Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History (28 page)

It was as they were debating Joe’s plan that I decided to walk in and see how things were going. I could sense the electric tension in the room, so I decided to use some parlor magic. “Let me show you how an operation like this works,” I said. I picked up two corks off a nearby counter, interlocking them between my thumbs and forefingers to form two D shapes. I had used this trick many times to illustrate how to set up a deception operation. “Here’s us and here are the bad guys,” I said. “And this is how we are going to get out of each other’s way.” With a little sleight of hand I pulled my two hands apart and the corks appeared to move through each other. It was a simple trick, but the goal was to show them that they were involved with professionals in the art of deception. That everything had been thought of.

It must have worked, because after that they voted five to one in favor of using the Argo cover option and leaving as a group.

With that out of the way, the six gave Julio and me a tour of the house, which was truly palatial. While we were making our rounds, Chris Beeby, the New Zealand ambassador, showed up along with his second secretary, Richard Sewell. Sewell would prove to be incredibly valuable over the coming days. He explained to me that he had a close contact down at Mehrabad who worked for British Airways, and Julio asked him if he would be willing to help us out by
grabbing some more of the yellow and white disembarkation/embarkation forms. Sewell readily agreed and we set up a time to meet at the Canadian embassy the following day.

Before leaving, I sat down with the houseguests once again to go over their cover stories. I handed each of them the personal résumé that Joe Missouri had created for them and told them to memorize them backward and forward. “If anyone stops you or hassles you in any way, just act confident and look them in the eye. Think about how someone from Hollywood would react. Remember, Julio and I will be right beside you, so if anything goes wrong let us do the talking.”

The last thing I wanted to go over was their disguises. I had brought with me the materials that Doris had included and I spread them out on the table. Since thousands of Iranians had passed through the consular section of the embassy, where the majority of the houseguests had worked, there was a chance that one of the Americans might be easily recognized.

I explained to them that the key to a good disguise was to identify the various salient features or qualities that make them who they are, and then alter those, rather than try to go overboard in one area. Often, it is the subtle things that give people away, such as the way they walk, or a particular mole. If this operation were taking place in Moscow, we would have had a whole crew of OTS disguise experts working with us. Instead, we would have to make do with what we had.

“Each of you is going to need to make yourself look a little flashier, a little more Hollywood,” I said. I handed Schatz his viewfinder and gave Cora the script.

“Julio and I will be back here on Sunday night to go through a
little dress rehearsal,” I told them. “But in the meantime, learn your parts. You will be tested!”

Since they knew the stakes, I didn’t have to tell them what would happen if they didn’t. I only hoped that Joe would come around and get into the spirit as the others had. Despite all the hard work and energy we’d put into the Argo cover story, one lackluster performance and the whole plot would come crashing down.

14

FINAL PREPARATIONS

Julio and I returned to the Canadian embassy on Saturday morning. The building, which was normally empty on the weekend, was buzzing with activity as the Canadians went through their last-minute preparations for shutting down on Monday. The first thing I did was send an updated ops plan and situation report to Ottawa and CIA headquarters. In it I elaborated on their cover, explaining that “six Canadians from Studio Six Productions” had called on the ambassador in Tehran. They were hoping that he could set up an appointment with the Ministry of National Guidance to present their case for leasing the local bazaar for their film “Argo.” I then went on to explain that the ambassador had advised them to look elsewhere for locations and that, following his advice, they would probably depart the country on Monday, January 28.

This would give us the option of bringing the six to the airport in an embassy vehicle with an embassy driver, saving us the difficulty of having to arrange reliable transportation to the airport.

After this was done, Julio and I sat down to work on the documents package. As gracious as ever, Taylor offered to let us use his office.

Julio immediately got to work on the disembarkation/embarkation forms. Sewell had dropped by with a stack of extras, which gave us a nice cushion. Julio completed the Farsi and English annotations on about twenty of these, using the wording on our own yellow sheets to guide him.

While this was going on, I turned my attention to the passports. My main task was to insert the Iranian visas that we had collected in Toronto and complete the back travel, including stamping in the arrival cachet entry for Mehrabad. The prime exemplar for the Mehrabad arrival cachet was the stamped impression we had received in our own passports upon arrival.

The worst thing that can happen when you’re falsifying a cachet entry is to forge the signature of an immigration officer before arriving in the country, only to discover this same person is about to stamp you out. He would obviously know that he was not working on the day your passport says you arrived. Another mistake, of course, would be putting in a stamp that was no longer in use. Our careful monitoring and collection of the cachets at Mehrabad, as well as the diligence of our OTS ink experts from the graphics division, allowed us to produce an exact match.

I then slowly and carefully placed the cachets in the passports, using a technique I’d learned from my days in the bullpen to make it look as if they’d been done hastily by an immigration officer.

As with operating in disguise, there are two types of validators: those who do it by feel and those who work in a controlled manner. The former tend to work better after lunch when they’ve had a few
martinis to loosen them up. I, on the other hand, was definitely a member of the second group. My approach to validating was to make it look as offhand as I could but to control it. That way, if I ever got in a tight spot, I didn’t have to rely on my instincts and reflexes, but could rely on my mechanical talents. There were several tools I’d been given in training to help me, such as the forger’s bridge, a technique using one hand to steady the other while writing. And of course there were many other tricks I’d learned on my own.

Over the course of my career I’d had plenty of opportunities to practice my skills as a forger. Being an artist-validator is anything but routine—there were times when I found myself holed up in some safe house on the other side the world, working long hours under the glare of a watchmaker’s lamp.

Among the first jobs that our new artist-validators typically will get are reproducing border cachets. The actual impressions of these stamps tend to be a little messy to begin with and so it’s okay if their work is not so perfect. In fact, perfection can sometimes be a detriment, as a document’s very perfection is often what sets it apart from the common variety. There is nothing more suspicious to an immigration officer than seeing a perfectly inked cachet impression in the midst of all the clutter in a travel document. After mastering the skill of creating realistic clutter, an artist can then move up to working on secondary documents: driver’s licenses, military ID cards, health cards—anything that would accompany a primary document. At the top of the food chain are major documents, such as a travel document. Some artists could work years in the bullpen before getting a crack at one of these, and it was considered a major insult if a
less experienced artist was assigned one before a more experienced artist.

On some occasions, we would have the whole department working on something together. I can remember one time when someone had access to a rarely seen communist country’s passport but had to return it the next day. A whole crew of experts was brought in on the weekend. It took all the process photographers we had on board just to photograph the different elements we had to make in order to duplicate it.

As an OTS traveling tech officer, you have to be ready to work at any time and under any condition. Once I was even forced to improvise in the bathroom of an airplane. This was on a mission to the subcontinent to help out with an exfiltration of a Russian defector and his family. (This same Russian had been smuggled overland from a neighboring country in the trunk of a car.) A cable had gone out asking for the services of an artist-validator and I’d hopped on the next flight. As the plane was descending to land, however, the flight attendant announced that there had been an outbreak of yellow fever in the country and anyone who was not currently vaccinated could expect to be put in quarantine for who knew how long. We had less than twenty-four hours to get the Russian and his family out of the country, so this was not an option. In addition, I had several incriminating rubber stamps and forging tools, not to mention thousands of dollars in cash hidden in a concealment inside my briefcase. With so much on the line, I couldn’t risk being held up. I quickly stepped into the toilet and upgraded my shot record to include a yellow fever notation good for ten years. I had to do this in a matter of minutes as the flight began its final approach. The turbulence made it difficult, but I was able to make
it back to my seat just before the plane’s wheels touched the ground. We were able to get the Russian and his family out the following morning.

A
s Julio and I worked on the documents, Taylor took a break from his activities and joined us in the office. Not wishing to bother us, he took a seat on a white sofa across the room while Julio and I continued to go about our business. Taylor sat and listened as we asked each other questions and discussed the finer points of our counterfeiting skills. He was clearly enjoying being in the midst of this clandestine skullduggery. A few minutes later, Taylor’s secretary entered the office to inform him that a rug wallah had arrived in the outer office. “Oh, right,” said Taylor. The wallah entered with a flourish. “I have brought only my finest rugs for you, Mr. Ambassador!” he called out. He unfurled several rugs, laying them about the floor. Taylor bent down to examine them with an expert eye. It was clear that he was hoping to purchase a few more antique Persian carpets to take home with him. They were having a quiet discussion about the goods, discreetly so as not to disturb us.

While this was going on, Claude “Sledge” Gauthier was busy slamming away with his sledgehammer, destroying sensitive equipment in a far-off room of the embassy, the reverberations of each impact echoing through the halls.

Julio and I were too engrossed to notice any of this. I was busy stippling in a date on one of the cachets with a sharpened stick, similar to a manicure stick my wife often used. When I’d finished with the cachets showing the houseguests’ back travel, it was time
to move on to the visas. We had had somebody from Ottawa pick up an exemplar for us in Toronto, which we’d then sent to OTS in Washington so that the techs could reproduce the stamp. However, as I opened the inkpad I noticed that the ink had completely dried up. Our ink chemist had painstakingly formulated this ink especially for its fluorescent quality. These visas were, in fact, the operative entries in the whole package. They would be subject to the closest scrutiny at immigration departure controls. Without these, it didn’t matter what cover story we used—we wouldn’t be able to get out of Iran. Looking about for a solution, my eyes fell on Taylor’s liquor cabinet. I walked over and scanned the labels, selecting a single-malt scotch that I thought would have a high-octane quality alcohol as one of its ingredients. I poured two fingers of scotch into a highball glass and brought both the bottle and the glass back to our workspace. Julio looked mildly amused as I set them down. “Thirsty?” he asked. I poured some of the scotch onto the inkpad to moisten it and without skipping a beat began stamping the visas into the passports. Julio shook his head and smiled his smile. “Why not?” he said. “This whole operation is being fueled by alcohol anyway.”

It took a good part of the morning to complete the entries in all six passports. The only thing left to be done was to tidy up our document packages and destroy any evidence of the dark arts of a forger. The spurious Canadian passports, the fallback set with the error in the visas, were sent to the shredder. So were the alias U.S. documents we had included in the diplomatic pouch just in case we needed them. Our tools, inkpads, ink supplies, and so on were fed into the flames of the embassy incinerator. The schoolteachers and nutritionists went up in smoke. It was Argo or nothing.

M
eanwhile, back in Hollywood, Bob and Andi Sidell were busy manning the phones at Studio Six. We hadn’t given them a timetable as to when the exfiltration was going to happen, so Bob assumed it could be at any moment.

In the beginning, Bob and Andi had gotten a thrill out of playing amateur spies. It wasn’t long, though, before this initial excitement was replaced by worry and fear. It suddenly dawned on them that the lives of eight individuals, possibly more, were in their hands. Later Bob told me that in the evenings they would crowd around the TV, hoping they wouldn’t see my face paraded across the evening news as the latest captive tied up and blindfolded. Down at the office, Andi began dreading the sound of the telephone, worrying each time she heard it ring that it would be someone calling to report bad news. Instead most of the calls were about business.

Even though Sidell had been in the film business for nearly twenty-five years, he was still amazed by how easily the myth of Studio Six had taken off. After our initial ad had run in the industry trades, the
Hollywood Reporter
had called asking for comment. Hollywood is a small town and word had gotten around that Calloway was connected to the picture. A reporter wanted to know who would be starring in the film. Sidell was quoted in the article as saying, “We will use substantial names. At the moment we are sworn to secrecy.” It wasn’t long before he began to get calls from friends who were looking for work. After two weeks, the office had been inundated with scripts and headshots. “This is crazy!” Bob said to Andi one day as they sifted through it all.