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

him walking down the hallway over at the headquarters building and told him to get his ass over to Central Building to be outfitted to go into Iran. Jack was an Asian American, and the thinking went that it would probably be easier for a non-Caucasian to slip into Iran inconspicuously. There was just one important element missing in order to make this scenario a reality.
    “They told me to come and see you,” he said. “But there’s no way I can do this—I don’t speak Japanese.”
    In another part of OTS, Mike Dougherty, an Irish mercenary in another life, ran his division roughshod and high-spirited. He was putting together his paramilitary capabilities to form a task force that would oversee the larger office response. His task force and my team coordinated our efforts with the operations directorate at CIA headquarters and the Pentagon. Mike and I had a series of meetings over the next four days, with attendance varying according to the topic. Mike loved a meeting, and so there were perhaps more meetings than I would have hoped. At one point we even had a meeting about meetings. There was an overwhelming amount of cable traffic, but that was pretty much an administrative chore that we were already set up to handle—there was not that much differencebetween two hundred and four hundred cables per day. But the meetings chewed up time, and time was precious. At the end of four days we were exhausted. Things were in the works. Plans had been made. But the Pentagon was in disarray because there was no special operations command; thus they had no way of marshaling resources. The White House was so timid in its response that President Jimmy Carter didn’t even want to call the hostages “hostages,” for fear of offending Iran’s revolutionary government, an oxymoronic term.
    I came dragging home on Thursday night, exhausted after working eighteen-hour days for the past four days. I was drained, and took off my coat as I walked through the greenhouse, which served as a vestibule attached to our kitchen. We often had formal dinners in there in the winter and hoped for snow each time. It was a magical place at night with the snow and a little candlelight. I loosened my tie and sank into my favorite chair in the living room, removing my shoes. Karen came to meet me with a beer and a hug. She sat down next to me on the sofa and listened while I rattled on about the job, the office, the Pentagon, everything. It was beginning to look more and more like the crisis was going to drag out indefinitely. On November 5, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s son Ahmad had praised the takeover as being in the name of the people. After that, the entire religious leadership of Iran had thrown its support behind the militants. Mehdi Bazargan, Iran’s prime minister, was forced to resign in protest, and this meant that there was only one person left for President Carter and his administration to deal with: the Ayatollah Khomeini.
    I paused long enough to take a sip of beer and felt her looking closely at me. Glancing up, I saw that she had been waiting for me to stop talking so that she could tell me something.
    “What?” I said. I thought on some subconscious level that she was having a problem with one of the kids.
    “Honey, I’ve been thinking,” she began. “I’ve been thinking of how to get those Iranians to leave the embassy and free the hostages. How to end the crisis. And I’ve got an idea…”
    “Okay,” I said. “Tell me your idea.” I leaned back into my chair. The truth was that I was only half listening—I was that tired.
    “You have to kill the shah,” she said.
    I turned to face her. “I’m all ears,” I said.

3
    DIPLOMACY
    The first few weeks of November became something of a blur for me at the CIA as we worked on getting the advance team up and running. We were meeting with the chief of the Near East Division, Chuck Cogan, his deputy, Eric Neff, and his branch chiefs to get organized and figure out what the U.S.