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Six days that shook Britain ================== It was one of the events that defined the 80s - establishing the SAS's lethal reputation and Margaret Thatcher as a prime minister who refused to give in to terrorists. But as the nation watched mesmerised on television, what was going on inside the Iranian embassy where six gunmen held 26 people captive for almost a week? Now for the first time, key players, including the policeman held hostage and three of the soldiers, talk to Peter Taylor Peter Taylor Wednesday July 24, 2002 The Guardian Wednesday April 30, 1980 was going to be a special day for PC Trevor Lock of the Metropolitan police. He had planned a surprise that evening for his wife, Doreen. It wasn't her birthday or their anniversary; he just thought that she deserved a treat. He was scheduled for diplomatic protection duty that day outside the Iranian embassy in Princes Gate, Kensington, and had planned to meet Doreen after work, buy her some perfume at Harrods and then take her to dinner and on to a West End show. The weather was lousy but at least he had something to look forward to. It didn't work out like that. Just before 11.30am, Lock was drinking a thick Iranian coffee with Abbas, the embassy concierge, when he saw a face through the glass panel of the door. He thought it was a student and moved to let him in. The man pulled out a machine pistol and let off a burst. Lock was hit by flying glass. "I remember a curtain of red coming down and immense pain in my eyes and face," he says. "I thought I'd been shot." Within minutes six gunmen, armed with automatic weapons and grenades, had seized the embassy and taken 26 people hostage, including PC Lock. A hundred and thirty five miles away at SAS headquarters in Hereford, the regiment's elite counter terrorist team were getting ready for a weekend exercise. Mac, one of its assault specialists, wasn't happy because he had been hoping for the weekend off. He was delighted when one of his colleagues rushed over and told him the exercise was off. Mac thought it meant he could take a break after all. "No," said the soldier. "It's for real." In Whitehall there was a flurry of activity as the government's emergency plans swung into action. Like the SAS, civil servants had practised the drills so often that they were second nature. By early afternoon, ministers, officials and military had gathered in the government's crisis management centre, the cabinet office briefing room, (Cobra). According to one official present, Margaret Thatcher, who was then prime minister, bustled about trying to organise everybody until she was gently and politely escorted to the door. Meanwhile, the Met's anti-terrorist squad had set up its operational base in a building next door to the embassy with trained negotiators in place. At this stage, no one knew who the gunmen were, where they were from or what they wanted. When it transpired that they were Arabs who wanted autonomy for an oil-rich region in southern Iran known as Khuzestan, officials were one the wiser. "We had no idea what it was all about," says Richard Hastie-Smith, the cabinet office official in charge of Cobra. "At that stage, no one knew that Iraq had trained and armed the gunmen to embarrass its enemy Iran, and that the drama about to be played out in Princes Gate was a dramatic prelude to the Iran-Iraq war that was to explode four months later and send millions of young men to their graves. Soon it transpired that the gunmen wanted the release of 91 of their comrades held in Ayatollah Khomeini's gaols. Iran said it was out of the question." The saga that would unfold over the next six days and its bloody dénouement was one of the defining events of the 80s. For millions watching television, snooker players were suddenly replaced by black-clad armed figures leaping through the windows of the embassy. The SAS raid that ended the siege was one of the most dramatic things ever seen on live television, a set of images that would take their place alongside Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon and John F Kennedy's assassination. By the time the smoke had cleared, the audacious raid had established the SAS's reputation as the world's most effective military unit and Thatcher as a leader who would not give in to terrorism. Now, for the first time, the full story of the siege and the devastating operation that ended it has been pieced together from interviews with several of those involved for a BBC documentary. Once the kidnappers were in control, the hostages were made to sit in a circle on the floor, staring down the barrels of guns. Lock sat in the middle, enthroned on a big Queen Anne chair. "That chair became a symbol of authority in that room," he says. "I was 'Mr British policeman' in full uniform while everyone else sat on the floor." Lock was consumed with guilt over having been inside drinking coffee instead of outside guarding the embassy. But he had another worry, too. He was armed with a revolver which, miraculously, the gunmen had not found during their cursory search of the hostages. It was hidden by his police over-jacket which he kept on throughout the siege. He toyed with the idea of using it - "Do I do the John Wayne bit and start blatting everyone in sight?" - but decided it would be unwise, given that he and other hostages would quite possibly end up dead. He was so concerned about its possible discovery that he even decided not to eat anything so he wouldn't have to go to the lavatory - a trip the hostages always had to make under armed escort - lest the gun be revealed when he dropped his trousers. He went without food for six days. Towards the end of the siege, when he was given a tube of toothpaste to freshen up, he ate it all. "I squeezed every gram into my mouth. It was the first thing I'd eaten. It was delicious." The SAS soon moved to a building adjacent to the embassy. Operation Nimrod was about to begin. The SAS were ready; they had been training for such an operation for years. Day after day they had practised their killing drills. Robin Horsfall was one of the counter terrorist team's crack shots. "Police marksmen get 100 rounds a year. We would get 400 in a morning. We could draw a pistol in a darkened room and put two rounds in a man's forehead in a four-inch circle. Bang! Bang!" He said the team had trained so long and hard that there was nothing left to do. "You can only sharpen a knife so much and the knife was already razor sharp." Mac says the firepower of the weapons they used was awesome. "The MP5 fires about 1,200 rounds a minute and you have a 30-round magazine. You pull the trigger and they have gone in about two seconds. They would go straight through a 'baddy'." When I asked Horsfall if he wanted the negotiations to succeed, he gave a brutally honest reply. "We didn't want them to surrender. We wanted them to stay there so we could go in and hit them. That was what we lived for and trained for. It's a bit like somebody training you to drive a racing car but never letting you get into the car and actually do a grand prix. We didn't want the negotiators to be successful. Ultimately, we wanted to go in there and do the job." For five long days, police negotiators played a verbal game of cat and mouse with the gunmen while the SAS waited and, like millions of other Britons, watched the finals of the Embassy world snooker tournament. A trickle of hostages were released in return for minor concessions - most notably the BBC broadcasting the hostage-takers' demands. Persuaded by Lock and the other hostages that honour had been satisfied, Salim, the gunmen's leader, then demanded a coach to Heathrow and a plane to fly them out. But Salim and his five comrades were going nowhere. From the beginning, Thatcher had made it clear that the only way the gunmen would come out was with their hands in the air to stand trial. The previous year her close friend and confidant, Airey Neave, had been blown up by the Irish National Liberation Army, and Lord Mountbatten and 18 paratroopers were killed on the same day by the IRA. She was in no mood to negotiate with terrorists. The SAS felt the same. During the siege, they learned that one of their officers, Captain Herbert Westmacott, had been shot dead by the IRA, ironically at the beginning of a siege in Belfast. "I personally have no time for anybody who carries out a terrorist act," says Tom, another member of the SAS counter-terrorist team. "I happen to believe in democracy and I think anybody who commits themselves to any terrorist act deserves everything they get." By day six, there was stalemate and Salim was growing more angry and frustrated at the lack of any movement and any sign of the coach. He threatened to kill a hostage again but this time he meant it. The chosen victim was the embassy's young press attaché, Abbas Lavasani, who worshipped his spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, and offered himself up to the gunmen as a martyr for the Islamic revolution. Now the gunmen took him up on his offer. He was tied to the bannister. Lock stood by in horror. "He said, 'Please Mr Trevor, don't worry, I'm not afraid to die,' and I did nothing. I don't like myself because of it. I knew I had a gun. Should I draw it and try and save this innocent lamb? I so desperately wanted to do something, but I did nothing." Lock went back to his chair and heard three shots. "What I heard was a classic execution." Some hours later, Lavasani's body was thrown out of the front door. The die was cast. A hostage had been killed and it was the signal for the SAS to storm the embassy. Just before the SAS team went in, Tom claims that a highly sensitive message was passed from Thatcher. He says that nothing was written down and it was relayed off the record, verbally, to the assault team. "The message was that we had to resolve the situation and there was to be no chance of failure, and that the hostages absolutely had to be protected. The prime minister did not want an ongoing problem beyond the embassy - which we took to mean that they didn't want anybody coming out alive. No surviving terrorists." Although, 22 years later, Tom is not 100% sure of the precise words, he stands by his recollection and has no doubt what it meant. However, Tom's counter terrorist team-mates do not share his recollection and the SAS and the Ministry of Defence refuse to comment. If a message was received, "an ongoing problem" could be open to wide interpretation. At 7.23pm on bank holiday Monday, the sixth day of the siege, the SAS blasted their way into the embassy as millions watched open-mouthed on live television. Within 11 minutes, the hostages had been rescued - all except one who was shot dead by the gunmen - and five of the six gunmen were killed. Within minutes Lock was involved in a life or death struggle with Salim. He had finally pulled his gun and held it to Salim's head. "I said, 'It's your fault, you bastard. You caused all this. I fucking told you.' His ear should have melted. He couldn't believe it. 'Mr Trevor's got a gun!' His eyes popped out of his head. Then I thought, if I kill him I'd be doing so out of anger and that's not the way I've been trained." Suddenly Lock heard a voice shout out his name and yell for him to get out of the way. Lock was amazed that the SAS man knew his name. Tom burst in through the door and opened up on Salim. Trevor looked round at the suddenly lifeless body. "There was a line of bullet holes going diagonally from his eye across his chest. No blood, just the holes." Tom showed no emotion. "There's a very distinct sound when a bullet hits a body. It's like a thud. I've shot deer all my life up in Scotland and you get the same sound when you hit a deer. Salim would have been dead before he hit the floor." Tom later gave Lock his SAS beret. The constable was bundled out of the embassy at lightning speed, manhandled down the SAS human chain. Horsfall was delighted when he saw that Lock was safe. "That was brilliant. Our number one objective had been achieved. He was part of our team. He was one of us." As he was hurled down the line to safety, Lock shouted 'thank you' to each soldier. Mac shot dead a gunman found hiding in a room and who, he said, had a weapon. Killing him meant nothing. "It's not being 'hard'. It's just part of the job." Horsfall killed another gunman at the bottom of the stairs. "He had a hand grenade. We shot him. That was it. End of story. There was no emotion. It was one of the simplest experiences up to that point in my life." But the most controversial killings took place in the embassy's telex room, where two of the gunmen, Shai and Makki, were guarding most of the Iranian hostages. As the building came under attack, the gunmen opened fire, killing one hostage and wounding another, Ahmad Dadgar. Dadgar took six bullets and, miraculously, survived fully conscious to witness what happened next. He says that the hostages persuaded the gunmen to surrender rather than be killed. According to his account, Shai and Makki agreed, threw down their weapons and sat on the floor with their hands on their heads. As the television pictures show, weapons were thrown out of the window and a white flag of surrender appeared. When the SAS entered the room, they demanded to know who the gunmen were. Dadgar remembers: "They then took the two terrorists, pushed them against the wall and shot them. They wanted to finish their story. That was their job." He said that they might have "had something in their pockets but certainly had no weapons in their hands at the time". Dadgar's account is confirmed by two of the other Iranian hostages who were witnesses in the telex room at the time. "To me it doesn't matter whether they were armed or unarmed," Dadgar says. "They were terrorists." At the coroner's inquest, one of the SAS soldiers said that he thought Makki was going for a gun and shot him in the back with "a short burst". Another said he thought Shai had a grenade and shot him in the back of the neck. The jury returned a verdict of justifiable homicide. Five of the six gunmen died in a hail of SAS bullets. One, Fowzi Nejad, survived by passing himself off as a hostage. Once "rescued" and taken outside the embassy, he was identified as a gunman by a real hostage and almost joined his dead comrades. One SAS soldier appeared to be about to drag him back inside the building until Horsfall advised him against it since the world was watching. "That would have been totally against policy and it would have been a very foolish thing for somebody to make that sort of mistake." Fawzi survived and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The SAS then retired to Regents Park barracks for a beer, a debrief and a congratulatory visit from Margaret Thatcher and Denis. Hastie-Smith, the cabinet office official, was with them. "Most of them appeared to have slightly ginger hair and ginger moustaches and bottles of beer in their hand," he says. "The state of excitement was something I've never see in my life before. They were like a pack of hounds. The air was thick with testosterone." Tom distinctly recollects the prime minister's Estee Lauder Youth Dew perfume and that Denis was "quite upset" that one of the terrorists had survived. "He told us in no uncertain terms that we had failed in some respects," Tom says. "He had a big grin on his face and said, 'You let one of the bastards live.' "We failed in that respect." · SAS: Embassy Siege will be shown at 9pm on BBC2 tomorrow. --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.bacIlu Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
