Dan Snow's History Hit - The Iranian Embassy Siege with Ben Macintyre

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

On the drizzly, grey morning of 30th April 1980, six heavily armed gunmen stormed the Iranian Embassy in London. They charged through the front door and took 26 people hostage, including embassy staff and a policeman. A nail-biting six-day siege ensued, culminating in an explosive SAS raid - broadcast live to the world - that thrust the secretive special forces unit into the limelight.For this story, Dan is joined by best-selling historian Ben Macintyre, author of 'The Siege'. From outside the embassy itself, they retrace the footsteps of the people involved in this gripping hostage crisis.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Thank you. The second frame. On the evening of May 5th, 1980, millions of Britons huddled around their TV sets watching the snooker championship final between Alex Higgins and Cliff Thorburn. In a Georgian terrace house overlooking Hyde Park, in the leafy, well-to-do neighbourhood of South Kensington, a group of SAS soldiers, clad in all black,

also sat together watching the snooker. Though their attention was divided. Next door, 26 hostages had been held in the Iranian embassy by six armed gunmen for six days. Their task was, when ordered by the Prime Minister, to storm the building and rescue the hostages. When the gunmen dumped the body of one of the hostages, an Iranian cultural attaché, on the doorstep of the embassy

and informed police negotiators that the other hostages would be killed imminently if their demands weren't met, the SAS teams assembled. At 7.23pm, the assault began. They came out of this balcony here, crawled across there, set a thing called a frame charge at the front window. So they used a great deal of explosive. And that balcony you can see now more or less blew off and landed in the street.

So they were crawling through smoke and debris to get inside. The first thing they saw as they were coming into the smoke and they threw flashbangs in which are a kind of stun grenade which are highly effective as a stun grenade but they're also incendiary devices so once they went in the building began to burn. Okay. And so some of the images you see here are of the curtains in this room here on fire and blowing out of the room with the SAS guys crawling through it. Now, what they didn't realise was that there was a hostage in there. One of the hostages, a man called Sim Harris,

who'd been involved in the negotiations, got himself out onto this balcony, or what was left of it, with the building behind him going up in flames. So you see the flame and the smoke billowing out of here and dropping on top of him. So he has to jump across so next door as you can still see because the flag's outside it is the Ethiopian embassy so in order to escape Sim Harris had to jump across that balcony now you can see it's quite

a long way yeah it's a long way with his jacket already smoldering and his hair kind of half on fire at the same time you've got snipers arranged around the front here but at the back it's also beginning to go wrong because one of the abseilers, a man called Tom Morrell, his abseiling rope had snagged and he was suspended above the balcony. So the other three members of that first abseiling team had also attacked the room where they believed the hostages were which they were not and they had thrown in flashbangs, the room was on fire, and Tom Morrell was suspended above it, being effectively burned. It didn't stop him from carrying on. So you've got one person effectively being sort of barbecued at the back there.

And then on the basement floor, you have yet another team that is trying to break in there, who looked up and saw one of their comrades twisting on a rope with fire coming out around him and worked out that they couldn't set off the explosives they had below to try and break in through the basement because they would take him too so they then had to go in by hand as it were with sledgehammers so you've got all these different things happening in the space of 11 minutes and so the action is extraordinarily pal-mal. All of this was happening in front of hundreds of reporters and news channels

watching and broadcasting to the nation and the world. It was unlike any news report anyone had ever seen before. The events that day transformed the reputation of the SAS and the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. They revolutionized news reporting and they also marked an important waypoint on the conflict-strewn journey of the Middle East. This is the story of the Iranian embassy siege, told like never before by the extraordinary historian and celebrated writer Ben McIntyre. You're listening to Dan Snow's history hit coming to you from outside the Iranian embassy in London.

Well Ben McIntyre, we are in Hyde Park now. Oh, look at that wonderful view down towards the London Eye and the Shard. And you've got central government, the heart of political and official London there. And then opposite, it's a great cultural venue. We've got the Royal Albert Hall and we've got the extraordinary Albert Memorial built by the heartbroken Queen Victoria when her husband Albert died. And this is really, we're standing at the centre now of the drama that played out with this Iranian embassy siege. First of all, tell me, why on earth were terrorists here? Who were they and what were they hoping to achieve? Well, it's a fascinating story really because it's both much more complicated

and much more interesting than the myth that we inherited about this event. These six young men were Arab Iranians. They came from a province called Khuzestan in the south of Iran. Now, Khuzestan is the oil-rich center of Iran. It's where the money that still maintains the Iranian regime comes from. These were people who had supported the Iranian revolution. They'd supported the Ayatollah because they thought they were going to get autonomy for Khuzestan. And indeed, the Ayatollah had promised them that. So a year before this happened, they were expecting political liberation. It didn't happen. The Ayatollah's security troops cracked down brutally on Arab protests and demonstrations in Khuzestan, and many

people were killed. It was in a period called Black Wednesday. Now, each of these gunmen had lost family in that moment, and each of them was enraged by the Ayatollah's regime. They were opposed to the fundamentalists in Tehran. It's often misunderstood that, but they were against them. Now, these were men of violence. I'm not going to kind of glorify them in any way, but like most people in history, they had their own stories, and I've sort of dug them up and so

while that doesn't justify or vindicate them in any way they were after something they were after and their plan and it was rather a simple and naive one was that they were going to take Iranian hostages in here they were going to take the diplomats they were going to seize them they were going to hold them they were going to use them as bartering tools to persuade the ayatollah to release Arab political prisoners in Tehran, and then the British government was going to provide them with a plane and then they were going to fly home. They really genuinely had no intention of killing anybody. I mean, they would have done it if they had to, and of course the end of this story is an extremely dramatic and bloody

one, but that was not their initial intention. So theirs is a political protest. And did they have links with London anyway? Why did they choose London? Well, London was chosen for various reasons, really. One, it was considered to be a soft target. There was such a large Middle Eastern community here, as there is today. They felt they would be able to get in without being spotted and then disappear. Now, the other critical element of this story that people forget is the whole thing was organized and bankrolled by Saddam Hussein. This was an Iraqi plot. The Iraqis were very happy to back these Arab protesters because it was a way of destabilizing Iran. Iran and Iraq were building up to the Iran-Iraq war which would burst out less than a year later. And this battle that took place here in Prince's Gate was in a way

a forerunner of the Iran-Iraq war. It's a battle between them. Now, the other thing that I discovered in researching this is that not only was Saddam paying and training these people in Iraq, the mastermind behind the whole operation was the world's most wanted terrorist, Abu Nidal, the Palestinian guerrilla leader. At that point, one of the most wanted men in the world, at that point he was working for Saddam as a kind of freelance terrorist advisor. So that's never been discovered before, but this was a proper international plot. And these six gunmen were in a way being manipulated by Saddam and his brutal mukhabarat, the intelligence service. They were being used

as pawns. I think they never really realised it. So behind what appears to be a kind of localised story of drama, there is this international story playing out. So, OK, so they arrive in London. They've had some training then. They've been through a sort of training process. Yes, they did weapons training. They did explosives training. Some of them were already quite experienced guerrillas. Some of them had already done this sort of stuff. They were led by a man called Tawfiq al-Rashidi. Again, his name has never been really revealed before.

And on the morning of the 30th of April, a drizzly, cold April morning, so six young men assembled on that memorial. They were armed, they were heavily armed, actually. They had submachine guns, they had revolvers, and they each had a hand grenade. Now, these weapons had been provided through the Iraqi embassy. They'd arrived in the diplomatic bag. And so on the morning, they moved up here at about 11 o'clock,

they walked through the park, and then three of them entered Prince's Gate, which is in a kind of lay-by off the main road. So there's a kind of parking area between the main road and this row of extraordinary row of Georgian houses, huge great townhouses. Three of them came from one end and three of them came from the other. Now on the door that day was PC Trevor Locke of the Diplomatic Protection Group. Now it was a cold day that day and the doorman in the Iranian embassy, so he was

there, he or a diplomatic protection officer was there all the time. They were largely decorative. They weren't really supposed to protect anything because embassies were supposed to be safe. So that was really why Trevor Locke had taken this job, was that it was spectacularly boring. Nothing ever happened. And he liked that, that was fine.

As he himself said, he was a Dixon of Dot Green. He wasn't a Sweeney, if you get the 1980s police reference. You know, he was an ordinary Bobby from Barking, but he was about to play an incredible role in this story. So at about 11.30, the gunmen attack the embassy. They go in through the front door. They are firing machine guns. Now, at this point, Trevor is just inside the front door, and he's never really forgiven himself for this. And I don't think he has anything to feel guilty about, but he still is in his own mind. He'd accepted a cup of coffee from the doorman. So he was just inside the door. He was really supposed to be outside at all times.

But it was cold and it was wet and he was having a cup of coffee. He's often said to me, you know, what would have happened if I'd been standing on the outside? Well, the answer is he would probably have been killed. Exactly. So they burst in through the outer security door, firing machine guns, through the glass in a door. The shards went into Trevor's face. There was blood pouring down his face. Now, inside the building at that point were 28 people. Most of them were diplomatic staff. Some of them were formal diplomats from Iran, but there were a handful of others from elsewhere as well. There were two BBC journalists, Chris Kramer and Sim Harris. There was a Syrian journalist called Mustafa Karkuti. And there were a handful of people

who had just happened to be there at the wrong time. There was a carpet salesman who'd come in to consult the medical officer in the Iranian embassy. So with all these stories, there are ordinary people caught up in circumstances that they absolutely cannot control. Now one of the things that makes this story rather remarkable is that Trevor Locke was armed. Trevor Locke had a gun, which all diplomatic protection officers had. He had a revolver under his tunic. The gunmen didn't know that.

And so they took everyone together, they put them in one room above, they patted everyone down and they missed trevor lock's gun so for the next six days trevor was in there knowing that he had an opportunity and the resource if he needed it to try and fight back again it's one of the kind of dynamics that is taking place inside this story because one of the reasons i love this story is that really in a strange way it place, although it has huge global import and the press are all pouring in and the politicians, it takes place in one room.

So it's a highly intense story about the relationships that develop inside this building, both between the hostages and the gunmen, and among the hostages, and between the gunmen and the police negotiators. So you've got a kind of strange boiling crucible in the middle of this story that the press outside here cannot see have no inkling of the hostages are all taken to one room the women are separated

from the men again the women's story and this has never been told there were six women inside that embassy and they were held for the most part separately with a separate guard on them. They were taken upstairs, they were held there. I mean the gunmen tried to reassure them and say we're not here to kill you all, we're just going to hold you and we're going to get... And they began to explain to them their reasons for doing what they were doing. And one of the strange things is that these gunmen wanted to be understood. They weren't radicals with suicide vests who were simply going to go in and destroy. They wanted to be understood and they wanted their message to get out. So in addition to trying to get these political prisoners released, they had a statement about what was going on in Khuzestan, about their opposition to the Ayatollah's

Iranian regime, which they wanted broadcast. So it's also about the relationship between the police and the media, how to get this message out, whether to get this message out. So it's also about the relationship between the police and the media, how to get this message out, whether to get this message out. So in the course of negotiations, so you've got one story taking place inside and you've got multiple other stories taking place around the country. And the British and Americans, no friend of the Ayatollah's regime either? Well, the international context is complicated because the Americans thought that this might be an opportunity to use success here, if it worked out that way, as a way of trying

to get the hostages out of the embassy in Tehran. So it takes on an international element with the Americans nudging the British to say, save these Iranian hostages in there and we can use that as a way of trying to persuade the Ayatollah to let our people go at the same time so there's this international thing taking place but within hours of the gunman going in cobra is assembled the sort of crisis committee of the government the kind of um if you like the emergency button which we're all now familiar with from covid and from other events taking place then of course it was margaret thatcher who convened it the person in overall charge was Willie Whitelaw, but it was not an overall charge. He was the one running it from the Cobra committee room, but it was Margaret Thatcher's choice. And there's another

political element to that. Thatcher had not been in power for a year by this point. Her premiership was still in its infancy. And this was going to turn out to be the key test of it. It was going to be the first moment when she was going to have to prove she hadn't actually got the super care yet, but whether she really was the Iron Lady. So the hostages are being treated reasonably well? Yes, I mean, there's no violence towards them. They are being herded around and they are being threatened

and they are absolutely terrified because they have no idea what is going on, of course. But the gunmen are not tying them up. They're not brutalising them. They are, however, barricading themselves in. They've moved the furniture. They are preparing for an assault. They actually believed they would be attacked quite quickly. But actually, the thing takes time to develop. It takes a long time. The gunmen thought they would be out in 24 hours. They'd been assured by their Iraqi sponsors and backers that this would be out in 24 hours they'd been assured by their iraqi sponsors and backers that this would be a very short operation they'd be going

home soon as heroes and so you have the mounting frustration of the gunmen on one side the terror of the hostages on the inside you've got the politicians beginning to get anxious about what they can do here how can they end this thing, because Thatcher has made it absolutely clear to them and therefore to the police that these guys are not going to be allowed out. They're not going to climb on a plane and fly home. That is simply not going to happen,

which gives the hostage negotiators, these six policemen who've been trained in hostage negotiation, very little to bargain with so you've got this situation where the countdown to the denouement is kind of in a way in place from the beginning and so thatcher said there will be a kinetic solution to this we're going to go in and we're going to neutralize the there was never any doubt about that not quite no what she said was to the police you may negotiate for as long as you like. You must keep them talking as long as you can.

We want a bloodless solution to this. But you cannot offer them because they will not get free passage out of this country. Her line was entirely understandable. She said they have broken the law in this country. They must be tried under the laws of this country. But if possible, keep them talking and try and get them out. I mean, one of the things that the gunmen wanted was they wanted to have negotiations through Arab ambassadors. They wanted the Syrian ambassador, the Algerian. They wanted them all to take part in the process. And Thatcher was very uncertain about that, too.

She wasn't sure that she wanted foreigners kind of getting involved in the conversation. So there was a huge amount of pressure on the police at this point. And it was the biggest deployment since the coronation. In fact, it was the biggest sort of kinetic, in your word, active deployment really ever on mainland Britain. I mean, there were thousands of police here, all assembled around this park to create a kind of a cordon through which they couldn't escape but one of the extraordinary things is that the police brought in a psychiatrist professor john gunn who is still around an extraordinary man who was there to advise the police on their tactics on their psychological tactics but he wasn't just monitoring what was going on inside the building he was also monitoring the police because the

pressure on them was absolutely intense and he's the most extraordinary resource he speaks so insightfully about what was going on inside the heads of everybody involved in this story and he was based in that building over there just six doors down with the police from where the siege was taking place when did the SAS enter the? Was it always clear that it would be that particular unit of the British army that would have to take the lead? Well since 1972 the Munich hostage massacre the British had decided that there had to be some form of force ready should a similar situation arise in Great Britain and so secretly and unbeknown to the vast majority of the British public, the SAS had been training for eight years by the time this happened. It was under a special provision whereby

if the civilian authorities could not cope with the situation, there still is a provision in British law where the military can be brought in. Up until the Iranian embassy siege, it had never been evoked. It had never been used. So this was going to be the first time that the SAS had been used. But by a sheer irony, one of the policemen on duty here within minutes of the thing taking off was a man called Dusty Gray, who had been in the SAS. Now, one of the first things he did on seeing what was happening here, he actually managed to smuggle himself into the back garden so he could see what was going on. He got to a telephone box

down here and he called SAS headquarters in Hereford and said something's going on here. So before in fact the official channels had alerted the SAS they were ready and that evening they rumbled out of Hereford. So under this plan, there would always be an SAS team on standby. Now, the SAS squadrons rotated in and out of this duty, so they would be abroad, they would be in Northern Ireland, they would be in Dofah, but then they would be coming back and retraining for an event like this. And in fact, in the middle of Hereford, the base, the SAS base,

is a building called the Killing House, which was used as the base where they would practice hostage rescues. So this had been going on, this practice, this training, had been in place for many, many years. In fact, the royal family was, and still is, I understand, periodically taken to the Killing House to experience what it's like to be taken hostage and then liberated by the SAS.

At one of these, they managed to set fire to the then Princess Diana's hair. Because they don't want to lose their cool in a hostage situation. Well, they don't. Although it has to be borne in mind, the SAS at this point was virtually unknown in this country. Well, exactly, yeah. They did not have the status or the public recognition that they would have after this event.

This is an absolutely key sea change in the way the SAS is perceived. So they had been ready for some time. They'd been brought in right at the beginning. They installed themselves next door, two teams, again rotating through the day so that one would be on duty at all times. And they began to sort of frame up various different scenarios for what they could do. There was a thing called an immediate action plan, which was the first thing they drew up, which was really just a commando style smash down the doors, kill as many of the gunmen as you can and get the guys out. And it would never have worked.

I mean, half of them would have been killed and God knows what would have happened to Hodgson. Then over time, over the course of the next six days, Hector Gullen, the unsung hero of this story, in fact, who was in charge of B Squadron, utterly sleepless next six days hector gullen the unsung hero of this story in fact who was in charge of b squadron utterly sleepless for six days drew up over time operation nimrod which is what they called a stronghold assault so it was a very carefully worked out plan of what to do if they had to assault and try to liberate the host so more taking into account the vagaries the building and yeah yeah yeah and so throughout this this So more taking into account the vagaries, the building. Yeah, yeah.

And so throughout this time, and this is where the sort of detail is so fascinating, the police and MI5, a big MI5 team, the security services team, was brought in to try to find out what was happening inside the building. Because they knew that if they could work out what was being said,

they had a much better chance of working out where people were, who was in command, who were the leaders among the hostages, who were the leaders among the gunmen. So they began trying to drill in audio probes. Now, to us these days, these sound like incredibly rustic pieces of sort of simple technology. Then they were absolutely cutting edge. I mean, nobody knew that MI5 and the police could do this. So they began drilling microscopic audio probes into the walls to try to listen in to what was happening. And by the end of the sort of fifth day,

they were actually getting live audio of what was going on in the different rooms. So there are extraordinary transcripts of what was being said. It was difficult to do because, of course, there were at least three different languages taking place inside there so they had to bring in translators because there was english a bit but there was also farsi being spoken by the iranians and arabic being spoken among the arabs and also to the iranians so trying to tease that apart so the idea that they were getting some clear audio feed from inside they weren't they were getting fragments of conversation

but it was kind of giving them a picture of what was going on but it very nearly caused absolute disaster because the gunmen heard the drilling they heard the drilling going on and believed they were about to be attacked believed that this was a precursor that explosives were going in so in fact it began heightening the tension and outside the police discovered that their drilling, their attempts to listen in, were actually making the situation worse. So first of all, believe it or not, they brought in the gas board and decided that the only way to cover a small noise was to create a very big noise. So they got two gas people with drills to start drilling just on that corner down there so that the noise would cover the noise of the drilling. Instead of having this effect, the gunman thought that this must be part of a plan to attack them. So he actually managed to increase the thing. So then they did something that they've

never done before or since. They contacted the Civil Aviation Authority and persuaded them to begin bringing in planes low over the top of Prince's Gate. So the noise of the aircraft would drown out the sound of the drilling. That was really, in a way, how they managed to finish getting this kind of audio picture of what was going inside was because jumbo jets were flying. Well, I mean, now you'd never be allowed to do it, but really low over Hyde Park. And those bad boys were noisy. I grew up on the flight path in the 80s, and they were noisy jumbois.

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Wherever you get your podcasts. So the jumbo jets going over, they're getting jittery. I imagine they're sleep deprived. They're thinking the plan's going wrong. Things must get very tense. Over the six days, the atmosphere inside that building, and Professor Gunn, the psychiatrist, is brilliant on this, becomes almost impossible. I mean, at times it seems that it's going to head towards a peaceful solution. Food is sent in, communications start to happen,

the gunman's statement is read on the BBC, and yet the gunmen are becoming increasingly jittery. And then two things happen. One is that the gunmen start to daub graffiti on the walls inside the embassy. And I've got pictures of this because they're kind of bored as well as being completely sleepless. So they get these magic markers and they start writing on the walls and they write these anti-Iranian, anti-Ayatollah slogans. And there is a confrontation that takes place between one of the young Iranian diplomats who is actually secretly a revolutionary guard. He's there as a kind of security person for the embassy and he confronts the gunman. And there's a terrible sort of semi-physical fight between this kind of Arab gunman, one of the lead gunmen, and this young, radical, fundamentalist...

True believer. A true believer. And that's one of the triggers. It sort of breaks... It breaks the moment. It breaks the sort of fragile peace that was taking place in there. And the gunmen become uncontrollable. The leader begins to back away from what is happening

because I think he can't face what's going on. And in a way, the dynamics among the gunmen are so extraordinary. And the number two begins to sort of take over a man called Jassim, who's a much tougher piece of work altogether. And by this point, Thatcher has agreed a principle that if one hostage is killed, they will still continue negotiating. If two hostages are killed, that's a patent and the SAS go in. So that is a red line that is drawn and it's never moved away from.

So if they believe that two people have died at the hands of the gunman, that's the moment they go in. So on the morning of the 6th of May, Bank Holiday morning, one of the hostages is taken downstairs and tied to the banisters and murdered by the number two gunman. While the hostages hear the gunfire going off, the shooting is heard by the audio probes that I've described to you. But the police don't yet know if anyone has died.

They know pretty soon afterwards because because a few hours later, the body is a man called Abbas Labassani, the one I was describing to you earlier, the radical sort of pro-revolutionary Ayatollah guy. His body is dumped on the front doorstep, and he's taken away. So the one body is gone in. But what they don't know is whether two have died. And then, some hours later, not long afterwards,

they hear gunfire again from inside. In fact, it is a bluff by the gunmen. They didn't kill a second hostage, but they made it sound as if they had. And that, with sort of horrible irony, is the false moment that triggers the assault. So from that moment, Thatcher, who is actually at Chequers at that point, she's on her way back from Chequers and Willie Whitelaw calls her

and says, we think there are two hostages have been killed. Are you ready to give the authority to go in? And she says, go in. And it was a heck of a gamble. If it had gone wrong, if it had ended the way that the attempted hostage rescue in Tehran had gone, the American one, if it had been a disaster, it would have done a whole series of things. It would have bolstered the Ayatollah's power. It would have undermined Thatcher radically at a key moment of her premiership. And it would probably have ended the SAS. There was already talk of them being disbanded. So there was a heck of a lot at stake here. And Thatcher said, you go in. You go in and do it.

So now we're on the corner of Queensgate. We can see the Iranian embassy. Ben, take me up close and talk me through the action that day. What was the first sign something was going on? The first sign from the outside was that the park became incredibly quiet. The SAS were all based in the building next door. You can see it here, number 15, which was then the College became incredibly quiet. The SAS were all based in the building next door. You can see it here, number 15, which was then the College of GPs. It had been the American ambassador's residence.

And unbeknown to anybody at the scene, the SAS had been assembling there for six days. So they'd been ready to go in really 24 hours a day. The plan for Operation Nimrod was finally given the go-ahead further down this terrace where the police and the S.A.S. liaison had what they called Zulu control. The terrorists would have known that every building, every surrounding was literally crammed full with security forces. Well it's a good question, Dan, because I'm not sure how much they did really know. They

were a pretty naive bunch, the gunmen. Of course, they knew that the place was surrounded by police. They could see them out of the window. I think they had no idea that an entire troop of heavily armed people in balaclavas with machine guns was about to come storming through the window. They had barricaded inside and they'd soaked the place with petrol. So they were preparing to do a last stand. and they'd soaked the place with petrol. So they were preparing to do a last stand.

Now, whether they were actually going to kill everybody and give up is not at all clear. I think they were probably preparing to set fire to the building and then come out. That seems to have been the plan. So the market actually gives the order, and quite instantly, the kind of speed of communication we expect today, things happen immediately, do they? Absolutely immediately.

The whole assault takes 11 minutes. Oh, wow. uh front and back and it's not just the front now the pictures we're all very familiar with the footage that broke into the snooker that evening so it was a bank holiday monday and everybody pretty much everybody 14 million people were watching the snooker world final including me age 14 and it broke away from the snooker i was sitting with my dad and we were furious initially it broke away from the snooker i was sitting with my dad we were furious initially it broke away from the snooker to this live footage of men abseiling down the back of the building and crawling across this balcony you can see here and it was the first time any of us anybody had seen live news reported in that way we're all used to it now you know news comes on

instagram tiktok and immediately we see it in real time. Then it was the first time. And the nation was absolutely enthralled. So they climbed out of this balcony here. So they climbed out of the balcony. So these windows here. Next door. So that was only one of six teams that were attacking. OK.

So one came out from here. They'd been hanging out in this house. Yep. There were two troops, red and blue, and they'd been doing 12 hours alternately. So there was always a team ready to go in. And the minute they crawl out of this balcony, the world's media are watching them. There's no hours alternately. So there was always a team ready to go in. And the minute they crawled out of this balcony, the world's media were watching them.

There's no covert... OK, so they're setting the frame... No, that was one of their worries, was that if the gunmen inside had been watching television, which they weren't, they would... They don't like snooker. They don't like snooker. They would have probably seen what was happening.

The truth was MI5 had already disconnected all the television aerials anyway. So although the SAS was anxious about this, it wasn't in fact a problem in the end. So the world knew that the SAS guy was setting a charge on the window and the guys inside didn't? No. So the guys inside were... They were spread out throughout the building.

So the hostages, there were now 23 of them, were held on the second floor there. So you see right above the balustrade, the second floor there, which was the telex room. Now, SAS listening apparatus and MI5 had penetrated the whole building with bugs. Didn't know they were there. They thought they were at the back of the building. So the whole plan was actually based on a misconception. So they put the frame charts there. At the same time, two more teams are coming down through the stairwell in the top.

They're lowering a huge bomb into the middle of it because there in fact there are two bombs one is to blow out the windows on the inside and the other is to smash the atrium roof so in the inside of this building there's a glass roof made of steel and glass they lowered the bomb on top of it the idea being that the gunman they thought were directly underneath it in order to give them what they called a close haircut so this was going to come straight down on top of them. Also immobilised the centre of the building so they couldn't go back up again. This was to try and separate the gunmen from the hostages. At the same time, behind this wall here

were two SAS marksmen with Polecat launchers who were firing tear gas, a particular kind of tear gas called CR gas, into the upper rooms to try and soap the whole building in debilitating tear gas. It was a particular kind of tear gas. CR gas, into the upper rooms to try and soap the whole building in debilitating tear gas. It was a particular kind of tear gas. It didn't just make you cry. It knocked you out completely.

At the same time, another team was going down the back on abseil ropes to break in through the balconies at the back. And that's some of the more famous images that we... That's some of the more famous images you'll see. I mean, it did not, like most military plans, it didn't go entirely to plan. And all of that is happening at once? Simultaneously. Right, exactly.

So it really lasts a very short time. At the same time, another team is assembling behind the building. I mean, the point of this mission was to rescue the hostages. It wasn't to kill the gunmen. That wasn't part of the brief. If that happened, that was what was going to happen. I mean, there was no doubt that they were armed and ready to use lethal force, but killing people was not the point. Saving people was the point. And so there was a whole team at the back ready to hand the hostages out as they came bundling out.

So the first thing that went wrong was they had used an enormous amount of charge on the frame charge, much more than they really needed, because the windows... Here's one of the wrinkles of this story, which very few people know, is that long before the assault happened in 1979, the SAS was brought in to advise the Shars people on how to reinforce the building. So the SAS had made their own problem much harder, because the first two floors had been reinforced.

It all had armour-plated glass. The front door was half made of steel. So normally they would have just smashed their way in. They knew they couldn't do that, so they had to blow their way in. But they didn't know how heavily armoured the windows had been, so they used a great deal of explosive. And then on the basement floor, you have yet another team that is trying to break in there, who looked up and saw one of their comrades twisting on a rope

with fire coming out around him and worked out that they couldn't set off the explosives they had below to try and break in through the basement because they would take him too. So they then had to go in by hand as it were with sledgehammers. So you've got all these different things happening in the space of 11 minutes. This is Dan Snow's History Hit, more after this. So the press are out here, you've just described what's going on, the press are out here reporting it, from all the research you've done, do the reports that the press are making

bear any resemblance to the truth of what was going on in that building? In truth, not really, Dan. I mean, you know, it really was the first draft of history. I mean, all they could see, the press, were explosions. They could hear the gunfire, the smoke billowing out of the front and the back. ITN, in fact, had set up a hidden secret camera in the flats at the back. So they were getting live footage of the abseilers coming down the back and the fact that they were stuck, that they were sort of on fire. So to us, this

seems like a sort of normal way of reporting the news these days. Then it was absolutely unprecedented. Nobody had seen live footage like this. And of course, we all remember Kate Adie, whose career was made on this day, because she was standing outside the embassy behind a car describing in real time what she was seeing behind them. Of course, they had no real idea of what was really going on. And the SAS, an intensely secretive organisation, was very happy to keep it that way. After the assault, they just slipped away. They just disappeared and none of them was ever interviewed. So they managed to maintain the sort of mystique

surrounding this event very, very well. Until you came along. Until I came along. Well, bits of it has sort of come out since then. But it's one of the wonderful things that's happened here is that the SAS has been given permission to talk to me. So the people who are still around the SAS who were involved in that story have been able to tell me with official permission their stories for the first time. And there's something very

extraordinary and moving about that. They are remarkably modest about this event. Most of there is actually only one person still living who was involved in the assault on the front of the embassy. The three others have died. And before we spoke, he had never told anybody, any journalist, anybody about what he'd actually done. And it's been rather remarkable that way to have these kind of memories brought back. But also what struck me about this, and this will interest you, I think, as a historian, this was 1980 and everybody was still writing everything down. It wasn't an era when we did everything by text message and email. Everyone was writing everything down

and so I found three unpublished accounts of what went on that were written. One of them was written as it was going on, inside the building. Sim Harris, the BBC sound recordist, was actually keeping a diary of what was going on and then two others, including the lead policeman and the Syrian journalist Mustafa Karkuti. So there is extraordinary amount of resource here that you can dig through to find out what was actually happening inside that building, which no one knew at the time. Just on the conversation you had with the SAS veteran,

what was it like as he entered that building and went room to room? What are his memories of it? They went in with an expectation of pretty high casualties i mean peter de la billiard the special forces director who was in the cobra emergency room reckoned that if they got away with 40 casualties that would be a success of the sas or of the hostages everybody of everyone involved you know they expected four out of ten people to be killed or injured in there. It was not going to be easy. So the SAS guys went into a situation that they knew was incredibly perilous. What is astonishing is that none of them was badly injured or killed.

And it was dark. It was filled with CS and CR gas, the two different kinds of tear gas. There was smoke everywhere. There was fire. They couldn't really see properly. They were dressed in these black overalls, but they weren't fireproof. These things melted.

In fact, one of the photographs you can see, one of the SAS guys has torn off his respirator and his hood because it was on fire. But he still went in, and so he amazingly managed to blast through the CR and the CS gas to get to the hostages. This is one of the things about training, is that in a weird way, these SAS guys had been trained on tear gas. So they weren't immune to it, but they knew what it did to you. And so they were better able to cope with some of the effects.

The gas masks didn't fit properly in some cases. In several cases, they vomited into their own gas masks. It was a pretty terrible moment. And what's more, they vomited into their own gas masks. It was a pretty terrible moment. And what's more, they didn't know what was happening on other floors. All they could hear were the explosions and the guns going off and the bombs and the bullets and so on. So it was a situation of pretty astonishing chaos. But it was being coordinated because at the back, Hector Gulland had a radio system. Again, nobody knew this, that everybody was wired up to the radio so at some points he could work out who was where but it was like exploding three-dimensional chess what was going

on inside there nobody really knew what was happening but he was able was he to call an end to it when the time came to stop shooting or yes they managed to save all but two of the hostages they managed to get them out They took them down the back staircase, they took them onto the gardens, which are at the back of the embassy there. There they handcuffed them, because they didn't know who were hostages and who might still be gunmen.

They didn't know whether the gunmen had brought out grenades with them, whether they were going to blow themselves up as the SAS were standing over them. So it's still incredibly dangerous. But yes, so 11 minutes after Hector Gullen received the order to go in, the whole thing was over. I mean, it's over in a blink of an eye. I mean, I think they're still, the survivors are still astonished by how many of them survived. And you could go back to watching the snooker with your dad? By this point, the snooker was over, actually actually. In fact one of the things is the SAS were also watching the snooker

by the way and as they came out and were being led back to the vans just to get away before the press got hold of them the first thing they asked the policeman standing around was who won the snooker. So the SAS are looking down at this row of bodies in front of them and all the gunmen are dead, bar one. The SAS went in with orders to free the hostages. In the end, that meant killing five out of six of them. And those moments have been described to me in great detail by the participants who are still around. And they are remarkable moments.

This was an exceptionally violent denouement. And perhaps it had to be. Perhaps that was the only way of ending it. I think it probably was. And so, yes, five of these young men did not survive it. And they are buried in a cemetery in London. Was the last one tried, as That Thatcher wanted in a British court? The one survivor, Fawzi Nejad, got out by the skin of his teeth. He came very close to not

surviving. He was tried, he was sentenced, and he spent more than 20 years in British prisons. So what Thatcher intended to happen did in fact happen to the one sole survivor. He faced British law and he paid that price. Perhaps this is just my bias in that it happened in my city, in my childhood, but my sense is that the sort of mythologising of SWAT, and particularly of the SAS, really begins with this incident. And we've been living in that era ever since in some way. That is absolutely right. Until this moment, the SAS was a shadowy and highly controversial unit.

They were operating in Northern Ireland. There were already accusations that they had been used for shoot to kill purposes. There were rumours around that the regiment might even be disbanded. But most Britons had never heard of the SAS. Overnight, they became an astonishing international sensation. Applications to join the SAS went through the roof. I mean, people actually genuinely thought they could turn up at recruiting centres and they would be given a gas mask and a machine gun and allowed to go and do it themselves. And that myth of the SAS, the idea that the SAS is somehow a troop of sort of macho kind of black suited frog men who will kind of solve any

solution became a kind of international myth, really. I mean, applications to have the SAS used in international situations also increased very, very quickly. They became sort of very, very famous. And they became, as one of them said, we became Thatcher's army. I mean, some people believe, and I think there's a decent argument here, which is that in a way what happened in the Falklands, and the SAS were very active in the Falklands, her sort of gung-ho approach to military situations was in a way born in Prince's Gate. So it changed everything for the SAS. Some in the SAS still maintain that actually it was very bad for the SAS, that they could no longer operate in the

shadows after this. They were incredibly famous. And that did change the way they were perceived. And it's one of the reasons why we get the television programs, you know, who dares wins, you know, the sort of people competing to show that they're they're sort of stronger and faster and fitter and so on. And of course, that is part of the SAS training. But it's not all about the SAS is a more complicated, it's a more intelligent organisation than that. And I think coming out of the shadows, some feel that it exposed them in a way that they've been wrestling with ever since because the SS is still caught between the secrecy that it wishes to maintain and the celebrity that was born at number 16 Prince's Gate. So apart from the SS what are the legacies what was the effect on the global political scene? Well Thatcher couldn't help a bit of crowing so she immediately called up the Americans and said you know they're out we're

pleased let us do anything we can to help you next sort of thing. For her, it was a key moment. Ever after, whenever she did something particularly spectacular, Thatcher would be pictured by cartoonists dressed in combat gear, abseiling down the outside of Big Ben. It became her kind of stock in trade. And she posed with the essay. One doesn't want to be too cynical, but she knew a political advantage when she saw it. She actually turned up at the party that was held in Regent's Park barracks immediately after the assault in order to mix and mingle with the different soldiers who'd taken part.

So she knew a political advantage when she saw one. In a way, it became one of the key symbolic linchpins of the toughness that characterised her legacy, if you like. It also changed the way that we perceived the news. This had been the first major live televised event, and I think it created an appetite for that. Certainly it had an effect on me. I mean, I watched it as a teenager, and I had never seen news be quite so dramatic and exciting.

I think it's one of the reasons I became a journalist. I thought, God, it's absolutely amazing these things can happen in real time. So there's a kind of technological media element to it that is also very, very new. And it is also the run-up to the Iran-Iraq war. You know, within months, that appalling conflict has broken out, which would last for eight years and more than a million people would die in that conflict and so that is also the precursor to the instability that we see in our world today you know no Iran Iraq war no Gulf

War no Gulf War no 9-11 no 9-11 no no Afghanistan war you know so these are part of a sort of historical continuum if you like and the things that were going on inside that building which were really a collision between violent men who believed they knew the truth on both sides. You know, on the one side, the fanatical Ayatollah supporters and on the other, the equally fanatical and dedicated Arab gunmen taking hostages. These are situations that we understand today in a different context. So in order, I would say, to kind of understand the world, the sort of incredibly politically divided

and violent world that we live in today, understanding what happened in 16 Prince's Gate over those six days is not just symbolic, but also a kind of strange window into our own world. You've got yourself another bestseller there, McIntyre. What's it going to be called? It's called, very simply, The Siege, and it's out now. Thank you very much, Ben McIntyre,

for coming here on this lovely sunny day in London and talking me through it. you