Welcome to the revolution -- Picking up the pieces -- Diplomacy -- Nowhere to run -- Canada to the rescue -- Lessons from the past -- Assembling the team -- Cover story -- Hollywood -- Studio Six -- A cosmic conflagration -- Getting ready to launch -- On location in Iran -- Final preparations -- The escape -- Aftermath

This book relates the true account of the 1979 rescue of six American hostages from Iran. On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the American embassy in Tehran and captured dozens of American hostages, sparking a 444-day ordeal. But there is a little-known footnote to the crisis: six Americans escaped. 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, and actors, traveled to Tehran under the guise of scouting locations for a fake film called Argo. While pretending to find the ideal backdrops, the team succeeded in contacting the escapees and smuggling them out of Iran without a single shot. Here the author finally details the extraordinarily complex and dangerous operation he led more than three decades ago.--From publisher description