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For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes ad free listening, early access to series first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books. Join the Declassified club@the restisclassified.com.
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One of the most audacious rescue operations CIA has ever run. It begins with a mob at the gates of the US Embassy in Tehran, six diplomats slipping out a side door, and a man painting a wolf in a studio above his garage in rural Maryland. This is the true story of Argo. This episode is brought to you by
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trempha fireradio.com well welcome to the Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.
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And I'm David McCloskey and today David,
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we begin a four part series on I think one of the most strange and perhaps improbable intelligence operations in history. How the CIA, and we'll come back to how much it really was the CIA.
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It took Gordon 20 seconds to sandbag the CIA. We were talking about this before we started recording. And no discipline. Gordon, when you made me read the
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first line about one of the most audacious rescue operations CIA has ever run, even that I'm going to kind of dispute, but I read it. So anyway, it is. The CIA are definitely involved in this operation.
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And it's audacious.
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And it is audacious and it is improbable.
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And it's a rescue operation.
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And it involves the rescue of six US diplomats from Tehran in January 1980. And it is, of course, David, best known to most people as Argo, isn't it? Because of the film, as we'll see,
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the operation is at the time not known as Argyle. That is not the sort of code name for the operation, anything like that. But it is memorialized in the 2012 Ben Affleck film Argo, in which Affleck directed, produced and starred. He won Best Picture for that film, Gordon. And spoiler alert, we will be doing a film review of Argo for club members. And Gordon Carrera, as you could tell, has very strong thoughts about this film after having rewatched it last night.
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I have, I have strong views, having both watched the film and having researched the story, I have strong views about its, not its, its qualities of drama or its worthiness, even for Best Picture, but it's at the degree to which it is historical reality, I, I am going to dispute quite strongly. But anyway, sorry, Ben Affleck, if you're listening, please do come on the pod and tell us about it. But the level of historical accuracy, I'm just going to just gently question, that's all.
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Well, and what's great is we're actually, we are involved right now. This is. I'm not joking. We are involved right now in an effort to get an interview with Ben Affleck about Argo, which I've just completely stymied on the podcast, which you. Which you have just stymied with. With. With your need. Your outburst about his wonderful film, which won the Oscar for, for best.
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Yeah, I should have played it better, shouldn't I? Wait a sec. Did you actually nearly bump into Ben Affleck? Is this also part of the, of your, your adulation for this film and for Ben Affleck? Is there some story about this?
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I did. Well, so he, Ben Affleck came to headquarters as he was doing the research for the film. And I was of course not involved at all in those discussions and meetings. I was a young analyst who was not working on Iran, although we did have, did have a guy who worked, he worked on another Middle Eastern country as an analyst. And he was this really old guy who had a big gray beard and would go down to the courtyard every day and smoke a pipe thoughtfully out in like wearing like a tweed kind of blazer. And, and he had actually been working on Iran in 1979. And so he got to go and brief Ben Affleck. But my version of the, my portion of the Ben Affleck story at headquarters is that as I was walking literally past the Dunkin Donuts at headquarters, I think this was before Ben Affleck had started doing all the commercials for Dunkin Donuts. I very nearly ran into a kind of short, scruffy looking guy who had a Boston Red Sox baseball cap on. And I veered out of the way of him in his entourage and then kept walking. And one of my friends said, do you know who that is? And I had no, I had no idea who it almost ran to. It was Ben Affleck who was scouting for the Argo shoot at headquarters.
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B
Well, I bet when he comes on the pod, he's going to remember nearly bumping into you.
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It was like there was, there was a, there was a tall, lurching analyst who I almost bumped into outside the Dunkin Donuts. That'll be a good story when it happens.
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Back to the real story. It is the story of a daring rescue, isn't it, inside Iran, which has got contemporary resonance as well.
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We talked about the rescue of a downed airman during Operation Epic Fury and the really remarkable lengths that the agency and the military went to to recover this airman. And we are going to be telling this is a different sort of rescue operation, as we'll see, perhaps more of a heist style drama than a, than a kind of shoot them up thriller. It'll be sort of nerve jangling all the same. And what I do find is this is wild. The details of this story. When we're telling a story that's happening in late 1979 and early 1980, the details don't come out until 1997, 17 years later. Many of the specific details about people who were involved in this operation are not declassified until even just a few years ago on the CIA's own podcast. Nonetheless. So the evolution of the story is in some ways part of the story of Argo as Well, yeah, how it
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comes out in the telling. I'm also really. I mean, it's not often I pay tribute to you and compliment you, David, but I.
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It's not.
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No, because often you do stories which, you know, sell the greatness of the CIA, but in this case you've done something different which is take a story which is also quite politically brave at the moment for you to sell. Because this is actually the story of Canada bailing out the United States. I mean, this is the story of Canada rescuing the U.S. and bailing out and doing the really hard work of saving some Americans, which in the current political context in which Canada. U.S. relations are perhaps not at their best, I think, to put it mildly, this is a great chance to say hello Canada and hello to all our Canadian listeners. Because I think, even though you may think that this is a story about the CIA, I think this is a story about Canadian heroism.
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Well, that, that is. That's a bold reframing of the Argo story, Gordon.
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I don't think so.
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This is a story that shows the power of deep security connections between countries, the power in the intelligence world of having partners to help you when things go wrong. I mean, Canada will be the focus, but it really shows a lot of the collaboration inside the Five Eyes arrangement, the intelligence sharing network between the us, the uk, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. And I mean, for a long time the credit for this operation went to Canada. So what I'm just trying to do, Gordon, is to just shed light on the American role in this operation.
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Oh, because you really need light to be shed on it after an Oscar winning best film, Argo, which basically just tells the CIA side of the story. I mean, because the other thing we should say about this, it is interesting, I think the narrative around this story and to some extent some of the tensions around it are really interesting. And it gets to the role of Hollywood because Hollywood is both part of the story, as we'll see in getting these guys out of Tehran, but it is also part of the reframing and the telling of the story in future years. So it's a really interesting example, I think, of the relationship between intelligence and Hollywood.
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The Argo story shows when we're talking about the tradecraft that's used at the CIA to, to backstop the COVID for the. What will become the exfiltration of these. Of these diplomats. It heavily hinges on connections, relationship, connections that the agency has had in Hollywood for. For many years. By the time we get to the late 1970s. Yeah, there's also a kind of sub theme to the story around the, as you're saying, this kind of back and forth relationship between the CIA and Hollywood where Hollywood innovations around disguise and prosthetics become the foundation of the way CIA does disguise. So there's a, there's this kind of transfer of knowledge from Hollywood into the CIA to help with these operations. And you know, a key player in the story is a guy named John Chambers, who, who is played by John Goodman in the, in the film Argo, who's a Hollywood makeup artist who, who won an Oscar for his work on Planet of the Apes. So great film. It's a great film. So there, there is a, a Hollywood element to this. And as you say in your extremely biting review of the Argo film, which declassified Club listeners will be able to listen to, we'll talk about the other direction of that transfer, which is how Hollywood then reflects back the operation that the CIA conducted with the assistance, the minor assistance of our friends in Canada.
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Your words. Right, so let's dive into the story. Let's get into the story. We've done a lot of Iran on the podcast. So, you know, just to say to people, if you want to go back and hear some of that deep history we talked in our opening episodes, the first episodes of the Rest is classified, about how the Shah of Iran is restored and put in power after the CIA MI6 coup in 1953 and is backed by his Western allies, particularly from the CIA from that period in the 50s. Right. Until we get to the start of our story, really, which is January 1979, when his regime is falling.
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January of 79. The Shah, as you said, Gordon, has been on the throne for about 38 years. And since the early 60s he's undertaken a really breakneck modernization program of land reform, women's suffrage, secular schools, literacy campaigns. It's been funded by oil money that's also rapidly developing Tehran. So the, the skyline of the city changes in these years. You have, you know, very famously wealthy secular women in Tehran are wearing mini skirts, they're going to university. The countryside for the most part is, is still very religious, deeply traditional. And in summarizing the root causes of the Iranian revolution in about a minute, you essentially have a situation in which modernization and this corrupt, autocratic, fairly brutal regime of the Shah is all widening socioeconomic and cultural schisms in the country. You have massive bouts of inflation. The Shah, importantly, is also sick with lymphatic cancer. CIA doesn't know this. The Americans don't know this. All of this turns Iran into a tinderbox. And you have significant protests that begin against the Shah's regime.
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Yes. And so the, the protests start. You get strikes, you get demonstrations. 1978, you get repression, you get clamped down. You, of course, have this exiled Shia cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, who is one of the kind of key fig who's been leading from the Islamic side the opposition to the monarchy. And then in January 1979, the Shah and his wife fly out of Tehran and he says, I think he's going on holiday, doesn't he? But he's never going to return. And then Ayatollah Khomeini comes back from his exile and returns to Tehran. He's not yet seized power, yet there's a provisional government. It's kind of a febrile atmosphere, isn't it? And at this point, you get the first tensions, particularly with the US and the US is getting targeted for interesting reasons, isn't it? It's partly because, of course, the Shah has been backed by the United States. He's been their backer. And of course, you've got the kind of Islamist dislike of the United States. The U.S. embassy is a target, isn't it?
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But I mean, at this point, again, we don't have an Islamic republic. We have a provisional government. It is a very chaotic security and political situation inside Iran. And on the 14th of February 1979, a group of Iranian Marxist guerrillas storm the US embassy in Tehran. This is not the famous embassy seizure of November of 1979. We're coming to that.
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It's a prelude to it, isn't it?
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It's a prelude to that. And they hold the embassy, including much of its staff, for four or so hours. The provisional government, with Ayatollah Khomeini's blessing, send in soldiers to boot the occupiers out. And we bring this up for a couple reasons. The first is that the American embassy staff is drastically reduced after this happens, including the CIA station. And second, and this is the most important point, the US comes away with the impression that the Iranian government will protect the embassy if anything ever happens again because the provisional government didn't want the Marxist guerrillas to take over the embassy. And really importantly, Ayatollah Khomeini backs the provisional government's decision to send in soldiers to kick out the occupiers.
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And that's got implications because if we fast forward, we are obviously fast forwarding through a lot of things that happened that year to later in the year. You get to Sunday morning, 4th of November, 1979, in Tehran. A gray, cold day. The air is heavy, as you say, with the smoke from wood fires burning across the city. And now the US Embassy is going to be targeted again, but with much more serious consequences for that embassy. It's a big compound, isn't it? I mean, it's, it's something like 27 acres. Half as big as Grand Central Station. Becky, our producer, is saying about half as big as the US Capitol, or for British listeners, almost two times as big as Windsor Castle. That big. So it's a big. It's a big embassy, walled compound, a dozen or so Marines guarding it, responsible for security. I mean, you've been in embassies overseas, David. I think you can say that, can't you?
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In the region? I've been in embassy. You can say that.
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So you've, you've been there. Have you ever worried about it being stormed or something like that? I mean, is that something you think about if you're stationed in an embassy overseas?
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It depends on where that embassy is.
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Yeah. Not London. Hopefully not.
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Not yet. Although after, after my comments on this podcast, maybe, yeah, I'll be. I could be. Yeah, I could be taken out by a wild Canadian mob. So. So my, my experience with this, that probably most relevant is, is in Syria where the embassy that we had in Damascus was in. It was in a very central part of town and there was, there was no setback from the road. And so you had this ever present concern around car bombs, right. And in fact, that it happened in 2006, there was an attack on, an attempted attack on the embassy that had led to one of the Syrian guards stationed outside being killed. And that gets to a point on, you know, related to the, to the embassy seizure in Iran, which is that you have Marines inside who, but they're not really there to engage. And in fact, there are tremendous risks if there is an overrun with engaging a large number of people in a firefight, if they come through the gates or over the walls. The external security should be and is provided by the host government. So you're in this massive compound, but to some degree you're really, you're reliant on your host, on the benevolence of the host, to protect the place.
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And we should say at this point, things are getting tense in Iran. I mean, a key factor, isn't it that the Shah has been allowed into the US to receive medical treatment because he's got cancer. And that decision by the Carter administration has ratcheted up the protests. Which are going on against the United States. And a few days before, thousand demonstrators and more had marched around the embassy wall shouting death to America, Death to Jimmy Carter had been scrawled on the walls. This day, this Sunday that we're talking about, around 10:00am that morning, you get a crowd, don't you, who are deciding that they're actually going to take action. And I think they're described as militant students. I mean, most students are militants, I think, but I think that has a slightly different meaning in 1979 Tehran.
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And militant students makes them sound spontaneous and disorganized and certainly there are elements of that. But it' it was, it was planned and there was some amount of organization to this. But in any case, the security plan in the embassy calls for everyone to fall back to the chancery, which is this three story building that has been hardened with window grills. You know, thick steel door on the second floor. It's where the station would be. The plan is to hold out for a few hours until the Iranian government, just like in February, sends help. And so this is, there's, there's an assumption here that that will likely happen. No help comes, which is its own story about Khomeini seeing value in holding the Americans as hostage, which we won't do at this point. But inside this, the chancery, the embassy and station staff are, you know, falling back, locking doors. There's a frantic attempt to destroy remaining classified material, so much so that the shredders can't even keep up. The staff starts to burn documents. Some of them are just ripping up these documents into thin strips by hand. And in fact, and this is depicted in the film, although the way this happens in the film is not historically accurate, the Iranians actually have teams of carpet weavers to try to reassemble the shredded documents strip by strip. And they'll eventually publish all of these in several volumes called Documents from the US Espionage Den. Interestingly enough, at this point, this, the CIA station in Iran has only three people in it, two of whom have been in the country only for a few months. So the chancery, the militants are trying to go after a pretty hardened building, but they find a weak spot which is a basement window that had been left unbarred as a fire escape. And the intruders seem to know where that is. Once they're in the basement, the second floor is no longer defensible. And the chief security officer in the embassy leaves the chancery at one point to try to reason with the crowd outside. He's this does not Go. Well, he's captured immediately brought back at gunpoint, and then made to shout through the door, telling his colleagues that there's no point in resisting. There's a frantic set of calls to Washington, and eventually the embassy staff decide to open the door. And this ends up with 66Americans taken hostage. 52 of them will end up being guests of the Ayatollah for the next 444 days. But this is really, really important, which is this is not a story about those hostages.
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Yes, and it is worth saying that because they will become, in a way, the visible face at the time of the hostages, those 52 of them who stay for so long, you know, blindfolded, paraded for cameras. You know, I think we should dive deeper into this story. Maybe another time and what's going on with them because it's also fascinating politics around it in Washington because it has a huge impact, I think, on the Jimmy Carter administration, these mock executions. But as you say, these are not the hostages that you're looking for. It's not about those hostages. It's about six others, six other diplomats who are in a separate building. And that fact that they're in a separate building on the other side of the embassy compound, the consular section, the bit that basically distributes visas for people who want to visit the United States, that means they have the opportunity to see what's happening in the main embassy and escape, isn't it?
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Well, they have access to the street. So it's this. It's this accident of a large compound that has multiple buildings. One of them, this, this building housing the consular section, they don't have to go through the main gate where the massive militant students have poured into the compound. And there are a number of diplomats working in that building. They see the commotion, hear the commotion outside. Some in this building do wind up being caught by the mob, but six of them are not. One of them is the agricultural attache, Lee Shatz, who goes out one of the exits, walks across the street to some apartments, and then goes on to the Swedish embassy nearby, where he spends the night using, apparently using the Swedish flag as a blanket to keep warm. Not sure how the Swedes thought about that. The other five take a separate exit. One of them is Bob Anders, senior consular officer. He is 54. He is a easygoing, fun loving guy who's alone on this Iran tour. There's a couple named Mark and Cora Leak. They're newlyweds. They're both in their 20s. Mark is 29, blonde, he's got big glasses he's very young looking. He's a junior consular officer. He'd come to the Foreign Service after four years in the Army. Cora, his wife, is 25. She's a consular assistant. Her parents had lived in Iran for four years in the 70s, and she'd visited twice, thought it was an exotic posting and had been really excited to come back. And then there's Joe and Kathy Stafford, who are also a married couple. Joe has a very kind of neatly trimmed mustache. He looks like he teaches economics. Big fan of sweater vests and sports coats. Kathy is 28, has an art school background and hopes to one day be an artist. And they have slipped out away from the bob. But this is 1979. They do not have cell phones. They obviously know their way around the city, but the city at this point is unstable, to say the least, which raises the question of where do you go?
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Where do you go in a. In a chaotic city full of mobs out to get Americans, where do you go? I mean, the obvious answer is you try and find friendly people who might shelter you. But as we'll see, I think that is actually a little bit more challenging than perhaps you might think.
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Well, at first. While the mob is seizing the main chancery building, Anders, the Li Yaks and the Staffords try to walk to the British Embassy compound, which is about 20 minutes away.
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Good choice.
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Good choice. Choice most American diplomats would probably make. And they can't get there because there's a demonstration that's blocking their path. So instead they head to Andrew's apartment, which is nearby, and try to figure out where to go. But of course, remember that the Americans know that the Iranian, these student mobs called Kite are out looking for Americans. So presumably, once these militant students figure out who's in the embassy and where they live and where are their American properties, they're going to come and visit these properties and try to extract Americans. So they don't want to stay at Andrew's house. Now, the. The first night, they take refuge with friends at the British Embassy's residential compound at Gulha Garden. So this is not the embassy, but it's a residential compound in Tehran for British diplomats. Have you been there, Gordon, or.
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B
Yeah, I've been to Tehran. I've actually been to the British Embassy in Tehran, which is in the center of Tehran is an amazing compound and with these huge sprawling gardens and very, very famous. But not to that compound, because that compound, I think, is separate and is where the diplomats live. Most of the diplomats, I guess, other than the ambassador but of course, the Brits are also under pressure at this time and are likely to be a pretty high on the list of places the Iranians might look for people. I mean, the British do put them up, don't they? At first. And I, for their first night at least, they, they get a warm meal and they even get some cocktails, which I'm impressed by. I don't know. Gin and tonic, I'd have thought. 1979 to Hayward. I don't know. But I think they realize that it's not going to be the safest place to be.
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A
Well, and in part it's because. So is this, is this a story, Gordon, about British cowardice? In some ways, because I. Because that, that evening a mob is, bro. So this the first night that the American diplomats are with their British friends, ensconced in the, the, you know, the warm. I, I suppose, you know, firelight and gin and tonics and good conversation with their British friends. A mob breaks off from yet another mob that is intending to target the British Embassy. And this splinter mob shows up at the residential compound looking for American diplomats.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And the Brits kind of say, maybe you should move along.
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B
I mean, look, I want to use this series to pay tribute to the Canadians rather than criticize the Brits. The fact you've actually got a mob turning up and looking for Americans there suggests it isn't the safest place. It is almost. It is that thing where it's almost too obvious, isn't it, to go to the British residency to stay. I'm trying to defend.
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A
I'm trying to defend the nose.
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B
So the Brits, unfortunately, in this case, or maybe fortunately, but fortunately for our story, because it makes it a lot more exciting as a story. Ask the Americans that perhaps it's best not to stay there for too long. So they have to move on. And it's, I mean, there's this period where they're just moving from house to house trying to find somewhere safe to stay.
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A
And they're. They're doing this with a combination of their own knowledge of the Western diplomatic community in Tehran and also the fact that the American charge affairs is stuck not at the US Embassy compound, but at the Iranian Foreign Ministry, and for the first few days has access to a phone. So they are occasionally in contact via their host, wherever they might be, and the charge affairs who can help them try to coordinate where they might go. They go to three more safe houses in the next five days. First up, they stay at the home of the US Embassy's Press officer who's already been captured at the main embassy compound. They actually end up, because they're bored sitting in this guy's house, they end up watching a film that turns out to be footage of the Shah's coronation and are sitting there kind of thinking maybe this isn't the best thing we should be watching because if a mob,
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B
if a mob turns, of a mob
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A
turns up and the Americans are sort of wistfully watching film of the Shah's coronation, that, that could go poorly. So they, they turn off the projector, hide the film in a hole, move on. They go to another U.S. diplomat's house. But in this property, it's on this, it's on a street corner, it's got floor to ceiling windows, there's no curtains. The stairway up to the bedrooms has a tall glass wall facing the street.
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B
No good.
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A
It's also been empty since the US Embassy takeover because remember, this house has been given to a US diplomat. So anyone there is going to eventually draw suspicion. So they're, they're running out of options. And keep in mind that the Iranians have a registry of all US Embassy owned properties. So you'd have to assume that eventually somebody in the mob is going to find the address and is going to show up in search. So these are not long term options. Now on the 8th of November, the charge affairs calls them the Iranian Foreign minister. Remember he's been trapped there since the fourth, says the line's about to be cut. The Iranian government shutting down their phones. It basically says, good luck. I can't, I can't help you anymore. Stay safe. So there's no more word from Washington for a while. So that night the Americans sleep in their clothes, ready to bolt out at the first sign of danger. And they, they cannot stay where they are. But they also don't know where to go.
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B
So Bob Anders picks up the phone and who does he call? The friends from the north. Oh, Canada. Let's take a break. And afterwards we'll look at how the Canadians save the. Welcome back. So we'd left these American diplomats on the run, shuttling from safe house to safe house until they finally turn to their rescuers, the Canadians.
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A
The Canadians. There's a Canadian diplomat named John Sheardown and Bob Anders plays tennis with John Sheardown. Another little kind of window into the way these diplomatic communities work. Sheardown is the chief of the immigration section at the Canadian embassy. 55, bald, smokes a pipe, married to a woman named Xena, originally from British Guyana. They're big on the Tehran social circuit and Anders has been over to the Sheardowns for dinner many times. Sheardown, of course, thinks that Anders had been captured on the 4th of November along with everybody else. And he is, he's amazed to hear his voice. And, and this is a great, this, this line, you know, even if, even if our American listeners have a frosty sensibility toward our friends in the north, Sheardown's response should cheer us and warm our hearts because he says, why didn't you call me before? What took you so long? And then Sheardown goes upstairs and tells his wife that they're going to have some house guests indefinitely, calls the ambassador, Ken Taylor. And Taylor, and I think this is. And Gordon's raising his hand because he, he wants to jump in on a, on a moment of Canadian courage. But Taylor, and we could agree on this, Taylor agrees on the spot to house them.
- [32:18]
B
Because I think Ken Taylor, it is worth just saying, I think we'll come to who the CIA say is the hero of this story. I think Ken Taylor is the hero of the story, the Canadian ambassador. I think he is such an interesting character. You know, he's been only in Tehran for a few years. He's relatively young. You see this picture, he's got this kind of crazy curly hair, kind of mop of hair and kind of big glasses. And he'd been sent over as a trade rep. Effectively, he had a background in trade to sell stuff to the Iranians. And now suddenly he's being plunged into a high political drama. And he is the one who's going to have to guide this process over the coming, as we'll see, months, and to oversee it. And he's going to do some really, really interesting things. So I just think it's worth introducing Ken Taylor. And you're right, the fact he agrees on the spot is also really interesting because he basically says, let's do this. And he does the smart thing, which some people in bureaucracies understand, which is that it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. Because once he's basically said, yes, we're going to do this, he then sends a flash cable to Ottawa. And this actually has to go first to the foreign minister, who then has to grab the prime minister who's in Parliament and say, is this okay? And the message comes back from Canada, yeah, we're going to do this. And I think that, you know, firstly, Ken, to, to do that, to take that, to make that decision himself and then, you know, run it back by headquarters. Next is a big call and for the Canadian government to do this is a big call because it is risky, isn't it? I mean, other countries, it looks like, were not so keen on taking the risk of sheltering Americans. And this Canadian diplomat and his higher ups thought, no, no, we're going to do this.
- [34:03]
A
And I think it's worth reflecting on what could have happened to Ken Taylor and his mission if this had gone sideways, because it's very possible that he would have had diplomats or himself held as hostage or even killed. You're right to point him out, Gordon. You know, Ken Taylor and a guy we're going to spend a lot of time talking about in this story, Tony Mendez, who ends up leading the CIA to this. There are many people, not just those two, who end up making decisions throughout the course of the story that could have put them at least in captivity, if not worse.
- [34:42]
B
Yeah.
- [34:42]
A
And who. And who do so on behalf of these. Of these six diplomats? And I think my sense of Ken Taylor is that he viewed not he obviously had a high sense of moral responsibility and personal courage, but that he also saw the seizure of the embassy, the American embassy, as like an affront to diplomacy. To diplomacy. This. You don't do this.
- [35:02]
B
It's not what you do.
- [35:03]
A
It's unacceptable. Yeah.
- [35:04]
B
And he actually spends a lot of time, doesn't he, he's kind of trying to corral other diplomats in Tehran to complain about this and make more of a, a thing about it. So he and the Canadian government go out on a bit of a limb to do this, but of course they do it secretly. We should, we should stress that it might be worth coming back to the Canadian politics a bit of it later because they're very interesting.
- [35:22]
A
Oh, that, that's a, that's a teaser right there. We're coming, we're going to come back to the, the Canadian political drama around this.
- [35:29]
B
So hold, hold on for the. You. You thought you were here for CIA tradecraft. We're going to give you Canadian politics that's going to keep. Keep everyone listening.
- [35:38]
A
It's almost as effective of a, a sort of teaser as in our steak knife series. But he said we're going to come back to the issue issue of beastial pornography later in episode four. So we will come back to the Canadian politicking for those who, those who want that. And, and hello to all of our Canadian listeners who are, you know, probably after over a year of basically no Canadian spy stories on this podcast, are getting a full fire hose of four episodes of Canadian secrecy and, and high politics. So Buckle up for the ride. Now back to Iran. So Sheardown, the Canadian diplomat, arranges for the Brits to pick up the other diplomats, including the agricultural attache, Lee Shatz, who's been bunking up with the Swedes. And they're all ferried to Sheardown's home. Now, when they arrive, Sheer Down, I love this detail. He's watering the sidewalk, which is common to deal with dust in Tehran. Tehran has a massive dust problem and it allows him to keep the garage door open so the diplomats can be dropped off without drawing attention. So by mid November of 1979, all six Americans have been brought to Canadian residences in Tehran. Bob Anders, Mark and Gore Liak and Lee Shatz are at the Sheer Downs. Joe and Kathy Stafford are at the Taylor's, and remember, Taylor is the Canadian ambassador. The Canadians call them the house guests, which has a fun kind of homey feel to it. What, you might ask, are these houseguests up to over the course of their season?
- [37:17]
B
They can't go out, can they? They really are house guests.
- [37:20]
A
They are house guests.
- [37:21]
B
They're not leaving the house to go do some sightseeing, they're basically staying in. I mean, it's, it's hard. They cook, they. And they drink. I think. I think this is captured slightly in the film. They drink quite a lot of John Sheardown's liquor stockpile, which is. Which. Which I know is there because the Canadians had planned to host a big kind of embassy party, but it's been cancelled. And I guess you stockpile that stuff just in case, but it's going to get filled with bottles, which becomes a problem, doesn't it, how they're going to get rid of all these empty bottles because you can't. Yeah. One of the problems is if you've got a load of house guests, you can't make it look like you've got a load of house guests. Whoever takes the trash, the bins, the garbage out.
- [38:01]
A
By this point, it's illegal to consume alcohol in the Islamic Republic because we now are in the Islamic Republic. That was passed by a referendum in April. And so Sheardown, what he winds up doing is smuggling the empties into the Canadian embassy and disposing of them in the diplomatic trash. So there's drinking, there's a lot of cooking, which is also depicted in the film. There's, there's big kind of group meals.
- [38:27]
B
Scrabble.
- [38:28]
A
A lot of scrabble, Competitive Scrabble, particularly between Lee Shatz and Bob Anders. They played so much Scrabble that they could tell which letter it was, even if they couldn't see the letter by the wood grain on the tile. They had stared at the tiles for so long they could tell which one was which. They listen to the BBC, they read, look at paperbacks from Sheardown's library. Interestingly, I mean, all, in all of these homes there are, you know, housekeepers and staff and the sheer downs have a Filipino housekeeper who's been with them for years. Ed knows that there are four extra Americans living upstairs. And again, one of these people who takes real, I guess, risks and, and maintains the secrecy, you know, she doesn't say a word about, about these guests to anybody else. And in the film Argo, there's a, an Iranian, not a Filipino housekeeper, an Iranian housekeeper who has this kind of moment of internal conflict and is actually questioned by somebody at one of these revolutionary committees about whether there might be guests there. And I think it's, it's interesting. Like, I mean, that doesn't happen in real life, but in, in the real story, the staff keep the secret just as well as the Canadians do.
- [39:44]
B
Yeah, because it's always an issue, isn't it, with embassies in that you always have locally hired staff and in residencies as well, and you have locally hired staff. And it's a classic thing, you know, if you think about people who lived in Moscow, the local, you know, drivers, you know, cleaners, cooks, gardeners are often recruited by the KGB or the local security service to spy. So that is an issue here, isn't it? I think particularly there's a gardener that they're worried about, might have ties to the revolutionary committee, so they need to, to keep him in the dark. So there's, there's, you know, it's, it's really tense and really difficult to try and keep the secret that these people are in these different houses.
- [40:24]
A
And throughout this period, the security situation in Tehran has become even more tense. The provisional government collapses in early November, largely as a result of the embassy takeover and dysfunction and debate inside the government over the wisdom of that path. You have non extremist characters running some of the ministries, but the government is essentially non functioning. And in some cases those ministries don't control anything outside of the buildings themselves. You have the, the Revolutionary Guard, which is new as of May. This is an organization in its infancy. They man checkpoint points, they are conducting raids. It's not yet a disciplined kind of organized paramilitary force, but it is increasingly active. What is most worrisome are these revolutionary committees, the com that are basically small gangs that rove across Tehran and the broader countryside, not particularly organized or centralized, beholden to different Iranian elites, Mullah's strongmen. You have revolutionary tribunals that have executed hundreds of people since February. Public hangings from cranes begin appearing in the autumn. You have the obvious signs of hardliners who are tightening up morality codes, you know, forcing women to wear the hijab, and loads of revenge killings against members of the former regime. So you, you get this feeling that the, the kind of context around the house guests has become much more worrisome since the embassy seizure.
- [41:58]
B
Yeah. So you have that pressure, which must be intense if you're in. In that house and you're aware of what's going on, because of course, you are hearing through the ambassador, through Sheardown, about, about events. But also I think there are worries that the secret might be slipping out. I mean, there's some very interesting things going on. Briefly, in Canada, you've got a Canadian prime minister who is being, you know, challenged by Pierre Trudeau, who's the former prime minister and lead the opposition about not doing enough for America and to stand up to America. And, you know, in Parliament, he's being kind of criticised. And so at one point, the prime minister goes to Pietro and tells him the secret that there are these American diplomats who's sheltering. Pietro still goes and criticizes, you know, and kind of slams it because it's pretty brutal. But one of the problems they've got is actually some journalists are starting to learn about the secret that these diplomats might be missing. And, and journalists have pieced it together by a mixture of the fact that there are some unaccounted for Americans. And so suddenly, word is getting out. One journalist in particular finds the secret and is asked to keep it secret, which he does. To his tribute, his editor, I think, wanted to publish the story that they were sheltering these diplomats, but they agree not to. But at that point, the Canadians, I think, say the Canadian foreign minister goes to the US Secretary of State and says, this secret is not going to hold. We need to do something to get them out. And this is. By the time you get into mid December, I think that the Canadians realize there is a time limit on how long they can hold them and there's a need to do something.
- [43:32]
A
Well, the Canadians are also making arrangements to close their own embassy and evacuate diplomatic personnel because of the security situation. So you've got multiple clocks running and none of them are favorable. Bowl.
- [43:44]
B
So enter the CIA at last. last.
- [43:49]
A
Just feels like a. Like a nice, cheerful bear Hug, warm bath. A nice warm bath. A bear hug from a loved one. So what has the CIA been up to throughout November?
- [44:00]
B
Yeah, what has it been up to?
- [44:01]
A
What have they been doing? The CIA has tried to grapple with the immensity of the disaster that has happened in Tehran. So Tehran station is gone. The chief of station and two other officers are hostages. There's cables flying back and forth from the, from the station as the, you know, delightly as the overrun is happening and with the loss of the station in the context of the broader embassy seizure in a span of 11 months. So going back to where we started the story in January of 1979, the CIA has gone from deeply embedded partner of the Shah's security service Savak to essentially blind in Iran. The focus is on a couple of fronts. The first is planning already in late 1979 for the operation that will, the ill fated operation that will become known as Eagle Claw and end in disaster in April of 1980. And that's an operation to actually try to rescue the main body of American hostages held in the embassy.
- [45:08]
B
And what's so interesting, and this is another fascinating detail, is the US is kind of blind. As you say, CIA is pretty blind in terms of collection. So who becomes their surrogate collector on the ground? And the answer is Ken Taylor. The Canadian ambassador basically has to bail out the CIA whose people are being captured and again the Canadians. So they're not just. This is what is such an interesting detail of the story and this only comes out many, many, many years later, that not only is Ken Taylor responsible for rescuing or helping rescue these hostages, but he's also going to act effectively as a kind of station chief for the CIA because he's going to go out and do intelligence collection for the CIA. He's going to go look at the embassy where the Americans are being held. He's actually going to be scouting for locations where a rescue party to free those hostages could hold up when they come in. And he's going to be, are also sending messages back from when the CIA do manage to get some undercover agents in, he's the one who's going to be sending back the messages. So he plays this, I mean it's a really, I think really unusual role for a foreign ambassador to act as an intelligence collector for the US government. I mean, I think pretty unique in many ways. And again, you know, Canada bailing out
- [46:23]
A
the Americans, just saying Ken Taylor, he takes his martinis shaken, not stirred. He could do it all. He could do it all. So, and then we set up front. Gordon, I think you've tried to portray me throughout the course of this, this episode as some kind of, you know, anti Canadian monster. But the reality is, again, a theme of this series is how these kind of security relationships and foreign partnerships end up adding tremendous value. Even when you're in the bigger country like the United States that has. The CIA is bigger than the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service. It has more money, it has more technological capabilities.
- [47:02]
B
And yet in this case, sometimes you need allies. Who'd have thought?
- [47:05]
A
Sometimes, I mean, you don't, you don't, you don't want allies. You know, you just want. You don't want them.
- [47:11]
B
You sometimes, sometimes you need them, sometimes they help.
- [47:14]
A
That's right. So CIA is planning for Operation Eagle Claw. CIA is leaning on Ken Taylor and
- [47:22]
B
we should say Eagle Claw is the rescue operation for the hostages. Which, which we'll look at another time. We're not going to get deep into those other hostages.
- [47:30]
A
In my notes, I was like Gordon was gonna, Gordon was gonna talk a little bit about Eagle Claw and instead he just talked about Ken Taylor. So we didn't even talk about Eagle Claw.
- [47:38]
B
Ken Taylor, James Bond distinguishable.
- [47:40]
A
Okay, so the CIA is planning for what will become Operation Eagle Claw. The CI is also trying to rebuild lost human intelligence networks inside Iran. Because I mean think about it. The CIA had run assets in Iran who are trying to get out. As the security situation has devolved. The CIA also had a network of stay behind agents in Tehran. These are Iranian citizens who had agreed to keep reporting. A lot of these have melted away. The agency is trying to get officers in under non traditional cover. There's also. Mendez talks about this in his his book There's a wild CIA plan to try to deceive the world into thinking that the Shah, who has then come to the US and, and who is one of the proximate causes of the.
- [48:25]
B
Yeah.
- [48:25]
A
Diplomats continuing to be held is the fact that the Shah is in the United States of America. And the reasoning in the CIA plan is the idea is let's make it look like the Shah has fled the US or even died. And the. The idea is pitched at the cf. The reasoning then the hostages are taken because the Shah's in the US Removing him might remove the problem. They actually fly. The CIA flies disguise and makeup specialists out from Hollywood. We're going to talk much more about the Hollywood connection of the next episode. And the plan was to create a body double of the Shaw and stage his death. And the idea made it up to the deputy Director of CIA before the idea was. Was killed.
- [49:05]
B
I mean, that's. That does strike me as not the smartest thing, because the shot is still a lot. I mean, anyway, it just. It's bizarre.
- [49:13]
A
Well, it didn't make it.
- [49:13]
B
It did.
- [49:14]
A
It got shelved in the end.
- [49:15]
B
Yeah. So they try. Yeah. We've got a picture of the CIA in crisis mode. Lots of meetings, meetings about meetings, you know, trying to rebuild its networks, trying to think about how it can gather intelligence. Using Ken Taylor, James Bond to gather intelligence, to potentially rescue the hostages in the embassy. The main hostage pool, if you like. But not our six. But that six, in a way, are not the priority, are they? Partly because they're not visible. And it's that very interesting thing. You see this as a journalist with hostage stories, when you have a visible group of hostages who the captors are putting out on the media, all the pressure, the public opinion, the political pressure is, let's do something about them. Of which there is a lot in Washington. But there isn't much pressure to deal with these six because, of course, no one knows about them. But at this point, the realisation, as we said, because the sense of, you know, that they can't go on like this in these houses being hidden and because of the fear the secret will come out. The job of trying to do something about them will end up with, in part, CIA and Langley working, I think, with the Canadians, it's fair to say, to come up with a way of getting them out. And here's where we meet. We've met the Canadian hero. Let's meet the American, you know, the American hero who is immortalized in film,
- [50:30]
A
of course, by Ben Affleck, Tony Mendes, that the operation, I think, from the COVID side of things and the ultimate exfiltration, is largely his brainchild. Although, as we'll see, it is a team effort to get this done. Including Gordon, the Canadiens. Mendes is 40 in 1979. He wears glasses. He's. I'd say he's well mustachioed, or at least above average mustachioed. He's not quite in Tom Selleck territory, but, you know, in. In the neighborhood. He doesn't have the beard now. Maybe he had it for the operation. When you look back at pictures of him from this time, he's not. He doesn't have the Ben Affleck scruffy beard that he has in the film. Mendes is a very low key guy, no drama guy, unflappable, very methodical. Someone during the press tour for the Filbargo asked Ben Affleck why he played the character of Tony so low key. And Affleck's response was, do you know Tony? So he, he is a very. No drama guy.
- [51:28]
B
Yeah.
- [51:28]
A
Grows up poor in Eureka, Nevada, which, according, according to National Geographic Magazine, Gordon is the loneliest town on the loneliest road in America. So I don't know what that says about him. Yeah, he's an artist by trade, sketching, watercolor. Actually works as a commercial illustrator and industrial draftsman. He paints on a. Paint on weekends for the entirety of his CIA career. Much later, Home and Design magazine will do a profile of his studio in. In Maryland. Mendez answers a blind ad. In 1965, this was the text artists to work overseas, US Navy civilians, which is a job listing which sounds quite vague. And you'll see why. For a graphic artist role that turned out to be for the CIA, which
- [52:14]
B
is really interesting, isn't it? To be. To do, you know, you're not joining the CIA as a kind of classic spy, but as a. As a graphic artist. The skills actually of Mendes as an artist are relevant to what he's going to be doing, as well as the practical skills, I guess, if you like, of being able to draw. But also, I mean, as we know in the intelligence world, actually you're dealing with sometimes with forgeries, with. With pictures, with things like that. And I think that's one of the interesting aspects of this, isn't it? He's got a really peculiar skill set. I don't know if you knew any artists or forgers at the CIA or whether you can tell us.
- [52:54]
A
Well, they're not called forgers, they're called artist validators, Gordon.
- [53:01]
B
Is that really what they're called?
- [53:02]
A
No. Really? Yeah. Yeah.
- [53:03]
B
I've heard some people doing some fake Monets, and they're going to start calling themselves artist validators. Artist validators.
- [53:10]
A
I think it's a very fascinating subculture of the CIA. These people that come in out of the. Out of trades and end up with jobs and espionage. As, I mean, as we'll see some of the forgery work, Gordon, you need chemists, right? So you have PhD chemists working on these teams at the CIA. You have people who are carpenters, you have people who are obsessive about documents and the creation of documents and the supplies, the inks, the papers. So there's a very. This is the world that Mendez is recruited into. And he'll wind up working for what is then known as the Technical Services Division, which is then renamed the Office of technical service in 1973.
- [54:01]
B
Back good year ago when we did MK Ultra. I mean, this is where Sidney Gottlieb famously came out of Friend of the podcast, Friend of the Pod, the people who made the poisons at one point in the 50s and the 60s. But I guess now it's also, it's a wide array of skill sets who are doing all kinds of things. But it's very practical, isn't it? Disguises as well as forged documents, these kind of things. I mean, you do wonder how much of it would be done by AI now these days. Some of those, some of those, you know, documentation and those things. But I, I guess some of it is still very physical, isn't it? There's some, something very physical and practical about the, the devices, the disguises, the forgeries, but that, particularly in this era are having to be made by, by, by these people.
- [54:43]
A
By the mid-70s, Mendez is running the disguise division. And up until this time, disguise work at the CIA, as Mendez writes, had been really primitive. You had ill fitting wigs, you had bad mustaches, you had hats, things that kind of came out of costume shops. As a result, a lot of the case officers didn't like to use disguise, and Mendez really tries to change that. So by 1979, Mendez is in charge of what's called the authentication branch. So he is in charge of really globally the false identities, disguises, and the forensic monitoring of foreign and forged documents that the CIA uses worldwide. So you think about the number of, if, if a case officer might have multiple passports, multiple alias identities that those passports are used to travel on. You have to centrally manage what that looks like and keep rigorous records of how those alias documents are used. So it's a, it's a big and very important job. As a result, he ends up being personally involved in a number of exfiltrations,
- [55:55]
B
including out of Iran. I mean, that's what I find so interesting, is that, so he's running disguises, he's running this authentication stuff, but he actually directly gets involved on the ground with doing exfiltrations, including one out of Iran earlier that year with I think, an asset codenamed Raptor, who'd been a colonel in the Shah's military and had been a CIA asset and who they had to get out. And so he actually is really involved in these, in planning and executing these exfiltration operations using his documents and disguises.
- [56:29]
A
You think about the maybe Hollywood depiction of an exfiltration which might have, you know, helicopters coming in late at night and a lot of fancy military gear and special operations commandos and things. Like that maybe a submarine. What Mendez talks about and what, spoiler alert, we'll see in this Argo story, is that you don't want to do an exfiltration where you're being hunted, and you don't want to do an exfiltration where you won't later on be able to deny the role of the American government or the CIA in the execution of that exfiltration. So as a result, you end up trying to think about these operations as essentially nitty gritty logistics exercises, to have documents ready for somebody and to be able to get them or disguise and to be able to get them out of an airport or just drive them out of a country. So in some ways, and I think this is one of the distinctions between the film and the actual story of Argo is the film, as we'll talk about in our review, juices up the tension at various points to make it feel like a thriller.
- [57:42]
B
Of course. Yeah.
- [57:43]
A
Which makes sense. The way that this is actually run is like he runs this in some ways, like he's a. A rigorous travel agent. Right. Yeah. So this is. This is Bora's story of the. The intricacies of COVID and alias documents than it is shoot them up kind of stuff. But Mendez, as we're saying, has been involved in running an exfiltration out of Iran. And this story, in and of itself could probably be its own episode, but essentially what he has done is flown into Iran and built a disguise and a set of alias documents for this guy who'd been a colonel under the Shah, and walks him. Now, this guy was terrified and nearly cracked as this happened, but walks him through Marabat Airport in Tehran and takes him out on a Swiss Air flight to Zurich. And that exfiltration involved disguise, a substantial disguise package to make this Persian colonel look like he was an Arab businessman who traveled around the Gulf. And a new set of documents, and they fly him out. And so I think for Mendez, as he is becoming aware in mid December of 1979 that the pressure is kind of ratcheting up on these house guests and there. There might need to be something done to get them out, he's coming to this operation with that context of having worked on exfiltrations for many years, but having in particular flown into Iran, built a cover around this for this kurdle, a disguise, and just walk him out of the airport. That's. That's the play that he's most recently run.
- [59:33]
B
So he's got this amazing experience. And by the time we get to, I guess just before Christmas, 79Mendes is thinking about how he might do that. The Canadians are looking for a way to get them out and Mendez is trying to think about some of the different options. And at this point, you know, there are lots of options, but he is trying to work out how he might be able to do it.
- [59:59]
A
And Mendez Mentez wrote that the, the idea that something needed to be done, not the specifics of the idea, but that there was an urgency and that that CIA might need to get more heavily involved in the exfiltration had come to him on Saturday 19th December 1979. He is in his artist studio, as you so eloquently read in the initial teaser to this episode, Gordon he is working on a painting called Wolf Rain. And his description of the painting is the figure of the wolf recognizable only by its eyes, two golden orbs floating in a rain soaked forest. And it is at this point that Mendez writes, probably with some amount of artistic license. He, after all, he is an artist. He decides, okay, we need to, we need to get more involved in what to this point has been a channel between Ottawa and the State Department over the management of the house guests and how to get them out.
- [60:58]
B
Because it is fair to say, isn't it, that the U.S. state Department has been quite happy to have this quite quiet to some extent to take a wait and see approach with the six Americans because, because there wasn't publicity around them. But of course there is this fear that the Iranians might realize that there's a discrepancy as they go through all those shredded documents that there is a discrepancy between the number of people who were at the embassy and the ones that they've managed to take hostages and work out who they might be. Now you know, that hasn't happened yet. They're not sure about it, but certainly you get that sense as you get to the end of 1979 that there are, that the Iranians might get onto them is a worry in Washington and on the ground in Tehran they're having some close calls about people maybe spotting that they're there. So this, the whole policy of just kind of hoping no one notices just doesn't feel sustainable. Which is the key for Mendez to really get involved, isn't it?
- [61:57]
A
Well, there were some semi close calls as the house guests are staying at the, at the Sheer Downs and at the Taylor's. There's one instance where Bob Anders and Lee Shats are sunbathing in the Sheardowns courtyard and an Iranian helicopter hovers directly overhead. And so they Scramble inside. You have servants, housekeepers at the Taylor's residence that are repeatedly asking questions about the Staffords who are staying with the Taylors. You know, if they're tourists, why are they always indoors? You have one instance where ABC News hanker Peter Jennings comes to dinner at the Taylor's home, which makes sense for Jennings to go have a conversation with.
- [62:34]
B
Canadian, right?
- [62:36]
A
Canadian. Yeah. And the Staffords spend the evening huddled upstairs in their room. So you, you have this sense that not only are the Iranians working the math out to figure out that people are missing, they don't have everyone accounted for, but you have a deteriorating security situation at a sense that at any point, this secret, you know, whether it's a. Whether it's a housekeeper, whether they're just spotted by somebody on the street.
- [63:00]
B
Yeah. And then you're. Then you're in a different game, aren't you? Because then you're suddenly having to. To rush them out rather than come up with a carefully planned operation, which is obviously what you prefer.
- [63:10]
A
Maybe there, Gordon, that is a good place to leave this first episode. And next time will we come back and look at this daring operation of Canadian American brotherhood Will look at how Tony Bendez goes to Hollywood for an answer on how you create a plausible cover to exfiltrate these six diplomats from Tehran.
- [63:33]
B
That's right. And just a reminder, if you don't want to wait, go join the Declassified club@the restisclassified.com where you can get access to the whole of this series. You'll also be able to hear from someone who worked on Iran for the CIA, who we've been speaking to, and our film review of Argo, which may involve some criticism, but Ben Affleck, please close your ears. And of course you can get our free newsletter as well. All of that you can sign up for@therestisclassified.com and we'll see you next time.
- [64:04]
A
We'll see you next time.