ARGO by Antonio Mendez

With Iran in the news of late, I recommend ARGO, the true life thriller documenting the CIA’s most daring rescue.

You might have seen the movie starring Ben Affleck.

The book is better.

Author Tony Mendez is known within intelligence circles as the inventive artist who rose from document forger to the CIA’s chief of disguise. His whole career was spent in the Office of Technical Services, the CIA office tasked with providing tactical technical solutions to intelligence operations—hide things, disguise things/persons, gain access to buildings and rooms, etc. Mendez was honored as a CIA Trailblazer.

I’m sorry to say I never met him--our CIA careers barely overlapped. But his legend lives on.

On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the US embassy in Tehran and captured 52 American diplomats. Six Americans managed to evade the mob, eventually finding sanctuary in the homes of Canadian diplomats. The Iranians pored over US embassy records, even using child rug weavers to piece together shredded documents. Eventually they realized some US officials had escaped and began searching for them.

Mendez had developed disguises for intelligence officers to use in Moscow and in other areas where meeting agents was highly risky. He also used disguises to exfiltrate agents whose lives were in danger, including a senior Iranian official who fled a few months before the embassy takeover.

But exfiltrating half a dozen people who did not have intelligence training and were being actively hunted door-to-door, during a chaotic revolution-in-progress, was an altogether different thing.

ARGO is a simply fascinating account of the terror on the ground in Tehran as the embassy was overrun, the confusion and danger for the six on the run, and tensions  in Washington and Ottawa as the situation unfolded. Mendez walks us through the creation of the audacious sci-fi movie cover scenario and the role of his Hollywood helpers. This was an operation with a million moving parts, fueled by Mendez’s nerves of steel (see the Sam Kass quote below)..

It’s a fast, riveting read that resonates with today’s headlines. Highly recommended.

Get ARGO on Amazon: http://mybook.to/argo/

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