Prince's Gate, number 16, South Kensington, London. Close to Knightsbridge station and in front of Hyde Park. All stories are enhanced when they include the name of a street, a neighborhood, or a metro station, and The Siege by Ben Macintyre (Critique) has such a specific setting that it even includes the floor plans of that number 16 Prince's Gate. In that Georgian-style mansion, the Islamic Republic of Iran had its embassy in 1980 (and still does) in the UK. On April 30 of that year, in the threshold between the 70s of Carlos the Jackal and the 80s of Thatcher and Reagan, six young armed Iranian Arabs took over the building and kidnapped 26 people, employees and visitors of Iranian, British, Jordanian, and Pakistani nationalities. When the attackers communicated their demands to the London police, no one understood what they were talking about. The kidnappers demanded an end to the oppression of the regime of Ruhollah Khomeini over Arabistan, a province in southwest Iran populated by Arabic speakers. So, Iran, the republic leading the revolt against colonialism, which would later cause Jimmy Carter's defeat that year due to the crisis at the American embassy, was portrayed by its own Muslim citizens as a colonial power? Impossible to understand... In 1980, the world was not even very familiar with the difference between an Arab and a Muslim.
The Siege resembles the books that have earned Macintyre his fame: A Spy Among Friends, The Spy and the Traitor, The Man Who Never Was... The Siege is another non-fiction account that explains the claustrophobic international relations of the 20th century through the personal stories of its pawns. Of spies, terrorists, soldiers, ministers... Who were those Arabs who stormed the embassy? What pained them, what did they fear? Were they aggressive or polite? And the police and soldiers on the other side in an exhausting six-day negotiation? And their hostages?
"No one has shown interest in the kidnappers until now," says Macintyre. "No one delved into them, and this is not unusual in the history of terrorism. Nor is it in the case of military interventions like Operation Nimrod by the SAS [the British Army operation to liberate the embassy]. People are characters, they don't have faces. I don't justify what these men did, but I am interested in their reasons. They came from a very mistreated community, from a very brutal environment. So much brutality that, at least within their frames, the embassy takeover was not an act of terrorism. It was a protest. They didn't believe they were there to kill anyone. They didn't want to create panic in society, which is the essence of terrorism. They never thought of dying. They thought of going back home with gifts for their families. I also resist using the word terrorists."
In Macintyre's portrayal, those non-terrorists were, above all, inconsistent. They were often very kind to their hostages. Then they became angry and violent. At night, they tended towards melancholy. "They were not true terrorists, and that explains their erratic behavior. Sometimes they were charming, sometimes cruel, and sometimes they seemed terrified, exhausted, eager to find an opportunity to surrender. They presented themselves as a group, but they never functioned as one. They were divided among themselves, had different attitudes towards their mission and their hostages. They were very naive. They didn't expect the situation they found themselves in. Saddam Hussein's secret services, the Mukhabarat, convinced them that it would be a harmless excursion. Unarmed police would come to listen to their demands, they would show their weapons a bit, and then they would be put on a plane to the Middle East with the purchases they had made on Oxford Street. They couldn't have been more innocent. The two leaders were 26, 27 years old. Their comrades were teenagers, a bit foolish."
At some point in The Siege, Macintyre writes that with terrorism, the same thing always happens: some foolish men act while other intelligent men manipulate them and remain safe. Were the embassy occupiers stupid? Who was pulling their strings? "At the top of the pyramid was Saddam Hussein. Then, and this is a novelty in this book, Abu Nidal, the most feared terrorist of his time, appears. Abu Nidal was a kind of global terrorism entrepreneur. In 1980, he worked for Iraq against Iran before their war began. And a bit lower down, a more elusive figure appears, a man who accompanied the commando to London and acted as their operations coordinator. He arranged accommodation, food, weapons, maps, explained the operation to them, and told them to act at 11:00, not before. At 11:00, that man took a plane to Paris. It is said that he is alive, his name is Sami Muhammad Ali, and the police have a photo of him. I have seen it, but I doubt it."
Was their cause reasonably just? "I suppose so. From the perspective of the Iranian government and the majority of Farsi-speaking Iranians, these people were a terrorist and separatist group who wanted to break away from Iran. Well, regarding that, I can tell you with certainty that it's not true. They didn't want to separate from Iran; they wanted some political autonomy and for children to study in Arabic. It is also true that they had endured almost a century of brutal repression designed by successive regimes in Tehran. The reason was oil. The Arab province has oil. Today, a timid movement survives that faces the brutal repression of the Revolutionary Guard."
Macintyre refers to the Islamic Republic as a fascist-religious system. Was it so in 1980? When Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, Tehran's Foreign Minister, learned of the embassy's kidnapping, his response was indeed fascist and religious: he informed the UK that he would not negotiate anything, that any concession would be avenged, and that the Iranian hostages were happy to die as martyrs and ascend to paradise. "There is not a strand of clash between civilizations or religions in this conflict," he clarifies. It was exclusively a political protest. The Arabs were Shia like the Iranians in Tehran."
And on the other side? The Siege also talks about the police who tried to convince the occupiers to surrender and the soldiers who finished the task with blood and fire.
-Would this story have been different in Paris, with Mitterrand?
-I hadn't thought about it. Is there something essentially British in this story? Perhaps. The police approach, to begin with. They tried to persuade these lost young men that they could find a bloodless end to the assault. They tried to convince them, be their friends... And then, they sent the Army to storm the embassy, so I suppose that approach failed. I suspect that Mitterrand would have sent the Army in earlier because that was his way of confronting those who challenged the power of the state. I lived in Paris at that time and always saw Mitterrand as a 'hard cookie' politician, which is a very British expression. I think he would have sent the troops in earlier, and more people would have died. In the United States, it would have been different too because society's pain threshold for a shootout is very low. And there are some references from Scandinavian countries. In the case that gave the name to the Stockholm Syndrome... Well, everything was simpler because the kidnapper was a somewhat brainless criminal. The strategy was to talk and talk until he surrendered.
"I believe the kidnappers were about to surrender. With a little more willingness...," says Macintyre. "And I think Margaret Thatcher was the figure that tipped the scales of the story. The best and the worst of Thatcher is in the embassy siege. The best: she was extremely clear. She set a precise goal for the negotiators, told them what she wanted and what they could offer, without changing her mind. She made it clear to the military and the police that she would take responsibility. 'My neck will be on the line.' There are no politicians who speak like that anymore. The worst? The toughness, the rigidity. She was convinced she was right. And there was a bit of a personal gamble in this case. Thatcher needed to consolidate her position, and the embassy was, in part, her gamble. It conveyed the image that the UK hits back. I don't like it, but people do."
The Siege is not a novel, so something about its outcome can be told. One: Minister Ghotbzadeh was executed by his regime in 1982, accused of spying for Israel. And two: Trevor Lock, a London bobby held hostage in the embassy, behaved like a hero. In the days leading up, he thought of himself as a coward.