On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

The biggest element in his psychological campaign was the endless practicing of the assault on the jail. Simons was quite sure that the jail would not be exactly as Coburn had described it, and that the plan would have to be modified. A raid never went precisely according to the scenario--as he knew better than most.

The rehearsals for the Son Tay Raid had gone on for weeks. A complete replica of the prison camp had been built, out of two-by-four timbers and target cloth, at Eglin Air Base in Florida. The bloody thing had to be dismantled every morning before dawn and put up again at night, because the Russian reconnaissance satellite Cosmos 355 passed over Florida twice every twenty-four hours. But it had been a beautiful thing: every goddam tree and ditch in the Son Tay prison camp had been reproduced in the mock-up. And then, after all those rehearsals, when they did it for real, one of the helicopters--the one Simons was in--had landed in the wrong place.

Simons would never forget the moment he realized the mistake. His helicopter was taking off again, having discharged the Raiders. A startled Vietnamese guard emerged from a foxhole and Simons shot him in the chest. Shooting broke out, a flare went up, and Simons saw that the buildings surrounding him were not the buildings of the Son Tay camp. "Get that fucking chopper back in here!" he yelled to his radio operator. He told a sergeant to turn on a strobe light to mark the landing zone.

He knew where they were: four hundred yards from Son Tay, in a compound marked on intelligence maps as a school. This was no school. There were enemy troops everywhere. It was a barracks, and Simons realized that his helicopter pilot's mistake had been a lucky one, for now he was able to launch a preemptive attack and wipe out a concentration of enemy troops who might otherwise have jeopardized the whole operation.

That was the night he stood outside a barracks and shot eighty men in their underwear.

No, an operation never went exactly according to plan. But becoming proficient at executing the scenario was only half the purpose of rehearsals anyway. The other half--and, in the case of the EDS men, the important half--was learning to work together as a team. Oh, they were already terrific as an intellectual team--give them each an office and a secretary and a telephone, and together they would computerize the world--but working together with their hands and their bodies was different. When they had started, on January 3, they would have had trouble launching a row-boat as a team. Five days later they were a machine.

And that was all that could be done here in Texas.

Now they had to take a look at the real-life jail.

It was time to go to Tehran.

Simons told Stauffer he wanted to meet with Perot again.

3____

While the rescue team was in training, President Carter got his last chance of preventing a bloody revolution in Iran.

And he blew it.

This is how it happened ...

Ambassador William Sullivan went to bed content on the night of January 4 in his private apartment within the large, cool residence in the Embassy compound at the comer of Roosevelt and Takht-e-Jamshid avenues in Tehran.

Sullivan's boss, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, had been busy with the Camp David negotiations all through November and December, but now he was back in Washington and concentrating on Iran--and boy, did it show. Vagueness and vacillation had ended. The cables containing Sullivan's instructions had become crisp and decisive. Most importantly, the United States at last had a strategy for dealing with the crisis: they were going to talk to the Ayatollah Khomeini.

It was Sullivan's own idea. He was now sure that the Shah would soon leave Iran and Khomeini would return in triumph. His job, he believed, was to preserve America's relationship with Iran through the change of government, so that when it was all over, Iran would still be a stronghold of American influence in the Middle East. The way to do that was to help the Iranian armed forces to stay intact and to continue American military aid to any new regime.

Sullivan had called Vance on the secure telephone line and told him just that. The U.S. should send an emissary to Paris to see the Ayatollah, Sullivan had urged. Khomeini should be told that the main concern of the U.S. was to preserve the territorial integrity of Iran and deflect Soviet influence; that the Americans did not want to see a pitched battle in Iran between the army and the Islamic revolutionaries; and that once the Ayatollah was in power, the U.S. would offer him the same military assistance and arms sales it had given the Shah.

It was a bold plan. There would be those who would accuse the U.S. of abandoning a friend. But Sullivan was sure it was time for the Americans to cut their losses with the Shah and look to the future.

To his intense satisfaction, Vance had agreed.