In her review of Robert Wright’s Our Man in Tehran: Ken Taylor, the CIA and the Iran Hostage Crisis, Barbara McDougall claims that “the author shines considerable light on a series of events that were pivotal in altering the relationship between the Islamic world and the rest, a relationship that continues to bedevil us.” But a detailed examination of Wright’s narrative, particularly his chapter tendentiously titled “A Nest of Spies,” turns up some troubling issues. For one, Wright offers no evidence whatsoever for his claims about Ken Taylor’s espionage role. Former prime minister Joe Clark has denied Wright’s claim that Taylor’s assistance in an espionage role was requested by the U.S. president, Jimmy Carter. Wright deploys a cloud of qualifiers to mask the fact that the evidence for Taylor’s role is missing—“it is easy to imagine,” “the request appears to have come,” “if Carter asked,” “it had to have happened,” and so on.
Wright digs himself in a little deeper when he has the good ambassador engaged in intelligence-gathering work on the U.S. embassy compound and in “calibrating the daily caloric intake of the hostages,” based on the movement of food in and out of the compound and the removal of waste. Strange duty for an ambassador whose main concern was keeping his own embassy staff and their U.S. house guests safe in an increasingly unpredictable Iranian environment. As Wright says, “if the ambassador had been found running a CIA operation out of the Canadian embassy—in aid of a planned U.S. military strike against Iran—the consequences would have been incalculably worse.” That part is certainly true and must cast serious doubt on the rest.
The real, or imagined, Canadian James Bond in this affair is not Ken Taylor, but a military police sergeant named James Edward, who was posted to the Canadian embassy in Tehran to increase its security in the aftermath of the fall of the shah and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascent to power. Wright, it would appear, did not interview Edward directly, but relies entirely on the transcripts of an interview that the erstwhile Canadian Bond apparently gave to a film maker named Les Harris. Curiously, Harris did not use much of the Edward material in his documentary The Iran Hostage Crisis: 444 Days to Freedom (What Really Happened), and shows only a photograph of the sergeant, rather than, as with the rest of the film, any live interviews with the participants in the drama. Was Harris less credulous than Wright, I wonder?
The story that Edward tells is that he was deployed (without any prior training or experience) as a front-line spy gathering daily and systematic intelligence on activities at the captured U.S. embassy even though he would, by his own admission, have stood out among the crowd of suspicious and volatile “students” guarding the site like a western sore thumb. Edward is described in the closing sentence of Chapter 14 as “the Americans’ only full-time spy in Tehran.” Wright finds it odd that CIA director Stansfield Turner never mentioned his (or Ambassador Taylor’s) spy exploits in his memoirs. Perhaps there is another reason?
If Wright’s account in Our Man in Tehran turns on his revelations of espionage, then what is certainly a lively account of a well-known story becomes a dubious account of a spy operation, affected by too much naiveté about the nature of intelligence and too much willingness to stretch the narrative and the evidence in order to tell a good, if tall, tale.
