CIA enlists Hollywood for real-life action-adventure

Ex-Hollywood makeup artist recalls covert operation in Iran
By RICHARD LAKE
REVIEW-JOURNAL

November 2004

It was a Saturday morning 25 years ago, and Bob Sidell was between jobs. He had wrapped up a stint as the makeup artist on "The Waltons" and had yet to begin working on the blockbuster "E.T."

Then a strange thing happened. The CIA came looking for help.

When Iranian revolutionaries took dozens of people hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979, six State Department employees escaped. They took refuge in the Canadian Embassy, and they needed a way out.

Sidell, a Hollywood makeup artist with such projects as "Laugh-In" and "M*A*S*H" under his belt already, was on the short list of people to call for help.

"Are you busy?" the man on the phone asked Sidell, who was relaxing in his Southern California home.

And that is how a round-faced man who might look like Santa Claus if his beard were a little whiter got involved in one of the most unusual covert rescue missions in U.S. history.

"I am part of history," said Sidell, reflecting last week as he sat in the Las Vegas office of his makeup company, the California Cosmetics Corp. "It's a big-time thing."

Sidell, 67, who now lives in Summerlin, is not the only person with local ties involved in the once-secret rescue mission. The CIA man who led it, Antonio J. Mendez, was originally from Nevada.

Mendez, whom the CIA named one of its top 50 agents in history, was born in Eureka in 1940. He was the son of a miner and recounted stories of being raised poor in his 1999 book, "The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in the CIA."

When the hostage crisis began, Mendez had recently been named to head the disguise, false documentation and counterterror division of the agency.

The 53 hostages were eventually released, 444 days after they were taken, but no one ever knew of the six State Department employees who secretly left through the back door. The CIA let Canada get the credit for the rescue until 1997, when details were released on the CIA's 50th anniversary.

Mendez and his colleagues cooked up a cover story they would use to get themselves in and to get the six hostages out: They would pose as movie producers scouting a location in Tehran.

"I said, `Let's do something outrageous,' " he said in a recent telephone interview from Maryland, where he now lives.

In his book, Mendez wrote: "Why not devise a cover so exotic that no one would ever imagine a sensible spy using it?"

For that, they needed experts.

He contacted John Chambers, the Academy Award-winning makeup artist who had worked on the first "Planet of the Apes" movie. Chambers had consulted the CIA before, according to Mendez.

But, in this case, Chambers needed help. He turned to his old "Planet of the Apes" colleague, Sidell.

"Are you busy?" he asked that Saturday morning when he called Sidell at home.

"Next thing you know," said Mendez, "I'm in Hollywood talking with Bob Sidell."

Sidell, who happened into the makeup business after serving in the Korean War in the U.S. Navy, said he was stunned when he heard what Mendez was proposing.

"When I got my chin up off the floor, I said `What can I do to help,' " recalled Sidell, who left Hollywood and moved part of the operation of his cosmetics business to Las Vegas about 10 years ago.

Sidell went about setting up a phony movie production company, Studio Six Production, named after the six escapees. He and his wife rented office space in Hollywood, ran advertisements in trade magazines for a phony science fiction movie, "Argo," and even took scripts in for movies they would never make.

They concocted elaborate "histories" for the six hostages in case they were questioned on their way out of the country. One would be a director, another a script writer, and so on.

Working with Canadian authorities, Mendez and another CIA agent traveled to Tehran in January 1980 to brief the six escapees on the plan.

It worked perfectly. The forged passports raised no eyebrows at the airport, and the "movie crew" safely landed in Zurich, and later, in the United States.

No one was allowed to know about it. Sidell said he didn't even tell his children until a few years ago.

Mendez got the six hostages out of Iran safely using the movie cover story. Sidell said he met four of them two years ago at the opening of a spy museum in Washington, D.C.

"It took that opening before it really hit me how important what we did was," he said. "I realized that if I die tomorrow, this is still here. ... I really have accomplished a legacy."

A documentary on the rescue mission is set to air this week on Canada's History Channel. The U.S. version is scheduled to air later this fall.

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