The Siege: A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World

Six Days on the Edge
A review of the Random House large-print paperback (September 10, 2024) released simultaneously with the hardcover/ebook/audiobook.

Just before 21:00, someone turned on a large television, and the men settled down to watch themselves for the first time. The news opened with a figure in black clambering across a balcony to plant explosives. At that moment someone with bouffant hair obscured the screen.
“Oi, fucking sit down at the front,” shouted John McAleese, who wanted a clear view of his moment of anonymous fame.
The person with big hair obediently ducked out of the way.
No one ever spoke to Mrs. Thatcher that way. But who dares, wins.

I was curious about Ben Macintyre's book about the 1980 Iranian Embassy in show more London crisis as I had actually read one of the very first books about it back in the day Siege : Six Days at the Iranian Embassy (1980) due to its blurb and Introduction by John Le Carré. That was apparently one of the fastest books ever published, coming only a few weeks after the actual event. I re-read and reviewed it recently as Black Ops in the Open.

Knowing the high quality of Macintyre's research and writing from some of his espionage histories such as A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (2014) and The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War (2018), I expected another tour-de-force and was not disappointed. Of course Macintyre had access to a huge amount of material that was unknown to the Observer reporters back in 1980, most especially the inside story from many of the SAS squadron members who were now able to speak freely about the events 44 years after the fact.

There was also the inside story from the point of view of many of the 26 hostages and their observations of how police negotiation tactics wore down the morale of the hostage takers. There were the further revelations about how the six gunmen had been recruited by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi Intelligence service and trained by Hussein's then protected terrorist Abu Nidal. All of it being an advance cold-war strike against Hussein's enemy the new Iranian government of Khomeini, which later erupted into the Iraq-Iran War (1980-88). Those six were pawns in the game, thinking they could do anything to relieve the situation for Arab-Iranians under the brutal Khomeini regime.

The youngest and most innocent of the gunmen survived the SAS assault, likely by being protected by the hostages who had grown sympathetic to him through the process of so-called Stockholm Syndrome. That survivor served 28 years of a life sentence before being paroled and now lives under a protected identity in the UK, while subject to a death sentence if ever returned to Iran.

It all makes for a fascinating inside story which reads like the best of fiction due to Macintyre's dramatic writing skills. I read the large-print version which was more easily accessible in the Toronto library when there were more holds on the regular print size. show less

The back-cover blurb of this book dubs Ben Macintyre the non-fiction equivalent of John le Carré. I agree wholeheartedly with this blurb. Macintyre has woven together an utterly gripping account of an event I knew nothing about before reading this book. Despite my unfamiliarity with the subject, I found this easy to read from a structural point of view. The actual subject matter gets pretty grim, especially when the actual siege happens. A chapter at the end describes what happened to all of the hostages and the key players involved in the rescue (as well as some peripheral characters). Very well done and highly recommended.

An in-depth account of an event I was only vaguely aware of. The author has reconstructed a terrific account of the event, one of the first breaking news events shown on live television, based on never-published accounts of the hostages and those involved in the rescue. Recommended.

Signed