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

Strategic Services (OSS). Commanded by Major General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the OSS had been staffed by some of the most colorful characters in the history of espionage, including con artists, second-story men, experts in counterfeiting, magicians, even actors and Ivy League blue bloods. World War II is full of the exploits of these daring operatives. The fledgling spy service sent operatives behind German and Japanese lines and created ingenious devices such as cigarette pistols, matchbox cameras, even exploding flour. It also paved the way for theCIA. In fact, much of the structure, operational methods, and procedures that the CIA would later come to use evolved directly from the OSS.
    OTS, meanwhile, sprang from the research and development branch of the OSS. Originally headed by a chemist, Stanley Lovell, the R&D branch would play an integral role in developing and pushing the capabilities of OSS operatives, while paving the way for future techs such as myself.
    Perhaps one of the most important legacies that the R&D branch left to later generations of OTS techs was the way in which it worked with outside contractors in order to develop new technologies. This allowed the OSS to take full advantage of the modern manufacturing and technological capacity of the U.S. private sector, which was very different from the way that other foreign services, such as MI6 or the KGB, went about developing their new technologies. Eventually this gave us a huge advantage when it came to defeating our Soviet counterparts, who relied on state-run facilities and bureaucratic thinking. Part of the reason for this outsourcing was necessity, since Lovell didn’t have the funds necessary to build laboratories from scratch. By taking full advantage of the private sector, however, OTS was able to stay on the cutting edge.
    In 1965, when I entered on duty at the CIA’s Technical Services Division, or TSD (it would be renamed OTS in 1973), we characterized our office and our work as mirroring the character Q from the James Bond films. We were the CIA’s gadget makers, the suppliers of the technical wherewithal necessary for our operations officers to successfully steal our enemies’ secrets.
    Our organization was part of the operational element of the CIA called the Directorate of Operations, or DO. There were threeother directorates—Administration, Science and Technology, and Intelligence. The work of the DO was primarily overseas, which meant our equipment and our expertise were exercised around the world, though typically not in the United States.
    There were essentially two groups that made up our office. Half of the officers in our development and engineering division were chemists, physicists, mechanical and electrical engineers, and an assortment of PhD scientists who specialized in extremely narrow fields, such as batteries, hot air balloons, special inks, you name it. These were the folks who designed and built our gadgetry. The other half were part of the operations division, the people who operated the equipment and who taught our case officers and foreign agents how to use it.
    A listing of the capabilities will give a hint of the robust possibilities at the beck and call of the CIA. In no particular order, those capabilities were audio, photo/video, disguise, documents, and concealments. We also had experts in graphology, psychology and parapsychology, forensics, and many other esoteric disciplines. If you needed technical support for your operation, we would provide it, and if it didn’t exist, we could invent it.
    M y office was located in Central Building, which also housed the authentication branch, the disguise labs, the artists’ bullpen, and the documents section. Across a small courtyard stood the imposing neoclassical South Building, the location of OTS headquarters. On November 4, 1979, my title was “chief of disguise,” but I was actually in the process of being promoted to “chief, authentication