Escaping from the Ayatollahs - a fine film, but is it true?

Once again we have to wonder how far you can travel from the truth when you make a film about a real event. First, I recommend strongly that people go to see ‘Argo’, a film about an absurd but effective plan to get six American diplomats out of Iran, at a time when most of their colleagues were hostages, and when capture would have meant almost certain death. This whole article will be a plot spoiler, so please don’t read on if you prefer the whole thing to be a surprise - but the story is quite widely known, and the film holds on to you till the very end, even though you know how it will finish.

 

First, here are some good things. The invasion and seizure of the US Embassy in the Persian capital is superbly portrayed, not overdone, almost matter-of-fact, as such horrible things look and sound when they actually happen. People who have been entitled to think themselves safe are suddenly not safe at all, because they have been transferred into a world where the rules no longer apply. It’s the wise, pessimistic cynics who tell their colleagues ‘Nobody is coming’, as they absurdly dial the Iranian government for help against the mob. The horrible, self-righteous droning of revolutionary tribunals (which these days like to have women as their mouthpieces) is superbly portrayed.

 

And a truly wonderful job has been done in recreating the appalling fashions of the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially in the Washington DC scenes. This era is now becoming the day before yesterday to a whole generation, who thought at the time that it was a modern era and an improvement on the past. Now, with its electric typewriters, appalling trousers, self-harming eyewear fashions, and unhinged hairstyles, it looks more like a serious wrong turning in human development, which we really ought to have pre-empted or avoided. I remember it all too well. I know roughly what I was doing when the events in this film were unfolding. A whole era is disinterred by these glimpses of proof that we really haven’t a clue what we are doing while we are doing it, and that our comical fashion victimhood applies to ideas just as much as it does to apparel. If only we could learn to see the present as clearly as we see the past we might, for instance, do something about antidepressants in time to save a lot of people from needless regret.

 

What happens next is that half a dozen Americans, junior diplomats mostly unequipped by life or training for a clandestine or adventurous life, realise that they are free to leave before the Ayatollah’s Revolutionary Guards take over their part of the Embassy, which has its own independent way out to the street. What do they do? Where do they go? Well, they end up in the Canadian Ambassador’s quite modest residence, and he and his wife, and their Persian housekeeper (perhaps, in retrospect, the bravest of all because she was the most exposed to the danger of death) , rightly get a lot of credit for their considerable nerve in sheltering them there. But at one stage in the film it is said that the ‘Brits’ and the ‘Kiwis’ refused to help them.

 

Is this true? Well, according to a report in the ‘Sunday Telegraph’ of 21st October, it isn’t. Read this : ’Sir John Graham, 86, who was Britain's ambassador to Iran at the time, said: "It is not the truth that they were turned away from the British Embassy. We gave them all help at the time. My concern is that the inaccurate account should not enter the mythology of the events in Tehran in November 1979." Arthur Wyatt, 83, who was the British charge d'affaires in Tehran, said: "I'm disappointed to hear how we have been portrayed. The Americans fetched up at our summer compound in northern Tehran, and I think they stayed there for one night. If it had been discovered we were helping them I can assure you we'd all have been for the high jump." Mr Wyatt, who served as a diplomat for 45 years, was awarded the Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George for his work in Tehran in recognition of the risks he took at the time. Mr Wyatt also sent supplies to three American diplomats hiding elsewhere in Tehran, another act of kindness unrecognised in Argo.

 

He said: "The revolutionary regime ignored all the rules of diplomatic protection and the Vienna Convention. When they over-ran our embassy too, I said to one of them: 'You can't do this; we're diplomats.' He just waved his machine pistol around and replied, 'This is what matters.'" Affleck has admitted agonising over taking liberties with history but said he had depicted events "as best I can, factually". The script also fails to credit the New Zealand diplomats who helped the group's passage to safety. "I struggled with this long and hard, because it casts Britain and New Zealand in a way that is not totally fair," Affleck conceded. "But I was setting up a situation where you needed to get a sense that these six people had nowhere else to go. It does not mean to diminish anyone." Robert Anders, 87, a former US consular officer and one of the six who were smuggled out, told The Sunday Telegraph: "If the Iranians were going to start looking for people they would probably look to the British. So it was too risky to stay and we moved on. They put their lives on the line for us. We're forever grateful."

 

I really don’t see why this act of courage should not have got a mention. And if it couldn’t be mentioned, I don’t see why the British and New Zealand diplomats had to be mentioned at all. I love Canada, and am completely unsurprised by the role of its Ambassador in this story. But I’m also sure the Canadians wouldn’t mind someone else getting a bit of the credit. There it is. The absurd plot – the invention of an (atrocious) Sci-Fi film by Hollywood executives, to provide the hostages with cover for their exit, is beautifully and hilariously (if profanely) done. Parts of the film reminded me strongly of another favourite film about the CIA, ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’. Jimmy Carter comes quite well out of events, as he often does. As for the ending, it’s some of the best melodrama you’ll see this decade. And if , afterwards, you feel that maybe it wasn’t quite like that, you’ll be right. But it somehow doesn’t matter, as in this section no profound untruth is told.

 

A spare, accurate account (‘The True Spy Story behind Argo’ is provided by Nate Jones in ‘Foreign Affairs’ Magazine, and can be found on the web. But, hugely as I enjoyed it, ad much as I recommend it as a far better film than ‘Skyfall’, given rather a poor launch by the film industry and confined, when I saw it, to a cinema so small my nose (admittedly large) almost touched the screen, I still resent the way my own country’s role is portrayed. No doubt I’ll be told (as I was over the ghastly ‘King’s Speech’ that it’s only a film. Well, so it is. But how many people get their idea of Lawrence of Arabia from the film of that name, and how many do so from reading ‘the Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ or, come to that ‘A Line in the Sand’ ? Films are important, When they deviate from the truth it matters. And when the film is as good as ‘Argo’ it matters even more.