The Real Argo
REDACTED: Declassified Mysteries with Luke Lamana
Wondery | Ballen Studios
4.3 • 668 Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 2025
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Amid the chaos of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, six Americans manage to evade capture and find refuge at the Canadian embassy. With time running out and their lives on the line, CIA disguise expert Tony Mendez devises an audacious plan: posing the group as a Hollywood film crew scouting locations for a fake sci-fi movie.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Redacted, declassified mysteries early, and ad-free right now. |
| 0:07.0 | Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. |
| 0:16.0 | Just before dawn, on January 28, 1980, |
| 0:23.6 | Korolajak stood outside the Canadian ambassador's residence in Tehran, Iran. |
| 0:29.6 | She breathed in the crisp morning air, trying to settle her churning stomach. |
| 0:34.6 | She exhaled and pulled a film script out of her bag. She knew the basic plot, |
| 0:40.2 | but hadn't had the chance to read it all the way through. The title page read Argo in big, bold |
| 0:45.9 | letters with the words, A Cosmic Conflagration, written below in smaller font. Cora flipped |
| 0:53.6 | through the pages. She tried to take in all the details ofora flipped through the pages. |
| 0:55.2 | She tried to take in all the details of the sci-fi thriller, the absurd names of the characters, |
| 1:00.4 | the ridiculous plot, the weirdly stiff dialogue. |
| 1:04.3 | The movie seemed to be about tearing down a caste system on an alien planet, which made |
| 1:09.3 | her wonder, what kind of hack had come up with this? |
| 1:13.1 | I did, she reminded herself. Cora had been instructed to memorize her cover story down to the last |
| 1:19.2 | detail and to sell the lie. I'm Teresa Harris, she told herself. I'm the screenwriter. Her husband, Mark, came up behind her to tell her it was |
| 1:32.0 | time to go. Cora, Mark, and the other four Americans in their group thanked their hosts and left |
| 1:38.5 | in a Canadian embassy van. Cora looked out the window as they drove. It was hard to believe how dangerous Iran's capital was by day, |
| 1:47.2 | when everyone was still peacefully asleep. |
| 1:50.0 | Her thoughts drifted to her coworkers, |
| 1:52.3 | the 53 Americans who were still being held hostage |
| 1:55.0 | by radical Iranian students at the American embassy. |
| 1:58.9 | She'd seen them being paraded around on the news with blindfolds on. |
... |
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