Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History

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 captured dozens of American hostages, sparking a 444-day ordeal and a quake in global politics still reverberating today. But there’s a little-known footnote to the crisis: six Americans escaped. And a midlevel agent named Antonio Mendez devised an ingenious yet incredibly risky plan to rescue them.Armed with foreign film visas, Mendez and an unlikely team of CIA agents and Hollywood insiders€”directors, producers, actors€”traveled to Tehran under the guise of scouting locations for a fake film called Argo. While pretending to find the perfect scenery and backdrops, the team succeeded in  contacting the escapees and smuggling them out of Iran  without a single shot being fired.Antonio Mendez finally details the mind-bogglingly complex and dangerous operation he led more than three

Antonio Mendez served in the CIA for twenty-five years and is a highly decorated CIA officer, one of the top 50 officers in its first 50 years and a recipient of the Intelligence Star for Valor for the ARGO operation. The author of The Master of Disguise and Spy Dust, Mendez lives with his family in rural Washington County, Maryland.

Matt Baglio has worked for a variety of news organizations and magazines. Author ofthe bestselling The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist, he divides his time between California and Italy.