Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History Part 22

We now know that when the militant students overran the American emba.s.sy, they did not expect to stay for any length of time. But as the crisis stretched on, and as Ayatollah Khomeini seemingly endorsed their actions, they discovered that they had invented a new tool of statecraft: hostage taking. In no other civilized country in the world would such an undertaking be tolerated by the host government. And therein lay the power of the technique. Once Khomeini approved of their plan, the students had no need to negotiate.

Iran has followed its own example in the interim, taking hostages almost whimsically whenever it felt a need for international attention or had a cause that needed leveraging. In 2007, fifteen British Royal Navy sailors were taken hostage and held for two weeks. In 2009, a British ship with five sailors was boarded in international waters and the sailors held hostage for over a week before being released. Three American hikers who wandered into Iranian territory, famously known as the "hiker-spies," were taken hostage and two of them held for over two years, released only after a million-dollar bail was paid. The British emba.s.sy was overrun in 2011, its files burned, its flag desecrated, and the building pillaged. Six hostages were taken briefly before the government stepped in. The Iranians have never had to pay a price either for ignoring the conventions of international diplomacy or for taking foreign civilian citizens hostage under the most questionable of circ.u.mstances. And there is no reason to believe that they will let up on this behavior anytime soon.

Iran today is considered a hot spot, one where the next international crisis may well be brewing. The country's insistence on pursuing a nuclear capability has put it near the top of the list of rogue states and earned it a series of international sanctions by the rest of the world. And Iran's capricious foreign policy relationship with Israel is much like a low-grade fever that could spike at any time.

Following the Arab Spring in 2011, which saw turmoil across the region, I was reminded that Iranians are not Arabs. They are Persians, a different race with a different history. On June 12, 2009, supporters of the opposition party candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi took to the streets of Tehran en ma.s.se in what has come to be known as the Green Revolution. Their aim was to protest the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Turnout was incredibly high and many Iranians suspected that Ahmadinejad had rigged the election. In a scene eerily reminiscent of the violence that rocked the nation in 1978, protestors clashed with riot police and were met with tear gas. In the ensuing struggle, nearly forty Iranians were killed. This was followed up in February 2011 with what is commonly referred to as the Day of Rage, when loyalists of the rival candidate, Mousavi, decided to hold a rally in support of the recent Arab Spring. But the spark was quickly extinguished by the mullahs and the heavy hand of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in a b.l.o.o.d.y crackdown. Several demonstrators were beaten and arrested and the young activists retreated, perhaps to protest another day.

As an intelligence officer I am not confident that our old rules of engagement will work any longer. It is difficult to negotiate with an adversary who does not want to come to the table. And it is impossible to find common ground with another government that does not respect the rules of international diplomacy. When the rules of governance flow only from the religious tracts of Islam, there is little room for agreement or compromise. The best that our intelligence community can hope for is to keep a watchful eye on the mullahs and the Iranian government and try to forestall any serious mischief they may be planning. A daunting task to say the least.

When I think about how long the story of Argo remained secret, I am reminded of the Sunday night dinner at the Sheardowns', when I told the houseguests that even though they might be tempted to do so, they were not allowed to tell anyone about what had really happened in Tehran. And for the most part we succeeded. The only leak of any significance came shortly after the story broke, when Jack Anderson said on his syndicated radio show that two CIA officers acting as "mother hens" had led the six through Mehrabad Airport. We a.s.sumed that Anderson had a source inside of the CIA, but the story never gained traction-either domestically or internationally-and we breathed a sigh of relief. Jean Pelletier would eventually go on to cowrite a book about the rescue t.i.tled The Canadian Caper, which turned out to be wildly off the mark given that he basically stuck to the letter of the cover story that Canada had done everything. The CIA could not have been happier.

No other books were written-not by me, not by the houseguests. And none would have been, except for the fact that the CIA saw fit to honor me in 1997.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the CIA, the Agency sought out a publicist to look for a way to celebrate the milestone. The CIA was advised to shrug off its cloak of secrecy ever so slightly and have a public event. This, in turn, morphed into an internal nomination of the top fifty officers in the CIA's first fifty years. Amazingly, I was selected as one of them.

The Trailblazer Award was presented with a citation that read in part that I had been chosen out of those "of any grade, in any field, at any point in the CIA's history, who distinguished themselves as leaders, made a real difference in CIA's pursuit of its mission, and who served as a standard of excellence for others to follow." There was, indeed, a public ceremony, to which the media was invited. There were Trailblazer Medals struck and presented to each of us, or in some instances next of kin.

It was the media, in the form of Tim Weiner of the New York Times, who requested the first interview. Someone had leaked the story of the rescue of the houseguests to him, but I told him that he couldn't use it. "People could get hurt," I said. He wrote a story, but did not use the Iranian operation. Then, when I checked with senior CIA officials, I was overruled and asked to tell the story of the Iranian operation to Dan Rather of CBS Evening News. When I protested, saying, "But this is one of our best-kept secrets," I was contradicted. "Tenet wants to do it," I was told. And so I did it. But I must say it was difficult for my lips to form the words the first time I actually verbalized what we had done.

I was worried about the safety of my family and about the Iranian reaction once they realized that they had been fooled. The suits on the seventh floor of headquarters a.s.sured me that there was no danger. "They could never even find your driveway," said one senior officer, a man who had visited my art studio over the years and knew that coming down my mile-long unpaved road was a challenge for anybody.

Once the truth came out, there was no longer a reason not to celebrate the story with the public at large. Cora remembers that when she was finally able to tell her motherinlaw, the woman was furious. "Why didn't you tell me before?" she asked Cora. "Because," Cora explained, "you tell one person, you tell a hundred."

Back in the summer of 1980, I invited the houseguests to my home for a picnic. I happened to run into Bob Anders in the Foggy Bottom metro station and he called out, "Kevin!" from across the platform. We embraced, like two long-lost friends. The houseguests were so busy that it was difficult for them to find a day when we could get together. Somehow they wedged me in before their appearance at Yankee Stadium, where that evening's game would be dedicated to them.

I invited them to my forty-acre patch in the woods for a clandestine barbecue. n.o.body could know. It wasn't until I issued the invitation that they learned my true name. At the barbecue they often forgot, though, and fell back into the habit of calling me Kevin. The get-together was a warm reunion. Joe and Kathy did not come, but the others were there. Jack Kerry and his wife, and Dan, from my team, were able to come too. Karen finally had the opportunity to meet these famous folks. We played tennis on our gra.s.s court and Lee, not surprisingly, was the star of the game, although Bob was no slouch.

Some of them had changed; most hadn't. Lee was still his old mischievous self. Cora seemed to have been affected most by her time with the Sheardowns. Before going to Iran she had always envisioned herself as a career woman and so had told Mark that she didn't plan on having kids. During the time they'd spent at the Sheardowns', however, she'd felt as if she belonged to a family. The experience gave her an entirely new outlook on life, and upon returning she realized that her priorities had slightly shifted.

Years later I visited Jerome Calloway at the Motion Picture and Television Country House, on Mulholland Drive in Burbank. Calloway and his wife had retired there following a stroke that he had suffered some time before. He was in a wheelchair now, with limited mobility, and his speech was slurred. But he still had the old sparkle in his eyes and was clearly glad to see me again.

He wanted to show me his room. He and his wife had separate apartments, and once I entered his it became clear why. His room was cluttered, festooned with mementos from a long and successful career in Hollywood. One long wall, maybe twenty feet long, was hung floor to ceiling, salon-style, with framed black-and-white glossy photos of Jerome with every movie legend you could name: Shirley Temple, Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn, Walter Matthau, Elizabeth Taylor, Bob Hope...It was a walk down memory lane, as if Memory Lane existed on the set of a Hollywood movie.

His trophies were lined up on a shelf on the same wall, from one end to the other. Gold statuettes of his most prestigious awards were all in a row. And, front and center, hanging with a bit of white s.p.a.ce around it, was the CIA's Medal of Merit, one of only two ever given to a non-CIA staffer. It was a special recognition of a very special man.

Calloway turned his wheelchair to face me and rolled over closer so that I could hear him more easily. "I've thought about it," he began, "and I've decided that if this place ever catches fire and we have to get out of here fast, the only thing I'm taking with me is that." He pointed to the medal. "It's hanging low, you see, so that I can grab it from this d.a.m.n chair." He wheeled himself over to the wall to show me how he could reach it if he ever needed to.

It was the last time I ever saw Jerome. It's a great memory of a man who did a lot for his country and who was a good, true friend.

The first rule in any deception operation is to understand who your audience is. In the case of Argo, the audience was not the Iranians but the houseguests themselves. While we'd backstopped the cover story to the hilt, the people we really wanted to convince were those six American diplomats. Of course, if any Iranian officials had actually checked, their story would have seemed legitimate. But knowing that is what sold the cover story to the houseguests in the first place. They believed in it, which gave them the confidence to carry it off.

The second reason Argo worked was its overall outlandishness. It was the proverbial too-crazytobealie story that was impossible to check. It was something that no intelligence officer in his right mind would ever choose for a cover story. And therein was its beauty.

Most films nowadays are judged to be a success or failure based on the box office receipts. In a way, even though our fake science fiction film never made a dime, in my mind it had had the most successful opening in the history of the cinema. We'd saved the lives of six people-not a bad haul for a film that never existed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have told the story of the 1980 rescue of six "houseguests" from revolutionary Iran scores if not hundreds of times over the years. The details of the role of the Canadian government plus significant Hollywood and CIA involvement in planning and conducting the operation were a well-kept secret until 1997. Then, at the CIA's request, I began to speak out as a way of celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Agency. The story became a chapter in my first book, The Master of Disguise, then it became an article in Wired magazine, and then a movie script t.i.tled Argo, and now it has become a book in its own right.

The story of Argo seems to have captured the public's imagination. Those in Hollywood involved in making the movie have expressed enormous enthusiasm for this story, and audiences across the United States have sat rapt as I told them how the CIA went into Iran in the middle of a revolution to rescue six innocent American diplomats hiding in the care of the Canadians.

In this book I have set forth the actual account of how that rescue was planned and executed. It is an honor to be able to tell this story. To that end I would like to acknowledge those who played a role in the operation.

First, I would like to thank my wife, Jonna, who is not only my muse, my comrade in arms, and my inspiration, but also a font of ideas and my most insightful and unyielding adviser. I could not have done this without her.

Equally important, I must nod to a good friend and a true patriot, "Jerome Calloway," who was responsible for mustering the Hollywood component of these events and many of the good ideas. Unfortunately, even in death we cannot name him, but he was a bona fide genius in his own right.

I must thank my son Jesse Lee Mendez for the weekends he has given up while home from college. We put this book together on a tight deadline, and although I would wave h.e.l.lo as he arrived and hug him good-bye as he left, we all missed hanging out and catching up. The same goes for his older siblings, Toby and Amanda. We promise to do better.

I was fortunate to be able to work with Matt Baglio on this project. A seasoned journalist and author, he now divides his time between Rome and California with his wife, Sara, and young son. Matt is a tireless investigative writer, researching the history of Iran that was the backdrop to the story of this rescue operation, interviewing the houseguests, and gaining an outsider's view of the story unenc.u.mbered by the proverbial wilderness of mirrors, the cla.s.sified details. It was a pleasure to work with him. During the writing of this book Matt and his wife lost her father, Fernando Di Bari, and my heart was and is with them.

This book would not have happened without the very direct partic.i.p.ation of Christy Fletcher of Fletcher and Company in New York. She was a vital part of the making of this book at every turn, and she and her a.s.sistant Alyssa Wolff made it a pleasure to move forward each day. Likewise, Joshua Kendall at Viking, a.s.sisted by Maggie Riggs, was an enthusiastic editor who cared deeply about the material and gave it careful attention in the editing process. It shows. He took something that was good and made it even better. My thanks to them both.

My former colleagues at the CIA will, of course, pretty much remain nameless. There are enough details in the book that CIA employees of a certain age will be able to identify their former colleagues and sometimes themselves. Others, at the same time, have been a.s.signed vague, generic names, like "Bob" (sorry Bob), but they know who they are. Unsung heroes, one and all. I hope that the reader will have a better and greater appreciation for the work of the CIA and the people doing that work.

The houseguests were perhaps the greatest source of new information for this book. Their insights, their points of view, and their experiences bring the human element to an operation that has heretofore been only known as "The Canadian Caper" or "The Rescue of Six Diplomats." Getting their feelings and experiences down on paper was something that the team managed with great finesse.

And then, of course, there were the Canadians. We have reached out to many of the Canadians involved in this rescue operation to revisit the history. It was a wonderful experience to work with them to achieve a common goal. From Ken Taylor and his secretary Laverna, recently deceased, to Roger Lucy and on down through the working levels, it was a pleasure to work with our neighbors to the north. While we like to say that "Small Is Beautiful," it is much, much more. Canada is a true friend to America and I will never forget the pleasure of working with a foreign government that felt so much like my own.

Thanks, Canada!

Antonio J. Mendez

BIBLIOGRAPHY

a.s.sociated Press. "Emba.s.sy Escape: American Escaped During Takeover," Free Lance Star (Fredericksburg, VA), November 14, 1979.

---. "9 Got Out of Emba.s.sy," Milwaukee Journal, November 14, 1979.

Axworthy, Michael. Iran: Empire of the Mind: A History From Zoroaster to the Present Day. London: Penguin Books, 2007.

Bowden, Mark. Guests of the Ayatollah. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006.

"Canada to the Rescue," Time, February 11, 1980.

Carter, Jimmy. Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President. New York: Bantam, 1982.

Christopher, Warren, Harold Saunders, Gary Sick, and Paul H. Kreisberg. American Hostages in Iran: The Conduct of a Crisis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.

Daugherty, William. In the Shadow of the Ayatollah: A CIA Hostage in Iran. Annapolis, MD: Naval Inst.i.tute Press, 2001.