Part 17 (1/2)
After the Sheardowns had gone, the houseguests were on their own for a day or so, but felt nervous about what they might do if a person came to the door or the phone rang. At that point, Taylor gave Lucy the task of taking care of the six, and he left his place to move in with them. However, since Lucy was busy during the day helping Taylor at the emba.s.sy, a Canadian MP, known as Junior, was sent over to watch the house while Lucy was away.
The six Americans were a bit surprised by the Sheardowns' hasty departure. But it also raised their suspicions that a plan might be in the works to get them out. Mark reasoned that since Zena didn't have diplomatic immunity, it only made sense that she would leave before any sort of rescue operation was attempted. Earlier clues as to the possibility of their escape had come when Taylor had discussed the issue of whether they wanted to use Canadian or U.S. doc.u.mentation. The mere fact that the question had been asked had indicated to the houseguests that a plan of some sort was being put together. However, since neither Sheardown nor Taylor had given them confirmation that someone was coming to get them out, they tried not to get their hopes up.
Back in Frankfurt, Julio and I spent the afternoon of January 22 going over our operations plan. For weeks OTS had been debriefing travelers and collecting uptothe-minute intelligence on Iranian doc.u.ment controls at Mehrabad Airport.
When you have worked in this business as long as I have, you come to realize that every airport, departure lounge, and gate has its own feel. Depending on what part of the world you are in, there are certain cultural and professional mores that come into play concerning how an airport runs. How organized is the staff? Are they literate, or well trained? Do they respond to threats or is it better to flatter them? Are bribes permissible? Is there a watch list? What are the things that customs agents might be looking for? What is the layout of the airport like? Over time it's possible to develop a sixth sense on how to deal with certain situations. In India, for instance, if confronted by a customs agent about a missing doc.u.ment, you might act indignant and blame the other guy: ”How should I know where that doc.u.ment is? It's your form! The guy in New Delhi didn't give it to me, so it's your problem-not mine.” Such a ploy would never have worked, though, in the former Czechoslovakia, where border agents were feared for their iron efficiency during the Cold War.
Nine times out of ten, the immigration officers would be illiterate or poorly trained, while the customs agents were top-notch. In that case it would be wise to know the types of items that the customs agents were keying in on. Once, when I had flown into another city on the subcontinent for an exfiltration, I had placed copies of Playboy and Time in my suitcase where they were easily accessible, knowing that these would be obvious distractions. Sure enough, I was stopped, as I knew I would be, and when the first customs agent saw the Playboy magazine his eyebrows shot up. ”Take it,” I said. The next agent frowned when he saw the Time magazine. That particular issue had a very negative article in it about the official religion of the country I was traveling to. ”This is forbidden,” the second agent said. ”It's yours!” I responded. Then, without waiting for them to continue their search, I quickly closed my suitcase and moved on. I had several visa stamps and nearly ten thousand dollars in cash hidden in a secret compartment.
When it came to the controls at Tehran's Mehrabad Airport, the biggest concern we had was with a two-sheet disembarkation/embarkation form that went back to the repressive days of SAVAK. The form was printed on ”no carbon required” (NCR) paper. Upon arrival, each person had to fill one out, at which point the immigration official would keep the white top sheet while the traveler retained the yellow copy. In theory, when the traveler then left the country, he or she would have to hand over the yellow sheet so the immigration official could then match it to the saved white one to see if there were any irregularities. Since we were planning on forging this yellow form, we would essentially be taking a risk. Due to the capricious nature of the komiteh men at the airport, there was no telling whether the immigration officials would take the time to compare our yellow forms with their nonexistent white counterparts.
In order to minimize this risk, we had been collecting as much intelligence as was humanly possible on the controls at Mehrabad to see if they were matching these forms.
There are basically two ways to collect information on airports. One is pa.s.sive and the other is to send in a probe. An example of pa.s.sive collection would be a traveler noting things he or she might see while just pa.s.sing through; then, upon returning, he or she would fill out a detailed report. This act of collecting intelligence is fairly low risk, since the traveler is not really going beyond the usual procedures of travel. Early on in the hostage crisis we had sent an all-points cable asking for anyone transiting through Mehrabad to monitor the controls.
Once we had identified the gaps in our intelligence-the ”known unknowns,” as you might say-we would move on to the second method, which is to send in a probe. In this case you are usually trying to test out a specific theory or concept.
By mid-January, the CIA had been able to place several officers into Tehran who were collecting intelligence on a variety of things, including Mehrabad. The most prominent of these officers was Bob, the old OSS operative who had been brought out of retirement to run the intelligence support for Eagle Claw. Bob was essentially one of our nonofficial cover men, or NOCs, and he had been tasked with reconnoitering the emba.s.sy and setting up a trucking company as part of Eagle Claw. The trucks were to be used to transport the Delta Force commandos to the U.S. emba.s.sy in Tehran as part of the final a.s.sault. Bob was a true professional who could speak several foreign languages and adopt just about any cover he needed. For this mission he was traveling on real doc.u.ments from an Eastern European country, and so in no way could he be traced back to the CIA. For the purposes of our operation, Bob had become a huge a.s.set as well. His job required that he frequently come and go, and he was often pa.s.sing through our OTS office in Europe, reporting on what he had seen at the airport. Bob also had individuals working under him in Iran, who were busy collecting intelligence.
Beyond this, of course, the Canadians had also been a great help. Early on in the crisis, I had asked Amba.s.sador Taylor to inform any of his personnel transiting through the airport to a.s.sist in our intelligence-gathering capabilities. On my trips to Ottawa, I had been able to debrief several of the Canadian MPs who had come through the airport, and the information the Canadians provided proved to be invaluable.
All of this intelligence painted a picture of the challenges that we would face in trying to get the houseguests out through Mehrabad. The first time I had gone through the airport to rescue RAPTOR, I had noted that the regular customs official had been replaced by a komiteh thug. By late January it appeared as though the Iranians were slowly getting their act together. Still, our best information was telling us that the Iranians were not matching up the white and yellow immigration forms at the airport. I hoped we would be able to get in and out with the houseguests before that changed.
On the morning of January 23, I drove with one of our female disguise officers to Bonn, to obtain my visa. I was in alias as Kevin and had brought with me the Argo portfolio, which I planned to use to wow the Iranian immigration officials. I had altered my appearance with a simple disguise and wore a green turtleneck and tweed blazer, which I would continue to wear throughout the operation.
As we approached the Iranian emba.s.sy in Bonn, I was a little concerned to see that the emba.s.sy of my ostensible country of origin was right across the street. If the Iranians chose to do so, it would be perfectly proper for them to send me back to my own emba.s.sy to get a letter of introduction before they would grant me a visa. If such a thing happened, it would be a real test of my ability to pull off my cover. I was dropped off down the block, then walked back to the entrance of the Iranian consular section.
The reception area was a large, dull room that contained a few straight wooden-backed chairs along with some Persian carpets strewn about on the floor. A row of clerestory windows ran along the upper portion of one of the walls but offered little in the way of natural light. Instead, the s.p.a.ce was lit by a series of dim fluorescent bulbs that gave it a gloomy, almost foreboding quality, like something you might see in a Hitchc.o.c.k movie. A half-dozen visa applicants were sitting in the chairs filling out applications, while a handful of young Revolutionary Guards in civilian clothes were standing around scrutinizing everyone with hard looks. It was only then that I realized that, stupidly, I had left the portfolio in the car when I was dropped off. I still had my alias pa.s.sport and other personal ident.i.ty doc.u.ments, but I was furious with myself. Fuming, I sat down to fill out the forms and went to the clerk's window to give them to the consular official. The disheveled clerk scrutinized me in the c.o.c.ksure manner of a zealot convinced of his own superiority. I could tell he was eager to show me that he belonged to a komiteh and was suspicious of all westerners.
When people ask me what it is like to play an alias, I always tell them that it's very similar to being a good liar. The trick is that you have to believe the lie and believe it so much that the lie becomes the truth. In other words, as I walked into the consulate as Kevin, I wasn't pretending to be Kevin. I was Kevin, and he was me.
For me, there are two basic approaches to role playing: doing it by feel and doing it in a controlled manner. Normally I'm a bit of a control freak, but when it comes to role playing, I tend to be a wingit kind of guy. But if you are not on edge when you are standing in front of an immigration officer and putting down your alias doc.u.ments, then you're not really ready. When you can fool a person into thinking you are someone else, it feels very powerful being the only one who is in the know.
”What's the purpose of your visit?” the clerk asked me, scratching his beard.
”A business meeting with my a.s.sociates at the Sheraton Hotel in Tehran,” I said in my best northern European accent. ”They are flying in from Hong Kong tomorrow and are expecting me.”
”Why didn't you get your visa in your home country?” he asked me, now seeming to be bored with the transaction and just going through the motions.
I explained how I'd been traveling through Germany when my boss had sent me a telex informing me of the meeting. I shrugged. ”I didn't have time to head home.”
The clerk thought about it and nodded twice. Twenty minutes later I was on my way out the door with a one-month Iranian visa stamped into my alias pa.s.sport. I hadn't even needed the Argo portfolio, but I had gotten lucky and I knew it.
Back in Frankfurt, Julio and I made final additions to the ops plan, the details of the visa acquisition, the plan for infiltration by Julio and me, and the escape and evasion (E&E) portion of the plan. This last part was a necessary component, although we all knew that if anything went wrong, the chances of executing an escape and evasion were practically nonexistent. The security at Mehrabad was overwhelming, and armed. There would be no chance to second-guess ourselves once we had committed to the departure. At that point the only way out of the airport would be on a flight.
We chose to fly out of Zurich because we wanted to arrive in Tehran on an early morning flight when the terminal at Mehrabad was quiet. We also wanted to fly on Swissair because of its reliable record. In addition, the Air France flight that we would doc.u.ment the houseguests as having arrived on landed at Mehrabad at almost the same time as our own flight. This meant that the houseguests would have ostensibly gone through immigration on the same day as us. The signatures and ink colors of the immigration entries would be identical to those in our own pa.s.sports, which would provide genuine exemplars for us to copy later.
When everything was set, we filed a FLASH cable that included our final operations plan, requesting permission to launch. It was standard procedure to request headquarters' approval before proceeding.