Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History Part 8

Sheardown steered him out of the apartment and down to the waiting car, again without saying a word. When Schatz saw that there was a second car idling behind them, it seemed to prove his suspicions about Sheardown. I can't believe there are a bunch of CIA guys running around in all this mess, he thought. Once they were in the car, however, Sheardown turned to him and disabused him of his fantasy by smiling and introducing himself. "You're going to come and stay with me," he said.

Schatz nodded, relaxing a little. "Okay, that sounds good," he replied. He still had no idea that the other Americans were there and was thrilled when he entered the Sheardowns' living room to see Cora and Mark Lijek and Bob Anders waiting for him. He wasn't close with the Lijeks or Anders, but he knew them through emba.s.sy functions. It was a great relief to see their faces and to know that he was among friends. Given the circ.u.mstances, it seemed like an ideal place to ride out the storm.

News of the houseguests wouldn't reach me until mid-December. Often, the only time to get any work done was after everyone had gone home, and since I lived about an hour's drive outside Was.h.i.+ngton, sometimes I didn't know whether I was coming or going. All of us were working around the clock, but I never heard anyone down at the office complaining. I was standing at my desk one morning having just come from the washroom, where I'd splashed water on my face, when Max, the chief of graphics, along with my deputy, Tim, showed up in my doorway. Max had a copy of a doc.u.ment in his hand, and he waved it about as he walked in.

"Have you seen this?" he said. "Some Americans have escaped from the emba.s.sy in Tehran."

By this time I had been promoted from chief of disguise to chief of the authentication branch, and was now in charge of creating and maintaining the myriad false ident.i.ties and disguises the CIA was using worldwide. I had a large staff of experts in all phases of ident.i.ty alteration who could penetrate any border undetected, duplicate almost any doc.u.ment, alter anyone's appearance, even change their gender if that's what the job required.

Historically, the chief of the authentication branch was an officer who'd come from our doc.u.ment a.n.a.lysts' ranks-or what we would have considered to be one of our best and brightest. The joke was that they were the only officers in our midst who could write (or spell). The fact was they were operationally more astute than some of our PhD technical officers and had a broader appreciation of the lifeblood of intelligence, which is communications. The work of our doc.u.ment a.n.a.lysts involved languages, area knowledge, travel, and writing-all skills highly valued in the CIA's culture.

I had decided to put my name in the mix when I heard that the chief of OTS operations, Fred Graves, was looking to replace a branch chief. Graves was a man who, on the surface, appeared to be as hard as nails. You would swear he was a former marine-he certainly swore like one-but he was not. He had been a cadet at the Citadel and had acquired a military bearing and point of view that served him well in a CIA culture that was, in fact, modeled after the U.S. military. Fred needed to replace Ricardo, the chief of the graphics branch, who was retiring. When he asked Ricardo who should be his replacement, Ricardo said it should be me. Quite a compliment, actually, but it was not my cup of tea.

"I have another suggestion," I'd said to Graves, sitting in his office in South Building. The GSA-issued furniture was only a backdrop to Fred's unique brand of decorating. Most visitors walked away the first time with the wording on a shade on his door burned into their mind. THE SALOON IS OPEN, it read-or CLOSED, depending on whether or not he was in a meeting.

"We give a lot of lip service around here to cross-training our future managers. Why not get somebody from authentication down to run graphics and make me chief of the authentication branch-the first guy from graphics to do that?" I had said.

"Not bad," he'd responded, nodding his head. "I'll get back to you, Mendez. But remember, you can't be out on trips, gallivanting around the world. You'll need to be back here, managing the branch."

"Yes, sir!" I'd said, trying to sound like a good marine, resisting the compulsion to snap a salute. Backing out the doorway, I b.u.mped into a bra.s.s plaque that read: IF YOU'VE GOT THEM BY THE b.a.l.l.s, THEIR HEARTS AND MINDS WILL FOLLOW. We all loved Fred Graves; we really did. There was something very tender lurking inside that barrel chest.

Thanks to my new promotion, it seemed as if my workload had nearly tripled in light of the hostage crisis. Because I was immersed in too many meetings at both Langley and Foggy Bottom and had many other matters that required my direct attention, I had instructed my secretary, Elaine, to send copies of important correspondence that required action directly to the line supervisor concerned.

So I was not surprised when Max and Tim walked into my office that morning with a copy of the State Department memo in their hands.

Max handed me the memorandum and took a seat while I looked it over. Tim sat at the conference table in front of my desk, scanning a copy of the same message.

The memo was addressed to CIA's Central Cover staff, which handles all cover requirement. It was requesting the CIA's advice about a potential exfiltration of six American diplomats who had escaped from the U.S. emba.s.sy in Tehran and were now in the care of the Canadians. It did not request that we take the lead in any rescue, but that we be available to consult during the planning stages. There was not a lot of information in the memorandum-certainly not enough to make any decisions.

I read it and thought it sounded interesting, but in the context of the hostage crisis it didn't seem like a top-tier requirement. It did not sound urgent. While not stated precisely, by omission it seemed to imply that the six Americans were settled, were safe, and could weather another few weeks or months without danger. I was inclined to put it aside to concentrate on helping to rescue the hostages at the emba.s.sy.

The original plan to deal with the houseguests, it seems, had been to sit tight and wait it out. In his early communications with the Canadian government, Taylor had discussed the possibility of creating contingency plans in case the houseguests might have to be evacuated, but once they had been settled, and were relatively safe, the thinking in Ottawa, as well as at the U.S. State Department, was that the situation at the U.S. emba.s.sy should take precedence. Once the hostages were released, they reasoned, the problem with the houseguests would work itself out.

After Lee Schatz had joined the other Americans at the Sheardowns', a couple of weeks had pa.s.sed without incident. They'd spent the majority of their time reading. Sheardown had a pretty extensive library, including many spy thrillers by John le Carre. Occasionally the group would get together to play cards or board games. One of their favorites was Scrabble. A born compet.i.tor, Schatz took the game very seriously. His main rival was Anders, who had a knack for the game. After a grueling duel, Schatz pored through a two-volume British dictionary that Sheardown had on the shelf. It wasn't long before he found a killer word-"dzo"-that helped him improve his score. When a skeptical Anders shook his head, Lee pulled out the dictionary. "Here it is," he said triumphantly. "Dzo-a cross between a cow and a yak."

Thanks to a fluke, the house's bas.e.m.e.nt was filled with all manner of beer, wine, and hard liquor, and the houseguests wasted no time depleting the stores. This largesse was because the Canadian emba.s.sy had been next in line to host the Friday night party-the weekly bender held at a different Western emba.s.sy each week. The tradition was discontinued after the takeover, but not before the liquor had been transferred to Sheardown's house. Eventually, they'd drunk so much that Sheardown had to get creative in disposing of the empties, which had been piling up. His solution was to parcel them out and take them with him to the Canadian emba.s.sy.

By all accounts, the highlight of their day was the evening meal, fondly remembered by all as a kind of traditional Norman Rockwell moment each night. John would come home from work and everyone would gather at the dinner table to hear the news. Since Sheardown's TV had broken a week or so after the houseguests had arrived, they relied on John to keep them informed on events happening in the outside world. The vibe got to be so familial that Anders took to calling Sheardown "Big Daddy."

On certain occasions, the Staffords would be driven over, giving the group a chance to catch up. On Thanksgiving, the Canadians threw a traditional dinner for everyone, which went a long way in helping to cheer them up.

They also had visitors. Roger Lucy, the first secretary of the Canadian emba.s.sy, was a frequent guest. Lucy, who was then thirty-one, had been in Switzerland visiting friends when the takeover had happened, but had since been brought up to speed on everything. He'd originally arrived in Iran in the fall of 1978, just days before the shah had declared martial law, and had been instrumental in helping Taylor organize the ma.s.s exodus of Canadian citizens out of Iran. An adventurous type, Lucy would become an important member of the local team looking out for the houseguests. Anders would later recall the first time he met Lucy at one of these early dinners. He described him as a character right out of Rudyard Kipling, with a bushy mustache and little circular gla.s.ses, wearing a pith helmet and carrying a little staff.

Two other frequent visitors would be amba.s.sadors Troels Munk from Denmark and Chris Beeby from New Zealand. Beeby would prove to be especially helpful as the crisis evolved, going above and beyond what anyone had asked of him, including bringing in a case of contraband beer for the houseguests. Coals to Newcastle, perhaps, but welcome nonetheless.

For the most part, however, the houseguests tried to keep a low profile. Despite their living situation, the threat of discovery was still very real. On more than one occasion, the Taylors' staff asked pointed questions about the Staffords, wondering why if they were tourists they always stayed indoors. The worry that an unexpected visitor might suddenly show up unannounced meant that the Americans tended to stay in the back of the house, or often shut up in their rooms. One evening, for instance, Taylor had ABC News correspondent Peter Jennings over for dinner. Jennings was one of the many Western journalists who had come to Iran to cover the hostage crisis. While the two were enjoying their dinner, the Staffords huddled in their room upstairs, worried they might make an inadvertent sound and be discovered.

On certain occasions Roger Lucy was asked to drive the Lijeks, Bob Anders, and Lee Schatz over to his own house. The owner of the house that Sheardown was living in was trying to sell it and would come over with prospective buyers from time to time. Lucy remembers these trips as being tremendously nerve-racking; one time they even got caught in the snow and Lucy had to ask a group of Iranians to help dig them out.

The houseguests were allowed to write letters home once a week, but it wasn't long before they ran out of things to say. In one of his early letters to his parents, Mark wrote, "We are in a safe place but I can't tell you where. If something happens to us you'll probably know because it will be on the TV or you'll get a call from the State Department, but unless something like that happens, you'll know we are okay."

As the weeks stretched on, concern began to grow among the Canadians that the secret of the Americans would get out. Amazingly, the local newspaper in Lee Schatz's hometown of Post Falls, Idaho, ran a story about his hiding out at "at an undisclosed location in Iran" after the State Department told his mother he was safe but apparently forgot to tell her not to tell the press. In another instance, during a telephone interview, an American citizen named Kim King, who had been at the consulate the day of the takeover, told a local reporter that he was one of nine Americans who had been able to escape the emba.s.sy on the day of the attack. Though these stories surprisingly didn't take hold in the United States, rumors began circulating in the Iranian press about the possibility that some Americans were hiding out in Tehran.

In addition, there was a strong chance that the Iranians at the foreign ministry had been monitoring the calls Laingen and Tomseth were making and so knew that the Americans had gotten out and were on the loose. Beyond that, there were all the employees at the Iran-America Society who had seen the Lijeks and Staffords and easily could have told someone. There were also their colleagues from the consulate. Had the Iranians been able to get to them?

Not five days after the houseguests had left Koob's house, Sam was accosted there by a group of militants who threatened him with a gun. They asked him about the house and he explained that the occupant was already down at the emba.s.sy, being held hostage. They eventually let him go, but he was badly shaken. He immediately went into hiding and would remain so for the duration of the hostage crisis.

6

LESSONS FROM THE PAST

After I'd received the memorandum, the issue of the houseguests had never completely gone from my mind. The State Department was taking a wait-and-see approach, but I wasn't convinced that this was the best course of action. As I often tend to do when I have a difficult problem that needs to be worked out, I'd gone into my studio one Sat.u.r.day afternoon to paint. And it was during that session, while I was working on "Wolf Rain," that I realized we couldn't afford to wait and let the urgency of the situation overtake us. Sure, the houseguests were safe for now, but they'd already been in hiding in Tehran for nearly two months. How much longer could they hold out? I'd always told my team that, whenever possible, it was better to perform an exfiltration before the bad guys knew you were there. If the houseguests were discovered for some reason before we could get to them, then it would be nearly impossible to get them out.

One of the reasons I was so concerned about the exfiltration of the houseguests was that I'd recently been to Iran. In my capacity as chief of disguise, in April of 1979, seven months before I'd even heard of the houseguests, I had volunteered to infiltrate the country to help rescue a high-priority agent, and in many ways the case was a good benchmark for what awaited the six Americans.

It was an open secret that during the reign of the shah there was a close relations.h.i.+p between the CIA and the shah's government. In fact, one of the more recent U.S. amba.s.sadors to Iran, Richard Helms, had formerly been the director of the CIA. But unknown to the Iranians, the CIA had also recruited a sensitive source who was a trusted member of the shah's inner circle. He was known within the CIA by his operational cryptonym. I have chosen to call him "RAPTOR."

RAPTOR was able to provide invaluable insights for U.S. policy makers concerned with the shah's intentions. The intelligence he provided was pa.s.sed clandestinely to his handler, who in turn prepared it as a raw intel report in a staff cable and sent it to headquarters from Tehran. Typically this information was so good that it was hand-carried by a CIA officer directly to the president in the Oval Office.

The manila envelopes used to hold the flimsy cables were marked with bold blue borders and the words TOP SECRET-RESTRICTED HANDLING-EYES ONLY printed in bold red letters in the center of the envelope. Because of these markings, these reports were known as "blue stripers." All copies were numbered and carefully controlled in this way. The restricted-handling, blue-striped envelope was double wrapped, then zipped and locked in a heavy blue canvas portfolio that was never out of the control of the courier.

All intelligence reports are given a grade from one to ten. The most valuable of these sometimes receive the grade "double-ten." RAPTOR's reports were typically double-tens.

RAPTOR had known for some time that the shah was losing his grip and had repeatedly warned his CIA handlers, but as can happen when raw intelligence doesn't match up to the preferred scenario held by policy makers in Was.h.i.+ngton, RAPTOR's warnings tended to be overlooked. Intelligence is only as good as the consumer's ability to believe and utilize it.

When the shah left the country in January, RAPTOR had immediately gone underground. With the tentacles of the Revolutionary Guard spreading deeper and deeper into all facets of Iranian society, he knew he wouldn't be able to hide for very long.

At that point, he began surrept.i.tiously meeting with "Don," a local CIA officer in Tehran who tried to organize his exfiltration. The two, however, didn't see eye to eye. Don, a young hothead who thought he could do everything on his own, had proposed disguising the Iranian as a Gulf Arab, something that RAPTOR knew he wouldn't be able to pull off. Unfortunately, rather than trying to work with the a.s.set to see what else he could come up with, Don had simply said, "Take it or leave it," which only made the problem worse. It was then that Hal, the CIA station chief in Tehran, had sent out an urgent cable requesting my help.

The case was challenging right from the beginning. A born warrior, RAPTOR longed to go out in a blaze of glory, an ivory-handled Colt in each hand. The prospect of being grabbed at the airport while wearing a disguise was too much for his traditional sense of honor to bear. To complicate things, he'd trained most of the security staff who worked at the airport, so they all knew his face. He was sure they would see through any disguise and spot him instantly. Since the success of the operation would hinge on his confidence and ability to carry it off, nothing was going to happen unless we could convince him to trust us. I knew from past experience working as a technical officer on numerous exfiltrations that some are more dependent on disguise than others. In RAPTOR's case, I realized that the disguise was paramount. With the Revolutionary Guards right on his heels, it would be important to impress him with our professionalism right away. It wasn't courage that he lacked, but confidence.

My first stop upon entering the country was the library on the second floor of the chancery of the U.S. emba.s.sy in Tehran. The city had the feel of a war zone. Armed gangs roved the streets and it wasn't uncommon to hear an explosion in some distant neighborhood. Though perhaps the most striking feature was the people themselves-browbeaten and scared. Everywhere you looked the sidewalks were full of women dressed head to toe in their black chadors. It was as if the whole city was in mourning.

As we pulled onto Takht-e Jams.h.i.+d Avenue, I noticed that the walls of the U.S. emba.s.sy were covered with graffiti-a vivid reminder that anti-American sentiment in the country was strong, and growing.

At headquarters we had gone through our entire holdings of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean travel doc.u.ments, finding three different nationalities that could work. But since we didn't know what RAPTOR's skin tone looked like, we decided I should make the final decision when I got facetoface with him in Tehran. In the meantime, I had gone to the library to look for something in particular.

The library was a quiet, musty, dimly lit room. Despite this, however, I could see that it was well used, with a stack of returned books waiting to be reshelved. There was no librarian at the desk, probably as a result of the drawdown, and so I proceeded on my own. I scanned the shelves and after a few minutes found what I was looking for. The book was bound in green and tan Moroccan leather and the t.i.tle on the spine was stamped in gold-embossed capital letters: STEWART-THROUGH PERSIA IN DISGUISE.

I pulled the volume down and turned it over in my hands. It was the collected memoirs of a British officer, Colonel Charles E. Stewart. In 1880, roughly one hundred years before my trip, he had donned the disguise of an Armenian horse trader and spent nearly two years traveling on horseback with his small party, surveying the region. He'd covered a remarkable amount of distance over that time and never once was he suspected of being a European.

The operation to exfiltrate RAPTOR was not unlike the journey of Colonel Stewart. I knew that the book, which had many pictures of the people Stewart had encountered in the region, would come in handy when I went to see RAPTOR later that night. Of course, first I would have to get to him, no easy task in a city teeming with mistrust for all things foreign, especially American spies.

Any good surveillance detection run, or SDR, always begins with the a.s.sumption that the hostiles, whoever they may be, are everywhere, and watching. This maxim had been drilled into my head in my OPS FAM (operations familiarization) course at "the Farm," a ten-thousand-acre facility where novice CIA officers go to learn their tradecraft before heading overseas. Later, when I visited Moscow in the mid-1970s and ran up against the state-sponsored paranoia of the KGB, I would come to see how true that statement was, when just about everyone-even the ticket puncher at the zoo-was an informer.