The movie Argo, up for seven Oscars at this year’s Academy Awards, is based on the true story of the CIA rescue of Americans in Tehran during the 1979 hostage crisis. Movie aficionados — and historians — know that the movie sticks pretty close to what really happened during the Iranian Revolution.

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Deceased (1940–2019)
Tony Mendez/Living or Deceased

Karen Mendez died of cancer in 1986. Their son Ian died in 2010.

The group of six would remain guests of the Canadian diplomats for almost three months. On January 28, 1980 they were rescued in a CIA extraction operation, led by operative Tony Mendez, in which the group posed as a Canadian film production team scouting locations in Tehran.

The script used for the fake film project was based on the 1967 science fiction novel “Lord of Light” by Roger Zelazny. In real-life, Make-up Artist John Chambers (played by John Goodman) came up with the title “Argo”, because he loved knock-knock jokes. In the film, the title becomes an off-color joke.

Mendez successfully smuggled six State Department employees out of Tehran during the 1979-1981 Iran hostage crisis, passing them off as a Canadian movie crew in a daring mission that formed the basis of the Oscar-winning movie “Argo” (2012).

During his quarter-century at the spy agency, Mendez served in multiple foreign posts, spending much of his time in Asia. He was a specialist in “exfiltration,” the art of quietly slipping people out of a country where they are endangered. For this reason, he was selected to travel secretly to Iran in January 1980.

Argo’s central, nutty storyline—in which the CIA establishes a fake movie production, complete with a full script and ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, in order to rescue six Americans stranded in post-revolutionary Iran—is 100 percent true, and pretty incredible.

In the movie, student Islamic militants sift through the shredded bits of paper and meticulously piece them back together to reveal some of the people from the embassy were missing. This leads to a final chase scene as the plane leave the runway, adding a heart-stopping ending to the film.