Remembering Ken Taylor | Canada |Axisoflogic.com

Ken Taylor, the Canadian ambassador to Iran, briefs a reporter on the current conditions in Iran one week before leaving Iran with six Americans in a 1980 file photo. Taylor, who sheltered six U.S. citizens during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, has died, says a family friend THE CANADIAN PRESS IMAGES/Peter Bregg/CP

For Pamela, who has lost a friend

Former Canadian diplomat Ken Taylor, fondly remembered as a hero for his role in sheltering six U.S. citizens during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis in Tehran — a real-life drama known as the Canadian Caper — has died.

Taylor, 81, died Thursday afternoon at about 2:45 p.m. in New York Presbyterian hospital after a battle with cancer, says a family friend.

Friend Ralph Lean says Taylor’s wife, Pat, was by his side. Taylor is also survived by his son, Douglas, and his wife Dana and two grandchildren.

“We lost a true hero. Those of us who know him lost a friend but Canadians lost a true hero who just lived life to the fullest and I got lucky enough to be allowed to tag along with Taylor,” Lean told The Canadian Press.

Born in 1934 in Calgary, Taylor was heralded as a hero for helping save the Americans — a clandestine operation that had the full support of Joe Clark’s short-lived Progressive Conservative government.

Taylor’s exploits in Iran in 1979 — a high-stakes political drama with life-and-death implications — later became the subject of the 2012 Hollywood film, “Argo.”

Taylor made headlines when he complained about how Canada’s role in the crisis was minimized in Ben Affleck’s Oscar-winning thriller about the hostage-rescue exploits of CIA agent Tony Mendez.

Affleck set the record straight, saying the CIA operation would not have succeeded without the help of Taylor and his fellow Canadians.

“There were folks who didn’t want to stick their necks out and the Canadians did,” Affleck told a Toronto International Film Festival press conference.

“They said, ‘We’ll risk ourselves, our diplomatic standing, our lives to harbour these six Americans that we owe nothing to and just because it’s the moral, right thing to do.'”

In 2013, Taylor’s story was told once more for posterity at the Toronto International Film Festival, which debuted the documentary, “Our Man in Tehran.”

From Maclean's:
On news of the death of Ken Taylor, at 81, I called Colin Robertson, another former Canadian diplomat, who served under Taylor in the early 1980s in New York, soon after Taylor became a hero for his role in hiding six Americans in Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979. Robertson, who lives in Ottawa now and works with the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, spoke about Taylor’s glory days following the “Canadian Caper.”

Q: What were your thoughts on hearing that your old boss had died?

A: Ken was a great Canadian patriot, a hero, but Ken was also really cool. I first met him when I was posted to New York in 1980, and he had of course already performed the great “Canadian Caper” in Tehran, and the government had appointed him our consul general there, partly because of his celebrity, the magnetism Ken had, and the importance of New York to the diplomatic establishment.

Q: So it was a good fit.

A: He took the town by storm. Anywhere he went. Even before he arrived, we saw it. Americans everywhere would thank us for what we’d done. Sending Ken to New York was exactly the right thing. He fit right into that highly cosmopolitan city, but he was still proudly Canadian. We had issues he was able to advance.

Q: What was he like to work under?

A: He was an unconventional diplomat, certainly for that era. First of all, he didn’t wear the classic blue suit; he always was always in a fashionable suit that suited him. Of course, he had that great hair, all the curls, and then the dark glasses that were his signature. Always a smile on his face. He was always approachable and personable. He had no desk in his office. He had a coffee table. You’d sit around it and deal with issues.

Q: He must have made quite an impression on you as a new guy.

A: I traveled with him as a junior officer. In his briefcase, there was always a novel—Bonfire of the Vanities—or a magazine—Sports Illustrated. It wasn’t the heavy-duty stuff. I remember him teasing me. I was traveling with a copy of Foreign Affairs. He said, “Colin, you gotta lighten up.”

There’s one episode that really sticks with me. We were traveling up to Yale, where he had a series of speeches to give. We didn’t take the car. He said, no, let’s take the train, because we could go to the bar car and have a martini. After we’d had oysters at Grand Central Station. And we talked. He pointed out that it was really important to understand the society as a whole if you were going to be a good diplomat. It wasn’t straight politics, or economics, or trade; it was understanding the culture in which you were working and having an empathy for it.

Q: You saw that in his way of doing diplomacy?

A: Ken had empathy for everybody, including the Iranian people. Remember, this was a time where the Iranians were not terribly popular, because of what had happened to the United States. He had a way—his own gentle way—of encouraging Americans that while they might have a disagreement with the Ayatollah and ruling elite in Iran, the Iranian people had great affection for America, and never break those links.

Q: And you feel that was effective, not just a nice way of looking at the world?

A: Ken defied the traditional norms of diplomacy, but he always achieved what we set out to. He was remarkably effective. As a boss, you couldn’t help but like him. He left it to you to get the job done. He wasn’t a micro-manager in any sense. He traveled a great deal because he was in great demand. But when he was there, it was just fun and interesting and you learned the craft. This how he did business. I’ve talked to people who were with him in Tehran, and before, and this is how he was. He created a sense of team around a shared purpose.

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