Argo

Few years ago I read the book Our Man In Tehran by Robert Wright. The book is about american hostages in Iran and Canadian involvement in that crisis from the point of view of the Canadian ambassador in Iran during those days, Ken Taylor. I also wanted to read the book Argo when it was released but never found the time to do so until the movie started to make lots of noise and eventually winning the Oscar. I wanted to read the book before seeing the movie.

I got the audio-book of the Argo from the library. The narration is done very well and the book is well written which made me to want to keep listening. I find this book more entertaining to read than Our Man In Tehran but the latter gives more realistic information about the whole situation. I got the feeling that the author either knowingly or just by mistake describing scenes in a way to make them more dramatic. One example of this is the reference to the revolutionary guards walking at night on the streets and blowing their whistles. I was living in Tehran during that time and I know that because of the increase in theft during and after the revolution some neighbors hired security guards to watch out for the cars and the houses in their neighborhoods. These guards were not part of the revolutionary guards but in Argo they are referred to as being part of them.

As I was reading both books I was asking myself that there must have been few people inside Iranian government who were aware of the situation and this report on the CBC kind of answered this question.