Dr. Patricia Taylor (centre) was instrumental in the escape of six Americans from Iran during the hostage crisis of 1979/1980.AP
Patricia Taylor was a microbiologist who worked on important research in fields such as vaccines and AIDS, and who as a young woman became an accomplished ballerina and musician. She was also married to the famous Canadian diplomat, Ken Taylor, and helped him when six American diplomats were hidden and then spirited out of Iran in 1980 in what became known as the Canadian Caper. Dr. Taylor died on Sept. 9 at a retirement home in Ottawa. She was 95.
She was born Patricia Lee was born in Ayr, Australia, on March 20, 1929, one of 11 children of Chinese immigrants Ernest Howard Lee Hang Gong and Mayzie Kwong Sue Duk. The family ran a grocery store where Patricia worked as a young woman.
Along with her academic achievements, she was an accomplished ballerina with the Royal Academy of Dance in Queensland.
At 24 years old, she was working as a research officer at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research when she won a scholarship to the School of Health at the University of California, Berkeley, to study encephalitis.
The title of her PhD thesis in 1964 was: Nutrition and infection: the effect of malnutrition on the inflammatory response as exhibited by the granuloma pouch of the rat. The thesis runs to 210 pages.
After earning her PhD, Dr. Lee was a teaching assistant at the Department of Epidemiology at the university. Later in life she was a Fulbright scholar and a Rockefeller fellow.
She met Mr. Taylor when he was taking a master’s in business administration at Berkeley. Mr. Taylor was on his way to a golf game when they crossed paths in the university cafeteria. Romance bloomed and they were married a short time later.
The couple soon moved to Guatemala for Mr. Taylor’s first posting, to the Canadian Embassy as a junior diplomat. Dr. Taylor was more than simply a diplomat’s wife and worked in her medical field in Guatemala City. She also danced with the ballet company there.
“She was a trailblazer. She worked in her field which was quite unusual at the time because diplomatic spouses didn’t tend to work outside the embassy, but Pat always did,” said Malcolm McKechnie, who met the Taylors in 1981 when he was posted to the Canadian Consulate in New York, where Mr. Taylor was consul-general. Mr. McKechnie rose to be Canadian Ambassador to Spain. “We became friends, and they visited me at my various postings,” said Mr. McKechnie, who spent a great deal of time caring for Dr. Taylor in the last five years of her life.
Mr. Taylor’s diplomatic postings took the couple from Guatemala to Detroit, London, Karachi and eventually Tehran. In every location, Dr. Taylor worked as a researcher, in many cases tackling problems unique to the place.
Their only child, Douglas, was born in Detroit in July, 1964.
The most dramatic event of the Taylors’ lives was helping six American diplomats escape from Tehran. In early November of 1979 Iranian students stormed the United States Embassy in Iran and took 53 American diplomats hostage. That captivity lasted for 444 days.
Mr. Taylor, then the Canadian ambassador to Iran, helped hatch a plan to give refuge to six American diplomats who were not at the U.S. embassy during the hostage-taking. The Americans secretly stayed for two and a half months at the Taylors’ residence and at the home of another Canadian diplomat. Working with the Canadian government and CIA, Mr. Taylor arranged for them to be issued false Canadian passports and, posing as a Canadian film crew, the Americans left the country in early January of 1980.
Mr. Taylor left Tehran for Paris on Jan. 29, 1980; Dr. Taylor, who was as much a part of the cover-up as her husband, left a day earlier.
Until then, she had been working at a laboratory in Tehran and teaching at the university during the height of the Iranian Revolution, which saw the Shah overthrown and sent into exile.
“There was a constant fear of being caught in a mob during the year after the Iranian Revolution,” she told an Australian newspaper after she and her family left Iran and spent some down time in her native Australia.
“I never felt really threatened personally, but there were some worrying times. The laboratory in which I worked was right in the middle of the disturbed area of Tehran. On two occasions mobs came bursting into the laboratory and many of them put on the researchers’ white coats.”
In a stoic understatement, she told the Australian reporter: “It was not conducive to calm research.”
“She was a remarkable individual in every sense,” Douglas Taylor said from his home in Miami, Fla. “She had incredible drive. Imagine the daughter of a grocery store owner in Australia making it out to achieve all she did.”
The Canadian Caper, as it became known, made the Taylors famous and they were feted in the United States, perhaps more so than in Canada. Just over a year after the incident, there was a movie, Escape from Iran, with actor Tisa Chang playing the role of Patricia Taylor. The 2012 feature film Argo also depicted this dramatic episode. Directed by and starring Ben Affleck, it won three Academy Awards. The Taylors were at the premiere.
Another film on the subject is the 2013 documentary Our Man in Tehran, based on the book of the same name by Canadian professor Robert Wright. “It wasn’t Hollywood and it was a more accurate portrayal of what happened in Tehran with the hostage escape,” Mr. McKechnie said.
When Mr. Taylor retired from the foreign service, the couple continued to live in New York, where he took a corporate job and Dr. Taylor worked at the New York Blood Centre on AIDS research. The couple lived on the 61st floor of a condo overlooking Central Park and were constant guests of grateful Americans.
In February, 1992, the Canadian Women’s Club in New York named Dr. Taylor its Woman of the Year. In her acceptance speech she talked about her work around the world, from Guatemala to Ottawa, and Tehran to New York City.
“My thanks also go to the government of Canada and all Canadian taxpayers because it was through Ken’s postings that I was able to gain such a wide cultural and scientific background,” she said as she listed medical research work she did while her husband led his separate life as a diplomat. The research included a study in Detroit, of blood disorders of pregnant woman; research on Hepatitis B in London, England; infectious disease in Iran and, “New York, just as the AIDS epidemic started.”
Dr. Taylor published more than 100 scientific papers covering tropical diseases and viral infections such as HIV/AIDS, among other topics. She retired from research work in 2007. Among her many awards, she was named a member of the Order of Canada in 1981.
“During the Iranian crisis, at serious risk but with cool determination, she shared responsibility for concealing a group of Americans in the Canadian residence for over two months, thus helping to ensure their safety and ultimate escape from the country,” read the citation for the Order.
Dr. Taylor retired to Ottawa four years after her husband died in 2015. She spent the past several years at a retirement home there, where a dramatic photo hangs on the wall of her as a ballerina.
“It was taken at the Royal Academy of Dance … where she studied ballet,” said Senator Pamela Wallin, a friend who visited Dr. Taylor often at the retirement home. “She was sharp and witty until the end.”
Dr. Taylor leaves her son, Douglas; two grandchildren, Tristan and Kassia; sister, June; brother, Tuppie; and extended family.
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