Can you tell us about what happened when you got a phone call in 1999 from Sgt. Eulis Presley?

That takes us to another story, this one with a few more moving parts. It began with a phone call where I thought Elvis had been reborn. Special Forces Sgt. Eulis Presley called, telling me about 125 to 175 Nung Vietnamese (Montagnard hill tribesmen) who had been forced to flee Vietnam at the end of the war in 1975, had escaped to an island off Hong Kong, and lived there for 25 years. Now as Hong Kong was going back over to China, they were going to be returned home to Vietnam to be executed by the Vietnamese government. I called Gen. Hugh Shelton, [then] chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I said “I received a call from a Special Forces sergeant named Eulis Presley.” For 10 minutes, Gen. Shelton told me about all the great accomplishments of Eulis Presley.

I told Gen. Shelton about the call from Sgt. Presley, and he responded, “Perot, I wouldn’t be alive without these men. We have to get them out.” Then I called the State Department to see if they would let the Nungs come to the United States, and they said, “Yes, if you can have someone validate that they actually are who they say they are.” I found that Gen. Wayne Downing had all that information, having just retired as commander of U.S. Special Operations Command. I called him, and his exact response was, “Perot, I wouldn’t be alive without those men – I’ll be on the next plane.”

I said, “General, where do you want me to send the ticket?”

He responded by saying, “Nobody buys these tickets but me – I wouldn’t be alive without the Nungs.”

Gen. Downing needed an interpreter, and he needed someone to arrange for the transportation for the Nungs. I asked Harry McKillop, who has worked with me since the first flight to Vietnam in 1969, and has done some incredibly heroic things going back to World War II when he was in the Navy. He has very strong ties to the airline industry. Harry agreed to organize flights and he flew on the mission.

I asked a former South Vietnamese fighter pilot named Nguyen Quoc Dat, who was a prisoner with our POWs in North Vietnam – we call him “Max” – to be the interpreter. He was assigned all the dirty jobs in the POW camp in Hanoi, because the North Vietnamese wanted to humiliate him in every possible way. Max used his job access to smuggle food and medicine to our men who were dying. When the U.S. POWs returned home, their highest priority was to honor Max at 12 U.S. military bases. We took care of that – and that’s when I met him.

Later, when South Vietnam was falling in 1975, one of the Son Tay Raiders, George Petrie, then stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, took a large bus to Max’s house, and evacuated Max and 30 family members to the U.S.

Max worked with me until he retired, and was living to California. I called him to see if he would go to Hong Kong with Wayne Downing and Harry McKillop, to be the interpreter. He volunteered immediately. When they arrived, Wayne Downing called me and said, “Perot, the local officials won’t let us on the island, but don’t worry; we’ll get on.” Two days later, Wayne Downing called me back, and said, “The men are on their way home; we’ll be coming back tomorrow.” In reply I asked, “Just out of curiosity, how did you get on the island?” Downing said, “Don’t ask, Perot!” and then hung up.

Today, all of these Nungs are living near Fort Bragg [N.C.]. They have jobs and they are living the Special Forces’ creed, “You never leave your men behind.”

In 2004, the Business Executives for National Security asked the Nungs to attend an awards dinner in my honor. There were many interesting people at that dinner, including all the people who were involved in the Iranian rescue. The chairman and all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff attended. I never would have dreamed they could all come to a public event with a war going on. I’ll always appreciate their presence — that’s an evening I’ll never forget.

Keeping Faith: The Perot Touch

For all the giving Perot has done over the years, there was one special occasion where it came back to him, when in 1978 two of his EDS executives were taken hostage by the Iranian government. When attempts to resolve the situation through diplomacy failed, Perot made the decision to act on his own. Remembering Col. Bull Simons, who had retired a few years earlier, Perot called him and asked him if he would organize and lead the rescue of his men in Iran. Within days, Simons was selecting and training a team of EDS employees (all highly decorated Vietnam veterans) into a hostage rescue team to rescue the two executives from the Tehran prison and bring them home.

In what may be the ultimate act of employer loyalty – the Iran rescue – you go to Iran in 1979 to get your people out. Can you talk a bit about what happened?

Before I left for Iran, I visited with my mother who was dying of cancer. I explained the situation to her, and that two of my men had been falsely arrested and jailed. She looked me squarely in the eye and said, “Ross, these are your men. You sent them over there and it’s your obligation to get them out.” What does that say about her?

Days later I was with Simons and the team in our safe house, and he looked me in the eye one day and said, “Perot … see if the U.S. Embassy will allow these men to receive refuge at the embassy when we get them out of prison.” That was the biggest mistake we made, because when I talked to the American ambassador he said “No,” and two hours later, the Iranian security forces were tearing up the town looking for me. Simons then said, “Perot, I want you to go to the prison where the men are held. Visit with them, and tell them what our plan of action is, so that they know where the rendezvous point is, what they’re supposed to do, etc.”

I replied, “Colonel, the Iranians are still looking for me.”

He replied, “One branch of the Iranian government is looking for you, but another branch of the government runs the prison. They don’t talk to one another – they won’t know anything about you at the prison.”

If Bull Simons told you to do it, you did it. A rescue team member drove me to the prison where the two EDS executives were being held. It was a giant fortress, with everyone standing in front, and there were at least a hundred camera crews there. I thought, “Well, this is it.” I walked past them and they ignored me. I thought to myself, “There must be somebody else here.” I went in, walked up to the reception room and there was former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, sitting there talking to the general in charge of the prison. Ramsey leaned forward and pointed at me, and spoke to the general. The general politely arranged for me to meet with Paul Chiapparone and Bill Gaylord [the two detained EDS executives], and I then left. After I returned home, and the story of the rescue was in all the papers, Ramsey called me and said, “Ross, I thought you were Frank Borman,” [the retired U.S. Air Force colonel, NASA astronaut, commander of the Gemini VII and Apollo 8 missions and then-president of Eastern Airlines] and I said, “Thank God!”

The man who actually led the rescue at the prison was an Iranian systems engineer working in our company – we called him “Rashid.” Simons roamed the streets of Tehran and observed huge numbers of Iranian terrorist teams. Simons had the genius to have Rashid create an Iranian “terrorist” team so that Rashid, as a leader, could attend the morning meetings. There were lots of these teams all over Tehran, and they would meet each morning to plan their daily activities. Simons learned that the team leaders also attended, so this meant Rashid was able to go to the meetings. Simons asked Rashid to form a team to infiltrate the revolutionary movement. Before the jailbreak actually occurred, Simons told Rashid, “See if you can bribe the police chief to leave open the police armory, where all the weapons [are] stored.” Rashid paid them $100, less than the cost of a pistol, to leave the police armory open. Rashid and his team attended the next morning meeting with more weapons than you can imagine. Rashid, who by now was very well regarded by his fellow terrorist team leaders, distributed weapons around the room, and shouted “Gasre Prison is our Bastille. It is our responsibility to free the thousands of political prisoners.”

One hour later, 30,000 terrorists stormed the prison and the guards were stripped down to their long underwear [and they] never fired a shot. 12,000 prisoners were allowed to escape so that our two men could also escape.

Our team drove their vehicles over 500 miles to the Turkish border before they ran into trouble. They were within 30 miles of the border when a group of Islamic revolutionaries stopped the vehicles, pulled Simons out, and started hitting him with a rifle butt. Simons, with no comment, pulled a note out of his pocket and handed it to them. The note read, “These people are friends of the revolution; please show them courtesy and escort them safely to the border, signed, Commandant of the Tehran Islamic Revolutionary Committee,” and it had a big seal. If you were to read the seal closely, it said, “Rezaieh Religious School: Founded 1344.” Simons gave me the note when he arrived in Turkey. He translated the words on the seal to me. I can tell you that I carefully read all seals on documents now!

The point is, it could never have happened without Bull Simons. The team did it – and nobody was hurt. It was too good to be true. When we landed in Dallas, my mother was at the airport, sitting in her car just outside the exit door. She was determined to see my two men reunited with their families. Mother passed away a few weeks later.