The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama
BOOK REVIEW: THE SIEGE: A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and The Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World
By: Ben Macintyre/Crown
Reviewed by: Nick Fishwick
The Reviewer — Nick Fishwick CMG retired after nearly thirty years in the British Foreign Service. His postings included Lagos, Istanbul and Kabul. His responsibilities in London included director of security and, after returning from Afghanistan in 2007, he served as director for counter-terrorism. His final role was as director general for international operations.
REVIEW — Iran means trouble today and meant trouble four decades ago. The reign of the brutally autocratic but pro-western Shah was ended in 1979 and the reign of the ayatollahs, repression succeeding repression, began. In November that year Iranian students invaded the US Embassy, keeping 53 Americans hostage. In April 1980 a daring US special forces operation to free the hostages, authorised by President Jimmy Carter, failed ignominiously. Less than a week later, 6 young Iranian Arabs walked into the Iranian Embassy in South Kensington, London, fired a volley of machine gun bullets and told everyone in the building not to move. This included British security personnel and journalists, people from other countries, Iranian diplomats and at least one Iranian spy. The occupiers had been occupied, the hostage takers taken hostage.
Ben Macintyre, one of Britain’s greatest writers on security and intelligence history, describes what happened and why in his latest book, The Siege. He writes brilliantly and the book demands, not quite successfully in my case, to be read at a single nerve-grating sitting. His research appears to be exhaustive: I doubt that there was a single person he should have interviewed but didn’t; a single account he should have studied, but missed. He notices the moments of humour and irony. He brings to the subject an understanding of both international politics and human nature: the moral tension of the story comes from the way he makes the reader view both hostages and terrorists with both sympathy and revulsion. Because if you want a simple tale of good and evil, this is the wrong book for you.
I was a student at the time of the siege. What mattered for me as for most British people was that an act of terrorism had been spectacularly foiled by the daring of our special forces. It seemed curious to be doing this to save Iranian diplomats given that their new regime was already clearly dominated by anti-western nutcases, but that was a slightly uncomfortable detail. The main point had been to defeat terrorism. That was certainly how our then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, saw it.
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But a mere 44 years later, Macintyre’s discussion of the background to the siege gives one pause for thought. The terrorists deserve some sympathy. They were all in their twenties had often been tortured or witnessed terrible events because of their commitment to the freedom of Iranian Arabs, opposed by both Shah and ayatollah. They were not religious fanatics and most of the time treated the captives with decency. They did not want to kill any of them. They hoped to avoid death themselves. Ailing hostages were released. Indeed – Stockholm Syndrome at work – the non-Iranian captives seem to have had some sympathy for their captors. And Macintyre shows how the intense stress, fear, sleeplessness of the terrorists contributed to violent mood swings, especially of the leader Towfiq Ibrahim al-Rashidi.
Moreover, the terrorists were suckers, patsies. The history of secret intelligence is disfigured by cases where idealists have been exploited, deceived and discarded by a state service. Towfiq and his colleagues fled to Iraq after brutal repression of pro-Arabistan agitators by the authorities. They were picked up, recruited and trained by the Iraqi secret service, the Mukhabarat, advised by the ruthless Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. The young terrorists seem to have accepted Mukhabarat assurances that the hostage taking operation would not last more than a day or two, would score tremendous publicity for the cause of Arabs in Iran, and would end with their being escorted to Heathrow airport for safe passage. “British police are not armed”, they were assured. There is no reason to doubt that the Mukhabarat and Abu Nidal shared the terrorists’ concern for Arab rights in Iran and desire to punish the Iranian government. But they clearly could not care less whether any hostages or terrorists came out of the siege alive. They were playing a bigger game. The Iraq-Iran war, provoked by Iraq, was only four months away.
Macintyre takes us into the Embassy and helps us understand the terrorists: damaged, violent, confused, exhausted, stressed. We get to know the hostages. These include the police constable guarding the embassy when the terrorists shot their way in, PC Trevor Lock, who somehow kept a gun concealed from the terrorists throughout the five-day siege and seems to have been an extraordinarily level-headed officer. They include the Syrian Mustapha Karkouti, a pro-Palestinian journalist whose presence in the embassy, actually an unlucky accident, caused suspicion on all sides but who did a heroic job of calming down the terrorists. They include the hard-snoring Pakistan businessman Ali Gul; and Roya Kaghachi, whom anyone who has ever worked in an embassy would immediately recognise as the one person you don’t mess about: the ambassador’s personal assistant.
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On the sixth day of the siege the terrorists, close to cracking up, executed the embassy IRGC officer, Abbas Lavasani, and that evening they threw his body, wrapped in his trademark yellow cardigan, into the street. The SAS struck within an hour. They had been trained in hostage rescue for years, since the Munich Olympics, and had spent days practicing the rescue, being briefed, studying models of the embassy and its warren of rooms. Of course, the operation did not go smoothly, most famously with a soldier let down by his abseiling equipment, stuck outside a window while flames lapped at his legs. One hostage was killed and more could have been. But it is still difficult to imagine a hostage rescue being better executed than this.
The most unlikely survivor of the scene was the youngest terrorist, Fowzi Badavi Nejad, who seems to have spent much of the siege flirting with the female captives and was cowering with the hostages when the SAS burst in. He survived, was tried, and spent 27 years in a British prison. Apparently, he now lives in the U.K. I wonder what he does for a living. Probably works for a bookmaker or sells programmes for a local football club.
The story of the siege is of course well known. It has been told many times in print, including by some of the SAS men involved. There have been numerous TV documentaries. But if you want to understand what happened and why, this is the definitive account. Macintyre stands on the shoulders of the previous accounts, using new human and written sources. Above all he brings us to a clearer understanding of those involved in the siege, and of the politics that brought it about. I’d have liked him to develop his comment about “the direct historical link between [the siege]…the two Gulf Wars that followed and the 9/11 attacks.” Certainly the west’s patience with Saddam Hussein and his Mukhabarat, presumably because he was the enemy of our Iranian enemies, was remarkable, fateful and endured another ten years. But that is another story.
The Siege earns a prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats
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