Peter Tarnoff, diplomat who helped plan the ‘Argo’ escape from Iran, dies at 86

Peter Tarnoff, a veteran diplomat whose behind-the-scenes work for Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton included setting up a secret channel to Fidel Castro and helping arrange the escape of six U.S. Embassy officials from Iran, an escapade that was later depicted in the movie “Argo,” died Nov. 1 at his home in San Francisco. He was 86.

His wife, Mathea Falco, said the cause of death was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Mr. Tarnoff was part of a cohort of Foreign Service officers who, inspired by the words of President John F. Kennedy, joined the U.S. diplomatic corps in the early 1960s.

Many of them cut their teeth on assignment in South Vietnam, and several – including Mr. Tarnoff, Anthony Lake, Frank Wisner II and Richard Holbrooke – went on to play leading roles in the American foreign policy establishment.

But while outsize personalities like Mr. Holbrooke, a sought-after candidate for secretary of state, and Mr. Lake, a national security adviser under Bill Clinton, rose to prominence, Mr. Tarnoff preferred to exercise his influence out of the public eye. hold.

“Peter was really the ultimate diplomat in the sense that he never asked for the spotlight,” Wendy Sherman, who served alongside him in the Clinton administration, said in a telephone interview. “He never had to be the person mentioned. He just got the job done.”

Early in his career, he developed a reputation as the consummate confidential assistant, guiding high-profile diplomats through high-profile negotiations.

In South Vietnam he became a close adviser to Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the American ambassador to Saigon, a role he continued in 1969 when Mr. Lodge led the American delegation to the Paris peace talks to end the Vietnam War.

Mr. Tarnoff performed similar service nearly a decade later as special assistant to Cyrus Vance, the secretary of state under Jimmy Carter, and Edmund Muskie, Mr. Vance’s successor.

In that role, he protected his principals from bureaucratic infighting — Mr. Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser, were engaged in open war for much of the Carter administration — and carried out assignments that were too sensitive to pass through conventional means. channels.

He built a secret relationship with Ricardo Alarcón, a top Cuban diplomat based in New York. Over cigars at the Plaza Hotel, and later during a secret meeting in Havana with Fidel Castro, they made a deal to end the exodus of thousands of asylum seekers to Florida, known as the Mariel boatlift.

He played an even more confidential role during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, when revolutionaries detained most of the US embassy staff in Tehran. Six had escaped to the Canadian embassy, ​​and Mr. Tarnoff was acting as a liaison between the Canadian government and the Central Intelligence Agency, which had a plan to get them back.

Posing as a Canadian film crew scouting locations for a science fiction film called “Argo,” the six staff members, along with two CIA agents, managed to get through Iranian passport control and board a flight to Zurich.

Mr. Tarnoff never confirmed his role in what became known as the Canadian Caper, nor did he see the Oscar-winning film about it. But State Department documents show he played an integral role.

He spent much of the 1980s in the private sector, including a stint as chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American think tank specializing in US foreign policy and international relations, founded in 1921. But he returned returned to the State Department in 1993 as the deputy secretary for political affairs, essentially the third spot.

A few months into his job, he caused a minor scandal when, speaking anonymously to a group of journalists, he said that the United States might have to withdraw its commitments abroad in light of budget deficits and the end of the Cold War. .

The New York Times, which had no reporter in the room, soon exposed Mr. Tarnoff, and for a moment it appeared he would lose his job.

But Mr. Tarnoff was too valuable to lose. He resumed his role as a secret intermediary for the Cuban government and again worked with Mr. Alarcón, this time on a deal to end the United States’ open-door policy to Cuban asylum seekers.

“Peter always had a fantastic talent for understanding what a director needed, and how to manage and synthesize ideas for solutions to problems and intervene, and do so with imperfect discretion,” said Mr. Wisner, who served as deputy minister of Defence. for the policies under President Clinton, said in a telephone interview.

Peter Tarnoff was born on April 19, 1937 in Manhattan and grew up in Brooklyn until he was 12, when his family moved to Montreal. His father, Norman, was an executive at Macy’s, and his mother, Henrietta (Goldfarb) Tarnoff, was a homemaker.

He graduated from Colgate in 1958 with a degree in philosophy, a subject he continued to pursue at the Committee on Social Thought, a doctoral program at the University of Chicago. But his interest in global affairs drew him away from academia, and in 1962 he joined the Foreign Service.

Mr. Tarnoff’s first marriage, to Danielle Oudinot, ended in divorce. He married Mrs. Falco in 1982. With her he is survived by a son from his first marriage, Alexander Tarnoff; a son of his second, Benjamin Tarnoff; his half-brother, John Tarnoff; and three grandchildren. Another of Mrs. Oudinot’s sons, Nicholas Tarnoff, died in 1991.

After an initial deployment to Lagos, Nigeria, he moved to Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), the capital of South Vietnam. In 1965, he was seriously injured by flying glass when a car bomb exploded next to the American embassy, ​​killing two people inside and 20 on the street.

In the 1970s he held various positions in Europe before moving to Washington in 1975.

After Ronald Reagan defeated Mr. Carter in the 1980 presidential election, tradition dictated that the new administration would take care of Mr. Tarnoff, who was both a nonpolitical Foreign Service officer and a confidant of one of the country’s leading cabinet members. the previous government.

But in a shocking split, Alexander Haig, the new foreign secretary, pushed Mr. Tarnoff aside, ostensibly because his work in Cuba had left him politically tainted. He completed a year-long fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and then resigned from the Foreign Service in 1982.

He served for three years as chairman of the World Affairs Council of Northern California, based in San Francisco, and then took over as chairman of the Council on Foreign Affairs from 1985 to 1993, when, at his compatriot’s urging, he left the State Department came. , Warren Christopher, who had just been appointed Secretary of State.

Mr. Tarnoff left the State Department in 1997 and returned to San Francisco. Not long before he left, he received the Distinguished Service Award, the department’s highest honor.