January 27, 1980
It was thirty years ago today, in the midst of the American embassy hostage crisis, that six American diplomats were successfully exfiltrated from Iran. In would become known as the “Canadian caper”, the escapees had been sheltered at the official residences of Canadian ambassador Kenneth Taylor and immigration officer John Sheardown.
The caper was a wonderful piece of cooperation between everybody involved, from the Canadian embassy staff to the Cabinet, which issued its first secret order-in-council since World War II to issue authentic Canadian passports to the American diplomats. The CIA was also involved, although their role in providing a cover story—which involved a fake movie production, of all things—wouldn’t be made public for over a decade after the operation.
It all makes me wonder whether we could pull this off again today. I’m not so sure.
Prime minister Joe Clark—who was leading a minority government—took then-opposition leader Pierre Trudeau into his confidence to tell him about the concealment at the Canadian embassy almost as soon as the government was aware of the situation.
And Trudeau, when the story was broken by Montreal’s La Presse, didn’t just issue a media statement expressing his party’s approval of the rescue. He praised the federal government, a government against which he was battling daily, because—oh, did I mention?—this all happened scarcely three weeks before a federal election. (Amazingly, Clark, who derived a substantial boost from arguably the feel-good story of the year, still lost.)
(Headline from The Globe and Mail, January 31st, 1980.)
I imagine a story like the Canadian caper today would instead probably find some nut accusing the government of playing politics by not bringing Parliament up to speed on official secrets. Someone else would suggest that the secret order-in-council showed a lack of transparency by the government before the operation even got started.
And almost certainly, someone, somewhere, would have the nerve to suggest that the prime minister timed the rescue mission to coincide with an election campaign. (As it happened, the only people accusing Clark of using the rescue for political gain were the Iranians, who even had the audacity to claim that the prime minister “apologized” for sheltering the Americans, which Clark angrily denied.)
And the media? La Presse, which had figured out the concealment at the Canadian embassy in early December, sat on its story until the six had safely left Iran. It’s hard to say what would have happened had that been, say, the modern-day New York Times instead.
The greatest thing about the caper was what it did for Canada’s reputation, especially in the United States. The Canadian embassy and consulates all over the States were inundated with tens of thousands of grateful callers expressing their thanks. The Oklahoma state legislature flew the Canadian flag for six days—one for each diplomat sheltered at the embassy. In San Francisco, a business corporation formed a “Take a Canadian to Lunch” club. And plenty of people learned that although Canada doesn’t usually have much in the way of international ambition, it’s not above pulling its weight every now and then.