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

by Antonio Mendez

  “If it worked for Michael Douglas, it will certainly work for us,” I said.

  With that out of the way, we began looking at the various roles the houseguests might play. I would have Joe work out the details later, but in the meantime I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask Sidell and Calloway what they thought. Along with copies of the passports, I had brought a list of the houseguests and their various ages and names. Both agreed that any credible person in the film business would need a long list of previous credits. The trick, said Calloway, was finding those kinds of jobs that give a person clout—art director, cinematographer, transportation coordinator—without necessitating that they have a name to go along with it, like a director or a producer. These would be easier for the Iranians to check.

  In addition to this, since the Hollywood personas the houseguests would be playing would most likely be members of one of Hollywood’s ubiquitous unions, Sidell reminded us that they would all need to have guild cards in their wallets. We made a note of these things and we agreed to look into it over the course of the following days.

  I had already decided that I would take on the role of the production manager, which would give me a logical reason to carry the production portfolio, as well as to keep track of everyone on the scout. My partner, Julio, meanwhile, would play an associate producer, representing our production company’s ostensible South American backers.

  On Saturday morning we went down to Sunset Gower Studios to look at our office space. They put the name of our production company on a little placard that was slid into a slot on the front door. It was all coming together, and rather quickly, I thought. We spent the rest of the day scrounging up office furniture and typewriters and calling in every favor that Calloway and Sidell had in order to get the phone lines connected. We installed several working lines, including a few that were listed. Earlier when we had discussed the idea of the production company, Sidell had agreed to man the office for the duration of the operation. This role would be absolutely necessary to complete the ruse that Studio Six was indeed a working production company and not just an address.

  One of the offices became mine and another Sidell’s. Since Calloway was so well known, we were trying to keep his involvement a secret.

  At that point, Sidell asked if it would be okay to bring in his wife, Andi, to act as production secretary. I told him yes, but that they couldn’t tell anybody about what they were doing, not even their kids.

  Later that night, Sidell asked his wife to take a walk with him outside their house and filled her in on what we had been doing. He told me later how she’d gone almost comatose just taking it all in. And as if that wasn’t shocking enough for her, he told her, “Oh, and by the way, congratulations—you now have a new job. You’re going to be the production secretary. You start work on Monday.”

  On Sunday, we reconvened back at Calloway’s house. Now that we had our production company up and running, we needed a script. We began by asking ourselves what kind of production would travel to Iran. Because Star Wars had recently been such a huge success (and was filmed in Tunisia), we immediately thought the genre would be perfect for us. Sci–fi stories often incorporated mythological elements and it would be a bonus if we could find something with a Middle Eastern flavor to it. It was then that Calloway told me about a script he’d been pitched several months back. Based on Roger Zelazny’s science fiction novel Lord of Light, the project had eventually fallen through when a member of the production team was arrested for embezzlement, but not before initial preproduction had begun. Even better, the producers had hired Jack Kirby, a famous comic book artist, to do concept drawings. At some point, the producer had envisioned a theme park connected to the project called Science Fiction Land, complete with a “Thunder Chariot-Launching Complex,” “Jet Tube Transporter,” even a three-hundred-foot-tall Ferris wheel, all of it set against the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.

  Calloway still had the script and the concept drawings, so he went to get them.

  “Brahma’s Pavilions of Joy,” I read as I examined an artist’s sketch of a road flanked by thousand-foot statues. In another sketch, a man wore robotic-looking “electronic battle armor” and a massive helmet with six horns. “What’s it about?” I asked.

  “Who knows!” he said. “Some space opera set on a colonized planet where men become Hindu gods or something like that.”

  I flipped open the script and read at random: “…Vishnu the Preserver and Yama-Dharma, Lord of Death, have covered the whole of Heaven…with what is said to be an impenetrable dome.”

  “This is perfect,” I said. “The Iranians won’t be able to understand this stuff.” I was thinking that, for operational purposes, the more confusing the better. If someone were to stop us, then it would be easy for us to overwhelm them with confusing conceptual jargon. In addition, I could add the sketches along with the script to the portfolio, which would give our production another layer of authenticity.

  Tehran had a famous underground bazaar that even matched one of the locations in the script, which would give us something to pitch to Iran’s Ministry of National Guidance, if it ever came to that.

  “What are we going to call it?” I asked. We all agreed that we needed something catchy from Eastern culture or mythology. After several tries, we hit on it.

  “Let’s call it Argo,” Calloway said with a wry smile. He then went on to explain how “Argo” also had major mythological connotations. “It’s the name of the ship that Jason and the Argonauts sailed in to rescue the Golden Fleece.”

  “That sounds just like our operation,” I said.

  At that point I grabbed a yellow legal pad and sketched out a logo for our film. Sidell and Calloway recommended that we place an ad in the trades. Since Hollywood is an industry that thrives on image, it would be a good idea, they said, to toot our own horn to create a bit of recognition for the project. If the industry knew it was going to happen, then that meant it was going to happen. Calloway had some of the trades lying around, so I quickly flipped through a few of them to see the kinds of ads they ran. The more dramatic and eye-catching, I realized, the better. In the end I settled on a full black page to signify the blackness of outer space, in the center of which a planet was exploding as a group of asteroids, shaped in the letters ARGO, were hurtling toward it. In thinking about a way we could pump up our film even more, I came up with the tagline “A Cosmic Conflagration,” which had a kind of genteel shabbiness to it. When I was finished, the ad read

  ROBERT SIDELL AND ASSOCIATES

  PRESENT

  A STUDIO SIX PRODUCTION

  ARGO

  A COSMIC CONFLAGRATION

  FROM A STORY BY TERESA HARRIS

  COMMENCING PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY

  MARCH 1980

  The following day, Calloway and I went down to the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety to place the full-page ad, which was scheduled to run on Wednesday, January 16.

  While this was going on, Sidell went out to get us some props, heading to an industry-backed retail establishment that provided various tools and equipment for the motion picture industry. There, Sidell picked up a shooting schedule board with the day–by–day divisions to make it look like the production board for the film, as well as a viewfinder for the cameraman to wear around his neck.

  When that was finished, I made the first business call from our studio offices to the Iranian consulate in San Francisco, using my alias as the production manager. I said I required a visa and instructions on procedures for obtaining permission to scout a shooting location in Tehran. My party of eight would be made up of six Canadians, a European, and a Latin American.

  The call to the Iranian consulate was a washout. Officials there suggested that we contact the Iranian embassy in Washington, D.C. This was not surprising, because many Iranian diplomats had been carried over from the shah’s regime, and most were unsure of their current status and their visa-granting authorities.

  Tuesday morning
was spent collecting whatever “pocket litter” we could get our hands on, including the guild cards, as well as receipts and anything else that would bolster the appearance that our houseguests indeed lived and worked in Los Angeles.

  Later that afternoon, Calloway and I had a “launch” party down at the Brown Derby, the iconic industry hot spot where Clark Gable once proposed to Carole Lombard. I was scheduled to leave first thing the following morning, and Calloway wanted to send me off in style with our own little version of the Hollywood tradition of celebrating a production’s launch.

  Being a professional Irishman, Calloway knew how to have a good time. His drink of choice was a margarita, and there was only one problem that kept it from being absolutely perfect: it was always served in a tiny glass. Initially he fixed this by ordering a pitcher for himself. However, it wasn’t long before his favorite haunt began serving us “JC’s”—margaritas in big bucket-sized glasses.

  Calloway and I hoisted several of them that evening before launching into an Argo battle cry.

  Afterward, as we talked about some of the personalities that Jerome had met over the years in the film business, I brought up my cover legend. The alias I would be using was “Kevin Costa Harkins,” a persona I had first created to handle all the exfiltrations we were doing on the Asian subcontinent in the early 1970s. A CIA operations officer might have, at any given time, multiple active alias identities issued to him. Central Cover staff dispensed these as situations arose. One alias identity was not enough. You might want to conceal travel to certain destinations, or break up your travel pattern so that it didn’t look interesting to a foreign immigration officer. The names were registered and controlled by Central Cover so that there would be no overlapping or duplication.

  Kevin Costa Harkins was a backstopped alias that I used from time to time over the years. He was ostensibly a northern European who had a California connection. He had an apartment off Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco. He was an artist and a world traveler. He was obviously well-off and could pick up and go somewhere on a whim. It was an ideal cover for an intelligence officer who might have to show up at an odd place at an odd hour.

  The fact that I would be coming from California was an advantage if I was going to be involved in scouting a movie location. I could show close ties between my artist persona and the Hollywood cover we were creating for our operation. No question I could show residence in California—interested parties would assume that I could be connected with the Hollywood crowd. However, for obvious reasons, the best part about Kevin was that he was a foreigner, which meant I wouldn’t be traveling on a U.S. passport.

  As I told Calloway about Kevin, he immediately grasped the northern European connection. Ever the professional Irishman, he set out to give me a more complex understanding of the name Costa Harkins as it related to places he had been and people he knew. The origin of the name “Costa Harkins,” as it turned out, went back to the time of the Roman Empire, as they pillaged, conquered, and colonized farther into northern Europe. Certain counties in Ireland assimilated many of the Romans, particularly those who were seagoing and had wrecked their ships on the shoals of County Cork; these became the so–called Black Irish.

  As I listened to him, I was inspired. I was going to have a decent cover story for once. A tale I would love to tell. Jerome was delighted. He and I practiced our ancestral accents and lifted our glasses in a toast to our mutual roots.

  When it was time to say good-bye, Jerome got quite serious all of a sudden, as if it had just occurred to him that this might be the last time he was ever going to see me. “Take care of yourself over there,” he said to me. Never an overly affectionate man, he gave me a great big bear hug.

  The following morning, as I flew back to Washington, the trades were coming out with our Argo ads in them, announcing that principal photography was set to commence in March.

  As I landed in the capital, I was thrilled with the way things had come together. We now had an actual working office at one of the movie studios staffed with Hollywood insiders who could back up our story if anyone checked from Tehran. As far as backstopped alias docs go, it didn’t get any better. Now I only hoped that headquarters and the Canadians would be as pleased as I was.

  11

  A COSMIC CONFLAGRATION

  No sooner were my feet on the ground in Washington than I learned that the situation with the houseguests in Tehran was becoming critical. Beyond the danger of the press leaking information, it seemed there was the direct threat that the houseguests could be discovered at any moment.

  On one occasion, Ken Taylor’s wife, Pat, had received a mysterious phone call from an unidentified person who asked in perfect English to speak with Joe and Kathy Stafford, then hung up. Ken Taylor, of course, knew that there were journalists who had been piecing the story together and because the caller had spoken English he hoped it was just a Western journalist fishing for information. But in a calculated move, he decided not to tell the six Americans about the call for fear of alarming them.

  After nearly three months, there were people in Iran who knew that the six Americans were on the loose. By this time the militants had a good handle on the various employees working at the embassy the day it was taken. Many documents had been shredded in a commercial shredder, the kind that cut the paper into long strips, but the Iranians had employed child carpet weavers to splice the strips back together. In addition, several boxes of documents had inexplicably been left behind on the first floor of the embassy as the staff had fled. Even more damaging, however, the entire contents of Bruce Laingen’s safe had been captured, revealing not only secret communications between Washington and Tehran, but also the identities of several of the employees, including the three CIA officers.

  Cora would later find out that the militants had eventually taken a consulate employee around to the various offices and asked who worked in each one. It was clear that the numbers of those who had been captured didn’t add up, and when the militants had pointed this out, their colleague had covered for the missing Americans by saying that they had been out of the country when the embassy fell. The militants had apparently bought it, but there was no telling for how long.

  Another time, Anders and Schatz were sunning in the courtyard when they’d been forced to duck into the house as a helicopter hovered directly overhead. The four houseguests then huddled inside and waited for what they assumed was the coming assault. Earlier they’d come up with a two-part escape plan in case something like this happened. The first part envisioned their hurrying up to the roof and then out onto the road that ran above Sheardown’s house. The second part was—well, that was the part they hadn’t worked out yet. With a helicopter hovering overhead, it wouldn’t be but a matter of seconds before they were spotted. They hunkered down and eventually the helicopter flew off. Zena called John at the Canadian embassy to find out if he knew anything. As it turned out, a mullah had been assassinated at a nearby mosque, and the Revolutionary Guard were combing the neighborhood looking for the assailant.

  Such close calls, coupled with the monotony of their confinement, tested the houseguests’ fortitude. Zena withdrew into herself more and more, while the others tried to cope with the uncertainty as best they could. Cora, it seems, decided to sleep late into the morning, and then most of the day. Mark remembers climbing under his bed one night as the Sheardowns gave a curious Iranian visitor a tour of the house. Every one of them felt they had overstayed their welcome with the Canadians and wanted desperately to find a solution. Another issue that occurred to them was the possibility that one of them would become seriously ill and need medical attention. The odds that they could be captured, killed, or suffer some freak accident increased with every second they remained in the country.

  Early on, the houseguests had been told that when the other hostages were released, they would be escorted down to the airport by a group of Western ambassadors who would then try to put them on the same plane. As the weeks dragged on, howev
er, this scenario seemed less and less likely. The fact that they had managed to escape, in their mind, would no doubt make them prime suspects in the eyes of the militants. What if the militants demanded to interrogate them? Or accused them of being spies simply because they had avoided capture? They saw themselves as being a separate entity from the embassy takeover altogether and felt that the State Department wasn’t doing enough to help them.

  Fed up with what they saw as inaction, they met one night in the den to draft a letter in which they expressed their frustration and fear of being left behind in the event that the hostages were freed. And even though they knew that Ambassador Taylor probably wouldn’t send the letter, they were certain that the intent of their message would get out.

  Meanwhile, the mood in Ottawa was also growing tense. Knowledge of the fugitive Americans was becoming an open secret. Flora MacDonald, for one, was getting increasingly nervous, as several people approached her to ask about the houseguests. The Canadians began making discreet arrangements to close down their embassy. It was anybody’s guess as to how much longer the secret of the houseguests could remain safe.

  Back in Washington, the various efforts being mounted against Iran were still running at full tilt, and I immediately sat down with my team to go over the final technical preparations for the Argo cover story. In addition, since headquarters had yet to sign off on any one particular operations plan, that meant we had to finalize materials for Argo as well as the other two cover stories—the Canadian nutritionists and the American English teachers. Despite our backstopping, apparently there were still some people within the State Department and National Security Council who were skeptical of the Hollywood option. It was too ambitious, too ballsy, too complex. In my mind, these were the very characteristics that would make it work.

  Everyone in the office had been impressed with the Variety ad, but I reminded them we still had a lot of work to do.