num_pages: 310
description: The true account of the 1979 rescue of six American hostages from IranOn November 4 1979 Iranian militants stormed the American embassy in Tehran and held dozens of Americans hostage sparking a 444-day ordeal and a quake in global politics that still reverberates today. Beaneath this crisis another shocking story was known by only a select few: six Americans escaped the embassy and hid within a city roiling with suspicion and fear. A top-level CIA officer named Antonio Mendez devised an ingenious yet incredibly risky plan to rescue them before they were detected. Disguising himself as a Hollywood producer and supported by a cast of expert forgers deep-cover CIA operatives foreign agents and Hollywood special-effects artists Mendez traveled to Tehran under the guise of scouting locations for a fake science fiction film called Argo. While pretending to find the ideal film backdrops Mendez and a colleague succeeded in contacting the escapees and eventually smuggled them out of Iran.After more than three decades Antonio Mendez finally details the extraordinarily complex and dangerous operation he led. A riveting story of secret identities international intrigue and good old-fashioned American ingenuity Argo is the pulse-pounding account of the history-making collusion between Hollywood and high-stakes espionage.
language: English
title: Argo: How the CIA & Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History
publisher: Viking