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

by Antonio Mendez

  The first thing we would need to do, I told him, was to meet with the houseguests and brief them on the various options for escape. This would also give me a chance to assess whether or not they’d be able to pull it off. We all agreed that the meeting should take place later that evening at John Sheardown’s home. After that, we would need to get to work on the visas and documents, which would most likely happen the following day. I had brought my kit of watercolors along with me, which I planned on using to put the final stamps into the passports. Taylor retrieved the first set of bogus documents along with the second pouch. This sealed pouch contained the second set of passports and several of the other secondary documents that we had included. Julio and I then examined the contents and were happy to see that everything had made it through. We showed the second set of passports to Taylor, and he seemed quite pleased by their authenticity. In order to make them looked used, our OTS techs in Ottawa had stomped on them repeatedly and rubbed them into the floor.

  When the meeting was finished, Taylor introduced us to Roger Lucy, who seemed like a capable and quiet leader. Lucy had already made several trips through Mehrabad on behalf of Taylor and had earned us a great amount of intelligence on the controls there. Next we were properly introduced to Claude, a Québécois who was the embassy’s chief of security. Claude had been given the nickname “Sledge” as a result of wielding a sledgehammer to destroy all but the most sensitive cryptographic and communications equipment at the Canadian embassy in preparation for their departure. It was a nickname that he would come to relish.

  Before he left to see his family off, we asked Taylor’s permission to send a cable to Washington through Ottawa, confirming our arrival and the plans to meet the houseguests later that night. I’ll admit that it was gratifying that both Taylor and Lucy were excited by all the progress we’d made on the Argo cover story. They told me it had a sort of dash that they could both identify with. When I opened the portfolio and showed them the ad in Variety, they were both impressed. Some people have suggested that there was a kind of competition between the CIA and Ottawa, but Taylor and I never saw it that way. This was a collegial cooperation from the beginning and I can say unequivocally that both of us had only one goal in mind: to get the six Americans safely out of Tehran.

  The houseguests had been told by Lucy that they should expect some visitors. Of course he didn’t tell them we were CIA—just that we were coming to help. In preparation for their escape, Taylor and Lucy had organized a set of luggage and extra clothes since the houseguests had neither. It would be awkward to have them enter the airport without any bags.

  After we finished up at the Canadian embassy, Claude agreed to take us over to the Sheardowns’, and Julio and I piled into the embassy’s Mercedes. By the time we pulled out it was five o’clock and the streets were snarled with traffic. Claude took it in stride and used his horn liberally, a device he said it would be impossible to drive in the city without. Not much had changed since the last time I’d been to Tehran. Large sections of the city were still shut down. Under the shah, Tehran had been famous for its nightlife. All of that had vanished after the revolution, replaced by blacked-out storefronts, boarded–up restaurants, and sandbagged bunkers manned by machine-gun-toting youths. The city was basically divided into north and south, with the more affluent residents living in the higher-elevated and cooler north, and the poor in the hot and overcrowded pan-flat south.

  It took us about thirty minutes to clear the central part of the city, and when we finally made it to the Shemiran district, it was like being in a different universe. It reminded me a lot of places like Bel Air in Los Angeles, where the rich and powerful lived safely cloistered behind their walled compounds.

  Since Ken had gone to the airport, Lucy had driven over to his place to pick up the Staffords, arriving at the Sheardowns’ slightly before we did. As they waited inside, some of the houseguests had played a little game about what we might look like. I’ll never forget the face of Lee Schatz as he opened the door. It was the face of an overgrown kid, full of mischief with a swooping mustache overtaking everything else. He took one look at us and said, “Trench coats! You guys are wearing trench coats?” He shook his head in dismay. It might have seemed clichéd, but then again it fit with our cover. The others rushed forward to meet us, brimming with nervous excitement and anticipation.

  As I entered the house I was confronted by a bizarre sight. A fire burned merrily in the hearth and the houseguests had laid out hors d’oeuvres. The group seemed rested and eager, even fit. Bob Anders actually had a nice tan. Lucy went into the kitchen to mix us drinks and it wasn’t long before we were sipping happily on our cocktails and getting to know one another. If not for the roaming bands of murderous Revolutionary Guards and komiteh patrolling the streets outside, it felt just like any other dinner party I had been to in Washington, D.C.

  When I felt that we’d sufficiently broken the ice, I stood up to brief them on the various cover stories. “Now, you guys have worked long enough in the government to know that we didn’t get here without some questions,” I said. “We’ve got three different options, each with their own passports and supporting documents. You will ultimately have to decide which one you like best, but Julio and I can certainly advise you.”

  I then laid down the different sets of passports and went through the various cover stories—American teachers, Canadian nutritionists, Hollywood option. I explained that regardless of which option they chose, the plan was to leave through Mehrabad Airport on Monday morning.

  The houseguests were obviously concerned about the security at the airport and wondered what might happen if they were stopped and taken into secondary, a form of interrogation reserved for those individuals deemed suspicious enough to warrant it. I could tell that Joe Stafford, of all the houseguests, was perhaps the most concerned. He struck me as being highly analytical, the kind of person who has trouble letting go in the moment. Since the success of any disguise is predicated on confidence, I hoped he would come around.

  Lee pointed to the U.S. documents. “Traveling though the airport as Americans seems like a pretty lame idea to me,” he said. The others nodded, noting as I had that the English schools had been closed for many months. I could tell they were wrapping their heads around the whole concept of their escape, trying to take it all in. I felt this was a perfect time to present my case for Argo.

  “I’ve managed a lot of these kinds of operations in the past,” I said. “And I’m confident that the Hollywood option will work.”

  I opened the Studio Six portfolio and took out the issue of Variety, which had the Argo ad in it. I then handed Cora Lijek her Studio Six business card and indicated the ad. “‘From a story by Teresa Harris’—that’s you,” I said. I picked up her Canadian alias passport with her picture and handed it to her. Cora studied her photo and forged signature with obvious wonderment. Next I picked up the sketch pad and handed it to Kathy Stafford. “Here,” I said. “We saw that you have a little art in your background and decided to make you the art director.” I passed out the remaining business cards, which indicated the various roles the other houseguests would be playing: Joe Stafford was an associate producer; Mark Lijek was “Joseph Earl Harris,” the transportation coordinator; Lee Schatz was “Henry W. Collins,” the cameraman; and Bob Anders was “Robert Baker,” the locations manager.

  I explained that we had rented an office in Hollywood and that right now we had a staff of people manning the phones. “If anybody calls, they’ll be told that Teresa Harris is with a location scouting team in the Middle East but will be back next week.”

  The six Americans stared at me for a long second, perhaps understanding for the first time the lengths to which we had gone to get them out, including setting up a fake movie production with offices staffed by real Hollywood insiders. This on top of all the hours spent by my team at Foggy Bottom working on perfecting their cover stories and documentation to “prove” they were who they said they were.
r />   Finally Mark spoke up. “It doesn’t sound totally crazy,” he said.

  “What’s the movie?” Anders asked.

  I tried my best to explain, using the jargon that Calloway had coached me on. “It’s like Buck Rogers in the desert,” I said. “The story mixes Middle Eastern myths with spaceships and far-off worlds. Believe me when I say the Iranians won’t be able to understand a word of it, which is great.”

  I could see they were still on the fence. “Whatever option you decide on,” I said, “this has to be something you can see yourself doing, something you can believe in.”

  With that, I instructed them to go into the dining room and discuss it among themselves. They also needed to figure out whether they wanted to leave as a group or individually.

  Later, I would talk with the houseguests about how this discussion went. The group had gathered around the table and immediately launched into the pros and cons of the various plans. For Lee, who was an agricultural attaché, the idea of nutritionists seemed like a nonstarter from the beginning, which wasn’t high praise given his background. The others felt that the schoolteachers and nutritionists just didn’t feel right. Cora pictured somebody stopping her and asking her a question about crops, and the thought worried her. She knew zero about agriculture and had no idea what she’d say. However, she knew a little something about Hollywood, just like everyone else. She pictured herself as a Hollywood screenwriter. All she would have to do would be to read the script and she would be good to go. The others began to come around as well. Mark realized that it made perfect sense that a person from Hollywood would be crazy enough to come to Iran in the middle of a revolution. Anders, for one, was instantly sold. He envisioned himself on the set of a film, rubbing elbows with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. It seemed like a role he was born to play. “It sounded like we were going to have one hell of a good time, and I couldn’t wait to get going,” he later told me. Lee, for his part, knew almost nothing about operating a movie camera, but he imagined the adventurous life of a Hollywood cinematographer traveling all over the world. He had been to some exotic places himself and figured he could easily wing it. The biggest factor for all of them was that it was clearly the option with the most supporting documentation, not to mention that there was an office actually staffed with people to back up the story.

  In the end the only dissenter seemed to be Joe, who kept saying, “I just don’t see it.” Joe, it appears, was against all of the plans and instead wanted to remain in Iran. Mark knew Joe quite well by now, and he saw Joe’s response as being more emotional than rational. To Mark, it appeared that he was feeling guilty at the prospect of escaping while their colleagues languished down at the embassy. “What if they retaliate against the hostages if we leave?” Joe asked everyone. It was a good point, and one that I had considered myself, but with Canada closing down their embassy and the Iranians getting closer and closer to discovering the fugitive Americans, there was really no other option but to leave. The other houseguests certainly felt that way. “Well, what do you want us to do—stay here? How is that going to help them?” Anders asked him. Joe then proposed that they go down to the U.S. embassy and try to reason with the militants. It might have been a noble gesture, but both Anders and Schatz were adamant. “You can forget about it,” they said.

  It was as they were debating Joe’s plan that I decided to walk in and see how things were going. I could sense the electric tension in the room, so I decided to use some parlor magic. “Let me show you how an operation like this works,” I said. I picked up two corks off a nearby counter, interlocking them between my thumbs and forefingers to form two D shapes. I had used this trick many times to illustrate how to set up a deception operation. “Here’s us and here are the bad guys,” I said. “And this is how we are going to get out of each other’s way.” With a little sleight of hand I pulled my two hands apart and the corks appeared to move through each other. It was a simple trick, but the goal was to show them that they were involved with professionals in the art of deception. That everything had been thought of.

  It must have worked, because after that they voted five to one in favor of using the Argo cover option and leaving as a group.

  With that out of the way, the six gave Julio and me a tour of the house, which was truly palatial. While we were making our rounds, Chris Beeby, the New Zealand ambassador, showed up along with his second secretary, Richard Sewell. Sewell would prove to be incredibly valuable over the coming days. He explained to me that he had a close contact down at Mehrabad who worked for British Airways, and Julio asked him if he would be willing to help us out by grabbing some more of the yellow and white disembarkation/embarkation forms. Sewell readily agreed and we set up a time to meet at the Canadian embassy the following day.

  Before leaving, I sat down with the houseguests once again to go over their cover stories. I handed each of them the personal résumé that Joe Missouri had created for them and told them to memorize them backward and forward. “If anyone stops you or hassles you in any way, just act confident and look them in the eye. Think about how someone from Hollywood would react. Remember, Julio and I will be right beside you, so if anything goes wrong let us do the talking.”

  The last thing I wanted to go over was their disguises. I had brought with me the materials that Doris had included and I spread them out on the table. Since thousands of Iranians had passed through the consular section of the embassy, where the majority of the houseguests had worked, there was a chance that one of the Americans might be easily recognized.

  I explained to them that the key to a good disguise was to identify the various salient features or qualities that make them who they are, and then alter those, rather than try to go overboard in one area. Often, it is the subtle things that give people away, such as the way they walk, or a particular mole. If this operation were taking place in Moscow, we would have had a whole crew of OTS disguise experts working with us. Instead, we would have to make do with what we had.

  “Each of you is going to need to make yourself look a little flashier, a little more Hollywood,” I said. I handed Schatz his viewfinder and gave Cora the script.

  “Julio and I will be back here on Sunday night to go through a little dress rehearsal,” I told them. “But in the meantime, learn your parts. You will be tested!”

  Since they knew the stakes, I didn’t have to tell them what would happen if they didn’t. I only hoped that Joe would come around and get into the spirit as the others had. Despite all the hard work and energy we’d put into the Argo cover story, one lackluster performance and the whole plot would come crashing down.

  14

  FINAL PREPARATIONS

  Julio and I returned to the Canadian embassy on Saturday morning. The building, which was normally empty on the weekend, was buzzing with activity as the Canadians went through their last-minute preparations for shutting down on Monday. The first thing I did was send an updated ops plan and situation report to Ottawa and CIA headquarters. In it I elaborated on their cover, explaining that “six Canadians from Studio Six Productions” had called on the ambassador in Tehran. They were hoping that he could set up an appointment with the Ministry of National Guidance to present their case for leasing the local bazaar for their film “Argo.” I then went on to explain that the ambassador had advised them to look elsewhere for locations and that, following his advice, they would probably depart the country on Monday, January 28.

  This would give us the option of bringing the six to the airport in an embassy vehicle with an embassy driver, saving us the difficulty of having to arrange reliable transportation to the airport.

  After this was done, Julio and I sat down to work on the documents package. As gracious as ever, Taylor offered to let us use his office.

  Julio immediately got to work on the disembarkation/embarkation forms. Sewell had dropped by with a stack of extras, which gave us a nice cushion. Julio completed the Farsi and English annotations on about twenty of these, using the
wording on our own yellow sheets to guide him.

  While this was going on, I turned my attention to the passports. My main task was to insert the Iranian visas that we had collected in Toronto and complete the back travel, including stamping in the arrival cachet entry for Mehrabad. The prime exemplar for the Mehrabad arrival cachet was the stamped impression we had received in our own passports upon arrival.

  The worst thing that can happen when you’re falsifying a cachet entry is to forge the signature of an immigration officer before arriving in the country, only to discover this same person is about to stamp you out. He would obviously know that he was not working on the day your passport says you arrived. Another mistake, of course, would be putting in a stamp that was no longer in use. Our careful monitoring and collection of the cachets at Mehrabad, as well as the diligence of our OTS ink experts from the graphics division, allowed us to produce an exact match.

  I then slowly and carefully placed the cachets in the passports, using a technique I’d learned from my days in the bullpen to make it look as if they’d been done hastily by an immigration officer.

  As with operating in disguise, there are two types of validators: those who do it by feel and those who work in a controlled manner. The former tend to work better after lunch when they’ve had a few martinis to loosen them up. I, on the other hand, was definitely a member of the second group. My approach to validating was to make it look as offhand as I could but to control it. That way, if I ever got in a tight spot, I didn’t have to rely on my instincts and reflexes, but could rely on my mechanical talents. There were several tools I’d been given in training to help me, such as the forger’s bridge, a technique using one hand to steady the other while writing. And of course there were many other tricks I’d learned on my own.

  Over the course of my career I’d had plenty of opportunities to practice my skills as a forger. Being an artist-validator is anything but routine—there were times when I found myself holed up in some safe house on the other side the world, working long hours under the glare of a watchmaker’s lamp.