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insisted that he had told EDS, when he took the passports, that this
        was his deal with the police; but he must have said it rather quietly,
        because no one could remember it.
        Paul was furious. Why had Goelz had to make any kind of deal with the
        police? He was under no obligation to tell them what he did with an
        American passport. It was not his job to help the police detain Paul and
        Bill in Iran, for God's sake! The Embassy was there to help Americans,
        wasn't it?
        Couldn't Goelz renege on his stupid agreement, and return the passports
        quietly, perhaps informing the police a couple of days later, when Paul and
        Bill were safely home? Absolutely not, said Goelz. If he quarreled with the
        police they would make trouble for everyone else, and Goelz had to worry
        about the other twelve thousand Americans still in Iran. Besides, the names
        of Paul and Bill were now on the "stop list" held by the airport police:
        even with all their documents in order they would never get through
        passport control.
        When the news that Paul and Bill were well and truly stuck in Iran reached
        Dallas, EDS and its lawyers went into high gear. Their Washington contacts
        were not as good as they would have been under a Republican administration,
        but they still had some friends. They talked to Bob Strauss, a high-powered
        White House troubleshooter who happened to be a Texan; Admiral Tom Moorer,
        a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who knew many of the
        generals now running Iran's military government; and Richard Helms, past
        Director of the CIA and a former U.S. Ambassador to Iran. As a result of
        the pressure they put on the State Department, the U.S. Ambassador in
        Tehran, William Sullivan, raised the case of Paul and Bill in a meeting
        with the Iranian Prime Minister, General Azhari.
    None of this brought any results.
    30 Ken Follett
     
        The thirty days that Paul had given the Iranians to pay their bill ran out,
        and on December 16 he wrote to Dr. Emrani formally terminating the
        contract. But he had not given up. He asked a handful of evacuated
        executives to come back to Tehran, as a sign of EDS's willingness to try to
        resolve its problems with the Ministry. Some of the returning executives,
        encouraged by the peaceful Ashura, even brought their families back.
        Neither the Embassy nor EDS's lawyers in Tehran had been able to find out
        who had ordered Paul and Bill detained. It was Majid, Fara's father, who
        eventually got the information out of General Biglari. The investigator was
        Examining Magistrate Hosain Dadgar, a midlevel functionary within the
        office of the public prosecutor, in a department that dealt with crimes by
        civil servants and had very broad powers. Dadgar was conducting the inquiry
        into Dr. Sheik, the jailed former Minister of Health.
        Since the Embassy could not persuade the Iranians to let Paul and Bill
        leave the country, and would not give back their passports quietly, could
        they at least arrange for this Dadgar to question Paul and Bill as soon as
        possible so that they could go home for Christmas? Christmas did not mean
        much to the Iranians, said Goelz, but New Year did, so he would try to fix
        a meeting before then.
        During the second half of December the rioting started again (and the first
        thing the returning executives did was plan for a second evacuation). The
        general strike continued, and petroleum exports-the government's most
        important source of income-ground to a halt, reducing to zero EDS's chances
        of getting paid. So few Iranians turned up for work at the Ministry that
        there was