After Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979, 52 Americans were taken hostage at the embassy. But six escaped, hiding in the
residences of Canadians until the CIA devised a way to save them.
Antonio Mendez, the CIA’s former master of disguise. (AP)
‘It’s like Buck Rogers in the desert.”
Antonio Mendez was pitching a science-fiction film that mixed “Middle Eastern myths with spaceships and far-off worlds” to a skeptical audience. Based on a novel called “Lord of Light,” the potential film already had concept drawings by famed comic book artist Jack Kirby, co-creator of Captain America and The Hulk, and featured such out-there characters as Vishnu the Preserver and Yama-Dharma, Lord of Death.
But Mendez described it with an intensity far beyond that of your average Hollywood lunch. That’s because Mendez was not a producer or screenwriter, but a high-level CIA operative — chief of the agency’s worldwide disguise operations — and his audience was six Americans stuck in Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis. His pitch was not for an actual film, but a plan for their escape. And, as Mendez writes in his new book, “Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History,” the ability of the six to trust Mendez’s wacky plan could mean the difference between life and death.
THE ‘HOUSEGUESTS’
The Iranian hostage crisis began on Nov. 4, 1979, when the American embassy in Iran — a 27-acre complex that included “the ambassador’s residence, an athletic field, tennis courts [and] even a swimming pool” — was breached by a clipped chain on a gate, followed initially by a swarm of women carrying signs reading “Don’t Be Afraid,” and, “We Only Want to Set In.”
Less than a year before, the royal Shah of Iran had been overthrown by an Islamic revolution. Supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been exiled for 15 years only to return as leader, were furious that the US had not only backed the Shah but continued to treat him at the Mayo Clinic.
Millions of dollars had recently been spent to fortify the complex, but as the crowds grew in number and intensity, Iranian militants “found the structure’s one weak spot” in “a basement window that had been left unbarred as a fire escape.”
While armed militants took the main embassy building, eventually taking 52 hostages, they were late to conquer the consulate, a “squat, two-story structure” located on “the northeast side of the US Embassy compound.” American workers there that day included 54-year-old Robert Anders and two married couples in their 20s, Mark and Cora Lijek, and Joe and Kathy Stafford.
With the angry mob outside numbering in the thousands, the consulate employees decided to hit the streets and head toward the British Embassy — which, it turned out, was under siege as well.
After several nerve-wracking days of house-hopping as Iranians hunted Americans throughout the city, they found security at the homes of Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor and a Canadian diplomat named John Sheardown.
Since large groups might have aroused the suspicion of their Iranian domestic staffs, the group split — the Lijeks and Anders to Sheardown’s home (later joined by a diplomat named Lee Schatz), and the Staffords to Taylor’s.
Meanwhile, local groups known as “komiteh,” who supported the militants and would betray any Americans they discovered, regularly patrolled the areas. Sheardown’s gardener was one of them, so the “houseguests” took great care to avoid him, including blackening a glass door, which would have exposed them whenever they walked to the kitchen, with shoe polish.
Taylor’s staff also began asking about the Staffords, who were supposedly “tourists” yet never left the house. And as Taylor greeted television anchor Peter Jennings one night, the Staffords “huddled in the room upstairs, worried they might make an inadvertent sound and be discovered.”
In mid-December, a Canadian journalist got wind of the “houseguests” in Iran, and threatened to go public. The Canadian ambassador to the United States convinced him to wait, but there were other security breaches as well, and increasing rumors of their existence among the Iranians.
Canadian foreign minister Flora MacDonald told US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance that if the houseguests weren’t removed from Canadian custody at once, she would “put them on bicycles and have them ride for the Turkish border.” Saving them suddenly became a top priority.
HIDING IN FLAMBOYANT SIGHT
For Mendez, a veteran of difficult exfiltrations, this one presented a greater-than-usual challenge. Contrary to what we see in the movies, the easiest way to smuggle someone out of a hostile area is not in a car trunk or by way of some dramatic, explosive rescue, but by disguising them on a standard commercial flight.
Mendez knew that even veteran operatives often folded under such conditions. Now he would need to rely on not one, but six inexperienced civilians who would need to maintain false identities while walking past Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
So Mendez needed a cover for the houseguests that would not only fool the Iranians, but feel real enough for the houseguests to embrace.
Normally, Mendez writes, cover stories are “designed to be boring so as not to attract attention.” But Mendez realized that nothing about this situation was normal. “What if we designed a cover story so fantastic that nobody would believe it was being used for operation purposes?”
And so he devised a plan to make the houseguests a film crew, who were in Iran to scout locations.
To get the plan rolling, Mendez turned to a veteran makeup artist he identifies in the book as Jerome Calloway, who had been a longtime favorite of Bob Hope.
Several years earlier, when Mendez had needed to exfiltrate “an important Laotian minister,” he sent the man’s measurements to Calloway, and they happened to match the measurements of actors Victor Mature and Rex Harrison, whose faces Calloway had once made masks of for their stunt doubles to wear. With Calloway’s help, the minister and an African-American case officer were transformed into “two Caucasians who loosely resembled Rex Harrison and Victor Mature” and smuggled to safety.
Once Mendez’s superiors approved the plan, he needed to make the film a verifiable reality, in case the Iranians checked, and also to bolster the confidence of the houseguests.
Calloway introduced Mendez to Bob Sidell, a veteran makeup artist who had worked with Steve McQueen, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. Sidell agreed to establish and run the production’s Hollywood office, so if anyone called to check on the cover story, Sidell could make it real.
They called the company “Studio Six Productions,” after the six houseguests, and gave Sidell $10,000 of CIA money to establish the company. They rented an office that had just been used by Michael Douglas for “The China Syndrome,” installed phones and other office equipment and designed business cards for the fake film professionals.
LIGHTS, CAMERA, ‘ARGO’!
But there was still the question of the film itself. The recent success of “Star Wars,” which filmed in Tunisia, convinced them that science fiction would work best, especially since the genre often employed “mythological elements” that would be well-served by a Middle Eastern presence.
Calloway brought Mendez an actual script called “Lord of Light,” which had been en route to being filmed until “a member of the production team was arrested for embezzlement,” and Mendez thought it was perfect, especially since given its science fiction mumbo-jumbo, it would leave the Iranians clueless.
And the title? One of Calloway’s favorite jokes went as follows: “Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Argo.” “Argo who?” The answer was to be said in an exaggerated drunken slur. “Argo f – – – yourself!”
Since Argo also happened to be the name of the ship in Jason and the Argonauts, it worked perfectly.
The team placed full-page ads in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety announcing the project, and threw a launch party at famed Hollywood eatery the Brown Derby. Then Mendez, posing as European production manager Kevin Costa Harkins, contacted the Iranian consulate about beginning his quest to seek locations for his film.
Mendez and his team also had to create documents showing that the houseguests had been in Iran all along, including not only tickets for travel, but “the various cachets and border stamps” showing their specific itineraries, a complex process involving “dozens of highly skilled technical officers” and requiring familiarity with every stamp used by the countries involved on that particular day.
ESCAPE FROM TEHRAN
Mendez and an associate flew into Tehran on Friday, Jan. 25, with the intention of flying out with the houseguests first thing Monday morning.
Mendez met the houseguests at Sheardown’s home, and told them about Studio Six Productions. Showing them the ad in Variety, where it read, “from a story by Teresa Harris,” he handed Cora Lijek a business card with that name and told her, “That’s you.”
Everyone bought into it and were even excited about it except for Joe Stafford, who feared that the embassy hostages could suffer retaliation for their escape and therefore thought they should remain in Iran.
After the houseguests voted five to one to proceed with the Argo plan, Mendez instructed them to learn every detail of their new identities and also told them to make themselves more flamboyant for the flight in both dress and behavior, noting that they needed to be believable as a Hollywood crew.
When he conducted a dress rehearsal on Sunday night, he was stunned at how they had embraced their roles, with Anders even blowdrying his hair and donning “tight pants and a blue shirt two sizes too small, unbuttoned down to his chest,” and “a topcoat across his shoulders like a cape.”
The next morning, Mendez met the houseguests at the airport while it was still dark. He was relieved to find that Joe had decided to join them and amused at how Anders “sashayed through the doors carrying a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger” like “a character out of a Fellini film.”
He had told the group that sticking together was paramount — so that if there was a problem, he could step forward as the film’s production manager and handle it — but when they lined up to go through security, Schatz, in his eagerness, jumped into a shorter line, winding up ahead of the rest.
He handed the security officer his fake passport, and the officer looked it over for what seemed far too long, and then asked, “Is this your photo?” Schatz said that it was, and the officer “disappeared into a back room,” leaving Mendez wondering if he’d made an error in preparing the fake document. When the officer returned, telling Schatz that the photo didn’t look like him, Schatz realized that the photo, taken months earlier, featured him with “a bushy Yosemite Sam mustache” that had since been trimmed. He “pulled a serious expression to match the one in the photo, then used his fingers to mimic a pair of scissors clipping the ends of his mustache,” and was waved on.
THE CREDITS ROLL
The rest sailed through security and headed toward their plane. As they prepared to board, seemingly ending their ordeal, it was announced that the flight was “delayed due to mechanical problems.”
No one had broken cover so far, but with a new delay and Revolutionary Guards starting to antagonize foreign passengers, the houseguests were riven with worry. Still, they managed to hold it together with just one minor slip-up — when Joe absentmindedly began reading a newspaper in Farsi, a language your average Hollywood crew member would not know. He realized his mistake as quickly as Mendez observed it and put the paper down.
Finally, after a wait Mendez calls “a grueling mental ordeal,” the flight was ready for takeoff. As the group approached the plane that would fly them to freedom, Anders punched Mendez in the arm, smiling, and said, “You guys think of everything.”
“Turning, I saw what he was pointing at,” writes Mendez. “There, painted on the side of the plane’s nose, was the canton in Switzerland where it had come from. In big letters, it read, ‘AARGAU.’ I let myself smile and took it as an omen that everything would be all right.”
“Argo” by Antonio Mendez with Matt Baglio will be published by Viking later this month. A film of the same name, based on the true events and starring Ben Affleck, is out in October.