to get warm, while they were not shooting--all except Simons, who stayed outside all day long, as if he were made of stone.
He was not made of stone--when he got into Merv Stauffer's car at the end of the day he said: 'Jesus Christ it's cold.'
He had begun to needle them about how soft they were. They were always talking about where they would go to eat and what they would order, he said. When
