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Mission 8 - Tactical Considerations
Iran Hostage Rescue Mission Part 2

Hostage Rescue 101 | Facing the Iran Threat

Hostage Rescue 101

Antonio Mendez was one of the foremost CIA experts in the dangerous art of exfiltration. Working with the Agency's Office of Technical Services, he became a master of disguises, document forgery, and other skills that help you get an asset out of a denied area. In 1979, after Iranian militants seized the US embassy, six hostages fled to the Canadian embassy and hid there. Mendez' task was to get them out. We interviewed him on how he did it.

A black exfiltration is when you sneak the asset out in a crate or hidden compartment. You always have a parallel plan for a black exfiltration - but we didn't use it. We decided on a gray exfiltration - where you use legal or quasi-legal means to move the asset out of the country, disguising his identity. The asset shows his papers at the border and leaves standing up. We've done more than 150 of these jobs, getting people out of the Soviet bloc.

In this case, we had six amateurs. These people weren't spies. We couldn't divide them up, and we'd need to go with them. Normally you want to build a cover for your asset that is completely unobtrusive - you want to paint them gray. But in this case, we had a mother hen situation - how would we shepherd all these people past the guards? Instead of painting them gray, we decided to paint them pink. We invented a movie studio - with a real office in Hollywood, a project to make a sci-fi fantasy film, and an identity and job for each of the six people. Why? Because Hollywood is known worldwide and because the stereotype of Hollywood people is that they're flaky - so we had a built-in excuse for any missing forms, strange behavior, and why we had to move in a group.

We put the word out about the project we were working on, and we even got press in Variety and other trade magazines. I made sure to carry copies when I went into Tehran. We even got films pitched to us, including one from Steven Spielberg! By the time we went in, the plan had been extensively backstopped, meaning the story had evidence behind it that people could check. When I flew into Tehran, I not only had identities for everyone, I was prepared to pitch that film to the Iranians.

As it was, everything went very smoothly. The six people took to their roles very well, and customs officials were too busy looking for their own citizens smuggling out antiques and Persian rugs to worry about us. We had Bloody Marys as the plane cleared Iranian airspace. I told my partner, "Now, we have to learn about finance. We're going to build cover identities for the Delta team and get them into Iran as construction workers for the film project." DCI Stansfield Turner told me they were still considering that idea in April, right before Eagle Claw, but they wanted to fly them in on helos instead. The rest is history.