On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

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: "Nous serons trois." There will be three of us. Bakhtiar always spoke French with Sullivan.

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 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

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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 document that gave Dadgar the money and at the same time gave Paul and Bill their freedom. In Dallas Tom Walter had at last found a bank willing to issue a letter of credit for the bail, but Howell and Taylor were having trouble finding an Iranian bank to accept it and issue the guarantee Dadgar required. Meanwhile, Howell's boss Tom Luce thought about the third option, a lien on property, and came up with a wild and wacky idea that just might work: pledging the U.S. Embassy in Tehran as bail for Paul and Bill.