Newfoundland woman played key role in 1980 Tehran ‘Canadian Caper’
She was a modest woman who rarely drew attention to herself, but Mary Catherine O’Flaherty had an incredible story to tell.
Almost 40 years ago, the woman from St. John’s, N.L., played a pivotal role in the “Canadian Caper,” a tense international incident that involved armed Iranian revolutionaries, a prolonged hostage-taking, coded diplomatic messages and an ultrasecret CIA plan that would later become the subject of the Oscar-winning film “Argo.”
When O’Flaherty died last month in Ottawa at the age of 92, her brief obituary gave no indication of her remarkable life in the diplomatic corps.
“She was calm under the toughest of circumstances,” says Valerie Pike, a longtime family friend who lives in St. John’s. “It would really have to be something to distract Mary’s attention or destabilize her in any way.”
Those qualities were put to the test in November 1979.
O’Flaherty was in charge of communications at the Canadian Embassy in Tehran when militant Iranian students stormed the American Embassy, taking more than 50 people hostage. In the chaos that erupted that day, six members of the embassy’s staff escaped from the U.S. compound.
With the help of Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor, the six were eventually taken to the home of his chief immigration officer, where they stayed in secret for almost three months.
During that time, O’Flaherty handled a constant stream of top secret messages between Tehran and Ottawa.
“It was Mary’s role, using communications equipment, to do the coded messages, to decipher the encryptions and to ensure the security of the messages,” says Pike. “As we know, she was indispensable.”
With each passing day, Taylor and his staff worried that the Iranian hostagetakers would realize that not all of the U.S. Embassy staff were accounted for. He ordered the shredding of documents in preparation for a quick departure, and plans were hatched for a rescue mission.
In early January 1980, two undercover CIA agents were dispatched to Tehran, where they posed as Canadian filmmakers. Using forged documents and Canadian passports, the six American fugitives were smuggled out of Iran on a regularly scheduled Swissair flight on Jan. 27.
The secret operation was referred to as the “exfiltration.”
But it wasn’t over.
The remaining staff at the Canadian Embassy left later that day.
O’Flaherty sent a final message to Ottawa: “See you later, exfiltrator.” And as a precaution, a military policeman smashed her cipher equipment.
“You can just imagine the tension,” says Pike. “The city was so violent at the time.”
The story broke in the media on Jan. 29, 1980, bringing an outpouring of gratitude from across the United States.
Taylor and members of his staff received many awards. O’Flaherty was appointed a member of the Order of Canada on July 1, 1980.
However, she remained humble about her role in the high-stakes, cloak-anddagger affair.