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

Authors: Antonio Mendez,Matt Baglio

Tags: #Canada, #Film & Video, #Performing Arts, #History & Criticism, #20th Century, #Post-Confederation (1867-), #History & Theory, #General, #United States, #Middle East, #Political Science, #Intelligence & Espionage, #History

Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History (7 page)

BOOK: Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History
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With their release came a statement by Khomeini that the remaining Americans were soon going to be put on trial as spies. Carter immediately warned the Iranian government through back channels that if any such “trials” took place, or if any of the hostages were harmed in any way, Iran would suffer dire consequences. To back up his threat he ordered an aircraft carrier battle group to take up station off the coast of Iran. The USS
Kitty Hawk
joined with another aircraft carrier already on station, the USS
Midway
, to form one of the largest U.S. naval forces ever to be assembled in the region.

B
y late November the Pentagon had come up with a complex rescue operation called Eagle Claw. The plan called for a small group of Delta Force commandos and Army Rangers to be flown by helicopter to a remote site in the Iranian desert
known as Desert One. There, the group would meet up with three C130 Hercules transport planes, refuel, and fly on to a second staging area, Desert Two, located about fifty miles outside of Tehran. At Desert Two, the Delta Force commandos, led by Colonel Charles Beckwith, would disguise themselves and then drive to the U.S. embassy in trucks, where they would storm the compound and rescue the hostages.

With so many moving parts, many of us within the intelligence community felt that the plan’s chances for success were low. The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) structure in place today that helps the various services work so smoothly together didn’t exist back then. This meant that the marine helicopter pilots, air force pilots, army commandos, and navy sailors would have to learn to cooperate on the fly. (In fact, the eventual failure of coordination among these elements was a major factor in the creation of JSOC.)

Whether or not we agreed with the plan, our number one priority was to get our advance party into Iran so that it could establish a staging area outside the city. Ultimately composed of several nonofficial cover officers drafted from the ranks of the CIA and its Defense counterpart, the DIA, the party was led by a seasoned former OSS officer, “Bob,” who got his start in the business working behind enemy lines in World War II. Bob was a legendary figure in the CIA’s clandestine history, an invisible hero whose exploits can never be celebrated. The goal of the advance party was to reconnoiter the situation at the U.S. embassy in Tehran and hopefully learn where the hostages were located. They would also case the area around the embassy, looking for landing sites for the rescue helicopters to get the hostages out of Tehran once the assault team had freed them. These urban landing zones were called Bus Stop I
and Bus Stop II. The advance party would also need to establish a commo system so that it could communicate with elements of the U.S. government while in enemy territory.

The team would also need to reconnoiter any potential landing sites in the desert, as well as scrounge up trucks for the final assault. Orbital imaging would initially be used to establish a landing site in the desert, but eventually someone would have to go and check it out. Part of that process would require a black flight, carried out by a CIA pilot and copilot along with a U.S. Air Force special operator. The flight, which would take place many months later, went off without a hitch, and the pilots were able to determine that there was no radar in the area. Once the Twin Otter had landed, the air force special operator then unloaded a small motor scooter from the airplane and drove it around taking soil samples throughout the area. Later, once these had been analyzed and it was determined that the location would work as a landing site, one of OTS’s many tasks was to fabricate infrared landing lights to mark a runway that could be seen with IR goggles.

W
ith the plans for a rescue operation still developing and overt diplomacy clearly not working, it wasn’t long before my colleagues and I at the CIA began analyzing other ways to end the stalemate. Not much was happening in the early days of the crisis in regard to covert action beyond supporting the advance team. But one very interesting idea did surface, and more than once.

My deputy, Tim Small, came into my office early on the morning of November 9. “Tony, do you have a minute?” he asked.

This was unusual behavior for Tim, because his morning routine was to spend the first several hours of the day uninterrupted, reading the cables and assigning action items to the branch. He seldom stepped out of character, and so when he asked for this meeting of course I agreed.

“I was walking my dog last night,” he said, “and I had an idea. I don’t want to say something crazy, but you tell me—is it possible that we could invent a deception and make it appear that the shah has gone away?”

It was the exact same idea I had heard from Karen the night before. She had reasoned that if the hostages were taken because the shah was in the United States, then if he departed—or died—the hostages might be released. It was amazing to be hearing it a second time, and from Tim.

He and I both knew that when Carter made the decision to admit the shah to the United States for medical treatment, he had been warned he was running the risk of the embassy’s being besieged again. And so it made some sense that if we removed the shah, we might remove the problem.

There is a great tradition in espionage operations of using the principles of magic, misdirection, illusion, deception, and denial. The Trojan horse is one well-known example of deception. Winston Churchill is only one of many world leaders who practiced the art of deception—he had a body double, as have many other public figures throughout history. In the world of stage magic, this is known as misdirection. The magician Jasper Maskelyne used the same principles of grand illusion to create battlefield deceptions during World War II. He actually “moved” the city of Alexandria, Egypt, several nights in a row so the Nazis mistakenly bombed an
empty harbor. Operation Bodyguard, another British operation, was a deeply elaborate deception used in the invasion of Normandy. Churchill called it his “bodyguard of lies.” The fake buildup of forces in another part of England made the Nazis believe the invasion would be launched at Calais instead.

I decided to test the waters and headed out the door and across our courtyard to South Building. I ended up on the second floor, at the office of Matt, the deputy chief of our operations group. He was up to his elbows in the massive flow of cables that the hostage crisis had generated, annotating some, highlighting others, and putting them in his out-box for distribution.

“What is it, Tony?” he asked, not even looking up.

I knew that Matt would immediately see the downside of any proposal, which made him the best devil’s advocate in the building.

“If you’ve got a minute, I’ve got an idea,” I said, stepping farther into his office and closing the door.

“Sure, what is it?” he asked, still not looking up.

“What if we could make it seem that the shah went away and expired?”

Matt paused, reflected, looked at me, and then said, “The shah becomes a nonperson. Pretty good…”

For the next ninety hours, this initiative was the only one to be entertained within the U.S. government as a means to deal with the hostage crisis. As chief of disguise I quickly assembled a team of experts to vet the idea. I called on Tim and several members of my disguise branch, as well as one officer from the documents branch. I wanted both seasoned officers and young people, an eclectic mix of ideas that I always preferred when tackling a problem.

“If we can’t come up with an operational time line in forty-five minutes, we’re going to forget this idea,” I said.

Forty minutes later we had the bones of an operational plan. I called Hal, chief of the Near East Division, Iran, on the secure phone and told him I had an idea. I knew Hal well, as he and I had worked together in Tehran to exfiltrate the Iranian agent RAPTOR. The two of us had established a good rapport during and after that operation and I considered him a friend, which would come in handy in the days ahead.

“Come!” he said.

I walked into his office at headquarters thirty minutes later, alone. He got up from his desk to tell me we were going to see Bob McGhee, the deputy chief of the Near East Division. McGhee then picked up the phone and called John McMahon, the deputy director of the CIA. McMahon was in McGhee’s office a few minutes later.

“What do you need?” McMahon asked.

“Immediate access to the shah,” I said.

“We don’t know who’s talking to him,” he said. “We know who isn’t. Can you build it backward?” he asked.

What he meant was, could we carry out our plan without initially engaging with the shah? I told him yes, we could.

“We will need everything we have on him, however—all the records, all the photographs, everything we could possibly learn about what he looks like. Scars, tattoos, blemishes—anything that would be subject to scrutiny in an adverse autopsy.”

It was at this moment, oddly enough, that McMahon took a call from Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot in McGhee’s office. Perot
had exfiltrated two of his employees early in the Iranian revolution with the help of a team of former army commandos. The commandos had infiltrated Iran, then used an overland “black” route to smuggle the employees out of the country and into Turkey. We stood to the side and (covertly) listened. We could hear Perot’s scratchy voice across the room without any amplification. “What’s the holdup?” he was asking. “Is it red tape? If that’s it, I can try and help you out and get things moving. Is it money? I can help you out there too till you get your finances flowing.”

McMahon thanked Perot for his call and told him he would call him back if he needed something. He put the phone down and came back across the room to our little group.

“Tell me what you need, Tony,” he said, “and I’ll make it happen.”

Saturday morning I went down to the DDI vault, which belonged to the Deputy Directorate for Intelligence, the analytical arm of the CIA, along with two of my best disguise and documents officers. Mountains of papers, photographs, journals, and files surrounded us. We combed through the paperwork, looking for anything that would help us on this reverse engineering project.

By noon we were ready to move to the next phase, to organize a “cattle call,” an invitation to a select group of Agency officers to audition for our starring role. We needed high-level authority to go to the Office of Security’s badge office and review the photos of all CIA employees. When we contacted those who seemed a suitable match, all but one were willing to come in on the weekend and work with us.

For those next ninety hours we worked nonstop, sleeping on the floor using our balled–up jackets as pillows. Our Hollywood
consultant, a makeup great I’ll call “Jerome Calloway,” had flown in from LA on Sunday and worked right alongside us. That episode is an amazing story in itself, but the upshot was that by the time we were finished we had not one but two deceptions ready to go.

Unfortunately, by Friday, the president decided against using our plan because he didn’t want to appear to be backing down to the Iranians—a decision, I am told, he would later regret. In light of this, our master consultant returned to Hollywood, but I would be calling on him again for another favor in a couple of weeks.

W
ith the end of November came the frustrating realization that while we were making incremental progress toward reestablishing our intelligence capability in Iran, as well as helping to plan a rescue mission, fifty-three American diplomats were still being held hostage. It was a hard fact to swallow, but if anything, it only made us redouble our efforts. There was plenty of work to do, and with other hot spots and ongoing clandestine operations grabbing our attention, we were being tasked with all that much more. Then, in the midst of this activity came a memorandum from the State Department marked
URGENT
. Surprisingly, not all the Americans working at the embassy in Tehran had been captured. Somehow, a group of six, who had been working at the consulate and at another building, had managed to escape and make their way into the hostile streets of Tehran. For the moment they seemed to be safe, but the Iranians were closing in, and there was a chance they could be discovered at any moment.

4

NOWHERE TO RUN

The consulate had gone relatively unnoticed during the first minutes of the attack. Located on the northeast side of the U.S. embassy compound, the building’s squat, two-story concrete structure had recently been renovated to handle the massive influx of visa applicants. So many had come in the wake of the shah’s departure that getting the building adequately staffed had been a challenge. On the morning of November 4, there were ten Americans, along with about twenty Iranian employees, working inside. Among the Americans were Consul General Dick Morefield, vice consuls Richard Queen and Don Cooke, consul officers Robert Anders and Bob Ode, as well as the building’s only security officer, Marine Sergeant James Lopez, known among the staff as Jimmy. There were also two young married couples, Mark and Cora Lijek, and Joe and Kathy Stafford (an eleventh American, Gary Lee, would later join this group during the assault).

The Lijeks and Staffords were particularly close. Mark and Joe,
both twenty-nine years old, had met the previous year in Washington while attending language school at the Foreign Service Institute. Despite being nearly polar opposites, the two had become good friends. Mark’s straight blond hair and boyish appearance was accentuated by a pair of large glasses that somehow made him appear even more youthful and innocent than he was. He was a guy you could talk to about anything, and he did like to talk. Joe, meanwhile, was the serious and quiet type. With a receding hairline and a neatly trimmed mustache, Joe was slightly shorter than his wife, and cultivated the look of an economics professor, complete with glasses, a sweater vest, and sport coat. The two friends had spent nearly seven hours a day together for six months and had gotten to know each other quite well. To Mark, who had a hard time figuring him out at first, Joe was a reserved, hardworking guy who would suddenly surprise you with his deadpan sense of humor. He liked pushing Mark’s buttons, and it was only after the fact that Mark would realize Joe had just been pulling his leg.

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