Tony Mendez: CIA disguise master whose Iran escape inspired Ben Affleck’s Argo

A forgery artist and master of disguise for the CIA, Tony Mendez once transformed a black agent and an Asian diplomat into a pair of white business executives, using masks that gave them an uncanny resemblance to the film stars Victor Mature and Rex Harrison. On another occasion, he devised an oversize jack-in-the-box – a spring-loaded mannequin – that enabled a CIA source to sneak out of his car while a dummy popped up in his place.

In his 25 years at the CIA, Mendez, who has died aged 78, was effectively in the business of geopolitical theatre. Pulling techniques from magicians, film makeup artists and even the TV show Mission: Impossible, he changed one person into another, transforming agents into characters with backstories, costumes and documents that helped them evade detection and avoid capture in foreign countries.

Appropriately for a man whose career seemed drawn from a Hollywood thriller, his greatest triumph hinged on a bogus sci-fi film, a sham production office in Los Angeles and a fake location-scouting expedition to Iran. Disguising himself as an Irish filmmaker, Mendez successfully smuggled six State Department employees out of Tehran during the 1979-1981 Iran hostage crisis, passing them off as a Canadian movie crew in a daring mission that formed the basis of the Oscar-winning movie Argo in 2012.

Mendez, who is survived by his wife and fellow CIA operative Jonna Mendez, was portrayed by Ben Affleck who also directed the film.

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A painter of impressionistic landscapes and outdoor scenes, Mendez was working as a draftsman when he was recruited by the CIA in 1965, and ran an art studio after he retired. “I’ve always considered myself to be an artist first,” he once said, looking back on his career, “and for 25 years I was a pretty good spy.”

After stints in Laos, India and the Soviet Union, he was serving as the CIA’s chief of disguise when the US embassy in Tehran was seized by a militant Iranian student group on 4 November 1979. The attack came months after the Islamic revolution forced out the country’s leader, the Western-backed Shah, and replaced him with the hard-line cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

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Sixty-six Americans, including six CIA officers, were taken hostage, while six other US diplomats managed to evade capture and took shelter in the homes of two Canadians, ambassador Ken Taylor and embassy official John Sheardown.

In the 444 days that followed, the hostage crisis drew unflagging news coverage, crippled Jimmy Carter’s presidency and resulted in the deaths of eight service members during a failed rescue mission in the Iranian desert. Mendez completed his rescue operation on 28 January 1980, but it took one more year before the last 52 hostages were released on the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981.

The idea for the “Canadian caper”, as Mendez’s mission came to be known, was born out of desperation. A specialist in “exfiltration”, the art of whisking people out of harm’s way, Mendez initially worked on a plan to free the American hostages by exchanging them for a dead body-double of the Shah, who was being treated for cancer in the United States.

That plan was nixed by the White House, according to a 2007 Wired magazine account by Joshuah Bearman, and when Mendez was promoted to chief of the agency’s Authentication Branch in December 1979, his efforts shifted to rescuing the six Canadian “houseguests”, as the American diplomats were euphemistically called. Their very existence was kept hidden from the public in an effort to protect them from the Iranians.

While one Canadian minister suggested the diplomats head for the Turkish border, possibly on bicycles, only a departure through the air seemed viable. Mendez just needed to settle on a story that would enable the escapees to board a plane. Schemes centred on teachers, crop inspectors and oil technicians all seemed flawed. So Mendez decided to “reverse the rules and create a distraction”.

“A cover should be bland, as uninteresting as possible, so the casual observer, or the not-so-casual immigration official, doesn’t probe too deeply,” he wrote in a 1999 memoir, Master of Disguise. His solution, the film gambit, was the opposite of bland – an idea so bold, he believed, that Iran would never consider that it might be fake.

Mendez called his friend John Chambers, a makeup artist who had won an honourary Oscar for his work on Planet of the Apes (1968), gave Dr Spock his pointy ears and had assisted the CIA on old assignments. With another makeup artist, Bob Sidell, who later worked on ET, they opened a production office in Los Angeles; created business cards for their fictional company, Studio Six Productions; and developed backstories and career histories for the six escapees.

Mendez and Chambers named their purported science-fiction film project Argo, for the raunchy punchline to a knock-knock joke and in a sly nod to the mythological ship that Jason used to retrieve the Golden Fleece. Advertisements in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter promoted the film as a “cosmic conflagration”.

With a Canadian passport in hand, Mendez flew to Tehran on 25 January, under the name Kevin Costa Harkins. (He chose an Irish identity, he later said, because the Irish are “nonthreatening” and “ubiquitous around the world”.) Supported by a second CIA agent known as Julio, he spent a few days preparing the six diplomats, teaching them their new identities – including as a cameraman and set designer – and preparing them for potential interrogations at the airport.

Before dawn on 28 January, they headed to Tehran Mehrabad International Airport for an early Swissair flight to Zurich. After being delayed for an hour because of a mechanical problem, the flight took off and cleared Iranian airspace, leading Mendez to celebrate by ordering a bloody mary and delivering a toast: “We’re home free.”

The diplomats returned to a heroes’ welcome in the United States, where Canadian flags were flown from town halls, and billboards reading, “Thank you, Canada” cropped up around the country. Mendez met with Carter in the Oval Office and received the Intelligence Star, one of the CIA’s highest honours. But his and the CIA’s role in the rescue operation was concealed until 1997, when Mendez was honoured as one of 50 “trailblazers” who shaped the agency’s first 50 years.

Mendez was born in Eureka, Nevada in 1940, to a mixed-heritage family (Italian, Mexican, Welsh) that he later credited with helping him blend in around the world. He was aged three when his father died in a copper-mining accident; his mother worked several jobs.

The family had little money, and Tony contributed by digging up bat guano (dung) in caves, loading it onto a toy wagon and selling it to his Mormon neighbours as fertiliser for a dollar per gunny sack. He sometimes dated his covert operations experience to an incident in which he posed as a girl to gain entrance to a couples-only school dance.

Mendez graduated from high school in Denver and, unable to cover tuition, quit the University of Colorado after one year. He was an illustrator at Martin Marietta, drawing parts for an intercontinental ballistic missile, when he saw a help-wanted ad in a newspaper: “Artists to Work Overseas – US Navy Civilians.” Consumed by wanderlust, he went to an interview and was handed a CIA recruitment guide.

Mendez retired in 1990 with a rank equivalent to that of a two-star general. The Master of Disguise, his memoir, served, along with Bearman’s article in Wired, as source material for Argo, which won the Oscar for best picture in 2013. (It took some liberties with the facts, Mendez said, including adding a chase scene and writing out two of his children.)

Mendez’s first wife, Karen, died of lung cancer in 1986. In 1991, he married Jonna Hiestand, an expert on clandestine photography who also served as the CIA’s chief of disguise. He is survived their son, his sisters, grandchildren and his son and daughter from his first marriage.

Makeup, Mendez often said, was typically one of the easier parts of developing a disguise. Behavioural tics needed to be adjusted, credible backstories invented.

“There are occasions when you’re getting ready to put your name on the hotel ledger,” he told The Washington Post in 2000. “You’ve got reservations made for you in [an] alias. You’ve just flown 10 hours. There’s that moment when you put the pen down and you think, ‘Oh, jeez, what’s my name?’”

“Once you go into the netherworld like that, by yourself,” he added, “it’s like going into another dimension. It’s like being a time traveller. How do you get back?”

Antonio Joseph Mendez, spy, born 15 November 1940, died 19 January 2019

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