Forty-one-year-old Police Constable Trevor Lock was at his usual post, guarding the Iranian embassy in London, on the morning of April 30, 1980. At 11.36 he noticed a young man whom he took to be “another Iranian student” approaching the building. “Then”, writes Ben Macintyre, “he saw the sub-machine gun.”
The “student” fired a round that shattered the half-open glass security door and lacerated PC Lock’s face. Joined by two other armed men, he rushed inside, and soon three more armed confederates arrived. Thus begins Macintyre’s perfectly paced and thrilling account of the six-day standoff between the British government and young zealots seeking justice for their fellow Arabs in the Iranian province that they called Arabistan and Persians knew as Khuzestan. Thirty-one people – diplomats, local staff, journalists and visa applicants – were in the building when the gang began rounding them up and threatening their lives. Five managed to escape in the initial confusion, leaving twenty-six as hostages to be bargained against ninety-one political prisoners in Iran. The new Islamic government in Iran refused to consider making concessions, and Margaret Thatcher’s year-old administration would not grant the terrorists safe passage out of the country with their hostages.
The dual rebuff left the police little bargaining room. Scotland Yard’s deputy assistant commissioner, John Albert Dellow, sought above all to bring the crisis to a peaceful conclusion without loss of life. Macintyre presents hi, as a conscientious cop doing his job. His chief hostage negotiator was another policeman, Frederick Luff. Luff, a committed and strict Christian, resembled the hostage-takers in being “neither calm nor stable”. Nonetheless, he used classic hostage mediation methods to prolong discussions with the gunmen and to give the police and SAS time to secure the adjoining buildings on the Prince’s Gate terrace, bore holes into the walls to monitor conversations inside and determine the exact location of hostages and terrorists.
As the story unfolds readers come to know not only Luff and Dellow (whose handmade shoes “he polished to a dazzling shine every Sunday”), but the terrorists, the captives and the SAS soldiers who would eventually rescue them, as well as the spouses of soldiers, policemen and hostages who waited anxiously to know whether those they loved would return home or die. Police cut the embassy’s communications and kept a field phone open between Luff and the group’s leader, twenty-seven-year-old Towfiq Ibrahim al-Rashidi, nom de combat…
THE SIEGE
The remarkable story of the greatest SAS hostage drama
400pp. Viking. £25.
Ben Macintyre
To read the full review visit the TLS website here.
