1___
The American Embassy's Volkswagen minibus threaded its way through the streets of Tehran, heading for Gasr Square. Ross Perot sat inside. It was January 19, the day after Paul and Bill were moved, and Perot was going to visit them in the new jail.
It was a little crazy.
Everyone had gone to great lengths to hide Perot in Tehran, for fear that Dadgar--seeing a far more valuable hostage than Paul or Bill--would arrest him and throw him in jail. Yet here he was, heading for the jail of his own free will, with his own passport in his pocket for identification.
His hopes were pinned on the notorious inability of government everywhere to let its right hand know what its left was doing. The Ministry of Justice might want to arrest him, but it was the military who ran the jails, and the military had no interest in him.
Nevertheless, he was taking precautions. He would go in with a group of people--Rich Gallagher and Jay Coburn were on the bus, as well as some Embassy people who were going to visit an American woman in the jail-- and he was wearing casual clothes and carrying a cardboard box containing groceries, books, and warm clothing for Paul and Bill.
Nobody at the prison would know his face. He would have to give his name as he went in, but why would a minor clerk or prison guard recognize it? His name might be on a list at the airport, at police stations, or at hotels; but the prison would surely be the
Anyway, he was determined to take the risk. He wanted to boost Paul's and Bill's morale, and to show them that he was willing to stick out his neck for them. It would be the only achievement of his trip: his efforts to get the negotiations moving had come to nothing.
The bus entered Gasr Square and he got his first sight of the new prison. It was formidable. He could not imagine how Simons and his little rescue team could possibly break in there.
In the square were scores of people, mostly women in chadors, making a lot of noise. The bus stopped near the huge steel doors. Perot wondered about the bus driver: he was Iranian, and he knew who Perot was ...
They all got out. Perot saw a television camera near the prison entrance.
His heart missed a beat.
It was an
What the hell were they doing there?
He kept his head down as he pushed his way through the crowd, carrying his cardboard box. A guard looked out of a small window set into the brick wall beside the gates. The television crew seemed to be taking no notice of him. A minute later a little door in one of the gates swung open, and the visitors stepped inside.
The door clanged shut behind them.
Perot had passed the point of no return.
He walked on, through a second pair of steel doors, into the prison compound. It was a big place, with streets between the buildings, and chickens and turkeys running around loose. He followed the others through a doorway into a reception room.
He showed his passport: The clerk pointed to a register. Perot took out his pen and signed 'H. R. Perot' more or less legibly.
The clerk handed back the passport and waved him on.
He had been right. Nobody here had heard of Ross Perot.
He walked on into a waiting room--and stopped dead.
Standing there, talking to an Iranian in general's uniform, was someone who knew perfectly well who Ross Perot was.
It was Ramsey Clark, a Texan who had been U.S. Attorney General under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Perot had met him several times and knew Clark's sister Mimi very well.
For a moment Perot froze. That explains the television cameras, he thought. He wondered whether he could keep out of Clark's sight. Any moment now, he thought, Ramsey will see me and say to the general: 'Lord, there's Ross Perot of EDS,' and if I look as if I'm trying to hide, it will be even worse.
He made a snap decision.
He walked over to Clark, stuck out his hand, and said: 'Hello, Ramsey, what are you doing in jail?'
Clark looked down--he was six foot three--and laughed. They shook hands.
'How's Mimi?' Perot asked before Clark had a chance to perform introductions.
The general was saying something in Farsi to an underling.
Clark said: 'Mimi's fine.'
'Well, good to see you,' Perot said, and walked on.
His mouth was dry as he went out of the waiting room and into the prison compound with Gallagher, Coburn, and the Embassy people. That had been a close shave. An Iranian in colonel's uniform joined them: he had been assigned to take care of them, Gallagher said. Perot wondered what Clark was saying to the general now ...
Paul was sick. The cold he had caught in the first jail had recurred. He was coughing persistently and had pains in his chest. He could not get warm, in this jail or in the old one: for three whole weeks he had been cold. He had asked his EDS visitors to get him warm underwear, but for some reason they had not brought any.
He was also miserable. He really had expected that Coburn and the rescue team would ambush the bus that brought him and Bill here from the Ministry of Justice, and when the bus had entered the impregnable Gasr Prison he had been bitterly disappointed.
General Mohari, who ran the prison, had explained to Paul and Bill that he was in charge of all the jails in Tehran, and he had arranged for their transfer to this one for their own safety. It was small consolation: being less vulnerable to the mobs, this place was also more difficult, if not impossible, for the rescue team to attack.
The Gasr Prison was part of a large military complex. On its west side was the old Gasr Ghazar Palace, which had been turned into a police academy by the Shah's father. The prison compound had once been the palace gardens. To the north was a military hospital; to the east an army camp where helicopters took off and landed all day.
The compound itself was bounded by an inner wall twenty-five or thirty feet high, and an outer wall twelve feet high. Inside were fifteen or twenty separate buildings, including a bakery, a mosque, and six cell blocks, one reserved for women.
Paul and Bill were in Building Number 8. It was a two-story block in a courtyard surrounded by a fence of tall iron bars covered with chicken wire. The environment was not bad, for a jail. There was a fountain in the middle of the courtyard, rose bushes around the sides, and ten or fifteen pine trees. The prisoners were allowed outside during the day, and could play volleyball or Ping-Pong in the courtyard. However, they could not pass through the courtyard gate, which was manned by a guard.
The ground floor of the building was a small hospital with twenty or so patients, mostly mental cases. They screamed a lot. Paul and Bill and a handful of other prisoners were on the first floor. They had a large cell, about twenty feet by thirty, which they shared with only one other prisoner, an Iranian lawyer in his fifties who spoke English and French as well as Farsi. He had showed them pictures of his villa in France. There was a TV set in the cell.
Meals were prepared by some of the prisoners--who were paid for this by the others--and eaten in a separate dining room. The food here was better than at the first jail. Extra privileges could be bought, and one of the other inmates, apparently a hugely wealthy man, had a private room and meals brought in from outside. The routine was relaxed: there were no set times for getting up and going to bed.
For all that, Paul was thoroughly depressed. A measure of extra comfort meant little. What he wanted was freedom.
He was not much cheered when they were told, on the morning of January 19, that they had visitors.
There was a visiting room on the ground floor of Building Number 8, but today, without explanation, they were taken out of the building and along the street.
Paul realized they were headed for a building known as the Officers' Club, set in a small tropical garden with ducks and peacocks. As they approached the place he glanced around the compound and saw his visitors coming in the opposite direction.
