Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History (19 page)

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 glasses, 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 shirts 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!”

Going anywhere with Calloway was an adventure, whether it
was to a local hamburger dive for lunch or into one of the many worlds that inhabited his stories. An inveterate storyteller, Calloway had a flair for the dramatic. And when his arms would get working and that toothy grin would flash, his enthusiasm was contagious. Several well-known movie stars refused to work unless he did their makeup. One of his favorite clients was Bob Hope. A born joke teller, he and Hope would trade one-liners the whole time Calloway would work on him.

A
fter taking me around the set, Jerome and I went back to his studio in Burbank, which was essentially the garage of his suburban bungalow. His house was small but neat. He was married to a nice woman in the cookie-cutter mold of the 1950s and lived with his ninety-year-old father, an ex–plumber for the city of Chicago whom he aptly called “Pop.”

Walking through his garage was like walking through a museum of sorts. Calloway had modified the space by adding a little office and studio. He had tables and workstations all lined with materials in various stages of completion. There were two storage sheds behind the garage that were filled with just about everything he had ever done—rubber noses, ears, monster parts. He was always getting calls from other makeup artists asking for help, some even as far away as Australia. If you told him you were looking for a particular kind of nose, nine times out of ten he would find it in a shoe box in one of his storage sheds. Though perhaps the most striking artifacts he had stored in his garage were the busts of several famous actresses. Back before the days of plastic surgery, Calloway had been hired to take molds of the chests of certain actresses
to then be able to make natural foam rubber “falsies” to put in a bra and make the women look more endowed. He kept these busts covered by towels, but occasionally he would unveil them when a friend would drop by. One of the many stories that he told involved a famous English actor walking in and seeing the mold of his wife’s chest. “Do you recognize it?” Calloway had asked him. “She looks familiar,” the actor said hesitantly. Calloway then informed him that it belonged to the man’s wife, who was a young up–and-coming actress at the time.

Joking aside, Calloway was truly gifted at his job. He was innovative and intellectually curious, always pushing new technologies. Ahead of his time, he was constantly reaching out to chemical manufacturers, looking for products, developing products, doing whatever he had to do to get the results he wanted. And nothing but the best would do. He was a master and a blast to collaborate with. If you had a job that needed to be done, or even just a loose sketch, then Jerome either had the solution or would work it out in a very short time. Oftentimes he had already done it and had it hidden away somewhere in his studio. “That sounds like the piece I made for Robert Mitchum.”

Needless to say, the two of us hit it off right away. The process of creating a good disguise was very similar to that of creating a work of art, and I think the two us realized we were kindred spirits. After our first meeting, it wouldn’t be long before I would be asking for his help.

R
eturning to Asia from Los Angeles, I soon found myself in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. With the war winding down in neighboring Vietnam, Vientiane had become a hub for
clandestine activity. It was like Dodge City on the Mekong. As soon as night fell, intelligence services from all over the world would descend upon the city’s principal roundabout to perform their rolling car pickups. A rolling car pickup is just that: an officer driving the car slows just enough so that a person can quickly dive into the backseat without being seen. There were so many rolling car pickups going on at this roundabout in Vientiane that people were getting into the wrong cars. At one point I was responsible for running twenty-six different disguises. It was all I could do to keep track.

Then one day I was approached by one of the local CIA senior case officers with a real problem. He was one of the few—if not the only—African Americans in town, which made him an easy target for surveillance. By a strange set of events, he had found himself stationed in the country when the new U.S. ambassador to Laos, who had known the officer in Congo, had requested him. The officer had been meeting with an important Laotian minister who had vital inside information on the communist side of the Indochina peace talks. The two had been meeting in secret for many weeks, but with the Pathet Lao closing in on the city, the local militia had instituted a curfew and had begun throwing up random roadblocks. The case officer knew that if the Laotian minister was caught with him it would be a disaster.

After he explained his predicament, I sat there for a few seconds wondering what I was going to do. Coming up blank, I explained to the case officer that we would accompany him on his next pickup to meet with the minister and get him programmed for a disguise. In the meantime, I sent a cable back to headquarters right away asking for their instructions. Almost immediately I got a reply
saying they didn’t know what to do either. The thing that worried them the most, they said, were the ears. In other words, the only thing they could think of was a device we were working on for our officers heading to the Soviet Union, which sat on the face but didn’t cover up the ears.

I then thought about some of the appliances I had seen in Calloway’s garage and wondered if he might have something that could help. First, however, I would have to meet with the Laotian minister to get his measurements, which I was able to do after being subjected to my own rolling car pickup. After I had all his information, I sat down and wrote a long cable outlining my plan. In the cable, I specified my idea, then asked headquarters to forward the information I was including to Calloway.

As I was later to learn, Calloway had gotten the measurements and had gone right out to his storage sheds. He had made masks of most of the stars in Hollywood for their stunt doubles to wear, and it just so happened that the specs I’d sent him fit those for Victor Mature and Rex Harrison.

After an interval of a few weeks, I received a package from headquarters. Inside were two masks, along with the other materials I had requested, including a pair of flesh-colored gloves. The disguise techniques that Jacob and I were eventually able to put together for this operation are still classified. When we were finished, Jacob and I were able to transform the African American case officer and the Laotian minister into two Caucasians who loosely resembled Rex Harrison and Victor Mature. As it turned out, after we had disguised them, they were on their way back from the safe house when our worst fears were realized. A random roadblock had been set up and the two were forced to stop. Rather than
panicking, however, they flipped out their brand-new diplomatic ID cards. The soldiers looked at the ID cards, peeked inside the car, and waved them through without incident.

The success of this operation was reported to headquarters in the highest channels. It was really the beginning of what we would call advanced disguise.

O
ver the years, as Calloway and I became good friends, I would come to spend a lot of time out in Los Angeles. On some of those trips, I would work alongside his team at whichever studio they were working for, just as if I was another member of his crew. On one of these outings I was sculpting a new prototype head to be used for the JIB while he and his team worked on the masks for a science fiction monster film. Another time, he and I were walking on the lot of a film studio when a tour bus came by and the driver announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, award-winning makeup artist Jerome Calloway.” Calloway, of course, pointed at me.

After I had become the chief of disguise, we would rotate disguise officers into Hollywood apprenticeships. And, like me, they often worked on the sets of the films he was making. He taught a generation of CIA officers the rudiments of how to make an effective disguise. Beyond that, he also became an invaluable sounding board for future scenarios, many of which are still being used by the CIA today.

Calloway became an asset for the disguise branch in other ways as well. On one of his many trips to Washington, I set up a lunch meeting between him and our chief of operations. At the time I
was looking to expand the disguise section. Calloway knew this, and the topic came up at lunch when the chief asked how my branch was doing. “Fine,” Calloway had responded, “but they’d be doing even better if they had more office space.” Sure enough, we got it.

When Jerome was visiting Washington a couple of years later, I decided to include him in a training exercise. “Flick,” a chemist from a chemical company that also collaborated with the CIA, just happened to be visiting, and I thought it might be good for the two of them to see how we operated in the field.

After the generalist program took off, we were continually training three to four officers at a time, getting them ready for their assignments overseas. In order to cross-train them in the various disciplines, we would immerse them for several weeks in one subject to teach them a particular craft, such as making dental facades. Then, for their final exam, we would put it all together in one complex operation that would require them to use all of their newly acquired skills. In one such exercise, a team of three trainees had to surreptitiously infiltrate a fictitious country, establish a headquarters in a hotel room at the Key Bridge Marriott in Rosslyn, Virginia, and then go out and pick up a terrorist who was on the run. At that point, they were to bring him back to the hotel, where he would be disguised for an exfiltration out of the country.

In order to have some fun, we decided to let Calloway and Flick play the border guards for the fictitious country. The two were thrilled, and went to our costume closet to make it more realistic. The border crossing was set up in Crystal City near the Pentagon. When our team showed up in a van, they found Calloway and Flick sitting at a card table in a vacant lot, wearing fur hats and Polish
uniforms. The trainees were unfazed and walked up to the table. “Hello,” they said. “We’d like permission to enter your country.”

“Why do you want to come in?” Calloway asked.

Using the cover they had prepared, they responded, “We’re flea enthusiasts and we’re planning on attending your flea festival.”

Ever the quick study, Calloway said, “Okay, but our fleas are restricted, so we’re going to have to do an inspection. Drop your drawers.”

The trainees must have had an idea what was going to happen, because when they dropped their pants they were all wearing American flag underwear.

After a quick examination, Calloway and Flick cleared them through and they hopped back into the van and drove to the Key Bridge Marriott. After checking in, they disguised themselves, then headed down to the bar to meet their local contact, played by another trainee. This person would respond using a sign/countersign, which the team had worked out beforehand. In this case, however, rather than using a word or phrase, the team had come up with something a little more creative.

Calloway, who was always telling jokes, had a favorite that had made its way into our office. It was a knock-knock joke involving a drunk at a bar. “Knock-knock,” Calloway would say. “Who’s there?” the person would respond. “Argo,” he’d say. “Argo who?” the person would dutifully answer. “Argo fuck yourself!” he’d exclaim, drawling out the words as if he’d just finished off a bottle of bourbon. It wasn’t long before the punch line had become a battle cry of sorts when the workload was heavy and we had a lot on our minds. Whenever that happened, Calloway would cut the tension by shouting out “Argo!” at which point everyone would respond in kind.

The trainees had decided to use ARGO as their countersign. Though, rather than say it, one of the officers had etched the word across a dental facade that he had created. So the exchange went something like: “The moon is blue,” followed by a big smile with ARGO written across the person’s front teeth in red.

The third part of the operation involved picking up the terrorist, who had decided to bring along his girlfriend, played by Doris Grange. The girlfriend was the twist, as the team hadn’t prepared documents for a woman and so had to disguise her as a man.

When the exercise was over, we got a private room in the hotel and celebrated. It had been a fun day. Calloway enjoyed himself immensely and I think appreciated the complexity of the tasks required of an officer on an exfiltration.

A
fter our operation to create the body double for the shah had fallen through, before flying back to Los Angeles Calloway had reiterated that he would be willing to do anything to help out. By the first week of January 1980, the crisis was still front-page news and I knew that Jerome would be feeling as frustrated as the rest of us.