The Rest Is Classified - 163. Argo: Smuggled Out of Khomeini's Iran (Ep 4)

Episode Date: June 3, 2026

Six American diplomats are about to walk through the Tehran airport with alias Canadian passports. But will they make it through? And how does the real Argo end? As the story reaches its dramatic conclusion, David and Gordon look at what can be learnt from the 1979 plot to smuggle six American diplomats out of Iran. ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 at the Rest Is Classified.com. Six American diplomats are about to walk through Tehran Airport, but with Canadian passports. Will they make it through? And how does the real Argo end? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McCloskey. And we are at the crucial moment of this story of these American diplomats who went into hiding, were bravely protected by the Canadians, and especially Canada's James Bond, Ken Taylor. Big shout out to the Canadian spies out there before the CIA join the rescue effort with Tony Mendez coming up with this wild idea of turning them into a Hollywood scouting location cruise. and giving them these false documents. But it is the moment, isn't it, David? Early in the morning of Monday, 28th of January, 1980, when it's all going to be put to the test. This is what it's all about, make or break.

Another episode of our Argo series, another opening with Gordon Carrera, slobbering all over the Canadians. At this point, I'm not even going to respond. You're not going to bother, are you? Good. It's early morning. Monday, the 28th of January, 1980. And we are just a few hours away from the Studio 6 film cruise flight from Tehran to Zurich.

Now, for those who have seen the film, we remember these tense sequence in which the Ben Affleck character is not sleeping that final night. He's kind of tossing and turning and pacing the hotel room and deliberating on what to do. The real Tony Mendez said that he slept like a baby. because he was exhausted. And he went back to his hotel. He's at the Sherrits, and he wakes up to his phone ringing at three in the morning. This is planned. He had scheduled to have his driver call at three.

And it seems like it's a Mendez character trait because when his flight actually, originally he'd been scheduled to come into Iran on a different flight from his partner, Ed, and that flight had been canceled out of Zurich due to weather. And he wound up finding a hotel out near the airport and apparently slept like a baby out there too. So Mendez is a good sleeper. The phone call is his ride to the airport. It's a Kiwi, a New Zealand diplomat who has brought the ambassador as Mercedes. So here again, we've got some love gorted inside the Five Eyes. We've got the Kiwis, yeah. With the wheels, which is great. Shout out to the New Zealanders. Actually, all of the Five Eyes have been in on this, because the Brits do,

to be fair, shelter them at the start for a couple of days before it gets pretty hot for the Brits. Got the Americans, got the Canadians, the Australians. We haven't got the Australians. We're the Australians. We're the Australians in this. I'm sorry, if there is an Australians who somehow played a role in this, please get in touch. But otherwise, we're nearly there. But anyway, here the Kiwis with the driver.

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The Kiwis have got the driver. Mendez throws this stuff together. in less than 15 minutes and that Mendez and the Kiwi arrive, the plan is for them to arrive separately from the rest of the crew because he wants to, Bendez wants to have a look and see how, you know, what the situation is at the airport prior to the houseguests arriving. So Mendez gets out of the car, walks into the terminal, and takes up a position.

So he's the scout. The house guests are going to follow a few minutes later. Ed, his partner on the mission, will be escorting them in a van from the Canadian embassy. So again, Five Eyes have got the wheels. The terminal is empty. It's very, I mean, it's like four at the morning. Yeah, which is, again, slightly different from the film version, isn't it?

Because it's actually sleepy at this time rather than bustling, which I guess they must have picked as a time when it's going to be, I guess, guards and everyone's going to be tired or less alert rather than the kind of bustling peak moment of the The Swiss air counter is staffed by a single agent. There are some revolutionary guards wandering around in green fatigues with rifles slung over the shoulders, but they're, you know, they look bored. Mendes confirms the situation. And then as a position by a set of windows where he'll be visible from the outside, so he can presumably signal that it's okay to drop off the houseguests and Ed. He has, Mendez has the Argo portfolio with him, which has that binder of Studio 6 material of business cards, the, the concept.

concept art, and he's kind of looking through it nonchalantly, which is the signal. So the rest of the crew, the houseguess, where are they? So they're going to come from the Sheardown residence. Roger Lucy, who had played the interrogator during their role plays, has spent the morning trying to get the houseguess up and moving. He's making pots of coffee. They obviously, they're tents. Many of them haven't slept.

Several are very hungover, apparently, from the previous night's farewell. dinner in which they consumed the large quantities of quontro. And Coral Elycheck remembers walking down the hallway and seeing Lee Shats making a mad dash and his underwear to vomit in the bathroom. So whether that's nerves or quantro, who could say? It's always the way you want to start a big day and a big mission. This is already going well. Vomiting up your quontro into the toilet. But yeah, I mean, as we talked about last time, they've been drinking, which is definitely a theme of this whole series. Now, their driver is an Iranian national

who works for the Canadian embassy and who has no idea who they are, which he thinks they're a film crew that the Canadians have, you know, in their hospitality given a lift to the airport too. Apparently the driver misses the correct turn for the Sheraton Hotel where they're going to pick up Ed and Bob Anders has to provide him

that they're supposed to pick someone up at the hotels and he'd pack tracks. They find Ed. He's been waiting in the Sheraton lobby, reading a newspaper. He sees the van pull up. And again, they have these two separate pickups so that Mendez can scout at the airport. The house guests plus ad arrive at the airport. It's a little after 5 a.m.

Inside the terminal, they see Mendez in position by the windows flipping through the Argo portfolio. That's the signal. It's all clear. The house goes climb out of the van. So that's the six of them, plus Ed. approach a policeman standing outside the terminal entrance, hand over their IDs, cop flips through them, he sees their tickets, waves everybody through, no problems. The house guests link up with Mendez at the Swiss Air Check-in counter. Mendez writes that their eyes are ratcheted with tension and fatigue.

Could also be the booze, but I think the tension and fatigue also would suffice. Because you know, you're going through a immigration in Tehran with an alias passport is not something that these diplomats have ever done. No. And I mean, also you think that they've been, you know, how long has it been? It's been two months, more than two months, that they've been held and they've not even been out very much since the seizure of the embassy in that moment. And so you can imagine the kind of overwhelming intensity of that moment as well as the

nerves and the fear as they realize, well, it's, you know, one way or another. It's out or bust, basically. out or jail or out or dead maybe even. But they've got to kind of get into their characters as well as hungover Hollywood guys. And on that front, Bob Anders is going method. Mendes sees him come in, sashing through the doors. He's got a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. And Mendez writes that he looked like a character out of a Fellini film.

So he's loving it. Totally in character. He's probably having fun. Yeah. Now, the luggage that they have with that. is light, and it's maybe too light for a Hollywood scouting party that's been, that's flown around, almost around the world at this point, because in the cover, they had come in from Asia.

You think, okay, around the world trip, you should have a lot of gear. The Canadians had improvised larger cases for them. The weights may be a little light. The Swiss air clerk, who Mendez and Cia had already decided was not so. so officious. Clerk doesn't really notice. Boarding passes are stamped. Bags go through.

No problems. But the next bit is the hard bit, isn't it? Because it's passport control. That's Swiss Air. It's passport control, which I think is one of the key checkpoints that's worrying them. And the plan here is for everybody

to stay together. If anything goes wrong, Mendez, who is the production manager and also the CIA officer, wants to be able to step in with the Argo portfolio and back up the cover. Lee Schatz, however, has some other ideas or just blanks, because back in 1980, airline check-in had, there were two lines. There was a smoking and a non-smoking.

Out of habit, Lee Shats jumps into the much shorter non-smoking line. I love that the non-smoking line is the shorter one. Well, everyone else is in the smoking line. By the time the rest of the group has their boarding power, asses, Shats has already gotten to the immigration controls. So he's ahead of the group. Mendez is alarmed by this. He notices that the immigration window is being banned by a uniformed officer, which is, you know, he's a real official, he's not like an untrained thug. Shat's hands over his passport. He's got that yellow disembarkation form as well, which has been appropriately

doctored. And the immigration officer studies Shats' passport and says, is this your photo? Shat says, of course, he's probably starting to freak out a little bit. Of course, it is a photo of him, but any question about the documents would be extremely alarming. Then the immigration officer leaves his post, disappears into a back room with the passport. And that's going to make you feel sick. That is the kind of moment where you think the game is up. We're done. And it's the fact that the others are watching this, aren't they?

because they're in the different lines. So they're not together. But if his cover goes and they're all together, it's going to be bad for all of them, isn't it? Mendez and the rest of the crew are just standing there staring. And I'm sure Mendez, in his mind, he's spreading through every contingency. Did they miss something somehow in the passport?

It's the official looking for the magic white disembarkation. What's he want? And there's no other way out if this goes wrong. You know, the airport's the only way out. Remember, Mendez had written up an escape and evasion plan, but even he acknowledged it was pure fiction. I mean, the way for them to get out is on a commercial flight out of Maribat Airport. The officer, after a few moments, returns, comes back and says to Lee Shats, this doesn't

look like you. And he shows Shats the passport photo. The photo had been snapped several months earlier when Shats had a larger, busier mustache, like a Yosemite Sam mustache that almost completely covered his upper lip. He had since trimmed it back while he had been at the at the Shear Downs house. And Shats uses his fingers to mimic a pair of scissors clipping the ends of his mustache. He says it's shorter now. And the immigration officer glances the photo, looks at Shats, and then stamps the passport.

And Shats disappears into the departure lounge. And I'm sure at that point, Mendez, the rest of the house guests, are like, okay, deep breath. Shats is through. The rest of them are not. The lines edging forward. Occasionally, it's stalling as there's arguments that break out between passengers and some immigration officials. Several Iranians ahead of them are apparently trying to travel on false documents,

and one woman is pulled into a back room when she refuses to cooperate. I guess this is revolutionary Iran. You've got people trying to escape the country. You know, maybe they were linked to the old region. regime or other things. So it is already a kind of tense of situation where they're not just looking for Americans, but they're looking for anyone who might be trying to escape on false documents. So interesting as well with Shats is there's no real disguise used in this, is there? I mean, not, I mean, they've slightly changed their appearance, but they are going effectively as the

people they are just under different names, which I guess helps. But then it's ironic. The Hats is trimming his mustache nearly kind of blows that rather than anything else. It's something he's done rather than a mistake in the kind of preparation. The point on the disguise or lack thereof is an important one because it also paints a contrast with the film where in the film those basket weavers are reconstructing photos, pictures of the diplomats that had been captured for the embassy. And it is true that the Iranians did have Weaver's kind of stitching documents back together. The fiction that the film develops to ratchet up the tension at the airport is that they're piecing together photos of the diplomats.

And then there's a clock ticking because will the Iranians actually figure out the face and the name of the people they're after and be able to match that face at the airport? court. And what the reality is, is that the Iranians knew that there were some people missing, but they didn't know who they were. They didn't have photos of them. And so Mendez and Ed and the Canadians could have some assurances that even with the light disguise, they would be okay. They'd be okay. So that they don't have the full-on prosthetics or anything like that. Corr Elijah, because they see this woman taken off, though, is because, because, because they see this woman taken off, though, is, because coming concerned because she's read an article in the Tehran papers a few weeks earlier about a woman who had been caught smuggling money in her body cavities. And so Coriolajek is thinking, well, what if

we're just randomly searched? You know, like what happens then? So by the time they reached the counter, the immigration officer has mysteriously disappeared. She's gone. The group stands there for several minutes, doing nothing. That's tense because, again, what's going on? We're just standing here. Are they on to us? Are they... Yeah, where is the... Where? What's happening? After a few more minutes, they have their answer

because the officer returns to his desk with a cup of tea that he is fixed for himself. Collects the passports, gives them their exit stamps, waves them through. He collects their yellow disembarkation forms. As he taps the edges of the stack down on the counter, one of them floats down to the floor.

As they walk past, Vendez writes that he bent down and picked up the form, slipped it in with his papers, and later looking at it, he realizes it's Bob Anders form. And so he's just walked off with the only physical record that a Robert Baker, total alias, was ever in Iran. So they've made it through passport control, which is the hardest part, and they're at the gate. And then, just as they sit down and get to the gate, you've got the final security check. You're in the kind of boarding room.

you're getting ready to board. We all know that feeling. And then what's the worst, you know, announcement you can possibly get over the loud speaker? Flight has mechanical problems. We've all heard it and been like, no. But do you imagine what it's like for them? Because, I mean, you must be so tense anyway as well as hungover. But that's just going to compound it and compound the tension for them.

It's Murphy's law, isn't it? Everyone's, of course, anxious. because what if the flight gets canceled? And then you have to come back and do this all again. Do it again? And the Canadian embassy is closing. So do you try to delay that a few days? You probably would have.

I think that's probably not a huge factor. But I mean, it's a piece of the puzzle. So they file back into the departure lounge. The problem, it turns out, is a faulty airspeed indicator, which is going to take about an hour to fix. They discuss switching over to a British Airways flight. But the bag is already checked on Swiss Air and switching. means pulling the bags off, rechecking them. I think as the day goes on, the Revolutionary Guard presence is going to pick up at the airport.

You want to get out on this flight if you can, so they decide to wait it out. It's agonizing. Sun's coming up, dawn breaks, departure lounge is filling up. Now we have more revguards circulating in the lounge. They're, you know, they're sort of getting tired. Vendez rights over time of picking on or checking on Iranians. They're turning their attention to foreigners. addressing them in rough, broken English or in German.

Now, Joe Stafford, who's bored and nervous, is reading a Persian language newspaper. And they're like, okay, wait a minute. What Canadian employee of Studio 6 productions can read Persian? And so Stafford and Mendez seem to realize this at the same time, and Stafford kind of slowly puts the paper down. there is then some awkwardness at the duty-free shop. I love it. I'm sorry.

They go to the duty-free shop. I mean, they can't wait for the booze, basically, the theme of this story. No, no, no, it's not. Well, it is, yeah, it is a theme. It's not booze, though, Gordon. Joe and Kathy Stafford have disappeared into the duty-free shop for several minutes. They come out with a sealed bag, and Joe comes up to Mendez and says, we would like you to have this as a token of our esteem.

and it's a huge container of Iranian buluga caviar, which is not cheap. Mendez is kind of awkward. He understands the gesture, but it seems a little out of pattern to buy your production manager a huge container of caviar from a duty-free shop. I mean, I guess you could say you're all together as a group

that we wanted to buy this as a souvenir of our time in Iran. Anyhow, Mendez accepts. Then get the announcement that Swiss Air Flight 363, is ready to board, scramble onto the airport bus, it's going to take them out to the plane. And as they're climbing the stairs, the air stair to get up to the plane, Bob Anders kind of knocks Mendez at the arm. He says, you guys think of everything. And Anders is pointing up at the side of the plane and painted in big red letters near the nose is the name of the Canton in Switzerland where the actual aircraft is registered. I don't know exactly how you pronounce this, but it looks

like Argo. Argao. Argao. A-A-R-G-A-U. Yeah. I mean, that's wild as a coincidence, isn't it? It's an omen. It's an ovid. So the plane rolls down the runway. It lifts off. Mendez is feeling euphoric. The wheels are up. They've still got a couple hours before they clear Iranian airspace. So you still do have to wait it out, grid it out a bit, because that plan could be asked to turn around. When the captain finally announces on the the intercom that they've crossed into Turkish airspace. The cabin erupts into cheers, and it's not just the houseguests. There's a bunch of other escaping Iranians on the flight who have presumably had their own, you know, tortured ordeals leaving the airport that morning. Although, sadly, none of them

memorialized into Hollywood into movies. You wonder what the stories are. None of them quite as crazy as this. Well, it gives you a sense of how tense that airport would have been. And that is something the film plays it up tremendously, which we'll talk about in our, which Gordon will rant about in his monologue on our declassified club episode. But the airport's a tense place and a high stakes place. I mean, I should say, I've flown out of Iran out of that airport a couple of times. And I remember the last time I went out, I mean, it was friendlier times than now with Iran. But you're nervous when you go through it. You know, until you leave, you just think, well, what if someone's going to stop me and accuse me of

being a spy and I'm suddenly going to end up in an Iranian jail cell? And that was me as a journalist during friendly times. So I think until you've actually, you know, the plane is flying and out of Iranian airspace, I think that is only the moment you can breathe out. So what do you do when you get out of Iranian airspace? you wheel out the bar cart. Everyone has bloody marries. Starts working on another bender.

Mendez raises his glass. Argo, he says, we're home free. Maybe there. Gordon, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll see how the operation is not by any beans. Over. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers.

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They're out of Iranian airspace. Not quite as it happens in the movie. It's fair to say you don't have chases down the runway. Where's the chase scene? Where's my chase scene? You promised me a chase scene. We'll deal with that question, I think, in our movie review, if review is the right word. Because there's quite a few things which happen in the film, which don't happen in real life.

And which are put in to kind of get the tension. But I think what is important is that they're out of the country, out of Iran, but there are still things going on which are quite important and which are going to lead to the long-term legacy of this operation. I mean, one thing, I think it's interesting, isn't it? Back at the Canadian embassy, they are shutting up shop and they are smashing that commo equipment. And I love the fact that one of the last messages that the Canadians get through, from Ottawa, before they smash up their covert equipment, is see you later, exfiltrator, which is my favorite, which is a bit of a kind of telling message, but that's the one sent to the brave Canadians for who finishing off the mission. But back in Tehran, they're shutting up shop,

but the story isn't quite over, is it? No. The six Americans are out. They have descended from the plane in Zurich and joyfully stomp their feet on the tarmac. There's no one to meet them at the gate, which I think is great. They have to go through Swiss immigration controls on their alias passports. It's fine. No issues. As they come into the parking lot, there's a group of U.S. State Department officials that suddenly approach. And they snagged the house guests, push them into a waiting van, and drive them off to a mountain lodge in the Alps, where they'll be fed pizza, given six packs of Heineken and inform that they can't yet contact their families to say they're safe. Because again, you don't want retribution against the hostages in Tehran.

And we should say that. It's important, isn't it? Is that the plan at this point was to try and keep the whole thing secret, wasn't it, effectively? And Mendez and Ed are left alone in the parking lot. They're not part of their jobs done. They're not there to baby. They don't need to talk to the diplomats. Mendez writes that he realized he was freezing

and he didn't have his coat anymore and Ed is like, where's your coat? Mendez says, I lent it to Joe. So Joe heads off with his coat and it's, I think, actually, you wouldn't write it this way. Obviously, Ben Affleck didn't in the film. But this is the end of the operation

for the CIA right there on, you know, in a parking lot in Zurich, but it's by no means the end of the story because how the story comes out and the pieces of it that are that are not shared for a long time is actually part of the story itself. Because remember, the cover, the Studio 6 Argo production team cover was at the time thought to be multi-use and could be helpful in a potential rescue of the other hostages. And so in particular, what Ed ends up doing as he goes, and over the course of that spring, takes classes in international finance and the entertainment industry. So he could

potentially more credibly play another associate, an associate producer on another rescue of Americans out of Iran. So that operation, of course, comes to be known as Eagle Claw. Eagle Claw does not wind up using the Argo Studio 6 cover, but in January of 1980, nobody has any clue that that's how it's going to go down. Yeah. So it's so interesting, isn't it? The plan is to effectively keep this whole operation hidden, keep what's happened hidden, and wait until they can get the other hostages out at the very least before even revealing

that the house guests are, you know, back in the United States. States, which must be weird for them because you think you've just escaped. The first thing you want to do is call your family and you're being told not to do it. So it must be pretty frustrating. But Word, we should say, has got back to the White House and word is getting around, hasn't it? Because back in Tehran, you know, the Canadians just before they shut up shop, have sent word of the mission success to Ottawa by cable. And so even by this stage, you know, the president knows about it. It's a big deal. It's amazing how quickly it, it's a big deal. It's amazing how quickly it becomes clear that the U.S. government won't be able to keep the secret.

The plan to do that to keep the houseguests secluded in Florida until the hostage crisis has resolved lasts less than two days. Because on the 29th of January, a Canadian journalist named Jean Paletti, who's the Washington Bureau Chief for La Press, writes that the six are out of Iran. Yeah, and we should say that he is the journalist who we discussed previously,

and on the earlier episodes, who'd worked it out earlier, and he'd worked out by the fact that there was a discrepancy in the number of American diplomats and that the Canadians were kind of, you know, in the kind of political context, dropping hints that they were doing something to help the Americans. He'd worked it out, and it had been agreed with his editor

that they would hold the story until the hostages were safe. And, you know, he'd been, he'd given the Canadian government his word, that he wouldn't publish anything. And I think, you know, that's testament to a kind of responsible journalist who had agreed to that. There's always pressure to get a scoop as a journalist. But there are times when, you know, there are public safety or their hostages situation where you do get asked, can you not report this or not yet or can you hold it? And he had, he'd held it until now. How would you have viewed his, from a journalistic perspective, how would you have viewed the decision to run a story before?

they had gotten out. So I remember as a journalist, you would particularly, people think you get censored and there's denotes and there's all this stuff about, you know, told that you can't report things. But the one time you do get asked sometimes not to report something is when you have a hostage situation. And particularly in the early period normally of a hostage situation where you, I would get a message or the BBC or someone would get a message saying, this is a very sensitive moment, we are trying to see if we can, for instance, negotiate a release or trying to, maybe there's a rescue mission going on, and publicity regarding that could endanger that person's life.

And you'd be a pretty crazy journalist to kind of go, hey, I'd rather have a scoop, even if it endangers someone life. So I think that is something which almost all responsible journalists would do, would sit on. But then there's always that moment. And I think we see it with this journalist as well, where he learned. on the 28th of January that the Canadian embassy is closing. And obviously he knows that that was the way most likely that these diplomats, American diplomats, were being sheltered.

So he works it out and calls, he does what a journalist should do, which he calls the Canadian embassy in Washington, you know, for confirmation. And he's told they would like him to still wait. But at that point, he feels he's got the story. So I think he's done, I think what most people would say would be the response, the correct thing, which is wait, but then you get to the point. And you can be frustrated if you're, you know, CIA because you'd like to have held it for longer. I think it would have been hard to hold it for much longer, if I'm being honest. But there were lots of other people who knew about it, lots of diplomats, a lot of officials, a lot of people in multiple countries.

I think these stories don't stay secret for that long. So, you know, he goes with the story and then within hours. It's out, isn't it? What's so fascinating about the way the story breaks is that Pelletier, the Canadian journalist, doesn't have the CIA angle, though. When the story comes out, it is, it's a Canada-centric Canada-focused story about the effort to hide the house guests and to expiltrate them. So you don't have, you know, you don't have any of the cover stuff, the Mendez side of it, the fake film crew, you know, the screenplay, John Chambers, none of that is in the initial round of reporting that comes out on the operation. And in fact, all of that remains classified until 1997 when President Clinton

declassifies many of the details around that operation. It is, it's interesting to go back and look at the video reels of the pictures, because in the states, in the days after that story breaks. Canada's pretty cool, Gordon. We got Maple Leaf flags, flying on private homes, as billboards go up in Times Square that say, thank you, Canada. Can you imagine that today? It's unimaginable today. It's absolutely unimaginable. The U.S. House of Representatives passes a resolution thanking the Canadians. And your hero, Ambassador Ken Taylor, it becomes an overnight celebrity. He's all over the place. He's awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 19. 81 by President Reagan in the Rose Garden, sharing company with the Dalai Lama and Pope John Paul

the second, which is, you know, it's quite kind of esteemed company. And John Chambers, the makeup artist who had helped Mendez set up the cover in Hollywood, takes out a full-page ad in his local Burbank newspaper that reads, thanks Canada, we needed that. And Mendez goes home to Barrett-Lid and like a good CIA ban doesn't tell anyone what he's done. At this point, Canada gets full credit. And I agree the CIA does get written out the story for good reason.

But I think in a sense, what you then get, you then get it declassified, as you said, in 1997, and then eventually you'll get the film Argo made, 2012. In a way, what you get is almost an over-correction. So at that time, it's like this is 100% Canada. and then the CIA bit gets revealed and it's like it's 100% CIA when the reality as we know

is somewhere more in between but it's interesting there's an interview with Jimmy Carter by none other than Pierce Morgan which comes out around the time of the Argo film coming out and it's so interesting because Jimmy Carter goes

great film but the true story is it was 90% he says 90% Canadian which I think is a really actually feels even a bit high for me. Even with my pro-Canada hat on, 90% seems a little bit high. It is high. That seems a little high. But it's like, in a way, it's a shame because the point you make, which is that the CIA bit is classified and then it gets declassified and then people focus on that,

means that it's quite hard to ever get a really sensible balance view of the contribution. And maybe it's not something you should be rating in terms of percentages. Because the point is it's a great allied effort. isn't it? I mean, that is part of the point of this story, is rather than arguing about, as I have been, as you have, as every, at the opening of every episode of the series, you have basically, it makes me wonder if you're taking Canadian money, Gordon. Is that an accusation that I'm on the payroll of Canadian CISIS? The Canadian Payroll.

Agent of influence for the Canadian intelligence service. Gordon Carrera. You're right that it is perhaps not even an interesting. question to say, well, what percent of the operation was the Canadians and what was the, what was CIA? I think what's more interesting is looking at this as a case study in how a joint operation actually works, which when you have two services that are friendly with each other and there's some measure of trust and with their shared national interest, you have a division of labor around what makes sense for each service to do. If you peel this whole thing, the whole thing,

back, you say, okay, well, what does each side bring to the table here? After the embassy is taken, the Canadians have the presence in Tehran. They have the diplomatic pouch that's going in and out that's so critical to this operation because it's the way you get in all of the forged documents, right, the disguise kits, all this kind of stuff, instead of having to smuggle them through some rat line, which would be complex and take a lot of time or airdrop, there's just something, you know, wild. You just, the Canadians can send them in. The U.S. doesn't have that at that point because the embassy's gone. That's hugely valuable.

You have properties, Canadian diplomatic properties around Tehran that you're hiding people in. You have an ambassador in Ken Taylor who is able to kind of ringlead this thing from the Canadian side and advocate for a rescue and exfiltration to kind of pound the table and make it happen. And then on the agency side, I think you have far more experience with exfiltrations, disguise, forgery, documents than the Canadians would have had. You have a real deep technical expertise inside OTS that Mendez and his team bring to this problem. And you have the deep connection in Hollywood to establish the plausible cover. So when you add all of these things up, you do. get a great picture of how it actually makes a ton of sense for a really big service like the CIA and a smaller service like the Canadians to partner with one another.

Because if we try to do something on our own and we bring 100 units of something and the Canadians bring 30 when you put both of them together, they're not saying that was the percentage on this operation. I'm just saying conceptually, the Canadians bring 30. When you put them both together, it's 130. So like you want, that's what you want. Yeah, but it's also, it may not be, it might be those 30 units are vital units which make it possible. Totally.

Totally. I completely agree that actually this to me just shows the value of liaisons and partnerships. And, you know, one country, you know, in five eyes or somewhere else can have access to a, to a location, to an agent, you know, to a platform to be able to do something. And the other one may be able to leverage that. And the idea it's simply about size or experience. It's not as simple as that, is it? the intelligence game. I think this is a really good example about that. I mean, there are some other things which I think are really interesting about it, you know, in terms of cover and tradecraft,

aren't they? Could you do something like this today? No. No. No. Okay. Because you couldn't, you wouldn't be able, I would say at most global airports, there would be, you'd have to work under the presumption that there would be biometrics or biometric capabilities that would create an anomaly between the person standing there, their iris, fingerprint, whatever it might be, and what the document says, the passport. So that's a major problem that would have created issues in this. Another one is the backstopping is much harder in an era where you can look at someone's social media presence and say, okay, well, you know, there's ways around this,

but it's harder now because if Mendez was trying to do this today, he would have had to create a huge amount of kind of digital dust for these personas that would look credible if someone at Iran started to dig in. Well, Studio 6, what is that? Well, now there'd be a web presence. It wouldn't just be a couple ads, you know, in variety in the Hollywood Reporter and a phone number that reaches an office on the old Columbia Productions lot, there would have to be a whole bunch of kind of digital trails that the Iranians could walk down to make it seem credible, and that's just more challenging to build. Yeah.

I mean, on a simple level, you'd go, what's the LinkedIn profile or what's the social media profile for the production manager or for the screenwriter? What other things have they've done? When was that profile set up? I remember someone, you know, from MI6, it was in the 2000s when they started to realize the old ways of cover didn't work because they actually started to run tests and they looked at it and they said,

the old ways we used to do a cover with a false passport, how long would that work against a genuinely curious and capable border guard, the equivalent of the border guards in the airport there, who had access to Google. So the 2000s when Google is just starting. And the answer was it would take about a minute to

unwind the old ways of cover with just a bit of like Googling in those days. And that's even you know, before you get to biometrics. So this does feel like something from a different era. But I take your point, which is that there are new ways of doing this, aren't there? And some of those are going to be secret of building cover and deepening cover and of creating whether it's companies or productions or backstories for people,

which do make it possible. But I guess it's just harder, isn't it? It takes a lot more work than just some stamps and some passports. Right. And I still think that those, those talents, the kind of trade skills inside the CIA are still there in many respects. It's just that it's harder to manage cover now.

I mean, one way that, one thread out of this story that you can pull forward to the present is, you know, there is still a group inside the CIA that's focused on disguise. You know, we call it getting programmed for a disguise. And the techniques, disguises have come a long, long way from the 70s and 80s. But it's interesting. The way that the agency builds them today, the foundation for that are still techniques

and technology that come out of the entertainment industry in Hollywood. At a Hollywood. So it's very similar to the way that the CIA absorbed techniques for prosthetics back when John Chambers and Tony Mendez were working together. And, you know, for like a disguise, you're getting programmed for this by sitting at a chair kind of inside a cage. There's an array of maybe 50 or 60 cameras around you. Shots get taken from all angles and all different kinds of lighting.

And then all of that is fed into a program that recommends a new face based on those photos. And so basically you can have masks that are sort of like Mission Impossible that are just pull on, but they're not particularly convincing because it's got gaps by the mouth and the eyes. It's thin, it's fragile. So it's not convincing if you're going to sit in front of someone to talk. But there's another type of mask, which is very similar to what an actor would wear in Hollywood if they were, you know, in a sci-fi movie where it's like an additive process where they build pieces of silicone that essentially are adhered to your face. So you could have new chin, cheeks, forehead, neck, nose, dental appliances for new teeth, kind of puff out, puff out your mouth, all applied with a spirit gum and then covered with a custom makeup. And all of that stuff is that's done inside the agency when there is still a need for disguise,

which is increasingly rare, but there are still operational reasons to do it, is very similar to what's done in Hollywood. So you still have that pipeline going between the agencies, technical people and Hollywood that guys like John Chambers and Tony Mendez really built out in the 70s and 80s. So there's still that liaison. Because you sometimes hear about Hollywood liaison from CIA, which we often think about, we talked about this right at the start as being more about can you influence the screenwriting

side of things and the plots and make them accurate or less accurate or things like that. But it's actually, I find it so interesting that it's actually the tradecraft side of things is the other bit of that connection between Hollywood and the CIA, and which was there then with John Chambers and must be still there now. And you can imagine it in lots of ways with production design as well. And maybe it's going to get even more so with some of the things you can do with artificial intelligence. Some of the things you're going to create, creating false identities or creating theater is something that spy agencies do as well as Hollywood. And Hollywood's got

the money for it, frankly, in the experience. So why not tap into it? I was going to end with a little coda about Tony Mendez, Gordon, but I'm afraid that you will then end on top of that with a rival coda about the Canadians. And I think your point on, on theater is maybe the right place to end this story because it is it is also I think it's sort of this great irony there's this feedback loop of Hollywood feeding the agency and then also reflecting the agency back out into the world through through the medium of film I think that might be the place to end it and tease it as we we prepare ourselves mentally physically and spiritually for Gordon Carrera's demolition of the film Argo in our in our episode for de Glasses.

Club members. Ben Affleck, if you're listening, please, well, first of all, please join the club. You still have to pay for membership, even if Ben Affleck. And then you can hear what I really think of. I'll go, as can everyone else, if you join up at the declassified club, but the rest is classified.com, where we're going to be talking a bit more about the film. And yeah, I think getting into not just the lack of realism of certain aspects of it, but I think the story around the film is genuinely really interesting and what's in there and what's not. And the reaction to the filming, including yes, from Canada. So a chance to listen to that. You can also sign up for our newsletter, which is free to everybody. You don't

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