Just finished The Siege by Ben Macintyre. I recommend it.
I can remember, back in the day (1980), calling to my then-boyfriend, who'd just paused in watching the final of the snooker, on which he had a bet, to make some tea: "Come quickly, they've sent the army in to the Iranian Embassy – *and Kate Adie is covering it!"
The siege of the Iranian Embassy in Prince's Gate, Kensington, London, began when six armed gunmen burst in and took hostage all those in the building, including the injured Ambassador, who had thrown himself out of a window in an unsuccessful attempt to escape. It lasted six days, ending when the British Government, led by Home Secretary William Whitelaw on behalf of PM Margaret Thatcher, sent in the SAS, a 'special forces' unit of the British army, fairly recently returned from duties in Northern Ireland.
This siege was the more dramatic for taking place against the backdrop of the simultaneous continuing hostage situation at the US Embassy in Teheran. The London hostage-takers were Iranian arabs, whose main demand was for independence for Arabistan, an arab enclave in Iran, though that was never made public at the time. The hostage-takers were deluded, hot-headed young men, many of whom had lost near relatives to the Iranian Ayatollah regime; Macintyre reveals [spoiler here] they were recruited, trained and financed by Iraq, via a group organised by the well-known purveyor of terror, Abu Nidal.
Macintyre's chunky (non-fiction) paperback draws on unpublished source material and testimony, very often anonymous, from parties on all sides involved in the siege and in operations around it. He remains heroically impartial – for the most part – and resists the temptation to rake over the politics, post hoc. Many of the political big beasts are now dead, which cannot have been a coincidence.
He does ask the question: were the SAS instructed to 'shoot to kill'?, but leaves it unanswered. The fact that one of the hostage-takers had 39 bullets in his (dead) body, while two others were not, in fact, armed at the time of their deaths, is probably rather telling. Of those, one had the air pistol used by embassy staff to scare pigeons - which proved fatally misleading – and the other, who was said to have been 'concealing something' under his torso, was revealed to have... a packet of biscuits. [Sorry, second spoiler.]
That day, *Kate Adie (31), was the BBC's duty reporter. Through her impressive live and unscripted commentary, much of it delivered sheltering behind a parked car as the siege came to its climax, she became the first British woman TV journalist, certainly of her age, to provide coverage of such a major international hard news situation.
