FOIAWEAR — ARGO / Studio Six Productions Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 039 — ARGO / “STUDIO SIX PRODUCTIONS”

On 4 November 1979 the United States embassy in Tehran was seized. Six American diplomats had slipped away and were hiding — in the Canadian ambassador’s residence and in the home of a Canadian diplomat. Getting them out meant inventing something so mundane that no one would look at it twice.

So the CIA built a film studio.

CIA technical specialists created a fake movie-production company in Hollywood and delivered the disguises and documents that made the diplomats’ escape from Iran possible in 1980. The team named it Studio Six Productions and titled its new production Argo. To make the cover believable they took offices on the old Columbia Studio lot formerly occupied by Michael Douglas, who had just finished producing The China Syndrome. A logo was designed, and business cards, letterheads, stationery and other logo items were produced — because a business card is the cheapest lie there is, and the hardest to doubt.

They bought advertising. Ads and articles were placed in Variety, the industry trade paper, proclaiming Argo to be a “cosmic conflagration” written by Teresa Harris — which was the alias chosen for one of the six Americans waiting to be rescued. The team wrote producer’s notes covering an introduction, story treatment and locations, and visuals. They commissioned a poster. The script was a deliberately convoluted Middle Eastern science-fiction story, written to be difficult to decipher and to sound exactly like the kind of expensive nonsense that gets a picture into trouble — which is to say, like a real film.

Six people walked out of Tehran as a film crew, on paperwork. The studio had never existed.

The artwork is a stylised late-1970s science-fiction one-sheet — the visual language of the cover identity itself, in period poster typography. The operation was a graphic-design exercise: the studio, its logo and its advertising were the whole deception. It is an interpretation drawn from the CIA Museum’s Studio Six Productions holdings, not a reproduction of any historic poster.

Offered in eleven garment colours: the artwork carries light typography on dark garments (Black, Graphite, Espresso, Navy) and dark typography on light garments (White, Ivory, Butter, Chalky Mint, Blossom, Light Green, Chambray).

The QR code on the front opens the CIA Museum’s page for the “Studio Six Productions” logo items, the source for everything above: https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/artifact/studio-six-productions-logo-items/

Note: this design is drawn from the historical record and the CIA Museum’s artifacts. It is not connected with, sponsored by, or derived from any motion picture or studio.

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed t-shirt. Heavyweight 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²), 100% ring-spun US cotton, pre-shrunk, relaxed fit, double-needle stitched with no side seams and a sewn-in label. Sizes S–4XL. Printed on the front at 300 DPI; plain back. The main artwork prints at 10 × 10 in and the QR at 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, with like colours. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the printed area.

FOIAWEAR is an independent brand and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States government, or any other government or agency.