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

By Ben Macintyre

13 min read

Why does it matter? Because the story you think you know about the Iranian Embassy siege is a legend that replaced a far stranger truth.

You already know the ending: black-clad soldiers, burning curtains, Thatcher triumphant, the SAS transformed overnight into Britain's most celebrated secret. What the legend quietly erases is everything that made the ending so precarious — the leader who was a poetry student before a regime murdered his brother; the policeman who kept a loaded revolver hidden for six days by telling anyone who noticed that the holster held notebooks, and then, when he finally had his chance, couldn't bring himself to pull the trigger; the journalist who faked a dysenteric collapse so convincingly that a gunman wept over him. Ben Macintyre's account of the six days inside 16 Princes Gate is not a story about superior tactics defeating fanaticism. It's a study in how completely unpredictable human beings become when exhaustion, grief, and mortal fear dissolve every calculation they arrived with — and how close the whole thing came to going catastrophically, unforgettably wrong.

A Poet, a Policeman, and a Cup of Yuk: The Ordinary Morning Before Everything Changed

Trevor Lock left his house in Dagenham that Wednesday morning wearing two pullovers under his police tunic. His wife Doreen had insisted — he'd be standing on the embassy step all day in the drizzle. She also wanted him home on time: it was her birthday, and he'd bought tickets to a West End musical, Ipi Tombi. He accepted the Persian coffee from doorman Abbas Fallahi not because he wanted it — he privately called it a 'cup of yuk' — but because refusing might seem rude. At 11:26 AM, with glass flying into his face and gunfire cracking through the marble hall, the coffee cup smashed on the floor.

That gap between the ordinary and the catastrophic is what the opening of this story keeps returning to. But the deeper surprise isn't Lock's interrupted birthday plans — it's what you learn about the man pointing the gun at him.

Towfiq Ibrahim al-Rashidi, twenty-seven years old, had spent his university years reciting poetry in three languages and driving around Tehran in a two-seater Toyota with his Iranian girlfriend. He demonstrated against the shah not with weapons but with sit-ins, believing that when Khomeini swept to power, the Arab minority in southwestern Iran would finally receive the autonomy they'd been promised. He was wrong about that. Then his brother Naji went home to continue the peaceful struggle, was arrested within a week, tortured for seven days, and shot in the desert. The Iranian secret police announced Naji's execution on the same day as a notorious informer's — a deliberate smear to make Naji's death look like justice rather than murder. Within a year, the poetry-loving moderate had crossed into Iraq, taken weapons training at a camp outside Baghdad, and adopted the name Salim.

Here's the part that should unsettle you: by the time Salim led five men into the embassy, he had already been abandoned. 'Sami the Fox,' the Iraqi intelligence handler who recruited, funded, and armed the group, kissed each man on both cheeks that morning, promised to stay close, and then boarded the 11:00 AM flight to Paris — the same hour the attack was timed to begin. The weapons had arrived via the Iraqi diplomatic bag. The plan was modeled on a successful hostage operation in Vienna. The gunmen believed they were freedom fighters. They were pawns, deployed and discarded before the first shot was fired.

The Trap Had No Exits Before the Siege Even Started

The siege was structurally doomed before the gunmen had finished barricading the stairwells. Not because of any single decision, but because every institution with the power to end it peacefully had a reason to refuse.

The clearest demonstration came late on the first night, over a phone line that almost no one knew existed. Iranian Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh — a man who had helped Khomeini return from exile and now served as the revolution's international face — somehow obtained the embassy's secret intelligence line, the one bypassing the main switchboard, the one even the state telephone service didn't have on record. When he got through, the chargé d'affaires Afrouz, jaw injured and barely coherent, begged him to consider the gunmen's demands. Ghotbzadeh's response was to salute the Iranian hostages for being 'ready to die as martyrs' and dismiss their captors as CIA agents. He wasn't stalling or posturing for leverage — he was actively closing the diplomatic exit. When Towfiq grabbed the phone and threatened to kill everyone, Ghotbzadeh told him to do what he liked. Tehran didn't want this resolved; it wanted martyrs, who were worth far more to the revolution than survivors.

On the British side, the obstruction was institutional rather than cynical. Margaret Thatcher had six months in office and the still-smoldering wreckage of Carter's failed helicopter rescue in Iran — Operation Eagle Claw had crashed in the desert just six days before the siege began — as her most recent object lesson in what Western weakness looked like. Her position going into the first Cobra meeting was already fixed: no concessions, terrorism treated as crime, the gunmen to be defeated visibly. This left Fred Luff, her designated negotiator, with nothing to offer. Effective hostage negotiation runs on time and the appearance of possibility — keeping people talking while exhaustion and boredom erode the will to die. Strip away any prospect of meeting demands, and you strip away the thing that makes talking worth doing. Luff, a man who had once confiscated John Lennon's artwork on obscenity grounds, was being asked to perform a subtle, empathetic, deceptive dance with no music and no floor.

The room had no exits. It just took six days to prove it.

The 'Crusher' Who Cried on a Wrestling Brief

Chris Cramer stomped around the BBC newsroom swearing at people. His colleagues called him Crusher — big, loud, bullish, the kind of man who treated vulnerability as a professional liability. When the gunmen took the embassy, he was sitting on the floor of a room full of strangers, and what he found in his pocket was a crumpled briefing note about wrestling housewives from Acton. The story was headlined 'Grapplers.' On the back of it, hands shaking, he wrote his parents a goodbye letter — the first letter he'd ever written them. He folded it into his wallet so the police would find it on his body.

Then he stood up and ran a deception operation.

Cramer began faking a catastrophic stomach illness: convulsions, drenching sweat, legs shooting out in spasm, saliva trailing from his mouth. He was so convincing that one of the gunmen — a young man called Shaye — knelt over him weeping, massaged his chest, and apologized in Arabic for the suffering they'd caused. Even Karkouti, who suspected the performance, couldn't be certain. After hours of this, the gunmen decided Cramer was a liability they couldn't afford, and Towfiq opened the front door.

At 11:22 on the second morning, Cramer staggered onto the pavement and climbed into an ambulance. He batted away the oxygen mask. Then, in a rush, he told the anti-terrorist officers everything: six gunmen, machine guns, hand grenades, the layout of the rooms — and the one detail that would matter most if the SAS ever went in: PC Lock still had his revolver, hidden, undiscovered.

It was the first forensic intelligence about the inside of that building. It came not from surveillance equipment or trained operatives, but from a man so frightened he'd written his parents a farewell note on a wrestling brief — and who then decided, somewhere in the gap between those two things, to improvise his way out. The siege was full of professionals making calculations. It was an amateur actor, weeping convincingly on a mattress, who first told the rescuers what they were walking into.

When Captors and Captives Start Signing Each Other's Visitors' Book

Think of what happens to skin when it's cut: the body doesn't wait for instructions. It just starts building scar tissue, drawing resources to the wound, doing whatever biology requires to keep the organism alive. Stockholm syndrome works something like that — not a weakness or a confusion, but an immune response. Terror is the wound; unlikely attachment is the scar tissue.

By day three of the siege, the evidence of this was sitting on a flattened cardboard food carton being passed around a second-floor office in Knightsbridge. After a shared lunch of steaks, french fries, and canned Coke — delivered to the doorstep by police, eaten together on the floor — someone produced a pen and suggested everyone sign their names. The carton circulated. A BBC sound recordist wrote 'All the best.' The embassy's protocol officer signed with a butler's pleasantry. A Syrian journalist declared it 'the beginning of new friendship.' One of the women pressed a lipstick kiss above her name. Then the lead gunman, who had been threatening to execute a hostage every forty minutes that same morning, signed his operational alias with a flourish. His second-in-command used the space for a political manifesto about imperialism and Arab liberation. The hardest man in the group, the one who wore a hand grenade on his finger like a ring, slipped it into his pocket before lunch and never took it back out.

The detail worth sitting with isn't that people behaved strangely under duress. It's that the strangeness had a precise logic. The gunmen needed their captives to understand them — to see the cause as legitimate, the men behind the weapons as human. The hostages needed the gunmen to see them the same way. Both groups were engineering the same outcome: a reason not to kill, and a reason not to die. The visitors' book was the peace treaty of a tiny improvised society that had formed inside a besieged building on a spring morning in London. Not sentiment. Survival, expressed in the only currency available — recognition. You exist; I sign my name; we are both, briefly, people to each other.

The psychiatrist observing from outside noted that this was inevitable, not pathological. Put any group of people under extreme threat and they bond. The bigger surprise, perhaps, is how quickly the arithmetic flipped: by day three, the hostages had begun to see the police as the greater danger to their lives. The authorities were stalling, refusing demands, goading the gunmen with broken promises. The men in the room were at least honest about what they wanted. When you're deciding who to trust, proximity and candor beat institutional process every time.

The Mastermind None of the Gunmen Knew About

Here is the question the previous sections haven't fully answered: did the six men who walked into that embassy actually believe in what they were doing? Because it turns out only five of them even knew what they were doing.

At two-thirty in the morning on day three, after a rambling conversation that had drifted from Earl's Court shawarma stands to Yasser Arafat, Towfiq held Karkouti back and shared something none of his own comrades had been told. The operation had a mastermind — someone who had planned it, armed it, and then vanished before the first shot was fired. His name made Karkouti gasp: Abu Nidal, a Palestinian militant whose appetite for violence had already outrun Carlos the Jackal in the estimation of the U.S. Defense Department. Born Sabri al-Banna, dispossessed, paranoid, possibly psychotic, he had spent a decade building a freelance assassination business out of Baghdad, bankrolled by Saddam Hussein's intelligence service to the tune of millions of dollars in cash and Chinese-made weapons. His preferred instrument was the embassy siege. Between 1971 and 1980, diplomatic buildings were attacked forty-eight times worldwide; in roughly a third of those cases demands were at least partially met, and half the attackers walked free. For a state sponsor with a grievance and no interest in being caught holding it, that was a serviceable return on investment.

What that means for the men inside is this. Towfiq's grief was real — his brother tortured and shot, his political hopes destroyed. The others had their own authentic reasons. But the cause those reasons were harnessed to, the operation they were dying for, was someone else's chess move entirely. None of the five other gunmen knew Abu Nidal's name. They thought they were freedom fighters. They were instruments, deployed by a regime that would deny them the moment the cameras turned away. The tragedy of the Iranian Embassy siege, seen from this angle, isn't that grievance produced violence. It's that genuine grief was a resource someone else spent.

The SAS Were Training in a Killing House; They Were Also Watching Snooker and Eating Pizzas

The most dangerous unit in the British military was, during the Iranian Embassy siege, watching snooker and eating pizza. That fact isn't a footnote — it's the key to understanding why they succeeded.

The public image of the SAS was built from the Killing House at Hereford: a low brick building where soldiers fired a thousand rounds in a single morning, where Prince Charles once left a note promising not to send the regiment to the Tower if they accidentally shot him during a training exercise, and where the air after a session tasted, according to one trooper, of lead. This was the version people imagined pacing the corridors of 15 Princes Gate, coiled and lethal, waiting for the word.

The reality was a squadron of men who had been awake for days in a borrowed house full of someone else's furniture, eating Carlo's pizzas, betting on whether Hurricane Higgins or Cliff Thorburn would take the World Snooker Championship, and occasionally nailing each other's boots to the floor. When a young clerk named Mark Gilfoyle looked too comfortable in his chair, two veterans handed him a machine gun, black overalls, and abseiling ropes and told him he'd been added to the assault team. Gilfoyle — a typist, not a soldier — dressed in kit he'd never worn, took his place among the others on standby, and sat there visibly shaking, chain-smoking two cigarettes at a time while the rest of the squadron strained not to laugh.

Professional readiness doesn't look like constant high tension. It can't — that's unsustainable. It looks like the ability to flood from boredom to lethal competence in seconds. The boredom wasn't a failure of discipline. It was evidence of it: the metabolic resting state of men trained to save their adrenaline for when it counted.

The Six Days It Took for Exhaustion to Become Execution

By Day Six, the thing holding the operation together wasn't resolve — it was inertia. Towfiq al-Rashidi had slept five hours across five nights. His skin had gone the color of old wax. He was answering in monosyllables. The psychiatrist monitoring him from outside predicted the gunmen's behavior would become 'progressively unpredictable,' which was the clinical term for a man who had already stopped calculating outcomes.

The moment it tipped started with Magic Markers. Jassim and Towfiq found a stock of them in a stationery cupboard and began scrawling slogans across the walls — 'Death to Khomeini,' 'Down with the Turbaned Shah.' Press attaché Abbas Lavasani watched from the doorway until something in him snapped. He lurched across the room beating his chest, screaming in Arabic and Farsi, deliberately goading the gunmen to shoot him. PC Lock wrestled him to the floor and held him in a neck lock. The confrontation ended, absurdly, with Lavasani and the journalist Karkouti rocking together on the floor weeping. But the damage was done. The gunmen stopped speaking to each other. Jassim emerged as the one willing to finish it. Towfiq sat apart, pale and disconnected, watching the scene from a long way off.

By morning, every exit was visibly closed. Arab ambassadors had met the night before and unanimously declined to intervene. The British government would offer nothing. The police negotiators were talking because talking was the protocol, not because there was anything to offer. When Towfiq delivered his final speech to Lock — they'd been messing him about, they didn't care if the hostages died, the drilling in the walls was proof they were coming — he wasn't making an argument. He was reading an autopsy.

At 12:26, Jassim knotted parcel twine around Lavasani's wrists and ankles and lashed him to the banister posts at the bottom of the staircase, slowly and methodically, while Lock narrated everything to the negotiator on the other end of the phone. Lavasani's expression, Lock noticed, was terrified. His voice was completely steady. 'Please don't worry, Mr. Trevor,' he said. 'I'm not afraid to die.'

At 12:55, Jassim shot him three times in the back of the head.

The claustrophobia of the preceding six days isn't that a villain chose violence. It's that exhaustion, institutional rigidity, and genuine ideological fracture each foreclosed one exit after another until the only door left open was the one Jassim walked through. The trap had no villain. It had geometry.

Eleven Minutes of Fire, Jammed Ropes, and a Policeman Who Hesitated

Tom Morell is dangling forty feet above a growing fire, his abseil rope jammed in the figure-eight device, boot beginning to melt into his foot. Below him, the general office is fully ablaze — flash-bangs landed in paraffin-soaked duplicator fluid, the curtains went up in seconds. Each time Morell swings away from the wall, the heat gathering in the window pulls him back toward the flames. His trousers are on fire from the knee down. On the roof, a soldier stands over the rope with a knife, waiting for the right moment in the pendulum arc, knowing that if he cuts on the outward swing, Morell will miss the balcony and fall sixty feet onto stone. He cuts. Morell drops ten feet, hits hard on his shoulder, and stands up immediately — adrenaline is, as Macintyre puts it, a powerful anesthetic — then turns and plunges back through the burning window to complete his assignment.

That is what the 'legendary' eleven minutes actually looked like. The rear frame charge was never detonated because Morell's body was directly above it; the front charge fired thirty seconds late; the assault team missed the target by over a minute while their commander yelled 'GET IN' from a Kingston House flat. Peter de la Billière, listening through headphones in the Cobra communications room, heard two unsynchronized explosions and told the waiting ministers that the regiment might have blown itself up. William Whitelaw went pale. The entire political architecture of the operation — Thatcher's premiership, the SAS's future, the doctrine of military force as a last resort — was briefly suspended over that burning building with Morell.

The decisions made inside were messier still. PC Lock, who had hidden his revolver for six days in the holster of a man he'd come to know, finally drew it and pressed it under Towfiq's jaw. He had five rounds. He chose not to fire — because policemen, he thought, don't shoot subdued men. Seconds later the door burst open and the SAS shot Towfiq fifteen times at a range of three feet. Jassim, caught trying to blend into the evacuation chain with a live grenade in his pocket, was clubbed down the staircase and shot thirty-nine times. Abbas, crouched on an ambassador's sofa with his arm raised, was shot twenty-one times — then investigators found that the weapon in his hand was a toy air pistol from the caretaker's cupboard, purchased to deter rats.

The one gunman who walked out alive survived not through restraint but because two hostage women threw themselves across his body and told the SAS he was their brother. The legend forged that evening on live television — fourteen million viewers watching black-suited figures abseil into smoke, the BBC cutting from snooker with the line 'and now from one Embassy to another' — was not wrong exactly. The hostages got out. But the clean decisive operation that entered British mythology was built on a jammed rope, a melting boot, a toy gun, and a human shield. What the camera caught was the outcome. What actually happened was improvisation under fire, held together by the one thing no doctrine can manufacture: men who stood back up.

What Gets Lost When Legend Replaces Truth

Here is what the myth costs you: the clean story. Fourteen million people watched black-suited figures descend through smoke and came away knowing something they hadn't known before — that Britain had men like this, that competence was possible, that the chaos of the previous decade might be over. The story served its purposes. It rehabilitated a prime minister, built a brand, gave a frightened country somewhere to put its fear. But the actual event is stranger and more instructive than anything the cameras caught. Where the legend says 'wicked terrorist defeated,' the story ends with a twenty-seven-year-old who never knew the name of the man who sent him there. Towfiq arrived as a grieving poet. He left as someone else's chess piece. That's the beat the mythology works hardest to bury.