The Siege

April 1, 2024

Macintyre (Operation Mincemeat), who often hits the best-seller lists with his true-life espionage thrillers, considers the 1980 siege on the Iranian Embassy in London, where 26 hostages were taken and, over the course of six days, negotiators navigated demands and politics and British special forces planned a rescue. Prepub Alert.

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July 29, 2024
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.

September 1, 2024
Fly-on-the-wall account of an Iranian embassy siege other than the one most Americans remember. On April 30, 1980, six young Arab men, seeking independence for the Arab-majority Iranian province of Khuzestan, entered the Iranian embassy in London and seized more than two dozen hostages, including Britons. Macintyre turns all this into high drama: after all, as he notes, "Britain had never before faced an international hostage--taking incident on this scale, and the siege changed forever the way terrorism was perceived, and dealt with." The hostage takers were new at the game, too, and the Iranian captives, representing the new government of the ayatollahs, were hapless, albeit McIntyre writes of the young ambassador, "His revolutionary credentials were impeccable, his religion extreme, and his devotion to Khomeini obsessive." Both the Iranian government and the British government refused to negotiate, the Iranian authorities adding that the hostage takers were doubtless in the employ of the CIA. One captive was killed, after six days, to force some sort of resolution. It came, writes Macintyre, in the form of a counterterrorist attack, something that the leader of the captors divined: "They are going to invade," he said, promising that, if so, every hostage would be killed. Instead, a detachment of Special Air Service commandos breached the embassy and killed five of the six young Arabs; all the remaining hostages but one survived. In the end, Macintyre writes, the SAS action "cemented Margaret Thatcher's reputation as an iron-willed leader," which was further bolstered by Britain's victory in the Falklands War shortly thereafter. McIntyre makes a good case in closing for considering the hostage crisis the opening shots of the eight-year Iraq-Iran War, an appalling bloodletting in which more than a million soldiers died. A capable work of true-crime writing that connects many subsequent geopolitical dots.

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