Argo: The CIA’s side of the story

If anyone had bothered to ask Antonio “Tony” Mendez, the real-life CIA agent portrayed by Ben Affleck in the new thriller Argo, about Canada’s contribution to 
the rescue of six American diplomats from Iran in 1980, there would never have been any trouble.
“Canada was still the real hero in the whole thing,” said Mendez over lunch back in September, before Argo had ever screened to the public. He gives particular credit to former Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor.
“Ken took a huge risk and he handled it wonderfully. He got the blame and he got the glory.”
Following the film’s premiere at TIFF, protests from concerned Canadians (as well as a personal request from Taylor) got director Affleck to change a postscript that originally slighted Canada’s contribution to the dramatic Tehran rescue after the violence that followed Iran’s 1979 revolution. The movie opens in theatres this weekend.
But as Mendez stresses in his new book, Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History (published by Viking), the Canucks were his backbone throughout. The book, co-written with Matt Baglio, retells the story from Mendez’s point of view.
“When the six were seeking asylum, they were turned away from so many places, but when they came to the Canadians, (immigration officer) John Sheardon just said, ‘What took you so long?’ and welcome them in. He didn’t even have to ask Ken. He knew he’d be on side.”
Mendez is 72 now and he looks like the kind of avuncular guy you’d ask to take your kids on a fishing trip, but back in the day, he was one of the toughest and most successful CIA field operatives around.
“I’d get a call at night, leave straight from the office, call home and say, ‘I’ll be gone for a while,’ but I could never say where I was going. At one point, I had 27 different Russians in play, all ready to defect. How many came over? I still can’t tell you.”
He realizes that he didn’t exactly work for the Salvation Army, but he still gets annoyed at the bad rap the CIA gets in many Hollywood films.
“They make us a kind of all-purpose villain, especially in the Bourne movies.
Sure, the CIA has been the bad guy on occasion. But it’s also done numerous good guy things that don’t see the light of day. They’re not supposed to see the light of day.”
He looks on the “Canadian Caper,” as it came to be called, as “a case with no espionage equity. Six American citizens were in harm’s way and we had to save them.”
Most media reports on Argo concentrate on the clever device by which a group of people supposedly making a sci-fi film were used to spring the hostages, but to Mendez, it wasn’t an entertaining process.
“(President) Jimmy Carter was almost paralyzed at that point. He was almost immobilized. We had to struggle against that kind of inertia. Everybody was looking at it from a political point of view, not a human one.
“(CIA official) Bob Gates was against it all the way. He kept saying, ‘There’s going to be so much blood on the floor if it fails,’ but I couldn’t think about that. I only thought about six American lives at stake.”
To Mendez, the most dangerous part of the whole process wasn’t the caper itself, “it was when people in Washington started having second thoughts. You can’t hesitate when you start out on an operation like this.”
The other factor that made this much riskier than most CIA operations was the lack of a level playing field.
“So much of our system relies on knowing how things work. What guards are at what gates at what airport and when do they change shifts. Things like that. Suddenly all that was out the window in Iran. No rules. No order. Just a lot of young guys with guns who didn’t like Western faces. That was scary.
“The capriciousness of the revolutionaries was frightening. They were so unpredictable. You never knew how they were going to react to anyone or anything.”
Still, now that the movie has been released and the book has been published, we are apt to wonder: Are there elements of the story still hidden?
“Every word in the book is the truth,” says Mendez carefully, “but is it all of the truth? Well, sometimes the truth is not everybody’s business.”
As lunch wraps up, the final question has to be how Mendez felt about having Affleck play him.
“He does a great job, but that’s not how I see myself. My wife wanted a younger Charles Bronson. I would have held out for Tommy Lee Jones.”