That night they ate dinner at the house of a British diplomat, said good-bye, and were driven by the British over to Graves’s house. Sam had told them that there was an old man in the neighborhood who belonged to a komiteh, and as they approached the house they saw someone on the street who happened to get a good look at them. Was this the guy? They couldn’t tell for sure.
On its surface, Graves’s house seemed like a perfect place to lie low. For one thing, it was a large three- to four-bedroom multilevel structure with servants’ quarters, all of it surrounded by a wall. It was also set back from the street far enough that they could move about freely without having to worry about being seen. They were also pampered, in a way. In addition to Sam and his wife, there was an elderly Thai housekeeper who worked at the house, and the three did all the cooking and cleaning for the Americans, which saved them the hassle, and risk, of having to go outside. Since there was no TV or books, in order to pass the time they played poker and slept.
One day, while looking for something to do, they found a 16mm film in one of the closets. Since Graves was the press officer at the embassy, it wasn’t out of the ordinary that he might have a projector to show such films. Once they got it up and running, though, they realized that it was a film of the shah’s coronation. This is perfect, thought Mark. A group of komiteh is going to come bursting in here and find us all watching a movie about the shah. They quickly turned off the projector and hid the film in a hole in the ceiling.
After two days, concerns that the militants were right on their heels began to eat at them, and they hatched a plan in case anyone came to the door. Kate Koob’s house was only three blocks away, so at the first sign of danger they’d all hurry out the back door and over the wall and try to make it to her house. None of them were familiar with the neighborhood, however, and Anders worried they’d quickly get lost and captured.
To make matters worse, the elderly Thai housekeeper had become more and more irrational as the days wore on. She accused the Americans of drinking all the wine in the house (one bottle), and eating all the food. “What will I say to Mr. Graves when he gets back?” she asked them. It wouldn’t do any good, they realized, to tell her that Mr. Graves wouldn’t be coming back for quite some time. When she became progressively more difficult, they contemplated locking her up in the basement, but quickly realized that it would only add to their problems.
At night they could hear the old komiteh guard continually passing by the house blowing his whistle, seemingly just to remind the Americans that they were trapped inside. The guard made it almost impossible to relax.
On Thursday, November 8, Laingen called from the foreign ministry to tell them that the Iranian government was cutting off the phone lines and that they wouldn’t be able to make any more calls. The Americans were now on their own. “Good luck” was all Laingen could tell them before signing off.
By this time, the tension was beginning to grow unbearable. In addition to Laingen’s final call, by this time news of Koob’s capture had reached them, causing their morale to plummet. They felt cut off, abandoned, helpless. There was no doubt in their minds that the militants were right outside waiting, biding their time before they came bursting through the front door.
And just when they thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did. Sam came home on November 9 and told them that their worst fears had been realized: the militants knew where they were and were coming to get them. Sam had gotten the news from a gardener at one of the apartments of an American who was being held in the embassy. The gardener had been working that morning when a group of militants showed up and ransacked the place. It was Mark’s worst-case scenario coming true. Sam told the Americans they had to be ready to move. If anyone showed up, the plan was still to try to make it over to Koob’s.
That night, everyone slept in their clothes, ready to bolt at the first sign of danger. Kathy and Cora shared the bedroom, while Mark, Joe, and Bob stayed up most of the night in the living room, talking and thinking. Mark was especially worried about Cora. He thought about the events leading up to his wife’s coming to Iran. They’d been college sweethearts and had gotten married soon after she graduated. Initially, once Mark had arrived in Iran and seen how bad things were, he had second thoughts—officials at the State Department, he thought, had painted a much rosier picture than the reality. Cora had told him he was overreacting. Now he wished he’d stood his ground and persuaded her not to come. Along with Joe and Kathy, they were the only married couples at the embassy in Iran, and his main concern was that he and Cora would be captured and the militants would use them against each other. He thought about the ways they could mistreat her, harm her—anything they wanted to get to him, and vice versa. It made him feel very vulnerable. This wasn’t some Hollywood movie, but life. The stakes were high.
As the Americans sat in the living room, outside the lonely komiteh made his nightly rounds, his whistle piercing the calm with its shrill wail. The noose was tightening around them and they knew it. And it felt like there was not a single thing they could do about it.
5
CANADA TO THE RESCUE
Just before sunup on the morning of November 10, the fugitive Americans had already made up their minds. Graves’s house just wasn’t safe enough anymore. It was time to leave.
They organized themselves quickly, agreeing that it would be better if they made the trip before it got light. They were in such a hurry they even forgot a load of laundry in the washing machine. Sam called an Armenian taxi driver friend, who came over and picked everyone up. Kate Koob’s home was the logical choice.
At Koob’s house, they sat uneasily in the darkness, too afraid to turn on any lights. When it was finally bright enough to see, they did a quick tour of the house and realized immediately that they wouldn’t be able to stay. It was located on the corner and right up against the sidewalk. It also had large floor–to–ceiling windows without any drapes, and they wouldn’t even be able to enter the kitchen without the whole world knowing. Despair set in once more; they had to find yet another hideout, and fast. Luckily, Anders had a plan.
Two days earlier, on November 8, after Laingen had called to tell the Americans they were on their own, Anders, who had a few numbers with him, phoned a good friend at the Australian embassy. Delighted to hear that Anders was fine, the friend readily agreed to take him in, but when Anders mentioned the others, the friend begged off, saying he just didn’t have the room. Anders then remembered John Sheardown, a colleague at the Canadian embassy whom he’d gotten to know well over the previous months. The two had met at one of the many Western-embassy functions that had become so popular in the absence of any nightlife in the city. They had a lot in common. Like Anders, Sheardown had served in World War II, and at fifty-five he was considered to be an old-timer among the Canadian diplomats in Iran. A distinguished balding man with a penchant for smoking pipes, Sheardown was the chief of the immigration section at the Canadian embassy. Since Bob had been in Iran without his family, John had frequently invited him over to his house for dinner. John’s wife, Zena, was not a Canadian citizen but was originally from British Guiana (now the independent nation of Guyana). This meant she didn’t have diplomatic immunity. A warm and vivacious person, she loved to entertain but rarely left the house.
After striking out with his Australian friend, Anders picked up the phone again and dialed the Canadian embassy. Sheardown, of course, knew about the attack on the U.S. embassy and had just assumed that Anders had been taken along with everyone else. He was amazed to hear that his friend had gotten out. “Where are you?” he asked with incredulity.
Anders tried to explain but gave up after a few minutes. The streets in Tehran were complicated enough, and to make matters worse they’d all been renamed after the revolution. “I don’t know where I am exactly,” he said.
Sheardown asked him what he needed. This was on Thursday, before the Americans knew they would soon be moving to Koob’s house. Anders told him that they were
okay for the moment but that they might need to find another place soon. “We’re in a bit of a bind,” he said.
Sheardown didn’t hesitate. “Why didn’t you call me before?” he said. “What took you so long?”
Anders explained that he was with four other Americans and that they had decided to remain as a group. Because of this, they’d been reluctant to impose on anyone for fear of putting lives in unnecessary danger. Despite not having official permission to do so, Sheardown told Anders that he’d be happy to help in any way he could. Like most Western diplomats in Tehran, he was incensed when Khomeini had endorsed the embassy takeover. The diplomatic community in Tehran was a tight-knit group, and not only did Sheardown know many of the people who were now being held against their will, but the entire exercise went against the conventions of international law and diplomacy. The fact that it was Anders who was calling only made him all the more willing to break with conventions. “We have plenty of room here,” Sheardown said.
Anders thanked him and they agreed to keep in touch if the situation ever changed.
As soon as he had gotten off the phone with Anders, Sheardown walked upstairs to see his boss, Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor. At forty-five and sporting a salt-and-pepper 1970s perm and mod-style glasses, Taylor was a bit of an iconoclast among the senior diplomats in Tehran. Born in 1934, Taylor had entered the Canadian Foreign Service in 1959 and made his way up the ranks as a trade counselor. Eventually he had become the director of Canada’s Trade Commissioner Service in 1974. Taylor had always had a bit of an unorthodox working style that sometimes rubbed the more genteel types in the Canadian diplomatic corps the wrong way. He worked at a table instead of a desk, and refused to use in/out boxes. But whatever his style, he got results. He was a tireless worker and a good manager, and his employees enjoyed working for him.
Taylor had been in Tehran since 1977 and had garnered a reputation for being decisive and calm under pressure for his handling of the evacuation of a sizable contingent of Canadian nationals just weeks before the shah had abdicated.
Sheardown had been relatively certain that Taylor would support his decision to help the Americans. Like Sheardown, Taylor was disgusted by the notion that innocent diplomats should be taken hostage and used by a government as leverage. Almost immediately after the attack, Taylor had begun working with the heads of other foreign embassies in Tehran to try to lodge an official protest of some kind against the Iranian government. In addition, a few days after the takeover, he’d been asked by the U.S. State Department to liaise with Bruce Laingen at the Iranian foreign ministry, which he would eventually do a week later, bringing with him, among other things, books and a bottle of English Leather cologne that was actually filled with single-malt scotch.
Sheardown explained his phone call with Anders and brought Taylor up to speed. He reiterated that the Americans were safe for the moment but would probably need a place to stay very soon. Taylor, to his credit, didn’t hesitate, and agreed that they should do whatever they could to help. The two then began discussing the best place to hide the Americans. The Canadian embassy had the benefit of security, but was heavily trafficked and didn’t have any living quarters. In addition, it was located downtown, close to the U.S. embassy. In the end they decided they would split the Americans between Sheardown’s and Taylor’s private residences. Both were in a quiet part of town and, more important, far away from the U.S. embassy. As an added bonus, the houses also fell under the protection of diplomatic immunity, not that that amounted to much in Iran. But it was something.
At that point, Taylor began working on a cable to send back to Ottawa, in the hopes of obtaining his government’s official permission. In it he outlined his own opinions on the matter and also the plan that he and Sheardown had just worked out.
Of America’s many allies, Canada had been one of the most outspoken in condemning Iran for the embassy attack, and it took only a day for Taylor to get his answer, which arrived the following morning. In the cable from Ottawa, he was told to use discretion, but was given a green light to do whatever he thought necessary to help the Americans. The approval had come directly from the Canadian prime minister, Joseph Clark.
The timing could not have been more fortuitous for the fugitive Americans. Bob Anders called Sheardown a second time from Kate Koob’s house Saturday morning just hours after Taylor had received the cable.
“Well, John,” Anders said. “I guess now’s the time.”
“Do you have a way of getting over here?” Sheardown asked.
“Not really,” Anders responded. He explained how the two British staffers had driven them over to Graves’s house, and Sheardown agreed to track them down.
“Sit tight,” he said.
The cars came to pick them up a little after one o’clock in the afternoon. Anders had explained to Sheardown that Koob’s was right down the street from Graves’s house and the drivers had no trouble finding the place. It wasn’t ideal to be navigating the afternoon traffic, but the British staffers knew the roads well and kept off the main avenues.
Sheardown’s house was located in the fashionable Shemiran district, Tehran’s version of Beverly Hills. Situated on the heights in the northern part of the city, the hilly neighborhood, with its large walled compounds and neatly trimmed gardens, was popular with senior diplomats, wealthy Iranians, and foreign businesspeople.
When the cars carrying the Americans arrived, Sheardown was waiting out front, watering the sidewalk with a garden hose. It might have seemed incongruous, but it gave him a plausible reason to keep an eye on the street. There was a construction site up the road and it was often crowded with young Iranian workers, some milling about with nothing to do. As the cars approached, John waved them into his detached garage and followed in after them, closing the door behind him.
Inside the safety of the garage, the Americans climbed out and John greeted everyone warmly. “It’s good to see you again,” Anders told him. After Anders had made the introductions, everyone followed Sheardown up a flight of stairs and into the main house.
Once inside, the group was introduced to Zena, as well as Ken Taylor, who had driven up while everyone was still in the garage. The Americans were instantly made to feel welcome. Zena had prepared some snacks and drinks, and everyone took a seat in the living room. They spent a few minutes chatting, relating the events of their escape as well as the news about the hostage crisis. They were told that both of President Carter’s envoys, Ramsey Clark and William Miller, had been refused entry into Iran and their plane was sitting on the tarmac in Turkey. At one point Mark embarrassed himself by standing up and asking if the Canadian ambassador was aware of their situation. Mark was concerned that maybe Sheardown was acting on his own and they were in for a repeat of Gholhak Gardens if Sheardown lost his nerve. Taylor had introduced himself earlier by name only, and Mark hadn’t realized who he was. Sheardown couldn’t resist. “Of course the Canadian ambassador knows,” he responded. “He’s sitting right next you.”
Everyone shared a laugh at Mark’s expense, but it was a great relief to know that there was a government supporting them. For the first time since their escape they felt truly safe.
As planned, the group was to be divided up between the Sheardown and Taylor residences. The Lijeks and Bob Anders would stay with the Sheardowns while the Staffords would go with Taylor. Taylor explained that he had quite a large domestic staff and any more than two visitors would probably raise some suspicions. The group was somewhat unhappy about splitting up but understood the logic of why it was necessary. At this point, everyone was still thinking that the hostage crisis would be resolved in a matter of weeks, if not days, and they would all be able to go on with their everyday lives.
Cora, Mark, and Bob spent the remainder of the afternoon familiarizing themselves with the layout of the Sheardowns’ house. The place was palatial, seventeen rooms by one count. The house sat perched on a hillside, spilling down from a road above through a multitude of levels u
ntil it reached the street below. It was actually possible to walk out onto the road above from the top floor, which would provide them with an escape route of sorts. The Americans were given their own rooms on an upper floor, separated from the master suite, which was on the top floor. The best part about the house, however, was that it contained an interior courtyard, which would allow the Americans to spend time outside without having to risk being seen on the street. Cooped up as they were, an hour of sunshine was priceless.
Sheardown explained that there was a local komiteh group that sometimes patrolled the neighborhood, but he told them not to worry as they seldom hassled the residents. However, he did warn them about his gardener, who also belonged to the komiteh. As long as they stayed out of sight when he was around, they should be fine.
Joe and Kathy, meanwhile, were driven by the Canadian ambassador over to his residence, an imposing white mansion with two-story columns marching across its facade, set back from the street and separated from it by an eight-foot wall. Waiting for them inside was Ken’s wife, Pat, who’d been born in Australia but was of Chinese ancestry. Pat was a woman with boundless energy, and in addition to her duties as the ambassador’s wife, she was a research scientist at Tehran’s national blood transfusion service. She showed the Staffords around the house, explaining to the Iranian staff that they were simply guests from out of town. Despite the fact that the house had a spacious back lawn, it was recommended that they stay inside as the neighbors might be able to see them.
The following day, Taylor cabled Ottawa to let them know that the Americans had been taken in and were safe. In order to be as discreet as possible, in the cable he referred to the five simply as the “houseguests.”
Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History Page 8