Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History (13 page)

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 relationship between the CIA and the shah’s government. In fact, one of the more recent U.S. ambassadors 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 passed 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 Washington, 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 surreptitiously 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 asset 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. embassy 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 Jamshid Avenue, I noticed that the walls of the U.S. embassy 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 documents, 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 face–to–face 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 title 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 assumption 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.

Now, on the streets of Tehran, my colleagues and I would use these skills to throw off any potential pursuers who might try to use us to get to RAPTOR. Hal and I were joined by Andrew, a local documents officer. Weaving through the narrow streets, the three of us quickly backtracked and then ducked into a bustling department store on Abbasabad Avenue. It was a favorite technique used by Agency officers, because the large stores usually had multiple exits and it was almost impossible to cover them all. Emerging from the store, we then strode through the middle of the street, dodging the suicidal traffic of Tehran—many of the cars driving without headlights—in order to throw off any vehicle surveillance that may have been following us. Such a move would probably be considered provocative by Moscow standards, where the operatives were all highly trained professionals, but here in Iran, where the opposition was basically composed of revolutionary zealots, it got the job done.

The nondescript apartment building was located just off Motahari Boulevard, right next to a hotel that housed a popular restaurant.

RAPTOR was hiding in the shadows of the second-floor landing, and as we approached, he stepped out into the light and embraced me, his eyes brimming with tears. I studied him with an artist’s attention to detail—the gaunt, sickly man in the ill-fitting sweater bore little resemblance to photos I’d been shown of a confident-looking colonel in his mid-thirties.

RAPTOR led us up to a fourth-floor apartment, which was bare except for a soiled couch and a partially dismantled TV set.
The kitchen counter was stacked with worn magazines that had been flipped through too many times, and Farsi newspapers, along with a bag of rice, a sack of lentils, and some canned food. It was obvious he’d been camping out here for several weeks. In lieu of curtains, old newspapers covered the windows.

Moving purposefully, Andrew and I walked RAPTOR through the dark apartment and toward the bathroom. I knew it was important to put him at ease. “This won’t take long,” I said, telling him not to worry.

As we entered the bathroom, Hal pulled open a narrow window at the back of the apartment and tossed out a coiled rope. This was to be our “escape route” in the event that Revolutionary Guards came charging up the stairwell. The window opened up onto a light shaft ending forty feet below, which adjoined the nearby hotel. After climbing down the rope, we could then enter through a laundry window and leave the hotel through a service entrance. All of this had been figured out the previous day, when the three of us had taken turns casing the service entrance from the hotel restaurant. During Hal’s turn, he’d gone into the restaurant’s washroom, which had a window that opened up onto the shaft. While he was leaning out, the band on his expensive wristwatch broke and the watch tumbled out onto the windowsill below. When he got back to the table, he explained what had happened. While he was lamenting his loss, I’d gone to see what I could do. Descending two flights of stairs, I entered the laundry and quickly put on a dirty waiter’s coat to blend in. I then made my way through the large tumbling machines to the washroom and retrieved the watch from the light shaft. Hal was speechless when I returned and dropped it onto the table in front of him.

Inside the apartment’s bathroom, RAPTOR improvised a lightbulb by attaching the twisted copper ends of a flat television antenna wire to a bulb with his right hand, while using his left to jam the opposite ends of the wire into the electrical socket next to the sink. I set down my kit and quickly got to work.

“I’ve done this hundreds of times,” I told him, as I applied the special disguise materials I’d brought with me. Half his face, from his hairline down to his upper lip, was soon covered by a stretchy material that obscured his vision and forced him to breathe through his mouth.

As I did this, Andrew assisted me by preparing a special adhesive, stirring it under a stream of water from the tap. Hal, meanwhile, sat on the sofa in the bedroom and monitored a small two-way Motorola radio he held to his ear. The radio connected him to a team of CIA officers who were outside, watching the street below. We were leaving nothing to chance.

“Just a few more minutes,” I said as I tested the disguise with my fingertips. Suddenly, we heard a knock on the door and everyone froze.

RAPTOR pulled the wires out of the socket and we emerged from the bathroom. We made our way through the living room toward the front door. Blinded by the disguise materials, RAPTOR was forced to grope his way along, as I led him by the hand. I showed him by feel where the doorknob was and he, in turn, put his mouth up to the crack between the door and the molding.

“Who’s there?” he whispered, his mouth just inches from the door.

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

We all relaxed. One of RAPTOR’s relatives owned many flats in the building and the voice belonged to the man’s son.

The child asked if RAPTOR needed anything from the bazaar.

“No,” he responded. “Come back and see me later.”

We listened to the boy’s light footsteps as they faded down the stairs. Then we returned to the bathroom, where I was finally able to remove the disguise materials.

A
fter this episode, RAPTOR was moved to a CIA safe site near the U.S. embassy. The two of us continued to meet repeatedly over the next three days as I finalized his disguise. We had decided to take him out through Mehrabad Airport right under the noses of the Revolutionary Guards. It was a risky move, but I was confident the plan could work. I had transformed the middle-aged Iranian colonel into a sixty-five-year-old Jordanian businessman, complete with a receding hairline and lumpy woolen suit. RAPTOR spoke decent Arabic and could affect a British accent when he spoke English, which would help him pull off the disguise.

On the day before departure, we all met with RAPTOR for a final dress rehearsal. Wearing his disguise, he sat at the dining room table flipping through the well-worn travel documents that Andrew had provided for him. When he looked up, a smile spread across his face and I could see that he was pleased with our efforts. To the untrained eye, he was a dead ringer for a distinguished Arab salesman who had traveled the Gulf states for decades. I had even coached him on how to walk and talk and fumble for his documents when presenting his papers to the immigration officers. In addition, he’d spent hours with Andrew going over his alias documentation, travel plans, and cover story. He’d also memorized a list
of phone numbers for “affiliate” offices in the Middle East, which were really CIA fronts prepared to vouch for him should Iranian officials call.

Everything seemed ready. RAPTOR had proved to be a quick study and was motivated, and yet I was worried. I’d noticed over the past few days how he would periodically slip into a deep depression.

His biggest fear was being caught and tortured. “You have no idea what they would do to me,” he said. Normally I would just chalk this kind of talk up to nerves, but when he asked if he could have a cyanide capsule, I became genuinely concerned.