9  RAPTOR in the Dark

If plans relating to secret operations are prematurely divulged, the agent and all those to whom he spoke of them shall be put to death.

—Sun Tzu

Tehran, April 1979

 • The tall Iranian stood facing me in the dim light of the cramped bathroom, gripping a strip of flat television antenna wire with both his hands. A naked bulb attached to the twisted copper ends of the antenna dangled from his right fist, while his left hand thrust the opposite ends of the wire into an outlet beside the bathroom sink. The door was shut to prevent the light of this improvised lamp from spilling into the other rooms of the dark apartment.

It was mid-April 1979, six months into the mounting chaos of the Iranian Revolution, triggered by the Islamic fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers. The Shah, self-proclaimed heir to the Peacock Throne of the ancient Persian Empire, was in exile, stricken with cancer. On February 14, two weeks after Ayatollah Khomeini had returned triumphantly from his own European exile, an anti-American mob overran and briefly occupied the sprawling U.S. embassy compound on Takhat-e-Jamshid Avenue in central Tehran.

Revolutionary Guards loyal to the Kometeh (the Committee for the Revolution) expelled the mob, then used the takeover as a pretext to roam the compound themselves, ostensibly “guarding” the threatened American diplomats. But these same custodians of order prowled the streets every night, firing submachine guns into the air and chanting in Farsi, “Death to the Shah! Death to America! Death to the CIA!” Tehran had become a city ruled by gangs of well-armed zealots whose loyalty lay with a shifting alliance of Muslim clerics loosely united under Khomeini.

This escalating violence had triggered the Tehran station’s urgent request for the exfiltration operation of our most valued Iranian agent (code-named “RAPTOR”), the man who now stood beside me. We were in an apartment on the third story of a nondescript building two blocks from Motahari Boulevard, where I worked as quickly as I could on the preliminary stages of RAPTOR’s exfiltration disguise.

The apartment was desolate but displayed evidence that RAPTOR had been camping here for several weeks. A soiled blanket was thrown across a sofa in the adjoining bedroom, and beside the sofa stood a vintage wooden console television set. He had obviously been tinkering with it, since its tubes and wires were strewn about the floor. The sofa and television were the only pieces of furniture in the apartment. In the narrow kitchen, there was a stack of well-thumbed foreign magazines and a pile of old Farsi newspapers. A bag of rice, a sack of lentils, and a single row of canned food from the bazaar were neatly stacked on the drainboard of the kitchen sink. All the windows were covered with layers of newspaper in lieu of drapes or blinds.

“Just a few more minutes,” I whispered to RAPTOR, trying to assure him that the special disguise materials on his face would soon be removed. His nose and cheeks, from his upper lip to his brow, were now covered with a material that obscured his vision. Forced to breathe through his mouth, he was clearly fighting off the claustrophobic panic that the loss of sight and normal breathing could induce.

On the other side of the sink, “Andrew” was assisting me, stirring a special adhesive under a stream of warm water from the rusted tap, while “Hal,” the acting CIA chief in Tehran, sat tensely on the sofa, listening to the subdued crackle of a Motorola two-way radio held against his ear.

 

THIRTY MINUTES EARLIER, as a smoggy night descended on the city, Hal, Andrew, and I had completed our surveillance detection run by passing through a bustling department store on Abbasabad Avenue. After leaving the store, we had dashed across the street, dodging cars, taxis, and trucks, most of which sped through the streets without headlights. Our risky move had the effect of making any foot surveillance visible; plunging recklessly into the chaotic onslaught of traffic would also thwart any vehicle surveillance. We would never have used such a blatant SDR in a sophisticated spy capital like Moscow, but the opposition in Tehran was essentially composed of bandits, not trained counterintelligence operatives.

Certain we hadn’t been followed, we made our way quickly around a corner to the side entrance of the apartment house. Two other CIA officers parked down the street saw us coming and scanned both ends of the block to confirm that we were clean before we entered the doorway. They then signaled by radio code that it was safe to proceed.

We crept up the dark stairs and found RAPTOR hiding in the shadows of the second-floor landing. He stepped into the dim light. The gaunt, lanky middle-aged man still bore the unmistakable stamp of a senior military officer, despite his ill-fitting civilian sweater and trousers.

During the previous ten years, RAPTOR had advanced swiftly in the Shah’s armed services, eventually assuming a key staff position in the palace. Over that decade, he had been a prized unilateral intelligence source for the CIA. The scion of a cultured, wealthy family close to the royal court, RAPTOR had nurtured a direct connection to the Shah and had been privy to his policies during the tumultuous years preceding the Islamic Revolution. In fact, RAPTOR had been our sole “Blue Striper” (top-level) source in Iran, whose intelligence was so reliable that it was sent directly to the White House on receipt at Headquarters. But when Khomeini had declared his Islamic Republic in February, many Iranian civil officials and military officers had fled the country, fearing brutal imprisonment or execution. RAPTOR had immediately gone into hiding. He had spent the first few weeks in a relative’s unheated attic, crouched beneath a tin roof on which melting snow dripped continually.

When we were safely inside the flat, RAPTOR embraced us, his eyes brimming with tears of gratitude. Darting quickly across the living room Andrew and Hal pulled open a narrow window and dropped a coiled rope to the bottom of the light shaft forty feet below, which adjoined a commercial hotel facing a busy avenue. The rope was our emergency escape route, to be used if we had to flee and the stairway was not an option. After descending the light shaft, we could enter the hotel through the laundry window and leave through a service entrance.

Watching us, RAPTOR regained his characteristic decisiveness and he took me into the bathroom to display his handiwork with the TV antenna and the forty-watt bulb. Without speaking, I laid out my materials, and Andrew joined us.

 

I TESTED THE disguise with my fingertips, but the material had not quite set. Suddenly, we heard a knocking on the front door…three faint taps. All of us froze. RAPTOR pulled the wires from the outlet, and I opened the bathroom door. Hal was whispering urgently into the radio. Blinded by the disguise material, RAPTOR groped his way toward the door as I led him by the hand, with Andrew and Hal close beside me.

Were we about to be caught red-handed? Andrew and Hal slipped past us to ready the rope in the open window.

The knocking persisted. With my hand guiding his, RAPTOR bent down, his mouth close to the door, and whispered in Farsi.

“Who’s there?” he asked, his voice muted because of the disguise material covering half his face. It glowed weirdly in the faint light.

“It’s me, Uncle,” came the voice of a young boy.

It was the son of one of RAPTOR’s relatives, who owned several flats in the building. Slowly, we exhaled.

“Do you need anything from the bazaar, Uncle?” the boy asked.

“No, lad. Not now. Come see me later.”

“I will, Uncle.” The child’s footsteps faded away on the stairs.

 

RAPTOR AND I spent the next three days together at Hal’s safe house apartment. But “safe” was hardly an appropriate word: In February, Hal had watched in horror as militants burst into the lobby with a .50 caliber machine gun and started firing away at the high brick walls of the nearby American embassy compound. Such unpredictable and gratuitous violence seemed inevitable in a country on the brink of anarchy. Even in the absence of organized surveillance, Revolutionary Guards, militant “students” loyal to their own mullah or ayatollah, or renegade former soldiers who had adopted Islamic zealotry, might simply decide to break down our door in search of booty and capture us in the process.

We planned to exfiltrate RAPTOR out through Mehrabad Airport right under the noses of the Kometeh security service and their armed enforcers, the Revolutionary Guards. We also decided to transform RAPTOR into an elderly Jordanian businessman, an Anglophile who favored rough tweed and had adopted the British manner of the old Trans-Jordan protectorate. This persona was chosen because RAPTOR spoke decent Arabic and could apply a British accent to the English he had learned at U.S. military schools.

On the day before the scheduled departure, we assembled all the elements of the disguise, wardrobe, and alias documentation. RAPTOR sat at the dining table of the flat in his lumpy woolen suit, carefully scanning the well-worn passport and other identity documents Andrew had provided. He looked up and smiled, transformed into an old Arab salesman who had traveled the Gulf states for decades, peddling oilfield equipment and truck parts. I could tell from his expression that we had managed to instill some trust in our subject, and I could only hope that it was warranted.

Since RAPTOR had never seen Andrew undisguised, we could use him as the spotter at the airport. His final task before boarding RAPTOR’s flight would be to make a phone call from the public booth in the departure lounge and pass a “go” or “no go” signal. If RAPTOR boarded the plane safely, Andrew could then identify himself after takeoff and assume his duties as the Iranian’s escort to freedom. If things did not go well, Andrew would presumably witness RAPTOR’s capture and have seen where he was taken, then report to us.

RAPTOR seemed comfortable in his clothing and with his personal effects, which greatly augmented his disguise persona. I had coached him for hours on how to walk and talk, and especially on the somewhat doddering manner to employ, presenting his airline tickets, passport, and customs declaration. Andrew briefed him for over an hour on the alias documents, ostensible travel itinerary, and cover legend. RAPTOR had memorized the phone numbers of his “affiliate” offices elsewhere in the Middle East, CIA fronts already alerted to vouch for his bona fides, should Iranian officials at the airport somehow decide to call.

After RAPTOR turned in following dinner, however, I had a final private word with Hal.

“He’s been a quick study and seems eager to meet the challenge,” I admitted. “But I’m worried.”

Three times over the past few days, RAPTOR had visibly slipped into depression. He had hunched in his chair, hands clasped between his knees, face tense. “What will happen if things go wrong at the airport?”

His greatest fear was being caught, tortured, and made to lose face in front of his captors. “You have no idea what they would do to someone like me,” he said. “Don’t you have a pill for me that I could use in such an emergency?”

I thought of TRINITY in Moscow. But I had neither the time nor the volition to make such a request of Headquarters. “You’re just feeling operational nerves,” I assured RAPTOR. “Everything will be fine. We’ve done this many times before and we’ll be with you every step of the way.”

As a diversion, I demonstrated my old sleight of hand with two wine corks. “This is how we will slip through the airport, just as though we were invisible.”

“What’s your assessment?” Hal asked after I related these incidents.

“We’ll wake him up very early tomorrow and I’ll make my final assessment of his mental state then.”

If I decided RAPTOR was not up to passing through the airport alone, I would buck Headquarters’ instructions and personally see him through the controls. I would not need to board the airplane with him, but would at least escort him safely into the departure lounge.

The next morning at three I awoke RAPTOR, now known as “Mr. Kassim.” Once he’d had a shower, I worked quickly to apply the disguise. But it soon became apparent that Kassim had changed overnight in fundamental and significant ways.

“Did you sleep well?” I asked.

He merely clicked his lip, the prototypical Middle-Eastern negative response. The subtle color matching I had struggled with preparing the disguise no longer conformed with his greenish pallor. His manner was also altered. There was no mistaking the hunted look in his face.

I understood his dilemma. Before reaching senior rank, RAPTOR had been an energetic young field officer. His soldier’s instinct was toward action. He preferred crossing hundreds of miles of mountains and desert on foot and shooting his way across a border, dying honorably in the action if that was God’s will. But to be caught sneaking from Iran unarmed, dressed like an old man, went against the grain of a once-proud soldier. He would need help at the airport.

While Andrew prepared a light breakfast of flatbread and tea, I took Hal aside once more and informed him of my decision.

“I’m going into the airport with Kassim.” Hal nodded his agreement. “I’ll go ahead with Andrew to reconnoiter the terminal one last time,” I added, “and confirm that the Swissair flight has landed and is scheduled to depart on time.” This was definitely stretching Headquarters’ instructions thin. But we were the operational officers on the scene and had to take chances or risk failure.

As we drove through the empty streets of Tehran before dawn on the crucial day, the acrid coal smoke and anti-American posters plastered on every bare wall heightened the menace of the deserted city and accentuated the gravity of our task. Driving beneath the ornate archways of Mehrabad Airport and around the circular drive we stopped near the glass-and-concrete main terminal. We were right on schedule. After Andrew parked the car and deftly removed his disguise, we strolled into the terminal. Glancing around quickly, I felt optimistic. The hall was empty except for a few drowsy militants slouched on benches and some temporary revolutionary officials sipping tea at their counters. No one seemed to pay attention to the two foreigners who had just entered the terminal. The Swissair agent confirmed that the plane was en route from Zurich and on time for both landing and departure. Andrew proceeded through immigration control with no problem. So far, so good, I thought.

I returned to the curb and waited for Hal and our star performer, Mr. Kassim. To avoid looking suspicious, I strolled to the dark end of the parking lot and watched the sunrise for a few moments to calm myself. As the sun lit up this promising spring day, taxis and vans rolled to the terminal to unload passengers, and soon Hal and Mr. Kassim arrived. They climbed out of the cab, and I walked up casually, offered a broad smile, and shook Mr. Kassim’s hand to reassure him. I then grabbed his luggage and nodded a farewell to Hal, who would return to the safe house and await the signal from Andrew that “Mr. K” was either safely aboard the flight or had not made it—an unenviable job.

Mr. Kassim passed through the customs departure control with no problem. Andrew’s documents were meticulous, and the disguise of a well-traveled, elderly Arab merchant aroused no suspicion among the amateurish revolutionary-zealot customs agents, who had been alerted to search for wealthy Iranians fleeing the Islamic Republic with gold, valuable carpets, or antiques. After Kassim checked in with Swissair and had his boarding pass, I took him as far as the immigration checkpoint and hung back as the Revolutionary Guard clerk stamped his passport.

Gripping Mr. Kassim’s hand to say good-bye, I could see the same glint of animal terror in his eyes as before. He abruptly broke away and proceeded down the corridor to the departure lounge. Something was not right. Even though I should have left the airport, I decided to stay in the terminal until the Swissair flight had departed.

Twenty minutes later, I was seated in the waiting area, listening for the boarding announcement, when I looked up and saw Andrew motioning to me through the clear glass barrier on the other side of the immigration checkpoint, his face grave.

“The flight’s been called,” he whispered. “But I can’t find Mr. K. I saw him come into the departure lounge, but he’s just disappeared.”

I thought fast. Could this operation be salvaged? “Go back and board the flight,” I said.

I returned to the Swissair desk and told the agent I had a problem.

“My uncle is boarding your flight to Zurich, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten to give him his heart medicine.”

The man frowned.

“Can you escort me through Immigration so I can find him and make sure he has the medicine and knows how to take it? You see, he’s an old man and very forgetful.”

The airline clerk nodded sympathetically and immediately walked me through the checkpoint, then turned me loose in the departure lounge. Across the hall, Andrew was preparing to pass through the final security check and board the bus to the airplane. He gave me a shrug—he still didn’t know Mr. K’s whereabouts.

I scanned the wide hall. Suddenly my eye fell on the door to the men’s lavatory. He had to be in there, I thought. As soon as I entered the echoing, tiled room, I noticed that one of the stalls was occupied.

“Mr. Kassim, Mr. Kassim,” I called softly.

The stall door opened slightly, and a large dark eye peered anxiously back at me.

“Come on, Mr. Kassim. You’ll miss your flight.”

The door opened further. He was transparently shocked at seeing me.

“Come on, my friend,” I said with a chuckle to reassure him. “It’s time to go.”

“How did you get in here?” he stammered.

Seizing him by the elbow, I thrust him from the men’s room and led him across the departure room, arriving just in time for the bus. Uniformed Revolutionary Guards, who were now obviously present in the departure lounge, glanced at us curiously but did not approach.

Although he had been literally immobilized by fear, my sudden appearance had broken the grip of his terror.

Five minutes later, the clerk informed me the flight was on its way to Zurich. I placed my call to Hal, signaling that the exfiltration had been successful. That afternoon, the return cable from Andrew was welcomed by all: RAPTOR LANDED SAFELY IN HIS NEST.

 

Washington, November 1979

 • In the early fall of 1979, I had been named Chief of Authentication for the Graphics and Authentication Division (GAD) of OTS. I was now responsible for disguise, false documentation, and the counterterror and counterintelligence forensic examination of questioned (possibly forged) documents and materials. After the RAPTOR operation, I made sure that we renewed our active contingency plans for agent rescues from hostile territory.

From the moment an agent came on board, GAD specialists began to prepare for his eventual exfiltration, which required the labor of hundreds of personal documentation and disguise specialists. The documents themselves were produced by graphic artists and craftsmen, whose products had to pass the most rigid scrutiny. At the same time, regional experts tailored an agent’s cover legend to match his demeanor and personality. Finally, technical operations officers had to be prepared to lead the operation in the field as I had, literally shepherding the escapee through the checkpoints to freedom, making sure that he did not lose confidence at the critical moment.

The ultimate test of our abilities would come in November 1979, when radical “student” followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini seized and occupied the American embassy in Tehran. Over the years, the 444-day-long captivity of the fifty-three hostages from the American embassy in Tehran, as well as the secret rescue of their six State Department colleagues on January 28, 1980, have been the stuff of myth. The role of the CIA in general, and my participation in particular, remained secret until the CIA’s fiftieth anniversary in 1997.

Jean Pelletier and Claude Adams’s book, The Canadian Caper (The True Story of Six Americans and Their Daring Escape from the Hostage Crisis in Iran), told only part of the story. Written soon after the crisis, it mentioned that some CIA help was provided to Canadian ambassador Kenneth Taylor in his escape plan for six American “houseguests,” who were hidden at the homes of Taylor and his chief immigration officer, John Sheardown. But since then, the prevailing impression has been that it was the Canadians alone who rescued the American diplomats from the vengeful Iranian mob hunting them down, and somehow managed to lead the six diplomats through Mehrabad Airport to freedom.

I am now at liberty to tell the true story of those tense, dramatic days.

 

MY MEMORY OF the prolonged national emergency begins on the morning of November 4, 1979, when I entered the CIA’s Foggy Bottom compound. The South Building seemed to be under a state of siege, with people striding grimly in all directions, clutching red-striped Secret files. A quick scan of the wire service tickers and cables from the field confirmed the worst. Hundreds of militant “students” shrieking, “Death to America!” had overrun the embassy compound as armed Revolutionary Guards stood by, or even aided them in their efforts. Ayatollah Khomeini quickly voiced his personal support for the unprecedented act of aggression. The presence of the deposed Shah in New York, where he was undergoing treatment for advanced lymphoma, had moved Khomeini and his followers to demand the Shah’s immediate return, along with all Iranian government funds held by American financial institutions.

Within days, however, a glimmer of hope emerged from the grave cables and shocking news photos of American diplomats, bound and blindfolded, herded at gunpoint by bearded young militants before a chanting mob of thousands surrounding the embassy compound. Apparently, five Americans—men and women working in the separate consular section building at the rear of the compound—had managed to escape during a sudden rainstorm and were taken in by the Canadian embassy. The five individuals were Consul General Robert Anders; Consul Joseph Stafford and his wife, Kathleen; and a second vice consul, Mark Lijek with his wife, Cora. Agricultural Attaché Lee Schatz had been working in a nearby office when the mob attacked. Eventually he was able to join the other Americans, making a total of six.

Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor sheltered Joseph and Kathleen Stafford in his official residence in the comfortable suburb of Shemiran, while Chief Immigration Officer John Sheardown and his wife, Zena, harbored the other four American fugitives in their nearby villa. Kept out of sight of the prowling Revolutionary Guards and Kometeh plainclothes operatives, the Americans were in no immediate danger.

But any day, the unpredictable Kometeh and Revolutionary Guards might double check their head count of the embassy hostages and come up six short. This was not yet an immediate threat because the situation in Tehran remained chaotic, and the Iranians couldn’t be sure precisely how many official Americans had been in the country and how many away on leave at the time of the takeover. If the hostage-takers did realize there were six American diplomats still free in Tehran, however, the Revolutionary Guards might search all diplomatic buildings, immunity be damned.

The fundamentalists in Tehran were in a frenzy of vituperation. The Ayatollah Khomeini, speaking on state television from the holy city of Qum, had declared the occupied U.S. embassy “an espionage place” that had worked for decades against the Iranian people. Now we had reason to worry. The fact that the six houseguests had evaded the militants’ initial assault—a possible indication of clandestine training—might unfairly brand the Americans as members of the despised CIA and could lead to harsh treatment if they were captured.

An equally ominous event almost went unnoticed during these chaotic days. The Kometeh’s secret courts condemned over six hundred allegedly anti-Khomeini prisoners to immediate execution. For three days, they were led before firing squads in the prisons once run by the Shah’s brutal secret police, SAVAK. As I read these accounts, the plight of the six Americans began to haunt me. The militants combined hatred of the West with stubborn vindictiveness. They might actually execute the six American houseguests, if they could get their hands on them.

In mid-December 1979, my division chief entered my office early on a Thursday morning and dropped the case files concerning the six Americans on my desk.

“I know you’ve got plenty on your plate,” he said. “But this job is going to have to take an equally high precedence.”

“I’ll form an exfiltration planning team immediately,” I promised.

In any exfiltration, failure was a catastrophe. In this case, if we were caught in an attempt to rescue the six American diplomats, our failure would receive immediate worldwide attention. Not only would it reflect poorly on the United States, President Carter, and the CIA, but it would also place the other embassy hostages in Tehran in an even more dangerous situation. The Canadians were in dire straits as well, and if our exfiltration were to unravel, we would drag their diplomats into the mess.

As usual, we were working under extreme time pressure. First, we had to evaluate the basics of the exfiltration. Fortunately, RAPTOR’S rescue had given us a body of technical data on then-existing airport controls, so now we had to collect and analyze current intelligence on Iranian Customs and Immigration, particularly concerning foreigners. To so do meant continuing to support the infiltration and exfiltration of a few officers and third-country agents traveling in and out of Iran on intelligence-gathering and hostage-rescue planning operations. We could turn their information to our own purposes.

We were most concerned about the positive immigration exit controls that dated back to the days of SAVAK’s iron efficiency. Iranian Immigration still used the two-sheet embarkation/disembarkation form, printed on No Carbon Required (NCR) paper, which foreign travelers had to complete on arrival. The original white copy remained with Immigration, and the traveler retained the second, yellow copy in his passport. Upon departure, the traveler presented this copy at the immigration exit control, where, in theory, the clerk compared the two copies of the form to verify that the traveler was departing before his visa expired.

This control procedure was similar to what we had encountered during the NESTOR exfiltration. But while Jacob and NESTOR had been able to bluff their way through Customs without their currency declaration sheets, it was foolish to think that six nervous American fugitives could brazen their way past revolutionary Iranian authorities.

“We’ll have to keep testing their efficiency right up to the operation itself,” I advised the team.

By studying the debriefs of the agents and officers passing periodically through Mehrabad Airport, we determined that the militants in control had not yet restored the level of efficiency needed to make this type of positive check a threat. In fact, one agent reported that as late as mid-December, the controls had been so unprofessional that the yellow copies of the forms hadn’t been collected unless offered by the departing passenger. However, we had no way of knowing how long these lax conditions would prevail.

Besides choosing our exfiltration route, we had to fabricate a feasible cover story and provide documentation for a party of six Americans, male and female, ranging in age from twenty-seven to fifty-four. Their real professional identities raised other problems. As American Consul General, Bob Anders was a well-known figure among Iranian officials. His deputies, Joseph Stafford and Mark Lijek, were also quite familiar to a broad cross-section of Iranians who had applied for visas to America, and we suspected that our diplomats and their wives were on a Kometeh wanted list, with their pictures hidden under Mehrabad immigration counters.

Consulting with Hal, who had returned to Headquarters as the Near East Division’s Chief for Iran, I immediately learned the DO’s position on the cover and passport debates now under way. Even though OTS had an ample selection of foreign documents, none of the six house-guests had been trained in the fundamental tradecraft necessary to put on a convincing show at a rigorous immigration control. “We can’t have them stammering their way through with some B-movie accent,” Hal said. Besides, he added, many Iranians spoke foreign languages, and someone might challenge the six to respond in their “native” tongue. “They just won’t be able to sustain a foreign cover story.”

“Well,” I quipped, trying to break the tension, “we can’t exactly make them American missionaries who wandered into Iran by mistake in the middle of this crisis and now just want to go home.”

Although everyone involved in OTS and the DO agreed that building a cover around U.S. passports would draw undesirable attention to the subjects, the Agency had to keep that option open. Ironically, there had been a constant stream of American journalists and well-intentioned humanitarians passing through Tehran since the embassy takeover, but we knew the Kometeh kept close tabs on those individuals. Allowing our houseguests to retain their American identity was an extremely risky proposition.

That left the Canadian option open. The six were hiding in Canadian diplomatic residences and spoke North American English, so constructing plausible cover legends around Canadian citizenship was feasible. There was one small problem, however: The government in Ottawa was constrained by laws that prohibited foreigners from using Canadian passports for any purpose. They were already challenging diplomatic convention by giving our people sanctuary.

“I don’t think Ottawa is going to bend on this one,” Hal cautioned.

“I’m afraid you’re right,” I said.

However skeptical I actually felt, I recommended the use of Canadian passports as the first choice. For the second option, I suggested using some type of foreign passport, preferably from Anglophone countries. We then plunged into a whirlwind of impromptu meetings and heated arguments, with fatigue and frustration raising stress levels. Anxiety reached an all-time high when the militants occupying the embassy discovered that two OTS-produced foreign travel documents had not been shredded when the compound was overrun. These papers had been issued to Agency officers assigned to the embassy, and one of these officers was among the hostages. He was now subjected to brutal interrogation.

Under Khomeini’s influence, radical subordinates such as the Ayatollah Mohammed Beheshti worked the mob at the embassy into a frenzy of paranoia. They vowed to kill every hostage if America attempted to free them by force. Finding the alias documents only heightened the militants’ paranoia. Foreign Minister Abolhassan Bani-Sadr deemed the American embassy to be nothing but a “spy nest…a vital spy center,” from which America had secretly ruled his country through the corrupt puppet Shah for thirty-five years.

My team and our OTS superiors seized this moment to push for Canadian alias passports through CIA’s Near East Division management. We then began an “all-sources” quest for information on the types of individuals and groups currently using Mehrabad Airport. As a fallback, the Near East Division was developing sources for overland “black” exfiltration options, hoping to establish contact with smugglers whose rat lines followed safer, and less weather-dependent routes out of Iran.

One possible source was H. Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire, who had used a land route to exfiltrate two of his employees imprisoned early in the Iranian Revolution. Perot had already offered his services to the Agency to rescue all the hostages. “What’s the holdup?” he’d snapped in his usual peckish manner. “If it’s red tape, I’ll put up the money and you can pay me back later.”

We soon learned that the groups still traveling legally to Iran included oil field technicians from companies based in Europe, who flew in and out of Mehrabad almost daily. Individual reporters and television teams from all over the world covering the hostage situation also frequented the airport. Surprisingly, a number of bona fide curiosity-seeking tourists obtained visas and traveled easily to Tehran, and the flow of self-appointed humanitarians, many of whom were U.S. citizens, continued. But all of these groups had undergone careful inspection by airport Immigration, with Kometeh agents hovering in the background. Trying to disguise the six houseguests as oil company employees or members of the news media was simply too risky. After much deliberation, I came to a decision: I would lead a small, highly experienced team directly into the revolutionary lion’s den to determine if we could in fact rescue these six helpless Americans without placing them in even greater jeopardy.

“We’ll have to talk to the boys upstairs,” Hal said, lending me his tacit support.

After a pivotal meeting with senior Near East Division management on January 2, 1980, to present our position and review options, I leaped on a flight to Canada, accompanied by “Joe,” an OTS documents specialist. We carried photos and a variety of alias bio-data for the six houseguests, so that we could show our contacts in the Canadian government how convincing their national cover would be, should they provide us with valid blank passports.

Ottawa was chill and snowbound, the Rideau Canal frozen solid, reminding us of the Moskva River in the winter. But we were welcomed warmly, and I saw immediately that our Ottawa contacts saw themselves as allies in the rescue effort. All the cable traffic about the six houseguests had passed through Ottawa to Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor, so he felt like a full participant in the operation, not just an observer. From what I could gather, he possessed many of the operational qualities we could need on the ground in Tehran: He knew how to think ahead and keep a secret.

Our first meeting that morning opened with an unexpectedly pleasant surprise. “Lon Delgado,” my local liaison contact, showed me a classified memorandum, saying “Cabinet convened a rump session of Parliament to pass an order in council to approve issuing your six diplomats Canadian passports for humanitarian purposes.”

I pushed our luck and requested six spare passports to ensure that we had two cover options. We then asked for two additional Canadian passports to be used by CIA “escorts.” Although they approved the six redundant spares, Parliament politely declined to make an exception to their passport law to cover professional spies like me.

At our next meeting with Lon Delgado, I put forth a concept for a cover legend that had occurred to me at home when I was packing my bag for the trip to Ottawa.

“In the intelligence business,” I explained, “we usually try to match cover legends closely to the actual experience of the person involved. A cover should be bland, as uninteresting as possible, so the casual observer, or the not-so-casual immigration official, doesn’t probe too deeply.”

I emphasized that the situation in Tehran was extraordinary, given the size of our party and their lack of experience. Therefore, why not devise a cover so exotic that no one would ever imagine a sensible spy using it?

Without citing him by name, I outlined my long involvement with Jerome Calloway, who had already volunteered his expertise to help rescue the American hostages in Tehran. In fact, the CIA had recently awarded Calloway the Intelligence Medal of Merit in a secret ceremony, making him the first nongovernment employee to be so honored. That award, he’d told me, was more precious than any of his overt professional achievements.

In my Ottawa hotel room the night before, I had called Jerome at his home in Burbank. He had no idea what I was working on and pointedly did not ask on the telephone.

“I’m in Canada,” I simply told him. “I need to know how many people would normally be in an advance party scouting an overseas location for a motion picture production.”

Jerome’s response was immediate. “I read you…about eight.”

“What would be their individual jobs?”

He ticked off the site scouting team: “A production manager, a cameraman, an art director, a transportation manager, a script consultant…that might actually be one of the screen writers…an associate producer, probably a business manager.” He paused. “Oh, yes, the director.”

He explained that the team’s purpose would be to examine the shooting site from an artistic, logistical, and financial point of view. The associate producer represented the financial backers, while the business manager investigated the local banking arrangements, since even a ten-day shooting schedule could mean millions of dollars spent in local currency. The transportation manager’s job was to rent a variety of vehicles, from limousines for the stars to flatbed trucks and mobile cranes for constructing the sets. The production manager was responsible for bringing all these elements together, while the other team members dealt with the actual cinematography, creating the film footage from the script.

Given America’s enormous cultural influence, almost every sophisticated person in the world, including officials in prerevolutionary Iran, understood that a Hollywood production company would have to travel around the world in search of the perfect street or hillside for particular scenes. Film companies, we agreed, were often composed of an international cast and crew, and the government-subsidized motion picture and television industry in Canada had a strong international reputation.

After the meeting, I sent Headquarters a cable outlining our progress with the Canadians and presenting the movie-team option, as well as two other options: The six could pose as a group of Canadian nutritionists conducting a survey in the third world, or a group of unemployed teachers seeking jobs at international schools in the region. I was half expecting a flaming rocket in response to my suggestions, but Headquarters remained silent, always a good sign.

Over the next ten days, I shuttled between Washington and Ottawa, struggling to flesh out the complex logistical details of all three exfiltration cover options. I helped form an OTS team in Ottawa to work on the documentation and disguise items, which the Canadians had agreed to send to Tehran by courier. In Washington, my GAD team labored around the clock, collecting and analyzing the latest information on Iranian border controls. All the messages between Headquarters and the field were transmitted with the FLASH indicator, CIA’s highest precedence. The sense of being engaged in a wartime effort intensified daily.

Headquarters recognized that the Hollywood scenario had potential beyond the possibility of rescuing the six diplomats. Parallel to our effort, the Agency was aiding the Pentagon in developing a military option to rescue the main body of hostages. If the movie cover held up for the exfiltration of the six, it might be possible to approach the Iranian Ministry of National Guidance with a proposal to shoot the film sequences in and around Tehran. Such a plan was not as crazy as it seemed. In spite of the embassy occupation, a number of Westerners not closely connected to the “Great Satan,” America, were still doing business in Iran. From the Iranian point of view, hosting the production of a film would have practical advantages: International sentiment was building against the Islamic Republic, while economic sanctions and the American freeze on Iran’s assets in the U.S. was starting to inflict damage. Allowing a Canadian production company to shoot a film would create a facade of normalcy while encouraging a flow of hard currency.

Between trips to Ottawa and intense planning sessions with the Near East Division, I made a quick trip to consult Jerome Calloway in California. I brought $10,000 in cash with me, the first of several “black bag” money deliveries to set up our cover motion picture company. Normally, such expenditures would be considered wasteful, since the Carter administration had not yet approved the movie option. But Admiral Turner and the Deputy Director for Operations realized that we had to be flexible, and that preparing such an elaborate facade took time and money.

Jerome met me at the airport on Friday night and introduced me to one of his Hollywood associates, “Robert Sidell,” at a suite of production offices they had managed to claim for our purposes on the old Columbia studio lot in Hollywood. With intensive effort over the next four days, Jerome and his associates managed to create “Studio Six Productions” by the close of business on Tuesday. Our offices had just been vacated by Michael Douglas’s China Syndrome production company, and we were sitting on prime movie country real estate. Jerome’s team included masters of the Hollywood system, and they had begun distributing what they called “grease” (cash payments and calling in favors), even before I arrived. Simple things such as the installation of telephones and furniture rental often took weeks and involved the industry’s turf-conscious web of unions. But we had everything we needed to operate by Tuesday afternoon.

On the second day of Studio Six’s conception, we turned to the important question of identifying an appropriate script. Jerome and I were sitting at his kitchen table discussing possible themes when he suddenly looked up beaming. “I think I’ve got what we need,” he said. He had recently received a script a little too evocative of The Exorcist for his taste, but which combined mystical elements with nonspecific Middle Eastern locations.

Jerome shuffled through the heap of screenplays littering his office and retrieved the script in question. It fit our purposes beautifully, particularly since its complex stage directions and cinematography jargon would be almost unintelligible to the lay reader. The script was an adaptation of an award-winning sci-fi novel and had already attracted some interest in the industry. Unfortunately, the producers, who had planned to transform the film’s massive set into a major theme park, had run into financial problems, and the project had collapsed. But they had hired a famous comic-strip artist to create elaborate visual story-boards of the sets and scenes, giving us more eyewash to bolster the production portfolio.

Now we had to find the appropriate name for our “property.” I had already decided that my cover in Iran would be as the production manager, and I would carry the only full copy of the script to use as a prop to show the Iranian authorities if necessary during our exit through Mehrabad Airport. But we still had to repackage the script with an appropriate logo and title.

Over more coffee, the three of us searched for the perfect name for our bogus movie. We needed something catchy, something evocative of the Middle East or mythology. After several failed attempts, Jerome came up with the winner, resorting to the punch line of our favorite knock-knock joke.

“Let’s call it Argo,” he said with a wry grin.

“Argo”—a contraction of “Ah, go fuck yourself,” mumbled by a drunken bum in the joke—had often been used to break the tension of working long hours under difficult circumstances. But Calloway also noted that Argo had major mythological connotations: Jason and his Argonauts had sailed aboard the vessel Argo to recover the Golden Fleece, after performing many feats of heroism.

“Sounds pretty much like this operation,” I said optimistically.

I quickly designed an Argo logo on a yellow legal pad, and the next day, we ordered full-page ads announcing the upcoming Studio Six production of Argo in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, the two most important “trades” of any show biz publicity campaign. The Studio Six production of Argo was described as a “cosmic conflagration,” from the story by Teresa Harris—the alias we had selected for our story consultant, who would be one of the six houseguests awaiting rescue in Tehran.

On my last day in California, I called the Iranian consulate in San Francisco, using my operational alias “Kevin Costa Harkins.” The officials at the consulate, like most Iranian diplomats in America, were vestiges of the former Shah’s government and existed in a state of limbo.

“I’m going to need a visa and instructions on how to obtain permission for scouting filming locations in the Tehran bazaar,” I told the befuddled Iranian consular officer. I added that my party of eight would be made up of six Canadians, a European (myself), and our associate producer, a Latin American.

“Oh, sir,” the man said meekly. “There is nothing we can do to help you or your other gentleman. The situation here is not normal. I suggest you apply to another Iranian consulate.”

Here was a minor complication. “Julio,” the OTS authentication officer who would accompany me, was already posted overseas, where he could receive his visa. He had Arabic language skills and considerable exfiltration experience. He also spoke excellent German and fluent Spanish, and could carry foreign passports with either ethnicity. We had already documented him with a cover legend as one of our production company’s South American backers. Since I planned to travel on an alias European passport, I would just have to obtain my Iranian visa abroad.

Flying back to Washington on the red-eye that night, I carried a rich collection of Hollywood pocket litter, right down to matchbooks from the Brown Derby, where Studio Six Productions had hosted a bon voyage dinner for me. At the airport, Jerome threw his huge arms around me, muttering, “Take care of yourself over there, Tony.” It was an unusually affectionate gesture for the gruff Hollywood veteran, whose style tended to be more evocative of a night club bouncer than a makeup artist.

 

AT THE CONCLUSION of a series of meetings back in Washington and in Ottawa, Lon took me aside and explained in a friendly but concerned manner that the Canadians were losing patience with Washington. “Look, your government hasn’t even stated a preference on your operational plan,” he said. “But Ottawa has made a series of unique concessions without hesitation. What’s taking you so long to move down there?” He added that the six houseguests, who had been hiding in the Sheardowns’ villa and Ambassador Taylor’s residence, were becoming increasingly nervous. Unusually large bands of Revolutionary Guards had prowled around the Shemiran neighborhood, and a military helicopter had been sighted flying low over the Sheardowns’ house, terrifying the Americans and Zena Sheardown.

The most disturbing turn of events involved possible press leaks. Earlier in the crisis, Jean Pelletier, the Washington correspondent of Montreal’s La Presse, had surmised from the official State Department hostage list that a number of American diplomats were unaccounted for in Tehran. Pelletier contacted the Canadian ambassador in Washington, a family friend, who confirmed his suspicions, but prevailed on the young journalist to sit on the explosive information until after the exfiltration. In return, the Canadian government promised Pelletier an exclusive on the dramatic story.

But other journalists were chewing around the edges of the secret, trying to unravel the purposely vague information on hostages that our State Department spokesman had provided as a smoke screen. It was clear that the news media could not be held at bay indefinitely.

Then, one afternoon in Tehran, Ambassador Taylor’s wife, Pat, answered a call on the personal line in the residence.

“Could I please speak to Joe or Kathy Stafford?” The man was soft-spoken, with a North American accent.

Pat Taylor had stifled momentary panic and calmly replied, “Is this some kind of a joke? There’s no one by that name here.”

“Look,” the man persisted, “I know the Staffords are staying at your home.”

It was impossible to determine whether or not the call had originated from inside Tehran or overseas. But one thing was certain: The net was drawing in tighter. The Canadians saw their situation becoming tenuous and initiated plans to close down their embassy before it, too, was overrun and their diplomats taken hostage.

 

NOW JULIO AND I shifted our attention to Europe. Agency officers there had been actively debriefing travelers and collecting the most up-to-date intelligence on Iranian document controls. As this process took place, Julio and I worked in separate cities, each preparing his own alias document package.

We planned to join up in Frankfurt for our final meeting before our launch into Tehran, now tentatively set for January 23 and 24, 1980. Julio and I would apply for Iranian visas at different embassies. If neither one of us was successful, I had a fallback position: A CIA officer in the region had an alias passport on which he had received a visa from a large Iranian embassy staffed by the new revolutionary diplomats. I could borrow his identity and alias passport if I had to.

On Monday, January 21, Julio left Frankfurt for Geneva to apply for an Iranian visa. I departed Washington’s Dulles airport the same day, traveling under my real name on my U.S. official passport but hand carrying the Studio Six portfolio and the materials I would need to complete our document packages.

I met Julio in Frankfurt on the morning of January 22. He brandished his alias passport with its newly stamped Iranian visa. “No problem, Tony,” he said happily. “They seemed happy to have me visit their country.”

Now I had to obtain my own visa. I planned to drive to Bonn the next morning, and hoped the Iranians there would also be accommodating.

That afternoon, we received a FLASH message from Ottawa. Our exfil kits had arrived in Tehran, but Ambassador Taylor and his first secretary, Roger Lucy, had reviewed the documents and discovered a serious mistake. The handwritten Farsi information on the rubber-stamped Iranian visas produced in Ottawa showed a date of issue in February, three weeks in the future. Our Farsi linguist had apparently misconstrued the Shiite Persian calendar. This type of error could unhinge the most meticulously planned operation, but it could also be easily corrected.

We fired back a message through Ottawa, assuring Taylor that we would deal with the mistake once we arrived in Tehran.

On Wednesday morning, January 23, an Agency officer drove me to the Iranian embassy in Bonn. For the first time, I was struck with a mixture of exhaustion, jet lag, and fear. Having been in Tehran for the RAPTOR exfiltration only eight months earlier, I worried that a paper trail of my presence there might have surfaced among the militants occupying the embassy. We knew that they had assigned large teams of child carpet weavers to the painstaking task of reassembling the shredded documents, just so they could identify American intelligence officers who had operated from the building.

I had altered my appearance slightly to match my alias passport photo and brought along the Studio Six portfolio as a prop. To complement this disguise, I wore a green turtleneck under a well-cut European corduroy sportscoat, hoping to evoke an artistic, unmenacing persona.

As we approached the Iranian embassy, I was alarmed to see that the embassy of my supposed country of origin was just down the street. If the Iranians doubted my cover, it would be perfectly standard for them to send me to my “own” embassy for a letter of introduction before granting the visa—something I dreaded, since my passport was spurious. I’d have to resort to the fallback alias passport, which was a prospect riskier than traveling on a freshly minted, authentic visa.

I left the car a block from the Iranian embassy and tried to stroll casually to the consular section. There were about a dozen visa applicants sitting in the reception room completing forms. Grim-faced young Revolutionary Guards in ill-fitting civilian clothes stood in the corners, glaring at the heathens like myself. I took a chair and began to fill out the application, then felt myself become flushed with anger and fear. I had left the Studio Six portfolio in the car when I was dropped off. All I had to convince a stern Iranian security officer that I actually was a movie producer was my alias passport and a few other personal identity documents, including my Studio Six business card. Taking a deep breath, I carried the forms to the clerk’s window and presented them to the consular official.

“What is the purpose of your visit?” he asked with quiet deference.

“A business meeting with my company associates at the Sheraton Hotel in Tehran,” I said in my most polished accent. “They are flying in from Hong Kong tomorrow and are expecting me.”

He studied my application and flipped through my passport, noting the tangle of visas and entry and exit cachets. “Why didn’t you obtain a visa in your own country?”

“Because I was here in Germany on business when I received the telex about the Tehran meeting.” I shrugged casually. “I have to fly to Tehran tonight.”

He nodded. “Very good.”

Fifteen minutes later, I left the Iranian embassy with a one-month visa stamped into my alias passport.

The operations plan for my entry into Tehran called for me to board a Swissair flight from Zurich, scheduled to arrive at five A.M. on the twenty-fourth. Julio would follow exactly the same itinerary one day later, so if anything happened to one of us en route, the other might still get through.

Back in Frankfurt, I sent a FLASH cable to Washington and Ottawa that I was ready to depart. Within minutes, I received approval to launch that afternoon. But thirty minutes later, a communicator handed me yet another FLASH, this one from DIRECTOR, asking me to suspend my departure because President Carter wanted to be briefed once more on the entire operation before granting final approval to the covert operation.

I paced the windowless office, struggling to overcome my mounting tension. Carter was a notorious stickler for detail. Would he cancel this entire operation—because he didn’t understand some arcane point of our profession?

Half an hour passed before the communicator reappeared with a final message from DCI Turner: PRESIDENT HAS JUST APPROVED THE FINDING. YOU MAY PROCEED ON YOUR MISSION TO TEHRAM. GOOD LUCK.

While I was packing my bag that afternoon at the hotel, someone rapped softly on my door. Julio ushered in an older man, a near-legendary Agency contract officer who had been traveling in and out of Tehran in support of the larger hostage rescue operation. Working as a “NOC” (Non-official Cover), his main responsibility was to create the internal support structure for the Delta Force, a highly risky endeavor.

The man’s usually long white hair had been clipped and dyed for the mission, giving him the appearance of robust middle age. Unless you knew the reality, it would be hard to guess he had been in the covert action business since World War II, when he had parachuted into the Nazis’ Fortress Europe to work with resistance groups. Having just returned from Tehran, he gave us very useful insight into the latest situation at Mehrabad and in the city. His most important information concerned documentation.

“There’re still a lot of Iranians trying to get out with forged papers,” he explained. The fact that we would be using valid passports, some with valid visas and others with the best possible forged replicas, was reassuring. But more than this hard intelligence, his positive spirit bolstered our confidence. This man was a master at our craft, and he had just thrown holy water on our hazardous endeavor.

My Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt departed exactly on time, and I allowed myself the luxury of a scotch. The Swissair flight from Zurich to Tehran was normally never delayed, so as I sipped the scotch in the Lufthansa Boeing, watching the moonlight flicker on the snowy Alps below, I tried to calm my inner turmoil. I was committed. The operation was perfectly planned. In two hours, I’d be en route to Mehrabad.

But once in the Zurich airport terminal, waiting for my Tehran flight to be called, I found myself pacing among the passengers. The flutter of nerves I had battled flying down from Frankfurt returned. Every minute that passed before boarding the plane gave me time to consider the gravity of the situation, and I was suddenly overcome with cold panic.

Although I could share only certain details of past exfiltrations with Karen, she had watched me become increasingly anguished and exhausted as this operation unfolded. And when I left the States, neither of us had spoken much about my assignment, although she knew that I was going into Tehran under alias. There had been no need for such a conversation. Karen understood the nature of my profession, and she also realized I would never send a less experienced officer to Tehran if I believed I had the crucial expertise on which success might depend. But on my last morning in our mountain valley, we were both overcome by an unspoken sadness. Again, events had conspired to take me away from my family. As was the usual practice when leaving on this kind of operation, the last thing I did when she dropped me at the airport was to hand her my wedding ring. Agency spies traveling under alias always used legends of single people.

It was this heavy sadness, rather than fear, which paralyzed me now. For several minutes, I trembled, cringing inside my overcoat. Then, the emotion passed.

Suddenly, the loudspeaker crackled. My flight to Tehran had been canceled because of a snowstorm that had closed Mehrabad Airport.

Chuckling at the irony, I checked into a hotel, ordered a steak with a bottle of wine, and called Julio in Germany. We would stick to his schedule the next night, arriving in Tehran together.

“I guess Murphy is still riding with us,” Julio joked.

“Roger that.”

 

WE ARRIVED AT Mehrabad at five A.M. on January 25. The DC-8 taxied between heaps of freshly plowed snow. As we walked to the bus, the coal smoke and lingering smog of winter in Tehran swept across the tarmac, an eerie reminder of the subcontinent’s smit.

Much to our surprise, immigration and customs controls were quick and efficient. The officer to whom I handed the disembarkation/embarkation form with my passport was a uniformed professional, not a disheveled, untrained irregular of the type I had encountered in April 1979. The man hardly glanced at our passports before slamming down his cachet entry stamp and tearing apart the white and yellow sheets of the forms.

I noticed some plainclothes Kometeh security types in the terminal, but they ignored the foreign passengers and concentrated on the Iranian families returning from abroad. I knew that the Kometeh and Revolutionary Guard presence would increase in an hour or so, as passengers leaving on the return Swissair flight began to appear. If the stream of families seeking exile continued, the Revolutionary authorities would be watching for people smuggling gold or valuable carpets—the ubiquitous emergency currency of the Middle East—out of Iran.

Our cab driver, the proud owner of a vintage Opel, was very friendly. “Eat food,” he shouted, handing us a piece of unleavened bread piled high with crumbly goat cheese.

As we careened on the roads to the Sheraton Hotel, we noted Farsi propaganda banners and revolutionary posters draped on the buildings along the main avenues. Fortunately, checking into the hotel at this early hour posed no problems, and a quick scan of the lobby revealed no overt security, although in the back of my mind I sensed that the Kometeh was present.

The next step on our ops plan was the nearby Swissair office, where I planned to reconfirm our eight reservations on the Monday morning flight to Zurich—a vital part of any exfiltration. But the Swissair office was not yet open. Since I knew the U.S. embassy was right down the street, I suggested we stroll past it, then reconnoiter the Canadian embassy, which our tourist map indicated was nearby.

It was bizarre to walk up the broad avenue toward the familiar brick-walled compound, now plastered with more propaganda photos of the Ayatollah Khomeini with his white beard, glowering beneath his black turban. The wrought-iron gates were studded with loudspeaker horns, which called the faithful to daily prayer and led them in the familiar chant: “Death to the Shah! Death to America! Death to the CIA!”

As we approached one of the sandbagged guard posts beside the main gate, I felt another tremor erupt along my spine as reality hit me. Fifty-three of my fellow citizens were being held in that building or at the nearby Foreign Ministry. Although a small group of women and blacks out of the original sixty-six hostages had been released before Christmas, the situation was still grievous. Some of the hostages in the embassy were CIA officers, and I knew the militants reassembling the shredded documents would eventually discover their real identities and turn on my colleagues with a vengeance. At this point, there was nothing Julio or I could do but memorize the exact position of the sandbagged machine-gun posts and observe that the roofs of the compound buildings were free of antiaircraft weapons.

We continued down Roosevelt Avenue and turned left onto Motahari, which the Revolutionary Council had apparently renamed for one of their martyrs. Julio and I stopped at the curb, our tourist map open between us, searching for the Canadian embassy. There was a building with a flag across the street, but it flew the blue and gold of Sweden, not the Canadian red maple leaf.

The uniformed policeman at the entrance of the Swedish embassy could not understand our questions. Julio tried German, Arabic, and even Spanish, but nothing worked. We handed the policeman our map, and I slowly pronounced the syllables, “Can…ah…dah.” But the guard’s perplexed frown only deepened.

The CIA had some of the best mapmakers in the world, as did the Defense Department. But our Studio Six cover was sure to be blown if the Revolutionary Guards searched us and found an intricate U.S. government-produced map. Operational security had required that we use a tourist map purchased at an airport kiosk in Europe. As I always told younger officers, you had to live your legend.

At that moment, a young Iranian crossed the street to join the discussion. He was bearded and wore a faded army field jacket over rumpled civilian clothes. To me, the young man looked suspiciously like one of the “students” who was occupying the embassy. He spoke sharply to the guard, and seemed to be demanding an explanation for our presence. Then he turned to Julio and addressed him politely in German. They opened the map together and immediately fell into a friendly discussion, the young man speaking in fluent German.

Is he just pinning us down here until his buddies show up? I wondered. But the man seemed perfectly polite and helpful. He borrowed a pen and a page from my notebook and jotted down an address in Farsi. Then he motioned for us to follow him back to Roosevelt Avenue, where he flagged down an old Mercedes taxi. After speaking intently to the driver in Farsi and showing him the slip of paper, the young man held open the door for us to get in.

“Danke schön,” Julio said, offering the young man some crumpled rial bills.

The fellow refused graciously, placing his hand on his heart and offering a gold-toothed smile, as if to indicate that the Revolution, faithful to the true tenets of Islam, was grounded in hospitality. It was hard to reconcile this image with the brutal reality. Less than a block away, Americans were locked in closets or tied to chairs, floundering in a black hole of terror and uncertainty.

The taxi seemed to travel half the city before dropping us off at a new building marked with the seal of the Canadian embassy. Ambassador Ken Taylor had been expecting us, and he was waiting in his outer office when a husky military police sergeant named Claude Gauthier escorted us upstairs. A lean man in his forties, wearing jeans, a plaid Western shirt, and gleaming cowboy boots, Taylor hardly fit the stodgy image of an ambassador. Most incongruous of all were his mod Italian glasses and helmet of tight salt-and-pepper curls. Reaching out to shake our hands, Taylor smiled benevolently, baring perfect white teeth.

“Welcome to Tehran, gentlemen,” he said with natural charm.

I saw that he was completely at ease and hardly the tense bureaucrat I had imagined. Ken graciously introduced us to his secretary, a petite elderly woman named Laverna, who offered us a cheerful, relaxed greeting. We could have been two technicians hired to fix the air conditioner, not American spies assigned to rescue six hidden diplomats, for all the casual friendliness of this encounter.

In Ken’s inner office, his manner became more serious. “I’ve pared down my staff almost completely,” he explained. “They left Tehran in small parties. Once my family flies out this afternoon, there’ll be only five of us left. But we’re scheduled to depart Monday morning on British Airways to London, just after your Swissair flight with the houseguests on board.”

Taylor said that he planned to send the Iranian Foreign Ministry a diplomatic note by messenger early Monday morning, explaining that the Canadian embassy would be “temporarily” closed. “Now,” he asked, “what can I do to help you fellows?”

Reciting from the operations plan I had memorized to the last detail, I laid out the tasks we would need to accomplish in the next three days. “Our first order of business is to meet with the houseguests, brief them on the plan, and assess their ability to pull it off.”

“Let’s meet tonight at the Sheardown villa,” Taylor suggested. “My counselor, Roger Lucy, can drive the Staffords there from the residence. So far, the Revolutionary Guards haven’t harassed our diplomatic vehicles, so I think that’s safe.”

Before we left the embassy, Taylor informed us that two “friendly” ambassadors and their staffs had also become involved in harboring the six Americans. These ambassadors had joined with Taylor in his regular visits to the American charge, Bruce Laingen, and two fellow Foreign Service officers, who were under “protection” at the Iranian Foreign Ministry. In theory, these diplomats, who had gone to the ministry to protest the demonstrations before the takeover, were free to leave Iran at any time, but they refused to abandon their colleagues held in the compound.

Taylor sent a message to Headquarters via Ottawa, confirming our safe arrival and outlining our plans. Before leaving the embassy, Taylor introduced us to his number two, Roger Lucy, a confident young man who had been caring for the four houseguests at the Sheardowns’ residence after the couple had departed earlier that week.

“I see you’ve met Sergeant ‘Sledge,’” Lucy quipped.

The burly Quebecois MP actually blushed. He’d earned that epithet wielding a twelve-pound sledgehammer, destroying all but the most essential classified cryptographic and communications equipment in preparation for the embassy shutdown. Sergeant Gauthier had also been on an informal recon near the American embassy a few days earlier when militants had dragged him inside for interrogation. He had quickly grown tired of the rough treatment, stood up, knocked them aside, and stalked out, leaving them in shocked silence.

It was Sergeant Sledge who drove Julio and me to the Sheardown villa in Shemiran that evening. Although it was dark, I could tell that the house was spacious and securely protected from the street by a high stucco wall.

As soon as Roger Lucy opened the door, the six rushed forward to meet us, beaming with anticipation, as if Julio and I alone carried the keys to their freedom. Once more, I felt as if I had stumbled into the Twilight Zone. A fire burned merrily on the hearth, and there were trays of hors d’oeuvres on the inlaid cocktail tables. As Roger Lucy poured drinks, I observed that the six showed no obvious signs of severe anxiety.

One of the couples, Joseph and Kathleen Stafford, sat on a couch opposite Mark and Cora Lijek, while the two single men, Bob Anders and Lee Schatz, stood near the fire. Anders, the consul general, looked fit and had even retained a tan. He explained that he had been able to exercise in the Sheardowns’ walled garden almost daily until the helicopter incident the week before. Lee Schatz, the agricultural attaché, a tall, younger man with a bushy mustache, appeared to be someone with quiet strength, a potential leader.

Once we had gotten acquainted with each other, I rose to brief the six on the preparations we had made for their escape.

“We have three separate cover stories,” I explained, “each with their own passports and supporting documents. You will have the final choice, but Julio and I can certainly advise you.”

The six began to pepper us with questions. How did we know what the airport controls would be? How would they answer if taken aside and interrogated about their presence in Tehran? I patiently answered each of these questions, and almost everyone appeared satisfied. But Joseph Stafford still seemed uneasy about the risks involved. Highly intelligent, he failed to exhibit the spirit of adventure kindling among the others.

Mark Lijek pointed to the U.S. passports and itinerant-teacher documents stacked beside the other two option packages on the table. “For openers,” he said, “I think this teacher deal is just plain crazy.” The others nodded vigorously, and I slid those documents to one side.

“I’ve managed a lot of these operations,” I said with my most confident smile, “and I believe the Argo movie plan will work.”

I opened the Studio Six portfolio and spread out the full-page ads from the Los Angeles trade papers. Then I handed Cora Lijek her business card and pointed to the page from Variety: “‘Based on a story by Teresa Harris,’” I recited. “You’ve just become Teresa Harris.” I flipped open her Argo cover-legend Canadian passport to the identity page. She stared at her picture with its forged signature.

“If anybody calls Studio Six Productions in Los Angeles,” I added, “they’ll be told Teresa Harris is with the location scouting team in the Middle East but will be back next week.”

I prayed that I was beginning to win them over.

Her husband, Mark, leaned over Cora’s shoulder. “Well,” he said “the movie crew idea isn’t totally crazy.”

“Look,” I finally suggested, “get together in the dining room and discuss these options among yourselves. First, try to decide if you want to leave as a group or individually because we’ve only got tomorrow morning to reshuffle your plane reservations.”

I waited about fifteen minutes, then entered the dining room. As I had expected, Joe Stafford was not impressed by any of the options. After a few minutes of more debate, Bob Anders called for a vote, then turned to me. “We’ve decided to leave together as a group with the Studio Six cover.”

We were able to relax for the time being, so Lee Schatz and Cora Lijek showed us around the villa, which was vast and beautifully furnished, with a kitchen usually found in luxurious restaurants. Patting his stomach, Lee said that they had spent much of the previous twelve weeks planning and cooking gourmet dinners for themselves and the few trusted outsiders who visited.

“We’ve also become the Scrabble champions of Iran,” Cora said cheerfully.

At that moment, one of the friendly ambassadors and his attaché, “Richard,” arrived to meet us, confirming their intention to help in any way they could, news we received with gratitude. Before Claude drove us back to the city center, I issued the Six their Argo supporting documents and resumes from the portfolio, wishing them luck and feeling optimistic as I looked into their hopeful faces.

 

OVER THE NEXT two days, the operation progressed swiftly. While the six were rehearsing their legends, Julio and I worked at the Canadian embassy on the travel itinerary of the Studio Six team, whose cover legend and airline tickets showed them arriving in Tehran from Hong Kong within the same hour that Julio and I had arrived at Mehrabad from Zurich. Because this Air France flight had landed on time, its disembarking passengers would have been processed by the same immigration officers we had encountered. Therefore, the Iranian cachets stamped in our passports were prime exemplars for those we now entered in the passports of the six.

That afternoon, we asked Richard to drive out to Mehrabad and pick up a stack of dual-sheet immigration forms from one of his contacts working for an international airline. Julio completed the Farsi notations on about twenty of these, using phrasing identical to our own. Such an act provided the six with enough forms to enter their false bio-data in their own handwriting and to use their alias signatures.

On Sunday morning, I completed a long cable to the Agency describing the final operations plan in detail, including Taylor’s proposed addition to our cover:

SIX CANADIANS FROM STUDIO SIX PRODUCTIONS CALLED ON THE AMBASSADOR, HOPING THE COULD FACILITATE AN APPOINTMENT WITH THE MINISTRY OF NATIONAL GUIDANCE TO PRESENT THEIR PROPOSAL TO LEASE PART OF THE LOCAL BAZAAR FOR TEN DAYS DURING THE SHOOTING OF THE FILM ARGO. THE AMBASSADOR HAS ADVISED THEM TO SEEK A LOCATION ELSEWHERE IF POSSIBLE, BUT HAS OFFERED ON E OF THE EMBASSY’S VACANT RESIDENCES AS GUEST QUARTERS UNTIL THEY CAN ARRANGE TRAVEL, THEY HAVE ACCEPTED THE EMBASSY’S HOSPITALITY AND ADVICE AND WILL PROBABLY DEPART ON MONDAY, 28 JANUARY.

When we reconvened Sunday night at the Sheardown residence Julio and I were struck by the transformation of the six’s appearances and personalities. On Friday night, I had given them the disguise materials and clothing props we had been able to secure without arousing suspicion. Since then, they had borrowed clothes from each other and revamped their images, having fun as they hammed it up as glamorous Hollywood people.

Cora Lijek had parted her dark hair so that it fell back across her neck in a severe “literary” style. Normally a nonsmoker, she now puffed nonchalantly on a cigarette, looking the epitome of the sophisticated screen writer. I darkened Mark Lijek’s wispy blond beard with mascara, altering a face that had become too familiar at the U.S. Consulate. Then I showed Kathleen Stafford how to pin up her long brunette hair. After adding thick-rimmed glasses and the Argo location sketchbook to her ensemble, she could easily pass muster as the set designer.

But Bob Anders, the stereotypically conservative consul general, had pulled off the most dramatic metamorphosis. His white hair was now puffed out in a blow-dried pompadour, and he wore tight, pocketless twill jeans with a slight flare, an even tighter blue silk shirt open at the chest, and a chunky gold chain and medallion.

“Check this out,” he said with a wry smile. Slipping a topcoat across his shoulders with the suave bravado of a character in a Fellini film, he strutted around the room with the chutzpah of a Wilshire Boulevard stud.

After the fashion show, we briefed them on the details of their supposed journey and arrival in Tehran. They were clearly intrigued with the visas and the deceptively authentic Farsi notations Julio had made, then collected the white originals of their immigration forms and burned them in the fireplace. Several of the six were concerned that exit control might try to match their yellow copies with the white cover sheets. “The authorities haven’t checked the white originals for months,” I assured the six. “But if they do complain, just act dumb. How are you supposed to know what happened to their little white sheets? You’ve got your yellow copies.”

Roger Lucy tried to lighten the mood. “Just remember to end every sentence with ‘eh?’ and you’ll be all right.”

Before dinner, I warned the houseguests not to drink too much, reminding them that they would face a “hostile interrogation” after the meal from Roger Lucy. Beaming as usual, Taylor arrived soon after. He had received an answer to our cable. The policymakers in both Ottawa and Washington were pleased with our proposed plan of action. They had concluded their message with “SEE YOU LATER, EXFILTRATOR .”

The two friendly ambassadors now joined us, and the mood became quite festive. The six served us a seven-course dinner, along with the Sheardowns’ vintage wine, champagne, coffee, and liqueurs. When I revealed the origin of Argo and Jerome’s knock-knock joke, they all raised their glasses and rallied to the “Argo!” battle cry. Then I got serious, and asked them to resist the temptation to publish details of the exfiltration in the future, as it was crucial for Julio and me to stay in business.

Now it was time for the interrogations. Roger Lucy, dressed in camouflage battledress jacket and military boots, took each American into a side room to be grilled. We heard him shouting angrily, relying on the old interrogator’s trick of using the agent’s real name, not the alias. Each time one of the six slipped up, Lucy began the fierce interrogation again. “Where visa issued?” he shouted in his best Farsi accent. “When? Name of father? You liar! You American spy!”

Before Julio and I left at midnight, we reviewed the final arrangements for travel to the airport. I would precede the others by thirty minutes, driven by Richard, who would pick me up at the hotel at exactly three A.M. Once in the terminal, I would confirm that the security situation was normal and that the Swissair plane was en route from Zurich Then I would put my suitcase through customs departure control and check in at the airline counter, where I would linger so that the others could see me as a personal, “all clear” signal as they entered the terminal. Julio would accompany the six to the airport in the embassy van and lead the way through Customs.

As Julio and I shook hands all around, the six repeated their hearty “Argo!” cry. They’re as ready as they’ll ever be, I thought.

 

I WOKE WITH a start in my hotel room to the shrill rings of the telephone. Richard was calling from the lobby. It was three in the morning, and I should have been up at 2:15. My watch alarm had gone off, but I had slept through it. I jumped into the shower, dressed, and joined Richard in the lobby less than fifteen minutes later. He drove his ambassador’s Mercedes dangerously fast through the narrow streets, and we arrived at the floodlit Mehrabad terminal just after 4:30 A.M.

The customs clerk glanced at my passport, chalked my suitcase, and nodded toward the ticket counters. There were just a handful of passengers in the hall, and several airport employees were dozing at their desks. The friendly young Swissair rep confirmed the flight was on time to arrive at five A.M. He took my bag and issued a boarding pass and baggage check. So far, so good, I thought.

Leafing through a copy of a magazine, I stood at my designated spot, waiting for the rest of the party. Richard went off to find his airline contact, just in case we needed a fallback flight. At two minutes after five, Julio led the six up to the customs departure counter. To my practiced eye, they looked slightly hungover and nervous. But I noticed that they had all done an excellent job applying their minimal facial and hair disguises and their stylish clothing. Once they heaved their bags, plastered with maple leaf stickers, onto the customs counter, they fell naturally into relaxed banter, a ploy that would have pleased the most critical tradecraft instructor at the Farm.

Check-in at the Swissair counter went smoothly, and now we were ready to proceed as a group to the immigration checkpoint, which was often haunted by Revolutionary Guards later in the day. If the operation was going to unravel, it would probably be here, either from hypervigilance on the Iranian side or obvious nervous behavior among the Americans.

I stayed behind, as the production manager responsible for the well-being of his team. I was armed with the leatherbound Argo portfolio and prepared to overwhelm any inquisitive official with Hollywood jargon.

But Lee Schatz was so eager that he had moved ahead and was already speaking with the Immigration officer. For a moment, my mouth went dry as the man studied Schatz’s passport, then looked up to ask, “Is this your picture?”

“Yes…of course,” Schatz said, his voice quavering.

The officer disappeared through a door without speaking. Is he looking for the white disembarkation sheet? I worried. Then the man reappeared and thrust Schatz’s open passport toward him. “The picture looks different,” he remarked.

I studied the demeanor of the other Americans in the stalled line but was glad to see that no one seemed on the verge of panic. Schatz saved the day by smiling and making a clipping motion with his fingers at the ends of his mustache. “It’s shorter now,” he said.

The officer shrugged, stamped the passport, and handed it back across the counter. As the others lined up to present their passports and yellow embarkation forms, the officer’s arm rose and fell robotically as he stamped each passport. He also collected the yellow forms but treated them so carelessly that one of the sheets floated to the floor. When no one was looking, I snatched it up. It was Anders’s form, and I slipped it into my sportscoat as a souvenir.

We were soon in the departure lounge with only the final security check to pass through before boarding the buses to the plane. I was pleased that the six followed instructions and were strolling through the duty-free shops like ordinary tourists, seemingly oblivious to the sudden appearance of four Revolutionary Guards in rumpled fatigues, who broke into pairs and began to prowl the hall, scrutinizing the passengers.

But when I looked back, I was stunned to see Joe Stafford holding a Farsi newspaper. He had grabbed the first prop he could find to hide his face, but he had chosen the wrong one. Fortunately, he seemed to sense the problem and snatched up an English magazine instead.

The Revolutionary Guards concentrated on the Iranian passengers, gruffly demanding to inspect their papers. Let’s hope they’re trying to flush out gold smugglers or maybe fishing for a bribe, I thought.

Richard appeared with his airline friend. Speaking in a stage whisper, the man asked why we hadn’t booked on his airline, for he would have given us the “royal treatment.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said softly. “We may need you if Swissair gets hung up.”

Then the loudspeaker announced the departure of our flight. Releasing a deep sigh, I shepherded the party of Americans into the glassed-in security room at our gate. The only thing standing in the way of our freedom now was a short bus ride to the aircraft.

The PA system echoed again. “The departure of Swissair flight 363 is delayed due to a mechanical problem.”

“Everything will be okay,” I said trying to reassure the party as we filed back into the departure lounge. The room was filling up with passengers from flights arriving en route to Europe and Asia. How long could we press our luck here before some perceptive Kometeh counterintelligence type made his daily rounds of the departure lounge, searching for foreign spies? I thought that it was time to switch-flights, because Murphy was definitely riding with us every minute of this trip.

I found Richard and his airline man in the corner of the lounge. They had already spoken to Swissair and assured me that the mechanical problem was minor, just a faulty airspeed indicator that would be replaced within an hour. We hurriedly discussed the option of switching to KLM or British Airways, but decided that would only draw undue attention to our party.

“It’s best to be patient,” Richard said earnestly.

Back at the benches where the others were sitting, I tried to convince them that we wouldn’t have long to wait. But I could see that my subjects were on the verge of becoming unhinged. The Revolutionary Guards had switched from harassing Iranian passengers to badgering foreign travelers, questioning them rudely in broken English or German.

One of the most agonizing hours of my life dragged by as bleak winter daylight filtered through the windows. Planes landed and took off. We sat in the stuffy, overcrowded departure lounge. Finally, the loudspeaker crackled: “Swissair flight 363 ready for immediate departure, gate four.”

As we clambered aboard the bus, I looked at my fellow Americans’ ashen faces. What had begun almost as a lark had become mental torture.

I was still feeling exhausted, trembling from an adrenaline overdose as I wearily climbed the boarding stairs to the plane. Then Bob Anders punched me lightly on the arm. “You guys arrange everything, don’t you?” He pointed to the name of this DC-8, lettered neatly across the nose: ARGAU, a city and region of Switzerland, and the perfect vessel to carry our Argonauts to freedom.

The flight crew could not serve alcohol until we had cleared Iranian airspace, so by the time we could hoist our Bloody Marys, we knew we had successfully escaped the brutal reach of the Kometeh.

 

IN ZURICH, SEVERAL of the six dropped down and kissed the tarmac at the base of the Argau’s boarding stairs—an act which raised eyebrows among the staid Swiss. Once past Zurich formalities, State Department officers whisked the six away in a van to a debriefing lodge in the surrounding mountains. They left Julio and me standing in the parking lot.

I was still in Frankfurt working on my postaction report when Jean Pelletier’s La Presse story broke in Montreal. The news spread fast to the world media. Two days later, when I arrived at JFK, I bought a copy of the New York Post bearing the triple-decker headline CANADA TO THE RESCUE!

In the weeks that followed, the United States, frustrated and enraged by the hostage stalemate, unleashed a flood of gratitude on Canada. Maple leaf flags and billboards emblazoned with THANK YOU CANADA shot up across the country, and Ken Taylor became an instant hero and celebrity nicknamed “the Scarlet Pimpernel” of diplomacy.

Aside from a few vague media references to unspecified assistance from the CIA, the Agency received no public credit for conceiving and directing the operation.

 

ON MARCH 12, 1980, I accompanied Admiral Stansfield Turner, the Director of Central Intelligence, to his morning meeting with President Jimmy Carter and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Turner told me that I would have exactly two and a half minutes of the meeting with the president. But Carter was confused about my identity and thought I was the “old hand,” the man who had briefed Julio and myself the night before we flew into Tehran. That operative was still in Tehran, helping to prepare the military rescue operation. Once the confusion was cleared up, I showed the president some of the Argo cover materials, then more confusion ensued. The Oval Office photographer appeared, and Turner was uncertain if I was authorized to be photographed with the president, since I was working undercover.

Years passed before I would receive my picture shaking hands with Jimmy Carter. But I was thrilled to learn that I had been promoted to GS-15, the equivalent of a full colonel in the military, that very same afternoon by the Director of OTS.

 

MY STOCK WITH the White House remained high that spring when Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff and most trusted confidant, asked me to prepare a disguise for him. Jordan had arranged ultrasecret European negotiations with Iranian Foreign Minister Sadeq Ghotbzadeh. If the meetings went well, the Carter White House would release Iranian assets frozen in America in exchange for the hostages. But the slightest hint in the press that Jordan and Ghotbzadeh were secretly meeting would blow the deal. It was obvious that Jordan needed a foolproof disguise.

I spent several hours with him in the White House basement barber shop, transforming the husky, clean-cut young man with the confident bearing of lofty authority into a rather frail, middle-aged gentleman who could walk unrecognized past his closest friends.

Later, Jordan would brag at singles bars around Washington that this disguise made him look like a “sleazy Latin businessman.” In my profession, that was a compliment.

 

IN MAY 1980, Julio and I were awarded the Intelligence Star, the Agency’s second-highest valorous decoration, at a secret ceremony in the Headquarters auditorium. Other CIA officers were also being recognized for their involvement in the failed OPERATION EAGLE CLAW rescue mission, in which Sea Stallion helicopters that had secretly landed in Iran from an American aircraft carrier in the Arabia Sea had exploded, killing eight airmen. The classified nature of the ceremony was deemed necessary because the American diplomats still languished as hostages. They were not released until January 21, 1981, after 444 days in captivity.

Although I was honored to receive the award, my pride was bittersweet while Americans remained hostage in Tehran. I was equally displeased that I was not allowed to invite Karen and the children or CIA friends to the ceremony, since the exfiltration of the six houseguests was still classified.

It was no secret to them that I had been in Iran during the rescue of the six. As with any Agency family, they were expected to endure my long absences with only scant details of the operations I conducted. Whether I was in Moscow or Tehran, we could not directly communicate, although the OTS fraternity did try to maintain an informal flow of information to our families to reassure them of our well-being.

For this reason, award ceremonies were important to Agency families. The presentations, usually held in the DCI’s conference room with relatives present, acknowledged their sacrifice and the vital support they provided to the officer. However, Admiral Turner had decided the Agency needed its own morale boost following the EAGLE CLAW debacle and requested the closed ceremony in the Headquarters auditorium.

When OTS Director Dave Brandwein called me at home to announce the award presentation, I was about to leave on a twentieth-anniversary trip with Karen. “Tell the Admiral I’m out of touch,” I told Brandwein.

He complied, but Turner issued an edict. “Find Mendez.”

So it was that I received my Intelligence Star in the company of a few friends and relative strangers, while Karen and the children expressed their joy from a distance.