Tehran. Two days later Bakhtiar offered to go to Paris for talks with the Ayatollah. For a ruling Prime Minister to offer to visit an exiled rebel was a fantastic admission of weakness, and Khomeini saw it that way: he refused to talk unless Bakhtiar first resigned. On January 29, thirty-five people died in the fighting in Tehran and another fifty in the rest of the country. Gharabaghi, bypassing his Prime Minister, began talks with the rebels in Tehran, and gave his consent to the return of the Ayatollah. On January 30 Sullivan ordered the evacuation of all nonessential Embassy personnel and all dependents. On February 1 Khomeini came home.
His Air France jumbo jet landed at 9:15 A.M. Two million Iranians turned out to greet him. At the airport the Ayatollah made his first public statement. 'I beg God to cut off the hands of all evil foreigners and all their helpers.'
Simons saw it all on TV; then he said to Coburn: 'That's it. The people are going to do it for us. The mob will take that jail.'
Nine
1_____
At midday on February 5 John Howell was on the point of getting Paul and Bill out of jail.
Dadgar had said that he would accept bail in one of three forms: cash, a bank guarantee, or a lien on property. Cash was out of the question. First, anyone who flew into the lawless city of Tehran with $12,750,000 in a suitcase might never reach Dadgar's office alive. Second, Dadgar might take the money and still keep Paul and Bill, either by raising the bail or by rearresting them on some new pretext. (Tom Walter suggested using counterfeit money, but nobody knew where to get it.) There had to be a
The State Department was by now loosening up, but was not quite ready to pledge its Tehran embassy as bail. However, it was ready to give the guarantee of the United States government. That in itself was unique: the U.S.A. standing bail for two jailed men!
First, Tom Walter in Dallas got a bank to issue a letter of credit in favor of the State Department for $12,750,000. Because this transaction took place entirely within the U.S., it was accomplished in hours rather than days. Once the State Department in Washington had the letter, Minister Counselor Charles Naas--Ambassador Sullivan's deputy--would deliver a diplomatic note saying that Paul and Bill, once released, would make themselves available to Dadgar for questioning; otherwise, the bail would be paid by the Embassy.
Right now Dadgar was in a meeting with Lou Goelz, Consul General at the Embassy. Howell had not been invited to attend, but Abolhasan was there for EDS.
Howell had had a preliminary meeting with Goelz yesterday. Together they had gone over the terms of the guarantee, with Goelz reading the phrases in his quiet, precise voice. Goelz was changing. Two months ago Howell had found him maddeningly correct: it was Goelz who had refused to give back Paul's and Bill's passports without telling the Iranians. Now Goelz seemed ready to try the unconventional. Perhaps living in the middle of a revolution had made the old boy unbend a little.
Goelz had told Howell that the decision to release Paul and Bill would be made by Prime Minister Bakhtiar, but it must first be cleared with Dadgar. Howell was hoping Dadgar would not make trouble, for Goelz was not the type of man to bang the table and force Dadgar to back down.
There was a tap at the door and Abolhasan walked in.
Howell could tell from his face that he brought bad news.
'What happened?'
'He turned us down,' Abolhasan said.
'Why?'
'He won't accept the guarantee of the United States government.'
'Did he give a reason?'
'There's nothing in the law that says he can accept that as bail. He has to have cash, a bank guarantee--'
'Or a lien on property, I know.' Howell felt numb. There had been so many disappointments, so many dead ends, he was no longer capable of resentment or anger. 'Did you say anything about the Prime Minister?'
'Yes. Goelz told him we would take this proposal to Bakhtiar.'
'What did Dadgar say to that?'
'He said it was typical of the Americans. They try to resolve things by bringing influence to bear at high levels, with no concern for what is happening at lower levels. He also said that if his superiors did not like the way he was handling this case, they could take him off it, and he would be very happy, because he was weary of it.'
Howell frowned. What did all this mean? He had recently concluded that what the Iranians really wanted was the money. Now they had flatly turned it down. Was this genuinely because of the technical problem that the law did not specify a government guarantee as an acceptable form of bail--or was that an excuse? Perhaps it was genuine. The EDS case had always been politically sensitive, and now that the Ayatollah had returned, Dadgar might well be terrified of doing anything that could be construed as pro-American. Bending the rules to accept an unconventional form of bail might get him into trouble. What would happen if Howell succeeded in putting up bail in the legally required form? Would Dadgar then feel he had covered his rear, and release Paul and Bill? Or would he invent another excuse?
There was only one way to find out.
The week the Ayatollah returned to Iran, Paul and Bill asked for a priest.
Paul's cold seemed to have turned to bronchitis. He had asked for the prison doctor. The doctor did not speak English, but Paul had no trouble explaining his problem: he coughed, and the doctor nodded.
Paul was given some pills that he assumed were penicillin, and a bottle of cough medicine. The taste of the medicine was strikingly familiar, and he had a sudden, vivid flashback: he saw himself as a little boy, and his mother pouring the glutinous syrup from an old-fashioned bottle onto a spoon and dosing him with it. This was exactly the same stuff. It eased his cough, but he had already done some damage to the muscles in his chest, and he suffered a sharp pain every time he breathed deeply.
He had a letter from Ruthie that he read and reread. It was an ordinary, newsy kind of letter. Karen was in a new school, and having some trouble adjusting. This was normal: every time she changed schools, Karen would be sick to her stomach for the first couple of days. Ann Marie, Paul's younger daughter, was much more happy-go- lucky. Ruthie was still telling her mother that Paul would be home in a couple of weeks, but the story was becoming implausible, for that two-week deadline had now been stretched for two months. She was buying a house, and Tom Walter was helping her with the legal processes. Whatever emotions Ruthie was going through, she did not put them in the letter.
Keane Taylor was the most frequent visitor to the jail. Each time he came, he would hand Paul a pack of cigarettes with fifty or a hundred dollars folded inside. Paul and Bill could use the money in jail to buy special privileges, such as a bath. During one visit the guard left the room for a moment, and Taylor handed over four thousand dollars.
On another visit Taylor brought Father Williams.
Williams was pastor of the Catholic Mission where, in happier times, Paul and Bill had met with the EDS Tehran Roman Catholic Sunday Brunch Poker School. Williams was eighty years old, and his superiors had given him permission to leave Tehran, because of the danger. He had preferred to stay at his post. This kind of thing was not new to him, he told Paul and Bill: he had been a missionary in China during World War II, when the Japanese had invaded, and later, during the revolution that brought Mao Tse-tung to power. He himself had been imprisoned, so he understood what Paul and Bill were going through.
Father Williams boosted their morale almost as much as Ross Perot had. Bill, who was more devout than
