Before Argo became a suspenseful Ben Affleck-directed film, it was a story in Wired. But long before that, it was known as the “Canadian Caper” — a rescue mission coordinated by the CIA and the Canadian government to rescue six U.S. diplomats from Iran, using a nonexistent sci-fi flick as cover.
“It was an incredibly audacious operation,” spy historian H. Keith Melton, co-author of The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception and owner of many items on display in a new exhibit of Argo artifacts, said in an interview with Wired. “The key was the film, so they had to take a viable premise and it had to have a real script, it had to have offices, it had to have a poster, it had to have people assigned to it, it had to have people to answer phones…. These artifacts were the original pieces that were created for it.”
The declassified materials used by the CIA in its elaborate covert op are now on display at New York’s Discovery Times Square as part of Spy: The Secret World of Espionage. (See a few select items in the gallery above.)
The pieces on display, which range from legit-looking office supplies to historical concept art by famed comic book artist Jack Kirby, show just how deep the CIA’s cover was for the operation.
The plan was that CIA “master of disguise” Tony Mendez (played by Affleck in the film) would go into Iran, find the six diplomats, and get them out of the country by pretending they were all part of the Argo production crew. As part of the operation, Mendez worked with Hollywood makeup artist John Chambers (played by John Goodman) to help set up the fake studio and its faux film Argo, complete with ads and stories in the trades.
The Agency’s fake production studio served as a convincing front as the spies worked to extract the half-dozen Americans who had gone into hiding in 1979 after militant students raided the U.S. embassy in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution.
Check out some of the items on display — none of which had been seen prior to the Spy exhibit — in the gallery above. The exhibit runs through March 2013. Affleck’s Argo opens Friday. And if you want to read the Wired story that inspired the film, here it is: “How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans From Tehran.”
Photos courtesy Spy: The Secret World of Espionage at Discovery Times Square
