On a spring day in 1980, just short of a year after Margaret Thatcher’s election, a hapless but heavily armed gang stormed the Iranian Embassy in London. They took 26 people hostage during a six-day showdown that ended catastrophically for the gunmen, but magnificently for Thatcher, setting her up to battle the Irish Republican Army and invade the Falklands.
The prime minister gave her negotiators no runway for actual mediation. None of the militants’ demands could or would be met, she insisted, and they would not be allowed to leave Britain. She would prefer otherwise, but if hostages died, they died. “The episode cemented Margaret Thatcher’s reputation as an iron-willed leader, uncompromising and decisive,” Ben Macintyre writes in “The Siege,” his masterly account of the weeklong ordeal.
The story has been largely forgotten in America, which was consumed with its own Iranian hostage crisis at the time, but in Britain, Macintyre argues, it was a transformative event. The hostage crisis inspired films, memoirs, a video game and an Action Man figure, the British equivalent of G.I. Joe.
Still, it has never been recounted so pleasurably as it has been here. In Macintyre’s telling, the gunmen are sympathetic and deceived, idealists ensnared in a dark world of Middle Eastern trickery. They are Iranians of ethnic Arab origin, from Iran’s southwest province of Khuzestan, and they call themselves the Group of the Martyr. Some have endured rough treatment at the hands of the shah’s security forces. Like many of the minorities who ring Iran’s periphery, they want greater cultural and political rights from the central government.
As Iran descends into revolution, scores of Iranian Arabs are recruited by Saddam Hussein’s military and intelligence service. An agent called Sami the Fox introduces the eventual hostage takers to one another in a training camp outside Baghdad. “Britain is the seat of democracy,” the Fox assures the men, the perfect place for their operation, “where you can get a fair hearing.” Plus, the British police are not armed, he says. “They will not attack you.” The Fox deposits the men in a flat in Earl’s Court, provides cash for some luxury shopping on Oxford Street and escapes to Paris the morning of the raid.
The gunmen put on their smart new outfits and sneakers, and crash their way into the embassy, convinced that the encounter will last 24 hours and make them fast heroes. Puzzled British authorities race to figure out what they are up against. The land the gunmen seek to liberate, “Arabistan,” does not appear on any of their maps. “Not the ayatollah lot?” witnesses listening to police chatter from a nearby window ask one another. No, they conclude, “they’re the other lot that get into fights with the ayatollah lot on Sundays in the park.”
That turns out to be partly right: After the shah fell in the Iranian revolution, Arab Iranians had hoped that they might gain control of the oil-rich province where they lived, but as Ayatollah Khomeini took power and established the Islamic Republic, it became clear that was not going to happen. British authorities soon find out that the gunmen are seeking nothing less than the secession of an entire region of sovereign Iranian territory, along with the release of Iranian Arab prisoners in Tehran. None of this is within Thatcher’s power to give. The gunmen grow enraged and despondent. Realizing they have been duped by the Iraqis, they shrink their demands.
As with all of Macintyre’s books, “The Siege” is threaded with complex side characters and sharp subplots. One involves the destruction and replacement of Iran’s political elite following the 1979 revolution. Just over a year before the siege, Iran’s ambassador to the United Kingdom was the urbane Parviz Radji, an effective diplomat with an economics degree from Cambridge, who lunched with top Fleet Street editors and threw parties attended by senior officials, Ava Gardner and Princess Margaret. The Islamic Republic replaces him with Gholam-Ali Afrouz, a 29-year-old ideologue with a degree from Michigan State and no international experience. Afrouz’s first act as Tehran’s envoy is to destroy the embassy’s excellent wine cellar. The staff, holdovers from the shah’s era, are glum. The Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow has been sold. No one is sent on errands to Harrods anymore.
The Group of the Martyr, though devoted to the cause of Iranian Arab independence, are fatally Persian in their manners. They are solicitous of the hostages, and decorously polite. The militants dole out Valium in the evenings to ease their captives’ anxiety; wanting to be good hosts, they poll the hostages on whether they prefer English or Persian food before ordering a feast of kebab, stew and shepherd’s pie; they call the female embassy staff “khanoum,” the politest Persian form of address to a lady. These manners have also been absorbed over the years by Ron Morris, the long-serving British steward of the Iranian Embassy, who brews and serves tea throughout the siege, keeping to protocol: ladies first, then diplomats and staff members in descending order of rank.
Macintyre acknowledges that Operation Nimrod, the Special Air Service rescue raid that ended the siege, had its detractors. All but two of the hostages were saved, but some of the survivors originally testified that S.A.S. soldiers shot the gunmen after they had surrendered. (A jury concluded the killings were justifiable homicide.)
Dame Rebecca West, the veteran English journalist whose apartment overlooked the embassy’s private garden, observed the siege until she was forcibly evacuated. It formed the subject of her final dispatch, Macintyre writes, at the age of 87. It was, she wrote, the “most disgusting and humiliating experience of my life,” also “one of the most glorious episodes in British history.”
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