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The siege of the Iranian Embassy in London was one of the first news stories to take place live in front of the TV cameras, and is most famous for the image of SAS troopers breaking into the Embassy from the balconies. In Britain the main long term impact of the siege was to make the SAS famous, after several decades in which it had been a rather shadowy part of the British Army, carrying out its operations away from the limelight.
This book looks at just about every angle of the siege. We follow the terrorists on their path from south-west Iran to London, via Iraqi training camps. We get a detailed day by day account of life within the besieged Embassy, and the experiences of the hostages. Outside the Embassy we follow the Police as they attempted to end the siege peacefully, the government as they decided how to handle it, the media as they reported on the siege (and found themselves attempting to find things to say on the quieter days!), and of course the SAS as they prepared to put into practice years of training for just this sort of incident.
Perhaps the author’s greatest achievement is to leave you feeling some sympathy for most of the terrorists. This starts with the look at their cause. They were from an Arab populated corner of south-western Iran (Khuzetan or Arabistan, depending on your side), which had joined the general uprising against the Shah but was then led down by the new Iranian regime. This triggered protests, which led to a bloody repression by the regime. Many of the six hostage takers had lost close family members. It continues when they fall into the hands of the Iraqi regime, and the infamous terrorist leader Abu Nidal, who manipulate them into carrying out the attack, but who had no intention of ever actually taking part in it themselves. It is clear that the six men who actually carried out the attack genuinely believed they would be allowed to broadcast their message and then leave the UK safely with some of the hostages. If they had carried out the attack a few years earlier that might even have been the case – embassy sieges had been surprisingly common during the 1970s, and on nineteen occasions the terrorists had been given safe passage to another country. However there were plenty of signs that this wouldn’t be the case here. There had been one previous embassy siege in the UK, when three Pakistanis seized hostages in the Indian High Commission in 1973 and demanded the release of prisoners. In this case the Police shot two and captured the third gunman. The occupation of the US Embassy in Teheran was still ongoing, and after the failure of a US rescue attempt the power to end it largely lay with the Iranian regime. Finally Mrs Thatcher had only recently become Prime Minister, and was extremely unlikely to give in to terrorist demands! It is unlikely that the hostage takers understood the political situation in Britain, or were aware of the 1973 event, but they must have known about the US embassy siege.
The sympathy is of course tempered by their actions. They had been surprised and disconcerted to find there were non-Iranians in the building – that hadn’t been part of the plan – but still chose to keep them as hostages. Once their message was eventually broadcast they had achieved a key part of their aim, and could have chosen to surrender. Finally, on what became the last day of the siege they killed one hostage, and were threatening to kill more.
On the outside it is interesting to see that the SAS had been preparing for exactly this sort of operation for years (since the hostage drama at the Munich Olympics), and spent much of their time practising for it in the Killing House, their specially adapted training building. The level of preparation for this operation is impressive, with a small scale model of the Embassy built, followed by one large enough to allow the troopers to actually train in! A great deal of effort went into planning how the SAS would break into the building, what they would do once inside, and how to get the freed hostages out safely, without also ‘rescuing’ any terrorist attempting to escape. Once the raid began things quickly went wrong, especially after one of the abseiling troops got stuck and ended up dangling above a fire for some time! Despite this, only one more hostage was killed during the operation (by one of the gunmen). One minor irony is that the only surviving terrorist was released after serving 27 years in prison and ended up living in exile in London, as he would almost certainly have been executed if he had been deported to Iran!
This is an excellent study of this famous incident, giving us a much wider view than the normal one of SAS daring (although with plenty of that thrown in!).
Chapters
Day One: Wednesday
1 – 16 Princes Gate
2 – The Group of the Martyr
3 – Cobra
4 – Grapplers
5 – Revolutionary Guard
Day Two: Thursday
6 – Eavesdroppers
7 – Cramer’s Gambit
8 – Twenty-five Hamburgers
9 – Operation Nimrod
Day Three: Friday
10 – Stockholm Syndrome
11 – One Woman and Her Dog
12 – This is Not a Drill
Day Four: Saturday
13 – One Thousand and One Nights
14 – The Nine O’Clock News
Day Five: Sunday
15 – Snooker
16 – Writing on the Wall
Day Six: Monday
17 – Yellow-card Rule
18 – Six Days
19 – One Hour
20 – Eleven Minutes
Author: Ben MacIntyre
Edition: Hardcover
Pages: 400
Publisher: Penguin/ Viking
Year: 2024