On Wings of Eagles Read Free Page B

frustrating. Iranians did not
        have the can-do attitude of American business executives, and often seemed
        to create problems instead of solving them. At EDS headquarters back in
        Dallas, Texas, not only were people expected to do the impossible, but it
        was usually due yesterday. Here in Iran everything was impossible and in
        any case not due until fardah--usually translated "tomorrow," in practice,
        "some time in the future."
    20 Ken Follett
     
        Paul had attacked the problems in the only way he knew: by hard work and
        determination. He was no intellectual genius. As a boy he had found
        schoolwork difficult, but his Italian father, with the immigrant's typical
        faith in education, had pressured him to study, and he had got good grades.
        Sheer persistence had served him well ever since. He could remember the
        early days of EDS in the States, back in the sixties, when every new
        contract could make or break the company; and he had helped build it into
        one of the most dynamic and successful corporations in the world. The
        Iranian operation would go the same way, he had been sure, particularly
        when Jay Coburn's recruitment and training program began to deliver more
        Iranians capable of top management.
        He had been all wrong, and he was only just beginning to understand why.
        When he and his family arrived in Iran, in August 1977, the petrodollar
        boom was already over. The government was running out of money. That year
        an anti-inflation program increased unemployment just when a bad harvest
        was driving yet more starving peasants into the cities. The tyrannical rule
        of the Shah was weakened by the human-rights policies of American President
        Jimmy Carter. The time was ripe for political unrest.
        For a while Paul did not take much notice of local politics. He knew there
        were rumblings of discontent, but that was true of just about every country
        in the world, and the Shah seemed to have as firm a grip on the reins of
        power as any ruler. Like the rest of the world, Paul missed the
        significance of the events of the first half of 1978.
        On January 7 the newspaper Eteldat published a scurrilous attack on an
        exiled clergyman called Ayatollah Khomemi, alleging, among other things,
        that he was homosexual. The following day, eighty miles from Tehran in the
        town of Qom---the principal center of religious education in the
        country---outraged theology students staged a protest sit-in that was
        bloodily broken up by the military and the police. The confrontation
        escalated, and seventy people were killed in two more days of disturbances.
        The clergy organized a memorial procession for the dead forty days later in
        accordance with Islamic tradition. There was more violence during the
        procession, and the dead were commemorated in another memorial forty days
        later.... The processions continued, and grew larger and more violent,
        through the first six months of the year.
        ON WINGS OF EAGLES 21
     
        With hindsight Paul could see that calling these marches "funeral
        processions" had been a way to circumvent the Shah's ban on political
        demonstrations. But at the time he had had no idea that a massive political
        movement was building. Nor had anyone else.
        In August 1978 Paul went home to the States on leave. (So did William
        Sullivan, the U.S. Ambassador to Iran.) Paul loved all kinds of water
        sports, and he had gone to a sports fishing tournament in Ocean City, New
        Jersey, with his cousin Joe Porreca. Paul's wife, Ruthie, and the children,
        Karen and Ann Marie, went to Chicago to visit Ruthie's parents. Paul was a
        little