[Peace-discuss] '...code-named 'Bob'..."

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Canada's man in Tehran was a CIA spy

The diplomat praised for sheltering Americans during the Iranian Revolution 
tells The Globe he was made 'de facto CIA station chief' in a secret deal 
between a U.S. president and prime minister Joe Clark

 From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published on Saturday, Jan. 23, 2010

Ken Taylor, the Canadian diplomat celebrated 30 years ago for hiding U.S. 
embassy personnel during the Iranian revolution, actively spied for the 
Americans and *helped them plan an armed incursion into the country*.

Mr. Taylor, ambassador in Iran from 1977 to 1980, became “the de facto CIA 
station chief” in Tehran after the U.S. embassy was seized by students on Nov. 
4, 1979, and 63 Americans, including the four-member Central Intelligence Agency 
contingent, were taken hostage.

Had his espionage been discovered, Mr. Taylor told The Globe and Mail in an 
interview this week, “the Iranians wouldn't have tolerated it. And the 
consequences may have been severe.”

His intelligence-gathering activities were kept secret by agreement between the 
Canadian and the U.S. governments, although his role in sheltering six Americans 
and helping to spirit them out of Iran was later made public, winning him and 
the Canadian government widespread U.S. gratitude.

Trent University historian Robert Wright, author of Our Man in Tehran , a new 
account of the incident released today, strongly implies that 
then-prime-minister Joe Clark insisted Mr. Taylor's spying be kept quiet, 
fearing a negative political fallout if the Canadian public learned that one of 
its envoys was a U.S. spook.

Mr. Taylor himself said he never expected the story to come out. “It had been 
under wraps for 30 years, and my assumption was that it would be for another 30 
years. I didn't expect to be here to talk about it.”

The phrase “de facto CIA station chief” appears in Prof. Wright's book, the 
manuscript of which Mr. Taylor saw and approved in advance of publication.

The request that he provide “aggressive intelligence” for the Americans was made 
personally by U.S. president Jimmy Carter to Mr. Clark, likely in a telephone 
conversation on Nov. 30, 1979, according to Prof. Wright.

Mr. Clark gave his approval, and informed his foreign minister, Flora MacDonald, 
who passed the request on to Mr. Taylor. He instantly agreed.

“I saw this [the hostage-taking] as something that wasn't right,” Mr. Taylor 
said. “Anything in a modest way that I could contribute … looking for some sort 
of solution to this, I was quite prepared to do. I felt strongly about it. And I 
felt we could get away with it. They weren't going to catch us.”

 From that point on, what amounted to the U.S. intelligence operation in Iran 
was run by Mr. Taylor from the Canadian embassy. The daily information he sent 
out was seen by only two officials at what was then the Department of External 
Affairs in Ottawa – Louis Delvoie, director of the intelligence analysis 
division, and Pat Black, assistant undersecretary for security and intelligence.

They showed the cables to Mr. Clark and Ms. MacDonald before passing them on to 
the U.S. ambassador in Ottawa, Kenneth Curtis, who in turned forwarded them to 
Washington.

What precisely Mr. Taylor was doing needs careful definition. In reality, he was 
managing a Canadian, not a U.S., intelligence station, which the Americans – 
because they had no network of their own after their embassy was seized – wanted 
to join.

The first CIA agent sent into Iran after the hostage-taking was rejected by Mr. 
Taylor as unsuitable. He left the country. The second agent sent in, code-named 
“Bob,” won Mr. Taylor's approval and thereafter operated out of the Canadian 
embassy.

Mr. Delvoie had the job of insulating Mr. Taylor from interference from CIA 
headquarters in Langley, Va. Thus, Mr. Taylor on his own managed Bob, and all of 
Bob's reports were sent to his Langley spymasters through Mr. Taylor. He was in 
charge.

The ambassador's chief accomplice was Jim Edward, head of security at the 
Canadian embassy. He, like Mr. Taylor, was given the choice of whether to spy 
for the Americans and, like Mr. Taylor, readily accepted.

He became a clandestine operative assigned by the ambassador to snoop for 
military intelligence while mingling inconspicuously with crowds of Iranians 
outside the U.S. embassy – an unlikely mission for the fair-haired, blue-eyed, 
broad-shouldered, six-foot-tall Canadian Forces sergeant.

The two men – at times in collaboration with Bob – assessed potential helicopter 
landing sites, arranged for trucks to be garaged at a secret location in Tehran 
and analyzed other logistics in preparation for a commando raid, dubbed 
Operation Eagle Claw, to free the hostages held at the embassy.

Sgt. Edward's specific job was to report on the number of guards at the embassy, 
how they were armed and when they changed shifts, ascertain where specifically 
the hostages were being held and track the daily movement of people and goods in 
and out of the compound – particularly the inward passage of foodstuffs and 
outward movement of waste, which allowed Mr. Taylor to calculate the hostages' 
daily caloric intake and assess their general health.

In conversation with The Globe this week, Mr. Taylor said he felt confident 
taking on the U.S. intelligence enterprise because Iran at the time was in chaos 
and the risk was minimal (although Sgt. Edward and his Iranian girlfriend Layla 
at one point were detained and questioned for five hours by Revolutionary Guards).

Mr. Taylor also said he was sure he could have got the “houseguests” – the six 
Americans sheltered in his and embassy immigration counsellor John Sheardown's 
residences – out of Iran without U.S. help, but the Americans didn't want the 
Canadians to move alone.

What frustrated Mr. Taylor and Ottawa was that the Americans wouldn't stay 
focused on the houseguests, although there was evidence that The New York Times 
and Jean Pelletier, Washington correspondent for Montreal's La Presse, had got 
wind of their presence in Canadian hideouts.

Ms. MacDonald decided to press her U.S. counterpart, secretary of state Cyrus 
Vance, to do something, providing a fascinating footnote to Canadian political 
history: the details of why she wasn't in Parliament on Dec. 13, 1979, for the 
vote that felled Mr. Clark's minority government.

She was in Brussels for a NATO ministers meeting. The meeting ended but Ms. 
MacDonald took advantage of being in the same city as Mr. Vance to seek a 
meeting with him. Face to face, she told him the Canadians would put the 
houseguests “on donkeys and send them across the border” if the Americans didn't 
move.

She then missed her flight across the Atlantic, and missed the vote.

The CIA working with Mr. Taylor arranged for the houseguests, using Canadian 
passports, to “exfiltrate” Tehran on a flight to Zurich on Jan. 27, 1980. Mr. 
Taylor then closed the embassy and left with his staff.

The last of the U.S. embassy hostages were not released until Mr. Carter's 
successor, Ronald Reagan, was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 1981 – 444 days after the 
embassy had been overrun.

Prof. Wright started working on a book about the hostage incident at the 
suggestion of his editor at HarperCollins Canada who noted that the 30th 
anniversary was approaching.

To his surprise, Mr. Taylor said he was telephoned by a senior spokesman at the 
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Rodney Moore, and asked whether he 
wanted to participate in the project.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/canadas-man-in-tehran-was-a-cia-spy/article1441545/

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