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

branch,” a job that would putme in charge of the CIA’s worldwide disguise operations, as well as any cases involving false documentation and the forensic monitoring of these documents for counterterrorism purposes.
    Moving from chief of disguise to chief of authentication was a big step, and I was eager to make the transition. I was well grounded in disguise, and felt perfectly capable of moving on. When it came to my professional abilities and knowledge, I honestly felt that there was probably nobody else as good as me, with the exception of somebody in the KGB whom I didn’t know about yet. “Cocky but confident” is probably how I was seen by my peers, “up–and-coming” by my bosses. As for me, I hadn’t yet encountered a situation or a foe that I didn’t feel up to tackling.
    I had never set out to become a spy. There was never a little voice in my ear suggesting I sign up for a job in the clandestine services. In fact, I was convinced that my life’s career would be as a fine artist. In several ways that career materialized, just not in the form that I had anticipated.
    I was born poor in Eureka, Nevada—according to National Geographic , the loneliest town on the loneliest road in America. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t know that when I was growing up. I thought things were just fine.
    My mom, Neva June Tognoni, came from an old Nevada family and was the only daughter in a family of boys. Her three brothers had gone on to relative success in this western state: one became a state senator, while the other two were attorneys, often representing mining cases. Her grandfather J. C. Tognoni, an immigrant from the northern Italian town of Chiavenna, had struck it rich with the largest gold strike in the history of the state. As quickly as he made his fortune, however, he lost it. Neva June never got totaste the riches that her grandfather had enjoyed; instead, she was set aside, over and over, as her brothers were given the education and opportunities she was denied.
    This was my mom’s story. She, in turn, passed her experience on to her family of four girls and two boys. My sisters were favored over my brother and me, in an attempt to right the cosmic wrong that had been her lot.
    My dad was named John Mendez. He was incredibly handsome and young when I was born, just twenty-three years old, but I never really knew him. He worked in the copper mines in Nevada, where he was killed when I was three years old, crushed by a cart full of ore. My father’s family had a murky background; it’s quite possible that my father’s actual name was Manuel Gomez. The story was that my dad’s mother was killed in a car accident in Los Angeles, and in a custody dispute between my grandfather and the sister of his deceased wife, my grandfather took his two boys, ran away, and changed the family name.
    My mom talked about my dad constantly when we were growing up. She had been madly in love with him, and they were both so young when she lost him.
    My brother John and I worked long and hard in the barren desert surrounding Eureka, hauling wood through the snow in a little red wagon during the winter, selling newspapers on the train that made a nine-minute stop in our town once a day, and harvesting and selling bat guano to the Mormon ladies on the other side of town, as fertilizer for their gardens. We made enough money for the occasional movie for the six of us, and sometimes an ice cream at the local confectionery. My mom had no extra money for such luxuries.
    From an early age I had loved to draw. Since we were so poor I had to make do with what I could find. I used a sharpened stick to scratch figures into the ground, a lump of coal on an old board or piece of cardboard, a pencil on a brown paper bag. When I was five or six, my mom came home from town with a package for each of us. My gift was a small watercolor kit, the most basic kind. My mom said, “Tony, you’re going to be an artist.” It was not a