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

by Antonio Mendez

  Among the first jobs that our new artist-validators typically will get are reproducing border cachets. The actual impressions of these stamps tend to be a little messy to begin with and so it’s okay if their work is not so perfect. In fact, perfection can sometimes be a detriment, as a document’s very perfection is often what sets it apart from the common variety. There is nothing more suspicious to an immigration officer than seeing a perfectly inked cachet impression in the midst of all the clutter in a travel document. After mastering the skill of creating realistic clutter, an artist can then move up to working on secondary documents: driver’s licenses, military ID cards, health cards—anything that would accompany a primary document. At the top of the food chain are major documents, such as a travel document. Some artists could work years in the bullpen before getting a crack at one of these, and it was considered a major insult if a less experienced artist was assigned one before a more experienced artist.

  On some occasions, we would have the whole department working on something together. I can remember one time when someone had access to a rarely seen communist country’s passport but had to return it the next day. A whole crew of experts was brought in on the weekend. It took all the process photographers we had on board just to photograph the different elements we had to make in order to duplicate it.

  As an OTS traveling tech officer, you have to be ready to work at any time and under any condition. Once I was even forced to improvise in the bathroom of an airplane. This was on a mission to the subcontinent to help out with an exfiltration of a Russian defector and his family. (This same Russian had been smuggled overland from a neighboring country in the trunk of a car.) A cable had gone out asking for the services of an artist-validator and I’d hopped on the next flight. As the plane was descending to land, however, the flight attendant announced that there had been an outbreak of yellow fever in the country and anyone who was not currently vaccinated could expect to be put in quarantine for who knew how long. We had less than twenty-four hours to get the Russian and his family out of the country, so this was not an option. In addition, I had several incriminating rubber stamps and forging tools, not to mention thousands of dollars in cash hidden in a concealment inside my briefcase. With so much on the line, I couldn’t risk being held up. I quickly stepped into the toilet and upgraded my shot record to include a yellow fever notation good for ten years. I had to do this in a matter of minutes as the flight began its final approach. The turbulence made it difficult, but I was able to make it back to my seat just before the plane’s wheels touched the ground. We were able to get the Russian and his family out the following morning.

  As Julio and I worked on the documents, Taylor took a break from his activities and joined us in the office. Not wishing to bother us, he took a seat on a white sofa across the room while Julio and I continued to go about our business. Taylor sat and listened as we asked each other questions and discussed the finer points of our counterfeiting skills. He was clearly enjoying being in the midst of this clandestine skullduggery. A few minutes later, Taylor’s secretary entered the office to inform him that a rug wallah had arrived in the outer office. “Oh, right,” said Taylor. The wallah entered with a flourish. “I have brought only my finest rugs for you, Mr. Ambassador!” he called out. He unfurled several rugs, laying them about the floor. Taylor bent down to examine them with an expert eye. It was clear that he was hoping to purchase a few more antique Persian carpets to take home with him. They were having a quiet discussion about the goods, discreetly so as not to disturb us.

  While this was going on, Claude “Sledge” Gauthier was busy slamming away with his sledgehammer, destroying sensitive equipment in a far-off room of the embassy, the reverberations of each impact echoing through the halls.

  Julio and I were too engrossed to notice any of this. I was busy stippling in a date on one of the cachets with a sharpened stick, similar to a manicure stick my wife often used. When I’d finished with the cachets showing the houseguests’ back travel, it was time to move on to the visas. We had had somebody from Ottawa pick up an exemplar for us in Toronto, which we’d then sent to OTS in Washington so that the techs could reproduce the stamp. However, as I opened the inkpad I noticed that the ink had completely dried up. Our ink chemist had painstakingly formulated this ink especially for its fluorescent quality. These visas were, in fact, the operative entries in the whole package. They would be subject to the closest scrutiny at immigration departure controls. Without these, it didn’t matter what cover story we used—we wouldn’t be able to get out of Iran. Looking about for a solution, my eyes fell on Taylor’s liquor cabinet. I walked over and scanned the labels, selecting a single-malt scotch that I thought would have a high-octane quality alcohol as one of its ingredients. I poured two fingers of scotch into a highball glass and brought both the bottle and the glass back to our workspace. Julio looked mildly amused as I set them down. “Thirsty?” he asked. I poured some of the scotch onto the inkpad to moisten it and without skipping a beat began stamping the visas into the passports. Julio shook his head and smiled his smile. “Why not?” he said. “This whole operation is being fueled by alcohol anyway.”

  It took a good part of the morning to complete the entries in all six passports. The only thing left to be done was to tidy up our document packages and destroy any evidence of the dark arts of a forger. The spurious Canadian passports, the fallback set with the error in the visas, were sent to the shredder. So were the alias U.S. documents we had included in the diplomatic pouch just in case we needed them. Our tools, inkpads, ink supplies, and so on were fed into the flames of the embassy incinerator. The schoolteachers and nutritionists went up in smoke. It was Argo or nothing.

  Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, Bob and Andi Sidell were busy manning the phones at Studio Six. We hadn’t given them a timetable as to when the exfiltration was going to happen, so Bob assumed it could be at any moment.

  In the beginning, Bob and Andi had gotten a thrill out of playing amateur spies. It wasn’t long, though, before this initial excitement was replaced by worry and fear. It suddenly dawned on them that the lives of eight individuals, possibly more, were in their hands. Later Bob told me that in the evenings they would crowd around the TV, hoping they wouldn’t see my face paraded across the evening news as the latest captive tied up and blindfolded. Down at the office, Andi began dreading the sound of the telephone, worrying each time she heard it ring that it would be someone calling to report bad news. Instead most of the calls were about business.

  Even though Sidell had been in the film business for nearly twenty-five years, he was still amazed by how easily the myth of Studio Six had taken off. After our initial ad had run in the industry trades, the Hollywood Reporter had called asking for comment. Hollywood is a small town and word had gotten around that Calloway was connected to the picture. A reporter wanted to know who would be starring in the film. Sidell was quoted in the article as saying, “We will use substantial names. At the moment we are sworn to secrecy.” It wasn’t long before he began to get calls from friends who were looking for work. After two weeks, the office had been inundated with scripts and headshots. “This is crazy!” Bob said to Andi one day as they sifted through it all.

  In addition, several credible people in the industry pitched him ideas and he even scheduled meetings. One writer wanted to know if he would be interested in producing a little-known Arthur Conan Doyle horror story titled “Lot No. 249,” about a college student who uses Egyptian magic to reanimate a mummy that ends up going on a murderous rampage. Sidell was so intrigued that he actually looked into purchasing the rights to the story from the Doyle estate, even though he knew full well that as soon as we got out of Iran, Studio Six would cease to exist.

  It was like a lie that had taken on a life of its own, and now he was forced to go along for the ride. In Hollywood terms, it was the role of a lifetime, but he wasn’t sure for how long he could keep it up.

  On Sunday night, Julio and I returned to the
Sheardown house to go through a dress rehearsal. The houseguests had spent the previous day learning their covers and perfecting their disguises. Now came the moment of truth. Lucy had brought the Staffords over and everyone was waiting for us in the den. When we got there, I couldn’t believe my eyes. All of the houseguests had borrowed clothes, assembled some personal items, and completely restyled their appearance in order to fit their new roles. Mark had used some black eyeliner to darken his beard, while Lee fiddled confidently with the viewfinder hanging around his neck. “Call me Woody!” he said. He had decided that any Hollywood cameraman worth his salt would have a nickname, and Woody was his. Cora, meanwhile, had used some sponge rollers to curl her hair, which she normally wore straight. She’d also taken off her glasses and used a lot more makeup than she was accustomed to. She flipped though the script absentmindedly. Our art director, Kathy, had pulled her long brunette hair up into a ponytail and put on a set of dark, thick-rimmed Truman Capote–esque glasses to go along with the Argo sketchbook. But the most surprising transformation came from Bob Anders, who had blow-dried his hair mod-style and donned tight pants and a blue shirt two sizes too small, unbuttoned down to his chest. To complete the ensemble, he wore a gold chain and medallion and threw a topcoat across his shoulders like a cape. “Check this out,” he said, sauntering self-importantly through the room. I found it hard not to smile.

  The best thing about the show was the relaxed and easy way the houseguests had adopted their new personalities. As I’d hoped, they were having fun and didn’t seem the least bit worried about the trip through the airport the following day. Joe hadn’t really done anything to change himself, but by virtue of the rest of the crew, I felt we could get by.

  In addition to their disguises, Roger Lucy had coached the houseguests on their accent to help them sound more Canadian. Cora gave me an example of the proper way a Canadian would say Toronto: “It’s Toronna, like piranha,” she said. Lucy joked that he told them to just say “eh?” a lot after every sentence and everything would be fine.

  Then there were the maple leaf stickers, lapel pins, and luggage tags Joe Missouri and I had purchased in Ottawa to be used for final window dressing for our travelers. As anyone who’s traveled abroad knows, real Canadians do tend to plaster their bags with maple leafs so they won’t be mistaken for Americans.

  After the dress rehearsal, Julio and I handed each of them their freshly stamped documents and their round-trip airline tickets, which reflected the travel itinerary we’d concocted for them as well as the origin of their visas. These latter details were extremely important. One of the first things an immigration officer would be apt to ask is where their visa had been issued and what was the route of their travel. Joe Missouri had purchased the round-trip tickets in Toronto on the appropriate dates and we had removed the coupons from their tickets for the legs they would have traveled. To not know the details and the route of travel would be the quickest way to capture.

  We also gave them some money, which would help them to feel slightly more normal under the circumstances.

  Soon Taylor arrived at the house with a response from Canada to an earlier cable I had written that morning containing the final operations plan. He handed it over to me and smiled. The powers that be in Ottawa and Washington had signed off on our ops plan and we were good to go for the following morning. They closed their message on a upbeat note: “See you later, exfiltrator!”

  We then retired to the dining room for what can only be described as a feast. Not wanting to leave anything behind for the Iranians, the houseguests had prepared a seven-course meal, complete with fine wine, champagne, coffee, and liqueurs. Ambassadors Munk, from Denmark, and Beeby joined us and the mood quickly grew festive. I reminded the houseguests not to drink too much as they would be facing a “hostile interrogation” by Lucy after dinner. I could see right away, however, that they had plans of their own. In fact the six had gotten together earlier and decided that in order to keep things as relaxed as possible, they were going to leave on adrenaline. The house still had a sizable selection of liquor and the houseguests seemed intent on drinking it all.

  As we ate, I regaled the guests with some of the lore of past operations in places known as “denied areas,” like Moscow, where the surveillance teams could sometimes number more than one hundred people. Julio joked that he would never again visit that country. Moscow had become an important proving ground for us, and many of the techniques we were utilizing on the Argo mission had at one point been tested out under the watchful eye of the KGB.

  Everyone was curious about the idea behind Studio Six and I clued them in on the origin of the Argo knock-knock joke. It wasn’t long before we all raised our glasses and gave a hearty “Argo!” cheer. I then got serious for a moment and asked them not to publish any details of the rescue mission in order to protect our sources and methods, which are the lifeblood of our secret operations.

  “After this is over you all are going to want to write a book,” I said. “Don’t do it. Julio and I need to stay in business.”

  After dinner, everyone met back in the den for the mock interrogations. In order to make it as realistic as possible, Lucy wore large jackboots and an army fatigue jacket, and carried a swagger stick. He looked to me like something right out of The Man Who Would Be King.

  He moved slowly to the center of the room and took on the posture of an officious immigration officer. “Who’s first?” he barked.

  The houseguests shifted in their seats. Taylor and I stood in the back of the room along with Julio, Beeby, and Munk.

  Lee shot up and walked over to Lucy, who stared him down. “Your passport, please,” he said, affecting the accent of a Persian speaker speaking English. Lee handed over his documents, and Lucy flipped through them. “And where visa you get?” he asked.

  Lee, who’d been playing it cool, suddenly went blank. “You know, funny thing…I don’t remember.”

  Lucy jumped down his throat. “What you mean you not remember?” He got right in Lee’s face. “You big liar! You American spy!”

  Taylor turned to me. “Is this really necessary?” he asked.

  “Absolutely. The more they get into their roles the better off they’ll be tomorrow,” I said.

  When Lee was finished, I turned to the group. “Listen,” I said. “We didn’t give you these cover stories for you not to learn them. Woody here just showed you how easy it is to trip up. You may get these questions and you may not. But if they come up you have to be comfortable answering them.”

  While the interrogations continued, one of the two foreign ambassadors asked me to step into the dining room. He’d been in contact with Mike Howland, one of the three American diplomats at the foreign ministry along with Vic Tomseth and Bruce Laingen. He told me that Howland had confided in him that he was planning an escape. In fact Howland said he’d already been outside of the foreign ministry and was asking for a glass cutter and a gun. The ambassador asked me what I thought he should do. I told him it would be okay to give Howland a glass cutter but definitely not a gun. (As it turns out I’m not sure he gave him either, as Howland, Laingen, and Tomseth would all remain in captivity at the Iranian foreign ministry for the duration of the hostage crisis.)

  When the mock interrogations were over, Julio and I sat down with the houseguests one last time to go over the final arrangements. I had drawn a diagram of the airport and took them through the various phases of the plan so there would be no confusion. “It’s all about misdirection. We’re going to use the same tricks that a magician uses to fool his audience,” I said. The plan was to be as follows: I would arrive at the airport thirty minutes before everyone else, driven by Sewell, who would pick me up from the hotel at three a.m. Once I had arrived, I would recon the airport and confirm that our flight to Zurich was on time. At that point, if all went well, I would check my bag in through customs, then take my position inside the large windows to give an all-clear signal.

  The houseguests, along with Ju
lio, meanwhile, would be driven to the airport in the embassy van. When Julio spotted my signal, he would then lead the houseguests through customs and meet me at the check–in counter.

  Ideally, in an operation of this kind, if anything went wrong, we would have a couple of cars waiting outside in case we needed to bug out in a hurry. We had no such backup—no backup plan at all, in fact. Once we got inside the airport and into the teeth of their security, there would be no chance to turn back.

  All of the houseguests had been through the airport, but I wanted to make sure there were no surprises. Despite being almost like a chicken coop, the airport was pretty well organized, thanks in large part to the draconian controls instituted under the shah. The first control point was just outside the main door: two national police officers checking passengers as they walked through. At this control only a picture ID was required. After this came the customs station. Unlike most Western airports, where people are allowed to take their bags unhindered right up to the airline counter, thanks to the fear of Iranians smuggling goods out of the country, there was a customs station almost immediately inside the front door. “After that we will proceed to the check–in counters,” I said. I didn’t envision we’d encounter a problem there. Immigration controls, however, were another matter. “Here is the choke point,” I said, pointing to the immigration desk on my diagram. I knew the houseguests still had some concerns about the disembarkation/embarkation forms, but I reassured them that the authorities hadn’t been matching up the white and yellow copies for months. “It’s much better to not have something than to include something you shouldn’t have,” I told them. “You can always bluff your way out if you are missing something. ‘How should I know where the white form is? It’s your form!’”