Hollywood  fabricated  the  story  of  the  rescue  of  Americans  in  Iran

It infuriates me when I see the words, “Based on a true story” when in fact much of the movie is make-believe. I should add that the same phrase, “Based on a true story” showed up on the screen of the movie, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a movie that was entirely fictional. Anyone who has watched the various movies depicting the sinking of the Titanic will remember the fictional stories within the movies but much of the movies dealt with the sinking of the ship and its causes. However, everyone knew that the stories within the movie were fictional.

Another good example of this can be found in the Oscar winning movie called Argo which is about the rescue of six Americans in Iran during the American hostage crises in 1970. But was the role of the Americans who played a part in rescuing the six men a depiction of what really happened?

Let me tell you what really happened during that particular crisis.

The illegal occupation of the American embassy was a diplomatic crisis between Iran and the United States in which Americans were held hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981, after a group of Islamist students and militants took over the American Embassy in Tehran in support of the Iranian Revolution. The government of Iran did nothing to prevent this from happening. In February 1979, less than a year before the hostage crisis, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, had been overthrown in a revolution. For several decades prior to his deposition, the United States had allied with and supported the Shah.  What was then happening in Iran after the shah’s overthrow strengthened the prestige of Ayatollah Khomeini and the political power of those who supported theocracy and opposed any normalization of relations with the West.

The hostage-takers in the middle of November 1979, later released 13 women and African Americans out of the original 66 seized claiming that they were sympathetic to oppressed minorities. One more hostage, a white man named Richard Queen, was released in July 1980 after he became seriously ill with what was later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. The remaining 52 hostages were still held captive 

The seizing of the hostages from the American embassy in Tehran brought about the total breaking down of relations between the two countries in the history of Iran/United States relations. At the time of this writing, the United States still doesn’t have an embassy in Iran.

Unbeknown to the Iranians, there were six members of the American embassy who were not seized by the students and militants. The six Americans escaped the embassy as it was being overrun. They found their way to then Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor, who enlisted Canadian consular official, John Sheardown and his wife Zena to shelter the escapees.  John and Zena were fully aware that if the Americans were found in their home, they would both be seized with the Americans and probably executed but they were willing to incur the risk to keep the six Americans out of harm’s way. They kept them hidden for months, through both Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Meanwhile, both the Americans and Canadians had to find a solution—a way to spirit the six hidden Americans out of Iran. If they were caught doing it, there would be consequences for all of them that could lead to their deaths.

The Canadian government under the leadership of Prime Minister, Joe Clark created a ploy and issued passports for the six Americans that would allow them to board a Canadian plane that would take them out of Iran unbeknownst to the powers that sought their capture. The six Americans were later surreptitiously and safely flown out of Iran in January 1980.

The people in the United States were extremely grateful to the Taylors and the Sheardowns.  John was offered the keys to New York by then mayor Edward Koch. He humbly declined, saying Taylor had already received them on behalf of all who were involved. Greyhound in the United States offered all Canadians wishing to accept their offer, the opportunity to be driven in their buses all the way across the United States for as little as $99.

The fabrication

Much of the movie was about the Americans creating a ploy involved them making of a science fiction fantasy movie. The so-called make-believe movie certainly wasn’t about the escape of the six Americans.  

The Oscar award movie Argo had a title that actually means aside from being a constellation; it is in Classical Mythology, the ship in which Jason sailed in his quest of the Golden Fleece. The Americans in the movie had a different plot for their make-believe movie.  According to the Oscar-winning movie Argo, the US State Department began to explore options for slipping the six Americans out of Iran. Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck), a CIA exfiltration specialist brought in for consultation, criticizes the proposals. He too is at a loss for an alternative until, inspired by watching Battle for the Planet of the Apes on the phone with his son, he plans to create a cover story that the escapees are Canadian filmmakers, scouting "exotic" locations in Iran for a similar science-fiction film.

Well my dear readers; that was not the ploy that got the six Americans out of Iran. It was the Canadian ploy that did the trick and only that particular ploy. There was no film being made by the Americans to act as a ploy so that the Iranians would be fooled into believing that the six Americans were part of the film crew. 

During the preparation of the fabricated American ploy, Mendez and his supervisor Jack O'Donnell (Bryan Cranston) contacted  John Chambers (John Goodman), a Hollywood make-up artist who has previously crafted disguises for the CIA. Chambers puts them in touch with film producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin). Together they set up a phony film studio, publicize their plans, and successfully establish the pretense of developing Argo, a "science fantasy" in the style of Star Wars, to lend credibility to the cover story. According to the movie Argo, the Iranians were gullible enough to fall for that caper. 

In reality, it never happened. It was all make-believe. It certainly added a lot of suspense in the real movie but it was so far from the truth, it would be like stretching truth the distance between Earth and the Constellation, Argo.

There really was a CIA man in Iran at that time but he was only there for a day and a half and not all the time the so-call movie ploy was being made in Iran. Mendez was decorated, and is now widely known, for his on-the-scene management of the Canadian ploy during the Iran hostage crisis. Ask yourself this rhetorical question. How could he manage the Canadian ploy when he was in Iran only a day and a half and only spoke with the Canadian ambassador once while they both were in Tehran?

The historic event that was dramatized in the film Argo came under fire for downplaying Canada’s role in the escape and omitting the real and dangerous efforts of John and Zena Sheardon.

In the movie, Mendez can’t seem to get through to Hamilton Jordan, President Carter’s chief of staff, to sign off on plane tickets for the escaping hostages, so he pretends to be calling from the school where Jordan’s kids go. In real life, Hamilton wasn’t married then and didn’t have any kids. Further, the plane tickets would hardly have been issued from the United States as that would be foolhardy and evidence in the Iranian’s minds that the Americans were attempting to smuggle six Americans out of Iran. The plane tickets were Canadian issued and sent to the Canadian embassy so that the six Americans could use them to leave Iran as Canadian citizens.

The street scene in Tehran where the six Americans were being chased by Iranians was complete fabrication. In actual fact, if they were being chased, then that would mean that the Iranian government would know that six men had escaped from the American embassy when in fact, they were completely unaware of their existence.

The film’s climax, with Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers jumping in a jeep, chasing the plane down the runway and shooting at it, was completely fabricated for excitement and exciting and suspenseful to watch.

Let me say from the getgo. I really liked the movie. It was exciting and suspenseful to watch even though a great deal of it was pure fiction. What I object to is that at the beginning, it was described as a true event when most of the movie was not true at all.

It makes me upset when screenwriters make up facts in stories about real people and real events to add drama to the film rather than just writing the real facts more interesting that perhaps they are. It makes viewers think that realism is just another style in art, so that no movie, no matter how realistic it looks, is believable. And to add insult to injury, the writer of the script, Chris Terio had the audacity to say at the Oscar Awards ceremony that he was thankful to Mendez for his part in rescuing the six Americans.  Give me a break. He should have thanked the Sheardons and the Taylors for their role in rescuing the six Americans.  They were the ones who incurred the risk.

Ben Affleck did however admit that Hollywood always wants it both ways, of course. Unfortunately the 2013 Oscar season was rife with contenders who banked on the authenticity of their films until they were challenged, and then they simply went back on the that old defence, “Hey, it’s just a movie.”

I think the scriptwriter of Argo had a problem from the beginning. The manner in which the Canadians pulled off their caper was imaginative and to some degree, risky but rather boring to say the least. The proposed movie needed something that was more detailed and yes, showing the rest of the world that the Americans are really smart enough to pull off the caper they did in the movie.

Admittedly, the plot was extremely interesting but it was unfair to the Canadians who were the real heroes in that Iranian hostage crisis. President Carter was embarrassed when he realized that the Canadians had been down-played in the movie. He went on record as saying that the Canadians were the people who rescued the six hostages. He ought to know because he was in touch with the Canadian prime minister during the rescue planning and the escape.

Could the script been written in any other way than the way it was? To make the movie interesting to watch as it was, I doubt it. But what could have been done was at the beginning of the movie, the statement on the screen could have said that the movie was a fictional account of a real event.  That way, the Americans wouldn’t have lost face.  They also could have put more emphasis on the role of the Canadians in the rescue. To quote an old American Indian axiom, the filmmaker’s message in Argo was spoken with a forked tongue.