Edward B Johnson, who has died aged 81, was a CIA officer who was recently revealed to have taken part in the flamboyant 1980 rescue of US diplomats from Iran under the guise of a B-movie production, an operation later dramatised in the Oscar-winning film Argo (2012).
The six diplomats had escaped the storming of the American embassy in Tehran on November 4 1979 and had spent 79 days in hiding at the residence of the Canadian ambassador. The plan eventually cooked up, nicknamed the “Canadian caper”, was that they should emerge posing as a Canadian film crew, joined by Ed Johnson, an exfiltration specialist, and
Tony Mendez, a CIA disguise expert, to scout Iranian locations for a cheap Star Wars knock-off with the working title Argo, and then leave by aeroplane under fake Canadian passports.
The Planet of the Apes make-up artist John Chambers tipped off Mendez about a long-binned script for a movie meant to promote a Middle Eastern-themed sci-fi theme-park ride, which already had concept art by the Marvel comic artist Jack Kirby.
The Hollywood version of the rescue depicted Mendez as a lone operative, although his 1999 memoir The Master of Disguise referred to a second CIA man, under the cover name “Julio”. But Johnson’s role was so heavily classified that even the commemorative painting of the pair at the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, shows Mendez clearly but only the back of Johnson’s head (and even that the painter had to model on the back of another CIA agent’s head, for security).
www.telegraph.co.uk
