by Ben Macintyre, 2024
Most Americans remember the Iranian hostage crisis well, which occurred during President Jimmy Carter’s term. For those of you who were too young in the late 1970s, or who aren’t American on my subscriber list, 52 American citizens and diplomats were taken hostage in the US Embassy in Tehran by armed Iranian college students who supported the Iranian Revolution. It started in November of 1979 and didn’t end for 444 days, and was the darkest episode of Carter’s presidency.
Here in the US, we were so mesmerized by this ongoing event, and so frustrated over the failure of our government to quickly negotiate an end to it, that many of us were unaware of a simultaneous hostage crisis that took place in London, lasting 6 days. The Iranian Embassy in London was seized by six heavily armed Iranian Arabs in May of 1980, with the intention of capturing the Iranian ambassador and any other high-ranking Iranian officials working there. It didn’t occur to the terrorists that there would be other people conducting business in the embassy that day, and they ended up also taking hostage ordinary British citizens, Iranian secretaries and administrative assistants, switchboard and telex operators, journalists, a Pakistani tourist, and a British policeman. In all, 26 people were held hostage when, in reality, all they wanted were a handful of embassy officials.
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A new book, The Siege: A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World, by Ben Macintyre, has just been released that tells this true story in heart-stopping detail.
Trevor Lock, the British policeman in charge of guarding the embassy, was not the brightest bulb in the box. During his stint in the British army, he admitted that he “volunteered for deployment to Tripoli, in the mistaken belief that it was in Italy.” He carried a gun only because his position at the embassy required it, but didn’t believe he’d ever have reason to fire it. In fact, the embassy assignments were purely decorative, and were considered “the least stressful and most boring of all British policing.”
PC Lock had been on the job at the embassy for only 5 months when the terrorists stormed the building. Against guard duty protocol, he stepped away from his position at the door to get a cup of coffee and chat with some embassy employees. Just then, someone with a submachine gun blasted through the half-open glass front door, sending shards of glass into his face. All hell broke loose and chaos ensued as the terrorists moved in and took control.
It’s speculative to say that the siege may never have happened had Lock been situated in place and alert, with his 3 days of firearms training, against six men armed with machine guns. But one wonders if things might have played out differently if he saw them coming from a distance, recognized what he was seeing, and acted accordingly.
Once they had the building locked down and lines of communication were established between the terrorists and the police, they made their demands: 1) release of 91 political prisoners held by the Ayatollah Khomeini, 2) grant the legitimate rights of the original Iranian “Arabistan” people, and 3) within 24 hours, safe passage out of England via airplane for the terrorists and the hostages. If their demands were not met, they would start shooting hostages.
In May of 1980, Margaret Thatcher had been prime minister for less than a year, and was already being tested heavily by the bloody battles with the IRA. The Irish terrorists would be watching, and judging her resolve by what happened at the Iranian Embassy. The problem was, these Iranian gunmen were demanding something that Thatcher could not deliver: release of political prisoners in another, hostile country over which she had no control. In addition, she had no intention of allowing the gunmen to leave the country scot-free. They would not get what they wanted. So the police had virtually no room to negotiate—an impossible situation.
Several of the hostages were journalists, and as the shock of the initial break-in wore off, they did what journalists do: they kept moment-by-moment diaries of everything that was taking place—detailed descriptions of the terrorists, how they interacted with each other and with the hostages, how the emotions would ebb and flow, etc. This must have been a godsend for the author, to have such detailed, first-hand accounts of what went on inside the embassy. Then, the author managed to unearth detailed accounts of the inner workings of Scotland Yard, MI5, MI6, the Special Air Service (SAS), and the Metropolitan Police, and how all these disparate teams came together to make an intricate plan, go about hostage negotiations, and make their final assault on the embassy.
Because of the phalanx of press corps that had set up camp outside the embassy and spilling into Hyde Park, the final resolution to the crisis played out on live BBC television, a spectacle on par with our own OJ Simpson’s white Bronco chase, on split-screen with the NBA finals. Millions watched as troopers stormed the building, something never before seen in the UK.
To say that I highly recommend this book because it’s a true story, a riveting story, and you won’t be able to put it down is one thing. But there’s another, deeper reason to read it and fit this event into our understanding of the bigger picture. The author draws historical connections between the centuries-old Iran-Iraq conflicts, this embassy siege in London, the hostage crisis in Tehran, the two Persian Gulf wars, and the 9/11 attacks that took place in the US. Getting a historian’s perspective on the region is invaluable.
Ben Macintyre, one of my favorite nonfiction authors, has also written A Spy Among Friends (about the famous Russian double-agent Kim Philby), The Spy and The Traitor (another true spy story), Operation Mincemeat (the intelligence operation that was the turning point of WWII), and Double Cross (a D-Day spy story). All are riveting true stories that I highly recommend. The Siege has become a new favorite because it occurred during my lifetime and I can say “Hey, I remember that! I was living in Dallas when that happened.”
