HISTORY
The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama
Ben Macintyre
Viking, $36.99
It takes me about 11 minutes to walk to the train for my commute into town. This, according to Ben Macintyre, is the amount of time that in April 1980 was needed by soldiers of the British SAS regiment to storm the Iranian embassy in London and rescue 19 hostages and kill or capture six heavily armed gunmen. One hostage was killed by the terrorists during the assault and two others were wounded.
Author and historian Ben Macintyre.Credit: Getty Images
“The Iranian Embassy Siege gripped the world, and immediately entered national mythology in Britain,” writes Macintyre, the author of a history of the SAS, among others. “For millions it became a historical watershed, a ‘where-were-you-when-it-happened’ moment, like the JFK assassination or 9/11.”
The spectacular assault was broadcast live on television at around the same time as the final match of the World Snooker Championship was being played between Cliff Thorburn and Alex “Hurricane” Higgins. In an epic contest notable for the tension and rancour it produced, the mercurial Higgins eventually succumbed to the relentless Thorburn.
The SAS, meanwhile, took enormous risks. The operation was complicated by the fact that security at the embassy had been upgraded following consultation with the regiment itself. “The Iranians had followed SAS security advice to the letter: the building was virtually impregnable from the ground.” As Macintyre describes, at any moment the mission could have gone disastrously wrong. One soldier had a target firmly in his sights only to have the gun jam. Another soldier abseiling down the outside of the embassy building became entangled in his rope above a fire, resulting in severe burns.
The SAS were helped by the fact that the terrorists, who were from a separatist Arab-speaking region of Iran and had been armed and assisted covertly by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, were poorly trained and led. The Iranian revolutionary government, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, had no interest in responding to the demands of the gunmen, and encouraged the Iranians among the hostages to embrace martyrdom.
Although the gunmen’s cause was little known, Macintyre sees continuities in our world: “The underlying forces that produced the crisis in London more than 40 years ago still agonise and destabilise our world, from Gaza to Iran to Ukraine.”
Near the end of the assault, when the hostages were being bundled out of the burning embassy, the difference between triumph and tragedy came down to the terrorist who forgot to pull the pin on the grenade he was holding just as he was identified and promptly shot dead.
“Few events in modern British history,” writes Macintyre, “are so heavily mythologised (and misunderstood) as the Iranian Embassy Siege.” Among those who tried to get involved was Prince Andrew. “The young royal wished to be where the action was. He wanted to see the drama unfolding. And he was used to getting what he wanted.” Sensibly, the prince was kept well away.
Macintyre writes that the historian of the siege has work to do in separating fact from fiction since “many people have recounted, or added to, the story without being directly or even peripherally involved”. The recollection of events varies among genuine participants, and Macintyre admits to making choices among competing memories: “A few interviewees will feel short changed,” he cautions.
He melds myriad disparate sources into a seamless narrative. Like countless other sports fans at the time, the soldiers were absorbed by the drama of the snooker final. “Most of the SAS contingent were rooting for Higgins,” notes Macintyre. “Something about this twitchy, tough, turbulent character chimed with the spirit of B Squadron.”
Reading this book felt like watching a well-made action movie that takes over your imagination to the extent that you feel part of that world somehow even after you have left the cinema. During the siege, one of the British hostages picked up a copy of Frederic Forsyth’s thriller The Day of the Jackal and read the whole book. “Bloody excellent,” was the verdict of Ron Morris, who was an embassy employee.
The suspense of The Siege may be likened to Forsyth’s gripping fact-based fiction about a plot to assassinate the French president – the reader knows what happened in real life yet is caught up in the skill and energy of the storytelling.
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