posted 11-03-2012 03:26 PM                       

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NEW YORK—It hasn’t been unusual over the last 20 years, when Ken Taylor returns to his home in New York from abroad, for a U.S. customs inspector to look at his passport, glance up, back at the photo and name, and say, “Hey, I studied you in high school!”

The experience always impresses two things on Canada’s former ambassador to Iran.

One, even for celebrated international heroes, time passes. And two, that for his role in rescuing six U.S. diplomats in 1980 after the tumultuous days of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution, he has a place in history.

It’s a place well earned by Taylor and his colleagues at the Canadian Embassy in Tehran — who put their lives on the line to harbour the half-dozen diplomats who slipped away from the U.S. Embassy as it was besieged by Iranian militants who took more than 60 Americans hostage and held most under harsh conditions for more than a year.

That’s why Taylor is, understandably, a little touchy about the new Ben Affleck movie Argo to be released this week, in which Canada’s role all but vanishes while the CIA and one of its agents, played by Affleck, become stars of the show.

Taylor, still fit, fashionable and unflappable at 77, understands full well that Argo is Hollywood, not history.

But, as he told the Star at his Upper East Side apartment building in Manhattan, he also knows that for those under age 45 or so, the hostage-takings of 1979, and Canada’s courageous support for its neighbour, “is a part of history that they may only vaguely remember.”

For them, he said, the movie will probably “be the story.”

And the movie, he said, is a big deal.

“You cannot go around New York without seeing this. It’s on buses. It’s on a three-storey building in Soho. They’re spending a lot of money. They’re banking on an Academy Award.”

That’s why Taylor is happy — and he’s still sufficiently famous to be getting media calls from all over the world — to politely “offer some interpretation of what went on in reality, rather than in Hollywood play time.”

“The movie’s fun, it’s thrilling, it’s pertinent, it’s timely,” he said. “But look, Canada was not merely standing around watching events take place. The CIA was a junior partner.”

Not only was that analysis demonstrably true, the period was hardly one of glory for U.S. intelligence and military operations. The CIA was blind to rising threats to the Shah’s regime in Iran. And the so-called “Eagle Claw” rescue operation aimed at freeing the remaining hostages in April 1980 ended in flaming fiasco in the Iranian desert with the death of eight American commandos.

In buffing up America’s “tarnished” image from the time, Argo tries to do what the CIA agent, Antonio Mendez, accused Iranian extremists of in his book on which the movie is based.

“Much like actors in a Hollywood movie,” he wrote, “the militants saw themselves as the heroes and expected the whole world to see them as such.”

On Nov. 4, 1979, outraged that the despised Shah had been admitted to the United States for medical care after fleeing the country, thousands of Iranians stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

Sixty hostages were seized in the embassy. Three were confined at the Foreign Ministry. (Thirteen women and black hostages were later released on the grounds they represented the oppressed of America.)

But a handful had slipped away, out of the U.S. consular office into the rainy streets of Tehran. Most were quickly captured by the Revolutionary Guard. Six weren’t.

Of these, five were taken in a few days later as soon as they called Canadian consular official John Sheardown for help. A sixth, who hid out for weeks with a Swedish diplomat, joined his countrymen a few weeks later.

The Canadian response was as unhesitating as it was high-risk.

For three months, it was Taylor and his colleagues who housed the six Americans, who moved them around Tehran when the need arose, who tried to boost spirits, who visited and smuggled the odd banned libation to the three Americans confined to the Foreign Ministry, who fought for the release of all the hostages, and — in Taylor’s case — collected intelligence for Washington on possible rescue operations.

Canadians shared the emotional ups and downs of the Americans, their boredom, their anxiety, the constant simmering fear of a leak through the Iranian staff at their houses or discovery if someone was spotted through a window.

Though long gone from the Canadian foreign service, Taylor retains the delightfully droll understatement of the diplomat.

“What would have happened if one way or another it would have gone awry? . . . I may have had to stay around awhile” in Iran.

Had his intelligence-gathering for Washington been discovered, “that would have been a difficult consequence, I think.”

It’s not for nothing the movie is set mostly in Washington and Hollywood and only fleetingly in Tehran, Taylor notes. Neither Mendez nor any other Americans under the tormented administration of President Jimmy Carter had much of a clue what was going on in Iran.

When Taylor heard a few years ago that Mendez had sold movie rights to his book (which, to be fair, is much more generous than the movie about Canada’s role), “I said, ‘Well, that’s going to be interesting.’

“But how do they know what’s going on, because Tony Mendez was only there for a day and a half? The six diplomats were in (Canadian safekeeping) for three months, and they had no idea what was going on outside.”

Some of Taylor’s friends tried to convey to the film-maker that there was “another side to this other than Tony Mendez’s book, since he was in Washington and Hollywood, he had no idea what was going on in Tehran.”

Eventually, Taylor’s wife, Pat, did receive a call from Page Leong, the actress who plays her.

“She had a long talk with Pat and Pat went over what happened,” Taylor laughs. “And then Page says, ‘Well, you know this is a thriller?’ What you’re saying isn’t necessarily going to be in the movie.”

How right she was.

When the movie was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, the former ambassador wasn’t invited, even though he was in Toronto at the time.

Friends who saw the opening were outraged on Taylor’s behalf, however, at how much history had been sacrificed to thrill. And after the Star’s Martin Knelman reported on this, Taylor was deluged with international attention.

Soon, Affleck phoned, Taylor recounts, and said, “ ‘You’ve got issues?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got issues.’ ”

So Affleck invited Taylor and his wife to Los Angeles, screened the movie, and offered — “although it’s going to cost money” — to cut the postscript and let Taylor “write what you want.”

The new postscript says: “The involvement of the CIA complemented efforts of the Canadian Embassy to free the six held in Tehran. To this day the story stands as an enduring model of international co-operation between governments.”

Even that hardly does Canada justice.

Although the short-lived federal government of Joe Clark was fully supportive and deeply involved, in Argo’s version Canada was not much more a factor than Iceland.

Another Canadian hero who gets short shrift is John Sheardown, the first Canadian official the Americans approached for shelter.

“Why didn’t you call me before?” he said. “What took you so long?”

Sheardown, now in his late 80s and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and his wife, Zena, took in four of the Americans — at considerable risk to Zena who wasn’t a Canadian citizen and had no diplomatic immunity.

“To make the movie work, I guess, they assumed that everybody was with Pat and me,” Taylor said. “And John and Zena did yeoman work.”

For Mendez’s part, he didn’t even learn of the six hostages until weeks after their escape. The CIA agent had his idea for the Hollywood angle in January. Then he arranged a back story to portray them as Canadian film-makers, created some disguises and documents.

“But for every moment in Washington,” Taylor recalls, “there was an equal moment in Ottawa.

“All the documentation to authenticate the diplomats as Canadians, the business cards, credit cards, the passports, the academic credentials, everything came out of Canada.”

Not only that, Canada had already devised “exit strategies” — which didn’t use a Hollywood angle Mendez had dreamed up — that Taylor believes “we could have pulled off.”

“We thought the (Mendez) plan was OK,” he said. “But we didn’t think we really needed something that intricate.”

The key was that the Americans were travelling as Canadians. Whether they were purported to be petroleum engineers, nutritionists, agronomists — instead of film-makers — probably didn’t much matter, he said.

In Tehran, moreover, Mendez “was totally in our hands,” Taylor said. His involvement over his weekend in Tehran was “not much . . . just some visa stamps. Ottawa had provided everything else.”

In fact, the CIA almost scuppered the plan by making passport notations that used the wrong Iranian calendar and would have essentially had the Americans leaving the country before they arrived.

Canadian official Roger Lucy, who spoke Farsi, spotted the error. Otherwise, Taylor said, “that would have been game over.”

On the departure date, Taylor arranged embassy cars to pick everyone up — Mendez from his hotel, the diplomats from the Canadian residences — in pre-dawn Tehran.

He ensured the flight got off before leaving Iran himself forever with the last of the Canadian embassy staff.

As for Argo’s car chase and Mendez/Affleck’s various on-screen heroics, “it makes a great movie,” said Taylor, who was played in an earlier movie on the Khomeini revolution by Gordon Pinsent and is this time portrayed by Victor Garber.

If Argo has a useful message, he said, it is on the importance and need for diplomacy and the fact that “what happened 32 years ago could happen tomorrow.”

For Taylor, his life changed utterly after his exploits in Tehran. He left the foreign service, spent four years as Canada’s consul-general in New York, and has since enjoyed a successful career in the private sector.

“It became a different life entirely,” he said. But not so much that the past isn’t these days ringing his phone off the hook.

Recently, he was called by the BBC World Service for Tehran to comment on the closure of the Canadian embassy in Iran and on Argo.

They told him “they still remember you in Iran,” he said.

And they wanted to know whether Canada had closed its embassy in Tehran to “coincide with the showing of the movie in Toronto.

“I said, ‘Well, I doubt it.’ ”

Whatever goes on in Hollywood, life goes on, and rather sweetly, for Ken Taylor, who will travel to Washington this week for a screening of Argo at the Canadian Embassy.

The other morning, the phone rang once more in his 26th-floor apartment overlooking the East River.

It was the BBC World Service calling back to inform him they owed him £40 for the interview.

He told them it was very thoughtful, but not to bother.

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