10 Movies You’ll Never Believe Came From True Stories

In the late ’70s, CIA operative Tony Mendez orchestrated a fake Hollywood movie as a cover to sneak U.S. embassy staff out of Tehran during the 1979 hostage crisis. If you’ve been living under a rock for the last six months, you might not know that that’s the premise for Ben Affleck’s critical and commercial smash Argo. Writer Josh Bearman came across snippets of the story from different sources and spent hours on the phone with the principal players, including spook Tony Mendez (whom Affleck plays). The 2007 Wired story “The Great Escape” was the result. Continue Reading
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