The Canadian Caper

The six were working in the consulate, a separate building at the edge of the American embassy compound in Tehran, when militants came over the wall on 4 November 1979. While the main chancery was overrun and its staff taken hostage, the consular officers slipped out by a back door into the street. They took refuge in an apartment, and four days later one of them, the head of the consular section, Robert Anders, telephoned John Sheardown, the Canadian embassy's chief immigration officer^1,3.

Houseguests

Canada's ambassador, Ken Taylor, did not hesitate. He decided to split the Americans between Sheardown's house and his own residence, telling local staff they were visiting Canadian tourists. Ottawa agreed: the Under-Secretary, Allan Gotlieb, wrote that there was "in all conscience ... no alternative," and Foreign Minister Flora MacDonald pulled Prime Minister Joe Clark out of Question Period to get his approval. Joseph and Kathleen Stafford went to Taylor's residence; Anders and Mark and Cora Lijek to Sheardown's. On 21 November the Swedish ambassador asked Taylor to take a sixth American, the agricultural attaché Lee Schatz, who had been hiding with a Swedish diplomat³.

The secret began to fray in December. Jean Pelletier, the Washington correspondent of the Montreal paper La Presse, noticed that American officials gave different numbers of hostages and deduced that some had escaped and that Canada was hiding them. He agreed to hold the story until they were out. On 10 December MacDonald, at a NATO meeting in Brussels, told Secretary of State Cyrus Vance that the time had come; on 30 December they agreed that the two countries would plan the escape together³.

A film nobody would make

At the CIA the problem went to Antonio Mendez, who on 11 December 1979 had become chief of the Office of Technical Service's Authentication Branch, responsible for disguise and false documents. His team weighed three things: whose passports to use, what cover story to give six people with no intelligence training, and whether to move them together or singly. The Agency preferred Canadian passports, and in Ottawa Mendez learned that the Canadian government had already approved issuing passports to non-citizens for humanitarian purposes^1,3.

For cover he reversed the usual rule. A good legend, he wrote, follows the user's real background and is dull enough not to interest anyone. Here he wanted something "so exotic that no one would imagine it was being used for operational purposes": a Hollywood crew scouting locations. A makeup artist who had long advised the CIA's disguise section told him that such a scouting party would number about eight people^1,4.

In mid-January 1980 the CIA set up "Studio Six Productions" in offices on the old Columbia lot in Hollywood in four days, took full-page advertisements in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, and dressed up a real but unproduced science-fiction script under the title Argo. The State Department and the Canadians had their own cover ideas, unemployed teachers and food economists among them, and the six would be offered all three¹.

Tehran, January 1980

The forged Iranian visas went to Tehran in a Canadian diplomatic pouch "the size of a pillowcase." When they arrived, a Farsi-speaking Canadian diplomat, Roger Lucy, noticed that the visa dates had been written in the Persian calendar wrongly and fell in the future. On 19 January someone telephoned Taylor's residence and asked for one of the Staffords by name. Two days later MacDonald ordered the escape to begin^1,3.

Mendez received his visa in Bonn on 23 January. Before he could leave he was told to wait: President Carter was being briefed. Half an hour later the message came, "President has just approved the Finding. You may proceed on your mission to Tehran." Mendez and a second technical officer, known in CIA accounts as "Julio," landed at Mehrabad on 25 January. That evening at Sheardown's house they briefed the six, who chose the film cover. The two officers spent the next day correcting the visas and stamping entry cachets that matched a real flight from Hong Kong¹.

In the early morning the eight went to Mehrabad for the 7:30 Swissair flight to Zurich, which the CIA chose for its reliability and because the Revolutionary Guards would still be in bed. The controls passed without trouble, but the flight was announced as delayed by a mechanical problem and left about an hour late^1,3.

Credit

The Canadian embassy closed the same day and its last staff left Iran. On 29 January La Presse published Pelletier's story, and Canada received the world's thanks. Taylor was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and made an Officer of the Order of Canada; Sheardown, Lucy and other embassy staff also received the Order of Canada³.

The CIA said nothing. In May 1980 Mendez and "Julio" received the Intelligence Star in a secret ceremony. The Agency revealed its part in 1997, when it named Mendez one of 50 "Trailblazers" at its fiftieth anniversary, and his account appeared in the unclassified Studies in Intelligence in the winter of 1999–2000^1,2.

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