Follett, Ken - On Wings of Eagles.txt
Page 17
Stauffer would get hold of one and use it as a model for the forgeries.
Throughout all this, Simons was still very low key, Coburn observed.
Chain-smoking his cigars (Boulware told him: -Don't worry about getting
shot, you're going to die of cancer"'), he did little more than ask
questions. The plans were made in a round-table discussion, with everyone
contributing, and deci-
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 129
sions were arrived at by mutual agreement. Yet Coburn found himself coming
to respect Simons more and more. The man was knowledgeable, intelligent,
painstaking, and imaginative. He also had a sense of humor.
Coburn could see that the others were also beginning to get the measure of
Simons. H anyone asked a dumb question, Simons would give a sharp answer.
In consequence, they would hesitate before asking a question, and wonder
what his reaction might be. In this way he was getting them to think like
him.
Once on that second day at the lake house they felt the fun fbrce of his
displeasure. It was, not surprisingly, young Ron Davis who angered him.
They were a bumorous bunch, and Davis was the funniest. Coburn approved of
that: laughter helped to ease the tension in an operation such as this. He
suspected Simons felt the same. But one time Davis went too far.
Simons had a pack of cigars on the floor beside his chair, and five more
packs out in the kitchen. Davis, getting to like Simons and
characteristically making no secret of it, said with genuine concern:
"Colonel, you smoke too many cigars, it's bad for your health.99
By way of reply he got The Simons Look, but he ignored the warning.
A few minutes later, he went into the kitchen and hid the five packs of
cigars in the dishwasher.
When Simons finished the first pack he went looking for the rem and could
not find them. He could not operate without tobacco. He was about to get in
a car and go to a store when Davis opened the dishwasher and said: "I have
your cigars IM."
"You keep dim, goddammit," Simons growled, and he went out.
When he came back with another five packs he said to Davis: "These are
mine. Keep your goddam hands off them."
Davis felt like a child who has been put in the comer. It was the first and
last prank he played on Colonel Simons.
While the discussion went on, Jim Schwebach sat on the floor, trying to
make a bomb.
To smuggle a bomb, or even just its component parts, through Iranian
customs would have been dangerous-"That's a risk we don't have to take,"
Simons said--so Schwebach had to design
130 Ken FoUeU
a device that could be assembled from ingredients readily available in
Tehran.
The idea of blowing up a building was dropped: it was too ambitious and
would probably lull innocent people. They would make do with a blazing car
as a diversion. Schwebach knew how to make "instant napalm" from gasoline,
soap flakes, and a little oil. The timer and the fuse were his two
problems. In the States he would have used an electrical timer connected
with a toy rocket motor, but in Tehran he would be restricted to more
primitive mechanisms.
Schwebach enjoyed the challenge. He liked fooling around with anything
mechanical: his hobby was an ugly-looking stripped-down '73 Oldsmobile
Cutlass that went like a bullet out of a gun.
At first he experimented with an old-fashioned clockwork stove-top timer
that used a striker to hit a bell. He 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 phosphorus matches and
ground up the inflammable material intD 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 passers-by-plus, quite
possibly, some of the prison guards--would have their
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 131
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 not fluoroscope outgoing baggage:
one was Kennedy.
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 banian 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
132 Ken FoUett
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 fines, so the
team developed a simple code.
GR meant A, GS meant B, GT meant C, and so on through GZ which meant 1;
then HA meant J, HB meant K, through HR which meant Z. Numbers one through
nine were IA through U: 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 Goff Uniform Hotel Kdo. -
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, wh"ough 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 anyonesuch 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.
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 133
Time and time again Simons walked up the "fence" and gave a hand signal;
Pochd 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 PochA, 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 anummition 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.
134 Ken Follett
It was bitterly cold out in the open, and they all huddled in a little
shack, trying to get warm, while they were not shootingall except Simons,
who stayed outside an 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 he was hungry he would open a can. He would laugh at someone for
nursing a drink: when he was thirsty he would fill a tumbler with water and
drink it all straight down, saying: "I didn't pour it to look at it." He
showed them how he could shoot, one time: every bullet in the center of the
target. Once Coburn saw him with his shirt off. his physique would have
been impressive on a man twenty years younger-
It was a tough-guy act, the whole performance. What was peculiar was that
none of them ever laughed at it. With Simons, it was the real thing.
One evening at the lake house he showed them the best way to kill a man
quickly and silently.
He had ordered--and Merv Stauffer had purchased--Gerber knives for each of
them, short stabbing weapons with a narrow two-edged blade.
"It's kind of small," said Davis, looking at his. "Is it long enough?"
"It is unless you want to sharpen it when it comes out the other side,"
Simons said.
He showed them the exact spot in the small of Glenn Jackson's back where
the kidney was located. "A single stab, right there, is lethal," he said.
:'Wouldn't he scream?" Davis asked.
'It hurts so bad he can't make a sound."
While Simons was demonstrating, Merv Stauffer had come in, and now he stood
in the doorway, openmouthed, with a McDonald's paper bag in either arm.
Simons saw him and said: "LA)ok at this guy--he can't make a sound and
nobody's stuck him yet.'9
Merv laughed and started handing round the food. "You know what the
McDonald's girl said to me, in a completely empty
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 135
restaurant, when I asked for thirty hamburgers and thirty orders of fries?"
"'Wbat?"
"What they always say-'Is this to eat here or to goT
Simons just loved working
for private enterprise.
One of his biggest headaches in the army had always been supplies. Even
planning the Son Tay Raid, an operation in which the President himself was
personally interested, it had seemed as if he had to fill in six
requisition forms and get approval from twelve generals every time he
needed a new pencil. Then, when all the paper work was done, he would find
that the items were out of stock, or there was a four-month wait for
delivery, or-worst of all-when the stuff came it did not work. Twentytwo
percent of the blasting caps he ordered misfired. He had tried to get night
sights for his Raiders. He learned that the army had spent seventeen years
trying to develop a night sight, but by 1970 all they had were six
hand-built prototypes. Then he discovered a perfectly good British-made
night sight available from the Armalite Corporation for $49.50, and that
was what the Son Tay Raiders took to Vietnam.
At EDS there were no forms to be filled out and no permissions to be
sought, at least not for Simons: he told Merv Stauffer what he needed and
Stauffer got it, usually the same day. He asked for, and got, ten Walther
PPKs and ten thousand rounds of ammunition; a selection of holsters, both
left-handed and right-handed, in different styles so the men could pick the
kind they felt most comfortable with; shotgun-ammunition reloading kits in
twelve-gauge, sixteen-gauge and twenty-gauge; and cold-weadier clothes for
the team including coats, mittens, shirts, socks, and woolen stocking caps.
One day he asked for a hundred thousand dollars in cash: two hours later T.
J. Marquez arrived at the lake house with the money in an envelope.
It was different from the army in other ways. His men were not soldiers who
could be bullied into submission: they were some of the brightest young
corporate executives in the United States. He had realized from the start
that he could not assume command. He had to earn their loyalty.
These men would obey an order if they agreed with it. If not, they would
discuss it. That was fine in the boardroom, but useless on the battlefield.
They were squeamish, too. The first time they talked about
136 Ken Follett
setting fire to a car as a diversion, someone had objected on the grounds