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IN APRIL 1980SASSASSASSASTV Your browser does not support the element.By Ben Macintyre. gunmen stormed the Iranian embassy in London and took 26 hostages. The assailants were not Islamist fanatics. Nor was this in retaliation for the then-ongoing seizure of America’s embassy in Tehran by the nascent , which had taken power the previous year. Instead this was the work of a militant group, the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan, hoping to secure a homeland for Iranian Arabs in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan. Less than a week later their ambitions were crushed when Britain’s Special Air Service (), an elite group of soldiers (pictured), charged into the embassy.In “The Siege”, Ben Macintyre tells the story of that week. In doing so he captures much more: the febrile politics of the Middle East, torn between Iraq and Iran; the spectacle of modern terrorism and its interplay with a new kind of journalism, reported and filed in real time by satellite phone; the solidarity that appears among those trapped in situations of mortal danger. Mr Macintyre is the master of this sort of modern history. His previous books have included stories of and a history of the , which gained global renown after its televised role in the crisis.The book has a remarkable cast of characters. Trevor Lock, a police constable tasked with guarding the embassy, was absent from duty at a key moment when getting a cup of tea, enabling the gunmen to smash their way in. As a hostage he lived in fear that his firearm would be discovered. It hangs over the story like Chekhov’s gun: he refused to eat, lest a visit to the toilet require him to remove his jacket. Fred Luff, a police negotiator, was so traumatised by his experience that he had to be withdrawn. After the siege he was checked into a nursing home, endured a mental breakdown and became a missionary in Africa. Their stories have never been told in such colourful detail before.The perpetrators were callow young men driven by rage at the mistreatment of their families and compatriots in Khuzestan by the Shah of Iran and the new theocratic government. They were sponsored, encouraged and directed by ’s spies—the siege was the “opening shot” of the Iran-Iraq war that erupted months later, Mr Macintyre asserts—as well as Abu Nidal, a notorious Palestinian terrorist associated with the deaths of 1,000 people in 20 countries. In the Middle East then, as now, terrorist violence and wider geopolitics were intertwined.The siege was one of many blood-soaked episodes that emerged from the revolutionary ferment of the region at the time. It became famous in part because it turned into a media spectacle. One surreal moment came when the police frantically tried to stave off a visit by Prince Andrew, who was keen to see the action for himself. Pro- and anti-Iranian crowds jostled outside the embassy. “There were ten Ayatollahs hanging on the wall,” sang one group of right-wing skinheads, repurposing a campfire song. “And if one Ayatollah should accidentally fall…”The hostage crisis attracted “the largest gathering of news reporters since the queen’s coronation in 1953”. A journalist for the provoked envy by turning up with a then-newfangled portable telephone that cost the eye-watering sum of £1,000 ($5,400 in today’s money). He was upstaged by American journalists who filed reports by satellite phone at the cost of $150 per minute. It was, wrote , a spy novelist, “Action-Man personified, a bunch of 007s on a tight rein live on screen at peak viewing time”.This attention propelled the to fame. A group that began life as “jungle ruffians” in the second world war, covertly blowing up Nazi planes behind enemy lines, became front-page fodder. “Never again would the be able to operate in the shadows,” concludes Mr Macintyre. “The regiment has struggled to balance secrecy with celebrity ever since.”
