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    Edward Johnson, C.I.A. Hero in Iran Hostage Crisis, Dies at 81

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    He was a secret partner who helped rescue six American diplomats in 1980 by passing them off as a film crew. The caper inspired the movie “Argo.”Edward B. Johnson, who as an anonymous C.I.A. officer in 1980 helped rescue six American diplomats during the Iran hostage crisis by casting them as a Hollywood crew scouting a Mideast location — an audacious escape that itself became grist for an Oscar-winning movie — died on Aug. 27 at his home in Fairfax, Va. He was 81.The cause was complications of pneumonia, his son Harold said.Documents detailing the Iran rescue were declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1997, and another C.I.A. officer, Antonio J. Mendez, who had masterminded the scheme and recruited Mr. Johnson, wrote a book about the episode, “The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in the C.I.A.” (1999).The caper became the basis of “Argo,” a film directed by and starring Ben Affleck (as Mr. Mendez), which won the 2013 Academy Award for best picture.Mr. Mendez died in 2019 without ever revealing his colleague’s name. Mr. Johnson was identified in the book only by his cover name, Julio, and wasn’t referenced in the film at all. And even at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., in a painting depicting the two C.I.A. officers forging visas for the diplomats, Mr. Johnson remained faceless, seen from behind.“Argo: Rescue of the Canadian Six,” a 2012 oil painting on canvas by a C.I.A. artist, Deborah Dismuke. It depicts the C.I.A. officers Antonio Mendez, top, and Mr. Johnson forging fake visas for six American diplomats who were trapped in Tehran during the hostage crisis in Iran. Mr. Johnson’s role in the escapade was not disclosed publicly until last year.Deborah Dismuke/C.I.A, via Associated PressNot until a year ago, in the season finale of “The Langley Files,” an official agency podcast, was Mr. Johnson’s pivotal role revealed publicly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Iranian Film Director Mohammad Rasoulof Flees Country After Jail Sentence

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      Mohammad Rasoulof, known for the award-winning “There Is No Evil,” had been barred from leaving Iran after his work criticized the country’s clerical leadership.The celebrated Iranian film director Mohammad Rasoulof said he had fled the country, after a court sentenced him to eight years in prison for his movies.Mr. Rasoulof — known for his award-winning film “There Is No Evil” — had been barred from leaving Iran after his work criticized life under authoritarian rule in the country. His lawyer, Babak Paknia, wrote last week on social media that a court had sentenced Mr. Rasoulof to imprisonment, whipping and a fine for movies that it called “examples of collusion with the intention of committing a crime against the country’s security.”On Monday, Mr. Rasoulof announced his escape from Iran in an Instagram post that featured a video of snow-capped mountains and said he had reached a “safe place” after a “difficult and long journey.”Addressing Iran’s clerical rulers, Mr. Rasoulof said he had been forced to leave “because of your oppression and barbarity,” and that he had now joined Iranians in exile who were “impatiently waiting to bury you and your machine of oppression in the depths of history.”He did not provide details on his location or respond to a message from The New York Times.“There Is No Evil” — which focused on executioners in Iran — won the top prize in the Berlin International Film Festival in 2020. Mr. Rasoulof, who had directed the film in secret, was not allowed to leave the country to attend that award ceremony.A scene from Mr. Rasoulof’s “There Is No Evil,” which won the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2020.Kino LorberIran’s film industry is acclaimed internationally and heavily policed at home, where the authorities can ban screening and filming.Mr. Rasoulof’s new movie, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” is set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in France this month.Some of the film’s producers were interrogated by the authorities and some of its actors were barred from leaving the country, Mr. Paknia said in social media posts last month.Mr. Rasoulof told The New York Times in 2020 that early on in his career he had used allegorical stories to avoid confronting power directly, but eventually felt that was “a form of accepting the tyrannical regime.”He went on to offer sharp critiques of Iran’s clerical rulers with his films, including “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” and “A Man of Integrity” — which won an award at Cannes in 2017.Over the years, the Iranian authorities had charged him with propaganda against the state, confiscated his passport, arrested and prosecuted him.In a statement released on Monday, Mr. Rasoulof said “the scope and intensity of repression has reached a point of brutality where people expect news of another heinous government crime every day.”Leily Nikounazar More

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      in Music

      Iran Sentences Prominent Rapper to Death, Lawyer Says

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      The rapper, Toomaj Salehi, was initially arrested after releasing music in support of the 2022 protests over the death of a young woman in police custody.A dissident rapper has been sentenced to death in Iran after releasing music in support of antigovernment demonstrations that rocked the country in 2022, according to his lawyer, in a case that has prompted global condemnation.The rapper, Toomaj Salehi, 33, was one of the most prominent voices among those arrested over nationwide protests against Iran’s clerical rulers after the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, 22. Human rights organizations have been calling for Mr. Salehi’s release, saying that he has been tortured in prison and warning that he could face execution.Amir Raesian, Mr. Salehi’s lawyer, told the Iranian reformist newspaper Shargh in an article published on Wednesday that a court in the central city of Isfahan had sentenced Mr. Salehi to death and that his client planned to appeal.The office of the U.S. Special Envoy for Iran condemned the sentence, calling it another example of “the regime’s brutal abuse of its own citizens, disregard for human rights, and fear of the democratic change the Iranian people seek.”Mr. Salehi was initially arrested in October 2022 for releasing music criticizing the government and backing the demonstrations ignited by the death of Ms. Amini in the custody of Iran’s morality police. He also posted videos on his Instagram account encouraging his followers to protest.The Iranian authorities charged him that November with “spreading corruption on earth,” an offense that can carry the death penalty. U.N. experts said the court proceedings were held behind closed doors without Mr. Salehi’s lawyer present and expressed alarm about reports the artist had been tortured, citing reports of his broken nose and several broken fingers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Terrestrial Verses’ Review: Crossing Lines in Iran

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      Ordinary Iranians face a maze of byzantine rules and small indignities in this series of gripping vignettes.Half the cast of “Terrestrial Verses” never appears onscreen. Instead we hear their voices as they speak to a variety of ordinary Tehranians: a young woman applying for a job, a man seeking to register his newborn son’s name, a filmmaker, a little girl, a driver’s license applicant. Out in the audience, we’re watching the hopeful faces of those people, who become crestfallen as it becomes clear that whatever they want, no matter how small, is impossible, for no real reason at all. An authoritarian regime, and a bureaucratic establishment that props up byzantine rules, has seen to that.“Terrestrial Verses,” written and directed by Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami, unfolds as a series of vignettes, almost like tiny one-act plays. Selena (Arghavan Shabani), the little girl, is wearing headphones and dancing when we meet her, while, off-camera, her mother and a shopkeeper discuss a uniform she needs for a school ceremony. Selena keeps getting called over by her mother, returning to our field of vision wearing yet another layer of clothing in the drab neutrals mandated by the school’s rules. In another vignette, a new father (Bahram Ark) wants to name his baby David, but is informed that it’s simply impossible, since the name is Western and doesn’t have the state-required religious connotation. In another, the filmmaker, named Ali (Farzin Mohades), exasperatedly converses with a culture ministry official, who wants him to remove nearly everything from his screenplay in order to make it acceptable to the regime.The most maddening segments show how boxed-in women are, attempting to simply live their lives without accidentally crossing some line. Or not even crossing it: Sadaf (Sadaf Asgari), a young ride-share driver with and a punk affect and short hair beneath her head scarf, argues with an official. Traffic cameras caught what the official insists is a woman driving Sadaf’s car, head scarf removed. Isn’t a car a private space?, Sadaf asks. The official disagrees, and Sadaf is deemed a criminal.Because each vignette is no more than a few minutes long and consists of Kafkaesque conversations that border on the absurd, “Terrestrial Verses” operates with a cumulative effect. It’s death by a thousand pinpricks, a succession of small indignities. Each seemingly simple task is not just saddled with procedural irritations — forms to fill out, appointments to attend, banal questions to answer — but with fear. Suppose your answer to a routine query could incriminate you or there’s no way to prove to an official that you aren’t lying. How would you live your life?Those questions run through “Terrestrial Verses,” which consists entirely of stark, locked-off shots that place each segment’s protagonist in the box of the frame. It becomes clear that the shots themselves are full of meaning. Each actor in the uniformly excellent cast is centered on the screen, and as they are heaped with indignities, the frame becomes something like a mug shot, or a prison — a place where they’re confined for us to look at them, watch their reactions, judge their facial cues.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘A Revolution on Canvas’ Review: The Personal, the Political and the Painting

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      A documentary about lost artwork intimately involves one of its directors.Midway through “A Revolution on Canvas,” one of the documentary’s directors, Sara Nodjoumi, receives a warning from a friend. She and her father, the painter Nikzad Nodjoumi (commonly known as Nicky) have been trying to discover if his paintings — left behind at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art when he fled Iran in 1980 — are still in the basement archives of the museum. By video chat, a friend counsels caution. “It’s just a film,” he says. “You don’t want to risk your life.”That’s not hyperbole. An element of danger hangs over “A Revolution on Canvas,” which Sara directed with her husband, Till Schauder. The film’s goal is to locate Sara’s father’s paintings and, hopefully, bring the work to the United States, where father and daughter both live. But the political situation that drove her father away from his homeland and from his protest paintings puts their quest, and anyone who helps them in it, in danger.Nicky Nodjoumi moved to New York in the 1960s, arriving after the artist Nahid Hagigat, whom he’d met as a student in Tehran and who would become his wife. Yet Nicky returned to Tehran in the late 1970s, feeling a pull to criticize the reign of the Shah through his art. It’s remarkable work, blending pop art techniques, classical Persian painting, illustration and a bold vision for criticizing not just the Shah but all kinds of ideologies. Seeing his art — which is sprinkled liberally throughout the film — makes it clear why he was a figure of danger in Iran.A few stories battle for attention in “A Revolution on Canvas”: Sara’s family history, Iran’s political history and the search for Nicky’s lost paintings. The braiding of these can be bumpy, and a little frustrating. It’s not always clear why we’re jumping from one strand to the next.Yet each strand on its own is fascinating. The film ably explains the history of midcentury Iran before the revolution through the stories of Sara’s parents, and in particular her father’s solo show at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art just after the Iranian revolution. The threats he and the museum received were the impetus for his return to New York, without his paintings. He and Hagigat split up years later, but their time together was filled with activism, child-rearing and art.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Hundreds of Shadow Puppets Were Stolen. A Bystander Helped Crack the Case.

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      Many of the puppets were still missing, however, after the theft of a U-haul truck in San Francisco holding props for the critically acclaimed Persian epic “Song of the North.” It was unclear if the show would go on.Inside the U-Haul were nearly 500 handmade shadow puppets and dozens of masks, costumes and backdrops — the culmination of three years of painstaking labor, which, on Sunday evening, came to life in a balletic performance before a crowd of hundreds at a theater in San Francisco.On Monday morning, the puppeteers awoke to find the truck gone.At first, they hoped the truck, parked at a Comfort Inn in the city’s northeast, had been mistakenly towed, said Hamid Rahmanian, 55, an Iranian American artist and the creator of the show “Song of the North,” an adaptation of the Persian poet Ferdowsi’s 10th-century epic “Shahnameh” that combines shadow puppetry, animation and music.But when hotel employees reviewed the security camera footage, it quickly became clear that the truck had been stolen. “My face dropped — my hands became cold,” Rahmanian said. Then, more than 48 hours later, on Wednesday morning, he received a call: A resident had spotted the truck in the city’s west, and notified the police. Rahmanian rushed to the scene to find years of careful work strewn about the truck in a “shamble.”The thieves appeared to have rifled through the boxes inside the truck, throwing some things away, and destroying others, he said, noting that while the full scale of the damage was unclear, at least 200 puppets were missing, and all of the costumes were gone.The next stop on the show’s global tour was Seattle, where a performance was scheduled for Friday. It was unclear whether the show would go on.The San Francisco Police Department said that it had received a call Wednesday morning from a resident in Richmond, northeast of San Francisco, about a “possible recovered stolen vehicle.”The police confirmed it was the same U-Haul and were investigating. No arrests had been made. The department did not offer more information about the contents of the security camera footage.Rahmanian, who moved from Iran to New York three decades ago to pursue a career in graphic design, said he had created “Song of the North” over several years in an endeavor to adapt the “Shahnameh,” or “Book of Kings,” for a Western audience. “There is a misrepresentation of Iranian culture, and everything is very much politicized,” he said. “Iran is like a symphony. But we only hear one note.”His work has garnered glowing reviews and audiences in places including China, Poland and Iowa. The puppet performances can take years to lay out in storyboards and to design and choreograph, Rahmanian said, noting that “Song of the North” involves 352 frames and an ensemble of nine people whose actions must be precise to the inch. For the 83-minute duration of the show, he added, “they work like a Swiss watch.”The laborious, costly work has not been very lucrative, he said, noting that he preferred to keep ticket prices affordable so that families could attend the shows. “There is no sane person” who would do this kind of work, he said. “The math doesn’t work.” In part, that is why he and his team decided to rent their own U-Haul instead of hiring outside contractors, he added, saying, “We thought we’re going to save a little bit of money.”The puppets don’t “have any value for these thieves,” their creator, Hamid Rahmanian, said through tears.Richard Termine Just after 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, he and his team loaded their wares into the truck, which was parked near the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, where Sunday’s show was held. They drove it less than a mile to the Comfort Inn, where they arrived at 9:13 p.m., Rahmanian said, noting he had felt anxious, given San Francisco’s reputation for crime, but told himself it was going to be fine in a parking lot.The next morning, the truck had disappeared.U-Haul did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday evening, but Rahmanian said that after the truck was stolen, the company had told him that it was not fitted with a GPS device and that it could not be located. Choice Hotels, which manages the Comfort Inn, also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian studies at Stanford University, said in an email that Rahmanian’s work offered an “antidote to the dangerous delusions of stereotypes” through an empathetic portrayal of Iranian culture. Rahmanian’s adaptations of the Shanameh, he added, “offered a rich tapestry of the joyous, even epicurean culture of Iran.”Rahmanian said he was particularly buoyed on Sunday evening, as the audience lingered in the lobby to discuss the show — which begins with a warrior imploring two armies to stop fighting. Two of the enemies then fall in love, he said, noting that “Song of the North” was ultimately a tale of forgiveness.It felt “cosmic,” he added, to wake up the next morning to find that even art didn’t appear to be safe from the ugliness of the world. “It doesn’t have any value for these thieves,” he said through tears on Tuesday evening, before the truck was located. “They’re going to open it up and realize, oh my god, it’s just puppets.”On Tuesday, Rahmanian said he would not press charges against those who stole the truck. He added, “I forgive you.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Persian Version’ Director Has Always Lived in the In-Between

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      In her new film, Maryam Keshavarz finds both gravity and levity in the struggle to reconcile her Iranian heritage and her life in the United States.When Leila, the central character in the new comedy-drama “The Persian Version,” sashays across the Brooklyn Bridge and into a Halloween party carrying a surfboard and wearing a burkini — niqab on top, bikini on the bottom — while Wet Leg’s cheeky anthem “Chaise Longue” plays, it’s clear that what’s to come will be a boundary-pushing take on straddling cultures that are at odds in the real world.Maryam Keshavarz wore a similar burkini costume once upon a time, and her semi-autobiographical film — which spans decades and moves between Iran and the United States — won an audience award and a screenwriting prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it had its world premiere. The film, written and directed by Keshavarz, will have a limited theatrical release in the United States on Friday.“The reality is, I’ve never really followed the rules,” Keshavarz, 48, who was born in New York to Iranian parents, told me in a video call earlier this month. “It’s also the reason that probably I’ve been able to get to where I am, because there’s no real path for us, is there? There’s no straight path if you’re an immigrant kid, if you’re queer, if you’re an outsider.”Keshavarz was an adult when she grasped that immigrants and women could be directors. “I thought that was stuff for white Americans,” she said. “Even the idea that we have a right to tell our story and to take up space is huge.”Women who follow the rules “would be crushed,” she came to understand. “It’s a society that doesn’t allow us to get what we need to survive and flourish. So we have to take things into our own hands.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation. Light spoilers ahead.Your film is arriving at a time when there’s heightened attention on the oppression Iranian girls and women face: The imprisoned Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi, who focuses on women’s rights in Iran, recently received the Nobel Peace Prize, and this month, a 16-year-old girl entered a subway car in Tehran with her hair uncovered and was later dragged out unconscious. How does your film fit with this larger picture?Of course, we are so grateful that the international voices have been used to amplify what’s going on in Iran in the last year, but this has been an ongoing issue ever since I can remember, we’ve been fighting against in Iran — all the morality police and, at every level, women, because they’re the symbol of the Islamic culture with the hair-covering and everything — have been on the forefront of pushing back.If you look at my film, my mother in the ’60s, she’s fighting against cultural norms to have her place in society. It’s not a battle that’s won in a day. And particularly young women, I’m in awe of them. The young girl who plays my mother at 14 (Kamand Shafieisabet), she lives in Iran, and she could have stayed in America, but she decided to go back after Sundance. She said, “It’s my duty to fight in my country.”More than anything, this is an international issue. The reason it’s caught fire around the world is because it’s not just about Iran. We also have issues here in the U.S. I think finally we understand that there’s more of an interconnectivity in our struggles.A scene from “The Persian Version.” Niousha Noor, in green, plays the mother, Shireen, who is based on Keshavarz’s own parent.Yiget Eken/Sony Pictures ClassicsKamand Shafieisabet has the film’s most dramatic moments. What was casting like for you, since you were essentially casting your own family?Everyone is Iranian. I was really dedicated to have actual Iranians. It didn’t matter what diaspora they were in, and it was so meaningful for them because all of us grew up in different countries.[Shafieisabet] lived and breathed this character, and she joked, “I’m giving birth to a child, and I’ve never kissed a boy.” She’s never acted. She was literally a freshman in high school. I wanted someone that was that innocent to play my mother, because my mother truly was at that time.When my mother met her — and my mom’s very verbose — I said, “Mom, you’re so quiet. What’s wrong?” And she said, “You know what? I never realized how young I was until I saw this girl. I was her age. I was a child. I was always struggling so hard to survive. I never had a moment to reflect.”Why is it important for you to elevate the stories of those who exist in that very particular space between cultures?To me, that’s quintessentially what it means to be American. You come to America and you’re allowed in many ways to continue your original national identity and still become American, and preserve those two things side by side. Also I wanted to take back the narrative of what it meant to be American. But more than anything, when you’re from two different places, you’re a bit of an outsider of both. And you do see the absurdity of both sides in some ways, and you understand it probably more than others would. So in some ways you become a translator of both cultures.Even Leila being a lesbian who gets pregnant by a man, as you did, plays in that in-between space.My family was so confused. That’s really the truth. Because I’ve been so adamantly with a woman and had been married and queer. We went out for drinks, and I was about to wimp out. Then the father of my daughter was like, “You’ve got to tell them.” I was like, “I’ll send them email.” And I did blurt it out just like that. Then they thought he was gay. They were so confused. The story of my life. As confused as me. [Laughs]That was very hard for me even to say “bisexual” for a long time. I was like, no, I’m queer. Also because of politics. It’s important that we have a sense of gay rights, regardless of the spectrum that you’re on. I’m from an older generation; my daughter’s generation has a completely different perspective on it. It was very important for me just to be adamant about our political rights as a community. But I realized life is more messy than the political movements allow us to be.Layla Mohammadi as Leila and Noor in a dancing scene from the movie. Yiget Eken/Sony Pictures ClassicsYou balance a lot of opposing themes: duality of identity, of course, but also comedy and drama, as well as different cinematic tones as we move through time and locales. Was it a struggle to bite off so much?I struggled with two things. One was the balance of the comedy and the drama. Another was to have an epic tale that was so intimate. That was very important for me, not to get lost in the period detail but to know that this is a story of essentially three women and to really ground it. And to do that, I decided that each character would have a different genre that’s reflective of who they are: So that the daughter is more ’80s-’90s pop. The grandmother is a tall teller of tales, as all grandmothers are, so she gets a spaghetti western. And then the mother, who, even though she’s created a new identity, is still traumatized by an old past — what you typically think of Persian films, which is like [an Abbas] Kiarostami sort of film.For me, it was important that all three women get to tell at least their version of the story. When I was writing it, I couldn’t crack the story until I realized my mother was the other writer. Because she came to this country to write her own future, rewrite her life. Once I got that, everything else fell into place. I realized all the men are just a chorus to our stories. And typically, it’s the other way around.On that note, do you really have eight brothers?In real life, I have seven brothers. In the story, I have eight. But I did grow up with one bathroom. I’m very traumatized to this day. I just have to have my own bathroom. [Laughs]The chaos of many siblings adds levity for sure. The movie, despite tackling serious topics, is also largely a comedy packed with big food scenes, choreographed dance sequences and tons of music, including Wet Leg at the start, but also Cyndi Lauper and Gagoosh.Certainly when I was a kid, Iran was synonymous with terrorist. And that was not my experience of Iran or Iranians. I’m like, “We’re so lazy. How can we be terrorists? We like to take long naps after lunch.” But honestly, it’s not the people I know; it’s not the culture and the celebration, the music, food. That’s a real political thing, too, what aspects of our culture are shown. I mean, if we can dehumanize people, it’s so much easier to invade them and to kill them and to take their oil and to create nameless wars, faceless wars. So I think the reason I went into cinema post-9/11 was to create a more nuanced view of our world. This film is in some ways a culmination of my entire career. I don’t believe in all this divisive rhetoric, and I feel like humor is a way that we can connect. More

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      in Movies

      C.I.A. Discloses Identity of Second Spy Involved in ‘Argo’ Operation

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      The movie about the daring mission to rescue American diplomats from Tehran portrayed a single C.I.A. officer sneaking into the Iranian capital. In reality, the agency sent two officers.In the midst of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, the C.I.A. began what came to be noted as one of the spy agency’s most successful publicly known operations: the rescue of six American diplomats who had escaped the overrun U.S. Embassy — using a fake movie as the cover story.“Argo,” the real-life 2012 movie about the C.I.A.’s fake movie, portrayed a single C.I.A. officer, Tony Mendez, played by Ben Affleck, sneaking into Tehran to rescue the American diplomats in a daring operation.But in reality, the agency sent two officers into Tehran. For the first time on Thursday, the C.I.A. is releasing the identity of that second officer, Ed Johnson, in the season finale of its new podcast, “The Langley Files.”Mr. Johnson, a linguist, accompanied Mr. Mendez, a master of disguise and forgery, on the flight to Tehran to cajole the diplomats into adopting the cover story, that they were Canadians who were part of a crew scouting locations for a science fiction movie called “Argo.” The two then helped the diplomats with forged documents and escorted them through Iranian airport security to fly them home.Although Mr. Johnson’s name was classified, the C.I.A. had acknowledged a second officer had been involved. Mr. Mendez, who died in 2019, wrote about being accompanied by a second officer in his first book, but used a pseudonym, Julio. A painting that depicts a scene from the operation and hangs in the C.I.A.’s Langley, Va., headquarters, shows a second officer sitting across from Mr. Mendez in Tehran as they forge stamps in Canadian passports. But the second officer’s identity is obscured, his back turned to the viewer.Ed Johnson, right, receiving the C.I.A.’s Intelligence Star from John N. McMahon, the agency’s deputy director for operations at the time, in a photo provided by Mr. Johnson’s family. Mr. Johnson was the long-unidentified second C.I.A. officer in the rescue of six American diplomats from Tehran.The agency began publicly talking about its role in rescuing the diplomats 26 years ago. On the agency’s 50th anniversary, in 1997, the C.I.A. declassified the operation, and allowed Mr. Mendez to tell his story, hoping to balance accounts of some of the agency’s ill-fated operations around the world with one that was a clear success.But until recently, Mr. Johnson preferred that his identity remain secret.“He was someone who spent his whole life doing things quietly and in the shadows, without any expectation of praise or public recognition,” said Walter Trosin, a C.I.A. spokesman and co-host of the agency’s podcast. “And he was very much happy to keep it that way. But it was his family that encouraged him, later in life, to tell his side of the story because they felt there would be value to the world in hearing it.”After Mr. Trosin heard Mr. Johnson and his family were visiting C.I.A. headquarters early this summer, he arranged to meet them. At the meeting, Mr. Trosin and his podcast co-host saw how much the C.I.A.’s recognition of Mr. Johnson’s work meant to his family and started looking for a way to tell the story on the podcast.Mr. Johnson, 80, was unavailable to discuss his career on the podcast or with The New York Times because of health issues. Undeterred, Mr. Trosin dived into the agency’s classified archives.Soon after dangerous operations, the C.I.A. often records secret interviews with the participants, to capture so-called lessons learned for its own, classified histories. In addition, for many storied officers, the C.I.A. records classified oral histories at the end of their careers. C.I.A. historians had done one such oral history with Mr. Johnson.“We found out there was this prior interview,” Mr. Trosin said. “And at least portions of which could be made public.”Thanks to the “Argo” movie, the C.I.A.’s role in the rescue of the diplomats, who were being sheltered by the Canadians, has become one of the agency’s best-known operations.The C.I.A. museum, which has a tendency to dwell on the agency’s failures, features a display on the operation. Among the artifacts is a copy of the script — or at least treatment — of the fake movie complete with the Hollywood-esque tagline “A Cosmic Conflagration.” Also displayed are the business cards of the fake production company used as part of the cover story and the concept art for the movie, which featured drawings from Jack Kirby, the celebrated comic book artist who helped create the Marvel universe.Like the painting, the museum display did not identify Mr. Johnson.A painting depicting a scene from the operation hanging in the C.I.A.’s headquarters shows a second officer sitting across from Tony Mendez as they forge stamps in Canadian passports while in Tehran but does not show his face.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesBut C.I.A. officials said Mr. Johnson, an expert in languages and extracting people from tricky places, was invaluable to the operation.At the time of the hostage crisis, Mr. Johnson was based in Europe, focusing his Cold War work on learning how to get in and out of countries that were not always hospitable to Americans.When Iranian revolutionaries overran the American Embassy and took 52 diplomats hostage, six Americans working in the consular office escaped. They eventually ended up under the protection of Kenneth D. Taylor, Canada’s ambassador to Iran, and the C.I.A. began working on a plan to sneak them out of the country.Mr. Mendez, who had worked with Hollywood experts to hone his tradecraft, came up with the plan to use a fake movie, which he named “Argo” after the story of Jason and the Argonauts, the ancient Greek heroes who had undertaken the arduous mission to retrieve the Golden Fleece.While some C.I.A. extraction operations at the time used single officers, the agency decided that for the rescue of the six diplomats, two officers would be needed, said Brent Geary, a C.I.A. historian who has studied the agency’s history in Iran.Mr. Johnson was fluent in French, German, Spanish and Arabic. He did not, however, speak Persian, the predominant language in Iran.Dr. Geary said the agency had Persian speakers, but could not risk sending in someone who might be known to current or former Iranian officials. The belief was also that someone fluent in the local language could draw questions, and what was critical to the mission was having people with Mr. Mendez’s and Mr. Johnson’s skill sets.“They had trained to get in and out of tight spots,” Dr. Geary said.Even without Persian, Mr. Johnson’s languages came into use. Soon after arriving, Mr. Mendez and Mr. Johnson mistakenly ended up at the Swedish Embassy, across the street from the U.S. Embassy, which was occupied by the Iranian revolutionaries.Tony Mendez, a master of disguise and forgery, was played by Ben Affleck in “Argo.”Mark Makela/Corbis, via Getty ImagesOutside the embassy, Mr. Johnson discovered that both he and the Iranian guard spoke German, and the two began talking. The guard then hailed a taxi and wrote the address of the Canadian Embassy on a piece of paper and sent the two fake movie producers off.“I have to thank the Iranians for being the beacon who got us to the right place,” Mr. Johnson said in his oral history.In the “Argo” movie, Mr. Affleck, portraying Mr. Mendez, is shown swiping Iranian forms that were needed to enter and exit the country. But in reality, it was Mr. Johnson who performed the sleight of hand to steal the documents. (Mr. Affleck did not respond to a request to comment.)In his oral history, Mr. Johnson said the “biggest thing” was to persuade the diplomats that they could pull off the movie team cover story.“These are rookies,” Mr. Johnson recalled in the recorded session. “They were people who were not trained to lie to authorities. They weren’t trained to be clandestine, elusive.”But Mr. Johnson recounted that the six diplomats pulled it off, putting aside their nervousness and adopting the persona of a happy-go-lucky film crew.The climax of the real movie — spoiler alert for a film that has been out for more than a decade — involves Iranian government officials reacting skeptically to the cover story, then realizing the “film crew” were American diplomats and chasing the plane down the runway. None of which happened.In reality, there was simply one last security check as the group left the departure lounge.“A couple of young Iranians, they’re patting people down as they went through,” Mr. Johnson recalled, noting that the diplomats were leaning into their parts, cracking jokes as they approached the checkpoint.With that, the diplomats, Mr. Mendez and Mr. Johnson were through the last checks. In the oral history, Mr. Johnson recalled boarding and seeing the plane’s name painted on the side. It was named Aargau, and Mr. Johnson thought to himself, “What the hell?”“After a bit, I forget when, I picked up The Herald Tribune and did the crossword puzzle,” Mr. Johnson said. “And one of the one of the clues was Jason’s companions … Jason and the Argonauts.”In the C.I.A. podcast, Mr. Trosin said the name of the plane and the crossword were simply coincidences.“To be clear,” Mr. Trosin said, “this is not C.I.A. officers with excess free time just planting clues.” More

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      The Iron Sheik, Villainous Hall of Fame Wrestler, Is Dead

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      Khosrow Vaziri drew on his Iranian heritage to create a caricature of a Middle Eastern villain and became one of the most memorable heels in wrestling history.The Iron Sheik, a Hall of Fame wrestler who became a villainous star in the 1980s, facing off against Hulk Hogan and teaming up with a wrestler who claimed to represent the Soviet Union, died in his sleep early Wednesday morning at his home in Fayetteville, Ga. He was either 81 (according to his passport) or 80 (according to him).The death was confirmed by his managers, Page and Jian Magen, who said they did not know the cause.Foreign-style heels are a time-honored tradition in professional wrestling, and the Iron Sheik, whose legal name was Khosrow Vaziri, became one of the most recognizable of them all.The Sheik drew loosely on his Iranian heritage to build a caricature of a Middle Eastern villain. He wore a thick mustache, boots with curled toes, and kaffiyeh, Middle Eastern head scarves — which are not generally worn in Iran.At the height of the Sheik’s infamy, and in the wake of the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, he often stomped into the ring waving an Iranian flag emblazoned with the face of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, to take on stereotypically American wrestlers.The Sheik’s signature move was the camel clutch, in which he sat on an opponent’s back, locked his fingers beneath the other wrestler’s chin and pulled up. His unfortunate opponent’s spine seemed to bend like a drawn bow.In 1983 the Sheik defeated Bob Backlund to win the World Wrestling Federation championship. But his time with the title was short.About a month later, on Jan. 23, 1984, the Sheik defended his title against Hulk Hogan, then a relatively new face in the World Wrestling Federation (now known as WWE), in front of a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden.The match seemed to be going the Sheik’s way, and he trapped Hogan in a camel clutch. But Hogan stood up with the Sheik on his back and slammed him into a corner pylon.The Sheik flopped to the mat. Hogan launched off the ropes, leaped into a leg drop on the Sheik and then pinned him. It was the first of Hogan’s six WWE championships and the beginning of Hulkamania.The defeat continued to sting even decades later, the Sheik, very much in character, told WWE in an interview in 2014.“Hulk Hogan, only thing he had was luck,” he said. “I have one bad night, I lost my belt.”Sgt. Slaughter was a regular opponent for the Sheik, who lost a major match to him at Madison Square Garden later in 1984.The next year the Sheik teamed up with Nikolai Volkoff, a heel supposedly wrestling for the Soviet Union (he was actually from Croatia), and went on to win the World Tag Team Championship at the inaugural Wrestlemania.The Sheik also dialed up his character’s anti-American rhetoric. He often snatched the microphone from an announcer and shouted “Iran No. 1! Russia No. 1!”Then he would glare at the audience, shout “U.S.A.!” and spit on the ground.The audience reaction could be so vicious that despite his ferociousness in the ring, the Sheik sometimes feared for his safety.Keith Elliot Greenberg, a wrestling historian and writer, said in a phone interview that he thought fans sometimes believed the Sheik’s character too much.“The reality was he was actually a very loyal American, and was grateful to the United States for the opportunities it afforded him,” Mr. Greenberg said.The Iron Sheik in action against Chavo Guerrero in the 1980s.George Napolitano/MediaPunch, via Associated PressHossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri was born in Damghan, a town about 200 miles east of Tehran. His birth date appeared as March 15, 1942, on his passport, but he was not certain that it was accurate and celebrated his birthday on Sept. 9. His parents, Ghassem and Maryam Vaziri, owned a farm that grew pistachios, grapes and other crops.When he was a boy, his family moved to Tehran and opened a wrestling gym where some of Iran’s foremost wrestlers trained. He grew up immersed in the sport.Vaziri became a talented wrestler, and his prominence helped him secure a job as a bodyguard for the family of the shah of Iran. But after the Olympic gold medal-winning wrestler Gholamreza Takhti died under mysterious circumstances in 1968, perhaps for displeasing the shah, Vaziri left Iran for the United States and settled in Minneapolis.He wrestled with an amateur club in Minnesota, winning an Amateur Athletic Union Greco-Roman wrestling tournament in 1971, and served as an assistant coach for the U.S. Olympic team in 1972 and 1976 before making the transition to full-time professional wrestling.Vaziri trained under Verne Gagne, the promoter of the American Wrestling Association. The idea for the Iron Sheik came from Mary Gagne, Verne’s wife, Mr. Greenberg said, though Vaziri experimented with other versions of the character over the years.In 1975 he married Caryl Peterson, who survives him. He is also survived by their daughters, Nicole and Tanya; a sister; and five grandchildren.During the 1980s the Sheik started using drugs and drinking heavily. In 1987 he and Hacksaw Jim Duggan — a babyface, as good-guy wrestlers are known — were arrested on the New Jersey Turnpike after police officers found cocaine and marijuana in their car.The Sheik appeared in a match as an ally of Sgt. Slaughter’s in 1991, and in 1997 he managed another wrestler, the Sultan. But his professional career mostly dried up as his drug use accelerated in the 1990s. He struggled with substance abuse for a long time, but according to an article Mr. Greenberg wrote for Bleacher Report in 2013, he had more recently been able to stay off drugs, except for an occasional beer.In 2003 his daughter Marissa, 27, was killed by her boyfriend, Charles Reynolds. Vaziri said that he contemplated attacking Mr. Reynolds with a razor blade in court, Mr. Greenberg wrote, but that his family kept him from doing it. Mr. Reynolds was sentenced to life in prison. He died in 2016.In 2005 the Iron Sheik was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.Beginning in the early 2000s, the Sheik brought a less inhibited version of his character to Howard Stern’s radio show to rant about different wrestlers. He threatened to sodomize rivals like Hogan and used homophobic slurs to describe the Ultimate Warrior.In more recent years the Sheik’s diatribes appeared on social media. His managers often posted profanity-laced messages in all capital letters on a Twitter account that has nearly 650,000 followers. A recent one just said “HOGAN,” preceded by an expletive.But, the Sheik allowed in 2014, things were more civil when he met Hogan outside the ring.“Nobody talk bad about the past,” he said. “I get along with him.”Alain Delaquérière contributed research. More