Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History Part 3

My dad was named John Mendez. He was incredibly handsome and young when I was born, just twenty-three years old, but I never really knew him. He worked in the copper mines in Nevada, where he was killed when I was three years old, crushed by a cart full of ore. My father's family had a murky background; it's quite possible that my father's actual name was Manuel Gomez. The story was that my dad's mother was killed in a car accident in Los Angeles, and in a custody dispute between my grandfather and the sister of his deceased wife, my grandfather took his two boys, ran away, and changed the family name.

My mom talked about my dad constantly when we were growing up. She had been madly in love with him, and they were both so young when she lost him.

My brother John and I worked long and hard in the barren desert surrounding Eureka, hauling wood through the snow in a little red wagon during the winter, selling newspapers on the train that made a nine-minute stop in our town once a day, and harvesting and selling bat guano to the Mormon ladies on the other side of town, as fertilizer for their gardens. We made enough money for the occasional movie for the six of us, and sometimes an ice cream at the local confectionery. My mom had no extra money for such luxuries.

From an early age I had loved to draw. Since we were so poor I had to make do with what I could find. I used a sharpened stick to scratch figures into the ground, a lump of coal on an old board or piece of cardboard, a pencil on a brown paper bag. When I was five or six, my mom came home from town with a package for each of us. My gift was a small watercolor kit, the most basic kind. My mom said, "Tony, you're going to be an artist." It was not a suggestion. Remarkably, during my future career at the CIA, I would often carry a similar watercolor kit on my world travels, just one of the many tools I used over the course of my espionage career.

After high school, I attended the University of Colorado at Boulder for a year, but took time off to work as a plumber's a.s.sistant to help support the family. It was around this time that I met my wife, Karen Smith, and five years later we'd had three children: the oldest, Amanda, followed by Toby, and later Ian. By then I was in Denver working for Martin Marietta as a tool designer/artist-ill.u.s.trator and running my own design studio. The work was mundane-drawing the wiring diagrams for the t.i.tan missiles that were being installed in silos across America-but it paid the bills. Then one day in 1965 I saw something that would forever change my life. It was an ad in the Denver Post looking for applicants to work as artists overseas for the U.S. Navy. I sent in a response with some samples to the P.O. box in Salt Lake City. I told Karen that it might be refres.h.i.+ng to try something new.

When I met with the representative from the government, it was not in the federal building in downtown Denver, but in a motel room on Colfax Avenue on the west side of the city. The blinds were closed. My meeting was with a somewhat shady-looking character who wore his snap-brim hat indoors like an old-time detective. He flashed a government credential at me and hefted a bottle of Jim Beam up onto the table.

"Son," he said, pouring each of us a gla.s.s of bourbon, "this is not the navy."

No kidding! I thought.

In fact, he told me, he was from the CIA. I didn't know what the CIA was at the time, but tried to look interested as I listened to his sales pitch.

"I don't know what kind of artist they're looking for," he said. "I sent them a few resumes, but they didn't seem quite right. Here-look at this. You will understand it better than I do."

I read through the (cla.s.sified!) recruitment guide and understood immediately that the kind of artist this CIA recruiter had in mind would quickly be locked up in a federal prison if he tried to practice this kind of "art" on his own. What they were looking for were old-fas.h.i.+oned forgers. Technically, this was not a problem for me. It was a matter of hand-eye coordination, along with an ability to manipulate the materials, and I could surely do that.

I went home and read up on the CIA, and the more I read the more interested I became. I could serve my country, see the world, and possibly make an impact on the events of the day. I put together an artist's sample of my work, including a Bulgarian postage stamp, part of a U.S. dollar bill, and some Chinese gra.s.s writing, and mailed it off to the Agency recruiter in Salt Lake City. The summons to Was.h.i.+ngton came within a few weeks.

In D.C., I had several levels of interviews. It was clear that they liked my samples, and the quality of my work was never a problem. In the end, the question became a moral issue. I met with the deputy director of TSD, Sidney Gottlieb, who conducted my last interview.

"You know, Tony," he said, "there are some people who might have a problem doing what we will be asking you to do. Breaking the laws of foreign governments. Lying to your friends and family, who will want to know where you work and what you do. Will you have a problem with that? Over a long period of time?"

I seriously considered what he was saying. This would be a new way of living, a new way of working, a shutting down of some avenues and the opening of doors that I could only imagine. I didn't hesitate. "I think, Dr. Gottlieb, that the truth is not necessarily everyone's business," I said, "especially when your country is relying on you to keep its secrets."

He stood to shake my hand. "You'll do just fine here, Tony," he said.

My first job at the Agency was in the graphics branch, working in the artists' bullpen, learning to work with linguists and experts who had studied foreign travel and security controls. When I arrived at the bullpen, I was the low man on the totem pole. The office was headed by Franco, a heavy-set, jovial, often demanding guy who was also very fair. If you wanted to work a little harder, he made sure you got credit. If you solved problems, you got rewarded. He was a great first boss. His deputy, Ricardo, on the other hand, was very compet.i.tive with his staff. If he saw a weakness, he would pounce.

I had many challenging projects over the twenty-two months I worked in the headquarters bullpen. Perhaps the most difficult of these, though, was dealing with Ricardo. Everyone would leave their artwork mounted down on their desk at the end of each day, and Ricardo would come in early the next morning to check everyone's progress, going around to each desk to see how the artist was doing. After he did his inspection he would make very small blue arrows on each artist's work indicating the areas they needed to work on. So first thing in the morning you would come in and see your artwork from the day before and find these small arrows all over it. It seemed he would get a certain pleasure from making those small blue marks. To the artists it was infuriating.

In order to break the tension, we had installed a dartboard, which we would use during breaks. Instead of throwing three darts a standard distance of nine feet, we developed a more macho, high-pressure game-one dart, at a distance of eighteen feet, for a dollar a throw. Ricardo proved to be a master, and could launch a dart with the cool accuracy of a scorpion flicking its tail. What he would love to do was get you in a dart game and take your money in front of the others. When I finally beat him, I wouldn't give him a rematch, and for a time I feared for my life. But he did appreciate my work enough that when he left for an a.s.signment to be chief of graphics at our Far East base a year later, he specifically requested me to be his subordinate, ahead of other artists with more seniority.

As artists we were reproducing mostly personal ident.i.ty doc.u.ments that could be used for operational purposes such as travel, renting safe houses or hotel rooms. They could also be used for exfiltrations, false flag recruitment, entrapment, or crossing international borders. The forgeries sometimes were designed to discredit individuals and governments, just like the KGB did to us. Their program was called Special Measures. Our program had no name-we just called it covert action. Other doc.u.ments that we produced could take the form of disinformation, letters in diaries, b.u.mper stickers, or any other graphics item that could influence events of the day. We were able to reproduce almost anything that was put in front of us; the only restrictions were matters of statecraft, such as currency. Making the other guy's money at that time was considered to be an act of war. But bombing a country with leaflets instead of munitions was a capability that we gladly provided.

After my time in the bullpen, I spent the next seven years, from 1967 to 1974, living and working in Okinawa and Bangkok and other far-off places, traveling the world as an undercover CIA technical officer. Throughout that time I continued to work as an artist-validator, but I also branched out into other areas such as disguise and exfiltration, helping to rescue defectors and refugees from behind the Iron Curtain. A big part of this was due to the fact that I had helped to usher in a new "generalist" program, which cross-trained technical officers in various disciplines like disguise or doc.u.ments or whatever was required for the particular region they would be working in. Not only did this give us a new skill set as technical officers, but it also allowed us to be more agile in responding to the potential needs of our station chiefs and case officers, who often asked techs to do a little bit of everything in the field.

Then, in 1974, I was promoted to chief of disguise and asked to come back to headquarters to run the disguise section. At the time I was only thirty-three years old, and some people didn't take kindly to a young upstart such as myself coming in and telling them what to do.

In the wake of Watergate, morale was near an all-time low in the Agency. Nixon had just left the White House and the Senate was preparing an investigation of the CIA. Blood was in the water. My att.i.tude was that there were still good people working in the Agency and a lot of work to be done. I was eager to get to it.

The 1970s were smack in the middle of the Cold War and there were numerous ongoing cases in the works. The Soviet Union was spreading out into the third world, and as they extended their reach we had greater access to their personnel.

As I pushed through the doors of Central Building on the morning of November 4, 1979, I could see that the crisis was garnering everyone's full attention. Despite the fact that it was a Sunday, the building seemed to be under a state of siege, with people hurrying in every direction. Several carried red-striped secret files; everyone carried grim expressions. I had never seen the building so frenetic-it was as though a silent alarm had gone off. The weekend was officially over.

I headed up to my suite of offices and labs, located on the third floor, to read the cable traffic and meet with my team.

First I popped my head into the office of the deputy chief of OTS operations. Matt, an intense, conservative, but polite man, was sitting behind his desk, handing out cables and talking on the phone.

"Hi, Tony. Welcome. Glad you could make it in," he said, covering the mouthpiece of the phone in his hand and motioning me to a chair with his jacket balled up on it. It was the first time I had seen Matt without his tie. His trademark red hair was uncombed and he didn't look up from the heap of paperwork on his desk.

"Sounds like we've got something to do," I said when he got off the phone.

"Yeah, we are expecting that it's going to get even more hectic around here. Why don't you get caught up and we'll touch base later."

I continued on to my section. Most of my team was already there, some working on other projects unrelated to the hostage crisis. Tim, my deputy, came striding in and yanked off his tie; he'd been coming back from church. Without so much as a h.e.l.lo he began brewing a pot of coffee. I paused at the door to the disguise labs, to see who else had made it in.

When I was first promoted to run the disguise section in 1974, the chief of operations had pulled me aside and tasked me with making the disguise capability of OTS the best it could possibly be, and I set out to make that a reality. At the time, most people thought the disguise branch was nothing more than a group of cosmetologists. The whole concept of disguise wasn't given great merit within the Agency, especially by officers who'd come of age when disguises amounted to nothing more than ill-fitting wigs, mustaches, and hats. There were people who worked at the CIA during that time whose approach to disguise amounted to sitting a case officer in a barber's chair and lecturing him or her on the art of disguise, while providing nothing in the way of materials.

That all changed once I began working with a Hollywood makeup artist in the early 1970s and started to show them what they could accomplish with a little creative thinking. The first such operation involved turning an African American case officer and a Lao cabinet minister into two Caucasians so they could meet in Vientiane, Laos, in 1972. The disguises had been so convincing that the two men had been able to pa.s.s through a roadblock undetected. The episode had opened up the floodgates and changed everything as far as operational disguise was concerned.

By the mid-1970s, everybody in the disguise branch had to learn to do a facial impression. Some people who worked there for twenty years were no longer qualified. But by 1979, we had totally revolutionized the department, creating numerous disguises that could completely alter a person's appearance and be applied in the dark in a matter of seconds. As I stood in the doorway and watched the professionalism of my team at work, I was reminded of just how far we'd come. They were motivated and ready, and I felt confident that no matter what challenge lay ahead, they could get the job done.

As I entered my office that morning, I saw a neat stack of about two hundred cables waiting for me on my desk. This was not unusual; what immediately caught my attention, however, was that a good number were marked FLASH. This was the highest level of priority the CIA used (the others being IMMEDIATE, PRIORITY, and the lowest, ROUTINE). FLASH cables were serious business, and only ever used in wartime or when U.S. lives were in immediate danger. Some communicators went their whole careers without ever even seeing one. In this case I wasn't looking at one, but several dozen. It was then that the gravity of the situation began to sink in.

That morning, most of us were still confident that the emba.s.sy occupiers would stay only a few hours, as had the group of Marxist guerrillas on February 14.

In the meantime, our first order of business was a tall one. Now that the emba.s.sy had been overrun, we would need to try to reestablish some kind of human intelligence network in Iran. Normally, when you have a nation in flux, or are in a denied area such as Moscow, you build a network of stay-behind agents, citizens who agree to stay in contact with the West after any untoward incident and will advise on the current situation. We had such a network set up in Tehran before the attack. Our agents, however, seemed to have melted into the landscape. They may have stayed put, but most of them "unrecruited" themselves when they realized the danger they and their families might be in.

The plan then was to a.s.semble a group of trained intelligence officers who could infiltrate Iran to reconnoiter the situation and start building an infrastructure for any potential rescue. Such a scenario involved our first asking several questions: What would their doc.u.ments and disguise materials look like? What would their nationalities be? We began looking for candidates who could carry the foreign personas that we had doc.u.ment intel and inventory to support. These individuals would need to have the language capability to pa.s.s themselves off as non-American. They also needed to look the part. A Latin American businessman has to look Latin. A German student needs to speak German.

Once the candidates were identified, we could then build their cover legends. Who was coming and going from Iran at this time in history? Businessmen? Journalists? The world was watching and the media was certainly all over the story.

As for disguise, the same rules applied. Did we already have things on the shelf? Would an officer need to look older? Could we make them look like Iranians? What about creating the insignia for Iranian uniforms? We were scrambling, running hard to stay ahead of whatever requirement we might be asked to fulfill. We were apprehensive but we weren't scared. Whatever needed to be done, we could do it, I thought, but it was going to take time.

Although the mood in the Central Building was anxious during that first week, there was no shortage of ideas, but not many of them were very well thought out. In one instance I had an exspecial forces operator step into my office and tell me that he was going to solve the whole d.a.m.n thing if I could just outfit him with a rubber "stunt double" mask and give him an AK47.

Another time, a senior CIA officer I had worked with in South Asia showed up in my doorway, looking lost. "Hey, Jack. What can I do for you?" I asked. He explained how the director of operations had seen him walking down the hallway over at the headquarters building and told him to get his a.s.s over to Central Building to be outfitted to go into Iran. Jack was an Asian American, and the thinking went that it would probably be easier for a non-Caucasian to slip into Iran inconspicuously. There was just one important element missing in order to make this scenario a reality.

"They told me to come and see you," he said. "But there's no way I can do this-I don't speak j.a.panese."

In another part of OTS, Mike Dougherty, an Irish mercenary in another life, ran his division roughshod and high-spirited. He was putting together his paramilitary capabilities to form a task force that would oversee the larger office response. His task force and my team coordinated our efforts with the operations directorate at CIA headquarters and the Pentagon. Mike and I had a series of meetings over the next four days, with attendance varying according to the topic. Mike loved a meeting, and so there were perhaps more meetings than I would have hoped. At one point we even had a meeting about meetings. There was an overwhelming amount of cable traffic, but that was pretty much an administrative ch.o.r.e that we were already set up to handle-there was not that much difference between two hundred and four hundred cables per day. But the meetings chewed up time, and time was precious. At the end of four days we were exhausted. Things were in the works. Plans had been made. But the Pentagon was in disarray because there was no special operations command; thus they had no way of marshaling resources. The White House was so timid in its response that President Jimmy Carter didn't even want to call the hostages "hostages," for fear of offending Iran's revolutionary government, an oxymoronic term.

I came dragging home on Thursday night, exhausted after working eighteen-hour days for the past four days. I was drained, and took off my coat as I walked through the greenhouse, which served as a vestibule attached to our kitchen. We often had formal dinners in there in the winter and hoped for snow each time. It was a magical place at night with the snow and a little candlelight. I loosened my tie and sank into my favorite chair in the living room, removing my shoes. Karen came to meet me with a beer and a hug. She sat down next to me on the sofa and listened while I rattled on about the job, the office, the Pentagon, everything. It was beginning to look more and more like the crisis was going to drag out indefinitely. On November 5, the Ayatollah Khomeini's son Ahmad had praised the takeover as being in the name of the people. After that, the entire religious leaders.h.i.+p of Iran had thrown its support behind the militants. Mehdi Bazargan, Iran's prime minister, was forced to resign in protest, and this meant that there was only one person left for President Carter and his administration to deal with: the Ayatollah Khomeini.

I paused long enough to take a sip of beer and felt her looking closely at me. Glancing up, I saw that she had been waiting for me to stop talking so that she could tell me something.

"What?" I said. I thought on some subconscious level that she was having a problem with one of the kids.

"Honey, I've been thinking," she began. "I've been thinking of how to get those Iranians to leave the emba.s.sy and free the hostages. How to end the crisis. And I've got an idea..."

"Okay," I said. "Tell me your idea." I leaned back into my chair. The truth was that I was only half listening-I was that tired.

"You have to kill the shah," she said.