Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History (23 page)

Another time, Anders and Schatz were sunning in the courtyard when they’d been forced to duck into the house as a helicopter hovered directly overhead. The four houseguests then huddled inside and waited for what they assumed was the coming assault. Earlier they’d come up with a two-part escape plan in case something like this happened. The first part envisioned their hurrying up to the roof and then out onto the road that ran above Sheardown’s house. The second part was—well, that was the part they hadn’t worked out yet. With a helicopter hovering overhead, it wouldn’t be but a matter of seconds before they were spotted. They hunkered down and eventually the helicopter flew off. Zena called John at the Canadian embassy to find out if he knew anything. As it
turned out, a mullah had been assassinated at a nearby mosque, and the Revolutionary Guard were combing the neighborhood looking for the assailant.

S
uch close calls, coupled with the monotony of their confinement, tested the houseguests’ fortitude. Zena withdrew into herself more and more, while the others tried to cope with the uncertainty as best they could. Cora, it seems, decided to sleep late into the morning, and then most of the day. Mark remembers climbing under his bed one night as the Sheardowns gave a curious Iranian visitor a tour of the house. Every one of them felt they had overstayed their welcome with the Canadians and wanted desperately to find a solution. Another issue that occurred to them was the possibility that one of them would become seriously ill and need medical attention. The odds that they could be captured, killed, or suffer some freak accident increased with every second they remained in the country.

Early on, the houseguests had been told that when the other hostages were released, they would be escorted down to the airport by a group of Western ambassadors who would then try to put them on the same plane. As the weeks dragged on, however, this scenario seemed less and less likely. The fact that they had managed to escape, in their mind, would no doubt make them prime suspects in the eyes of the militants. What if the militants demanded to interrogate them? Or accused them of being spies simply because they had avoided capture? They saw themselves as being a separate entity from the embassy takeover altogether and felt that the State Department wasn’t doing enough to help them.

Fed up with what they saw as inaction, they met one night in the den to draft a letter in which they expressed their frustration and fear of being left behind in the event that the hostages were freed. And even though they knew that Ambassador Taylor probably wouldn’t send the letter, they were certain that the intent of their message would get out.

Meanwhile, the mood in Ottawa was also growing tense. Knowledge of the fugitive Americans was becoming an open secret. Flora MacDonald, for one, was getting increasingly nervous, as several people approached her to ask about the houseguests. The Canadians began making discreet arrangements to close down their embassy. It was anybody’s guess as to how much longer the secret of the houseguests could remain safe.

B
ack in Washington, the various efforts being mounted against Iran were still running at full tilt, and I immediately sat down with my team to go over the final technical preparations for the Argo cover story. In addition, since headquarters had yet to sign off on any one particular operations plan, that meant we had to finalize materials for Argo as well as the other two cover stories—the Canadian nutritionists and the American English teachers. Despite our backstopping, apparently there were still some people within the State Department and National Security Council who were skeptical of the Hollywood option. It was too ambitious, too ballsy, too complex. In my mind, these were the very characteristics that would make it work.

Everyone in the office had been impressed with the
Variety
ad, but I reminded them we still had a lot of work to do.

Now that we had Studio Six up and running, the next step would be to build up the portfolio, assign the houseguests their roles, and work on their secondary documentation. I knew we had a very small window in which to get this done, so we had to move fast.

Joe Missouri had recently returned from Canada and I put him on the task of fleshing out the backstories for each of the houseguests. I had nothing but confidence in Joe. He could invent any story for any situation. I had shared with him some of the notes that Calloway and Sidell had given me about the various roles that each houseguest would most likely play as well as their credits. It would be Joe’s task to look at the personalities and ages of the houseguests and come up with the plausible jobs for each. For instance, we learned that Kathy Stafford had had an art background, so he made her the art director.

I can remember seeing Joe at his desk, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he plucked away at his manual typewriter. Joe was as bright as they come and fit the mold of a new breed that was immersed in the world around him. He was having fun, and would occasionally come to show me what he’d done. In order to make it easier for the houseguests to remember who they were, Joe had come up with the ingenious trick of using details from their real lives. For example, in coming up with the name for Mark Lijek’s alias, “Joseph Earl Harris,” Joe had used the first and middle names of Cora’s father. Likewise, for the birth date of Mark’s alias, he’d used Cora’s father’s birthday.

Trying to memorize an alias can be a daunting task, especially if your life depends on it. Sometimes you can’t help but get confused, especially when you’re traveling on multiple documents. I remember
one instance when I traveled to Moscow on an alias and was checking in at a hotel when the clerk said, “Okay, Mr. Mendez, we have you staying two nights.” Without breaking stride, I slid across my alias passport and said, “Oh, Mendez couldn’t make it. I came instead.” Inadvertently, somehow the reservation had been made in my real name. In fact, sometimes when you sign into an embassy you can spot the people who have momentarily forgotten who they are supposed to be because they have signed in under one name, then scratched it out to write a different one in its place.

When he was finished, Joe had taken the roles of various members of the production party and rewritten them in the form of résumés. Not only would this help the houseguests to learn their aliases, but it could also be carried out in the open in the production manager’s portfolio, which would lend credibility to my own cover.

While this was going on, I met with Truman, our chief of production, to talk about the Studio Six business cards. Each houseguest would be given his or her own card, which contained the individual’s title and the phone number of our LA office. I had thought of an idea while on the trip back from LA and ran it by him. “How about a big red number six on them,” I said, “made out of film strips.” He nodded his agreement. I also handed him the exemplars for the guild cards that Calloway and Sidell had “borrowed” from their friends, as well as the script and Jack Kirby’s sketches. For the script we would need to take out any reference to the previous title and insert “Argo.” For the sketches, I wanted some of the illustrators from the bullpen to create their own versions of outer space creatures and far-out drawings, as if our art director had been working on her own ideas. I realized this was a
strange request, but I had nothing but confidence in our artist-validators, who were hired because of their ability to do it all. No task seemed out of their reach, including fine technical schematics and forged writing. Most were blue-collar “tradesmen” who prided themselves on their quirkiness. They were a unique breed of cat in the midst of our bureaucratic organization. They were difficult to manage. More than once they threatened to go on strike. But they were highly competent at what they did.

Truman, who was originally a typesetter, fit right into the mold of these blue-collar types. As chief of production, Truman oversaw anything we might need in the graphics department. He would assign a number to each of the jobs that came into the graphics branch and attach that number to a large manila envelope known as a job jacket. This was how the progress of the job was traced and the hours tracked from section to section. This was, of course, because almost every graphics job required multiple departments. OTS had ink experts, paper experts, photo experts, even a printing press at its disposal.

Once I had given them the guild cards, the artists would pore over them from every angle. It’s not enough for a document to look right. It also has to feel right. For instance, how does it sound when you crinkle it? So you examine the paper and go down to your paper stock and get the one that fits. The same goes for laminated IDs. If someone is going to stop you in the middle of the night to examine your ID, he may not even be able to see it, but he can certainly feel it. Maybe one of the traps is that the laminate is sticky. All of these things are factored into how the graphics branch reproduces documents.

Allen Dulles said it best:
“Any intelligence service worth its salt can make the other fellow’s currency.”
In other words, every nation needs to have its own airtight security measures, while at the same time be actively working in secret to reverse engineer those of the enemy faster then they can invent them.

A
fter we had fleshed out the portfolio, the next job would be to work on the houseguests’ travel documentation. Now that we knew who they were, we had to show how they’d gotten into Iran in order to get them out.

This is not as easy as it sounds, as it entailed not only booking tickets but also inserting the various cachets and border stamps into the houseguests’ passports to show that they had indeed followed the particular itinerary we were saying they did. The process is always complex and involves dozens of highly skilled technical officers working in tandem. In this case we had decided on an around-the-world itinerary, with the houseguests making their final flight into Iran from Hong Kong. What this meant was that Joe needed to go to our archives and look up the particular cachet that was used by the immigration officer at Hong Kong the day the houseguests were said to have departed. This is why it is so important to continually update the travel records and why the CIA is constantly launching probes, sending officers or agents through areas to update our database. After finding the right cachet, Joe would then send it to the chief of production, whose job it was to see it through the various phases involving numerous departments within OTS. When the process was complete, Joe would be handed a travel document with an appropriate cachet stamped into it. But that would be for just one country. Imagine having to insert
dozens of stamps into one travel document. Further, imagine hundreds of operations going on simultaneously, and you get an idea of the complex nature of the work going on in the graphics department.

To complete our scenario, Doris was busy putting together some disguise materials. These would be included in the bag that would eventually be sent by Ottawa to the Canadian embassy in Tehran. Since I was going to be heading into Iran, I was a little bit more hands–on than normal, and she would come to me from time to time with a progress report. Because of the houseguests’ inexperience in wearing sophisticated disguises, we chose to emphasize basic behavioral and visual clues for them to masquerade behind. Diplomats are traditionally conservative in their appearance; we would encourage them to become more flamboyant, edgier, sexier. Lots of perfume and aftershave, shirts unbuttoned, tight pants, gold chains, loud jewelry, hair blow-dried—outfits that they never would have chosen. Their behavior would have to change too: they would need to be louder, more aggressive, more histrionic, arrogant even. In short, all the stereotypes that an outsider would associate as characteristics of a person who worked in Hollywood.

We also didn’t know how much space we were going to have, since the disguise materials would have to fit in the same bag along with all the documents. Doris came back with a small do–it–yourself kit for each of the houseguests, which included products such as styling gel, makeup, mod-style glasses, eyeliner, etc., as well as a typed sheet of detailed instructions on how the houseguests could alter their appearance. The props kit also included the viewfinder that Sidell had picked up for the cameraman to wear around his
neck, as well as the materials I would be bringing with me in the portfolio, such as the script and sketch pad.

With headquarters and the State Department still vacillating about the various cover options, I wrote an updated version of the operations plan in which I laid out my idea of taking all three options with me into Iran. I would then present them to the houseguests and let them decide whether they wanted to leave individually or as a group and choose which cover they preferred. It wasn’t an ideal scenario, but with so many different governmental organizations involved, I felt it was the only way we could get there in time. I also knew that since I was going to be the one to present the options to the houseguests, I could help steer them in the direction I thought we should go. Anything was better than just sitting around and waiting for the bureaucrats to make up their minds. I knew the Canadians were getting nervous as well. It was time to get our diplomats out before it was too late.

About a week after my return from California, everything was ready. Joe and I hopped on a plane and flew to Ottawa to load the pouch.

As soon as we were in Canada, Joe and I set about finalizing the documents and collecting yet more pocket litter, such as maple leaf pins, matchbooks, business cards, receipts—this time, things that would give the houseguests the appearance of being Canadian citizens.

The Canadian pouch turned out to be the size of a pillowcase, barely big enough for our exfiltration kit of documents and disguise materials. The Canadian couriers apparently had a much easier time than the typical U.S. State Department courier, who usually accompanies several mailbag-sized pouches. The Canadian
courier is allowed only one bag, and he keeps it with him at all times. So here was a final setback: some of our extra disguise materials would have to be left behind.