The CIA Iran Task Force's account of the Canadian Caper (1980)

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CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room

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26 October 2026, from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine copy of the government page (copy)

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Public domain: a work of the US federal government (17 U.S.C. § 105).

Most of this document is white space. Of its five pages, the title page, page 4 and most of pages 2, 3 and 5 are blanked under FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3), for classified information and information protected by statute. The title, "CIA's Iran Task Force: Intelligence and Operational Accomplishments," suggests a wider review of the Agency's work during the hostage crisis. What survives is a few paragraphs on the Canadian Caper, the escape of six American diplomats who had avoided capture when the US embassy in Tehran was seized on 4 November 1979¹.

The memo carries no date. It describes the escape of 28 January 1980 in the past tense, so it was written after that; each page is marked Secret, and a closing line says all portions are classified at that level¹.

What the surviving passage says

It begins mid-sentence: CIA "played a role" in getting out the six, who were hidden by a party whose name is redacted. By early December CIA had begun working on strategies for getting them out of Iran. On 4 December the State Department asked CIA to take responsibility for the exfiltration. On 13 December CIA gave State an exfiltration plan, and on 17 December, mindful of its need for support in Tehran, the Agency agreed that the six could stay where they were "for the time being"¹.

By the end of the month the United States and another party, whose name is redacted, had grown worried that the Americans' presence would become known. An article in the Ottawa Journal on 29 December about diplomats who had avoided capture "gave added point to these concerns." Planning "went into high gear," and in early January it was decided that the six would leave by commercial air. On 7 January CIA officers, among them Antonio Mendez, conferred on cover and documents; documentation was prepared and sent to Tehran. Mendez then went to Tehran to brief the six on their cover story and hand out documents and "pocket litter." On 28 January he led them through Mehrabad Airport, and they reached Zurich a few hours later¹.

Set against other accounts

The memo gives none of the detail that made the story famous: no Hollywood cover, no "Argo," no Canadian passports, and no names of the Canadian diplomats who sheltered the six. Those come from Mendez's own article of 1999 and from Canada's history of the affair^1,2,4.

How to read it

This is an internal CIA summary, written while the Agency's part was still secret and Canada had all the public credit. The CIA disclosed its role only in 1997, at its 50th anniversary³. The surviving passage is matter-of-fact and gives the Agency's own dated chronology from 4 December to 28 January. Because so much is redacted, it cannot show how the work was shared with the Canadians, which Canada's history describes in detail^1,4.