The following day, Eleanor escorted me to the White House basement barbershop. It was still light out when we went downstairs. The shop was closed but Eleanor let me in. I was surprised to see that it looked just like every barbershop I have ever been in: two chairs, two mirrors, two sinks. She pulled the shades on the garden-level windows and turned on the lights. When Jordan arrived, I sat him in one of the chairs and used a custom-made wig, mustache, and pair of glasses to completely alter his appearance. When I was finished, I had transformed him from a brightly polished American bureaucrat into what he came to call his “sleazy Latin American businessman” look. I took the description as high praise.
Jordan’s meeting had been part of a scenario worked out by two men, Christian Bourguet and Hector Villalon, two adventurers with access to Iran’s secular government. Bourguet was a French lawyer involved in radical causes while Villalon was a businessman from Argentina, whom Carter would later describe as having the reputation of a “South American riverboat gambler.” Both were old friends of Ghotbzadeh’s and claimed they could open a direct line between Iran’s secular leadership and the White House. It was always a long shot, but Carter was desperate. Up until this point, there had been no direct talks on any level between the White House and Iran. So Carter sent Jordan and Hal Saunders to meet with the two men in Paris, and over the course of a few weeks they were able to hash out a plan that was said to have the support of both Ghotbzadeh and Iran’s newly elected president, Abulhassan Bani-Sadr. The convoluted idea would involve a multistep process that started with the creation of a five-person UN commission that would listen to Iran’s grievances. Eventually this commission would take control of the hostages after they had been transferred to a hospital in Tehran. Many thought the plan was nothing but a distraction. Ghotbzadeh was a natural schemer who talked a good game, but who in the end had little clout when it came to the hostages. When Khomeini refused to give the UN commission permission to meet with the hostages, the whole thing fell apart.
No one was more frustrated by this than President Carter. By early April it appeared as if diplomacy had run its course. On April 7 he expelled all Iranian diplomats from the United States and enacted unilateral trade sanctions against Iran. Then, five days later, at a meeting of his National Security Council, he announced that he was ready to launch Operation Eagle Claw.
From the beginning, my office had some grave reservations about the viability of Eagle Claw. By the winter of 1980, RAPTOR had settled into his new life in the West and had aligned himself with the intelligence community. As an Iranian ex-colonel, RAPTOR had intimate knowledge of the country’s topography, including the geography of the area that Colonel Beckwith’s men called Desert One. The plan, which had evolved slightly, called for eight helicopters to fly into Desert One from an American aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. There, they would link up with six C130 aircraft. The C130s would bring in Beckwith and his team of Delta Force commandos and Army Rangers, as well as large packets of fuel for the helicopters. After being refueled, the helicopters would then ferry the soldiers on to Desert Two, the second site outside of Tehran. From there they would launch their assault on the U.S. embassy. With his local knowledge, RAPTOR could see right away that there was a problem. The site picked for Desert One was on a smugglers’ route used only at night, and he believed that the U.S. military had a good chance of being discovered if they tried to use it as a staging area. Reportedly, he warned the planners and Beckwith about this but was rebuffed.
The history of Eagle Claw has now been written, and the world knows that the helicopters never made it to the U.S. embassy in Tehran. In fact, they never even made it to Desert Two. The problems began almost as soon as the mission got under way. When the C130s made it to Desert One, RAPTOR’s prediction turned out to be true. Upon landing, Beckwith and his team immediately encountered several unknown vehicles racing through the area. Even worse, a firefight erupted. It turned out that one of the smugglers’ trucks was carrying fuel, and when a soldier tried to knock it out with an antitank rocket the fireball lit up the desert sky for miles. It appeared as if one of the men in the truck had escaped and made it into a second truck, which then sped away. If that wasn’t bad enough, as Beckwith was contemplating this new development, a large Mercedes bus carrying nearly forty Iranians swung into view, and the Army Rangers were forced to stop it at gunpoint. This put Beckwith on the horns of a major dilemma and forced him to divide his forces. So much for the element of surprise.
While this unfolded, the eight helicopters en route from the aircraft carrier were having their own problems. Two had mechanical failures and were forced to turn back, while a third made it to Desert One but became inoperable upon landing. Five helicopters weren’t enough to complete the mission, and President Carter made the decision to abort. In the ensuing confusion, one of the helicopters collided with a C130 gunship full of fuel. Eight U.S. servicemen tragically lost their lives while several others were wounded. The remaining helicopters and C130s returned safely.
By almost any metric, the aftermath of the failed rescue was the lowest point for America during the 444-day Iranian hostage crisis. In his book Keeping Faith, Carter describes it as one of the worst days of his life.
A few days later, Cyrus Vance, who had been against Eagle Claw from the beginning, resigned as secretary of state.
In May of 1980, for our role in helping to rescue the six houseguests, Julio and I received the Intelligence Star, which was one of the CIA’s highest honors. The medals and certificates were presented in the Agency’s secure bubble, on a stage in front of a few hundred of our colleagues. Admiral Stansfield Turner did the honors. Since the operation had been a secret, my family was not allowed to attend the ceremony.
After a brief stay in Panama, the shah had moved on to Egypt, where he died on July 27. Strangely, this was more or less the exact scenario that Jerome and I had envisioned for our body double operation at the beginning of the crisis. With the shah now dead, Russian armies on the march in Afghanistan, and Iran tiring of the American embargo, Khomeini finally signaled his willingness to negotiate. The United States was also inadvertently helped in this matter by Iraq, which had invaded Iran in September of 1980. Needing American parts and ammunition for their weapons was just one more incentive to bring the Iranians to the table.
On January 21, 1981, the fifty-two remaining American hostages were finally released. Jimmy Carter flew to Germany to meet with them personally, but by this time the damage to his political career was irreversible. His failure to resolve the crisis caused him to be seen as a weak and ineffective leader, and Ronald Reagan had easily defeated him in the 1980 presidential election. Rubbing salt into the wound, the Iranians had chosen the date of Reagan’s inauguration as the day they would hand over the hostages. In all, the hostages had spent almost fifteen months in captivity with the United States government unable to do anything to effect their release.
Obviously, diplomatic relations with the Iranian government ceased the day that the American embassy was overrun. But nobody could have predicted that more than thirty years later the United States and Iran would still have no formal contact. Iran, a country once considered our long-term friend and strategic ally, has now segued into a rogue state governed by Islamic fundamentalist zealots. During the hostage crisis, America was frustrated by its inability to negotiate with a regime that placed the ideals of theocratic bigotry before those of reason and the rule of international law. Unfortunately, not much has changed. Today, the United States and Iran are as far apart as they have ever been, while the population of Iran suffers under a corrupt and ineffective regime.
We now know that when the militant students overran the American embassy, 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 embassy 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 circumstances. 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 masse 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 bloody 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 assumed 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 titled 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 assured 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 mother–in–law, 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. Nobody 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 grass 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 space 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 damn 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.
Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History Page 25
