Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History Read Online Free PDF Page A

hold on for two hours until the Iranian government could send help. As it turned out, the plan had worked to perfection. The only problem, of course, was that the help never came.
    N ews of the embassy attack reached me on Sunday morning while I was standing at the kitchen counter sipping my first cup of coffee. This was my favorite part of the weekend—when my family was still asleep and the house was quiet. I had asmall transistor radio tuned to NPR and I half listened to it as I flipped through the Sunday newspaper. Outside, a light dusting of snow covered the ground and the sky was cold and gray. I was wondering how much firewood I was going to have to cut before I could get into my studio to paint. We had a large greenhouse attached to the front of the house and I was just about to step into it to watch the snow when the NPR broadcast was interrupted by news of the attack.
    Events were still unfolding, but the overall picture was clear. A mob had stormed the embassy and the lives of nearly seventy American diplomats were in danger.
    My mind flashed back to April 1979, the last time I had set foot inside the U.S. embassy in Tehran. As a technical officer in the CIA’s Office of Technical Services with more than fourteen years of experience at the time, I had been asked to infiltrate Iran in the midst of the revolution to help rescue a “blue striper,” or top Iranian agent, code-named RAPTOR. As the chief of the disguise branch, I was charged with coming up with a convincing disguise that would allow the agent, a former colonel in the Iranian army, to walk past the security controls at Mehrabad Airport and onto a commercial flight.
    The operation was similar to countless others I’d done in Southeast Asia and other distant parts of the world, but it was far from routine. Violence had exploded all across the country and revolutionaries were hunting down former members of the shah’s regime. Time was running out for the colonel. He’d spent the winter hiding in his grandmother’s tin-roofed attic, where snow dripped down on him while a group of Revolutionary Guards rifled through the apartment below. By the time I got to him he was badly shaken.
    I had used the library in the embassy as part of my research forhis disguise. Then I spent the better part of a week preparing him, training him, using all the tricks I’d learned over the course of my career to get him out of the country alive.
    After listening to the news for a few minutes, I tiptoed into the bedroom and quietly picked up my car keys and my Agency badge. I stopped in the kitchen to scribble a note to Karen explaining where I had gone, then picked up the phone and called the duty officer for my section. On the weekends it would be his job to monitor all the cable traffic and let me know if I needed to come in. The details of the attack were still sketchy, but cables were flooding in by the minute. All of us at the CIA were aware of the dangers that the embassy personnel were up against in a place as unpredictable as revolutionary Iran. Among the Americans were three CIA colleagues of mine who no doubt would be singled out for special treatment if the Iranians were able to identify them. I only hoped that the staffers had had enough time to destroy all the sensitive documents inside the embassy. When I finally got the duty officer on the line, he only confirmed what I had already suspected. Things were rolling down at the office. It was time to go to work.

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    PICKING UP THE PIECES
    In 1979, the headquarters for OTS was located in Foggy Bottom, on a small hill on the District side of the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge, just north of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The small collection of neoclassical limestone and brick buildings was unremarkable by most accounts. Once a part of the original Naval Observatory in the late 1800s, the buildings were eventually taken over during World War II by America’s first intelligence agency, the Office of