Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History (32 page)

It was around this time that I landed at JFK in New York. I’d flown over on a TWA flight from Frankfurt and had trouble getting them to refrigerate the huge tin of caviar that Joe Stafford had given me. The stewardess took one look at the tin and said, “Sir, that caviar is either Iranian or Russian. If it’s Iranian, I am not refrigerating it until the hostages are released. If it’s Russian, after they get out of Afghanistan and the Olympics are rescheduled, we would be glad to find room for it in our fridge.” I looked at her with newfound admiration. I took all of my laundry out of my carry–on bag and swaddled the tin in my American underwear.

Before hopping on my connecting flight, I called my family from JFK to let them know that I was going to be arriving on time.

I had an emotional reunion with my family at Dulles when Karen and the kids came to pick me up. Much was left unsaid, but I think all of them could tell that I was relieved to be home. Later that night, when Karen and I were going to bed, the two of us
lapsed into a minute or two of silence. Eventually she turned to me. “You’re a national hero,” she said, and then, after a short pause, “but nobody will ever know.”

About a week later, I went to Los Angeles with Hal and our wives to meet with Calloway and Sidell and their spouses. In the wake of the story being published, Studio Six had quietly faded away and it was time to express our gratitude. Dave, the CIA officer I had handed the ten thousand dollars to in LA, had come down for the celebration with his wife as well. As we pulled into the parking lot at the Universal Studios Sheraton, we saw on the marquee the now familiar slogan
THANKS, CANADA!
and as we checked in we were given round metal Sheraton lapel buttons emblazoned with the same expression. We each proudly pinned them to our lapels. Our “wrap” party, the Hollywood tradition celebrating the last day of filming, was being held secretly in the midst of the celebration of Canada’s great rescue operation. A casual observer might have thought we were Canadians, from the way we were celebrating.

At the end of the evening I proposed one last toast. Standing at the end of the table and swaying only slightly, I raised my glass and uttered a word that few outside of our group would hear or understand. “Argo!”

On March 11, Stansfield Turner invited me to join him at the White House for his morning meeting with President Carter. I was told I had two and a half minutes with the president to tell him briefly the story of Argo and how we were able to pull it off. The only other person in the Oval Office was Zbigniew Brzezinski, the president’s national security adviser. The president was on the phone when we entered the office, standing in his shirtsleeves
poring over a memo. He was telling someone to change the word “hate” on the bottom of page two to “abhor.” Classic Jimmy Carter—all about the details. Turner introduced me to the president and he shook my hand, but looked perplexed as to who I might be or what I might have done. Turner attempted to clarify, but I was prompted to move through my story quickly while trying to keep the president on schedule. When it came time for the obligatory photo, the White House photographer came forward and snapped several frames. Admiral Turner immediately threw himself in front of the camera. “No, no,” he said, “we can’t show his face. He’s undercover!” The president asked if it couldn’t be just between the two of us. “Sure,” I said. It would only take me seventeen years, but eventually I would be allowed to have the photo. Today it hangs in my library.

When I got back to Foggy Bottom, I went to Fred Graves’s office and he immediately took me to see the director of OTS, Dave Brandwein. I tried to tell them about my meeting with President Carter, but they seemed uninterested. “Here,” they said, “this is more important.” They told me I had been promoted to GS15, the equivalent of a full-bird colonel in the U.S. Army.

After I walked out of South Building and went up to the third floor of Central Building to my office, I caught my secretary elbows deep in her safe drawer. “Guess what, Elaine?” I said. “I got promoted and I saw the president, but not in that order.”

“Did you get my message?” she asked. “You’re having dinner at the White House tonight. Call Jacques Dumas. You’re supposed to be there at five o’clock.”

I called Jacques on the green phone, the secure line between our offices and headquarters, to ask him what was going on. “Oh,
yeah,” he said, “I put that part about having dinner at the White House to be sure you’d call me back. Actually, you’re going to meet with Hamilton Jordan, White House chief of staff, at five o’clock.”

My instructions were to go to the West Wing and meet Jordan in his office. I found my way back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the second time that day. I was ushered into Jordan’s office by his secretary, Eleanor, who informed me that “Ham” would be there shortly. Eventually the door opened and a smiling face came bobbing into the room. Hamilton Jordan shook my hand and we settled into a couple of chairs in his sitting area while he proceeded to tell me what he needed. Jordan wanted a disguise, the best disguise that we could build in a short time. He then explained why. He’d arranged a secret back-channel meeting with Sadegh Ghotbzadeh in Paris to discuss the release of the hostages. However, the slightest hint that Ghotbzadeh was meeting with Jordan would throw the whole thing out the window.

The following day, Eleanor escorted me to the White House basement barbershop. It was still light out when we went downstairs. The shop was closed but Eleanor let me in. I was surprised to see that it looked just like every barbershop I have ever been in: two chairs, two mirrors, two sinks. She pulled the shades on the garden-level windows and turned on the lights. When Jordan arrived, I sat him in one of the chairs and used a custom-made wig, mustache, and pair of glasses to completely alter his appearance. When I was finished, I had transformed him from a brightly polished American bureaucrat into what he came to call his “sleazy Latin American businessman” look. I took the description as high praise.

Jordan’s meeting had been part of a scenario worked out by two men, Christian Bourguet and Hector Villalon, two adventurers
with access to Iran’s secular government. Bourguet was a French lawyer involved in radical causes while Villalon was a businessman from Argentina, whom Carter would later describe as having the reputation of a “South American riverboat gambler.” Both were old friends of Ghotbzadeh’s and claimed they could open a direct line between Iran’s secular leadership and the White House. It was always a long shot, but Carter was desperate. Up until this point, there had been no direct talks on any level between the White House and Iran. So Carter sent Jordan and Hal Saunders to meet with the two men in Paris, and over the course of a few weeks they were able to hash out a plan that was said to have the support of both Ghotbzadeh and Iran’s newly elected president, Abulhassan Bani-Sadr. The convoluted idea would involve a multistep process that started with the creation of a five-person UN commission that would listen to Iran’s grievances. Eventually this commission would take control of the hostages after they had been transferred to a hospital in Tehran. Many thought the plan was nothing but a distraction. Ghotbzadeh was a natural schemer who talked a good game, but who in the end had little clout when it came to the hostages. When Khomeini refused to give the UN commission permission to meet with the hostages, the whole thing fell apart.

No one was more frustrated by this than President Carter. By early April it appeared as if diplomacy had run its course. On April 7 he expelled all Iranian diplomats from the United States and enacted unilateral trade sanctions against Iran. Then, five days later, at a meeting of his National Security Council, he announced that he was ready to launch Operation Eagle Claw.

From the beginning, my office had some grave reservations about the viability of Eagle Claw. By the winter of 1980, RAPTOR
had settled into his new life in the West and had aligned himself with the intelligence community. As an Iranian ex-colonel, RAPTOR had intimate knowledge of the country’s topography, including the geography of the area that Colonel Beckwith’s men called Desert One. The plan, which had evolved slightly, called for eight helicopters to fly into Desert One from an American aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. There, they would link up with six C130 aircraft. The C130s would bring in Beckwith and his team of Delta Force commandos and Army Rangers, as well as large packets of fuel for the helicopters. After being refueled, the helicopters would then ferry the soldiers on to Desert Two, the second site outside of Tehran. From there they would launch their assault on the U.S. embassy. With his local knowledge, RAPTOR could see right away that there was a problem. The site picked for Desert One was on a smugglers’ route used only at night, and he believed that the U.S. military had a good chance of being discovered if they tried to use it as a staging area. Reportedly, he warned the planners and Beckwith about this but was rebuffed.

The history of Eagle Claw has now been written, and the world knows that the helicopters never made it to the U.S. embassy in Tehran. In fact, they never even made it to Desert Two. The problems began almost as soon as the mission got under way. When the C130s made it to Desert One, RAPTOR’s prediction turned out to be true. Upon landing, Beckwith and his team immediately encountered several unknown vehicles racing through the area. Even worse, a firefight erupted. It turned out that one of the smugglers’ trucks was carrying fuel, and when a soldier tried to knock it out with an antitank rocket the fireball lit up the desert sky for miles. It appeared as if one of the men in the truck had
escaped and made it into a second truck, which then sped away. If that wasn’t bad enough, as Beckwith was contemplating this new development, a large Mercedes bus carrying nearly forty Iranians swung into view, and the Army Rangers were forced to stop it at gunpoint. This put Beckwith on the horns of a major dilemma and forced him to divide his forces. So much for the element of surprise.

While this unfolded, the eight helicopters en route from the aircraft carrier were having their own problems. Two had mechanical failures and were forced to turn back, while a third made it to Desert One but became inoperable upon landing. Five helicopters weren’t enough to complete the mission, and President Carter made the decision to abort. In the ensuing confusion, one of the helicopters collided with a C130 gunship full of fuel. Eight U.S. servicemen tragically lost their lives while several others were wounded. The remaining helicopters and C130s returned safely.

By almost any metric, the aftermath of the failed rescue was the lowest point for America during the 444-day Iranian hostage crisis. In his book
Keeping Faith
, Carter describes it as one of the worst days of his life.

A few days later, Cyrus Vance, who had been against Eagle Claw from the beginning, resigned as secretary of state.

I
n May of 1980, for our role in helping to rescue the six houseguests, Julio and I received the Intelligence Star, which was one of the CIA’s highest honors. The medals and certificates were presented in the Agency’s secure bubble, on a stage in front of a few hundred of our colleagues. Admiral Stansfield Turner did the
honors. Since the operation had been a secret, my family was not allowed to attend the ceremony.

After a brief stay in Panama, the shah had moved on to Egypt, where he died on July 27. Strangely, this was more or less the exact scenario that Jerome and I had envisioned for our body double operation at the beginning of the crisis. With the shah now dead, Russian armies on the march in Afghanistan, and Iran tiring of the American embargo, Khomeini finally signaled his willingness to negotiate. The United States was also inadvertently helped in this matter by Iraq, which had invaded Iran in September of 1980. Needing American parts and ammunition for their weapons was just one more incentive to bring the Iranians to the table.

On January 21, 1981, the fifty-two remaining American hostages were finally released. Jimmy Carter flew to Germany to meet with them personally, but by this time the damage to his political career was irreversible. His failure to resolve the crisis caused him to be seen as a weak and ineffective leader, and Ronald Reagan had easily defeated him in the 1980 presidential election. Rubbing salt into the wound, the Iranians had chosen the date of Reagan’s inauguration as the day they would hand over the hostages. In all, the hostages had spent almost fifteen months in captivity with the United States government unable to do anything to effect their release.

Obviously, diplomatic relations with the Iranian government ceased the day that the American embassy was overrun. But nobody could have predicted that more than thirty years later the United States and Iran would still have no formal contact. Iran, a country once considered our long-term friend and strategic ally, has now segued into a rogue state governed by Islamic fundamentalist zealots. During the hostage crisis, America was frustrated by
its inability to negotiate with a regime that placed the ideals of theocratic bigotry before those of reason and the rule of international law. Unfortunately, not much has changed. Today, the United States and Iran are as far apart as they have ever been, while the population of Iran suffers under a corrupt and ineffective regime.

We now know that when the militant students overran the American embassy, they did not expect to stay for any length of time. But as the crisis stretched on, and as Ayatollah Khomeini seemingly endorsed their actions, they discovered that they had invented a new tool of statecraft: hostage taking. In no other civilized country in the world would such an undertaking be tolerated by the host government. And therein lay the power of the technique. Once Khomeini approved of their plan, the students had no need to negotiate.

Iran has followed its own example in the interim, taking hostages almost whimsically whenever it felt a need for international attention or had a cause that needed leveraging. In 2007, fifteen British Royal Navy sailors were taken hostage and held for two weeks. In 2009, a British ship with five sailors was boarded in international waters and the sailors held hostage for over a week before being released. Three American hikers who wandered into Iranian territory, famously known as the “hiker-spies,” were taken hostage and two of them held for over two years, released only after a million-dollar bail was paid. The British embassy was overrun in 2011, its files burned, its flag desecrated, and the building pillaged. Six hostages were taken briefly before the government stepped in. The Iranians have never had to pay a price either for ignoring the conventions of international diplomacy or for taking foreign civilian citizens hostage under the most questionable of circumstances.
And there is no reason to believe that they will let up on this behavior anytime soon.