Canadian Caper

The "Canadian Caper" was the popular name given to the joint covert rescue by the Canadian government and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of six American diplomats who had evaded capture during the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran, Iran, and taking of embassy personnel as hostages by Islamist students and militants on November 4, 1979.

The "caper" involved CIA agents (Tony Mendez and a man known as "Julio") joining the six diplomats to form a fake film crew made up of six Canadians, one Irishman and one Latin American who were finishing scouting for an appropriate location to shoot a scene for the nominal science-fiction film Argo. The ruse was carried off on the morning of Sunday, January 27, 1980, at the Mehrabad Airport in Tehran. The eight Americans successfully boarded a Swissair flight to Zürich and escaped Iran. The 2012 film Argo, which won three Academy Awards and three BAFTA awards including Best Picture, is a fictionalized cinematic representation of the operation.

When the Islamist Iranian Revolution occurred, the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, fled the country, leaving it in disarray. Amid the turmoil, a mob of youthful Islamists, calling themselves the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line, stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, capturing dozens of diplomats and holding them hostage, demanding the return of the Shah to Iran for trial. The provisional government fell shortly thereafter, when Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and his cabinet resigned. Although the new Iranian government stated that the hostage-takers were merely students acting on their own, it joined in demands for the return of the Shah. Most of the hostages were held until early 1981.

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