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Peter Tarnoff, a seasoned diplomat whose work behind the scenes for presidents Jimmy Carter and Invoice Clinton included establishing a secret channel to Fidel Castro and serving to organize the escape of six U.S. Embassy officers from Iran, an escapade later depicted within the 2012 film “Argo,” died on Nov. 1 at his house in San Francisco. He was 86.
His spouse, Mathea Falco, stated the reason for dying was problems of Parkinson’s illness.
Mr. Tarnoff was a part of a cohort of Overseas Service officers who, impressed by the phrases of President John F. Kennedy, joined the American diplomatic corps within the early Sixties.
Lots of them lower their enamel on task in South Vietnam, and several other — amongst them Mr. Tarnoff, Anthony Lake, Frank Wisner II and Richard Holbrooke — went on to play main roles within the U.S. overseas coverage institution.
However whereas outsize personalities like Mr. Holbrooke, a frequent contender for secretary of state, and Mr. Lake, a nationwide safety adviser beneath Invoice Clinton, turned well-known, Mr. Tarnoff most well-liked to wield his affect out of the general public eye.
“Peter was actually the quintessential diplomat within the sense that he by no means requested for the highlight,” Wendy Sherman, who served alongside him within the Clinton administration, stated in a cellphone interview. “He by no means wanted to be the named individual. He simply received the job achieved.”
From early on in his profession, Mr. Tarnoff developed a status because the consummate confidential assistant, guiding high-profile diplomats via high-profile negotiations.
In South Vietnam he turned a detailed adviser to Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, a job by which he continued in 1969, when Mr. Lodge led the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks to finish the Vietnam Warfare.
Mr. Tarnoff carried out the same service almost a decade later because the particular assistant to Cyrus Vance, the secretary of state beneath Jimmy Carter, and to Edmund Muskie, Mr. Vance’s successor.
In that function he each protected his principals from bureaucratic infighting — Mr. Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the nationwide safety adviser, have been locked in open warfare for a lot of the Carter administration — and carried out assignments too delicate to run via standard channels.
He established a secret relationship with Ricardo Alarcón, a high Cuban diplomat primarily based in New York. Over cigars on the Plaza Lodge, and later in a secret assembly in Havana with Fidel Castro, they hashed out a deal to finish the exodus of hundreds of asylum seekers to Florida, often called the Mariel boatlift.
He performed an much more confidential half throughout the 1979 Iran hostage disaster, when revolutionaries detained many of the personnel on the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Six had escaped to the Canadian Embassy, and Mr. Tarnoff served because the liaison between the Canadian authorities and the Central Intelligence Company, which had a plan to extract them.
Posing as a Canadian movie crew scouting areas for a science fiction movie referred to as “Argo,” the six workers members, joined by two C.I.A. operatives, managed to get via Iranian passport management and onto a flight to Zurich.
Mr. Tarnoff by no means confirmed his function in what got here to be often called the Canadian Caper, nor did he see the Oscar-winning movie made about it. However State Division paperwork present that he performed an integral half.
He spent a lot of the Eighties within the personal sector, together with a stint as president of the Council on Overseas Relations, the American assume tank specializing in U.S. overseas coverage and worldwide relations based in 1921. However he returned to the State Division in 1993 because the beneath secretary for political affairs, primarily the No. 3 spot.
A couple of months into the job, he set off a minor scandal when, talking anonymously to a gaggle of journalists, he stated that the US would possibly want to drag again its commitments abroad within the face of finances deficits and the tip of the Chilly Warfare.
The New York Occasions, which didn’t have a reporter within the room, quickly unmasked Mr. Tarnoff, and for a second it regarded as if he would possibly lose his job.
However he was too invaluable to lose. He reprised his function as secret go-between to the Cuban authorities, and once more labored with Mr. Alarcón, this time on a deal to finish the US’s open door coverage to Cuban asylum seekers.
“Peter all the time had this fabulous knack of understanding what a principal wanted, and the right way to handle and put collectively concepts for options to issues and run interference, and to take action with full discretion,” Mr. Wisner, who served as beneath secretary of protection for coverage beneath President Clinton, stated in a cellphone interview.
Peter Tarnoff was born on April 19, 1937, in Manhattan and raised in Brooklyn till he was 12, when his household moved to Montreal. His father, Norman, was an govt at Macy’s, and his mom, Henrietta (Goldfarb) Tarnoff, was a homemaker.
He graduated from Colgate in 1958 with a level in philosophy, a topic he continued to pursue on the Committee on Social Thought, a doctoral program on the College of Chicago. However his curiosity in world affairs pulled him away from academia, and he joined the Overseas Service in 1962.
Mr. Tarnoff’s first marriage, to Danielle Oudinot, led to divorce. He married Ms. Falco in 1982. Alongside along with her, he’s survived by a son from his first marriage, Alexander; a son from his second, Benjamin; his half brother, John Tarnoff; and three grandchildren. One other son with Ms. Oudinot, Nicholas, died in 1991.
After an preliminary posting to Lagos, Nigeria, Mr. Tarnoff moved to Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh Metropolis), the capital of South Vietnam. In 1965 he was severely wounded by flying glass when a automobile bomb detonated beside the U.S. Embassy, killing two inside and 20 on the road.
In the course of the Nineteen Seventies he held quite a lot of posts round Europe earlier than shifting to Washington in 1975.
After Ronald Reagan defeated Mr. Carter within the 1980 presidential election, custom dictated that the incoming administration would maintain Mr. Tarnoff, who was each a nonpolitical Overseas Service officer and a confidante of one of many earlier administration’s main Cupboard members.
However in a surprising breach, Alexander M. Haig Jr., the brand new secretary of state, pushed Mr. Tarnoff apart, ostensibly as a result of his work in Cuba had left him politically tainted. He took a yearlong fellowship on the Hoover Establishment at Stanford, then resigned from the Overseas Service in 1982.
He served as president of the World Affairs Council of Northern California, primarily based in San Francisco, for 3 years, then assumed the management of the Council on Overseas Relations from 1985 to 1993, when he joined the State Division on the behest of his fellow Californian, Warren M. Christopher, who had simply been named secretary of state.
Mr. Tarnoff left the State Division in 1997 and returned to San Francisco. Not lengthy earlier than leaving, he obtained the Distinguished Service Award, the division’s highest honor.
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