There are a lot of things that we will never know about that’s still buried by the CIA and all these other intelligence agencies. Some of the stories are beyond fiction and we’d probably see these stories in Netflix sooner or later. Studio execs picked up Argo some time ago before it went to development limbo and fell into Ben Affleck’s hands. Somehow it even managed to win the 2012 Oscar for Best Picture, and I’ve watched it; it’s pretty good.
I do have a handful of issues with the book though. Some of these issue can’t be helped. There is a wealth of characters here, if we can say that real people are characters in a non-fiction recount. There is very little to differentiate them save for a paragraph in the beginning and this makes them difficult to differentiate, that you may need to track back a few pages to refresh your memory — ‘oh right it was that head of security guy, whatshisname’. The characters blur into one at some stage and are reduced to mere names and occupations.
There are perhaps other books and better reading for those who want to know about the hostage situation in the US embassy, which made headlines all around the world when it happened. How the siege came about, and who instigated it are still up for debate. The state did not sanction the student protesters to take over the embassy, but they were surprised by their own success and once the inertia took the wheel, the situation escalated. But the focus of the book is not on the embassy itself but the six Americans who managed to escape from the ordeal, and the Canadians who managed to hide them.
I guess that’s what the movie really lacks is the central involvement of the Canadians, who took great risks and bent SOPs so that the Americans were in a position to be rescued. The involvement of the Canadian embassy has its fair share in the book, although the focus is always on the CIA and the escapees. And I think this is where the problem lies. The Americans are paper plain in the book and I honestly couldn’t care less about them. If anything, they are like the stereotypical entitled Americans, getting drunk on a seemingly endless supply of booze. Yet, in their return, they are treated as heroes having managed to sneak past the Iranian authorities as Hollywood execs.
The portrayal of Iranians in the book are hostile and antagonistic, and perhaps this book needs that as conflict is essential. There is a deep mistrust of the Americans with the Iranians, and I do think that some of these portrayal is unfair and shallow. There are two sides of every issue and if you’re familiar with Iranian history, America has also muddled their hands with Shah Pahlavi. But it is hard to be objective in such a controversial topic. Yet, in the book, the Iranians are otherised.
It is an account of the CIA’s department of disguise, peppered with rich anecdotes on how Mendez smuggled people out of precarious parts of the world. His job for a while was not something that the CIA took seriously, but his team played an important role in the logistics of disguises — keeping track of identities, documents, who has what and schedules. Some of these documents include B-reel documents such as bumper stickers, letters in diaries, graphics — anything that will make the lie convincing. What is also covered in the book is the involvement of Hollywood makeup artists who lent their expertise to some of these missions.
Argo is a relatively quick read, if a little dry. Some of the anecdotes can be imagined as spy movie scenes, but these are the high points of the book. As much as the premise of the book is interesting, and what actually happened deserved the Ben Affleck movie depiction, I don’t think the story is given the right treatment that I felt indifferent to the events that took place, as brutal as they might be.
