Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History Part 1

ARGO.

HOW THE CIA AND HOLLYWOOD PULLED OFF THE MOST AUDACIOUS RESCUE IN HISTORY.

by Antonio J. Mendez and Matt Baglio.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1

Welcome to the Revolution

2

Picking Up the Pieces

3

Diplomacy

4

Nowhere to Run

5

Canada to the Rescue

6

Lessons from the Past

7

a.s.sembling the Team

8

Cover Story

9

Hollywood

10

Studio Six

11

A Cosmic Conflagration

12

Getting Ready to Launch

13

On Location in Iran

14

Final Preparations

15

The Escape

16

Aftermath

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Late that Sat.u.r.day afternoon I was painting in my studio. Outside, the sun was just beginning to fall behind the hills, casting a long dark shadow that covered the valley like a curtain. I liked the half-light in the room.

"Come Rain or Come s.h.i.+ne" poured from the radio. I often listened to music while I worked. It was almost as important to me as the light. I had installed a fine stereo system and if I painted late enough into Sat.u.r.day night, I could catch Rob Bamberger's Hot Jazz Sat.u.r.day Night on NPR.

I had been painting since my early childhood, and was working as an artist when the CIA hired me in 1965. I still considered myself to be a painter first and a spy second. Painting had always been an outlet for the tensions that came with my job at the Agency. While there were occasional bureaucrats whose antics brought me to the point of wanting to throttle them, if I could get into my studio and pick up a brush then those pentup hostilities would melt away.

My studio sat perched above the garage, up a steeply angled set of stairs. It was a large room with windows on three sides. The room had diagonal yellow pine floors covered with a variety of oriental carpets and was furnished with a huge white sofa and some antique pieces that my wife, Karen, had acquired for her interior design business. It was a comfortable s.p.a.ce and, most important, it was mine. You needed permission, which I gave pretty freely, to enter. Friends and family knew, however, that when I was in the middle of a project, they should tread lightly.

I had built the studio as I had built the house. Upon returning from a posting overseas in 1974, Karen and I had decided it would be best to raise our three kids away from the grit and crime of Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. We'd chosen a forty-acre plot of land in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and after clearing a section of woods, I'd spent the better part of three summers constructing the main house while the family and I lived in a log cabin I had also built. The land had a long history. Antietam Battlefield was just up the road and every now and then we would find Civil War relics-b.u.t.tons, bullets, breastplates-discarded among the leaves and fallen trees bordering our property.

The painting I was working on that afternoon had been triggered by a phrase a.s.sociated with my job: "Wolf Rain." It had the haunted sound of blue, dreary, dank weather, and spoke to the depths of the wooded landscape, just outside my window, on a winter's night. It conveyed a kind of sorrow that I couldn't explain, but felt that I could paint.

Working on "Wolf Rain" was one of those things you hope happens in your career as an artist-the painting just emerges from nowhere. Perhaps like a character who shoulders his way into a book to take over the narrative. The figure of the wolf was recognizable only by the eyes-it was a floating image in a rain-soaked forest, and you could sense the anguish in its gaze.