‘CANADIAN CAPER’ HERO
Diplomat Ken Taylor dies
Kenneth Douglas Taylor, who has died at age 81, was a Canadian ambassador who became an American hero in the snakepit of revolutionary Iran, risking his own life to save six others.
He died of colon cancer Thursday afternoon in New York Presbyterian Hospital, having lived since the early 1980s mainly in Manhattan, where he consulted to private clients on government affairs.
In 1979, though, he was Canada’s man in Tehran when the Islamic Revolution violently ousted the American-backed Shah. As protesters swarmed the American embassy, taking hostages in one of the defining crises of the era, six staff managed to escape and, days later, sought refuge from the Canadians.
Taylor, whose bushy hair and glam coke-bottle glasses at the time gave him the air of a punk economist, stickhandled the topsecret effort to spirit them to freedom after three months in hiding, in a daring piece of trickery that involved forging passports and posing as a film crew.
Known to Americans as the Canadian Caper, the episode came to embody a Canadian self-image of iron-willed bravery and kindness, cleverly concealed behind a quiet and self-effacing exterior.
Argo, the 2012 Ben Affleck movie that won the best picture Oscar, turned it into a swashbuckling American success story. But Taylor knew the truth, and told Affleck himself, leading to last-minute changes. He had risked his own neck to save others, not just the six, but also the others who remained in captivity, by gathering intelligence for the Americans planning to rescue them. The others, 52 of them, were freed after 444 days.
As Taylor told the Toronto Star’s Jim Coyle in 2012: “The movie’s fun, it’s thrilling, it’s pertinent, it’s timely. But look, Canada was not merely standing around watching events take place. The CIA was a junior partner.”
In a statement Thursday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Taylor “valiantly risked his own life by shielding a group of American diplomats from capture. Ken Taylor represented the very best that Canada’s foreign service has to offer.”
The episode began when diplomat Robert Anders, having led five others on a desperate six-day effort to evade capture on the streets of Tehran, called Taylor’s number two, John Sheardown, who died in Ottawa in 2012 at age 88.
“What took you so long?” came the Canadian’s reply.
Taylor sheltered two in his home, with his wife Pat, while Sheardown took four. They hosted them for 79 days, concealing them by shopping in different stores and bribing garbagemen. It was a modern Anne Frank tale, with a Hollywood ending.
At Taylor’s request, Ottawa issued false Canadian passports for the six Americans, which allowed them to pose as a Canadian film crew in Iran to scout locations for a science-fiction movie to be called Argo, taglined “a cosmic conflagration.” They even taught them how to use the Canadian “eh?” and one was given a Molson-branded key chain.
All this allowed them to board a flight to Zurich in January 1980, on a plane coincidentally named Aargau, after the Swiss province. With his embassy closed, Taylor left as soon as he confirmed the Americans were safely out.
Taylor’s funeral is to be held Oct. 27 in Toronto.