The experience always impresses two things on Canada’s former ambassador to Iran. 
 
 NEW YORK—It hasn’t been unusual over the last 20 years, when Ken Taylor returns to his home in New York from abroad, for a U.S. customs inspector to look at his passport, glance up, back at the photo and name, and say, “Hey, I studied you in high school!” 
 
 That’s why Taylor is, understandably, a little touchy about the new Ben Affleck movie Argo to be released this week, in which Canada’s role all but vanishes while the CIA and one of its agents, played by Affleck, become stars of the show. 
 
 It’s a place well earned by Taylor and his colleagues at the Canadian Embassy in Tehran — who put their lives on the line to harbour the half-dozen diplomats who slipped away from the U.S. Embassy as it was besieged by Iranian militants who took more than 60 Americans hostage and held most under harsh conditions for more than a year. 
 
 One, even for celebrated international heroes, time passes. And two, that for his role in rescuing six U.S. diplomats in 1980 after the tumultuous days of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution, he has a place in history. 
 
 “You cannot go around New York without seeing this. It’s on buses. It’s on a three-storey building in Soho. They’re spending a lot of money. They’re banking on an Academy Award.” 
 
 And the movie, he said, is a big deal. 
 
 For them, he said, the movie will probably “be the story.” 
 
 But, as he told the Star at his Upper East Side apartment building in Manhattan, he also knows that for those under age 45 or so, the hostage-takings of 1979, and Canada’s courageous support for its neighbour, “is a part of history that they may only vaguely remember.” 
 
 Taylor, still fit, fashionable and unflappable at 77, understands full well that Argo is Hollywood, not history. 
 
 “The movie’s fun, it’s thrilling, it’s pertinent, it’s timely,” he said. “But look, Canada was not merely standing around watching events take place. The CIA was a junior partner.” 
 
 That’s why Taylor is happy — and he’s still sufficiently famous to be getting media calls from all over the world — to politely “offer some interpretation of what went on in reality, rather than in Hollywood play time.” 
 
 Not only was that analysis demonstrably true, the period was hardly one of glory for U.S. intelligence and military operations. The CIA was blind to rising threats to the Shah’s regime in Iran. And the so-called “Eagle Claw” rescue operation aimed at freeing the remaining hostages in April 1980 ended in flaming fiasco in the Iranian desert with the death of eight American commandos. 
 
 In buffing up America’s “tarnished” image from the time, Argo tries to do what the CIA agent, Antonio Mendez, accused Iranian extremists of in his book on which the movie is based. 
 
 “Much like actors in a Hollywood movie,” he wrote, “the militants saw themselves as the heroes and expected the whole world to see them as such.” 
 
 On Nov. 4, 1979, outraged that the despised Shah had been admitted to the United States for medical care after fleeing the country, thousands of Iranians stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. 
 
 Sixty hostages were seized in the embassy. Three were confined at the Foreign Ministry. (Thirteen women and black hostages were later released on the grounds they represented the oppressed of America.) 
 
 But a handful had slipped away, out of the U.S. consular office into the rainy streets of Tehran. Most were quickly captured by the Revolutionary Guard. Six weren’t. 
 
 Of these, five were taken in a few days later as soon as they called Canadian consular official John Sheardown for help. A sixth, who hid out for weeks with a Swedish diplomat, joined his countrymen a few weeks later. 
 
 The Canadian response was as unhesitating as it was high-risk. 
 
 For three months, it was Taylor and his colleagues who housed the six Americans, who moved them around Tehran when the need arose, who tried to boost spirits, who visited and smuggled the odd banned libation to the three Americans confined to the Foreign Ministry, who fought for the release of all the hostages, and — in Taylor’s case — collected intelligence for Washington on possible rescue operations. 
 
 Canadians shared the emotional ups and downs of the Americans, their boredom, their anxiety, the constant simmering fear of a leak through the Iranian staff at their houses or discovery if someone was spotted through a window. 
 
 Though long gone from the Canadian foreign service, Taylor retains the delightfully droll understatement of the diplomat. 
 
 “What would have happened if one way or another it would have gone awry? . . . I may have had to stay around awhile” in Iran. 
 
 Had his intelligence-gathering for Washington been discovered, “that would have been a difficult consequence, I think.” 
 
 It’s not for nothing the movie is set mostly in Washington and Hollywood and only fleetingly in Tehran, Taylor notes. Neither Mendez nor any other Americans under the tormented administration of President Jimmy Carter had much of a clue what was going on in Iran. 
 
 When Taylor heard a few years ago that Mendez had sold movie rights to his book (which, to be fair, is much more generous than the movie about Canada’s role), “I said, ‘Well, that’s going to be interesting.’ 
 
 “But how do they know what’s going on, because Tony Mendez was only there for a day and a half? The six diplomats were in (Canadian safekeeping) for three months, and they had no idea what was going on outside.” 
 
 Some of Taylor’s friends tried to convey to the film-maker that there was “another side to this other than Tony Mendez’s book, since he was in Washington and Hollywood, he had no idea what was going on in Tehran.” 
 
 Eventually, Taylor’s wife, Pat, did receive a call from Page Leong, the actress who plays her. 
 
 “She had a long talk with Pat and Pat went over what happened,” Taylor laughs. “And then Page says, ‘Well, you know this is a thriller?’ What you’re saying isn’t necessarily going to be in the movie.” 
 
 How right she was. 
 
 When the movie was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, the former ambassador wasn’t invited, even though he was in Toronto at the time. 
 
 Friends who saw the opening were outraged on Taylor’s behalf, however, at how much history had been sacrificed to thrill. And after the Star’s Martin Knelman reported on this, Taylor was deluged with international attention. 
 
 Soon, Affleck phoned, Taylor recounts, and said, “ ‘You’ve got issues?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got issues.’ ” 
 
 So Affleck invited Taylor and his wife to Los Angeles, screened the movie, and offered — “although it’s going to cost money” — to cut the postscript and let Taylor “write what you want.” 
 
 The new postscript says: “The involvement of the CIA complemented efforts of the Canadian Embassy to free the six held in Tehran. To this day the story stands as an enduring model of international co-operation between governments.” 
 
 Even that hardly does Canada justice. 
 
 Although the short-lived federal government of Joe Clark was fully supportive and deeply involved, in Argo’s version Canada was not much more a factor than Iceland. 
 
 Another Canadian hero who gets short shrift is John Sheardown, the first Canadian official the Americans approached for shelter. 
 
 “Why didn’t you call me before?” he said. “What took you so long?” 
 
 Sheardown, now in his late 80s and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and his wife, Zena, took in four of the Americans — at considerable risk to Zena who wasn’t a Canadian citizen and had no diplomatic immunity. 
 
 “To make the movie work, I guess, they assumed that everybody was with Pat and me,” Taylor said. “And John and Zena did yeoman work.” 
 
 For Mendez’s part, he didn’t even learn of the six hostages until weeks after their escape. The CIA agent had his idea for the Hollywood angle in January. Then he arranged a back story to portray them as Canadian film-makers, created some disguises and documents. 
 
 “But for every moment in Washington,” Taylor recalls, “there was an equal moment in Ottawa. 
 
 “All the documentation to authenticate the diplomats as Canadians, the business cards, credit cards, the passports, the academic credentials, everything came out of Canada.” 
 
 Not only that, Canada had already devised “exit strategies” — which didn’t use a Hollywood angle Mendez had dreamed up — that Taylor believes “we could have pulled off.” 
 
 “We thought the (Mendez) plan was OK,” he said. “But we didn’t think we really needed something that intricate.” 
 
 The key was that the Americans were travelling as Canadians. Whether they were purported to be petroleum engineers, nutritionists, agronomists — instead of film-makers — probably didn’t much matter, he said. 
 
 In Tehran, moreover, Mendez “was totally in our hands,” Taylor said. His involvement over his weekend in Tehran was “not much . . . just some visa stamps. Ottawa had provided everything else.” 
 
 In fact, the CIA almost scuppered the plan by making passport notations that used the wrong Iranian calendar and would have essentially had the Americans leaving the country before they arrived. 
 
 Canadian official Roger Lucy, who spoke Farsi, spotted the error. Otherwise, Taylor said, “that would have been game over.” 
 
 On the departure date, Taylor arranged embassy cars to pick everyone up — Mendez from his hotel, the diplomats from the Canadian residences — in pre-dawn Tehran. 
 
 He ensured the flight got off before leaving Iran himself forever with the last of the Canadian embassy staff. 
 
 As for Argo’s car chase and Mendez/Affleck’s various on-screen heroics, “it makes a great movie,” said Taylor, who was played in an earlier movie on the Khomeini revolution by Gordon Pinsent and is this time portrayed by Victor Garber. 
 
 If Argo has a useful message, he said, it is on the importance and need for diplomacy and the fact that “what happened 32 years ago could happen tomorrow.” 
 
 For Taylor, his life changed utterly after his exploits in Tehran. He left the foreign service, spent four years as Canada’s consul-general in New York, and has since enjoyed a successful career in the private sector. 
 
 “It became a different life entirely,” he said. But not so much that the past isn’t these days ringing his phone off the hook. 
 
 Recently, he was called by the BBC World Service for Tehran to comment on the closure of the Canadian embassy in Iran and on Argo. 
 
 They told him “they still remember you in Iran,” he said. 
 
 And they wanted to know whether Canada had closed its embassy in Tehran to “coincide with the showing of the movie in Toronto. 
 
 “I said, ‘Well, I doubt it.’ ” 
 
 Whatever goes on in Hollywood, life goes on, and rather sweetly, for Ken Taylor, who will travel to Washington this week for a screening of Argo at the Canadian Embassy. 
 
 The other morning, the phone rang once more in his 26th-floor apartment overlooking the East River. 
 
 It was the BBC World Service calling back to inform him they owed him £40 for the interview. 
 
 He told them it was very thoughtful, but not to bother. ||||| Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways 
 
 Ken Taylor, the Canadian diplomat who sheltered six Americans in Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis and clandestinely aided their flight from the country, died Thursday in New York City. He was 81. “As Canada’s ambassador to Iran during the Iranian Revolution, Taylor valiantly risked his own life by shielding a group of American diplomats from capture,” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a statement. “Ken Taylor represented the very best that Canada’s foreign service has to offer.” Except for those three months in winter of 1979, Taylor’s public career evinced little of the drama that would characterize one of the most famous moments in Canadian diplomatic history. He worked in Canada’s industry ministry and specialized in foreign trade commissions before Pierre Trudeau elevated him to the diplomatic corps. An initial New York Times description of Taylor after the escape from Iran perfunctorily described him as a diplomat “whose career has been spent primarily in furthering his country’s commercial interests.” 
 
 That changed on November 8, 1979, when John Sheardown, a Canadian consular official, telephoned Taylor and informed him that five Americans had escaped from the U.S. embassy in Tehran after it was stormed four days earlier, and that they were in hiding in Sheardown’s house. (Sheardown died in 2013.) Taylor moved two of them to his own residence, where they were joined by another American who had found temporary refuge among Swedish diplomats. In the tumult that followed the Iranian Revolution, the U.S. and Canadian governments feared what would happen if the six Americans and their Canadian protecters were discovered. Taylor and his remaining staff, in coordination with Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark and the U.S. State Department, orchestrated the six Americans’ escape from Iran. Every possible avenue of escape posed its own risks, as Taylor explained to The New York Times in 1981. At first, Canadian officials in Teheran considered driving the four men and two women to Tabriz, in the northeast, and over the border to Turkey. But Mr. Taylor said that Tabriz was “up in arms with local revolts and once they left our residences we would lose control.” Next, a dash for a Persian Gulf port and a friendly tanker was considered. But Teheran was lawless, he said, “to say nothing of the countryside.” Moreover, this move would have meant traveling through Khuzistan, the Arab-populated province that was in turmoil and later became the focus of the war with Iraq. “We couldn't say goodbye to our house guests with any degree of confidence on that route,” Mr. Taylor said. “So we decided to confront the Iranians head on,” he added, and fly out the six Americans directly from the Teheran airport. Taylor gave Canadian passports to the Americans so they could pass through customs, while the CIA forged exit visas and sent an agent, Tony Mendez, to aid their flight. As the Americans left, Taylor also evacuated the few remaining Canadian personnel and closed the embassy on January 28. The six Americans’ safety was originally kept secret by both governments for fear of retribution toward the hostages. ||||| But this year, vindication came in a decision that forced the Paris-based bank BNP Paribas to pay a $9 billion penalty for violating sanctions against Iran, Sudan and Cuba. Some of that money was suddenly available for victims of state-sponsored terrorism. Congress was also motivated by many members’ anger over the Iran nuclear accord. 
 
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 Some of the hostages were subject to physical and psychological torture during their long ordeal, and many regarded the thaw as frustrating and premature. 
 
 Like most of the hostages, Mr. Sickmann learned of the imminent legislation in a conference call with their main lawyer, V. Thomas Lankford, on Dec. 16. 
 
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 “It became clear that we were sort of inextricably linked to the nuclear negotiations,” Mr. Lankford said in an interview. “Those negotiations resulted in an understanding that an inevitable next step in securing a relationship was to address the reason for the rupture, which was our kidnapping and torture.” 
 
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 “As valuable as stopping the spread of nuclear arms is,” he added, “it’s equally important to establish the precedent that in one way, shape, form or another, a state sponsor of terrorism will not be permitted to walk away.” 
 
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 It is not clear whether all the former hostages or their families will receive full payments. In large measure that is because the $4.4 million total authorized by Congress depends on the outcome of efforts to collect on judgments won in earlier court rulings involving victims of terrorist attacks, as well as on the number of victims who file claims. 
 
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 The law authorizes payments of up to $10,000 per day of captivity for each of the 53 hostages, 37 of whom are still alive. Fifty-two hostages were released on Jan. 20, 1981; a 53rd hostage had been released earlier because of illness. Spouses and children are authorized to receive a lump payment of as much as $600,000. 
 
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 Of the $9 billion penalty paid by BNP Paribas, about $1 billion will be put into a compensation fund for victims of terrorism, with more money and assets potentially added as a result of continuing litigation. An additional $2.8 billion will aid victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and their family members. 
 
 Initial payments are to be disbursed within one year, according to a formula that will be overseen by a special master appointed by the Justice Department and that imposes limits on payments to victims who have won judgments in excess of $20 million. The initial payments are expected to fall well short of the maximum. 
 
 Several of the surviving hostages and their families said that reparations were long overdue.Many said they felt their ordeal had been long forgotten by the general public until the 2012 movie “Argo,” directed by Ben Affleck, which focused on six people who managed to escape from the besieged embassy and take refuge in the home of the Canadian ambassador, Ken Taylor. 
 
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 Some of the hostages also said the compensation award would serve as a reminder of the perils still faced by United States diplomatic personnel working in dangerous locations overseas, such as the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, where Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in 2012. 
 
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 For years, the hostages pushed for relief from Congress. 
 
 “Time and time again, we thought we’d get a bill,” said David M. Roeder, a retired Air Force colonel who was an attaché at the embassy in Tehran when he was taken hostage. “We were pushing toward the goal line, and our portion would get stripped out.” 
 
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 Mr. Roeder called the experience “the epitome of the roller coaster ride.” He added, “We were sent into harm’s way by our government and then nobody seemed to want to do anything about it.” 
 
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 Over the years, the former hostages had numerous champions in Congress. In recent years, some of their strongest advocates included the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican of Georgia, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, Representative Sean Duffy, Republican of Wisconsin, and Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia. All had pushed for stand-alone legislation to compensate the ex-hostages. 
 
 In a statement, Mr. Reid said that the action by Congress was long overdue. “These Americans, held hostage for 444 days in 1979, deserved to finally be compensated for the horrors that they and their families have survived,” he said. 
 
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 Mr. Sickmann said that he would have preferred that Iran pay compensation directly, as Libya did for victims of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, but that he did not expect an apology from Iran. “I don’t believe that they will ever, ever apologize,” he said. “They don’t believe that they did anything wrong.” 
 
 Some former hostages and their family members had expressed frustration at the Justice and State Departments for blocking efforts over the years to get compensation. In a sense, the spending bill represents Congress’s taking control of the BNP Paribas money back from the Justice Department. 
 
 Some hostages did not want to discuss the legislation. “It’s enough,” said Barry Rosen, who was a press attaché at the embassy. “We’ve gone through enough.”
– Ken Taylor, the Canadian ambassador to Iran who helped smuggle six American hostages home from the country in 1980, died Thursday of colon cancer at the age of 81, his wife tells the AP. For three months, Taylor and his deputy, John Sheardown, hid at their Tehran homes the six US hostages who escaped from the American Embassy after it was overrun by Iranian student radicals on Nov. 4, 1979. Along with the CIA, Taylor helped arrange the hostages' escape by procuring plane tickets and fake Canadian passports. It was an incredibly risky operation that included passport foul-ups and a suspicious airport official, but the six hostages flew to safety from Tehran's airport on Jan. 28, 1980, the New York Times reported. Taylor's Iran exploits were chronicled both in the 2013 documentary Our Man in Tehran and in Ben Affleck's Oscar-winning Argo, though critics complained of the latter movie's inaccuracies, saying it minimized the Canadians' role in the rescue and gave most of the credit to the CIA. "Canada was not merely standing around watching events take place," Taylor told the Toronto Star in 2012. "The CIA was a junior partner." (Affleck later apologized and reworked the closing credits that mentioned Taylor's role, the Atlantic notes.) Meanwhile, Taylor's wife of 50 years, Pat, remembers one of her husband's most notable traits: his generous spirit. "He did all sorts of things for everyone without any expectation of something coming back," she tells the AP. "It's why that incident in Iran happened. There was no second thought about it."