Every Bottle down the Drain

In​ the late morning of 30 April 1980, I left my flat at 90 Westbourne Terrace, near Paddington Station, to walk across Kensington Gardens to the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate. I wanted a visa to visit Iran, where the US raid to rescue staff held hostage in its embassy in Tehran had failed disastrously a few days earlier. As I walked, trying to work out what to say to the Iranian press attaché to persuade him to give me a visa, I didn’t at first notice that something odd was happening between the Serpentine and Princes Gate, where people were milling about and the police were setting up a cordon. I asked one of them if I could get through to the embassy. He seemed surprised that I didn’t know what was going on. ‘You don’t want to do that,’ he said. ‘That’s where all the trouble is.’

I waited in the park. It emerged that the embassy had been taken over by gunmen, though their identities and demands were still unknown. I guessed that they must have some connection with the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran, which was what the newly created government of the Islamic Republic of Iran also believed. These were the first uncertain moments of the six-day siege. Since then, it has become one of the most heavily reported British stories of the last half-century, with every detail of what happened inside and outside the building examined and re-examined in books, articles and documentaries. The rescue of all but two of the hostages by the SAS immediately became a legendary example of British military success, much like the Dambusters raid on Germany in 1943. That raid owed its iconic status largely to the classic film about it in 1955; the SAS abseiling down the walls of the embassy was on TV as it happened. Ben Macintyre has written a fast-paced, heavily researched, highly readable book about the personalities and actions of the gunmen, hostages, police, SAS, government and everyone else caught up in the siege. He describes in detail how six young Arab Iranians opposed to Ayatollah Khomeini – all from the oil province of Khuzestan in south-west Iran, where protests had been violently suppressed by the new revolutionary government – stormed the embassy, seized 26 hostages and made a series of demands for the release of 91 people being held in Iranian prisons as well as regional autonomy for Khuzestan. These demands could have been met only by the government in Tehran, which had no intention of complying. The book relates the British response to the hostage crisis, culminating in the SAS’s assault on 5 May. Macintyre writes that the story of the siege was ‘presented afterwards as a straightforward morality tale of military daring, civilian bravery, patient police work and wicked foreign terrorists bent on mayhem’. In reality, as he says, the events were more complicated. Most of what he writes has long been known, but the drama remains as gripping as ever.

At about 11 a.m. on 30 April, the six men gathered near the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens. They looked like any group of students or tourists from the Middle East, wearing smart trainers, anoraks and red and white or black and white keffiyehs. They walked towards the embassy, five hundred yards away, pulling their keffiyehs over their faces as they got close. Inside the embassy, Police Constable Trevor Lock of the Diplomatic Protection Group had just accepted a cup of coffee from the Iranian doorman when he saw what he thought was an Iranian student approaching the half-open front door. As the young man reached the front steps, he produced a sub-machine gun and opened fire. ‘The first bullet smashed through the glass security door, sending shards flying into Lock’s face. As he staggered backwards, the gunman fired another volley of shots, shouting in Arabic. The coffee cup and saucer smashed on the marble floor.’ Lock didn’t have time to draw his revolver, which he was to keep concealed throughout the siege, but he did manage to press the button on his radio sending out an alert to Scotland Yard that an emergency was underway. Within minutes the embassy was surrounded by police.

Police outside the Iranian embassy in London, 1 May 1980.

The gunmen expected that their hostages would all be Iranian embassy staff, but among the visitors present that morning were two BBC journalists who had come to apply for visas, a student, a banker, two Pakistani tourists, a Syrian-born journalist and an Iranian rug merchant who had come to see the embassy medical officer. The diversity of the captives didn’t end there, since many of the embassy staff, including the doorman serving coffee, had been inherited from the shah’s regime, overthrown in the revolution led by Khomeini the year before. All the diplomats, however, were former dissidents against the shah’s rule, including the chargé d’affaires, Gholam-Ali Afrouz, who had studied psychology and education at Michigan State University before returning to Iran, where he was arrested and imprisoned by Savak, the shah’s ferocious secret police. On coming to London, he had sold off the embassy’s Rolls-Royce and poured every bottle from its wine cellar down the drain. Macintyre is unsympathetic towards the newly appointed revolutionary diplomats, the chief target of the hostage takers, describing Afrouz as ‘a sleek, self-satisfied opportunist with a paunch’. The deputy press attaché, Abbas Lavasani, who was to be shot in the head and his body dumped outside the embassy door, thereby precipitating the SAS assault, is dismissed as a ‘spy’ and ‘fundamentalist fanatic’.

Macintyre shows more empathy for the men who took over the embassy, presenting them as sincere and determined, but naive: they didn’t realise they were on a suicide mission. Mustapha Karkouti, the politically sophisticated Syrian journalist resident in London who was the only one of the hostages to speak Arabic and English as well as some Farsi, saw them as ‘amateurs’ far out of their depth. He noticed that they had expensive watches and other luxury items – bought in London during a shopping spree a few days earlier – suggesting that they expected to go home at the end of it. They were not fanatics, but ‘idiots’ who had been ‘sent here to die’. Towfiq Ibrahim al-Rashidi, their leader, came from a well-off family in the shipping business in Khorramshahr, an Iranian port across the Shatt al-Arab waterway from Iraq. He had studied at Tehran University and was arrested under the shah; he still had scars on his back after being beaten with an iron bar by Savak. Soon after Khomeini took over, the anti-shah coalition that had toppled him fragmented into warring factions. As the Islamic Republic stabilised itself, it moved to crush Arab irredentists in Khuzestan, whom it saw as a danger to the revolution and – not entirely mistakenly – as cat’s-paws of Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq. Iranian Arab protesters were shot down in the streets of Khorramshahr and Towfiq’s brother Naji was betrayed, captured and executed. Towfiq escaped to Iraq, where he was selected by the Mukhabarat as an ideal recruit for special operations abroad.

The Iraqi connection is usually the most neglected part of accounts of the siege, since it complicates an otherwise straightforward tale. Yet the operation was wholly planned and organised by Saddam’s intelligence service, right up to the moment the gunmen burst into the embassy. Macintyre recognises that ‘war between Iran and Iraq was looming, and the opening battle was being fought inside 16 Princes Gate.’ In fact, it wasn’t the opening battle: the embassy seizure was one of a rapidly escalating series of violent incidents staged by Iraq in the first half of 1980, leading up to its full-scale invasion of Iran on 22 September. Some years later, I read a declassified message from an agent in Baghdad working for the Defence Intelligence Agency, the intelligence arm of the Pentagon, sent on 8 April, three weeks before the Iranian embassy takeover. ‘There is a 50 per cent chance that Iraq will attack Iran,’ the agent wrote (his name is blacked out but he was evidently well connected with the Iraqi elite). ‘Iraq has moved large numbers of military personnel and equipment in anticipation of such an invasion.’ Skirmishes had already begun: two days earlier, an Iraqi commando unit had fired rockets at an Iranian oilfield. The agent finished by saying that Iraq’s leaders believed that ‘the Iranian military is now weak and can be easily defeated.’

Hostility between Iraq’s Sunni Arab regime and Shia Iran was deepening by the day. On the same day the DIA agent made his report, Saddam had ordered the execution of the revered Iraqi Shia cleric Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and his sister, Bint al-Huda. On 5 April, he made an angry speech defining the coming conflict as one between ‘the Arabs and the Persians’, denouncing Khomeini as ‘a shah in a turban’. I had been in Baghdad and Tehran in the months before the siege, but I didn’t fully realise how close the two countries were to all-out war. Saddam’s foreign policy had previously been cautious, making concessions to the shah in order to end the Kurdish rebellion, so it seemed unlikely that he would invade a neighbour boiling with revolutionary fervour which had three times the population of Iraq.

Further proof about the extent of Iraqi involvement in the events in London came later. Macintyre quotes a defector from Iraqi intelligence who revealed that the man who ‘“trained, equipped and directed” the operation was a senior officer in Directorate Four of the Mukhabarat. His name was Fowzi al-Naimi.’ The hostage takers were briefly trained in the use of weapons at a camp on the outskirts of Baghdad. An Iraqi intelligence officer took them to London, gave them each £700 in cash, and supplied them with sub-machine guns, semi-automatic pistols and grenades brought to the UK in the Iraqi embassy’s diplomatic bag. If captured, he told them, they should not tell ‘the police you have come from Baghdad. Say you came from Tehran or Lebanon.’

Why did the Iraqi government make so little effort to hide their involvement? Why did the British security services not pick up on what was being plotted? After all, the Iraqi government already had a gruesome track record in London; less than two years earlier, in July 1978, a former Iraqi prime minister, General Abdul Razzaq al-Naif, seen as a political enemy by Saddam, was shot and killed as he left the Intercontinental Hotel in Park Lane. Even after the embassy siege, Iraqi intelligence remained cavalier about its activities in the UK. In June 1982, three Palestinian gunmen shot and gravely wounded Israel’s ambassador to the UK on the orders of Iraqi intelligence, later depositing their weapons at the Iraqi embassy. I am not suggesting British government complicity with the Iraqis, but this tolerance of deadly operations in central London seemed strange at the time and still does. Macintyre says there was a Mukhabarat cell of four agents stationed at the Iraqi embassy.

The explanation might be that at the height of the economic boom in the Middle East, caused by oil price rises after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the British government was determined to keep in with a big oil exporter such as Iraq. After the fall of the shah, Iraq had an additional attraction as a potential ally against Khomeini. Blaming Iraq too vigorously for orchestrating the attack on the Iranian embassy would have had clear disadvantages. It may also be that Saddam believed that an Iraqi-backed seizure of Iranian diplomats, replicating more or less exactly what had happened to the US embassy in Tehran, would impress Washington, demonstrating Iraq’s value as an ally.

Failure to foresee what Iraq might be up to was the main British lapse during the crisis in London, where police and military operations tended to run smoothly. This efficiency probably owed a lot to the authorities’ experience of the IRA’s campaign of assassinations and bombings. A year earlier, the Irish National Liberation Army had placed a sophisticated bomb in the car of a prominent Conservative MP, Airey Neave, killing him as he drove out of the House of Commons car park. Also in 1979, the Provisional IRA had killed Lord Mountbatten, uncle of Prince Philip, with a bomb on his boat. The bewildered young men in the Iranian embassy were scarcely of the same calibre as the IRA.

Macintyre gives a step-by-step account of developments inside the embassy. The hostage takers repeatedly set deadlines – on the expiry of which they said they would start to kill their captives – only to delay every time they were promised a minor concession. Cut off and exhausted, their only contact with the outside world was via field telephone with negotiators, who were never going to meet their demands but would also never categorically turn them down, so as to avoid precipitating a final crisis. The gunmen were eager to have their demands – the release of prisoners, autonomy for Khuzestan – read out on the BBC, for which they had a high respect, having listened to the World Service for years under the shah. (After decades of cuts, would the BBC carry the same authority today?) For them, the optimum outcome would have been a repeat of Carlos the Jackal’s takeover of the OPEC headquarters in Vienna in 1975, which ended with the hostage takers getting what they wanted and being flown out of Austria to a safe destination. Since the Iranian government was obviously not going to make any concessions, the only practical purpose of the siege was as a giant publicity stunt, to make the world aware of what was happening in Khuzestan. The more astute hostages knew the UK government was never going to let their captors walk free, so the affair was bound to end badly for everybody inside.

Macintyre introduces his book by calling it ‘a true story of people thrust into a dangerous situation they could not control: a group of strangers who suddenly found themselves captive and besieged’. This is a well-tried formula for a bestseller, and The Siege is one of the best examples of the genre. It is full of interesting minutiae, such as the police and military takeover of the grand white stuccoed houses around the embassy. The police, having briefly considered the Albert Hall to the west of the embassy as their operational headquarters, moved into the Royal School of Needlework at 25 Princes Gate, but found that smoking was forbidden, for fear of damage to the delicate and ancient fabrics on display. The SAS took over the Royal College of General Practitioners right beside the embassy, which was to be their jumping-off point for an immediate assault if the gunmen started killing the hostages. A problem was that the embassy’s defences had been strengthened a few years earlier, with advice from the SAS. As a result, they faced reinforced armoured glass windows on the ground and first floors and an inner steel and glass door inside the main entrance.

A major question hanging over a book seeking to humanise a many-faceted story about a group of people who became involuntary actors in a historical crisis is the reliability of the informants. Any journalist who has interviewed eyewitnesses soon after a shooting or bomb blast will be suspicious if there is too much detail or if too many conversations are reported verbatim. Memories are just not that good. Minutes after a crisis has passed, people reimagine what they ought to have seen had they been looking in the right direction. Macintyre’s sourcing looks sound, but sometimes there are too many details for the account to be convincing. On one occasion, Roya Kaghachi, a senior secretary in the embassy who much preferred working for the old regime, is talking to Karkouti, the Syrian journalist. Karkouti asks her whether she preferred the shah’s ambassador, Parviz Radji, to his revolutionary replacement, Afrouz, who had been injured trying to escape at the start of the siege by jumping from a window twenty feet above ground. ‘Glancing across at the injured chargé d’affaires propped up in the corner, she sniffed: “There is no comparison whatsoever.”’ Karkouti did write a 345-page unpublished manuscript entitled ‘A Hostage’s Tale’, so presumably the description of the sniffing and glancing and the conversation comes from there. But since Macintyre’s book has no footnotes, it’s impossible to know how he knows what was said by captors and captives. Macintyre explains in his note on sources that ‘most of the source material for this book is secret, pseudonymous, unpublished or privately owned.’

Some of the conversations inside the embassy were picked up by bugs. The various branches of British security, sometimes unaware of one another’s activities, devoted much effort and ingenuity to inserting tiny microphones through the 22-inch-thick wall of the embassy and the 15-inch wall of the building next door. This required drilling holes by hand through granite and dense Victorian brick to avoid making a sound likely to alert the gunmen to what was going on. Fake roadworks were staged outside, to hide the noise of the drill. The aim was to come out behind an electric socket, so that the microphone would be hidden behind a piece of plastic. In the event, the field telephone which had been given to the gunmen for communications with the police, and which contained a permanently active bug, appears to have been the most useful listening device. On day six of the siege, it picked up three snippets of conversation in Arabic which, when translated, read ‘we do something before sunset … kill two or three or four … kill all by 10.’ Soon afterwards, the front door of the embassy opened and Lavasani’s corpse, wrapped in an orange blanket, was pushed onto the front steps.

Pictures of the SAS assault that immediately followed were seen by hundreds of millions around the world. The last eleven minutes have an iconic place in British collective memory. The SAS came to replace, to some degree, the RAF and the navy in British popular esteem. This was scarcely a healthy development, as the current inquiry into SAS death squads in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013 illustrates. The six gunmen at the embassy, of whom five were killed, gained little, since the fate of the Iranian Arabs in Khuzestan never became an international cause. Saddam Hussein proceeded with his disastrous invasion of Iran, starting a war that lasted eight years and left half a million Iraqis and Iranians dead. Britain’s successful rescue of most of the hostages was compared with the US failure in Iran days earlier, but the odds were hardly the same: the British siege took place in the heart of London, so to call this conclusive proof of British grit and effectiveness is rather a stretch. The British military’s performance in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was at best ineffectual and at worst disastrous. At 16 Princes Gate in 1980, the enemy was a handful of brave but befuddled young men manipulated by Iraqi intelligence, though I suppose a victory is still a victory.