Read Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History for Free Online

suggestion. Remarkably, during my future career at the CIA, I would often carry a similar watercolor kit on my world travels, just one of the many tools I used over the course of my espionage career.
    After high school, I attended the University of Colorado at Boulder for a year, but took time off to work as a plumber’s assistant to help support the family. It was around this time that I met my wife, Karen Smith, and five years later we’d had three children: the oldest, Amanda, followed by Toby, and later Ian. By then I was in Denver working for Martin Marietta as a tool designer/artist-illustrator and running my own design studio. The work was mundane—drawing the wiring diagrams for the Titan missiles that were being installed in silos across America—but it paid the bills. Then one day in 1965 I saw something that would forever change my life. It was an ad in the Denver Post looking for applicants to work as artists overseas for the U.S. Navy. I sent in a response with some samples to the P.O. box in Salt Lake City. I told Karen that it might be refreshing to try something new.
    When I met with the representative from the government, it was not in the federal building in downtown Denver, but in a motel room on Colfax Avenue on the west side of the city. The blinds were closed. My meeting was with a somewhat shady-lookingcharacter who wore his snap-brim hat indoors like an old-time detective. He flashed a government credential at me and hefted a bottle of Jim Beam up onto the table.
    “Son,” he said, pouring each of us a glass of bourbon, “this is not the navy.”
    No kidding! I thought.
    In fact, he told me, he was from the CIA. I didn’t know what the CIA was at the time, but tried to look interested as I listened to his sales pitch.
    “I don’t know what kind of artist they’re looking for,” he said. “I sent them a few résumés, but they didn’t seem quite right. Here—look at this. You will understand it better than I do.”
    I read through the (classified!) recruitment guide and understood immediately that the kind of artist this CIA recruiter had in mind would quickly be locked up in a federal prison if he tried to practice this kind of “art” on his own. What they were looking for were old-fashioned forgers. Technically, this was not a problem for me. It was a matter of hand-eye coordination, along with an ability to manipulate the materials, and I could surely do that.
    I went home and read up on the CIA, and the more I read the more interested I became. I could serve my country, see the world, and possibly make an impact on the events of the day. I put together an artist’s sample of my work, including a Bulgarian postage stamp, part of a U.S. dollar bill, and some Chinese grass writing, and mailed it off to the Agency recruiter in Salt Lake City. The summons to Washington came within a few weeks.
    In D.C., I had several levels of interviews. It was clear that they liked my samples, and the quality of my work was never a problem. In the end, the question became a moral issue. I met with thedeputy director of TSD, Sidney Gottlieb, who conducted my last interview.
    “You know, Tony,” he said, “there are some people who might have a problem doing what we will be asking you to do. Breaking the laws of foreign governments. Lying to your friends and family, who will want to know where you work and what you do. Will you have a problem with that? Over a long period of time?”
    I seriously considered what he was saying. This would be a new way of living, a new way of working, a shutting down of some avenues and the opening of doors that I could only imagine. I didn’t hesitate. “I think, Dr. Gottlieb, that the truth is not necessarily everyone’s business,” I said, “especially when your country is relying on you to keep its secrets.”
    He stood to shake my hand. “You’ll do just fine here, Tony,” he said.
    M y first job at the Agency was in the graphics branch, working in the