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

by Antonio Mendez

  Then one day I was approached by one of the local CIA senior case officers with a real problem. He was one of the few—if not the only—African Americans in town, which made him an easy target for surveillance. By a strange set of events, he had found himself stationed in the country when the new U.S. ambassador to Laos, who had known the officer in Congo, had requested him. The officer had been meeting with an important Laotian minister who had vital inside information on the communist side of the Indochina peace talks. The two had been meeting in secret for many weeks, but with the Pathet Lao closing in on the city, the local militia had instituted a curfew and had begun throwing up random roadblocks. The case officer knew that if the Laotian minister was caught with him it would be a disaster.

  After he explained his predicament, I sat there for a few seconds wondering what I was going to do. Coming up blank, I explained to the case officer that we would accompany him on his next pickup to meet with the minister and get him programmed for a disguise. In the meantime, I sent a cable back to headquarters right away asking for their instructions. Almost immediately I got a reply saying they didn’t know what to do either. The thing that worried them the most, they said, were the ears. In other words, the only thing they could think of was a device we were working on for our officers heading to the Soviet Union, which sat on the face but didn’t cover up the ears.

  I then thought about some of the appliances I had seen in Calloway’s garage and wondered if he might have something that could help. First, however, I would have to meet with the Laotian minister to get his measurements, which I was able to do after being subjected to my own rolling car pickup. After I had all his information, I sat down and wrote a long cable outlining my plan. In the cable, I specified my idea, then asked headquarters to forward the information I was including to Calloway.

  As I was later to learn, Calloway had gotten the measurements and had gone right out to his storage sheds. He had made masks of most of the stars in Hollywood for their stunt doubles to wear, and it just so happened that the specs I’d sent him fit those for Victor Mature and Rex Harrison.

  After an interval of a few weeks, I received a package from headquarters. Inside were two masks, along with the other materials I had requested, including a pair of flesh-colored gloves. The disguise techniques that Jacob and I were eventually able to put together for this operation are still classified. When we were finished, Jacob and I were able to transform the African American case officer and the Laotian minister into two Caucasians who loosely resembled Rex Harrison and Victor Mature. As it turned out, after we had disguised them, they were on their way back from the safe house when our worst fears were realized. A random roadblock had been set up and the two were forced to stop. Rather than panicking, however, they flipped out their brand-new diplomatic ID cards. The soldiers looked at the ID cards, peeked inside the car, and waved them through without incident.

  The success of this operation was reported to headquarters in the highest channels. It was really the beginning of what we would call advanced disguise.

  Over the years, as Calloway and I became good friends, I would come to spend a lot of time out in Los Angeles. On some of those trips, I would work alongside his team at whichever studio they were working for, just as if I was another member of his crew. On one of these outings I was sculpting a new prototype head to be used for the JIB while he and his team worked on the masks for a science fiction monster film. Another time, he and I were walking on the lot of a film studio when a tour bus came by and the driver announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, award-winning makeup artist Jerome Calloway.” Calloway, of course, pointed at me.

  After I had become the chief of disguise, we would rotate disguise officers into Hollywood apprenticeships. And, like me, they often worked on the sets of the films he was making. He taught a generation of CIA officers the rudiments of how to make an effective disguise. Beyond that, he also became an invaluable sounding board for future scenarios, many of which are still being used by the CIA today.

  Calloway became an asset for the disguise branch in other ways as well. On one of his many trips to Washington, I set up a lunch meeting between him and our chief of operations. At the time I was looking to expand the disguise section. Calloway knew this, and the topic came up at lunch when the chief asked how my branch was doing. “Fine,” Calloway had responded, “but they’d be doing even better if they had more office space.” Sure enough, we got it.

  When Jerome was visiting Washington a couple of years later, I decided to include him in a training exercise. “Flick,” a chemist from a chemical company that also collaborated with the CIA, just happened to be visiting, and I thought it might be good for the two of them to see how we operated in the field.

  After the generalist program took off, we were continually training three to four officers at a time, getting them ready for their assignments overseas. In order to cross-train them in the various disciplines, we would immerse them for several weeks in one subject to teach them a particular craft, such as making dental facades. Then, for their final exam, we would put it all together in one complex operation that would require them to use all of their newly acquired skills. In one such exercise, a team of three trainees had to surreptitiously infiltrate a fictitious country, establish a headquarters in a hotel room at the Key Bridge Marriott in Rosslyn, Virginia, and then go out and pick up a terrorist who was on the run. At that point, they were to bring him back to the hotel, where he would be disguised for an exfiltration out of the country.

  In order to have some fun, we decided to let Calloway and Flick play the border guards for the fictitious country. The two were thrilled, and went to our costume closet to make it more realistic. The border crossing was set up in Crystal City near the Pentagon. When our team showed up in a van, they found Calloway and Flick sitting at a card table in a vacant lot, wearing fur hats and Polish uniforms. The trainees were unfazed and walked up to the table. “Hello,” they said. “We’d like permission to enter your country.”

  “Why do you want to come in?” Calloway asked.

  Using the cover they had prepared, they responded, “We’re flea enthusiasts and we’re planning on attending your flea festival.”

  Ever the quick study, Calloway said, “Okay, but our fleas are restricted, so we’re going to have to do an inspection. Drop your drawers.”

  The trainees must have had an idea what was going to happen, because when they dropped their pants they were all wearing American flag underwear.

  After a quick examination, Calloway and Flick cleared them through and they hopped back into the van and drove to the Key Bridge Marriott. After checking in, they disguised themselves, then headed down to the bar to meet their local contact, played by another trainee. This person would respond using a sign/countersign, which the team had worked out beforehand. In this case, however, rather than using a word or phrase, the team had come up with something a little more creative.

  Calloway, who was always telling jokes, had a favorite that had made its way into our office. It was a knock-knock joke involving a drunk at a bar. “Knock-knock,” Calloway would say. “Who’s there?” the person would respond. “Argo,” he’d say. “Argo who?” the person would dutifully answer. “Argo fuck yourself!” he’d exclaim, drawling out the words as if he’d just finished off a bottle of bourbon. It wasn’t long before the punch line had become a battle cry of sorts when the workload was heavy and we had a lot on our minds. Whenever that happened, Calloway would cut the tension by shouting out “Argo!” at which point everyone would respond in kind.

  The trainees had decided to use ARGO as their countersign. Though, rather than say it, one of the officers had etched the word across a dental facade that he had created. So the exchange went something like: “The moon is blue,” followed by a big smile with ARGO written across the person’s front teeth in red.

  The third part of the operation involved picking up the terrorist, who had decided to bring along his girlfriend, played by Doris
Grange. The girlfriend was the twist, as the team hadn’t prepared documents for a woman and so had to disguise her as a man.

  When the exercise was over, we got a private room in the hotel and celebrated. It had been a fun day. Calloway enjoyed himself immensely and I think appreciated the complexity of the tasks required of an officer on an exfiltration.

  After our operation to create the body double for the shah had fallen through, before flying back to Los Angeles Calloway had reiterated that he would be willing to do anything to help out. By the first week of January 1980, the crisis was still front-page news and I knew that Jerome would be feeling as frustrated as the rest of us.

  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, wa
s 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.

  The 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.