Who Dares Wins: Ben Macintyre on the Iranian Embassy Siege
When members of the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan (DRFLA) bundled PC Keith Lock into the doorway of 16 Prince’s Gate and captured the Iranian Embassy, taking 26 people hostage, they set in motion events that would have a profound impact on Britain’s response to terror. Six days later the siege was over, with five of the six dead, but the storming of the building had been watched live on TV by around 14 million, most of who had been watching the nail-biting climax to the Embassy World Snooker Championship final between Alex Higgins and Cliff Thorburn (Thorburn won 18-16).
Prior to 5th May, few had heard of the Special Air Service. Perhaps some were familiar with the exploits of David Stirling and Paddy Mayne, but that was probably it. Afterwards, the SAS were a household name gaining an almost mythical status with the British public. Their status was further solidified by vital operations in the Falklands two years later, and the ongoing action against their nemesis, the IRA, meant they were often on the front pages. In addition, Margaret Thatcher had proven herself a formidable adversary to violent opponents, and would be tested again by the hunger strikers in the H Blocks of the Maze a year later, and by the Argentine junta in 1981. She would not back down with any.
None of these factors had been anticipated in any way by the leader of the DRFLA when plans were laid in Iraq, alongside the Iraqi intelligence service and the elusive mastermind Abu Nidal. Arabistan is an oil-rich province in Iran, and in 1980 the DRFLA were attempting to gain autonomy for the region, after years of oppression first by the Shah, and then by the new theocratic regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. Manipulated into the action by the Iraqis, the terrorists had thought Britain would be a soft touch. When reading Ben Macintyre’s quite brilliant The Siege, one comes away with sympathy for the six, even if they did murder a hostage (Abbas Lavasani).
“I think if you asked anybody in the street who were the gunmen who went into that embassy, and this doesn’t sound patronizing, but nine out of 10 would say, these were Islamic fundamentalists bent on doing a bad thing in Britain. That was not true…One has to see the historical context of it for a start, which is that the revolution in Iran had taken place in 1979. The Ayatollah and an extreme fundamentalist government had come to power. In the Iranian embassy in London, the representatives of that power, the Ayatollah’s men, were in charge…They were Arab Iranians who were fighting for greater autonomy in the southwestern part of Iran, which is called Khuzestan. It’s the oil-rich area and the Arabs there, there are some four million of them, had always felt like a beleaguered minority in Iran.
“When the revolution came along, they supported the [it] wholeheartedly against the Shah, believing, and indeed they were promised, that they would win political rights as a result. Now, that did not happen and the Ayatollah’s security services clamped down on the Arab protests in Khuzestan in the most brutal way. Hundreds were killed.
“That helped to create a violent guerrilla movement on the part of these Arabs, so that was really what they were doing. They were attacking the Iranian embassy because they believed that they would get a good hearing in Britain. They believed that Britain would help them force the Ayatollah to release political prisoners in Iran and they would take hostages, but those hostages would be Iranians representing a regime that they opposed. They would hold them hostage for 24 hours and then they would fly home. That was their plan. They did not anticipate a six day siege. And so in a way that’s already, to me, more interesting than a story about bad fundamentalists going in with suicide vests. Each of those six gunmen had their own backstory. They’re all interesting humans. I’m not defending them, they were men of violence, but they all had reasons, as they saw it, for doing what they were doing.”
The organisation’s demands of Iran were restrained. It was not as though Arabistan was demanding independence. Added to that, they were ultimately pawns in a game orchestrated by Saddam Hussein. This is the tragedy for its people in that for all the attention the embassy siege drew, much of it went to the SAS, rather than the plight of the Arabistanis.
“It’s one of those accidents of history, really. Had the sheikhs of Arabistan managed to establish independence in the 1920s, that part of the world would be another Kuwait, another Qatar, another very rich petro-state. It ended up being part of a greater Iran. It’s almost unknown in the West. Although it continues to this day, there is still a sort of independence movement down there, heavily repressed by the Iranian state.
The other geopolitical element of this is that we’re talking about the run up to the Iran-Iraq war. These gunmen were bankrolled and trained by Saddam Hussein. For Saddam [it] was a very easy way to destabilise the hated Iranian regime next door. He was encouraging guerrilla tactics against the Iranians, and he was posing as the great leader of the Arab world. For him, this was a huge political advantage. [They] had been taken to training bases outside Baghdad where they were taught how to do what they were going to do.
“It was Abu Nidal, a Palestinian, extreme radical, at one point believed to have carried out more terrorist attacks than anybody else, who at that point in 1980 was working and living in Baghdad as a kind of freelance terrorist advisor to Saddam Hussein…In a way, the first battle of the Iran-Iraq war was being fought out in Kensington.”
The SAS had trained repeatedly for a moment like this. By the end of the fifth day the urge to storm the embassy was overwhelming. This proves to be a controversial moment for some, since once they did mount the assault, five terrorists were killed and the sixth was lucky to get out alive having been protected by some of the hostages. The commanding officer at the time was Michael Rose.
“Mike has been incredibly helpful on this. He was the one in charge of 22 SAS. He was on duty in Hereford Barracks when word came through. And he immediately deployed [his men], who were then on standby, to go to London. In fact, they began deploying before the politicians even knew what was happening. By sheer coincidence, really, one of the first policemen on the scene was a man called Dusty Gray, who had been in the SAS.
“In truth, actually, Oliver, I don’t think they thought it was going to happen. They had been stood up and stood down so many times. They had trained so often that [when] they climbed into those Range Rovers and headed to London, I would say 99 % of them thought, ‘well, we’ll be back home by the weekend. This is going to be another false alarm.’ There had been so many. So I don’t think they were overzealous. As time went on and as the siege progressed, they ended up being stationed in the building next door…I think the tension all around this story begins to ratchet up very dramatically…By the time we get to day six…some of them are straining on the leash. They’re ready to go.”
Rose is quoted in the book as saying the siege was the worst thing that could have happened to the SAS. I find this hard to believe given the mythical hold the unit has on the British imagination today, and that’s before we take into account the deterrent factor, excepting the IRA, and the increase in recruitment.
“It’s fascinating, isn’t it? There was not another hostage-taking incident in the UK, of any major political sort, after this. It made it clear that that’s not the way you do it. There are better ways of getting what you want. I think when Mike says that, what he’s really saying is that it utterly changed the perception of the SAS from the outside. They saw this huge spike in applications from people who were really not qualified to apply. People were turning up at recruiting centres and saying, ‘Give me a gun and a balaclava and I’ll go and take on the Ayatollah’s guys.’
“There was and is a very established system for applying for the SAS from within the existing armed forces. It wasn’t like they were crying out for recruits. I think what that really means is that they could no longer operate in the shadows after this. They could no longer be an invisible strike force deployed around the world to do interesting, dangerous, sometimes slightly questionable operations around the world. They were now in the glare of publicity. We still see it today. There’s a reason why, Who Dares Wins and Are You Tough Enough? where ordinary people dress up and try and be SAS soldiers. That’s because that myth has gone straight into the central cortex of British cultural life. It did mean that they were no longer stealth warriors. They were no longer these roguish types from the war who could slip in and slip out. The spotlight was on them and it’s still on them.
I think it changed the way that Britain in many ways perceived itself. The SAS became an emblem of sort of national pride for good and ill. That’s not necessarily something that was incredibly beneficial. Other foreign states began asking Britain to lend out the SAS when things like this happened. It’s one thing to have a standing force of SAS ready to deal with a terrorist incident on this country’s soil. It’s another to have a set of hired guns who are being sent, as it were, around the world to operate on behalf of other countries. That’s a slightly more complicated piece of moral juggling that has to go on there, particularly if you don’t know quite what the regime is that you’re helping out. So I understand what he means. The SAS became public property.”
For Margaret Thatcher the siege was an early test of her government, and she clearly refuses to bow down. A year later she was dealing with the hunger strikes, and then of course the Falklands in 1982. Was this a key stage in the hardening of the Iron Lady?
“Yes, very well put…This all takes place within the context of rising violence in Northern Ireland…She [writes] about this in her memoirs. She knows that what happens at the Iranian Embassy…it’s going to be looked at very closely by her opponents and by the IRA. They’re going to watch this very closely. Pretty much from the beginning, she makes it clear that these gunmen are not going to get what they want.
“Thatcher’s approach was, we’ll talk to them. We will allow them to broadcast their message. We will keep them talking. We will negotiate with them to a certain extent. We will even, if necessary, talk to intermediaries including diplomats and so on…But she made it actually clear from the beginning, they are not leaving this country. They have committed a crime on British soil. They will be tried on British soil. Now that’s all very well, but it didn’t give the police a lot to negotiate with.
“For Thatcher, this was a really important moment. The success of the Iranian embassy made its mark on her premiership ever afterwards. It was hailed as an absolute triumph in Britain. It was the moment when Mrs. Thatcher’s boys went in,the SAS became referred to as Thatcher’s army. You know, they emerged from almost total obscurity to being incredibly famous. And forever afterwards, know, every time Mrs. Thatcher did something particularly sort of aggressive or dramatic, she’d be pictured dressed as an SAS assailant wearing battle camouflage, abseiling down the outside of Big Ben.”
The Prime Minister would face challenges from terrorism throughout her premiership, largely from Irish terrorism, and most famously at the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984. She met her opponents head on, without compromise. It seems likely the Iranian Embassy siege provided her with a template.
Ben Macintyre is the author of The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama.
