Journalist and author Ben Macintyre has written the first definitive account of the SAS storming of the Iranian embassy in 1980. We in the UK watched it unfold live on TV. The Siege is an astonishing account of what was (vividly, horrifically, humanly) happening behind the scenes
Google it. Because the footage, more than 40 years on, is still remarkable. Mesmerising. Horrifying. Even (still) unique.
Maybe it’s partly the contrast. On (slightly shaky) camera, an elegant background scene appears. We can see a building; and not just any old building. Neoclassical pillars are topped by triangular pediments; there are stone-balustraded balconies built for men (back in the day) to enjoy an al fresco cigar; or, as the decades tick inexorably on, the perfect backdrop for beautifully coiffed couples delicately to nibble on soupcons of Caspian Sea caviar washed (politely) down by glasses of Dom Perignon.
The paleness of the stucco is meant to be timeless; classic; reassuring. It’s not meant to be a bright foil against which black-clad figures stand out like an eclipse of the sun.
(Is that a gun?
It is a gun.)
It’s not meant to be the pallor of the day against which a cloud of night explodes out of nowhere: a flash of fire; a mass of black smoke playing hide and seek with the building.
It’s not meant to be the white of a blank canvas on which a whole new world is being sketched.
The year before – 1979 – we’d flocked to the cinemas to see Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, with its hide-behind-hands bangs and flashes. We watched Alien, where the deep-space crew were hostage to a parasitic ET.
But that was Vietnam… But that was Space (where no one could hear you scream).
This footage – beamed into our living rooms; live on our TVs – is London. A once-familiar London of Georgian terraces that we’d pass – without second glance - on the way to Kensington Gardens or the Royal Albert Hall.
This footage is about 26 hostages held for six days by six heavily armed gunmen – sub-machineguns and grenades - inside the Iranian Embassy on Princes Gate overlooking Hyde Park.
This is about them. Yet it is also about us.
Somehow, on our comfy sofas back in 1980, we seemed to know – even if we couldn’t articulate it – that something fundamental was changing.
THIS IS The Real Life Hostage Drama You Won’t Believe Isn’t Fiction, says the Waterstones email that bounces into my account, announcing the publication of Ben Macintyre’s book, The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama.
As did Ben.
‘I remember it vividly,’ he says. ‘I was a teenager – 14 – watching the snooker with my dad.’
Bank Holiday Monday: Hurricane Higgins (unpredictable; colourful; lightning fast) versus Cliff Thorburn (slow, methodical): Hare and the Tortoise.
‘It was coming down to the final frame… I mean, I’d forgotten how much snooker was part of all of our lives. It was a kind of a celebrity sport: 14 million people glued to the box.’
Millions of people who, as they held their breath, suddenly found themselves watching a completely different series of frames.
‘[The TV screen] - as you know – swung away to this incredible scene of men in balaclavas assaulting a building in the middle of London in broad daylight, with Kate Adie crouched behind a car saying, ‘They’re going in’.’
Ha, yes! Remember how we were all so gripped by snooker in those days, flicking between four TV channels; channels that insisted on relaying news to us at set times of day (commentators already familiar – by the time they went on air – with exactly what they were going to say).
So different from today’s world of hand-held phones streaming live events on social media; of TV channels beaming 24/7 as news unfolds.
‘And of course,’ he adds, ‘I don’t know if you’re the same as this – I had for many years rather a simple idea of what had taken place that day.’
SO, WHAT DID take place that day?
Well, to revert: the ‘simple’ version is that, on April 30, 1980, six gunmen burst into the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate and took 26 hostages. Amongst these hostages were embassy staff, as well as visitors on badly timed visits. Three were British.
I can see why Waterstones suggest Ben’s book might be mistaken for fiction. Because – just like the white-building/black-suited footage of the storming of the embassy six days later – so much of what we, the public, knew of this remained firmly in black and white, too. A pencil-sketch of (in truth) a deeply colourfully complicated full portrait.
As Ben takes up his palette, we begin to see detail so vivid, we can practically taste the Persian coffee that Iranian doorman, Abbas Fallahi, offered to PC Trevor Lock at 11.18am that morning. Lock, an officer of the Diplomatic Protection Group, was technically guarding the embassy. (Did it really need guarding? Nodding to diplomats and other visitors, more like.) Lock should have refused the coffee (no eating or drinking on active duty); didn’t even like the strong, black, sweet brew. But he didn’t want to offend.
Which is why he wasn’t exactly where he should have been when a young man approached the half-open front door.
A student, Lock thought… Right until the moment he spotted the sub-machine gun.
No simple students they.
But who were these terrorists? And why were they there?
It’s a question Ben Macintyre (journalist; reviewer; columnist for The Times; meticulous researcher) answers fascinatingly over some 300 gripping pages. Towfiq Ibrahim al-Rashidi, an Iranian Arab – and the terrorists’ de facto leader – had been a foreign language student at the University of Tehran; particularly close to his elder brother, Naji. When he joined a student protest against the Shah, he was arrested, thrown into the notorious Evin Prison, beaten with an iron bar, and released without charge. He was optimistic when the Shah was overthrown; his optimism was misplaced.
After more protests, Towfiq’s brother Naji was arrested, tortured for a week, taken to the desert and shot.
Fowzi Badavi Nejad was another of the six: 22 years old and startlingly handsome. He’d seen Iranian security forces wipe out four friends with machine-gun fire. Fleeing, he’d stumbled over a small child soaked in blood. Despite his own mortal peril, he carried her to hospital: he never discovered if she survived.
If that narrative seems unduly sympathetic – after all, the actions of these terrorists resulted in the deaths of the innocent – then cave. Some of the hostages themselves went on not only to form an emotional bond with their captors over those six days; but even to try to offer protection during the siege.
Strange thing to pick up on, maybe. But this is why I say it: With the snooker match, you were on one side or the other. And it didn’t matter which; you just wanted yours to win. Human beings like uncomplicated stories.
‘So right. And this [siege] story, in the 40 years afterwards, has often been presented in an incredibly simplistic way – as if it really was a battle of good against evil. Brave, butch SAS guys going in. [B Squadron, 22 SAS: the secret force which stormed the building and brought the siege to an end.] A story of derring do.
‘If you asked anyone in the street – and I hope this doesn’t sound patronising – I think nine out of 10 people, if you said to them: ‘Who were the gunmen at the Iranian Embassy siege?’ would probably say, ‘Oh, well, they were fundamentalist Islamic extremists’.’
Whereas, of course, that is the reverse of the case. What these six men wanted was more autonomy for their homeland of Arabistan (AKA Khuzestan), a province of southwest Iran, bordering Iraq. A place of oppression, where the Arab inhabitants had been ‘robbed’ of their natural resources; (need we even mention the word ‘oil’?). They’d fruitlessly fought the Shah for independence; now they were fighting the Ayatollah.
Other powers in the region were happy to exploit their discontent. The names of Saddam Hussein and Abu Nidal are – as Ben describes – writ large in this story (if, at times, in invisible ink).
‘Look – I had to be so careful here because what I don’t want to do is glamorise [the terrorists’] cause. These were men of violence, who had knowingly signed up for an act that could – and, indeed, did – end in the deaths of innocent people, and one shouldn’t lose sight of that.
‘But they had their own stories; they had their own motives; they had their own reasons. Personal and political. And I think if we try to reduce….’
Exactly. We – I - love to divide the world into good and evil, where the heroes win and the villains are vanquished.
‘And, if we look back on history, it’s like moral accountancy. You have to say: slavery: bad, bad thing. Empire: not good any more. But history is much more complicated than that.’
And sometimes it’s difficult to bear in mind human psychology: the strange fact that people doing even hideously bad things can genuinely believe they have the moral high ground.
‘Well, look, this is ultimately a story of a clash: the Iranians against the Arab gunmen. It’s a clash between two sets of men who believe that they are in the right. Who believe that God is on their side on one side. And that history is on their side on the other.
‘They are absolutely adamant in their self-righteousness. They are prepared to use extreme violence to impose it on other people. Now, if you want to understand what is happening in Gaza today, there are worse places to start than 16 Princes Gate.
‘…Self-belief on a moral plane has caused more human suffering, in my view, than any other.’
THERE ARE ALL KINDS of bravery that become apparent in the telling of this story. Lock’s, for one (who manages – at great personal risk – to conceal a Smith & Wesson .38-calibre revolver from the gunmen. As a result, he consumes as little as he can to keep his supervised visits to the lavatory to a bare minimum). There’s Ron Morris, the embassy’s chief household steward, who never fails in his ability to make everyone a comforting cup of tea. (Believe it or not, there are some very funny moments in the story.) There are the outside negotiators, who suffer extremes of stress; the SAS themselves, of course.
(Even as I write this in 2024, a news item pops up: SAS soldier John Thompson, an SAS soldier involved in the ‘daring attack to free hostages’ has died at the age of 82.)
There’s moral courage, too.
We peak behind the scenes at Cobra to see the part Margaret Thatcher, Willie Whitelaw and Douglas Hurd played in all this. Thatcher sets a broad agenda (with defined limits): then the politicians say, ‘It’s over to you now [the negotiators; the psychologists; the police; the SAS]. You’re the experts….’
What’s radical is the next sentence: ‘We, the politicians, will take complete responsibility.’
Goodness. That’s a phrase that’s been in danger of disappearing from the English language in political theatre, hasn’t it?
‘Hasn’t it… Hasn’t it… Whitelaw said it. Thatcher said it to Peter De la Billière, head of the special forces there. He told her, before it happened: We think a good outcome would be getting these people released and only 40 percent of everybody involved either killed or injured.
‘And she said, ‘I’m telling you on my word that, if it goes wrong, it is my call. It is my responsibility.’’
Courage: It’s a subject Ben Macintyre ponders a lot.
Though he won’t say it himself, it took courage to write this book. ‘I found myself waking up in the middle of the night in a kind of inchoate fear. I didn’t know what I was frightened of: I think it was the impact of living in this terrifyingly tense moment: living and dreaming it; writing it the next day; researching it.’
But the question he asks himself constantly is a more visceral one.
‘I still cannot answer the question that I do subliminally ask of the reader. Which is: What would you do? Which of these people would you have been?’
After all, like the hostages swept up in a world-changing drama on April 30, 1980 (a drama that, for some, began with an ordinary mid-morning coffee), we never know what terrible events might challenge us. And how deep our reserves might be.
‘I know for damn sure I would never have been one of the SAS guys abseiling down the outside of the building,’ Ben says. ‘I don’t have that in me. But of the civilians inside there? Would I have been Trevor Lock?’
Would any of us…?
• The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama, by Ben Macintyre, is published by Viking, price £25 hardback.
• Ben is appearing at Stroud Book Festival on Saturday, November 9: stroudbookfestival.org.uk
