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Privately, some Canadian officials said they were "extremely upset" that the story of the escape had been broken by Jean Pelletier, a Washington correspondent for Montreal's La Presse and son of Canada's ambassador to France. Like a number of newsmen, including correspondents and editors of TIME, Pelletier had long been aware that the six had been hidden in Tehran and had kept the secret. When Pelletier learned that the Americans were out of Tehran, he felt the news would quickly become public, and his newspaper decided to break the story. This destroyed a Canada-U.S. plan to hide the escapees in Europe until the fate of the 50 U.S. hostages still held in the embassy was resolved.
Despite the secrecy, the available facts provided a fascinating tale of intrigue, involving CIA-doctored documents and bold "rehearsals" in Tehran on how to slip the Americans past Iranian airport inspectors. The plot's mastermind and instant hero was Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor, 45, a gregarious diplomat whose gravelly voice and hearty laugh had made him a popular intermediary between visiting Westerners and Iran's unpredictable government officials. His superiors, Prune Minister Clark and Secretary MacDonald, let Taylor direct every detail of the risky rescue.
The escape of the six began on the rainy day of the storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4. While the assault centered on the main embassy building, five of the six escapees were working in an adjoining consular section within the compound. Mark Lijek had been processing visas that morning. Among his visitors was Kim King, 27, a tourist from Oregon who had stayed on in Iran for six months to teach English to local businessmen. He had both overstayed his visa and lost his passport, with its date-of-entry stamp, and he sought Lijek's help in acquiring new papers.
Then, as King tells it, a woman working in a front office shouted, "They're coming over the wall!" King peered through the two windows, protected by a grillwork made of bricks, in Lijek's second-floor office. He saw the men on the wall and heard others moving on the roof. He did not see any weapons and heard no shooting. "We weren't afraid," he recalled. "We thought they probably were the police."
An Iranian attacker broke a window in a nearby men's room and tried to enter through it. Said King: "A Marine went in there and knocked him out of the window and fired tear gas."
As the Marine guards radioed other Marines to help gather all the office occupants together for protection, the lights suddenly went out and the radio equipment was silenced. "It got very dark in the room, because of the grillwork on the windows," King said. "We realized then that we had to get out."
The Americans grouped together in a back room on the building's ground floor. Among them, according to King, were Lijek, Anders and Kathy Stafford. The Marine managed to jimmy a back door, which had been bolted automatically as a security precaution. The door opened onto an alley. "Mark and I looked out the window upstairs," said King, "and it was clear as far as we could see. We went back down. I opened the door and we walked out."