Part 5 (1/2)

For the next ninety hours, this initiative was the only one to be entertained within the U.S. government as a means to deal with the hostage crisis. As chief of disguise I quickly a.s.sembled a team of experts to vet the idea. I called on Tim and several members of my disguise branch, as well as one officer from the doc.u.ments branch. I wanted both seasoned officers and young people, an eclectic mix of ideas that I always preferred when tackling a problem.

”If we can't come up with an operational time line in forty-five minutes, we're going to forget this idea,” I said.

Forty minutes later we had the bones of an operational plan. I called Hal, chief of the Near East Division, Iran, on the secure phone and told him I had an idea. I knew Hal well, as he and I had worked together in Tehran to exfiltrate the Iranian agent RAPTOR. The two of us had established a good rapport during and after that operation and I considered him a friend, which would come in handy in the days ahead.

”Come!” he said.

I walked into his office at headquarters thirty minutes later, alone. He got up from his desk to tell me we were going to see Bob McGhee, the deputy chief of the Near East Division. McGhee then picked up the phone and called John McMahon, the deputy director of the CIA. McMahon was in McGhee's office a few minutes later.

”What do you need?” McMahon asked.

”Immediate access to the shah,” I said.

”We don't know who's talking to him,” he said. ”We know who isn't. Can you build it backward?” he asked.

What he meant was, could we carry out our plan without initially engaging with the shah? I told him yes, we could.

”We will need everything we have on him, however-all the records, all the photographs, everything we could possibly learn about what he looks like. Scars, tattoos, blemishes-anything that would be subject to scrutiny in an adverse autopsy.”

It was at this moment, oddly enough, that McMahon took a call from Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot in McGhee's office. Perot had exfiltrated two of his employees early in the Iranian revolution with the help of a team of former army commandos. The commandos had infiltrated Iran, then used an overland ”black” route to smuggle the employees out of the country and into Turkey. We stood to the side and (covertly) listened. We could hear Perot's scratchy voice across the room without any amplification. ”What's the holdup?” he was asking. ”Is it red tape? If that's it, I can try and help you out and get things moving. Is it money? I can help you out there too till you get your finances flowing.”

McMahon thanked Perot for his call and told him he would call him back if he needed something. He put the phone down and came back across the room to our little group.

”Tell me what you need, Tony,” he said, ”and I'll make it happen.”

Sat.u.r.day morning I went down to the DDI vault, which belonged to the Deputy Directorate for Intelligence, the a.n.a.lytical arm of the CIA, along with two of my best disguise and doc.u.ments officers. Mountains of papers, photographs, journals, and files surrounded us. We combed through the paperwork, looking for anything that would help us on this reverse engineering project.

By noon we were ready to move to the next phase, to organize a ”cattle call,” an invitation to a select group of Agency officers to audition for our starring role. We needed high-level authority to go to the Office of Security's badge office and review the photos of all CIA employees. When we contacted those who seemed a suitable match, all but one were willing to come in on the weekend and work with us.

For those next ninety hours we worked nonstop, sleeping on the floor using our balledup jackets as pillows. Our Hollywood consultant, a makeup great I'll call ”Jerome Calloway,” had flown in from LA on Sunday and worked right alongside us. That episode is an amazing story in itself, but the upshot was that by the time we were finished we had not one but two deceptions ready to go.

Unfortunately, by Friday, the president decided against using our plan because he didn't want to appear to be backing down to the Iranians-a decision, I am told, he would later regret. In light of this, our master consultant returned to Hollywood, but I would be calling on him again for another favor in a couple of weeks.

With the end of November came the frustrating realization that while we were making incremental progress toward reestablis.h.i.+ng our intelligence capability in Iran, as well as helping to plan a rescue mission, fifty-three American diplomats were still being held hostage. It was a hard fact to swallow, but if anything, it only made us redouble our efforts. There was plenty of work to do, and with other hot spots and ongoing clandestine operations grabbing our attention, we were being tasked with all that much more. Then, in the midst of this activity came a memorandum from the State Department marked URGENT. Surprisingly, not all the Americans working at the emba.s.sy in Tehran had been captured. Somehow, a group of six, who had been working at the consulate and at another building, had managed to escape and make their way into the hostile streets of Tehran. For the moment they seemed to be safe, but the Iranians were closing in, and there was a chance they could be discovered at any moment.

4

NOWHERE TO RUN

The consulate had gone relatively unnoticed during the first minutes of the attack. Located on the northeast side of the U.S. emba.s.sy compound, the building's squat, two-story concrete structure had recently been renovated to handle the ma.s.sive influx of visa applicants. So many had come in the wake of the shah's departure that getting the building adequately staffed had been a challenge. On the morning of November 4, there were ten Americans, along with about twenty Iranian employees, working inside. Among the Americans were Consul General d.i.c.k Morefield, vice consuls Richard Queen and Don Cooke, consul officers Robert Anders and Bob Ode, as well as the building's only security officer, Marine Sergeant James Lopez, known among the staff as Jimmy. There were also two young married couples, Mark and Cora Lijek, and Joe and Kathy Stafford (an eleventh American, Gary Lee, would later join this group during the a.s.sault).

The Lijeks and Staffords were particularly close. Mark and Joe, both twenty-nine years old, had met the previous year in Was.h.i.+ngton while attending language school at the Foreign Service Inst.i.tute. Despite being nearly polar opposites, the two had become good friends. Mark's straight blond hair and boyish appearance was accentuated by a pair of large gla.s.ses that somehow made him appear even more youthful and innocent than he was. He was a guy you could talk to about anything, and he did like to talk. Joe, meanwhile, was the serious and quiet type. With a receding hairline and a neatly trimmed mustache, Joe was slightly shorter than his wife, and cultivated the look of an economics professor, complete with gla.s.ses, a sweater vest, and sport coat. The two friends had spent nearly seven hours a day together for six months and had gotten to know each other quite well. To Mark, who had a hard time figuring him out at first, Joe was a reserved, hardworking guy who would suddenly surprise you with his deadpan sense of humor. He liked pus.h.i.+ng Mark's b.u.t.tons, and it was only after the fact that Mark would realize Joe had just been pulling his leg.

Fortunately for Mark and Joe, Cora and Kathy had hit it off as well. They were all young, eager, and for the most part excited to be in Tehran, which was their first posting. (And in fact they were not alone-many of the diplomats working at the Tehran emba.s.sy had been drawn there specifically for the sense of excitement, and danger, that the posting offered.)

Mark had thought about joining the Foreign Service during his soph.o.m.ore year in high school when a friend had turned him on to the idea. Originally from Detroit but raised in Seattle, he headed east after high school to attend Georgetown University in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., on a ROTC scholars.h.i.+p. After graduating in 1974, he spent the next four years in the army, two of them working as a speechwriter for a high-ranking general. He eventually made it into the Foreign Service in 1978. His first choice of posting had been South America, but then he'd gotten a call from a junior officer asking him to volunteer for Iran. He thought about it. The shah was still in power at that point and it seemed like it might be an adventure. He said yes.

Cora, a vivacious twenty-five-year-old Asian American, had also been excited when she heard the news. Her parents had lived in Iran for four years when she was nineteen and she had visited twice. She thought it was an exotic place. She hadn't been following the news and thought it was going to be a lot of fun to go back. By the time she'd landed at Mehrabad Airport, however, her opinion had changed significantly. By then the country was in the midst of the revolution and under the strict rule of Khomeini. Things had changed dramatically. The biggest difference for her was now seeing all the women in their black veils, or chadors. She remembered how before the revolution only a few women wore them, and even then they were always colorful, some with floral prints. Now everyone was covered head to toe in black.