HISTORY
The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama
Ben Macintyre
Viking, $36.99

It takes me about 11 minutes to walk to the train for my commute into town. This, according to Ben Macintyre, is the amount of time that in April 1980 was needed by soldiers of the British SAS regiment to storm the Iranian embassy in London and rescue 19 hostages and kill or capture six heavily armed gunmen. One hostage was killed by the terrorists during the assault and two others were wounded.

“The Iranian Embassy Siege gripped the world, and immediately entered national mythology in Britain,” writes Macintyre, the author of a history of the SAS, among others. “For millions it became a historical watershed, a ‘where-were-you-when-it-happened’ moment, like the JFK assassination or 9/11.”

The spectacular assault was broadcast live on television at around the same time as the final match of the World Snooker Championship was being played between Cliff Thorburn and Alex “Hurricane” Higgins. In an epic contest notable for the tension and rancour it produced, the mercurial Higgins eventually succumbed to the relentless Thorburn.

The SAS, meanwhile, took enormous risks. The operation was complicated by the fact that security at the embassy had been upgraded following consultation with the regiment itself. “The Iranians had followed SAS security advice to the letter: the building was virtually impregnable from the ground.” As Macintyre describes, at any moment the mission could have gone disastrously wrong. One soldier had a target firmly in his sights only to have the gun jam. Another soldier abseiling down the outside of the embassy building became entangled in his rope above a fire, resulting in severe burns.

The SAS were helped by the fact that the terrorists, who were from a separatist Arab-speaking region of Iran and had been armed and assisted covertly by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, were poorly trained and led. The Iranian revolutionary government, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, had no interest in responding to the demands of the gunmen, and encouraged the Iranians among the hostages to embrace martyrdom.

Although the gunmen’s cause was little known, Macintyre sees continuities in our world: “The underlying forces that produced the crisis in London more than 40 years ago still agonise and destabilise our world, from Gaza to Iran to Ukraine.”

Near the end of the assault, when the hostages were being bundled out of the burning embassy, the difference between triumph and tragedy came down to the terrorist who forgot to pull the pin on the grenade he was holding just as he was identified and promptly shot dead.