coming home? Is he all right? Will he get out alive?' Merv tried to soothe her, but he would not give her any information, so she would demand to speak to Ross Perot, and Merv would tell her that was not possible. Then she would call her mother and burst into tears and pour out all her anxiety and fear and frustration over the phone.
The Dvoranchiks were kind. They were trying to take her mind off her worries.
'What did you do today?' Toni asked.
'I went shopping,' Liz said.
'Did you buy anything?'
'Yes.' Liz started to cry. 'I bought a black dress. Because Jay isn't coming home.'
During those days of waiting, Jay Coburn learned a good deal about Simons.
One day Merv Stauffer called from Dallas to say that Simons's son Harry had been on the phone, worried. Harry had called his father's house and spoken to Paul Walker, who was minding the farm. Walker had said he did not know where Simons was, and had advised Harry to call Merv Stauffer at EDS. Harry was naturally worried, Stauffer said. Simons called Harry from Tehran and reassured him.
Simons told Coburn that Harry had had some problems, but he was a good boy at heart. He spoke of his son with a kind of resigned affection. (He never mentioned Bruce, and it was not until much later that Coburn realized Simons had two sons.)
Simons talked a lot about his late wife, Lucille, and how happy the two of them had been after Simons retired. They had been very close during the last few years, Coburn gathered, and Simons seemed to regret that it had taken him so long to realize how much he loved her. 'Hold on to your mate,' he advised Coburn. 'She's the most important person in your life.'
Paradoxically, Simons's advice had the opposite effect on Coburn. He envied the companionship Simons and Lucille had had, and he wanted that for himself; but he was so sure he could never achieve it with Liz that he wondered if someone else would be his true soul mate.
One evening Simons laughed and said: 'You know, I wouldn't do this for anyone else.'
It was a characteristically cryptic Simons remark. Sometimes, Coburn had learned, you got an explanation; sometimes you did not. This time Coburn got an explanation: Simons told him why he felt indebted to Ross Perot.
The aftermath of the Son Tay Raid had been a bitter experience for Simons. Although the Raiders had not brought back any American POWs, it had been a brave try, and Simons expected the American public to see it that way. Indeed, he had argued, at a breakfast meeting with Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, in favor of releasing the news of the raid to the press. 'This is a perfectly legitimate operation,' he had told Laird. 'These are American prisoners. This is something Americans traditionally do for Americans. For Christ's sake, what is it we're afraid of here?'
He soon found out. The press and public saw the raid as a failure and yet another intelligence foul-up. The banner headline on the front page of the next day's
Simons went to the White House to receive the Distinguished Service Cross for 'extraordinary heroism' from President Nixon. The rest of the Raiders were to be decorated by Defense Secretary Laird. Simons was enraged to learn that over half of his men were to get nothing more than the Army Commendation Ribbon, only slightly better than a Good Conduct Ribbon, and known to soldiers as a 'Green Weenie.' Mad as hell, he picked up the phone and asked for the Army Chief of Staff, General Westmoreland. He got the Acting Chief, General Palmer. Simons told Palmer about the Green Weenies and said: 'General, I don't want to embarrass the army, but one of my men is just likely to shove an Army Commendation Ribbon up Mr. Laird's ass.' He got his way: Laird awarded four Distinguished Service Crosses, fifty Silver Stars, and no Green Weenies.
The POWs got a huge morale boost from the Son Tay Raid (which they heard about from incoming prisoners). An important side effect of the raid was that the POW camps--where many prisoners had been kept permanently in solitary confinement--were closed, and all the Americans were brought into two large prisons where there was not enough room to keep them apart. Nevertheless, the world branded the raid a failure, and Simons felt a grave injustice had been done to his men.
The disappointment rankled with him for years--until, one weekend, Ross Perot threw a mammoth party in San Francisco, persuaded the army to round up the Son Tay Raiders from all over the world, and introduced them to the prisoners they had tried to rescue. That weekend, Simons felt, his Raiders had at last got the thanks they deserved. And Ross Perot had been responsible.
'That's why I'm here,' Simons told Coburn. 'Sure as hell, I wouldn't do this for anyone else.'
Coburn, thinking of his son Scott, knew exactly what Simons meant.
4___
On January 22 hundreds of homafars--young air force officers--mutinied at bases in Dezful, Hamadan, Isfahan, and Mashad, and declared themselves loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini.
The significance of the event was not apparent to National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who still expected the Iranian military to crush the Islamic revolution; nor to Premier Shahpour Bakhtiar, who was talking about meeting the revolutionary challenge with a minimum of force; nor to the Shah, who instead of going to the United States was hanging on in Egypt, waiting to be summoned back to save his country in its hour of need.
Among the people who did see its significance were Ambassador William Sullivan and General Abbas Gharabaghi, the Iranian Chief of Staff.
Sullivan told Washington that the idea of a pro-Shah countercoup was moonshine; the revolution was going to succeed and the U.S. had better start thinking about how it would live with the new order. He received a harsh reply from the White House suggesting that he was disloyal to the President. He decided to resign, but his wife talked him out of it: he had a responsibility to the thousands of Americans still in Iran, she pointed out, and he could hardly walk out on them now.
General Gharabaghi also contemplated resigning. He was in an impossible position. He had sworn his oath of loyalty, not to the Parliament or the government of Iran, but to the Shah personally; and the Shah was gone. For the time being Gharabaghi took the view that the military owed loyalty to the Constitution of 1906, but that meant little in practice. Theoretically the military ought to support the Bakhtiar government. Gharabaghi had been wondering for some weeks whether he could rely on his soldiers to follow orders and fight for Bakhtiar against the revolutionary forces. The revolt of the homafars showed that he could not. He realized--as Brzezinski did not--that an army was not a machine to be switched on and off at will, but a collection of people, sharing the aspirations, the anger, and the revivalist religion of the rest of the country. The soldiers wanted a revolution as much as the civilians. Gharabaghi concluded that he could no longer control his troops, and he decided to resign.
On the day that he announced his intention to his fellow generals, Ambassador William Sullivan was summoned to Prime Minister Bakhtiar's office at six o'clock in the evening. Sullivan had heard, from U.S. General 'Dutch' Huyser, of Gharabaghi's intended resignation, and he assumed that this was what Bakhtiar wanted to talk about.
Bakhtiar waved Sullivan to a seat, saying with an enigmatic smile:
A few minutes later General Gharabaghi walked in. Bakhtiar spoke of the difficulties that would be created if the general were to resign. Gharabaghi began to reply in Farsi, but Bakhtiar made him speak French. As the general talked, he toyed with what seemed to be an envelope in his pocket: Sullivan guessed it was his letter of resignation.
As the two Iranians argued in French, Bakhtiar kept turning to the American Ambassador for support. Sullivan secretly thought Gharabaghi was absolutely right to resign, but his orders from the White House were to encourage the military to support Bakhtiar, so he doggedly argued, against his own convictions, that Gharabaghi should not resign. After a discussion of half an hour, the general left without delivering his letter of resignation. Bakhtiar thanked Sullivan profusely for his help. Sullivan knew it would do no good.
On January 24 Bakhtiar closed Tehran's airport to stop Khomeini from entering Iran. It was like opening an umbrella against a tidal wave. On January 26 soldiers killed fifteen pro-Khomeini protestors in street fighting in
