This story begins with an embassy takeover, continues with a fictitious Hollywood film, and ends with a real one—an Oscar winner. Between the two film projects, the fake and the real, lies a dispute over who actually saved six Americans from revolutionary Tehran.
November 4, 1979. A crowd of Islamist militants climbed over the walls of the American embassy in Tehran. 66 people were taken hostage—the crisis had begun, stretching across 444 days and costing Jimmy Carter the presidency. But six State Department employees were in the consular section when the assault began—a separate building—and they had a few minutes’ head start. They slipped out through a side exit while the embassy’s main building was turning into a trap.
The first hours and days are the most chaotic part of the story. Joseph and Kathleen Stafford, Mark and Cora Lijek, Bob Anders, and Lee Schatz moved from one hideout to another until they found shelter under the roof of Canadian diplomats. Two people played the crucial role: Canada’s ambassador Ken Taylor and the Canadian embassy’s first secretary John Sheardown, who took some of the fugitives into his own residence. The Canadians were risking literally everything—diplomatic relations with the new Iranian regime, their own safety, their careers. Every day the six Americans hid in their homes, the danger of exposure grew: Iranian revolutionary committees were methodically combing the city, while the students who had seized the embassy began reconstructing destroyed documents—the embassy staff had run papers through shredders before the assault, and now the Iranians were literally gluing the strips back together.
The Canadians sheltered the six for nearly three months. Taylor was simultaneously passing intelligence to Washington and Ottawa, coordinating logistics, and maintaining the appearance of normal diplomatic work. Sheardown and his wife Zena fed them, sheltered them, and essentially lived side by side with people whose discovery would have meant an international scandal with unforeseeable consequences. Canada’s Parliament secretly passed an order allowing the Americans to be issued Canadian passports—a fact the general public learned only after the operation was over.
In Langley, the job of getting the six out went to Tony Mendez—a CIA officer specializing in “exfiltration,” the covert evacuation of people from hostile countries. Mendez was a master of disguises and forged documents, but Tehran in 1980 posed a challenge of an entirely new order: he had to explain why six Westerners with Canadian passports were in Iran, where the number of foreigners was shrinking with every passing week.
Mendez considered several cover stories. Oil engineers? Too easy to verify through the oil companies. Teachers? Implausible in the middle of a revolution. Agricultural consultants? Iran had not invited foreign specialists. And then came an idea bordering on the absurd: a Hollywood film crew scouting locations for a science-fiction movie. Iran, with its desert landscapes, bazaars, and architecture, could indeed pass for an exotic setting. And film people are eccentric by definition—their strange behavior is easier to explain than that of an engineer who does not know the name of an oil field.
To carry out the plan, Mendez turned to John Chambers—the legendary Hollywood makeup artist who received an honorary Oscar for his work on 1968’s “Planet of the Apes.” Chambers had already worked with the CIA, producing masks and other disguises for agents. Through Chambers, another Hollywood professional joined the operation—a producer and special-effects specialist who helped assemble a cover story sturdy enough to withstand scrutiny from anyone who picked up the phone and called Los Angeles.
The fictitious film company Studio Six Productions got a real office on the Columbia Pictures lot—the very same lot where “The China Syndrome” (1979) with Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon had been filmed not long before. The company had business cards, a phone line with an answering machine, a logo. I’m still fascinated by the level of detail: if an Iranian official had decided to check whether Studio Six existed, he would have found a real office at a real studio, where a real person would have picked up the phone and confirmed that yes, a production was in preparation.
The project needed a screenplay—and here the story takes another unexpected turn. By then, Hollywood already had an unrealized adaptation project for Roger Zelazny’s novel “Lord of Light,” a science-fiction epic steeped in Eastern mythology. The project came with concept art by the great comic-book artist Jack Kirby—the very Kirby who created Marvel’s visual language, drew Captain America and the Fantastic Four. His drawings depicted futuristic cities and temples that could easily have existed in the Iranian deserts. The screenplay was renamed “Argo”—a title that, according to one version, referred to the Argonauts’ ship from Greek myth, which for a rescue operation sounded almost too fitting.
January 15, 1980. The trade publication Daily Variety ran an item announcing the start of production on “Argo.” The next day, a full-page advertisement appeared. Ads were also placed in The Hollywood Reporter. To the film industry, it all looked entirely routine—another science-fiction project riding the wave of “Star Wars” success. Nobody asked questions, because Hollywood announces dozens of projects every week, most of which never make it to the screen.
Each of the six Americans was given a “legend”—a biography as a member of the Canadian film crew. Cora Lijek received the alias Teresa Harris and was listed in the documents as the project’s screenwriter. The others became producers, cameramen, art directors. Mendez supplied them not only with Canadian passports, but with a package of “production documents”: storyboards—the very Kirby drawings—budgets, shooting schedules, business correspondence on Studio Six letterhead.
January 23, 1980. President Carter personally approved the operation. Two days later, on January 25, Mendez and a colleague flew into Tehran—two men with suitcases full of Canadian passports, makeup, and cover stories. They had three days to meet the six, rehearse their roles, and fly out.
The rehearsals were essential: each of the six had to know their biography by heart, be able to answer questions about Canadian realities, explain the purpose of their visit to Iran and the reason for their departure. People who had spent three months sitting within four walls in constant fear now had to play carefree Canadian filmmakers. Mendez held several sessions with them, testing their legends, asking unexpected questions, drilling their behavior at checkpoints.
The morning of January 28, 1980. Mehrabad Airport. Six Americans with Canadian passports, Mendez, and his colleague—eight people approaching passport control. A Swissair flight, an aircraft bearing the name “Aargau”—a coincidence that seems invented, but is documented. They passed through without dramatic incident. The passports were checked, stamps were issued, questions were asked—standard ones. No chase down the runway. The plane departed on schedule, and once it had left Iranian airspace, Mendez ordered whiskey for everyone.
That same day, the Canadian embassy in Tehran closed. Ken Taylor and the other Canadian diplomats left Iran. News of the rescue of the six exploded across the world’s media, and Canada became the hero—American flags were raised in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal, while an electronic billboard in New York’s Times Square displayed the words “Thank you, Canada.” The operation was called the Canadian Caper.
This is what truly gets me about this story: the CIA kept silent about its role for 17 years. Until 1997, when the Agency declassified materials for its own fiftieth anniversary, the public version of events was purely Canadian. The world knew about the courage of Taylor and Sheardown, the Canadian government’s decision, the passports. About Studio Six, “Argo,” Mendez, and Chambers—nothing.
For Mendez, that meant years in which he could not tell even close friends about the brightest operation of his career. For the Canadians, it meant a decade and a half of deserved glory that no one disputed. After the declassification, the balance began to shift: Mendez published his memoirs, the story acquired a new layer, and the focus of public attention began moving from Ottawa to Langley. In 2007, journalist Joshua Berman published a detailed article in Wired magazine reconstructing the Hollywood side of the operation—and that article became the seed from which the film grew.
Ben Affleck’s “Argo” (2012) received seven Oscar nominations and won three statuettes, including the biggest one—for Best Picture. Affleck played Mendez, and it was a gripping, masterfully made thriller. The problem is that a thriller needs tension, while the real operation—for all its sheer improbability—went off without a cinematic climax.
The film has a scene in which Iranian police chase the plane down the runway in cars and on motorcycles. That never happened. In the film, passport control turns into an agonizing interrogation where everything hangs by a thread. In reality, the inspection was tense but passed without a breakdown. In the film, Canadian ambassador Taylor appears as a secondary figure—a kind but generally passive host of the apartment where the Americans are hiding. Sheardown’s role was cut from the original version of the screenplay altogether, and only after protests from the Canadian side was his name added to the closing credits.
Affleck later acknowledged that he had dramatized the events—it is standard practice for films based on true stories. Nobody in their right mind expects documentary precision from a Hollywood thriller. But the scale of the distortion genuinely stung Canadians. In February 2013, former president Carter—the man who approved the operation and knew it from the inside—publicly stated that 90% of the credit for devising and carrying out the plan belonged to Canada and to Taylor personally. The film, Carter said, had unfairly minimized the Canadian role in favor of the CIA.
This statement was not a gesture of politeness. Carter named specific things: the Canadians had sheltered the six for months, risking their lives; the Canadian government had authorized the issuing of passports; Taylor had coordinated intelligence work on the ground and handled the logistics. The CIA devised a brilliant cover story and carried out the final evacuation—but without the Canadian foundation, there would have been nowhere to place that cover.
There is a symmetry in this story that is hard not to notice. In 1980, the CIA created a fake movie to save real people. In 2012, Hollywood created a real movie that—not deliberately, but inevitably—replaced the real story with its own version. And in both cases, cinema worked precisely because people believe a well-told story more readily than a complicated truth.
Affleck’s film cannot be called a lie, though. The Hollywood cover was real. Mendez was a real hero, displaying ingenuity and cool-headedness. Studio Six, the Variety ads, Kirby’s storyboards—it all existed. The film lies not in its facts, but in its proportions: it inflates the CIA’s role and shrinks Canada’s role to the size of a set piece. For a viewer who does not know the context, “Argo” is the story of how one clever American fooled the Iranians. For those who do know the context, it is the story of how Canadian diplomats hid other people’s citizens for three months, and then an American intelligence officer came up with a way to get them out.
Ken Taylor died in 2015, insisting to the end—restrainedly but firmly—on Canada’s share of the credit. John Sheardown died earlier—on December 30, 2012, before the film’s release. Tony Mendez passed away in 2019. The argument over whose operation it was will outlive every participant—and that is perhaps the most predictable thing in a story where a fake film turned out to be more believable than the real one. The six who were rescued, however, always thanked both sides, and, bluntly speaking, it did not matter all that much to them on whose shelf the Oscar stood—they flew out of Mehrabad alive, and the Swissair flight to Zurich carried them to a place where arguments over credit happen in television studios, not in the basements of revolutionary committees.