Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History Part 12

I nodded and told him that I would. I indicated Joe, and mentioned that I would be taking him with me, then introduced the young officer to Eric and Hal. Joe was dressed more like a seedy professor than one of Eric's officers in full dress mode, and he seemed hesitant, almost apologetic, when he shook Eric's hand.

Joe's role in Ottawa would be to establish the continuity between the CIA and the Canadians, essentially setting up partners.h.i.+ps between his OTS colleagues and their mirror images in Ottawa. This would free me up to handle the more strategic negotiations with the Canadians, Tehran, and the U.S. government. Dealing with the State Department, the White House, and the senior levels of the CIA, working through Eric, was a daunting task. I would soon discover that the simplicity with which the Canadian government operated would make it a dream to work with by comparison.

Eric, by his very nature, was overbearing. He wasn't really sure how I would proceed, but he did try to exercise some of the privilege of his office. His instructions were a little stilted, but he meant well. For instance, when in response to my question about the pa.s.sports he said he'd already raised the issue, he was a little miffed that I would bring it up, as though I was stepping on his toes. Eric was trying to figure out how to run an exfiltration, something he had never done before, and represent himself to Canada as an expert on the subject. He was also the channel between President Carter and Stansfield Turner, the director of central intelligence. It was like a tripod: the president, the DCI, and the Canadians. Eric's job was to maintain a delicate balance between the policy makers and the clandestine elements in the field. I didn't envy him.

The winter sky was gray and there were traces of snow on the ground as our plane touched down in Ottawa. The city itself struck me as being a little dingy, but the parliament buildings gave a certain air of elegance to what was essentially a small town.

We checked into the Lord Elgin Hotel, a stately, gothic pile of stones in the middle of Ottawa close to most government offices. It was decorated with photographs, paintings, and flower arrangements full of tulips, an incongruous contrast in the middle of the dark winter days of Canada.

Just in case he needed a reminder that the life of a real spy was nothing like what we see in the movies, the airline had lost Joe's luggage. And with only the clothes on his back, he was forced to borrow one of my ski sweaters, which he would wear for the next ten days while he remained in the Canadian capital. Strangely, it would not be the only article of clothing that I would lose on this operation.

The following day, Joe and I headed over to the U.S. emba.s.sy for our first meeting with members of the CIA's Canadian offices. The CIA chief in Ottawa, a tall, slim, middle-aged man, cheerfully went over the meetings they had set up for us that day.

At the first meeting later that morning, Joe and I got right to the point. We sat down across the table from a slight but impeccably dressed middle-aged man. I'll call him "Lon Delgado." He clasped his hands together and looked me straight in the eye.

"What can I do for you?" he asked.

"We're here, first of all, to thank you for all that Canada has done for America on this matter," I replied. "Second, as you might guess, we're here with our hat in hand, asking for more favors. And so we apologize for that. We feel fortunate that our relations, government to government, are so beneficial."

I paused, measuring my words. "What do you think the prospects would be for allowing us to use Canadian pa.s.sports to provide cover for our six diplomats?" There it was, out in the open. The thing we wanted most and thought would be the hardest to negotiate. I realized that we were asking for the Canadians to make an exception to their own pa.s.sport law. My research had told me that the only way to do this was by a special "orderincouncil," requiring the consent of Parliament.

Mr. Delgado opened a file in front of him and extracted a piece of paper with a large red wax seal on it. He set it aside and softened his demeanor while he responded. "I think we've already done that," he said.

We were stunned. I tried to imagine what it would take for a representative of a foreign government to come to Was.h.i.+ngton and ask the U.S. Congress to pa.s.s an exception to our own pa.s.sport law. It was no minor matter.

What I didn't know was that the Canadians had been working on the problem of the pa.s.sports for quite some time. From the day that the houseguests had come under their care, I think the Canadians realized the logic of allowing them to use Canadian doc.u.mentation. I would later learn that the orderincouncil had been pa.s.sed during a rump session of Parliament, when Flora MacDonald, working in concert with Prime Minister Joe Clark, had maneuvered the issue in such a way that it could be pa.s.sed without debate. This was because only a few cabinet ministers knew anything about the houseguests to begin with and the need for secrecy was paramount.

At that point I decided to press our luck, asking Delgado if we could have six spares for the six houseguests to give us a redundant capability for the operation, as well as two additional pa.s.sports for use by CIA "escorts." Lon agreed to get us an extra set for the houseguests, but rebuffed our latter request. The exception to the pa.s.sport law had been made for refugees, not professional intelligence officers. "Sorry," he said, "but you'll have to get your own."

There is an understanding among intelligence services that there is no such thing as a "friendly" service. At this time in history Canada did not admit to even having a secret intelligence service. But this man was probably very close to representing that capability. And it certainly felt friendly. Mr. Delgado continued, "Do you have a list of names to be used for the pa.s.sports?" he asked. "And by the way, we are going to need photographs as well."

Without hesitation Joe reached into his briefcase and brought out an envelope, the contents of which were the list of names that he had already prepared as aliases for the six. Accompanying each name was a pa.s.sport-sized photograph. Along the vertical margin on each photo we had forged the alias names in the handwriting of each of the six houseguests. This was the way it should be in the Canadian pa.s.sport.

Mr. Delgado reviewed the material very quickly. He commented that the photographs looked good but that one of the names we'd chosen had a slightly Semitic sound to it-not a good idea in a Muslim nation. He thought we should fix it and Joe suggested a new name. Delgado nodded in the affirmative and Joe produced another clean photograph of Kathy Stafford, handing it to me. "You're an artist-validator, Tony," he said.

Using a technique I'd learned from my early days in the bullpen, I positioned the photo on the corner of Delgado's desk and signed Kathy's new name in her handwriting.

Joe and I left the meeting encouraged. The first phase of our plan was coming together with much less effort than we had ever imagined. We had a commitment for six Canadian pa.s.sports for our subjects plus a set of duplicates, which would give us an option for a fallback plan if we needed it.

After breaking for lunch at the Lord Elgin, we were picked up by an official car and taken to the ministry of defense.

Prior to coming to Canada, we had learned that Amba.s.sador Taylor was in the process of drawing down his emba.s.sy, which could help us with our intelligence-gathering operation. Of special interest to us were the military police who had been working at the emba.s.sy. Many of the military police were well traveled and familiar with border procedures around the world. We wanted to set up a system in which if any more of them traveled in or out of Mehrabad Airport, they would have a standard debriefing on the controls.

With that done, I returned to Was.h.i.+ngton the next morning, leaving Joe behind to follow up on the pa.s.sports and to meet with the national security forces who would help in rounding out the doc.u.mentation packages that would complement the pa.s.sports. They would also arrange for the collection of an Iranian visa issued in Canada. Joe would spend the following ten days in Canada tending to these ch.o.r.es.

I boarded my flight home feeling a sense of accomplishment accompanied by relief that we had been able to move this project forward in a major way. I also felt grat.i.tude that we were working with a neighbor who was truly supportive of America's dilemma.

On my way home, I reflected on Canada and its government. The "Small Is Beautiful" mantra kept playing in my mind. The Canadian government appeared ready and able to turn on a dime if necessary, and our government seemed bloated and sluggish in comparison. The fact that the Canadians had antic.i.p.ated our needs and had taken the extraordinary steps required to reach out to us was a little overwhelming and certainly unprecedented. They were redefining what it meant to be a good neighbor.

With the issue of doc.u.ments behind us, we could now focus on the question of which cover story to use. The importance of having a good cover story and accompanying doc.u.mentation can sometimes be the difference between life and death. One of the most famous cases in the history of the CIA happened in Cuba in 1960. A group of three audio techs, Thornton Anderson, Walter Szuminski, and David Christ, all from the Technical Services Division, had traveled to Cuba on a bugging mission. Ostensibly they were posing as three American tourists out to have a good time. All of them carried forged doc.u.ments saying that they were electrical engineers, and in their wallets they carried credit cards and driver's licenses, all of it faked by the capable TSD techs who had furnished them with their aliases. Their real purpose for traveling to Cuba was to install clandestine listening devices in a building that was slated to become the emba.s.sy of a very important hard-target third country. In the middle of installing the devices, however, they were captured and thrown into the local prison. If just one of them broke, or a flaw was detected in their doc.u.mentation, then they would all be labeled spies and most likely executed. In total the men would spend nearly a month undergoing harsh interrogations during the night, but they never once cracked. Eventually they were transferred to a notorious prison outside Havana. They would finally be released three years later, when the U.S. government arranged to swap them for some tractors. In all that time, their cover held and they were never found guilty of spying. For their courage all three would be awarded the Agency's highest medal for bravery, the Distinguished Intelligence Cross.

When I got back to Foggy Bottom, my team and I began an all-source quest for information on the types of groups traveling in and out of Mehrabad Airport. We soon discovered that groups traveling legally to Iran included oil field technicians from European-based companies, news teams of all nationalities covering the hostage situation, and all sorts of curiosity seekers and aid workers from around the world. Many of these people were U.S. citizens. None fit our purposes, given the profiles and patterns of these groups, and the careful scrutiny and control applied to them by the Iranian security and immigration services.

Unlike in the movies, cover stories are normally designed to be boring so as not to attract attention. They are also chosen based on the experience of the person. There are several factors that go into the process of choosing a cover. Does the person speak a foreign language, and can they pa.s.s for another nationality? Do they have any clandestine training? We had made both NESTOR and RAPTOR businessmen. In the past I had traveled as a tourist or a midlevel diplomat, both situations I could easily manage. Just as important as who the person might be is his or her ability to carry off a new persona and make it believable. This was why it had been so important for Jacob Jordan to meet with NESTOR, and why I was now proposing to headquarters that we send in a team to a.s.sess the houseguests. Whatever reason we came up with for them to be in Iran, it had to be something that they could wear as comfortably as a suit, something that became them and was almost second nature to them. No easy task when you are dealing with six amateurs.

The State Department had proposed that the six use U.S. doc.u.mentation and be disguised as unemployed English teachers who had traveled to Iran presumably to find work, while Ottawa's idea was to turn the houseguests into nutritionists who had traveled to Iran to inspect crops. A third option had them posing as petroleum workers. None of these options was really clicking for me. Most of the English schools in Tehran had closed months earlier and it would seem odd to have such a large group of outofwork teachers show up all together. As far as the Canadian plans, I didn't think it would take long for a Revolutionary Guard to figure out that these people knew nothing about agriculture or petroleum. Iran was completely s...o...b..und in the winter and it just didn't seem believable that a group of nutritionists would be inspecting crops at that time of year.

We needed a cover that could help to engage them, get them to believe in us and to become willing partic.i.p.ants. Pretending to be someone you are not isn't as easy as it sounds, especially if your life depends on it. I had seen trained operatives like RAPTOR nearly break under the pressure.

My team and I discussed the pros and cons of each option. Everybody seemed to agree with my a.s.sessment, but no one had any better ideas.

With several other things on our plate, I broke up the meeting and we decided to reconvene later.

We spent the remainder of the week working out the problem but still weren't able to come up with anything. Then, as I was standing in my studio getting ready to head back to Ottawa to check in on Joe, an idea suddenly occurred to me. While it was true that normally cover stories were designed to be mundane, we weren't dealing with a normal situation here. So instead of boring, what if we went in the opposite direction? What if we designed a cover story so fantastic that n.o.body would believe it was being used for operational purposes?

By the time I had landed in Ottawa, I had formulated a plan. If we could pull it off, it would be one of the most audacious rescue operations in the history of the CIA. But before moving forward I would have to call the one person who could make that plan a reality. I picked up the phone and dialed.

9

HOLLYWOOD

I met Jerome Calloway for the first time during the early 1970s, on the set of a spy-themed TV show. The show was popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s, known for pus.h.i.+ng the limits of visual effects and makeup. Calloway had been brought in by the production specifically to devise each episode's signature shot-the crafty spy finally revealing his true ident.i.ty. The show, along with a film that Calloway had worked on around that time, had caught the eye of Lou Terno, then the CIA's chief of disguise. Much like in the TV show, during the film a succession of well-known actors magically revealed their movie star good looks after taking off a series of outlandish, but entirely believable, disguises. For instance, a famous male singer with one of the most recognizable faces in the world was disguised as an old woman, but you would have never known it. For Terno, the wonder he experienced as he watched the star emerge from his vulcanized chrysalis was akin to that of a remote Amazonian tribe suddenly witnessing a Fourth of July fireworks display. It was miraculous. "How come we can't do that?" he exclaimed.

Terno had then flown out to Los Angeles to meet with Calloway. This was right after NESTOR, when the CIA was beginning to think about forward-deploying "kits" to improve our readiness in case we might need to carry out an exfiltration within a moment's notice. Terno wasn't sure what Calloway could do, but hoped he'd be open to advising us in some way.

Calloway, who had served in the army in World War II, was only too happy to help. He was a patriot through and through, and loved the idea that he could again do something for his country. Before getting involved with Hollywood, he had worked for many years creating false noses and gla.s.s eyes for wounded soldiers. In fact, even after he had become a lion in the entertainment industry, this aspect of his early professional life was always the one that had most gratified him. To him, producers were just a bunch of barracudas out to take your lunch.

A few months after Terno's trip, I had flown back to Was.h.i.+ngton from Okinawa to receive some training as part of authentication's new generalist program. This was the very same program that I had proposed after the NESTOR operation as a way to deploy cross-trained technical officers closer to the action. Jacob and I were given the opportunity to test out the theory by forming the first team. We were to be stationed in the Far East, but first I would need to get trained in disguise.

Back then the disguise techniques used by the CIA really weren't anything to write home about-mostly utilizing off-the-rack department store wigs, gla.s.ses, and hats. It's no wonder, I thought, that most officers in the field refused to wear this stuff. In all, the training lasted about ten days, at which point I was certified an "expert." It was while I was on my way back to Asia that Terno asked me to stop off in LA and visit with Calloway.

From its inception, the CIA has relied on the ingenuity of outside contractors to help American spies keep pace with their adversaries. Unlike our Soviet counterparts, who enjoyed strong government support, in the wake of World War II America's spies found themselves out of a job when President Truman disbanded the OSS in 1945. It wouldn't be until 1947 that the United States would have a functioning intelligence agency again, but even then it was grossly underfunded when compared to its rivals. In addition, America's spymasters found it hard to compete with the private sector, which could not only pay more, but also offer its scientists the prospect of accolades and recognition, something a spy agency could not. As a result, the CIA found itself at a technological disadvantage for nearly the first two decades of its existence. Even by the early 1960s, for example, the CIA had yet to create a small and reliable spy camera that agents could use to copy doc.u.ments. This disadvantage became painfully obvious when one of America's most important Russian agents, Colonel Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, was rolled up in the fall of 1962 and executed in 1963.

To overcome this technology deficit, the Agency began hiring more techs right out of college, while farming out various projects to the private sector. For instance, in looking for help to design a new miniature camera known as the T100 in the early 1970s, OTS techs turned to a precision optical contractor that was able to design the camera's 4mm-diameter lens. When it was finished, the camera was so small it could fit into a fountain pen. Another example saw OTS techs working with a leading hearing aid manufacturer to create a microphone that was small enough to fit into a .45 caliber bullet. The techs were looking for a way to plant a listening device inside a tree that was in the courtyard of a foreign emba.s.sy. The trick, of course, was that the microphone had to work even after the bullet had embedded itself into the tree. It took some time, but ultimately the company was successful.

In addition to Calloway, I would work with many outside contractors throughout my career. In the mid-1970s I worked with a magic builder who had designed magic tricks for illusionists and Hollywood productions to help perfect a device known as the JIB. The idea behind the JIB was to allow an officer riding in the pa.s.senger seat of a car to evade surveillance by having a dummy pop up in his place just as he exited the car. In order to succeed, however, the exchange had to be done so quickly that the KGB surveillance car trailing behind didn't see it happen. The device went through several iterations, from an initial slightly modified inflatable s.e.x doll to a s.p.a.ce-age contraption that weighed nearly fifty pounds. Thinking of how we could simplify it, I had contacted the magic builder, who was a friend of Calloway's (the two had actually worked together on a James Bond film, of all things). The magic builder's solution was an elegant device that could be hidden inside a variety of objects and worked on the same principle as an umbrella. When it was finally finished, the driver of the car could even animate the device by using a small controller to make its head turn.

During our first meeting, Calloway took me around the set of the spy-themed TV show, introducing me as his "friend from the army," a phrase he always accompanied with a wink. In later years this would become a big inside joke with him. "This is my friend-he does special effects for the army."

By the time I met him, he was already considered one of the most innovative makeup artists in the movie business. He had won top industry awards for his work on a science fiction film.

As he took me around, someone came up behind us and said, "Jerome Calloway is a sissy." We turned to see one of the stars of the TV show walking up behind us. The joke was funny if you knew Jerome. A first-generation American who had grown up in Chicago, Calloway had a larger-than-life quality to him. His big, expressive face sat framed by a pair of thick-rimmed fifties-style gla.s.ses, while his hair was often slicked back with a thick sheen of pomade. He was a large man who looked more like a bouncer than a makeup artist, and he wore white short-sleeved s.h.i.+rts and black ties almost as if they were his uniform. Here and there, however, he would exhibit a certain kind of panache. He wore a little pinky ring with a precious stone in it and drove a pastel yellow Pontiac, the biggest one they made.

Despite having grown up far away from the movie business, Calloway had been drawn to the limelight from the very beginning. He told me that when he was just a kid in Chicago, he had heard about a warehouse fire in his neighborhood. He'd rushed down in the hopes that by volunteering he might get his picture in the newspaper. When a photographer had snapped a photo of him and another person lugging a stretcher, he thought for sure he would see himself on the front page. The following morning, however, he was disheartened to see that the photographer had cut him out of the picture with the exception of his hands. He used to relate this story as a cautionary tale on the emptiness of fame. "You go to all that trouble and in the end, the only thing they might remember you for are your hands!"