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placing them in even greater jeopardy.
We ll have to talk to the boys upstairs, Hal said, lending
me his tacit support.
After a pivotal meeting with senior Near East Division
management on January 2, 1980, to present our position and
review options, I leaped on a flight to Canada, accompanied
by Joe, an OTS documents specialist. We carried photos and
a variety of alias bio-data for the six houseguests, so that we
could show our contacts in the Canadian government how
convincing their national cover would be, should they provide
us with valid blank passports.
Ottawa was chill and snowbound, the Rideau Canal frozen
solid, reminding us of the Moskva River in the winter. But we
were welcomed warmly, and I saw immediately that our Ott-
awa contacts saw themselves as allies in the rescue effort. All
the cable traffic about the six houseguests had passed through
Ottawa to Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor, so he felt like a
full participant in the operation, not just an observer. From
what I could gather, he possessed many of the operational
qualities we could need on the ground in Tehran: He knew
how to think ahead and keep a secret.
Our first meeting that morning opened with an unexpectedly
pleas-
276 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
ant surprise. Lon Delgado, my local liaison contact, showed
me a classified memorandum, saying Cabinet convened a
rump session of Parliament to pass an order in council to ap-
prove issuing your six diplomats Canadian passports for hu-
manitarian purposes.
I pushed our luck and requested six spare passports to en-
sure that we had two cover options. We then asked for two
additional Canadian passports to be used by CIA escorts.
Although they approved the six redundant spares, Parliament
politely declined to make an exception to their passport law
to cover professional spies like me.
At our next meeting with Lon Delgado, I put forth a concept
for a cover legend that had occurred to me at home when I
was packing my bag for the trip to Ottawa.
In the intelligence business, I explained, we usually try
to match cover legends closely to the actual experience of the
person involved. A cover should be bland, as uninteresting as
possible, so the casual observer, or the not-so-casual immigra-
tion official, doesn t probe too deeply.
I emphasized that the situation in Tehran was extraordinary,
given the size of our party and their lack of experience.
Therefore, why not devise a cover so exotic that no one would
ever imagine a sensible spy using it?
Without citing him by name, I outlined my long involvement
with Jerome Calloway, who had already volunteered his ex-
pertise to help rescue the American hostages in Tehran. In fact,
the CIA had recently awarded Calloway the Intelligence Medal
of Merit in a secret ceremony, making him the first nongovern-
ment employee to be so honored. That award, he d told me,
was more precious than any of his overt professional achieve-
ments.
THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 277
In my Ottawa hotel room the night before, I had called
Jerome at his home in Burbank. He had no idea what I was
working on and pointedly did not ask on the telephone.
I m in Canada, I simply told him. I need to know how
many people would normally be in an advance party scouting
an overseas location for a motion picture production.
Jerome s response was immediate. I read you& about eight.
What would be their individual jobs?
He ticked off the site scouting team: A production manager,
a cameraman, an art director, a transportation manager, a script
consultant& that might actually be one of the screen
writers& an associate producer, probably a business manager.
He paused. Oh, yes, the director.
He explained that the team s purpose would be to examine
the shooting site from an artistic, logistical, and financial point
of view. The associate producer represented the financial
backers, while the business manager investigated the local
banking arrangements, since even a ten-day shooting schedule
could mean millions of dollars spent in local currency. The
transportation manager s job was to rent a variety of vehicles,
from limousines for the stars to flatbed trucks and mobile
cranes for constructing the sets. The production manager was
responsible for bringing all these elements together, while the
other team members dealt with the actual cinematography,
creating the film footage from the script.
Given America s enormous cultural influence, almost every
sophisticated person in the world, including officials in
prerevolutionary Iran, understood that a Hollywood produc-
tion company would have to travel around the world in search
of the perfect street or hillside for particular
278 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
scenes. Film companies, we agreed, were often composed of
an international cast and crew, and the government-subsidized
motion picture and television industry in Canada had a strong
international reputation.
After the meeting, I sent Headquarters a cable outlining our
progress with the Canadians and presenting the movie-team
option, as well as two other options: The six could pose as a
group of Canadian nutritionists conducting a survey in the
third world, or a group of unemployed teachers seeking jobs
at international schools in the region. I was half expecting a
flaming rocket in response to my suggestions, but Headquarters
remained silent, always a good sign.
Over the next ten days, I shuttled between Washington and
Ottawa, struggling to flesh out the complex logistical details
of all three exfiltration cover options. I helped form an OTS
team in Ottawa to work on the documentation and disguise
items, which the Canadians had agreed to send to Tehran by
courier. In Washington, my GAD team labored around the
clock, collecting and analyzing the latest information on Iranian
border controls. All the messages between Headquarters and
the field were transmitted with the FLASH indicator, CIA s
highest precedence. The sense of being engaged in a wartime
effort intensified daily.
Headquarters recognized that the Hollywood scenario had
potential beyond the possibility of rescuing the six diplomats.
Parallel to our effort, the Agency was aiding the Pentagon in
developing a military option to rescue the main body of host-
ages. If the movie cover held up for the exfiltration of the six,
it might be possible to approach the Iranian Ministry of Nation-
al Guidance with a proposal to shoot the film sequences in and
around Tehran. Such a plan was not as crazy as it seemed. In
spite of the embassy occupation, a number of Westerners not
closely connected to the Great Satan, America, were still
doing business in
THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 279
Iran. From the Iranian point of view, hosting the production
of a film would have practical advantages: International senti-
ment was building against the Islamic Republic, while econom-
ic sanctions and the American freeze on Iran s assets in the
U.S. was starting to inflict damage. Allowing a Canadian pro-
duction company to shoot a film would create a facade of
normalcy while encouraging a flow of hard currency.
Between trips to Ottawa and intense planning sessions with
the Near East Division, I made a quick trip to consult Jerome
Calloway in California. I brought $10,000 in cash with me, the
first of several black bag money deliveries to set up our
cover motion picture company. Normally, such expenditures
would be considered wasteful, since the Carter administration
had not yet approved the movie option. But Admiral Turner
and the Deputy Director for Operations realized that we had
to be flexible, and that preparing such an elaborate facade took
time and money.
Jerome met me at the airport on Friday night and introduced
me to one of his Hollywood associates, Robert Sidell, at a
suite of production offices they had managed to claim for our
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