Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History (14 page)

“I’m not sure he’s going to be able to pull this off,” I told Hal the night before the exfiltration.

“What do you have in mind?” he asked me.

“I’ll wake him up early tomorrow and make my final assessment then,” I said. “If I don’t think he can make it through on his own, I’ll personally see him past the controls.”

It was going way beyond headquarters’ mandate, but I didn’t see any other option.

The following day my fears were confirmed when I woke RAPTOR, now known as “Mr. Kassim,” at three in the morning only to be confronted by a wreck of a man with a greenish pallor and a haunted look in his eyes. It was clear that he hadn’t slept at all and was certainly in no condition to attempt getting through security on his own.

While Andrew prepared a light breakfast for RAPTOR, I took Hal aside. “I’m going to take him into the airport,” I said. Hal seemed to know this was coming, and nodded his agreement. “I’ll go ahead with Andrew and check out the terminal one last time
and then confirm the flight,” I said. No doubt headquarters would think I was taking an unnecessary risk, but I wasn’t about to be second-guessed by someone in an office thousands of miles away. We were the operational officers on the scene and nobody knew better than us what was required.

The predawn streets of Tehran were eerily quiet as Andrew and I drove toward Mehrabad Airport. Anti-American slogans and posters covered every wall of the deserted city, giving us an almost overwhelming sensation that in order to succeed we would somehow have to overpower the entire country itself. Passing beneath an ornate archway, we stopped the car near the drab concrete main terminal, right on schedule.

I waited for Andrew to park the car and then the two of us did a quick sweep through the terminal, which was empty except for a few komiteh slouched on some benches, while a group of temporary revolutionary officials stood around their counters sipping tea. No one seemed to care as we walked up to the Swissair check–in counter to confirm that the flight was on time.

Andrew then passed through immigration controls, while I walked outside to wait for Hal and RAPTOR. Since Andrew had always worn a disguise when he’d met with RAPTOR, the plan was to use Andrew as our “spotter” in the airport. This meant that his job would be to make a call from a public phone in the departure lounge and pass a “go” or “no go” signal, depending on whether or not RAPTOR had made it onto the flight. At that point Andrew would then board the plane, introduce himself to RAPTOR, and proceed to escort him to freedom.

I waited outside, deciding to take a walk in order to avoid looking suspicious. It was still dark and I headed to the far end of the
parking lot to watch the sunrise. It also helped to calm my nerves. By the time I returned to the terminal, taxis and vans were beginning to arrive, disgorging their passengers onto the sidewalk. I spotted RAPTOR and Hal getting out of a cab and casually walked over. I shook RAPTOR’s hand and flashed a warm smile, hoping the act would help to put him at ease. His hand was cool and moist and his grip lifeless. He forced a smile from behind the disguise. He looked to me like a man on his way to the gallows, and I began to worry he might fold before he even got to the check–in counter. I grabbed his bag and said good-bye to Hal, whose job would be to return to the safe site and wait for the call from Andrew.

We entered the terminal and approached customs, and I was pleased to see that RAPTOR’s disguise aroused not even the slightest bit of suspicion among the amateurish revolutionary customs agents who’d been told to look for wealthy Iranians trying to smuggle goods out of the country.

After the check–in counter, I stayed with RAPTOR as far as the immigration controls, where the Revolutionary Guard clerk stamped his passport and handed it back to him. It was now time to say good-bye, but as I once more shook his hand, I sensed that something was wrong. I saw that the haunted look had returned to his eyes, and so rather than leave, I decided to stick around the airport and wait until his flight had departed.

I was sitting in the waiting area twenty minutes later when I caught sight of Andrew through the glass partition. He was clearly agitated by something and he motioned me over. He explained that the Swissair flight had been called but there was no sign of RAPTOR anywhere. “I saw him enter the departure lounge,” Andrew said, “but after that he disappeared.”

My mind raced. Where could he be? I told Andrew to go back and board the flight; then I returned to the Swissair desk. I explained to the agent that I had a serious problem. “My uncle is boarding your flight to Zurich but I’m afraid that I forgot to give him his heart medication. Can you escort me through immigration so I can find him and make sure he knows how to take it? You see, he’s a very old man.”

The Swissair clerk nodded sympathetically and quickly escorted me through security and into the departure lounge, where he turned me loose.

I scanned the wide hall, looking for any sign of RAPTOR. He had to be here somewhere. My eyes fell on the door to the men’s bathroom.

My shoes echoed on the tile floor as I entered. The bathroom appeared to be empty, but I noticed that one of the stall doors was closed. I walked over.

“Mr. Kassim?” I whispered.

The stall door opened a crack and I saw one anxious eyeball glaring back at me.

“Come on, Mr. Kassim. You’ll miss your flight.”

The door opened further and I could see that RAPTOR was shocked to see me—both his eyes were now wide open like a startled animal’s.

“How did you get in here?” he stammered.

Without replying, I grabbed him by the elbow and hustled him out of the bathroom. As we hurried across the departure lounge and toward the gate, a few Revolutionary Guards gave us sideways glances but otherwise didn’t seem to care. RAPTOR had been paralyzed with fear but my sudden appearance had snapped him back.

Five minutes later I learned from the Swissair clerk that the flight was on its way to Zurich, and it was up to me to call Hal and let him know that RAPTOR had gotten out. That afternoon we received a return cable from Andrew stating that RAPTOR was safe. He also relayed a funny story. While they had been on the flight, RAPTOR had removed his fake mole and handed it to Andrew as a souvenir.

T
he RAPTOR operation was on my mind as I headed over to the State Department to find out about the status of the exfiltration plan to rescue the houseguests. The State Department memo had said they were planning on taking the lead, but I was concerned about their ability to pull it off. I knew there were several challenges to this case that might not seem important to the uninitiated. Infiltrating and exfiltrating people into and out of hostile areas is one of the most dangerous jobs in the spy business. It’s also one of the full-time concerns of OTS, which has worked on these kinds of operations since the OSS days. The “authentication” of operations officers and their agents by providing them with personal documentation and disguise, cover legends and supporting data, “pocket litter” and so forth, is a fundamental element in any clandestine operation. At OTS, personal documentation and disguise specialists, graphic artists, and other specialists spend hundreds of hours preparing materials, tailoring the cover legends, and coordinating the plan. If valuable human assets can no longer remain in place, then it is the official policy of the CIA to bring them in from the cold.

When it came to the houseguests, I could see that this was
going to be a tough nut to crack. RAPTOR had been a highly trained operative and still he had wilted under the pressure. With the six Americans we were basically dealing with untrained amateurs who were hiding out in a city seething with hatred for westerners. It would take all the resources we had to figure this one out.

The Department of State building at Twenty-third and C Street in downtown Washington, D.C., is massive. It was located just across the street from our own Foggy Bottom offices, so close in fact that sometimes we would eat lunch in their huge cafeteria.

The architecture of the State Department headquarters, both inside and out, was designed to be modern and sleek but had faded rather quickly into a series of bland rectangles with no character.

We were meeting with an undersecretary of state, a dignified woman who was very much in charge. She had a spacious office on the seventh floor. Present at the meeting, in addition to a young documents officer and myself, were two of her assistants, a member of CIA’s cover staff, and a CIA Near East Division case officer who thought he was running the meeting. The case officer began by describing how he would plan and execute the exfiltration of the six State Department diplomats.

The undersecretary brought him up short. “Excuse me,” she said, “but we haven’t yet assigned the responsibility to you. We understand you’re here to give advice, not to take charge. I assure you that since these are our diplomats, the department has the utmost concern with how we should comport ourselves in effecting their rescue.”

Our man sat down and one of the undersecretary’s aides took the floor. He described what they thought was the way to go about mounting such an operation. They seemed to favor a plan to bring
out the six incrementally, effectively running three or more operations in tandem, not necessarily coming out through Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport. At this point I interrupted.

“Excuse me,” I began, “but my experience tells me that when we are managing a complex operation for more than one or two people, it’s best to consolidate your risk, put everyone together under an appropriate cover, and take the shortest and quickest route out. It’s one of the principles of guerrilla warfare: choose the time and place for action and overwhelm their senses.”

I looked around the room and saw that I had everybody’s attention.

“Exfiltrations are like abortions,” I said. “You don’t need one unless something’s gone wrong. If you need one, don’t try to do it yourself. We can give you a nice, clean job.”

The undersecretary looked at me, startled, obviously appalled. Then, with a wry smile, she said, “Well, you do have a way with words, Mr. Mendez. I think maybe we can get on with it, and with you, after all.”

I
had begun honing my skills in exfiltration in the early 1970s. At the time, the Soviets were moving out into the third world and as a result we were getting more and more “walk-ins.” A walk–in is just that: a defector who shows up at a U.S. embassy or otherwise presents himself to an official American entity and either asks for asylum or has valuable information that he wants to share. Any good case officer needs to know how to handle a walk–in, as it’s the bread and butter of the spy business. Screw up a walk–in and you’re done—simple as that.

So many Soviet personnel were going missing without a trace during this period that the KGB thought we must have been kidnapping them. In retaliation, there was even talk at the highest levels of the KGB about a program to kidnap American officials, but ultimately Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, nixed the idea.

My first exfiltration involved a high-level KGB officer code-named NESTOR, who was posted to a Soviet embassy in a densely populated capital of the Asian subcontinent. At the time, I was stationed in Okinawa and running the twenty-five-man graphics branch when a cable arrived marked
IMMEDIATE
, asking for an artist-validator. The cable had been sent by a CIA officer I’ll call “Jacob Jordan.” He and I had first worked together on a job in Hong Kong in 1968, when I’d been asked to help forge the travel documents for a top Chinese asset.

Jacob, a senior OTS disguise and documents officer for Asia, was already a legend when I started working with him. Despite being from the Midwest, Jacob had an appearance and demeanor more Savile Row than Sears Roebuck. He wore custom-made shoes and expensive suits and in every way affected the air of a British gentleman. In all the time I spent with him, I never once saw him break character. A gifted linguist, he spoke fluent Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. After joining the CIA’s Technical Services Division (the precursor to OTS), Jacob’s first posting was to Shanghai in 1949. By the time China had fallen into the hands of the communist Red Army, he was considered the leading American expert on the region.

Less than twenty-four hours after receiving Jacob’s cable, I found myself, along with a documents officer, “David,” holed up in a tiny vaultlike room in a Southwest Asian seaport. The two of us
had flown into the country posing as tourists, and after checking into our hotel, had been picked up at a prearranged site by a local CIA officer, “Mac,” and driven through back alleys to this secure location. The site was in a commercial office building that was a front for nonofficial contacts. The building stood amid a sea of similar office buildings, so it was no problem for us to blend in with the myriad British and American businessmen who plied their trade in this busy port.

Once we were inside, Mac introduced us to two more local CIA officers, “Raymond” and “Jane,” who had been working around the clock for the past few days.

The whole reason for our being there had been set off twelve days earlier when NESTOR had walked out of the Soviet embassy and contacted a local CIA officer, telling him that he wished to defect. After confirming that NESTOR was indeed who he said he was, the CIA officer had given him instructions on how to get in touch, then promised to help organize his escape. NESTOR, meanwhile, had gone underground for several days before arriving at the prearranged rendezvous where Jacob was waiting.

If we could get him out of the country, NESTOR would be considered a huge catch. Not only was he an officer in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, the part concerned with foreign espionage, but he was also a member of a group that the CIA had dubbed the “Junior KGB.” Under an alias, NESTOR had spent several years attending schools in England and the United States while posing as the son of Soviet officials legitimately stationed there—so he spoke fluent English with both a British and an American accent. After that, he had attended several KGB institutes in preparation for being stationed in Asia. As a result, not only could he provide
invaluable intelligence on the KGB’s operations in Central and Southeast Asia, but as an added bonus he could also help identify other “juniors” who were being trained overseas.