Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History by Matt Baglio, Antonio Mendez Read Free Book Online

do a facial impression. Some people who worked there for twenty years were no longer qualified. But by 1979, we had totally revolutionized the department, creating numerous disguises that could completely alter a person’s appearance and be applied in the dark in a matter of seconds. As I stood in the doorway and watched the professionalism of my team at work, I was reminded of just how far we’d come. They were motivated and ready, and I felt confident that no matter what challenge lay ahead, they could get the job done.
    As I entered my office that morning, I saw a neat stack of about two hundred cables waiting for me on my desk. This was not unusual; what immediately caught my attention, however, was that a good number were marked FLASH . This was the highest level of priority the CIA used (the others being IMMEDIATE , PRIORITY , and the lowest, ROUTINE ). FLASH cables were serious business, and only ever used in wartime or when U.S. lives were in immediate danger. Some communicators went their whole careers without ever even seeing one. In this case I wasn’t looking at one, but several dozen. It was then that the gravity of the situation began to sink in.
    That morning, most of us were still confident that the embassy occupiers would stay only a few hours, as had the group of Marxist guerrillas on February 14.
    In the meantime, our first order of business was a tall one. Now that the embassy had been overrun, we would need to try to reestablish some kind of human intelligence network in Iran. Normally, when you have a nation in flux, or are in a denied area suchas Moscow, you build a network of stay-behind agents, citizens who agree to stay in contact with the West after any untoward incident and will advise on the current situation. We had such a network set up in Tehran before the attack. Our agents, however, seemed to have melted into the landscape. They may have stayed put, but most of them “unrecruited” themselves when they realized the danger they and their families might be in.
    The plan then was to assemble a group of trained intelligence officers who could infiltrate Iran to reconnoiter the situation and start building an infrastructure for any potential rescue. Such a scenario involved our first asking several questions: What would their documents and disguise materials look like? What would their nationalities be? We began looking for candidates who could carry the foreign personas that we had document intel and inventory to support. These individuals would need to have the language capability to pass themselves off as non-American. They also needed to look the part. A Latin American businessman has to look Latin. A German student needs to speak German.
    Once the candidates were identified, we could then build their cover legends. Who was coming and going from Iran at this time in history? Businessmen? Journalists? The world was watching and the media was certainly all over the story.
    As for disguise, the same rules applied. Did we already have things on the shelf? Would an officer need to look older? Could we make them look like Iranians? What about creating the insignia for Iranian uniforms? We were scrambling, running hard to stay ahead of whatever requirement we might be asked to fulfill. We were apprehensive but we weren’t scared. Whatever needed to be done, we could do it, I thought, but it was going to take time.
    Although the mood in the Central Building was anxious during that first week, there was no shortage of ideas, but not many of them were very well thought out. In one instance I had an ex–special forces operator step into my office and tell me that he was going to solve the whole damn thing if I could just outfit him with a rubber “stunt double” mask and give him an AK47.
    Another time, a senior CIA officer I had worked with in South Asia showed up in my doorway, looking lost. “Hey, Jack. What can I do for you?” I asked. He explained how the director of operations had seen