CARTER REVEALS DETAILS OF AMERICANS ESCAPE FROM IRAN

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000606540008-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 24, 2010
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: July 19, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/24: CIA-R
19 July 19a~
Carter reveals details of Americans escape from Iran
TO: C
firmer President Jimmy Carter, at a news confere ,
aoerts+elped Canadian diplomats smuggle six Americans out of Iran while 52
carers were being held hostage by Iranian militants.
The sx had escaped and fled to the Canadian Embassy when militants of
rv tollah Ruhol"ah 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 t-hat
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
Canaoian 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
cf -cia1s in Tehran organizing the escape of the six Americans.
"Tne CIA people who contributed to the effort were experts in
cocumantation," he said. "They made a vital contribution in putting the visas
o mace."
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."
:o the Iranian official who told him, "Stop. Something's wrong."
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/24: CIA-RDP90-00552R000606540008-4