Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History (20 page)

When I’d been getting ready for my follow–up trip to Ottawa, I kept thinking about the problem of the cover story for the houseguests, going over and over in my mind the types of people traveling into and out of Iran. As I was standing in my studio, Calloway’s final words rang in my ears. Was there a way that Calloway could help out with the houseguests? I thought of all the stories he’d told me, all my experiences out in LA. Then, by the time I’d landed in Ottawa and had checked into the Lord Elgin once again, I’d hit
upon an idea for a cover story that I thought just might work. Rather than pretending to be petroleum workers or nutritionists or teachers, the six Americans would pose as part of a Hollywood production company that was scouting locations in Iran for an upcoming film. The plan, which would normally be out of the question for most clandestine operations, had several attractive features. For one, Hollywood film crews were typically made up of people from all over the world. And of all the groups heading into Iran, it wasn’t implausible to imagine a group of self-absorbed Hollywood eccentrics traveling there in the middle of a revolution to find the perfect locations for their movie. Beyond that, it had the one quality that I felt the other stories lacked. It was fun, which I knew would help the houseguests to connect with it in a way the other stories couldn’t. With their lives on the line, it would help to make their performances that much more believable. While some people might not know the first thing about agriculture, everybody had some idea of what Hollywood was like. The prime criterion for any cover was always, Would I be willing to use it? In my gut, I felt it was our best option.

But before I could present the idea to the Canadians, I needed to call Calloway to see what he thought. He had no idea what I was working on at the time, and since it was an open line I had to be circumspect about what I could say.

“Hi, Jerome. It’s your friend from the army,” I said.

“Hey, Tone,” he said, using a favorite nickname for me. “What’s up?”

“How many people in a Hollywood location scouting party?” I asked him.

“I read you,” he said. “About eight.” He listed them off one by
one: director, cinematographer, production manager, art director, transportation manager, script consultant, associate producer, and business manager.

He then explained that the group’s purpose would be to examine the potential locations for the film from an artistic and business standpoint. The associate producer represented the financial backers. The business manager concerned himself mainly with banking arrangements; even a ten-day shoot could require millions of dollars spent on the local economy. The transportation manager rented a variety of vehicles, ranging from limousines to transport the stars to heavy equipment required for constructing a set. The production manager made it all come together. The other team members were technicians who created the film footage from the words in the script.

When he was finished, I thought it sounded perfect. “Thanks,” I said. “That’s a big help.”

The following morning, I met with Delgado bright and early to run my new idea by him. He sat patiently as I outlined my past involvement with Calloway and explained the cover story for the Hollywood location scouting party. He was immediately intrigued, and said he thought it could work. He agreed with me that the eccentricities of the people working in the film business were well known, probably even among Iranians. Even better, he said, Canada had a fairly robust film industry, so the cover would fit perfectly with the Canadian documentation.

I then began thinking of how I was going to create a crack in which to drive a wedge and get my idea through headquarters. I thought back to something I had learned from the NESTOR operation, when Jacob had been forced to deal with everybody at
headquarters piling on. In that situation, Jacob had basically handed headquarters a
fait accompli
: essentially, he was already doing the thing that he was proposing to do. The tactic had also been used during the exfiltration of Svetlana Stalin, when the local case officer had sent a cable to headquarters telling them basically that they were going to put her on a plane to Athens, because if they didn’t, then by morning her absence would have been discovered. So by the time headquarters got the cable, the operation was already under way. In essence, this is what I had in mind to do now. Delgado and I would work out the details of the operations plan, solve the problems, make a schedule, and then tell headquarters that he and I had an agreement and that we both wanted to move on this plan by the end of the week.

With Delgado on board, I then briefed the chief of station in Ottawa, who nodded his agreement. “Sounds great,” he said. At that point, I sat down at the chief of station’s desk and wrote out a sixteen-page operations plan in longhand on a yellow legal pad. The operations plan is the comprehensive plan that you hope headquarters will sign off on, so you try to be as detailed as you can and answer any question you can think of. I remember that while I was writing the cable, the chief of station and the U.S. ambassador were standing in the doorway of the office watching me. “He’s writing the solution right now,” I heard the COS whisper to the ambassador. When I was done, I handed it straight to the communicator, who typed it up and sent it off to headquarters, compartmentalized handling
FLASH.

The following morning I was back in Washington, sitting in my office trying to catch up on some cables, when the phone rang. I had a good idea who was on the other end even before I picked up. “Hello?” I said.

Sure enough, it was Hal from the Near East Division. “Eric wants to see you,” he said. “You think you can find some time this morning to come over?” The cable I’d sent from Canada had, as expected, already made the rounds, and while Hal didn’t tell me, I could tell that Eric was not very happy about it. I told my secretary where I was going, then headed out into the parking lot. In my early days in the graphics bullpen I used to ride a bike to work. Having a car seemed almost like a luxury. When I got to Eric’s office he looked up from a folder on his desk and told me to sit down. “I have some issues with you,” he said. He went on to explain that in his opinion I’d made an error by sending the cable based on the approval of the chief of station, who was only a liaison. His main point, of course, was that I should have coordinated with him, rather than try to go around his back with the COS, whose job in Canada was more representational than anything. “You know that, Mendez,” he told me. With that out of the way, the tension seemed to leave the room and he told me that the plan was a damn fine piece of work, recognizing that it could have advantages even beyond the problem of rescuing the six houseguests. He explained his thinking:

The Pentagon was still in the process of ironing out the plan for Eagle Claw, and given Tehran’s geographical location, hadn’t yet come up with a feasible way to insert a force of army commandos to rescue the hostages. The movie cover could be an elegant solution that might actually be welcomed by the Iranian Ministry of National Guidance. The ministry had been charged with countering negative publicity on Iran by—outrageously enough—promoting tourism. Tehran was also looking for ways to alleviate some of the cash-flow problems caused when President Carter froze Iran’s assets in the United States. A motion picture production on
Iranian soil could be an economic shot in the arm and would provide an ideal public relations tool to help counteract the adverse publicity stemming from the hostage situation.

A relative “moderate,” Abulhassan Bani-Sadr, was about to be elected president of Iran, and we judged it possible that he could be sold on these economic points and then might be able to gain agreement from the radical factions of the regime. If so, the cover for infiltrating the Delta Force commandos (in preparation for a hostage rescue attempt) as a team of movie set construction workers and camera operators to prepare the location was a natural. We imagined it might be possible to even conceal weapons and other material in the motion picture equipment.

It was a scenario that could work on many levels. However, as I was driving back to Foggy Bottom, I was momentarily consumed by doubt. The Hollywood option had been so readily embraced that I wondered if it might just be wishful thinking on everyone’s part. On the surface, the idea was so preposterous that I had expected some pushback, and when I hadn’t gotten any, it was only natural that I began to wonder: Had we overlooked something? Were we creating an unnecessarily convoluted plan that was going to get somebody killed? Since I was the plan’s architect, I had to be certain. For some reason, despite the plan’s implausibility, it was the only option I felt comfortable using myself.

T
he rest of my day was spent meeting with my team and getting them up to speed on the Hollywood option as well as the other covers. Joe Missouri was still in Canada working out the problem of the secondary documents, such as credit cards
and Canadian driver’s licenses, which were turning out to be difficult to obtain. Much like our own government, the Canadians had certain restrictions in place on the use of their security documents. In an attempt to get the driver’s licenses, Joe had eventually met with the head of the national security forces, who had told him it wasn’t going to happen without some kind of special approval from on high. At that point, they had called in the solicitor general (a post similar to the attorney general in the United States). Joe later recounted how the solicitor general had come in and looked at the head of the national security forces, then at Joe, then back to the head of the national security forces, and said: “Get the fucking things.” In addition, the Canadians had finished a set of six passports and some OTS artists in Canada had quickly inserted the proper cachets, including a visa that originated from a country in Europe. These were to be emergency documents in case the houseguests needed to escape immediately, and so they were assembled rather quickly and sent off through the diplomatic bag. The next set would be sent much later, along with the secondary documents that Joe was working on.

I
was in my office later that day when Matt, deputy chief of OTS operations, came in. He was dropping by to check on our progress. Matt had seen my cable and so knew about the idea for the Hollywood location scouting party, but now it was time to make it a reality. “If anyone checks, we need the foundation to be there,” I said.

“How are you going to make it happen?”

The best kind of backstopped stories are those where you could
go into the city or town where the person’s alias documents say he or she is from, then to the street and finally the house, where inside on the mantelpiece you would see a photo of the person alongside his or her supposed spouse or family. That was the level of backstopping I was proposing now.

“Hollywood is a town that runs on image,” I said. “I want to get an office, get it staffed, do as much as we can.” Since the houseguests were going to be pretending to be members of a location scouting party, we would need to create a production company and a film for them to be working on. Since I knew the lay of the land, it only made sense that I would be the one to fly out there and get it done. I told him I planned to ask for an advance of funds from the budget and finance office for ten thousand dollars to cover our expenses.

Matt thought about it for a second. He knew we were taking a chance because we hadn’t yet gotten consensus approval for the Hollywood option, but the risk was minimal compared to the payoff. If we ended up also using this cover to rescue the hostages down at the embassy, then laying the groundwork now seemed like the smart thing to do.

His face brightened and he shook his head. “Only you could think of something like that,” he said. “I like it.”

We then began discussing the logistics of the exfiltration. Up until this point I had yet to assign the team of officers who would be infiltrating Iran to link up with the houseguests. “Who’d you have in mind?” he asked.

I think it’s safe to say that from the beginning I was convinced that I should lead the team. Technically, as the chief of the
authentication branch, I was a manager and too senior to be out in the field. Further, by the nature of my job I knew too much about the inner workings of the CIA’s clandestine operations. If I was to be compromised, then that would be a huge security risk. Still, thanks to the fact that I had recently been in Iran, and due to the high-profile nature of this exfiltration, I think everyone was willing to accept the risks. With the lives of six Americans on the line, the direct involvement of the Canadian government, as well as pressure mounting on President Carter from every quarter, all of us knew that failure wouldn’t be an option.

“Me, and somebody from documents,” I replied. “Maybe Julio.”

“Julio” was a thirty-one-year-old documents officer stationed in Europe. In my mind, Julio was one of the most capable documents guys we had. He was a true “gray man” and could carry just about any persona you asked of him. When people think of spies, most think of Hollywood films in which the spy is always flamboyant and larger than life. In the real world of espionage, however, a spy has to be able to blend in. One thing I always say when it comes to the types of people the CIA looks for is that it’s not the guy who gets all the stares, but the one who, after you see him in line at the bank or after he passes through the checkout counter at the supermarket, you cannot remember what he looks like. Le Carré got that right. He could be tall, short, European, American, South American—whatever is required to get the job done, which is what Julio was like. Originally from the Midwest, Julio had studied at the Sorbonne and was a gifted linguist who spoke German, Spanish, Farsi, and French. It seemed that if you gave him the
weekend to learn a new language he’d come back on Monday completely fluent. Besides this, Julio had participated in numerous exfiltrations, in which he had proven himself more than capable. During one such operation in the Middle East, he had picked up a high-profile terrorist who wanted to come over to our side. Julio had met him at a safe site and gotten him out onto a ferry, only to have the ferry turn around and return to the harbor. The boat’s propellers had gotten fouled on some trash, and Julio was forced to improvise. It’s easy to imagine how spooked the terrorist must have been as the ferry made its slow turn back to the docks. In those types of situations it can be incredibly difficult to get a person to go back through the whole process of trying to escape a second time, but Julio proved to be unflappable and got the terrorist out of the country the next day.