THE SIEGE

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.