ISBN: 978-0593728093, Crown, September 2024, 400 pages, $22.35 (Hardcover)
Reviewed by: Scott E. McIntosh, Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies, Anchorage, Alaska, United States
It is hard to overestimate the importance of 1979. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in response to a perceived threat to a neighboring socialist regime; militants had taken over the holiest site in Islam—the Grand Mosque in Mecca; a mob of students had seized the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan; and, in November, another student-led swarm had rolled over the walls at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and seized 66 American hostages. There appeared to be a large number of angry people in the Islamic world, and they were increasingly attacking institutions in which security was assumed under the aegis of sovereignty and the international rule set. It was an exciting time to be a 15–30-year-old male with few opportunities and therefore little to lose if someone with an agenda put an automatic rifle in your hands and a cause in your heart.
The same year, however, in May, Margaret Thatcher moved into Number 10 Downing Street and, as Ben Macintyre describes in his latest book The Siege, this rising trend toward terror and grievance soon collided with her government in London. Macintyre, a columnist at The Times and award-winning author of 15 books, has had several of them adapted into BBC documentaries and cinematic films. Taken in aggregate, his works are well received not only by historians—especially those who emphasize military and intelligence events—but they have also served to flesh out some of the more blurred events of the twentieth century. His research and reporting on the 1980 Iranian embassy siege are therefore most welcome.
The people who seized Iran’s London embassy were not the same militants who deposed the Shah, and in fact, they employed their terror in opposition to the Ayatollah’s regime. The situation was far more complicated than the simple adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Before rolling into the whole-of-government effort, the British security apparatus kicked off to cope with it, and Macintyre does the due diligence of attempting to explain it. To sum up, a minority of Arabistan separatists from Iran’s province of Khuzestan, trained and supported by Saddam Hussein’s intelligence enterprise, sought to wrench their Arab minority population out from under the new theocratic regime in Tehran; taking over that regime’s embassy inside a sophisticated Western nation was their communication channel to the rest of the world.
Indeed, as the book points out, the location for this attack seemed ideal:
Many Iranian Arabs held Britain responsible for their plight: the British government had supported the semi-independent sheikhdom of Arabistan before switching allegiance to Reza Shah in 1925. The group would pass unnoticed among London’s large Middle Eastern population … [And] London was packed with journalists and other members of media organizations, domestic and international, who were not controlled by the government (p. 33).
And, on 30 April, six of them took the Iranian embassy and 26 hostages; they demanded the release of political prisoners in their home province and safe passage to a more hospitable location in the Islamic world.
British intelligence and law enforcement had for years studied the lessons learned from the 1972 Olympic Village attack in Munich and “had drawn up contingency plans for a similar event in the UK, along with a set of basic principles: terrorism should be treated as a crime and prosecuted in Britain; police would handle tactics during any hostage-taking incident, but the controlling strategic role would be exercised by the government, through the home secretary. If all else failed, the incident might be terminated with an assault by an armed force, trained and equipped specifically for the purpose: the SAS” (p. 41).
One of Macintyre’s most famous books is 2016’s Rogue Heroes, in which he narrated the origins and early history of the Special Air Service, a notoriously tight-lipped community, so one would assume he began culling some of his previous sources in the community to produce his rigorous analysis of their performance in the 1980 siege. His other histories, concentrated on British intelligence episodes, are equally interesting and readable—particularly those on Kim Philby, A Spy Among Friends (2015), and Macintyre’s 2013 account of the Allied Double Cross deception operation that fooled the Nazis into putting more defensive assets into Calais than Normandy before the invasion.
While the SAS accounts in The Siege grab the reader’s attention, especially when the narrative shifts from anxious waiting to rappelling into the embassy and clearing rooms, his descriptions of the UK’s planning, intelligence collection, logistics, and information aspects of the operation are no less poignant and interesting. The negotiation and media relations tasks—not to mention clearing protesters out of the neighborhood—were no less important than inserting acoustic listening devices or blowing out walls to lob gas and flash-bangs into the building. Most readers know how this event played out—five terrorists killed, one in prison for 27 years afterward, and two hostages lost—but Macintyre is still able to amp up the tension as he describes the hostages’ conversations, the deliberations of the Thatcher government, and its interactions with the diplomatic corps in working toward a hopefully bloodless outcome. The book, by necessity, tightens the aperture around the six days—and it reads like a true crime account as the minutes tick away toward the SAS assault. There is such a volume of good material here that Macintyre likely was advised to cut quite a bit to keep the work within 365 pages. National security and law enforcement professionals, though, would doubtless prefer to see more on the peripheral events both upstream and downstream of these six days. The period from the 1960s to the 1980s experienced multiple terror and hostage events. Within the parameters of unclassified documents, what lessons learned and best practices from previous events most influenced the Thatcher government in this case? What gems lay in the after-action reports from The Siege—the takeaways—that influenced later responses to similar events? If a reader’s biggest gripe, though, is that they want more, I would consider this work a success.
