Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History (16 page)

If you stood in the entrance of the branch offices and looked left, you would see the doorway to the deputy branch chief’s office. Tim Small had been at one time my boss. Now I was his. Tim was older, in his fifties, an austere, humorless man from Eastern Europe whose office reflected his personality perfectly. There was no personal decor. Everything was in order; the desk was clean, the in–box empty. Tim dotted his I’s and crossed his T’s before anything else. “It pays to check” was his mantra. In fact, he was right. Nevertheless, we called him “the old fart,” a nice balance to some of our younger officers.

Looking to the right, you would see the doorway to my office. Front and center on my desk was a sign about a foot long and six inches high.
WORK STINKS
, it read. On the walls were some paintings I had recently completed; my art rotated through the office as I completed fresh pieces and sold older ones.

The tall windows behind my secretary, Elaine Younger, looked down onto the interior courtyard of the compound. Elaine had a
voice like a foghorn, partly due to her long history of smoking. Callers who had not personally met her would call her “sir” on the phone. She had been in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II and was a no–nonsense woman. She typed with a cigarette hanging from her mouth. She guarded the door to our offices with true vigor and was as loyal to me, her new boss, as she was to her country, and God help anybody who crossed either one of us. Elaine had been there long before any of us arrived and would be there after most of us had gone. We were just passing through, as far as she was concerned.

The group entered my office one by one. In addition to Tim Small, there was Truman Smith, chief of production from graphics. Truman was a consummate graphics guardhouse lawyer-bureaucrat. He knew how to please his boss and how to commit mayhem on a guy’s morale. Tall, blond, and with bad posture, the fiftysomething had the physique of an aging former football player—a lineman perhaps. Not particularly well liked, he was effective. “Deadlines R Us” might have been his motto. He and Tim Small had reached a cosmic balance of dislike. While there was room for only one of them, the jury was still out on which was worse.

Next came Joe Missouri and Dan Varga, two bright, young, energetic analysts from documents.

Joe had been in the CIA only about two years. He was a prime example of a “young fart,” the kind that would balance out Tim Small’s sometimes closed mind. I liked to put young and old in the same room because they would certainly have different takes on the same problem. Joe would eventually become our man in Canada on this operation, but that’s getting ahead.

Joe was only about twenty-four years old. He was talented, not
so much in languages as so many in Docs were, but in creating cover stories that were enormously credible. He was audacious. He also had a fierce sense of humor that served him, and us, well. Piercing dark brown eyes, a Mediterranean complexion, and a not-too-tall stature: Joe was a good “inside man.”

Dan, meanwhile, came from the analytical portion of the CIA, the Deputy Directorate for Intelligence (DDI). He held an advanced degree in Chinese and was the picture of a young professor: receding hairline, trimmed beard, longish hair, plastic-rimmed glasses that looked like the standard GI issue. He had quite a sense of humor and was extremely smart. I was anxious to see what he would bring to this endeavor.

Next there was Doris Grange, our chief of disguise. Doris was a petite woman, but with a demeanor that prevented her from being overlooked when she spoke. She was both stylish and businesslike in her professional appearance, and one of the most capable disguise officers we had—she was the chief of her division, after all. Doris was charming but ambitious. She was considered a role model by many of our junior female officers. But underneath the aggressive facade, she had a soft nature and was a natural mentor.

The last member of our team was Jack Kerry, our resident PhD chemist. Jack was new to the CIA and to OTS. His assignment would be to support us in any research, development, and engineering (RD&E) requirement we might have—for instance, supplying us with a piece of technical equipment, or building one if it was needed. He was a gentle soul, extremely intelligent, intellectually curious, and very much an outdoorsman. His thinning hair, sparse beard, and prematurely gray hair belied the fact that he was only thirty-five years old.

I closed the door after Jack entered. Elaine didn’t even look up, just flicked her cigarette ash into the wastepaper basket next to her desk.

“Everyone remember that memo from State we received a little while ago?” I asked. They all nodded. “Well, it appears things just became a whole lot more urgent.” I explained the situation with Pelletier, which got everyone’s attention.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s start with the basics.”

Since the epiphany in my studio, I had been informally tasking team members with preliminary planning for the exfiltration, and now it was time to examine the results. Our first priority would be to establish the route by which we could get the houseguests out of the country. We always knew our best option was on a commerical flight out of Mehrabad Airport.

This meant our major area of concern would be how to get the houseguests through the airport’s draconian immigration controls. Every country’s airport procedures were different, and the best way to understand them was to send a probe in and out to collect data. Iran’s controls had been put in place under the shah, but thanks to the revolution, there was no telling what to expect. Protocol could shift from one day to the next. We were fortunate in one sense, however, since we already had a large collection of data on the customs and immigration controls at the airport thanks to the RAPTOR operation seven months before. In addition, we could augment our data collection by continuing to support the insertion of the advance team or running our own probes. Eventually a team of intelligence officers would need to make the final probe into Iran and meet up with the houseguests to assess their state of mind and ability to carry off the operation. Near East Division,
meanwhile, would look into a potential black route for getting them out overland as a fallback, much like the one that Ross Perot had used to exfiltrate two of his employees a year earlier. At this stage, it was important not to rule anything out, and to have a fallback plan if necessary.

With that out of the way, we then turned to the problem of the cover, which posed a unique challenge. We had six American diplomats, male and female, varying in age from fifty-four to twenty-five. As far as we knew, none of them could speak a foreign language and none of them had any clandestine training. To make matters worse, because they worked in the consulate, which was heavily trafficked by Iranians, we suspected that their faces were probably pretty well known and that they might be on a watch list.

“We don’t yet know what we are going to use for documents or what their cover is going to be, but we are going to have to come up with some of those answers quickly,” I said. “I’m going to have to interface with NE/Iran on this and get them on board with anything we’re going to do.”

I turned to Dan and Joe. “So what do you think, guys? What have you got?” It would be the job of the documents branch to fabricate a realistic cover story for the houseguests to accompany their alias documents. For this reason they often kept backstopped alias documents on the shelf ready to use in a moment’s notice. But depending on the subject, there are really only a few nationalities that would work at any given time, and until they started inventing new countries, we had to be incredibly careful about wasting them.

This problem had been highlighted when the militants at the embassy had ferreted out two altered documents issued to two
CIA officers captured at the embassy. Both of the documents corresponded with friendly Western powers, and had almost created a diplomatic scandal. The defense minister for one of the countries in question just happened to be touring Langley when the news broke, and he asked pointedly how many more of these items the CIA had fabricated. “Just the one,” he was told. “Like hell,” the minister had muttered. As a result we had to be incredibly selective about what kinds of documents we used.

“How about one of the Nordic countries?” Dan responded.

“Okay,” I said. “What are six people from northern Europe doing in Tehran?”

Joe piped in. “Do they all have to be from the same place? We could issue each of them a travel document from a different country and then have them line up at the airport as if they just happened to arrive all together.”

“The real problem,” I said, “is that no one in headquarters believes that these people are going to be able to carry any foreign cover. They’re not even sure they could carry false U.S. passports.”

In an earlier call with Hal, who after the RAPTOR operation had been promoted to the Near East Division’s chief for Iran, the two of us had discussed the possibility of the houseguests’ using foreign documents for their cover story. Since none of the houseguests had even basic training in the tradecraft needed to carry off a foreign cover, he doubted it would work. “Besides,” he had said, “almost everyone in Iran speaks a foreign language, and we can’t risk that they might stumble upon somebody who could question them in their ‘native’ tongue.”

“What is State saying?” asked Tim.

“Their idea is to have them be unemployed U.S. schoolteachers
who had come to Iran looking for work,” I said. “They could give us any of the documentation we would need, but that would still make them U.S. citizens, which doesn’t seem like the best idea to me.”

“What about Canadian passports?” Doris asked.

“That would make the most sense, but I don’t know if they’ll go for it. I’d like to pose the question while I am in Ottawa and see if they jump.”

“When are you going?” Joe asked.

“I am scheduling it now,” I said. “I want to get up there as soon as possible, and if we are going to ask them for Canadian documents, we need to have done it yesterday.” I had already decided that it would be Joe’s job to come up with a cover legend for the six. Working in documents did not mean that Joe was a forger. The forgers were the artist-validators who worked in the bullpen, a position I had held myself in the earliest days of my career. Documents people were in charge of maintaining travel documents and understanding the controls related to those documents. They often traveled on probes to update their portfolios and knew what kinds of documents would be needed by a person in order to carry off a certain cover.

“Joe, I want you with me. This may not be legal, and they may say no, but if they say yes, I want to be ready to move on it.”

“What do we need to take with us?” Joe asked. Joe had already gone across the street to the State Department and requested current passport photographs of the six houseguests. He had also collected current samples of their handwriting and had assigned them alias names in advance. He had done all of this background work without knowing in which direction we were going to go with
their documentation.
Be prepared
. It was not just a Baden-Powell Boy Scout motto. It was the motto of the intelligence officer as well.

“Bring everything you’ve got,” I replied. “We might be able to use it all.”

There was a knock at the door. I looked up to see Elaine poking her head around the corner. “They’re here,” she said. When she saw the puzzled look on my face, she took a drag off her cigarette and blew the smoke out into the vestibule. “The Christmas Door Decorating Committee from the art shop,” she explained. I looked at her without speaking. “I’ll just close the door and they can do this without any fuss,” she said, closing the door with a small clatter. I shook my head.

I turned to Doris. “In the meantime, Doris, we don’t know yet what the disguise requirement will be, but I want to make sure that you and the disguise section are ready in case you are needed.”

“Got it,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, “this has just become the highest priority. So get your heads together and see what you can come up with.”

8

COVER STORY

As the end of December neared, the houseguests’ initial calm was beginning to wane. They spent hours on end trying to combat the boredom, drinking too much, sleeping too much, and fantasizing about escape. After reading so many le Carré novels, Schatz had a good idea of how he could pull it off. In one scenario he wore “native dress” to blend in while he hiked over the border into Pakistan. In another he drove a car he’d stashed somewhere in the city up to the Turkish border. In a third, he was at the controls of a small speedboat racing across the Persian Gulf, the chaos of Iran disappearing behind him in a haze. The more he read, the more he fantasized.

The others were getting antsy as well. By this time they had played Scrabble so much that they could recognize the individual tiles just by the wood grain on the backs of the pieces. After nearly two months they began to feel forgotten and wondered if anything was being done to rescue them.

Their only source for news was to listen to the BBC in the morning. Mark had gotten into the habit of sleeping late and often missed the broadcast, so Anders would give him a recap. In an attempt to deflect anger away from the United States, on December 15 the shah, who was well enough to travel, had left the United States and gone to Panama. The militants, however, seemed not to care. In their minds it was the United States that was pulling the strings, not Panama. To make matters worse, on December 26 the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, which only heightened tensions in the region. With the Soviet army fighting on Iran’s doorstep, the military options for attacking Iran became even more limited. In a strange twist, the White House suddenly found itself in the awkward position of having to do all it could to bring the hostages home while at the same time trying to counter Soviet aggressions in the region. In many ways, the invasion of Afghanistan became the initial spark that would eventually lead Iran and the United States back to the table. No one could foresee this, though. Iran had gone through a series of new foreign ministers, each more ineffective than the last. The will of the Revolutionary Council could not be questioned for any reason, and anyone seen to be negotiating with the United States was labeled a traitor. On top of this, the militants at the embassy continued to stoke the revolutionary hysteria sweeping the nation with their rhetoric and public displays of blindfolded Americans, all of them liars, all of them spies, all of them out to destroy the revolution.