The Siege
A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World
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4.5 • 55 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“For six days, it was the Iranian Embassy on Princes Gate in London that riveted the world. . . . Macintyre’s superb reconstruction restores it to vivid, complex life.”—The Washington Post
A thrilling tick-tock recounting one of the most harrowing hostage situations and daring rescue attempts of our time—from the true-life espionage master and New York Times bestselling author of Operation Mincemeat and The Spy and the Traitor.
“[Ben Macintyre is] John le Carré’s nonfiction counterpart.”—The New York Times
As the American hostage crisis in Iran boiled into its seventh month in the spring of 1980, six heavily armed gunman barged into the Iranian embassy in London, taking twenty-six hostages. What followed over the next six days was an increasingly tense standoff, one that threatened at any moment to spill into a bloodbath.
Policeman Trevor Lock was supposed to have gone to the theater that night. Instead, he found himself overpowered and whisked into the embassy. The terrorists never noticed the gun hidden in his jacket. The drama that ensued would force him to find reserves of courage he didn’t know he had. The gunmen themselves were hardly one-dimensional—all Arabs, some highly educated, who hoped to force Britain to take their side in their independence battle against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Behind the scenes lurked the brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who had bankrolled the whole affair as a salvo against Iran.
As police negotiators pressed the gunmen, rival protestors clashed violently outside the embassy, and as MI6 and the CIA scrambled for intelligence, Britain’s special forces strike team, the SAS, laid plans for a dangerous rescue mission. Inside, Lock and his fellow hostages used all the cunning they possessed to outwit and outflank their captors. Finally, on the sixth day, after the terrorists executed the embassy press attaché and dumped his body on the front doorstep, the SAS raid began, sparking a deadly high-stakes climax.
A story of ordinary men and women under immense pressure, The Siege takes readers minute-by-thrilling-minute through an event that would echo across the next two decades and provide a direct historical link to the tragedy on 9/11. Drawing on exclusive interviews and a wealth of never-before-seen files, Macintyre brilliantly reconstructs a week in which every day minted a new hero and every second spelled the potential for doom.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We love historian Ben Macintyre’s books about World War II espionage like Operation Mincemeat, but this compelling history of a modern hostage standoff may be his finest work yet. On April 30, 1980, six Arabic men took control of London’s Iranian embassy to protest the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini and call for one Iranian province to become a sovereign Arabic country. The standoff, broadcast live across the UK, transfixed the country and ended up being the first real test for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s new government. As always, Macintyre has done an amazing amount of research, and his writing has the rapid-fire pace of a page-turning thriller. Macintyre gives at least as much space to the hostage takers (and the person who turns out to be pulling the strings of their demands) as their captives. This makes The Siege a deeply nuanced take on the ever-shifting alliances of an unstable region and why this incident still resonates through world politics today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nerve-wracking menace, unlikely sympathies, and a daring rescue mark this rousing saga of a notorious terrorist incident. Bestseller Macintyre (Agent Sonya) revisits the May 1980 occupation of the Iranian embassy in London by six Iranian Arab terrorists championing the nationalist cause of Iran's ethnic Arab minority. Led by a charismatic, volatile man named Towfiq Ibrahim al-Rashidi, the militants took 26 hostages, demanding the release of 91 Iranian Arab prisoners being held in Iran and an escape plane out of Britain. As negotiations with British police (who never intended to comply) dragged on, al-Rashidi grew increasingly agitated. On the sixth day, after the terrorists executed a hostage, Britain's elite Special Air Service unit staged a spectacular rescue (it was broadcast live), with commandos rappelling down from the roof and smashing through windows. Macintyre's narrative is cinematic in its bloody climax—"He... spray the group indiscriminately, firing in short bursts, back and forth"—and even more so in its tense buildup. He paints the embassy occupation as a psychological pressure cooker, with al-Rashidi veering between solicitude toward the hostages and threats to kill them, while the hostages' attempts to mollify him led to an outbreak of Stockholm syndrome (after the standoff ended, female hostages pretended he was a hostage to protect him). Without demonizing those involved, Macintyre provides a nuanced, perceptive analysis of the intense emotions roiling a high-stakes standoff.
