Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History Part 2

The morning of November 4, 1979, had started off just like any other, and for the Americans heading to work that day there was no reason to suspect that the emba.s.sy was in the crosshairs of a ma.s.sive a.s.sault. Bruce Laingen had chaired a morning meeting of the department heads, after which he, along with Vic Tomseth and Mike Howland, had gone to Iran's foreign ministry to discuss obtaining diplomatic immunity for American military personnel stationed in Iran.

One of the first people to see the militants enter the compound was John Graves, who was the public affairs officer. Graves had been in Iran for more than a year and had been through the Valentine's Day attack.

The press office was located just off the motor pool near the front gate. Somebody had cut the chain looped through the gate, and a large crowd of demonstrators came surging in. Most of them were women carrying signs that read, DON'T BE AFRAID and WE ONLY WANT TO SET IN-mistakenly using the English "set" instead of "sit" in the latter. The preponderance of females in the first wave was actually by design, as the militants felt that the U.S. Marines would be hesitant to fire on the women. As Graves stood by the window he watched one of the militants approach an Iranian policeman who was supposed to be protecting the emba.s.sy, and the two men embraced. Graves wasn't surprised.

As the militants dispersed throughout the compound, the rest of the emba.s.sy personnel were slow to react. Demonstrations and crowds shouting "Death to America" and "Down with the shah" had become an almost daily occurrence, so much so that the Americans working inside referred to them as background noise. To complicate matters, the militants had chosen to launch their attack on National Students Day, an event commemorating the death of a group of students killed by the shah's forces during a demonstration at the University of Tehran the year before. The demonstration had drawn several million students, and the planners were able to use this larger crowd to camouflage their a.s.sault.

In a matter of minutes, the militants were able to completely cut off the chancery. Staffers and emba.s.sy personnel, now fully aware of what was going on, stood on chairs to peer out windows. Some crowded around closed-circuit monitors located down in the security room. What they saw startled them. The emba.s.sy grounds were swarming with militants who were waving signs and chanting, "We only want to set in!" Then, one by one, the closed-circuit monitors went blank as the cameras were yanked out of the walls.

Most of the emba.s.sy personnel were calm, some even annoyed. It seemed as if the students were just going to march around the emba.s.sy grounds chanting and cheering until it was time to go home. Over and over, voices rose above the din-some with the aid of megaphones-shouting, "We mean you no harm! We only want to set in!"

Unbeknownst to the Americans, this was not some overzealous protest march but a well-coordinated a.s.sault. Calling themselves Muslim Students Following the Imam's Line, the students had cased the emba.s.sy for many days and had drawn up detailed maps. They'd cut strips of cloth to use as blindfolds for nearly one hundred hostages and had even stockpiled food to feed their captives.

The plan was to occupy the emba.s.sy for three days, at which point they would read a list of grievances against the shah and America. Their princ.i.p.al hope was that the attack would weaken the position of the moderate Bazargan government by forcing it into a tough situation. If Bazargan came to the rescue of the Americans, then Iranians would see him and other moderates in the government for what they were: puppets of the West.

Some of the militants carried makes.h.i.+ft weapons such as bike chains, boards, even hammers. At least a few carried pistols, contradicting later claims that the a.s.sault was completely nonviolent.

After locking down the chancery, the marines quickly donned their riot gear. They loaded pistols and shotguns and took up positions throughout the emba.s.sy. The adrenaline was pumping and some seemed eager for a fight. One lay down in one of the offices on his belly with ammunition easily within reach, sighting down the barrel of his shotgun sniper-style as he scanned the window.

Meanwhile Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland were in a car on their way back from their meeting at the foreign ministry. They had just pulled out into traffic when Al Golacinski called on the radio and told them to turn around. "There's hundreds of people swarming all over the emba.s.sy grounds," he said. The three realized that even if they reached the emba.s.sy, they probably wouldn't be able to make it inside. They quickly decided that the best course of action would be to head back to the foreign ministry and try to organize help from there.

The last thing Laingen told Golacinski before signing off was to make sure that the marines didn't open fire. If even one of the marines fired, then they would likely have a bloodbath on their hands.

"What about tear gas?" Golacinski asked him.

"Only as a last resort," Laingen responded.

By this time, the staffers on the second floor of the chancery began to realize that the attack was more serious than they had at first thought. Some of the marines and other Americans, including John Graves, who'd been working in the outer buildings, had already been captured, and the Americans in the chancery watched from the second-floor windows as their colleagues were blindfolded, had their hands tied, and were marched toward the amba.s.sador's residence near the back of the compound.

Don Hohman, an army medic who was at the Bijon apartments across the street from the back gate, radioed Golacinski to tell him that a group of Iranians had broken in over there as well. Up on the fourth floor, he could hear them kicking down doors and searching the apartments below. Golacinski realized there was little he could do; he told Hohman he was on his own. (Hohman would later be captured as he tried to scale down the outside of the building.)

At the moment, Golacinski had bigger problems than Hohman; word had reached him on the radio that the chancery had just been breached. Despite the fact that several million dollars had recently been spent to fortify the building, the militants had found the structure's one weak spot: a bas.e.m.e.nt window that had been left unbarred as a fire escape. In fact, the intruders seemed to know beforehand exactly where it was.

With the militants inside the chancery's bas.e.m.e.nt, Golacinski ordered everyone, including the Iranian staffers waiting on the first floor, up to the second floor. (The second floor was normally considered off-limits to the local employees.) In a fit of bravery or stupidity, depending on how you look at it, Golacinski then asked Laingen over the radio if he could go outside to "reason" with the crowd, which now numbered well over a thousand. Laingen told him he could do so only if he could guarantee his own safety, which he could not. Golacinski went anyway, and he was soon captured and marched back to the chancery at gunpoint.

On the second floor of the chancery, marines and staffers began piling up furniture behind the steel door. The central hallway was crowded now and everyone shared worried glances. Some of the Iranian employees started crying. Marines walked among everyone handing out gas masks. Other marines c.o.c.ked and rec.o.c.ked their shotguns. The mood was tense.

Elsewhere in the building, a small group of Americans was busy destroying doc.u.ments and dismantling sensitive communications equipment so it couldn't fall into the hands of the militants. The order to do so had been slow in coming from Laingen, since it was hoped that the demonstration would end without incident. A few of the more enterprising staff members had already begun destroying doc.u.ments inside the emba.s.sy's ultrasecure communications room, referred to as the "vault" because it could be sealed off by a large steel safelike door. Besides housing the communications equipment, the vault, which was about twelve feet by twelve feet, also contained a barrel-like device used to pulverize doc.u.ments. However, the machine often jammed, so somebody had brought in a commercial shredder that cut papers into long strips. But the going was slow, and rather than destroying the doc.u.ments completely, it left a pile of strips on the floor.

The situation was deteriorating fast. The militants led Al Golacinski into the bas.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.sessment) 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. emba.s.sy and told Ann Swift, the emba.s.sy'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 emba.s.sy, she was doing her best to keep the lines of communication open. Early in the a.s.sault, 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 a.s.sistant 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 doc.u.ments, but in the end they too would be forced to give up.

The original security plan had called for the emba.s.sy 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 emba.s.sy 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 emba.s.sy 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. emba.s.sy 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 emba.s.sy 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 emba.s.sy 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 doc.u.ments inside the emba.s.sy. 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 neocla.s.sical 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 j.a.panese 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sortment 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, doc.u.ments, 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 doc.u.ments section. Across a small courtyard stood the imposing neocla.s.sical South Building, the location of OTS headquarters. On November 4, 1979, my t.i.tle 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 doc.u.mentation and the forensic monitoring of these doc.u.ments 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 n.o.body else as good as me, with the exception of somebody in the KGB whom I didn't know about yet. "c.o.c.ky but confident" is probably how I was seen by my peers, "upand-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 antic.i.p.ated.

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, pa.s.sed 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.