Times Obituary 16/3/15
British diplomat who helped six Americans to escape Iranian militants but was angered by the film Argo
Arthur Wyatt was one of the British diplomats in Tehran who risked their lives to help six Americans fleeing the occupation of the US embassy by Iranian militants in November 1979.
During the crisis, militant students briefly invaded the British embassy as well as the American building. “We were living on our nerves and under constant threat,” Wyatt remembered. “The revolutionary regime ignored all the rules of diplomatic protection and the Vienna convention. When they overran 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’.”
Wyatt supplied the six American fugitives with books, chocolate and other items, as they passed a tense night at the British summer residence at Gholhak, several miles from the city centre, before they succeeded in moving them to the Canadian embassy and, eventually, to freedom.
Wyatt, who had been the economic and commercial counsellor at the British embassy, became the chargé d’affaires under the revolutionary Islamic regime of Ayatollah Khomeini and led the last half-dozen British staff — around 60 were evacuated — who stayed on in an atmosphere of anti-Western hysteria until the British embassy was closed. It did not reopen for almost a decade.
The crisis had erupted on November 4 when a mob of Iranian students, stirred by Ayatollah Khomeini’s denunciation of the United States as “the Great Satan”, stormed the US embassy, taking more than 60 staff hostage. The six who escaped were in a different section of the building with its own exit to the street.
The British were well aware that giving any assistance to the Americans was courting trouble. “If it had been discovered we were helping them, I can assure you we’d all have been for the high jump,” Wyatt later said.
Two of Wyatt’s colleagues, Martin Williams and Gordon Pirie, calmly drove the escapers to Gholhak. On arrival, Williams told his wife, “We have extra guests for dinner tonight.” Another hero was the compound’s chief guard, a Pakistani former soldier Iskander Khan, who turned back a mob approaching the 50-acre tree-lined garden compound in search of the fugitives, declaring there was no one to be found.
Even so the six — Robert Anders, Mark and Cora Lijek, Joseph and Kathleen Stafford, and Henry Schatz — could not safely stay for long on such a sprawling site, and the British again drove them through the hazardous streets, this time to safer billets at the homes of a Canadian diplomat John Sheardown and his ambassador, Ken Taylor. Canadian passports were arranged and they were flown out of Iran, with the assistance of the CIA, at the end of January 1980. The hostages at the US embassy were held for more than a year.
The events of those weeks came back into the spotlight in 2012 with the release of the film Argo, directed by and starring Ben Affleck. The story was changed in Hollywood to suggest that the fugitives had been turned away by British embassy staff. After seeing the film, Wyatt said: “I’m disappointed to see how we have been portrayed.”
Arthur Hope Wyatt, was born in Anderton, Lancashire in 1929, the son of a railway engineer. He won a county scholarship to Bolton School where he developed a special love of history. He won a place at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, but after National Service in the army, joined the Foreign Office in 1950. His first posting, to Ankara in Turkey, was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the country. He became fluent in Turkish, and was to return twice more, lastly after his ordeal in Iran, as counsellor from 1981 until 1984.
He first met his wife Yvonne in the grand room of the British ambassador’s residence in Ankara when they both attended a reception. He was third secretary — a post he held between 1952 and 1956 — she was the daughter of a British army officer based in Cyprus. They married in Cyprus in 1957. They had two daughters, Patricia and Catherine.
After postings in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and again in Ankara, where he was second secretary, the family enjoyed four tranquil years stationed in Bonn, West Germany. In 1970, after a stint in London, Wyatt was posted to Africa and he was counsellor and head of chancery in Lagos, Nigeria from 1972 until 1975.
He spent 18 months as deputy high commissioner in Valletta, Malta, but was given a week to leave the country by the island’s prime minister Dom Mintoff in 1976. Wyatt was blamed by Mintoff for the leak of a remark made at confidential talks between the Maltese and European Economic Community officials. The precise reason was never made public but Wyatt left, leaving his wife to stay behind to pack up.
He rounded off his career as high commissioner to Ghana and nonresident ambassador to Togo from 1986 until 1989, where a minor but repeated difficulty, which amused him, was that the president of Togo was always too busy for him to come and present his credentials. He retired in 1989, but was re-employed in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London until 1995.
Yvonne died in 2002. He was also predeceased by his daughter Catherine, who joined the Foreign Office as a secretary and worked in Barbados. She died in 1996 of complications from influenza. He is survived by his other daughter Patricia, who works in human resources and IT. In retirement he played bridge, tackled crosswords and remained a lifelong football fan and a devotee of Preston North End.
Wyatt’s thoughts on Argo echoed those of many involved in the hostage drama. Sir John Graham, who was Wyatt’s ambassador in Tehran at the time, put his dismay in stronger terms: “My immediate reaction on hearing of this was one of outrage”, he said. “My concern is that the inaccurate account should not enter the mythology of the events in Tehran in November 1979.”
Arthur Wyatt, CMG, diplomat, was born on October 12, 1929. He died on March 4, 2015 aged 85
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