Tony Mendez

All right.

He played Tony Mendez in Argo.

He played Chucky Sullivan in Good Will Hunting.

Oh.

Okay, characters all played by...

Oh, yeah, I've got this one.

Tony Mendez in Argo, Chucky Sullivan in Good Will Hunting, Nick Dunn in Gone Girl, and Batman in Batman vs. Superman, Dawn of Justice.

Name the actor.

We are talking about the 2012 film Argo.

Directed by and starring Ben Affleck as Tony Mendez.

Right, an extractor for the US government.

Now, this is not a novel.

He created a theatrical deception that the intelligence community bought into.

Right.

Decades later, in reality, Tony Mendez invented a fake movie production to help six refugees survive physically.

He created a theatrical deception that the Iranian authorities bought into.

The longer that we were in hiding, the more the potential was that we would be found.

When the Central Intelligence Agency learn of the Americans on the run, they assign one of their top escape agents, Tony Mendez, to get them out.

He comes up with an extraordinary plan, to walk the diplomats out of Iran in broad daylight, posing as a Hollywood film crew.

It was a perfect example of truth being stranger than fiction.

While State Department staff grapple with how to deal with the embassy, they also become aware of the six escapees through information sent from Canadian officials in Tehran.

The State Department turns to the CIA.

[gentle music] In early December, a series of top secret flash cables arrive on the desk of an intelligence officer called Tony Mendez.

Flash cables are the highest priority communications, usually restricted to wars or the most urgent of information.

It was believed the film was the perfect reason to scout locations in Iran.

To build the cover story, Tony Mendez, a disguise and exfiltration expert for the CIA, was brought in to provide documents, clothing, materials, and a cover story.

Mendez had answered a blind advertisement in 1965 for a graphic artist.

He was hired and was soon working as an espionage artist for the Technical Services Division of the CIA, where he specialized in document forgery and the creation of disguises.

Another way is to say it rewrote history to make other people look like heroes at the expense of the reputation of the diplomats that risked it all in the Canadian caper.

But hey, that's just my opinion, and the opinion of Ken Taylor, alongside Sir John Graham, who was Britain's ambassador to Iran at the time, who was denied the U.S. diplomats returned away from Britain's embassy as shown in the movie.

Not only that, the hero of the movie was CIA fixer Tony Mendez, played by Ben Affleck.

According to Richard Sewell's diary, a Kiwi diplomat, New Zealand's ambassador Chris Beebe was closely involved with the ambitious plot to fly the U.S. diplomats to safety.

Right there.

Um, I made a joke with the, the, the famous, uh, CIA officer, Tony Mendez, who did the Argo mission, you know, nobody knew Tony did the Argo mission until that movie came out.

Nobody, I, I was in a theater in Abu Dhabi.

right? When I, when our, what's his name? Who's the guy who plays? Who's the actor? Ben Affleck.

And I made a joke about how Iranian disguises were probably so outdated.

They were probably wearing bell-bottom pants and putting guys in afros.

And we laughed at that because, you know, he was like the last CIA officer there, right? And we laughed at it for a second.

And then he thought, Yeah, they probably haven't really advanced in their uniform tradecraft, and that might be a thing.