OUR MAN IN TEHRAN
Documentary shows Ken Taylor as the true hero of Canadian Caper
When Canada was helping six American hostages escape from Iran as part of the famous Canadian Caper — a designation that is recaptured in the documentary Our Man in Tehran — the RCMP forged Canadian passports for the Americans.
The documents were then sent to Washington for fake visas. When the passports arrived in Tehran, a member of the Canadian consulate noticed that the American officials, apparently confused by the Iranian calendar, had put the wrong dates on the visas.
It was a mistake that could have resulted in death for the hostages as they left the country under the cover of phoney Canadian citizenship. The passports were returned to the U.S. for corrections, and the rest is history.
It was history American-style in the Oscar-winning film Argo, which glorified an American plan to spirit the hostages out of Iran by pretending to be a Canadian movie crew making a Hollywood blockbuster.
Argo was itself a Hollywood blockbuster, downplaying the role of Canadians in the operation and adding a lot of drama — such as a fictional race to the airport and a hair’s-breadth escape — to make it exciting enough.
The real-life story as outlined in Our Man in Tehran was a lot more subtle. It involved things like mistaken dates on visas. It’s not a film to get the pulse racing; rather, it’s designed to get the brain working.
Directed by veteran documentarian Larry Weinstein and firsttime filmmaker Drew Taylor, Our Man in Tehran covers a lot of familiar ground, at least for those who don’t get their history from Hollywood. Based on Robert Wright’s book of the same title, it also uncovers some new information on the hostage crisis and adds a lot of valuable context.
The film starts with a long history of Iran, ending with the exile of the much-reviled Shah — a great American friend — who fled the Islamic revolution and whose treatment for cancer in a U.S. hospital helped ignite the hostage crisis.
It then moves into a measured telling of what happened when students seized the U.S. embassy, holding 52 people hostage. Six escaped and hid in the home of Ken Taylor, then Canadian ambassador to Iran.
At one stage, when U. S. president Jimmy Carter wanted to send in a small force to rescue the hostages, Taylor acted as a spy, watching the movement of guards at the embassy, planning escape routes and even sketching the layout of the Tehran airport.
The rescue failed, and it may have cost Carter the presidency. The hostages at the U.S. embassy were released on the day Ronald Reagan assumed office.
Our Man in Tehran also gives credit to former prime minister Joe Clark and his foreign affairs minister Flora MacDonald, who helped negotiate the rescue in secrecy.
We meet William Daugherty, a CIA agent at the U.S. embassy who talks about how he was tortured, and the real Tony Mendez — the character played by Ben Affleck in Argo — who came up with the idea of the fake movie as a cover to spirit the six hostages to freedom.
It was an elaborate ruse, maybe too elaborate, in Taylor’s view. He thought the hostages could have posed as a Canadian documentary crew, making a movie about the benefits of the Iranian revolution.
It would have been a lot simpler, and it would have made a lot more sense. But what could Hollywood have done with that story?