On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

Majid continued: 'The officer then said, 'I suppose the other two are gone also?' Fara saw that he had four files on his desk, and she asked which other two. He told her Mr. Chiapparone and Mr. Gaylord. She said she had just picked up Mr. Gaylord's residence permit earlier this morning. The officer told her to get the passports and residence permits of both Mr. Gaylord and Mr. Chiapparone and bring them to him. She was to do it quietly, not to cause alarm.'

'What did she say?' Coburn asked.

'She told him she could not bring them today. He instructed her to bring them tomorrow morning. He told her she was officially responsible for this, and he made sure there were witnesses to these instructions.'

'This doesn't make any sense,' Coburn said.

'If they learn that Fara has disobeyed them--'

'We'll think of a way to protect her,' Coburn said. He was wondering whether Americans were obliged to surrender their passports on demand. He had done so, recently, after a minor car accident, but had later been told he did not have to. 'They didn't say why they wanted the passports?'

'They did not.'

Bucha and Nyfeler were the predecessors of Chiapparone and Gaylord. Was that a clue? Coburn did not know.

Coburn stood up. 'The first decision we have to make is what Fara is going to tell the police tomorrow morning,' he said. 'I'll talk to Paul Chiapparone and get back to you.'

On the ground floor of the building Paul Chiapparone sat in his office. He, too, had a parquet floor, an executive desk, a picture of the Shah on the wall, and a lot on his mind.

Paul was thirty-nine years old, of middle height, and a little overweight, mainly because he was fond of good food. With his olive skin and thick black hair he looked very Italian. His job was to build a complete modem social- security system in a primitive country. It was not easy.

In the early seventies Iran had had a rudimentary social-security system, which was inefficient at collecting contributions and so easy to defraud that one man could draw benefits several times over for the same illness. When the Shah decided to spend some of his twenty billion dollars a year in oil revenues creating a welfare state, EDS got the contract. EDS ran Medicare and Medicaid programs for several states in the U.S., but in Iran they had to start from scratch. They had to issue a social-security card to each of Iran's thirty-two million people, organize payroll deductions so that wage earners paid their contributions, and process claims for benefits. The whole system would be run by computers--EDS's specialty.

The difference between installing a data-processing system in the States and doing the same job in Iran was, Paul found, like the difference between making a cake from a packaged mix and making one the old-fashioned way with all the original ingredients. It was often frustrating. Iranians did not have the can-do attitude of American business executives, and often seemed to create problems instead of solving them. At EDS headquarters back in Dallas, Texas, not only were people expected to do the impossible, but it was usually due yesterday. Here in Iran everything was impossible and in any case not due until fardah--usually translated 'tomorrow,' in practice, 'some time in the future.'

Paul had attacked the problems in the only way he knew: by hard work and determination. He was no intellectual genius. As a boy he had found schoolwork difficult, but his Italian father, with the immigrant's typical faith in education, had pressured him to study, and he had got good grades. Sheer persistence had served him well ever since. He could remember the early days of EDS in the States, back in the sixties, when every new contract could make or break the company; and he had helped build it into one of the most dynamic and successful corporations in the world. The Iranian operation would go the same way, he had been sure, particularly when Jay Coburn's recruitment and training program began to deliver more Iranians capable of top management.

He had been all wrong, and he was only just beginning to understand why.

When he and his family arrived in Iran, in August 1977, the petrodollar boom was already over. The government was running out of money. That year an anti-inflation program increased unemployment just when a bad harvest was driving yet more starving peasants into the cities. The tyrannical rule of the Shah was weakened by the human-rights policies of American President Jimmy Carter. The time was ripe for political unrest.

For a while Paul did not take much notice of local politics. He knew there were rumblings of discontent, but that was true of just about every country in the world, and the Shah seemed to have as firm a grip on the reins of power as any ruler. Like the rest of the world, Paul missed the significance of the events of the first half of 1978.

On January 7 the newspaper Etelaat published a scurrilous attack on an exiled clergyman called Ayatollah Khomeini, alleging, among other things, that he was homosexual. The following day, eighty miles from Tehran in the town of Qom--the principal center of religious education in the country--outraged theology students staged a protest sit-in that was bloodily broken up by the military and the police. The confrontation escalated, and seventy people were killed in two more days of disturbances. The clergy organized a memorial procession for the dead forty days later in accordance with Islamic tradition. There was more violence during the procession, and the dead were commemorated in another memorial forty days later.... The processions continued, and grew larger and more violent, through the first six months of the year.

With hindsight Paul could see that calling these marches 'funeral processions' had been a way to circumvent the Shah's ban on political demonstrations. But at the time he had had no idea that a massive political movement was building. Nor had anyone else.

In August 1978 Paul went home to the States on leave. (So did William Sullivan, the U.S. Ambassador to Iran.) Paul loved all kinds of water sports, and he had gone to a sportfishing tournament in Ocean City, New Jersey, with his cousin Joe Porreca. Paul's wife, Ruthie, and the children, Karen and Ann Marie, went to Chicago to visit Ruthie's parents. Paul was a little anxious because the Ministry of Health still had not paid EDS's bill for the month of June; but it was not the first time they had been late with a payment, and Paul had left the problem in the hands of his second-in-command, Bill Gaylord, and he was fairly confident Bill would get the money in.

While Paul was in the U.S. the news from Iran was bad. Martial law was declared on September 7, and the following day more than a hundred people were killed by soldiers during a demonstration in Jaleh Square in the heart of Tehran.

When the Chiapparone family came back to Iran the very air seemed different. For the first time Paul and Ruthie could hear shooting in the streets at night. They were alarmed: suddenly they realized that trouble for the Iranians meant trouble for them. There was a series of strikes. The electricity was continually being cut off, so they dined by candlelight and Paul wore his topcoat in the office to keep warm. It became more and more difficult to get money out of the banks, and Paul started a check-cashing service at the office for employees. When they got low on heating oil for their home Paul had to walk around the streets until he found a tanker, then bribe the driver to come to the house and deliver.

His business problems were worse. The Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Dr. Sheikholeslamizadeh, had been arrested under Article 5 of martial law, which permitted a prosecutor to jail anyone without giving a reason. Also in jail was Deputy Minister Reza Neghabat, with whom Paul had worked closely. The Ministry still had not paid its June bill, nor any since, and now owed EDS more than four million dollars.

For two months Paul tried to get the money. The individuals he had dealt with previously had all gone. Their replacements usually did not return his calls. Sometimes someone would promise to look into the problem and call back: after waiting a week for the call that never came, Paul would telephone once again, to be told that the person he had spoken to last week had now left the Ministry. Meetings would be arranged, then canceled. The debt mounted at the rate of $1.4 million a month.

On November 14 Paul wrote to Dr. Heidargholi Emrani, the Deputy Minister in charge of the Social Security Organization, giving formal notice that if the Ministry did not pay up within a month EDS would stop work. The threat was repeated on December 4 by Paul's boss, the president of EDS World, at a personal meeting with Dr. Emrani.

That was yesterday.

If EDS pulled out, the whole Iranian social-security system would collapse. Yet it was becoming more and more apparent that the country was bankrupt and simply could not pay its bills. What, Paul wondered, would Dr. Emrani do now?

He was still wondering when Jay Coburn walked in with the answer.