"Very few people believed that the end was near." "It was a game that we had to win." "People were in real danger." "This wasn't a movie, this was real life." "You could hear executions outside;" "you could hear firing squads;" "you could hear screaming." "I have thought often, what would I have done in a circumstance like this?" "I expected I would take these stories to my grave." "Nobody would ever know." "My name is Ken Taylor." "I arrived in Iran as Canadian ambassador in the fall of 1977." "Off-screen:" "Ken Taylor, take one." "And concluded my post in January 28th, 1980." "When an ambassador arrives, he or she is a non-person until they present credentials to the host government." "In the Shah's time, this was a ceremony of grandeur." "It was one taken very seriously by the Iranians." "I'd been posted to London and had been among others to a reception at Buckingham Palace and" "Buckingham Palace really was an aged palace." "It was almost threadbare in comparison to the Shah's." "Gradually you made your way to the Shah's reception room." "The Shah is in a suit of pure white with decorations." "In every sense of the word, this is a monarch who believes that he's a monarch." "He has influence, he has power, and he's got ambitions for his country." "This shah, he was just the son of a... an Iranian army officer who staged a coup and declared himself Shah, declared himself successor to all these other emperors of the glories of the Persian empire." "My name is Joe Schlesinger, and for decades" "I was a foreign correspondent for the CBC and covered all sorts of conflicts all over the world, and one of the more memorable ones was the one in Iran." "The Shah had an iron will." "He was going to make it a modern state, this backwards country, he was going to make it modern, he was going to resuscitate the glories of the Persian empire." "He tended to play up the Iranian side of things, the heritage of Persia." "My name's Roger Lucy." "I was first secretary at the Canadian embassy." "I was responsible for reporting the political situation in Iran and there was a lot going on in Iran, so it kept me busy." "The Shah was trying to make Iran into a great power." "He hoped to equal Germany by the end of the century." "People were expecting things to get better and better, and they weren't getting better and better for everyone." "Iran had oil, but oil didn't matter that much until 1973, when the oil states," "Iran participating, created the oil crisis and the price of oil just went up to the sky." "And all of a sudden," "Iran, a poor country, was rich." "I always took my economic indicators in a way rather than from statistics, from the bar of the Hilton hotel." "At the bar of the Hilton hotel, it was the... it was where everybody met at the end of the day." "And the more caviar they sold, I figured economic indicators were up." "Suddenly there were all sorts of salons from Paris opening up, foreigners making money, bars in a country in which people didn't drink." "People are always happy to ban pleasures that they themselves cannot afford, so that could strike a real chord when you saw people living a dissolute western life while they themselves were, were finding it harder and harder to" "get enough to eat." "At the same time there was also a growing rift between the clerics, those visibly committed to the faith, and the more Westernized Iranians." "You could sense the increasing tension within the population." "All through this time the Iranian people liked Americans." "And they weren't necessarily hostile to the American government." "My name is William Daugherty." "My position in the American Embassy in Tehran was primarily as a case officer for the" "Central Intelligence Agency, a street operations officer, which gave me access to the individuals that we hoped to target and recruit." "Is the CIA active in Iran today?" "Probably yes, and why not?" "So you're not worried about" "whatever they might do here?" "I don't think so." "Because we might differ... on some issues eventually with our good American friends, but there are many more things that link us together than separates us." "The Nixon administration came in and they had this grand geo-strategic idea of allowing Iran to become the policeman of the middle east... which fit in with the Shah's desire to be a major world player." "We particularly welcome you and the Empress, as good friends, and old friends." "We treasure that friendship, and from that friendship we hope to work together toward a better world for both of our peoples." "The Shah had more leverage with us in many respects, than we did with him." "He was determining the price of oil, which was absolutely critical to American domestic politics and he was also defending our interests in the region, so our leverage against him was really pretty limited." "My name is Gary Sick." "I was the point person in the White House, the chief aide for Iran in the National Security Council during the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis." "And I think a lot of people don't understand that 1972 was a real turning point." "It was the change from a position where you could argue that the Shah was really beholden to us... to the reverse." "Kissinger, on behalf of President Nixon, wrote a memo to the Department of Defence, and it said:" ""Sell the Shah of Iran anything he wants except a nuclear weapon."" "One of the things, for example, the Shah got seventy-two F-14 Tomcat jets, just brand new." "Iran was the only country in the world that the United States sold the F-14s to." "The Iranian people said," ""we don't want to be a world power." "We have the poor, we have the impoverished, we need the education... why is the regime giving billions of dollars to the U.S." "for things that did not come back to benefit the people?"" "My name is Zena Sheardown." "My husband was the first secretary at the Canadian Embassy in Tehran." "We did have a choice of postings and we thought that the Shah ran a very tight ship and of all the places we were asked to go, this one seemed to be the most stable." "You know the Shah was firmly in control and we never expected to have problems there." "As a diplomat, as a journalist, as a banker, as whoever you were in Tehran, you rationalized, you, you've almost fooled yourself into thinking that this regime, this Pahlavi dynasty was going to last into the indefinite future." "And then there was the New Year's Eve toast in Tehran." "The President had stopped over for the night." "There was a huge state dinner for President Carter." "Before he went to that dinner he asked several high level advisors in his administration, what he should say." "And the general advice he was given was to talk about the qualities of the Iranian people or something to that effect but don't laud the Shah." "Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world." "This is a great tribute to you, your majesty, and to your leadership, and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you." "The toast to the Shah at New Year's was, was taken very seriously by all parties, I think." "It gave the Shah the impression that the U.S." "was steadfast behind him, essentially no matter what." "Iranians who had perhaps been on the fence, were not sure whether to join this burgeoning, active, dissident movement." "After that toast, they did." "And suddenly the whole thing sort of came to a head around 1978." "There were huge demonstrations against the Shah and the Shah reacted with brutality by shooting people." "And I witnessed some of these shootings." "It was, it was just brutal." "These clashes in the streets between the" "Shah's forces and the revolutionaries resulted in mass killings." "And overshadowing all of it was the secret police, the SAVAK." "The SAVAK was the state organization for security and intelligence." "My name's Carol Jerome." "In the 1970's I was working in the CBC Paris bureau as a reporter and producer and covered the revolution in Iran." "SAVAK became a very brutal secret police with totally wide-open powers to arrest and torture and kill as they pleased." "The United States initially began training SAVAK but approximately 1956, 1957, it was clear that SAVAK was going in a direction that did not necessarily fit with American values." "The Shah wasn't oblivious at all to what was going on." "He gave them full permission to do it." "In addition, the Americans themselves were not oblivious to it." "The Americans knew about it and let it go on." "The Iranians would actually produce books that were pages and pages and pages of colour pictures of bodies that had been tortured to death." "One of the favourite techniques of the, of SAVAK, was to use a blow-torch on people's feet and so I saw a lot of bodies where ultimately their whole foot was just charred black." "And the Shah just seemed oblivious to so much of this." "There is a very specific and special relationship between me and my people." "This maybe is not very well understood in other countries and as long as this special relationship exists between myself and my people," "I don't see where somebody should or could step in and break it." "Behind all this of course was the rather shadowy image of Ayatollah Khomeini who really was the opposition in absentia." "He appeared to be a great democratic revolutionary." "He was compared often with Gandhi." "I'm Mohamad Tavakoli and I was born and raised in Tehran during the last two decades of the Shah's regime." "People viewed Khomeini as a person that would consolidate the democratic trend, within the Iranian revolution." "In 1963 he had led a revolt and openly denounced the Shah." "The Shah threw him in jail, tried to deal with him, he refused and eventually they kicked him out of the country." "And he ended up in Iraq, next door." "And so he spent the next what... 14 years teaching, studying, lecturing and eventually ended up in Paris." "And the thinking by the Shah was that that was probably good, he was far away and he had no connection directly with the clerics." "Wrong." "It was a daily routine that he would come across the road, over to a kind of compound where they'd set up a blue and white striped tent that served as a mosque and he would come over and lead daily prayers." "I first saw him face to face when he was walking up and looked at me and I will never forget his eyes." "It was like looking into the abyss." "One of the tactics they had was to have him record these cassettes of his messages that would then be smuggled into Iran and they would be broadcast from the mosques." "Every night at 10 o'clock, you could get on your rooftop and hear the Ayatollah through cassettes, preach his views." "The Shah was facing an opponent in Ayatollah Khomeini who was absolutely clear what he wanted which was a total change of the regime." "He basically was playing for total victory." "If you're looking at this situation, who would you bet on?" "The Shah had been on the throne for 37 years." "He had been around crises, one after the other." "He had a very large military force." "He had one of the most feared secret services in the world, he had vast sums at his disposal." "Who would you bet on?" "The Shah, or a bunch of people operating out of a mosque?" "Who do you think would win that battle?" "My name is Antonio Mendez and as a technical services officer in the CIA my responsibility was "identity transformation."" "I've always considered myself to be an artist and for 25 years I had to put bread on the table, so I became a spy." "Because we didn't see the revolution coming in Iran, we seemed to be in denial because other people that we'd talk to would say, are you sure that the Shah's government is stable?" "And the answer was:" ""he's good for another 25 years."" "It was not only an intelligence failure, it was a failure to understand what was going on in the world, essentially." "It's absolutely true that Carter, and the Carter administration, of which I was a member, paid very little attention to Iran because at that exact same moment, that 1978 period, Jimmy Carter was betting his entire presidency on the Camp David Accords and" "Arab-Israeli peace." "People were not sitting around in Washington, worrying about Khomeini, and by the time we got around to doing something, history had already passed us by." "The revolutionary demonstrations became so relentless that the Shah could no longer live in denial." "It became clear that the Shah had to leave Iran, that he wasn't going to survive as king." "He let the corruption and the cronyism completely undermine and destroy the good things he was trying to do." "The departure was a moment of absolute abject torment." "Tears, the loyalists pleading with him to stay." "At least he felt he left with a certain amount of dignity." "So you had a country that was back to bare bones." "And in a sense, waiting for the next chapter." "And for most Iranians it was a joyous chapter to come, the arrival of the Ayatollah." "For some it was ominous and threatening." "Many of us, including myself, ended up flying back to Iran on the famous flight that took Khomeini back to his revolution." "When the plane came in over Tehran, it was coming in for a landing, you could see all of these millions of people in the streets." "It was the crowds were just humongous and here we were in this cavalcade of a few cars and I and my cameraman were in the car behind him, and the adoration, the people who wanted to touch," "just pressing in on us." "This crowd was so passionate, so determined, and he took it in and just sort of thrived in this adulation." "You can't blame him because just imagine, you've been in exile for so long, and suddenly you come home and you're the hero." "And millions..." "and there were more than a million people out there... just adoring him." "It became, for the first time, possible for him to imagine an Islamic form of government and" "Islam became the central element of his revolution." "The moderates had believed him when he said he was just going to go off back to the holy city of Qom and mind religious matters." "He had no intention of doing that." "So it became a battle day by day, who was going to be supreme." "There were three or four parties contending for the leadership, each one with their own followers, no police force, no semblance of order." "As the revolution began to unfold it became a lawless city." "Order has just collapsed." "One day you hear gunfire in the street and you know it's the army shooting at demonstrators, the next day you hear gunfire in the street and you know that everyone and their uncle has an assault rifle." "My name is Patricia Taylor and I went to Iran to join Ken in Tehran." "It was the middle of the revolution, Ken was not able to send a car to meet me at the airport, so I arrived and had to get home somehow on my own and we drove past cinemas that had been burned," "car places that had been destroyed." "So it looked like a war zone and it really shocked me..." "I didn't quite know what was going on." "What we didn't know at the time is around then the Shah had also received a diagnosis that he had cancer and so he was pushed for time in a way that nobody really realized because nobody was aware of his illness." "Eventually he was allowed into the United States to be treated." "That was what triggered the hostage seizure because the Iranians were absolutely convinced that they were going to come in and take over and reinstall the Shah." "It did precipitate a bitter and acrimonious dispute within the U.S. itself." "I mean, here's been our steadfast ally for 20 years plus and what are we doing, we're just sacrificing him for some nebulous idea of a new Islamic government." "On the other hand, you had those who said it was a repressive regime;" "this is a genuine response by the Iranians." "Why are we putting the US presence in Iran, particularly at the embassy, in jeopardy?" "We don't owe the Shah anything." "There was a famous meeting that was held in the" "White House in which all of President Carter's advisors sat around the table and one after another they argued that the president should permit the Shah to come into this country for medical treatment." "And Jimmy Carter was the last holdout and at the end of the meeting he said, "All right, you're all in agreement, you all tell me that we must let him in for various reasons."" "He said, "I really wonder what you're going to tell me when they take our people hostage in Tehran?"" "I'm Cora Amburn-Lijek and I worked in the" "Embassy in Tehran as the consular assistant." "I'm Mark Lijek." "I was in Tehran as the" "American Citizens' Services officer." "When Carter decided that the Shah should go to New York, that changed everything." "The Iranians were extremely unhappy." "They believed it was a CIA plot to put the Shah back in power and get rid of the Ayatollah and that's when we started seeing the daily demonstrations in front of our embassy." "On November 4th, 1979, probably around 8:30, 8:45, a very loud demonstration in the street just kept getting louder and then it got really loud and a navy officer came in and he said," "they've broken into the grounds." "My name is Bob Anders, my position in Tehran at the American embassy was Deputy Chief of the Consular Section." "The American embassy there was on about a 27-acre compound, with 10 or 15 buildings throughout the compound." "The main building, the Chancellery was towards the front." "Our building, the consular building, was towards the back of the compound." "Somebody said, "there's people outside on the compound;" "they've got, they've got... bats and stones..." "shut the door!"" "I'm Kathleen Stafford, I was working in the consular section in 1979 in Iran." "Most of the windows were kind of covered up... you really couldn't see out very well." "And we waited for the local police to come and take the students away, make the students leave." "Someone made a phone call and asked them to come and" "I think they hung up on us, but in any case, no one ever came." "The senior security officer who had stayed at the embassy had been taken by the Iranians and had been brought up to the door, apparently put a gun to his head, and a senior security officer said," ""open the door," so we surrendered." "Someone thought they heard footsteps on the roof or they smelled smoke and they thought they were trying to build a fire on the roof of our building." "We decided it was time to go." "So that's when we decided to break into small groups." "I think it was the marine guard who had a chance to look out the back door." "He looked out there and saw there was no one there so we did have an exit there." "I think the students had forgotten about it but that alley was empty and that was the, that was the lucky thing for us." "So the idea was to go to the safe haven, the British embassy." "We started in that direction and there was another mob and they were coming our way." "So there was no way that we could get in." "We'd have to fight our way through a crowd and that didn't make any sense." "So my apartment was not too far from that area so I suggested, well, let's go to my place and see what's happening." "We just said okay we're going with you Bob because we just figured the best thing was to get off the street you know and it would be over in a few hours and we'd go back to work the next day." "One report said that some of the hostages have been blindfolded since they were seized Sunday." "And two more Americans picked up at their hotel today may have joined the other 60 Americans including 28 Marine guards and 40 Asians being held at the Embassy." "The State Department suggested today that the..." "We had our hands tied, we were blindfolded, kept waiting, you know, for help to come, but it became clear that these guys were in control." "And so we resigned ourselves at least to a few more days." "At that point it was really regarded by virtually every country in the world as unthinkable... that basically that a country would lend itself to the kidnapping and holding of an entire foreign embassy, on their own soil," "in the centre of their own capital city." "It marked the end of conventional diplomacy, a breach of diplomatic sovereignty and sanctity which was unparalleled." "So it became a global issue, and the Iranians themselves, the demonstrators, of course, became worldwide news and to some extent they, of course, relished that." "But early days I'm not entirely certain they knew what their intent was." "The students appeared en masse today inside of the" "Embassy grounds in a show of solidarity with the crowd outside." "Tonight, thousands appeared at their windows and on the rooftops shouting: "God is great."" "To spur them on there was a radio message from their leader, Khomeini." ""You brave people," his message read," ""you have decided to rub America's nose in the dirt."" "We were really very nervous." "I don't think we slept much during... at night." "We would jump at every sort of sound and you'd just try to hold yourself together because you know, what good does it do to think about all the bad possibilities?" "Bob decided to contact John Sheardown, just to feel him out in case we needed a new place to hide." "The phone rang and I get up to answer it and found that it was Bob Anders." "I told him, this is Bob..." "I didn't give my full name... and the first thing he says," ""Why didn't you call sooner?" "Where are you... come on, you can stay with us."" "And I said, "Yes but I've got four other people with me"" "and he said, "that's okay, bring 'em all."" "I immediately phoned Ken, Ambassador Taylor." "I told him that we were expecting guests and invited him over." "I didn't see a conceivable rationale to say to the five diplomats, "Sorry, maybe you could find somewhere else."" "So I drafted up a message, with John, to Prime Minister Clark and Flora MacDonald," "Foreign Minister, proposing this is what we were going to do." "My name is Flora MacDonald and at that time I was the Foreign Minister of Canada." "Michael Shenstone came into my office and he said," ""Minister, I have something to tell you."" "You know, he told me the United States needed our help and so I went into the House of Commons, my seat was next to Joe Clark, and I said," ""When question period is over, and you usually leave then,"" "I said, "Would you just stay where you are?"" "And he said, "What?" You know?" "And I said, "There's something I have to tell you."" "And so there were Joe and I sitting in the House of Commons by ourselves and I told him all about this business in Iran." "I'm Joe Clark, I was Prime Minister in 1979 and '80." "I think her briefing had been fairly limited but frankly neither one of us needed a lot of persuasion that we should support the courageous acts that had been taken by our diplomats on the ground." "Of course we realized the possible consequences if everything collapsed, if the Iranians found out, if we were put in front of a tribunal." "There could be severe consequences." "But I think I reflected the mood of my colleagues in the embassy that that didn't matter." "We were on the alert for another contact... when exactly they would be able to make the move, and on Saturday, the 10th of November," "I received a phone call saying that the time is now." "Any drive in Tehran was tense for me because" "I didn't look Iranian." "I had kind of dirty blonde hair and I just felt very conspicuous anytime I was outdoors." "There's not a lot of images I remember from 33 years ago but I distinctly remember Mark Lijek and" "Bob Anders had my scarves on so nobody would see their light coloured hair..." "always travel with scarves when you have to escape." "Traffic is bad and it moves slowly in Tehran and people can see in so as you're cruising along at five miles an hour, you know, people are looking in the windows of the car and it's kind of" "nerve-wracking so it was very nice when we pulled up in front of John's house and we just scooted out as quickly as we could into the garage." "And they shut the door and then we were behind walls and no one could see us." "When we arrived we were introduced to John's wife" "Zena and to this youngish looking guy named Ken Taylor who I assumed was John's assistant because he was maybe 40, and quite a bit younger than John and being new to the foreign service I thought ambassadors were you know, old guys with pot bellies... kind of like I look now you know, not..." "So after we sat down and Zena had given everybody a drink I asked John, does your ambassador know that we're here and you know he kind of puffed at his pipe and then he kind of nodded in the direction of Ken" "and said, "well that is our ambassador, that's Ambassador Taylor over there, you've already met him!"" "That was wonderful, and Ken said," ""Yes, I'm Ambassador Ken Taylor."" "Curly hair and all..." "little spiffy sports car and I think he was wearing jeans." "So then we talked a bit and he said he wanted one couple to come with him." "So that's how Joe and I ended up going to the Taylors' house." "It was never stated that we were those Americans that were hiding." "Eventually their staff," "I'm sure after a good ten days, and every time somebody comes to the house and we go upstairs and hide," "I'm sure their staff figured out who we were." "And oftentimes they would come and ask these questions... for instance if they asked why they never went out to sightsee, the answer... my answer, was well they're so tired because they travelled so much before coming to stay with us." "And that was accepted." "It was theatre, this whole thing, before the American embassy, the crowds yelling," ""Marg bar Amrika;" "Death to America"" "and when you came and you turned on the camera, the crowd would respond and of course if you turned off the camera, things would settle down again." "Marg bar Amrika!" "These are the faces of the captors of the 50 Americans." "Not like the faces you might see at McGill or" "Simon Fraser but these are nonetheless students, just as they claim to be." "They seem to have no grasp at all of the political complexities, of what it would mean to the" "United States to give in to terrorism, of the implications of political anarchy and their defiance of their own government." "Carol Jerome, CBC News." "The hostages and that whole crisis became a lever whereby the extremists could maneuver all the moderates out of power." "We very quickly became pawns in this game of seeking power between the Islamist and the so-called moderates and whoever controlled us actually controlled the government." "Khomeini was not willing to surrender one inch of power." "Nothing happened without him." "That siege on the embassy would never have happened if he had just said one word and said: "go home!"" "And I asked, I asked the minister, will this government, in the next 24 hrs." "get in contact with the other six summit leaders, ask them collectively, to make a statement of solidarity with the United States, and to make it publicly at the head of state level as Mr. Clark should be making a statement." "I was under a lot of pressure in the House of Commons." "It was not very pleasant because we were being harassed all the time." "I'd be practically in tears coming out of question period." "Mr. Speaker." "I am sure that the former Prime Minister recognizes that the Prime Minister has made statements..." "And I would have to go into parliament and answer and at the same time I was fumbling all over the place." "I mean I looked like I was trying to hide something... which I was." "That is what we're asking the government, not vague statements by European..." "And I remember Pierre Eliot Trudeau always sneering at me and he could sneer with the best of them." "I found the exchange between Mr. Trudeau and myself to be a little surprising because" "I had taken the decision to brief him directly about what was happening." "I thought it was appropriate to bring him into the picture." "...be prepared to impose international sanctions on Iran, or..." "Trudeau knew perfectly well what was at stake:" "he knew about the houseguests, he knew the dangers." "And yet he went on and played politics like this with it in the Commons." "Mr. Speaker, I would have thought, that of all people in this house, the Rt. Hon. Leader of the Opposition would have understood that the purpose of Canada and other countries..." "I said that he of all people should know how delicate the situation was and I was able to do that I think without signaling to anyone else what exactly was delicate." "In early December, I believe it was around" "Dec. 6th, I was taken down the hall." "They began a very serious interrogation." "The leader pulls out a very sensitive, high-level, top secret State Department document and it had my true name in it;" "it had the true name of another agency officer;" "it talked about our cover jobs and it talked about the Iranian officials that we were to target for recruitment." "So I was really..." "I was really stunned." "I looked at the cable and read it and I looked up at him and said:" ""OK I'm CIA, so what?"" "And the guy got so frustrated with me he threw the documents down and said," ""get him out of here."" "At one point, Douglas, the Taylors' son came home from boarding school, and I think it was Thanksgiving." "My name is Douglas Taylor." "At the time my parents were in Iran I was 13 years old." "It was surprising that there were two people that were staying at our place, what happens if they get discovered and what happens if the other four get discovered together with them or separately?" "He never told anybody that his parents were hiding these people for all these months." "Now that's some kid that doesn't let that secret out." "When you think back on it, it was probably a good thing that they were there in terms of somebody to spend time with." "They had the game of Petropolis, which is like" "Monopoly but you have..." "I think the pieces are like gold..." "and it's oil countries as the properties and not Park Place and Boardwalk and things like that." "And instead of plastic houses or hotels, you had oil rigs and platforms and those oil rigs and platforms were either in silver or gold." "So we played games with him and he went back to school after Thanksgiving, and we said," ""See you at Christmas," and then he came back... we were still there..." "wasn't funny." "The Sheardown house was amazing." "It was huge... they could have absorbed more than the four of us who ended up living there." "We had our own wing in the house, and our own bathroom." "There was a den that we spent our days in and they took really good care of us and Zena was there all day if we needed anything." "So as time went on they developed their own routine and I developed my own and in the evenings we would make a point of sitting down and having a dinner together and we would all come together as a group, as a family, if you like." "I mean John became kind of like our daddy, you know we used to wait for him to get home from work, then we'd have a formal meal and then after that we'd retire to the den for cognac and cigars and" "conversation and we'd listen to the VOA and the" "BBC broadcasts and stuff and John would tell us the latest gossip that wasn't on the news." "A few miles away in the downtown our colleagues are basically being abused." "The contrast, to me still, to this day, it's just amazing that we could be living so well while that was going on." "They took my hands and with a very heavy nylon twine, tied them together like this, and had the twine very, very tight so that it cut off the circulation and as everybody knows, when, you know," "your extremities go numb they become very sensitive and so they held out my hands like that and this big muscular Kurd just whacked it with this rubber hose, and that may well be the worst pain" "I've ever had in my life..." "I've had three back surgeries... you know, the last time they put more hardware in than they got at Home Depot and I'm telling you, that pain wasn't anywhere like this was." "In the first month of the hostage taking" "President Carter sent a very private note to Khomeini and it said basically, if any of the hostages are harmed, and that includes putting them on trial, Iran would lose its access to the rest of the world." "And we could do that." "And basically from that point on, even according to most of the hostages... there were a few exceptions, and Daugherty and there were one or two others who were in solitary confinement and were treated very badly the whole time," "but most of the hostages, the daily threats and all of that sort of thing stopped by about the end of November and it was clear that Carter's message had been received and understood." "There is no recognized religious faith on earth which condones kidnapping." "There is no recognized religious faith on earth which condones blackmail." "There is certainly no religious faith on earth which condones the sustained abuse of innocent people." "I found him a very sympathetic person." "I've always said about him that he could very easily have been a Canadian." "He was going through at that time the terrible agonies of power, particularly power being exercised by someone who has the strong personal and moral beliefs that he does." "He had been regarded in Washington as an outsider and I think that there was probably some questioning even, even then as to whether this PhD... peanut farmer from Plains had the stuff to be able to deal with those matters." "In Iranian culture they actually respect power." "If you appear weak they despise that and I think" "Carter was seen as weak by the Iranians and they already did despise him, they referred to him as the "Great Satan"." "The biggest mistake Carter made was to declare publicly that his primary goal was to get everybody back safely." "While I support the goal, you don't tell your opponent in any kind of a contest, that they hold all the cards and that's basically what Carter did." "He and the people around him could not have been unconscious of the questions as to whether or not he was going to be tough enough to deal with all those things." "It has to be remembered that an embassy is considered the sovereign territory of that country, within the host nation." "So seizing an embassy and taking the staff hostage, the way they did, was an act of war." "In the past 24 hrs. the confrontation with the United States has escalated by several notches." "There was the announcement by Ayatollah Khomeini that the hostages in the embassy would be tried as spies and Washington's reaction:" "to dispatch war ships to the Persian Gulf and the pointed reminder that the" "United Nations Charter provides for the use of force in cases such as this if there is no peaceful resolution." "Joe Schlesinger, CBC News, Tehran." "I think Carter thought about every conceivable possibility, everything that was available to him, no matter what, and that included military." "I don't think Carter was afraid to use military if he thought it would work, if he actually thought it would get the hostages out and not get them killed." "It was thought that the U.S. could mount a commando raid, that is, with maybe 50 special forces made up of the three services, six or seven helicopters landing in the desert, making their way into Tehran," "breaching the walls of the US Embassy, rescuing the people, taking them back by bus and then helicopter." "It was a daring scheme, and called "Eagle Claw."" "The US never asked us, the Canadians, for any advice as to feasibility of the raid." "What they asked us for was, would you prepare the groundwork for us to do it?" "At some point, from what I understand, is President Carter phoned Prime Minister Clark and asked if the Canadians could carry this out, could prepare and send to Washington something which would be basic to a commando raid." "They asked that one CIA agent be placed within our embassy." "He was called "Bob"." "He would report to me but he would be part of the embassy but pose as a business executive if anybody stopped him on the street." "And then also that Sergeant Jim Edwards, who headed up our military police unit could be made available to do reconnaissance." "Together we monitored the activities of the" "US Embassy compound to determine the number of guards inside and outside the walls, how many were armed, what additional ammunition or firepower they had, any gun positions that had been placed around the Embassy, and what time they changed shifts." "We kept track of exactly where the hostages were held, any assault would have to come from the north-east and west sides of the compound." "We searched for a suitable location to hide the Delta Force commandos, we also had to secure vehicles for their disposal." "We plotted escape routes, monitored the density of traffic surrounding the embassy, and potential checkpoints of revolutionary guards." "Of course, this revolved around the location of suitable helicopter landing sites." "All of this data was compiled and every day" "I sent a new batch of it through the cipher machine to Ottawa, they passed it to the US Embassy, who transmitted to Washington, where it was distributed to the White House, CIA headquarters at Langley," "and the Pentagon." "Here we were, communication wires sticking out every window, sending volumes of data each day with the objective of having a commando raid..." "that was a different level." "That's where the intensity was." "When I found out that Ken was, had been gathering information for the CIA it was a surprise and I really didn't know at that time how to react." "Under the circumstances, it was something that someone needed to do and not many people would have undertaken the responsibility to do it." "And some Canadians I think would say well no, you shouldn't tarnish Canadians' reputation by helping out a US military raid." "Off-screen:" "But there are reasons for that?" "But there are reasons for it." "I mean, what are we going to do?" "Sorry US, but we can't do that because it offends us or what have you." "In the Crisis Center here at the State Department officials were grappling with the murky, dangerous, confusing situation." "More weapons including machine guns have been moved into the Embassy compound by the students holding the hostages." "And radio broadcasts by Khomeini and his supporters have now become ugly and violently anti-American." "At the moment, things appear very grim." "Right from the first day the US diplomats arrived it was uppermost in our mind, now that they're safe, but, how do we get them home?" "The colleagues in Ottawa came up with a number of scenarios..." "all based on the fact that they would become Canadians." "That was the basic, fundamental first step." "The risks that we were taking in the planning of the exfiltration of the six centered around:" "what would happen to them if they got caught?" "The revolutionary government was up in arms about CIA being everywhere, and so if they could find some indication of clandestine activity they would leap upon it and do what they do best which is drag the corpse with a jeep" "through the villages... something to that effect." "The criminal, the United States government," "Mr. Carter, the CIA... we are at war with them and we are responsible to struggle against them and put them on trial." "Those who are our oppressors, those who have committed crimes, those who are spies... they must be destroyed." "I could just imagine a swarm of revolutionary guards being called in and John and I and whoever else was with him being marched off and that would have been the last you'd heard of us probably." "The first thing you do when you start planning an exfiltration is you figure out who you're trying to move and where they came from and what is their cover legend." "And I had this notion:" "Hollywood!" "It's an easy cover to carry because they are eccentric and they would be anywhere in the world looking for a location to shoot their movie, then it doesn't have to seem sensible at all." "Seems to be just what they are, eccentric." "We proposed that they were petroleum engineers, that they were agronomists, that they were nutritionists." "The CIA proposed the movie scenario, which was ingenious, but we thought rather complex and complicated." "We called in a few favours and we found out that" "Michael Douglas had just finished shooting" "The China Syndrome and was about to vacate a suite of offices on the old Columbia Studios lot." "He moved out and we moved in." "Put up our sign..." "we decided to call it" "Studio Six Productions because there were six people so we thought, in your face, put a big red six on our sign and on our business cards." "We were trying to make something that looked sci-fi, mythical, mystical, kind of like Star Wars" "and then we took out full page ads in the" "Hollywood Reporter..." "we had a full page ad which I had sketched which had an explosion in its face:" ""Argo, a Cosmic Conflagration entering into principal photography on" "March, 1980."" "And that's how it started." "The huge, unanswered question to me, in the whole plan, for getting the houseguests out was why, when you've gone to all the trouble of getting them these Canadian passports, why do you make them Hollywood producers?" "That is to say, Americans with Canadian passports, but nonetheless." "It's so strange!" "What it was originally is that it was a Canadian team, film team, movie team, that came to Iran to give the true story of the revolution." "Where it lost its way is because the CIA and Tony..." "and this is to some extent the way Americans do things... money means no object so and the total engagement of making it this fabricated "Argo" movie got away from what I saw as the strength of the" "Canadian movie team was to offer a sympathetic account of the truth of the revolution, which the Iranians would have said, isn't that the greatest thing going?" "Instead of this outer space movie, with everything else, but... that was, that's the CIA and that's Hollywood." "I mean they loved it." "They got caught up in themselves as the wonder of this marvelous idea they had..." "What Canada did, apart from the meticulous planning and risk-taking on the ground in Tehran, was prepare Canadian passports for the six hostages." "Can you imagine somebody coming to Washington, asking the US Congress for an exception to their passport law and giving us passports without question?" "Never happen." "It required an order in council to be passed and" "I told the rest of the Cabinet that this was an extraordinary measure and I was not going to be able to explain why we were doing this but I asked them to accept my word that it was worth doing" "and there was no dissent." "It wasn't the kind of thing that you did." "You didn't falsify passports." "I mean it just struck me as being wrong but at the same time you had the possibility of saving people's lives." "So you know, you had to make a choice and" "I made a choice to sign the passports." "I can tell you my hand shook while I was signing them, but they were good enough to be accepted and off, off they went." "These passports in turn were sent to Washington." "The CIA stamped them with visas and they were then sent by diplomatic bag for our use." "Ken said well we better have a look at these and so I opened up the passports and" "I looked at the visas and I suddenly realized that the dates were obviously based on the Western Calendar which begins on January 1st and unfortunately the Iranian calendar, which goes back an awfully long time, starts on the 21st of March, the spring equinox," "and then our first action was to send a flash message back to Ottawa saying, the visas are wrong:" "what are we going to do?" "So, six new passports came to us about the time that" "Tony Mendez arrived but the CIA's mistake could have been fatal." "Good evening." "The Iranian situation tonight." "Ayatollah Khomeini has refused any Iranian negotiations with the presidential team dispatched from Washington last night." "His terms on a radio broadcast today," "There is nothing to negotiate until the US sends him the deposed Shah, ill in a New York hospital." "The would be negotiators..." "The moderates mistakenly believed that Khomeini was going to be the path to this new democracy of free people, and you could see almost every day that that dream faded farther and farther into the darkness." "Many people were arrested, imprisoned and executed for their opposition against the Islamic direction of the Revolution." "Revolutions revolve 360 degrees and this one revolved." "It started out with great enthusiasm, great hopes, and basically then turned into a regime that was just as repressive as the one it replaced and" "I think that's been a huge disappointment for a lot of people in Iran." "As the date for the departure of the US diplomats came closer it was reasonable, sensible and logical to cut back the staff as far as we could." "Those who left included John and Zena." "When they left Roger Lucy stayed with the four." "Zena and I departed on the 20th of January and," "I must admit that we felt that we were abandoning our houseguests." "I felt very nervous and I really respect John and" "Zena for sticking it out for two whole months cause I tell you, every time I heard a car stop outside the house I thought, this is it, they're coming to get us cause in my heart of hearts" "I was scared shitless, but um..." "I'm sorry..." "scared to death and my fingernails got quite a bit shorter." "We really didn't know anything about any sort of plans before that." "We didn't have any information about anything that was going on and I'm sure, once again, it was Ken thinking that we should know as little as possible in case we ever were picked up, we should just," "you know, the need to know." "So we were taken to the Sheardowns and that's when Tony came." "We had dinner together and then we went to the den, and of course he had been introduced to us as a" "CIA agent and he told us he'd done it before, he'd gotten other people out..." "he was very convincing." "And very charming." "And he had this little wine cork trick which I learned but I've since forgotten how to do and he took these two wine corks that were interlinked and he went, we're going to get you out of Tehran," "one, two, three." "And all of a sudden he had them apart." "I know it was just a sleight of hand trick but somehow" "I thought look, this guy can do hand tricks," "I don't know, but he was really convincing." "I thought his plan was so perfect," "I was just positive it was going to work." "They thought of every possible detail." "I was also the graphic artist and I thought," "I could do that, if they ask me to draw something" "I can draw something." "And Cora was going to be the scriptwriter and she has her Masters in English." "Teresa Harris was my name and I was a scriptwriter." "The interesting thing is I actually went to school with a woman named Teresa Harris and she and I have the exact same birthday." "I was really curious, like, was that a coincidence?" "Did they look back at my high school yearbook?" "In my case they, my first and middle name were my father-in-law's and" "I'm born in Detroit and my passport said" "I was from Windsor, which, close enough, and so they... they did things to make it easy for us to remember, at least to the extent they could." "And obviously some research had been done on us." "Ottawa provided all the documentation... the business cards, the birth certificates, the academic records, the passports, of course." "You know, we had all the stuff..." "I mean, the driver's licenses, the health cards, the business cards." "I mean, this was all RCMP stuff as far as I know." "They provided all of that and it was very well done and I was very impressed with the package that I was given." "As that old trite saying says, it's to some extent a lie is like an onion." "You can keep peeling it back." "And we had lots of room to peel it back." "We tried to learn how to be Canadian." "I must say it's not that easy!" "We didn't know anything about the geography." "We knew almost nothing, I'm ashamed to say." "But we practiced saying "eh, eh", and just memorized our names, our birthplaces, all the things that they might ask us." "We drilled them in their Canadian persona and ran them through sort of mock airport drills and I, just to jazz things up, put on a camouflage jacket and strode about snarling in my best Persian accent and generally doing the Eric von Stroheim bit." "He wasn't kidding around." "This was not friendly Roger, this was Mr. Revolutionary guard and I'm going to get you." "Just let me try:" "When did you come to Iran?" "Where did you get your visa?" "What do you mean you don't know where you got your visa?" "If they didn't respond in the way he wanted them to." "he would slap the desk with his swagger stick, bam, bam, bam!" "We would forget some detail or other and then he'd say:" ""You're an American spy,"" "you know, "we're going to shoot you!"" "Or something like that." "The person who had the most fun making themselves over for their Hollywood role, first and foremost would be Bob Anders who turned into this kind of Fellini character." "One of the things I got was a shirt that was about two sizes too small and I put it on and could only button it up to about here and then it was open like this and I got the idea, maybe if I got" "some kind of chain and put a little medallion or something, and I hadn't had a haircut for about three months and so I pulled my hair down over... strange long hair and I had sunglasses on." "So that was my disguise and I got into the role." "He would mince up and down and he even had a cigarette holder so he would be smoking like some gay European person." "Part of this whole thing was, it was kind of fun you know, especially the idea, well we're going to put one over on these people." "I've been through Mehrabad Airport several times." "You do not want to tangle with those people." "If they get suspicious at the slightest little thing, you're gone into the back room." "They ran a terrible risk there." "It's almost cowboyism... gunslinger, that you want to make them these Hollywood producers." "That could have backfired into the most terrible tragedy." "We had been scouting Mehrabad airport, so" "I sketched a rough diagram for the six to commit to memory." "We knew each checkpoint, exactly who would be there to confront them, the number and position of revolutionary guards, traditional immigration officers, and military police." "And on top of that, the airport at that time absolute pandemonium..." "that was in our favour." "Airports in that part of the world tend to become chaotic at a certain hour and I wanted to get there kind of before everybody woke up." "When we entered the building at the airport terminal, just being in a crowded place, the glare of those fluorescent lights and I'm imagining all the things that could possibly go wrong so" "I was doing my best to scare myself." "The Revolutionary Guard was stirring and getting ready to maraud around, making themselves known to the bad guys in the airport, if there were any and we didn't want to get tangled with them." "It was kind of an almost out-of-body experience." "We'd been in one house for almost three months, and had only been out a few times, so that was kind of scary, so it was very reassuring seeing Tony there, waiting for us." "He was at the Swissair counter and if he was smiling we were supposed to proceed; if he was frowning and scratching his cheek that meant, turn around, get back in the van and go home." "We arrived at immigration, put down our authentic-looking phony documents." "The immigration guy looked down at the pile, looked at us, scarfed up the pile, went in the back room." "What's he doing?" "Well he came out stirring a cup of tea." "He was taking a tea break." "They did call our flight so we took the bus out to the tarmac to board the plane..." "and Swissair names all their aircraft and so we got about to board the plane and I noticed the name of the plane we were on was "Aargau."" "Bob Anders nudged me with his elbow and said, you guys think of everything." "Letters across the nose of the aircraft was the word" ""Aargau", close enough." "When we got outside Iranian air space and the announcement came on, alcohol will be served, up went a cheer and we ordered Bloody Marys all around." "Tony turned around and toasted us and we all toasted him but you know we didn't make a lot of noise or say a whole lot because the plane was full of Iranians and who knew who they were," "but he had a big smile on his face and" "I think so did the rest of us." "It was as much his life on the line as ours and probably more his because he really was a spy and who knows what the Iranians would have done if they had caught him, so he was running a big risk" "and of course we appreciate that;" "it's not something that you ever forget." "I at that point went down to the embassy and was joined by Claude Gauthier, one of the sergeants, and we then meticulously went through the embassy, burned and destroyed the remaining documents we had." "He hammered the cipher machine to death, closed the embassy by putting up a sign outside and we made it to the airport about 4 or 5 in the afternoon, sat around and got on SAS to Copenhagen." "Good evening." "Canada has secretly helped six American diplomats escape from Iran." "The six were greeted with thunderous applause, cheers and bone crushing hugs." "Hundreds and hundreds of their colleagues joined by members of congress, jamming the diplomatic lobby, could barely contain their joy." "Canadian ambassador Kenneth Taylor, who orchestrated the escape, was professionally cool." "Delighted to be here." "Reporter: "Are you going to say anything about your experiences in Iran?"" "Not right now." "You have the same name as my husband." "That's a good start." "We were celebrities and this was quite a surprise to both of us." "There were all sorts of invitations to go to visit places, to be given keys of the city, and it felt to me just like being a rock star, it was just overwhelming." "Canada is still in the Iranian doghouse tonight." "The government there is still miffed at what it calls" ""Canada's treachery" but what others call heroism." "Sooner or later, here or anywhere in the world," "Canada will pay for this violation of the sovereignty of Iran." "We paid a price for the action that we took because our embassy was not open for a long period of time." "We were not quite as influential as we had been." "Was it worth it?" "Yes, it was." "But I think it indicates that except in cases that are fairly extreme, you try to keep those relations open." "One night the guard went asleep and so I was able to talk across the hall through a ventilating opening above the solid steel cell door." "And so the first thing they wanted to know was what had happened to me because most of them thought I was dead... a number of colleagues on that cellblock were really surprised that, that I was still alive." "And then, Tom said, six were rescued... they had been sheltered by the Canadians and taken out of the country secretly." "After we got back, one of the ladies, when I came over to give her a big hug, and whatever, she said she just wasn't sure that any of us would want to talk to them." "And I asked why and she said," ""well we got out and you all had to stay"." "And I told her that anybody who could get out was welcome to get out, we would never hold it against them, in fact we were delighted that at least somebody got out." "Everything was workable and everything was quite functional, but the team ran into a terrible dust storm along the way..." "they had to do all of this in radio silence and basically in the middle of the night." "If you've ever flown in a large military helicopter, any time, for any period of time, you'll know it's not a very pleasant experience and then to do it in the middle of the night in a dust storm" "with no radio contact, requires you know, amazing heroism, just to do it." "But what happened was two of the helicopters were lost along the way and the third had an irreparable problem with the hydraulic line and as they circled around in the dark to go home, one of the helicopters clipped one of the planes" "on the ground and it burst into flames and it was a complete catastrophe." "So the job never got done." "There was no fighting, there was no combat, but to my deep regret, eight of the crewmen of the two aircraft which collided, were killed and several other" "Americans were hurt in the accident." "It was an appalling scene the way the Iranians crowed over these poor dead bodies." "Judge Khakali gleefully showed the remains of the marines that they had brought back, sometimes pieces... they had spread them out in the open compound of the embassy and showed them for the cameras." "It was dreadful and" "I remember being with the Americans." "These were hardened war correspondents, some of these people, and they were just in tears." "The positive side is that we all got out alive." "Most of us got out physically healthy, most of us with little or no really psychological problems or at least not severe, serious." "And so everybody was very grateful for that." "I don't think there was a magic bullet." "I don't think there was an easy way out." "I think Carter systematically looked at all the possibilities and he paid the price." "But I think a lot of the hostages would understand that in a strange sense" "Carter put their welfare above his own and for most senior politicians at a presidential level, that's not typical." "That is not what people do." "And I think you have to give him credit for that." "I think it wasn't the death knoll of diplomacy but it certainly changed it." "It had ramifications as of that day and it still does today." "For what?" "What did it prove?" "Maybe the Iranians thought they proved something." "In my own mind I'm not convinced." "Everyone wants to be free but... they don't necessarily want freedom for others;" "they want freedom for themselves." "So they can't tolerate minorities or make compromises." "It's all, it's my way or the highway kind of thing." "And that's the way Iran was run." "And that's the way Iran is still run." "You know, when you join the foreign service you think of a life of luxury and beautiful residences that are well appointed and the ability to meet people who are the power brokers in the world, but there is also this underlying responsibility." "You have to have some sort of willingness to undertake a risk if it's in the benefit of mankind in a way." "It was a new era introduced innocently enough by a few young Iranians." "It had ramifications as of that day, and it still does today." "It's a good example of how you can accomplish something without bloodshed or violence." "For me, the whole thing was an unfolding tragedy." "Watching people who had worked all their lives for the revolution being betrayed." "It's really very humbling that people will stick their necks out and put their lives in danger for people they barely know." "I do think that the Canadians were willing to take risks that many other embassies would not." "We rose to an occasion and it showed us at our best, not simply because it worked but because the motives were correct." "Too many times in America now, a hero's the guy who bats 396." "or the movie star who makes 20 million in one movie, people lose sight of what a hero really is."