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

by Antonio Mendez

  Understandably, as the days wore on and the impasse continued, it wasn’t long before the public began doubting the president’s resolve. And while the Carter administration was cautioning restraint, protests and violence toward Iranians erupted all over America. In one surreal instance, Hamilton Jordan, President Carter’s chief of staff, remembers driving past a demonstration outside the Iranian embassy in Washington, where American police were holding back an angry crowd. It was the irony of all ironies. Here was the United States protecting Iranian diplomats, while at the same time in Iran, American diplomats were being held captive and abused.

  How could the president stand by and do nothing while sixty-six Americans were in danger? There was no shortage of critics, including political foes of Carter who used the moment to score points by decrying him as weak and ineffective.

  News coverage of the crisis was relentless. From day one, the event had become a media circus, with hundreds of journalists from all over the world descending on the U.S. embassy in Tehran to point their cameras and pontificate on the nightly news. It’s clear that early on the militants viewed the media as an ally and counted on them to beam their message into America’s living rooms. This, of course, led to an odd situation in which American journalists roamed freely about the city while sixty-six of their fellow countrymen were being held hostage. Most of the news anchors would set up for their nightly broadcasts right outside the embassy’s gates while nearby crowds chanted, “Death to America” and “Down with Carter.”

  One of the reasons for this frenzied coverage was the highly personalized nature of the crisis. The hostages came from different parts of the country and had friends and family who could be interviewed, all of which gave local news outlets a chance to weigh in on a national story. One local radio station in Ohio was somehow able to call the embassy and speak with one of the militants, who identified himself as “Mr. X.” At another radio station in the Midwest, the station manager spent a portion of the day tied to a chair in his studio to better communicate to his listeners what it felt like to be in captivity.

  The family members of the hostages were repeat guests on talk shows and radio programs. And with each appearance, the echo chamber increased. Carter was criticized for not being bold enough, and for allowing the shah into the country. One of his most outspoken critics was Dorothea Morefield, the wife of Dick Morefield, who was the embassy’s consul general. She repeatedly criticized Carter for not having evacuated the embassy before he had allowed the shah to come to New York.

  In one instance, Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes was granted an interview with Khomeini. The questions had to be submitted beforehand, and when Wallace tried to go off script the imam refused to answer. Throughout the interview Wallace was extremely—almost excessively—respectful of Khomeini, which rubbed the Carter administration the wrong way.

  The Iran hostage situation was also the prime subject for Ted Koppel’s ABC show Nightline, which began four days after the siege of the embassy and continued its coverage throughout the crisis and well beyond.

  In a fit of frustration, Carter told his press secretary one day that he was tired of seeing “those bastards holding our people referred to as ‘students.’ They should be referred to as ‘terrorists’ or ‘captors,’ or something that accurately describes what they are.”

  The militants for their part soon revealed their talents for manipulating the media, who were hungry to gain access to the hostages and willing to tolerate almost anything to get an exclusive. They organized staged events, handed over signed “confessions,” and ferreted out the most malleable of the hostages to give false statements about the conditions of their captivity. Thirty-three hostages were made to sign a petition requesting the return of the shah. And the more attention they got, the more emboldened the militants felt.

  One of Carter’s early strategies was to encourage outside intermediaries with connections or access to Khomeini to try to resolve the crisis. Pope John Paul II sent an emissary to Qom only to have Khomeini lecture the Vatican on the evils of the shah and the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church toward his regime. The imam was reported to have told the emissary that if Jesus were alive today, he would want Carter impeached.

  On December 19, NBC aired an interview with Marine Sergeant Billy Gallegos, the first such exclusive with a hostage. The conditions given by the militants, however, stipulated that Nilufar Ebtekar, the militants’ spokesperson, otherwise known as “Tehran Mary,” be allowed to read an unedited statement before and after the interview. In it, Ebtekar proceeded to lecture the American people about the evils of the shah and the past sins of America’s imperialistic agenda, after which a hollow-eyed Gallegos came on the air to demand that the Carter administration hand over the shah.

  Naturally, the American population responded to such displays with anger and frustration, which mystified the militants.

  Early on the militants were convinced that their actions would cause the “oppressed” in America, namely blacks and other minorities, to rise up and overthrow the government. On one occasion the militants purchased a half-page ad in the New York Times calling for America’s minorities to revolt. When the revolution didn’t come, they assumed it was because of media censorship. For instance, when NBC aired the Gallegos interview, the producer mentioned to Ebtekar that for time constraints they were going to have to edit the segment, which she took to mean that the U.S. government had commanded NBC to censor it. Having grown up in Iran, she had no concept of a press that was not controlled by the state.

  When the reality eventually emerged that Americans actually despised the militants for kidnapping and torturing their fellow countrymen, the militants were shocked and saddened. To some of the hostages who interacted with them on a daily basis, it fit perfectly with the militants’ skewed worldview. Much like actors in a Hollywood movie, the militants saw themselves as the heroes and expected the whole world to perceive them as such.

  Upon taking over the embassy, the militants appeared almost as shocked as the Americans that their plan had succeeded. They had very little idea about how an embassy operated or what the staff did. In their minds, the embassy’s sole purpose was for spying. In one press conference they held up a Dictaphone claiming it was a spy apparatus of some sort—this got a laugh from us at the CIA.

  They seemed eager to believe any conspiracy theory, no matter how far-fetched. So any name that was found in an address book was considered a conspirator. Some of the political officers who had extensive contacts within the country were terrified that these militants were going to hunt down representatives of some local governments and shoot them for simply having met with an American diplomat. The students seemed not to comprehend the whole purpose of diplomatic relations.

  In reality there were only three CIA officers at the embassy when it was taken. But even their involvement was nominal. The revolution had severed most of the ties we had with former agents, and those officers, two of whom had been in the country for less than three months before the embassy fell, had spent the majority of their time building their cover and getting to know the layout of Iran and its government. In the minds of the students, however, everyone at the embassy was somehow connected to the CIA, and they set out to prove this theory, diligently and viciously.

  Relatively early on in their confinement, the hostages were subjected to beatings, sleep deprivation, and long periods of painful binding, and they were often made to stay in awkward or uncomfortable positions. They were also repeatedly threatened. Dick Morefield was even made to lie on the floor while a gun was pointed to the back of his head. On another occasion, Colonel Dave Roeder, the assistant defense attaché, was shown a picture of his family and told by the militants that they knew his son’s school bus route back in America. If he didn’t start cooperating, they told him, they would kidnap his son, cut him up, and send the pieces to his wife.

  Other hostages, especially the three CIA officers, were kept in isolation for nearly the entirety of their 444
days of captivity. All of them were undernourished and underfed and would emerge from captivity as shells of their formers selves.

  In early November, the conditions under which the hostages were being held were largely unknown to the Carter administration or the public at large. Then, on November 18 and 19, in a deal brokered by representatives from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a group of thirteen hostages, consisting of women and minorities, was allowed to leave. Before going, they were subjected to a press conference, where they were made to sit in front of a sign that denounced America for harboring the shah. It was upon their return that the White House learned of the extreme conditions that the hostages were being subjected to.

  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.

  By 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.

  With 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.”