Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History

by Antonio Mendez

  After breaking for lunch at the Lord Elgin, we were picked up by an official car and taken to the ministry of defense.

  Prior to coming to Canada, we had learned that Ambassador Taylor was in the process of drawing down his embassy, which could help us with our intelligence-gathering operation. Of special interest to us were the military police who had been working at the embassy. Many of the military police were well traveled and familiar with border procedures around the world. We wanted to set up a system in which if any more of them traveled in or out of Mehrabad Airport, they would have a standard debriefing on the controls.

  With that done, I returned to Washington the next morning, leaving Joe behind to follow up on the passports and to meet with the national security forces who would help in rounding out the documentation packages that would complement the passports. They would also arrange for the collection of an Iranian visa issued in Canada. Joe would spend the following ten days in Canada tending to these chores.

  I boarded my flight home feeling a sense of accomplishment accompanied by relief that we had been able to move this project forward in a major way. I also felt gratitude that we were working with a neighbor who was truly supportive of America’s dilemma.

  On my way home, I reflected on Canada and its government. The “Small Is Beautiful” mantra kept playing in my mind. The Canadian government appeared ready and able to turn on a dime if necessary, and our government seemed bloated and sluggish in comparison. The fact that the Canadians had anticipated our needs and had taken the extraordinary steps required to reach out to us was a little overwhelming and certainly unprecedented. They were redefining what it meant to be a good neighbor.

  With the issue of documents behind us, we could now focus on the question of which cover story to use. The importance of having a good cover story and accompanying documentation can sometimes be the difference between life and death. One of the most famous cases in the history of the CIA happened in Cuba in 1960. A group of three audio techs, Thornton Anderson, Walter Szuminski, and David Christ, all from the Technical Services Division, had traveled to Cuba on a bugging mission. Ostensibly they were posing as three American tourists out to have a good time. All of them carried forged documents saying that they were electrical engineers, and in their wallets they carried credit cards and driver’s licenses, all of it faked by the capable TSD techs who had furnished them with their aliases. Their real purpose for traveling to Cuba was to install clandestine listening devices in a building that was slated to become the embassy of a very important hard-target third country. In the middle of installing the devices, however, they were captured and thrown into the local prison. If just one of them broke, or a flaw was detected in their documentation, then they would all be labeled spies and most likely executed. In total the men would spend nearly a month undergoing harsh interrogations during the night, but they never once cracked. Eventually they were transferred to a notorious prison outside Havana. They would finally be released three years later, when the U.S. government arranged to swap them for some tractors. In all that time, their cover held and they were never found guilty of spying. For their courage all three would be awarded the Agency’s highest medal for bravery, the Distinguished Intelligence Cross.

  When I got back to Foggy Bottom, my team and I began an all-source quest for information on the types of groups traveling in and out of Mehrabad Airport. We soon discovered that groups traveling legally to Iran included oil field technicians from European-based companies, news teams of all nationalities covering the hostage situation, and all sorts of curiosity seekers and aid workers from around the world. Many of these people were U.S. citizens. None fit our purposes, given the profiles and patterns of these groups, and the careful scrutiny and control applied to them by the Iranian security and immigration services.

  Unlike in the movies, cover stories are normally designed to be boring so as not to attract attention. They are also chosen based on the experience of the person. There are several factors that go into the process of choosing a cover. Does the person speak a foreign language, and can they pass for another nationality? Do they have any clandestine training? We had made both NESTOR and RAPTOR businessmen. In the past I had traveled as a tourist or a midlevel diplomat, both situations I could easily manage. Just as important as who the person might be is his or her ability to carry off a new persona and make it believable. This was why it had been so important for Jacob Jordan to meet with NESTOR, and why I was now proposing to headquarters that we send in a team to assess the houseguests. Whatever reason we came up with for them to be in Iran, it had to be something that they could wear as comfortably as a suit, something that became them and was almost second nature to them. No easy task when you are dealing with six amateurs.

  The State Department had proposed that the six use U.S. documentation and be disguised as unemployed English teachers who had traveled to Iran presumably to find work, while Ottawa’s idea was to turn the houseguests into nutritionists who had traveled to Iran to inspect crops. A third option had them posing as petroleum workers. None of these options was really clicking for me. Most of the English schools in Tehran had closed months earlier and it would seem odd to have such a large group of out–of–work teachers show up all together. As far as the Canadian plans, I didn’t think it would take long for a Revolutionary Guard to figure out that these people knew nothing about agriculture or petroleum. Iran was completely snowbound in the winter and it just didn’t seem believable that a group of nutritionists would be inspecting crops at that time of year.

  We needed a cover that could help to engage them, get them to believe in us and to become willing participants. Pretending to be someone you are not isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially if your life depends on it. I had seen trained operatives like RAPTOR nearly break under the pressure.

  My team and I discussed the pros and cons of each option. Everybody seemed to agree with my assessment, but no one had any better ideas.

  With several other things on our plate, I broke up the meeting and we decided to reconvene later.

  We spent the remainder of the week working out the problem but still weren’t able to come up with anything. Then, as I was standing in my studio getting ready to head back to Ottawa to check in on Joe, an idea suddenly occurred to me. While it was true that normally cover stories were designed to be mundane, we weren’t dealing with a normal situation here. So instead of boring, what if we went in the opposite direction? What if we designed a cover story so fantastic that nobody would believe it was being used for operational purposes?

  By the time I had landed in Ottawa, I had formulated a plan. If we could pull it off, it would be one of the most audacious rescue operations in the history of the CIA. But before moving forward I would have to call the one person who could make that plan a reality. I picked up the phone and dialed.

  9

  HOLLYWOOD

  I met Jerome Calloway for the first time during the early 1970s, on the set of a spy-themed TV show. The show was popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s, known for pushing the limits of visual effects and makeup. Calloway had been brought in by the production specifically to devise each episode’s signature shot—the crafty spy finally revealing his true identity. The show, along with a film that Calloway had worked on around that time, had caught the eye of Lou Terno, then the CIA’s chief of disguise. Much like in the TV show, during the film a succession of well-known actors magically revealed their movie star good looks after taking off a series of outlandish, but entirely believable, disguises. For instance, a famous male singer with one of the most recognizable faces in the world was disguised as an old woman, but you would have never known it. For Terno, the wonder he experienced as he watched the star emerge from his vulcanized chrysalis was akin to that of a remote Amazonian tribe suddenly witnessing a Fourth of July fireworks display. It was miraculous. “How come we can’t do that?” he exclaimed.

  Terno had then flown out to Los Angeles to meet with Calloway.
This was right after NESTOR, when the CIA was beginning to think about forward-deploying “kits” to improve our readiness in case we might need to carry out an exfiltration within a moment’s notice. Terno wasn’t sure what Calloway could do, but hoped he’d be open to advising us in some way.

  Calloway, who had served in the army in World War II, was only too happy to help. He was a patriot through and through, and loved the idea that he could again do something for his country. Before getting involved with Hollywood, he had worked for many years creating false noses and glass eyes for wounded soldiers. In fact, even after he had become a lion in the entertainment industry, this aspect of his early professional life was always the one that had most gratified him. To him, producers were just a bunch of barracudas out to take your lunch.

  A few months after Terno’s trip, I had flown back to Washington from Okinawa to receive some training as part of authentication’s new generalist program. This was the very same program that I had proposed after the NESTOR operation as a way to deploy cross-trained technical officers closer to the action. Jacob and I were given the opportunity to test out the theory by forming the first team. We were to be stationed in the Far East, but first I would need to get trained in disguise.

  Back then the disguise techniques used by the CIA really weren’t anything to write home about—mostly utilizing off-the-rack department store wigs, glasses, and hats. It’s no wonder, I thought, that most officers in the field refused to wear this stuff. In all, the training lasted about ten days, at which point I was certified an “expert.” It was while I was on my way back to Asia that Terno asked me to stop off in LA and visit with Calloway.

  From its inception, the CIA has relied on the ingenuity of outside contractors to help American spies keep pace with their adversaries. Unlike our Soviet counterparts, who enjoyed strong government support, in the wake of World War II America’s spies found themselves out of a job when President Truman disbanded the OSS in 1945. It wouldn’t be until 1947 that the United States would have a functioning intelligence agency again, but even then it was grossly underfunded when compared to its rivals. In addition, America’s spymasters found it hard to compete with the private sector, which could not only pay more, but also offer its scientists the prospect of accolades and recognition, something a spy agency could not. As a result, the CIA found itself at a technological disadvantage for nearly the first two decades of its existence. Even by the early 1960s, for example, the CIA had yet to create a small and reliable spy camera that agents could use to copy documents. This disadvantage became painfully obvious when one of America’s most important Russian agents, Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, was rolled up in the fall of 1962 and executed in 1963.

  To overcome this technology deficit, the Agency began hiring more techs right out of college, while farming out various projects to the private sector. For instance, in looking for help to design a new miniature camera known as the T100 in the early 1970s, OTS techs turned to a precision optical contractor that was able to design the camera’s 4mm-diameter lens. When it was finished, the camera was so small it could fit into a fountain pen. Another example saw OTS techs working with a leading hearing aid manufacturer to create a microphone that was small enough to fit into a .45 caliber bullet. The techs were looking for a way to plant a listening device inside a tree that was in the courtyard of a foreign embassy. The trick, of course, was that the microphone had to work even after the bullet had embedded itself into the tree. It took some time, but ultimately the company was successful.

  In addition to Calloway, I would work with many outside contractors throughout my career. In the mid-1970s I worked with a magic builder who had designed magic tricks for illusionists and Hollywood productions to help perfect a device known as the JIB. The idea behind the JIB was to allow an officer riding in the passenger seat of a car to evade surveillance by having a dummy pop up in his place just as he exited the car. In order to succeed, however, the exchange had to be done so quickly that the KGB surveillance car trailing behind didn’t see it happen. The device went through several iterations, from an initial slightly modified inflatable sex doll to a space-age contraption that weighed nearly fifty pounds. Thinking of how we could simplify it, I had contacted the magic builder, who was a friend of Calloway’s (the two had actually worked together on a James Bond film, of all things). The magic builder’s solution was an elegant device that could be hidden inside a variety of objects and worked on the same principle as an umbrella. When it was finally finished, the driver of the car could even animate the device by using a small controller to make its head turn.

  During our first meeting, Calloway took me around the set of the spy-themed TV show, introducing me as his “friend from the army,” a phrase he always accompanied with a wink. In later years this would become a big inside joke with him. “This is my friend—he does special effects for the army.”

  By the time I met him, he was already considered one of the most innovative makeup artists in the movie business. He had won top industry awards for his work on a science fiction film.

  As he took me around, someone came up behind us and said, “Jerome Calloway is a sissy.” We turned to see one of the stars of the TV show walking up behind us. The joke was funny if you knew Jerome. A first-generation American who had grown up in Chicago, Calloway had a larger-than-life quality to him. His big, expressive face sat framed by a pair of thick-rimmed fifties-style glasses, while his hair was often slicked back with a thick sheen of pomade. He was a large man who looked more like a bouncer than a makeup artist, and he wore white short-sleeved shirts and black ties almost as if they were his uniform. Here and there, however, he would exhibit a certain kind of panache. He wore a little pinky ring with a precious stone in it and drove a pastel yellow Pontiac, the biggest one they made.

  Despite having grown up far away from the movie business, Calloway had been drawn to the limelight from the very beginning. He told me that when he was just a kid in Chicago, he had heard about a warehouse fire in his neighborhood. He’d rushed down in the hopes that by volunteering he might get his picture in the newspaper. When a photographer had snapped a photo of him and another person lugging a stretcher, he thought for sure he would see himself on the front page. The following morning, however, he was disheartened to see that the photographer had cut him out of the picture with the exception of his hands. He used to relate this story as a cautionary tale on the emptiness of fame. “You go to all that trouble and in the end, the only thing they might remember you for are your hands!”

  Going anywhere with Calloway was an adventure, whether it was to a local hamburger dive for lunch or into one of the many worlds that inhabited his stories. An inveterate storyteller, Calloway had a flair for the dramatic. And when his arms would get working and that toothy grin would flash, his enthusiasm was contagious. Several well-known movie stars refused to work unless he did their makeup. One of his favorite clients was Bob Hope. A born joke teller, he and Hope would trade one-liners the whole time Calloway would work on him.

  After taking me around the set, Jerome and I went back to his studio in Burbank, which was essentially the garage of his suburban bungalow. His house was small but neat. He was married to a nice woman in the cookie-cutter mold of the 1950s and lived with his ninety-year-old father, an ex–plumber for the city of Chicago whom he aptly called “Pop.”

  Walking through his garage was like walking through a museum of sorts. Calloway had modified the space by adding a little office and studio. He had tables and workstations all lined with materials in various stages of completion. There were two storage sheds behind the garage that were filled with just about everything he had ever done—rubber noses, ears, monster parts. He was always getting calls from other makeup artists asking for help, some even as far away as Australia. If you told him you were looking for a particular kind of nose, nine times out of ten he would find it in a shoe box in one of his storage sheds. Though perhaps the most striking artifacts he had stored in
his garage were the busts of several famous actresses. Back before the days of plastic surgery, Calloway had been hired to take molds of the chests of certain actresses to then be able to make natural foam rubber “falsies” to put in a bra and make the women look more endowed. He kept these busts covered by towels, but occasionally he would unveil them when a friend would drop by. One of the many stories that he told involved a famous English actor walking in and seeing the mold of his wife’s chest. “Do you recognize it?” Calloway had asked him. “She looks familiar,” the actor said hesitantly. Calloway then informed him that it belonged to the man’s wife, who was a young up–and-coming actress at the time.

  Joking aside, Calloway was truly gifted at his job. He was innovative and intellectually curious, always pushing new technologies. Ahead of his time, he was constantly reaching out to chemical manufacturers, looking for products, developing products, doing whatever he had to do to get the results he wanted. And nothing but the best would do. He was a master and a blast to collaborate with. If you had a job that needed to be done, or even just a loose sketch, then Jerome either had the solution or would work it out in a very short time. Oftentimes he had already done it and had it hidden away somewhere in his studio. “That sounds like the piece I made for Robert Mitchum.”

  Needless to say, the two of us hit it off right away. The process of creating a good disguise was very similar to that of creating a work of art, and I think the two us realized we were kindred spirits. After our first meeting, it wouldn’t be long before I would be asking for his help.

  Returning to Asia from Los Angeles, I soon found myself in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. With the war winding down in neighboring Vietnam, Vientiane had become a hub for clandestine activity. It was like Dodge City on the Mekong. As soon as night fell, intelligence services from all over the world would descend upon the city’s principal roundabout to perform their rolling car pickups. A rolling car pickup is just that: an officer driving the car slows just enough so that a person can quickly dive into the backseat without being seen. There were so many rolling car pickups going on at this roundabout in Vientiane that people were getting into the wrong cars. At one point I was responsible for running twenty-six different disguises. It was all I could do to keep track.