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

by Antonio Mendez

  The situation was deteriorating fast. The militants led Al Golacinski into the basement of the chancery and then marched him up to the second floor, where the Americans had barricaded themselves behind the reinforced door. The stairwell was filling with tear gas and his eyes stung. Someone waved a burning magazine in front of his face and he recoiled in fear. “Don’t burn me!” he shouted. Then the barrel of a gun was shoved to the back of his head and he was given an ultimatum: tell them to open this door or you die.

  Golacinski shouted through the metal door, telling his colleagues that there was no point resisting. He said the militants had already captured eight Americans (this was his own assessment) and that they only wanted to read a statement and then leave. “This is just like February 14,” he said.

  John Limbert, a political officer who spoke fluent Farsi, volunteered to go outside and see if he could persuade them to free Golacinski. At first the militants were surprised when he admonished them like children in their own language, telling them that the Revolutionary Guard was on the way to kick them out. They knew he was bluffing, and in a matter of minutes he was captured and given the same option as Golacinski: get your friends to open this door or we shoot you.

  Laingen had by now realized that resisting further was hopeless. Despite their best efforts at the Iranian foreign ministry, he and Tomseth had been unable get the Iranian government to help. Using the telephone in the foreign minister’s office, he called the U.S. embassy and told Ann Swift, the embassy’s senior political officer, to surrender. Swift and two other staffers were manning a bank of phones in Bruce Laingen’s outer office. As the most senior official present at the embassy, she was doing her best to keep the lines of communication open. Early in the assault, she had called the Operations Center at the U.S. State Department and had been put through to three senior officials, including Hal Saunders, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. Saunders was still on the phone with Swift an hour later when Laingen told her it was time to give up. “We’re going to let them in,” she told Saunders over the phone.

  Realizing the seriousness of the situation, Saunders then relayed this information to President Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who then called the president at four in the morning. Carter was “deeply disturbed but reasonably confident” that the Iranian government would quickly remove the militants, much as it had on February 14.

  After surrendering, the Americans in the chancery resigned themselves to their fate. When the steel door was finally opened, the breathless mob flooded in. The staffers inside the vault would continue to hold out for another hour or so destroying documents, but in the end they too would be forced to give up.

  The original security plan had called for the embassy staff to hold on for two hours until the Iranian government could send help. As it turned out, the plan had worked to perfection. The only problem, of course, was that the help never came.

  News of the embassy attack reached me on Sunday morning while I was standing at the kitchen counter sipping my first cup of coffee. This was my favorite part of the weekend—when my family was still asleep and the house was quiet. I had a small transistor radio tuned to NPR and I half listened to it as I flipped through the Sunday newspaper. Outside, a light dusting of snow covered the ground and the sky was cold and gray. I was wondering how much firewood I was going to have to cut before I could get into my studio to paint. We had a large greenhouse attached to the front of the house and I was just about to step into it to watch the snow when the NPR broadcast was interrupted by news of the attack.

  Events were still unfolding, but the overall picture was clear. A mob had stormed the embassy and the lives of nearly seventy American diplomats were in danger.

  My mind flashed back to April 1979, the last time I had set foot inside the U.S. embassy in Tehran. As a technical officer in the CIA’s Office of Technical Services with more than fourteen years of experience at the time, I had been asked to infiltrate Iran in the midst of the revolution to help rescue a “blue striper,” or top Iranian agent, code-named RAPTOR. As the chief of the disguise branch, I was charged with coming up with a convincing disguise that would allow the agent, a former colonel in the Iranian army, to walk past the security controls at Mehrabad Airport and onto a commercial flight.

  The operation was similar to countless others I’d done in Southeast Asia and other distant parts of the world, but it was far from routine. Violence had exploded all across the country and revolutionaries were hunting down former members of the shah’s regime. Time was running out for the colonel. He’d spent the winter hiding in his grandmother’s tin-roofed attic, where snow dripped down on him while a group of Revolutionary Guards rifled through the apartment below. By the time I got to him he was badly shaken.

  I had used the library in the embassy as part of my research for his disguise. Then I spent the better part of a week preparing him, training him, using all the tricks I’d learned over the course of my career to get him out of the country alive.

  After listening to the news for a few minutes, I tiptoed into the bedroom and quietly picked up my car keys and my Agency badge. I stopped in the kitchen to scribble a note to Karen explaining where I had gone, then picked up the phone and called the duty officer for my section. On the weekends it would be his job to monitor all the cable traffic and let me know if I needed to come in. The details of the attack were still sketchy, but cables were flooding in by the minute. All of us at the CIA were aware of the dangers that the embassy personnel were up against in a place as unpredictable as revolutionary Iran. Among the Americans were three CIA colleagues of mine who no doubt would be singled out for special treatment if the Iranians were able to identify them. I only hoped that the staffers had had enough time to destroy all the sensitive documents inside the embassy. When I finally got the duty officer on the line, he only confirmed what I had already suspected. Things were rolling down at the office. It was time to go to work.

  2

  PICKING UP THE PIECES

  In 1979, the headquarters for OTS was located in Foggy Bottom, on a small hill on the District side of the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge, just north of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The small collection of neoclassical limestone and brick buildings was unremarkable by most accounts. Once a part of the original Naval Observatory in the late 1800s, the buildings were eventually taken over during World War II by America’s first intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Commanded by Major General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the OSS had been staffed by some of the most colorful characters in the history of espionage, including con artists, second-story men, experts in counterfeiting, magicians, even actors and Ivy League blue bloods. World War II is full of the exploits of these daring operatives. The fledgling spy service sent operatives behind German and Japanese lines and created ingenious devices such as cigarette pistols, matchbox cameras, even exploding flour. It also paved the way for the CIA. In fact, much of the structure, operational methods, and procedures that the CIA would later come to use evolved directly from the OSS.

  OTS, meanwhile, sprang from the research and development branch of the OSS. Originally headed by a chemist, Stanley Lovell, the R&D branch would play an integral role in developing and pushing the capabilities of OSS operatives, while paving the way for future techs such as myself.

  Perhaps one of the most important legacies that the R&D branch left to later generations of OTS techs was the way in which it worked with outside contractors in order to develop new technologies. This allowed the OSS to take full advantage of the modern manufacturing and technological capacity of the U.S. private sector, which was very different from the way that other foreign services, such as MI6 or the KGB, went about developing their new technologies. Eventually this gave us a huge advantage when it came to defeating our Soviet counterparts, who relied on state-run facilities and bureaucratic thinking. Part of the reason for this outsourcing was necessity
, since Lovell didn’t have the funds necessary to build laboratories from scratch. By taking full advantage of the private sector, however, OTS was able to stay on the cutting edge.

  In 1965, when I entered on duty at the CIA’s Technical Services Division, or TSD (it would be renamed OTS in 1973), we characterized our office and our work as mirroring the character Q from the James Bond films. We were the CIA’s gadget makers, the suppliers of the technical wherewithal necessary for our operations officers to successfully steal our enemies’ secrets.

  Our organization was part of the operational element of the CIA called the Directorate of Operations, or DO. There were three other directorates—Administration, Science and Technology, and Intelligence. The work of the DO was primarily overseas, which meant our equipment and our expertise were exercised around the world, though typically not in the United States.

  There were essentially two groups that made up our office. Half of the officers in our development and engineering division were chemists, physicists, mechanical and electrical engineers, and an assortment of PhD scientists who specialized in extremely narrow fields, such as batteries, hot air balloons, special inks, you name it. These were the folks who designed and built our gadgetry. The other half were part of the operations division, the people who operated the equipment and who taught our case officers and foreign agents how to use it.

  A listing of the capabilities will give a hint of the robust possibilities at the beck and call of the CIA. In no particular order, those capabilities were audio, photo/video, disguise, documents, and concealments. We also had experts in graphology, psychology and parapsychology, forensics, and many other esoteric disciplines. If you needed technical support for your operation, we would provide it, and if it didn’t exist, we could invent it.

  My office was located in Central Building, which also housed the authentication branch, the disguise labs, the artists’ bullpen, and the documents section. Across a small courtyard stood the imposing neoclassical South Building, the location of OTS headquarters. On November 4, 1979, my title was “chief of disguise,” but I was actually in the process of being promoted to “chief, authentication branch,” a job that would put me in charge of the CIA’s worldwide disguise operations, as well as any cases involving false documentation and the forensic monitoring of these documents for counterterrorism purposes.

  Moving from chief of disguise to chief of authentication was a big step, and I was eager to make the transition. I was well grounded in disguise, and felt perfectly capable of moving on. When it came to my professional abilities and knowledge, I honestly felt that there was probably nobody else as good as me, with the exception of somebody in the KGB whom I didn’t know about yet. “Cocky but confident” is probably how I was seen by my peers, “up–and-coming” by my bosses. As for me, I hadn’t yet encountered a situation or a foe that I didn’t feel up to tackling.

  I had never set out to become a spy. There was never a little voice in my ear suggesting I sign up for a job in the clandestine services. In fact, I was convinced that my life’s career would be as a fine artist. In several ways that career materialized, just not in the form that I had anticipated.

  I was born poor in Eureka, Nevada—according to National Geographic, the loneliest town on the loneliest road in America. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t know that when I was growing up. I thought things were just fine.

  My mom, Neva June Tognoni, came from an old Nevada family and was the only daughter in a family of boys. Her three brothers had gone on to relative success in this western state: one became a state senator, while the other two were attorneys, often representing mining cases. Her grandfather J. C. Tognoni, an immigrant from the northern Italian town of Chiavenna, had struck it rich with the largest gold strike in the history of the state. As quickly as he made his fortune, however, he lost it. Neva June never got to taste the riches that her grandfather had enjoyed; instead, she was set aside, over and over, as her brothers were given the education and opportunities she was denied.

  This was my mom’s story. She, in turn, passed her experience on to her family of four girls and two boys. My sisters were favored over my brother and me, in an attempt to right the cosmic wrong that had been her lot.

  My dad was named John Mendez. He was incredibly handsome and young when I was born, just twenty-three years old, but I never really knew him. He worked in the copper mines in Nevada, where he was killed when I was three years old, crushed by a cart full of ore. My father’s family had a murky background; it’s quite possible that my father’s actual name was Manuel Gomez. The story was that my dad’s mother was killed in a car accident in Los Angeles, and in a custody dispute between my grandfather and the sister of his deceased wife, my grandfather took his two boys, ran away, and changed the family name.

  My mom talked about my dad constantly when we were growing up. She had been madly in love with him, and they were both so young when she lost him.

  My brother John and I worked long and hard in the barren desert surrounding Eureka, hauling wood through the snow in a little red wagon during the winter, selling newspapers on the train that made a nine-minute stop in our town once a day, and harvesting and selling bat guano to the Mormon ladies on the other side of town, as fertilizer for their gardens. We made enough money for the occasional movie for the six of us, and sometimes an ice cream at the local confectionery. My mom had no extra money for such luxuries.

  From an early age I had loved to draw. Since we were so poor I had to make do with what I could find. I used a sharpened stick to scratch figures into the ground, a lump of coal on an old board or piece of cardboard, a pencil on a brown paper bag. When I was five or six, my mom came home from town with a package for each of us. My gift was a small watercolor kit, the most basic kind. My mom said, “Tony, you’re going to be an artist.” It was not a suggestion. Remarkably, during my future career at the CIA, I would often carry a similar watercolor kit on my world travels, just one of the many tools I used over the course of my espionage career.

  After high school, I attended the University of Colorado at Boulder for a year, but took time off to work as a plumber’s assistant to help support the family. It was around this time that I met my wife, Karen Smith, and five years later we’d had three children: the oldest, Amanda, followed by Toby, and later Ian. By then I was in Denver working for Martin Marietta as a tool designer/artist-illustrator and running my own design studio. The work was mundane—drawing the wiring diagrams for the Titan missiles that were being installed in silos across America—but it paid the bills. Then one day in 1965 I saw something that would forever change my life. It was an ad in the Denver Post looking for applicants to work as artists overseas for the U.S. Navy. I sent in a response with some samples to the P.O. box in Salt Lake City. I told Karen that it might be refreshing to try something new.

  When I met with the representative from the government, it was not in the federal building in downtown Denver, but in a motel room on Colfax Avenue on the west side of the city. The blinds were closed. My meeting was with a somewhat shady-looking character who wore his snap-brim hat indoors like an old-time detective. He flashed a government credential at me and hefted a bottle of Jim Beam up onto the table.

  “Son,” he said, pouring each of us a glass of bourbon, “this is not the navy.”

  No kidding! I thought.

  In fact, he told me, he was from the CIA. I didn’t know what the CIA was at the time, but tried to look interested as I listened to his sales pitch.

  “I don’t know what kind of artist they’re looking for,” he said. “I sent them a few résumés, but they didn’t seem quite right. Here—look at this. You will understand it better than I do.”

  I read through the (classified!) recruitment guide and understood immediately that the kind of artist this CIA recruiter had in mind would quickly be locked up in a federal prison if he tried to practice this kind of “art” on his own. What they were looking for were old-fashioned forgers. Technical
ly, this was not a problem for me. It was a matter of hand-eye coordination, along with an ability to manipulate the materials, and I could surely do that.

  I went home and read up on the CIA, and the more I read the more interested I became. I could serve my country, see the world, and possibly make an impact on the events of the day. I put together an artist’s sample of my work, including a Bulgarian postage stamp, part of a U.S. dollar bill, and some Chinese grass writing, and mailed it off to the Agency recruiter in Salt Lake City. The summons to Washington came within a few weeks.

  In D.C., I had several levels of interviews. It was clear that they liked my samples, and the quality of my work was never a problem. In the end, the question became a moral issue. I met with the deputy director of TSD, Sidney Gottlieb, who conducted my last interview.

  “You know, Tony,” he said, “there are some people who might have a problem doing what we will be asking you to do. Breaking the laws of foreign governments. Lying to your friends and family, who will want to know where you work and what you do. Will you have a problem with that? Over a long period of time?”

  I seriously considered what he was saying. This would be a new way of living, a new way of working, a shutting down of some avenues and the opening of doors that I could only imagine. I didn’t hesitate. “I think, Dr. Gottlieb, that the truth is not necessarily everyone’s business,” I said, “especially when your country is relying on you to keep its secrets.”