CARTER REVEALS DETAILS OF AMERICANS ESCAPE FROM IRAN

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000101020012-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 28, 2010
• Sequence Number: 12
• Publication Date: July 19, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/28: CIA-RDP90-00552R000101020012-6
ASSOCIATED PRESS
19 July 1983
Carter reveals details of Americans escape from Iran
TOKYO
Former President Jimmy Carter, at a news conference iuesoay, said LLM
agents helped Canadian diplomats smuggle six Americans out of Iran while 52
others were being held hostage by Iranian militants. -
The six had escaped and fled to the Canadian Embassy when militants of
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's revolutionary Islamaic regime seized the U.S.
Embassy and hostages on Nov. 4, 1979.
Canada informed the United States and Carter said, "I directed that
intelligence agencies, primarily the CIA, begin to go into Tehran with
disguises sometimes as a motion picture crew, sometimes otherwise to go
privately into the Canadian Embassy and train these six Americans and the
Canadians on how they, might best be extracted from Tehran."
He described Ken Taylor, who was then the Canadian ambassador to Iran, as
"justifiably an American hero."
Carter is on a six-day, private visit to Japan and made the remarks at a news
conference.
Taylor, now the Canadian consul general in New York, told The Associated
Press that the U.S. intelligence agents "made a vital contribution" to the
escape of the six Americans who flew out of Tehran on Jan. 28, 1980, with forged
Canadian passports and visas. The 52 Americans were released through
Algerian-sponsored mediation and left Tehran Jan. 20, 1981, after 444 days as
hostages.
Taylors said there were "two or three" CIA agents who worked with Canadian
officials in Tehran organizing the escape of the six Americans.
"The CIA people who contributed to the effort were experts in
documentation," he said. "They made a vital contribution in putting the visas
into place."
Taylor said he was still not "entirely free" to discuss the episode, because
it involved "an agency and department of the U.S. government," and he did not
know why Carter chose to speak about it at this time.
The Americans left Tehran on a morning flight with Canadian diplomatic
personnel and Taylor departed on an evening flight. The Canadian Embassy in the
Iranian capital then was closed, but the two countries have not severed
diplomatic relations.
Carter, discussing the CIA agents who entered Tehran to assist the
Canadians, said one using a West German passport was stopped by an immigration
official but then got through by recalling Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
He said the agent showed his passport, which carried the middle initial "H."
to the Iranian official who told him, "Stop. Something's wrong."
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Z
The official then said "I have been here 25 years and I have never seen a
German passport with a middle initial, so I'll have to find out something more
about you before you can pass," Carter told the news conference.
He said the "very quick-thinking CIA agent went back and said, 'Well, I
wonder if I could talk to you privately' " and he then told the official, ' I
was born in the late 1930s, and my parents gave me the middle name of Hitler,
and I've always gotten permission to conceal this fact in my passport."
Carter said the official then told the agent, "Well, I understand. You go
right ahead."
The former chief executive also spoke of the attempted rescue mission that he
sent to Iran on April 24, 1980. Eight Sea Stallion helicopters and six C-130
transport planes landed in an Iranian desert 250 miles southeast of Tehran
before 300 commandos were to enter the Iranian capital to try to fee the
hos tages.
The mission was abandoned when technical problems forced three of the
helicopters to drop out, and eight U.S. servicemen were killed when a helicopter
crashed into a C-130 as the aircraft prepared to leave the Iranian airstrip.
Carter was asked what he might have done differently, and he replied, "I
would have sent one more helicopter to the desert rescue mission."
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/28: CIA-RDP90-00552R000101020012-6