Inside the devastatingly audacious SAS raid on the Iranian Embassy launched by Maggie Thatcher – from a lay-by near High Wycombe

Standing in the elegant entrance hall of the overrun Iranian embassy, the exasperated leader of the gang of Arab gunmen told PC Trevor Lock: ‘Mr Trevor, I’ve had enough, we have brought a hostage downstairs.’

He pointed at a distraught-looking young diplomat dressed in a yellow cardigan and then at a field telephone sitting on the reception desk. ‘Tell your bosses we will shoot him in five minutes unless we get what we want.’

It was just before 1pm on Monday, May 5, 1980 – Day Six of the Iranian Embassy siege in central London. Since the previous Wednesday six young Arab gunmen – the self-styled Group of the Martyr – had occupied the building in Princes Gate, South Kensington, seizing 26 hostages in the process, among them a British policeman and six women.

Their cause was an obscure one in a distant country – more rights for Arabs like them in largely Persian Iran, where the old-style ruler, the Shah, had recently been ousted, replaced by the theocratic rule of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Pictured: Seyyed Abbas Lavasan who was taken hostage in the siege 

Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pictured in 1983

Jassim, one of the gunmen and by far the most militant, walked up behind Lavasani and fired three bullets at point-blank range into the back of his head

They wanted their views broadcast, Arab ambassadors to escort them to safety and political prisoners in their homeland released.

For days they had been stalled and now their leader, Towfiq al-Rashidi, codename ‘Salim’, was losing patience. He had released four of the hostages without making any progress in negotiations with the authorities.

Now he had selected one of the remaining 22, Abbas Lavasani, a young embassy press attache, who even now was being tied with twine to the spindles of a staircase and a strip of cloth bound over his eyes.

PC Lock had been the English bobby on duty at the door on Wednesday when the embassy was stormed and ever since had been trying, so far successfully, to keep things reasonably calm.

But now events were racing out of control. He took the phone, pressed the button with trembling fingers and told the police negotiator on the other end of the line: ‘They are trussing him up like a chicken. They’re going to kill him.’

Salim then seized the phone and held it to poor Lavasani’s mouth, who declared: ‘I am tied up and they are going to kill me. Please help me.’ Salim snatched the telephone back but the line was open and sounds of an argument were heard, followed by gunshots.

Jassim, another of the gunmen and by far the most militant, had walked up behind Lavasani and fired three bullets at point-blank range into the back of his head. Salim followed up by warning the other hostages: ‘We will shoot one of you every 45 minutes until we get an answer about the ambassadors. It is in their hands.’

But hostage Ron Morris, the embassy’s head steward and maintenance man, its only full-time British employee, knew a red line had been crossed and there was no going back. ‘One man or 20,’ he told his captors, ‘it doesn’t matter now. If you’ve killed one hostage, you might as well kill us all. You won’t get out from this place alive.’

Sim Harris escaping from the Iranian Embassy during a siege in 1980 

Hostage Sherry – Shirazeh Boroumand, secretary and switchboard operator

Towfiq pictured at a student party in Tehran shortly before the fall of the Shah

The outside of the Iranian embassy in London where the siege took place 

The week-long siege was about to end and not peacefully. At Dorneywood, the Home Secretary’s country retreat, pre-lunch gin and tonics were interrupted by a call from the police that shots had been heard inside the embassy.

Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw summoned the ministerial car and the 4.2-litre Jaguar shot out of the gates, through Slough, and on to the M4.

The driver hit the Hammersmith flyover at over 120mph, sped the wrong way up Constitution Hill between Hyde Park Corner and Buckingham Palace, and screeched to a halt outside the Cabinet Office in Whitehall. The 30-mile journey into central London had taken 18 minutes.

In the Cobra meeting room, the committee designed to handle matters of national emergency, Whitelaw was met by Brigadier Peter de la Billière, Director SAS, whose recruits were experts in surveillance, close-quarter combat, explosives, marksmanship and urban warfare and whose units were trained to tackle insurgents, guerrillas and terrorists like those holed up in the Iranian Embassy and then slip away, unidentified and unseen. Selection was (and is) famously demanding.

One such unit was now on standby in central London with a complete battle plan in place, though, De la Billière told Whitelaw, there was no guarantee it would work.

SAS preparations had been underway ever since the gunmen’s assault on the embassy had begun. Within hours seven white Range Rovers, two white Ford Transit vans and two large yellow furniture lorries had been on their way from the SAS camp in Hereford, carrying 45 soldiers in civilian clothes and enough weaponry to fight a medium-sized war.

The SAS Special Projects team might have been setting out to repel the invasion of Britain – which, in a way, they were.

Each man had a green holdall packed with his personal weapons and kit: a sub-machine gun with four 30-round magazines, a 9mm semi-automatic pistol with two spare rounds of ammunition, a respirator, gloves, balaclava helmet, body armour, boots, belt and weapons-cleaning kit.

The vans carried tear-gas launchers and canisters, stun grenades, sawn-off pump-action shotguns, explosives, gun torches, food, water, radios, medical equipment and spare weapons. The lorries contained the heavy kit: scaling ladders, ropes and abseiling gear, lighting rigs, screens, thermal lances for cutting through metal, smoke machines, generators and battering rams.

A photograph taken from the incident at the Iranian embassy in London in 1980 

Pictured: Hostage Nooshin Hashemenian – a secretary

A gunman is identified by the SAS and handed over to the police who haul him away 

For days they had been hunkered down in the building next to the embassy – the Royal College of General Practitioners, which they dubbed the Doctors’ House. Designated the ‘Forward Holding Area’, it would be the springboard for an armed assault.

Here they formulated an Immediate Action (IA) plan to be executed instantly if the gunmen started killing hostages. It was pretty basic. From the roof of the Doctors’ House, the SAS assault team would climb on to the adjacent roof, then smash through the windows of the top floor and fight their way downwards with firearms and tear gas, in the hope of rescuing at least some of the hostages before they were massacred. Another team would attack from the rear.

De la Billière conceded that the scheme was ‘relatively crude’ and extremely dangerous. Inevitably it would lead to high casualties. ‘Even if things go well, we must expect 40 per cent of the people in the building to become casualties,’ he warned.

‘Anything less than that will be a good outcome.’ He told the Home Secretary that the decision to go in with military force had to be a political one. Whitelaw was firm in his response: ‘Peter, I want you to understand two things. The first is that if and when the operation is launched, I will not interfere in any way.

‘The second is that if it goes wrong, I will take the responsibility afterwards.’

Whitelaw settled in for what he described as an ‘odious period of waiting’. Cobra was ready to strike, but with nothing to do.

De la Billière arrived at the Doctors’ House with Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Rose, Commanding Officer of 22 SAS, where their troops were readying for action, smearing black camouflage cream on faces and necks, checking weapons, loading fresh batteries into their radios, memorising call signs and learning two words in Farsi, the Persian language, by heart: ‘Beeya paeen’ – ‘Get down!’

De la Billière noticed that, although the men knew they were facing a heavily armed enemy and a building that was probably wired with explosives, there was no sense of anxiety. They exuded ‘quiet confidence’, he wrote.

Photo taken by Shaye inside the Embassy with a Kodak Instamatic camera

The cause was an obscure one in a distant country – more rights for Arabs like them in largely Persian Iran

Some were pensive. One recalled: ‘I sat on the toilet and said a little prayer.’ He feared a bloodbath. ‘Because you’re attacking a defensive position, there are going to be booby traps, they’re going to be able to open up on you coming down the stairs. We’re going to take casualties.’

Meanwhile, Doreen Lock, policeman Trevor’s wife, had slipped out of the back door of their house in Dagenham to avoid the Press pack on the doorstep, clambered over the garden fence into an alleyway and headed down to the local Catholic church. There she lit a candle and said a prayer for her captive husband.

At the same moment, Lock was being handed the telephone and told by Salim to ‘make sure they know we mean it. One hostage every 45 minutes’. He did as instructed, only for Salim to declare half an hour later, without giving an explanation, that the deadline had been extended. Lock saw in Salim a man swept along by events, unwilling to complete his own threats.

As for the hostages, after all this time they were gripped by what one of them, Sim Harris, a BBC sound engineer who’d been at the embassy getting a visa for Iran when it was attacked, called a ‘numbed tension’, a listless, expectant terror. ‘Everyone is lying around in a state of shock. What else can possibly happen?’

The gunmen themselves seemed to have entered a ‘trance-like’ state, all their swagger gone. Two of them appeared on the verge of tears. They had run out of cigarettes and cadged, apologetically, from the hostages.

Only Jassim seemed fully wired up. He had just killed, and the set of his jaw suggested he was ready to do so again. He was now the leader. He did not expect to go home. Perhaps he never had.

That, though, was definitely not the case with the youngest gunman, 22-year-old Fowzi Nejad. He had joined the operation and come to London to seek publicity for their political cause, not for revenge or blood. They had all expected to be on their way home after 24 hours.

That was what they had been told by Iraqi intelligence, who had duped them into staging this terrorist spectacular on British soil.

Saddam Hussein’s thugs had assured them the British government would quickly accede to their demands, but nearly a week had passed and there was no sign of an end. Fowzi told Salim it was time to end the siege. ‘We must stop this,’ he said. ‘Come on, at least release the women.’

But Salim had passed the point of no return. His response to Fowzi’s plea was simple: ‘If you go against me, I will kill you.’

Salim now sat in a corner, taping together two magazines for his sub-machine gun so when he emptied one, he could just turn it around and insert the other. ‘What will your police do now?’ he wondered out loud. ‘Will they attack?’ The question hung in the air.

Ron Morris churned through the possibilities. If Lavasani had indeed been killed, it was only a matter of time before the police ended the siege by force; any assault on the building would probably take place in darkness; and, if that happened, they would need to run for it.

He whispered to fellow hostages, ‘I think we should all keep our shoes and socks on tonight.’

Next door in the Doctors’ House, those listening in and preparing the assault picked up three separate snippets of conversation on a bug. Translated from the Arabic, they were ‘we do something before sunset’; ‘kill two or three or four’; ‘kill all’. Jassim could be heard saying, ‘I’ll execute them all.’

Picture taken by Shaye inside the Embassy with a Kodak Instamatic camera

Pictured: Hostage Roya Kaghachi – a senior secretary at the embassy 

Next Salim rang and once again threatened to kill a hostage. Then the line went dead. Shortly after, the field telephone rang again, and instead of a voice on the other end, there were three shots, one after the other. The gunfire was heard by the police negotiators but, to the frustration of John Dellow, heading the police

operation, the audio probes they had inserted in the walls could not pinpoint precisely where inside the building the gun had been fired.

In the Telex Room on the second floor of the embassy, the shots had also been heard, leaving the hostages staring in bewilderment. No hostages had left the room, so were the gunmen now shooting each other?

The front door of the embassy opened, and a corpse wrapped in an orange blanket was pushed out on to the front steps and the door closed again. Salim rang the negotiators. ‘There’s a body on the doorstep,’ he said bleakly.

‘You can come and collect it. Another one in half hour. All hostages will die.’

Two anti-terrorist officers rushed forward with a stretcher and carried the body away.

The dead man was identified as Lavasani and he’d been killed at least an hour ago. Which was confusing. The second and third shots played down the telephone suggested another murder had taken place. But there was no second body.

Salim, it turned out, was bluffing, ready to kill again but hoping he could get what he wanted without having to. Dellow, though, had come to the logical – but wrong – conclusion that further deaths had resulted from the shots heard, that at least two hostages had been killed, and that the gunmen were embarking on a course of systematic killing.

Lieutenant-Colonel Rose was not so sure. ‘That sounds like a fake,’ he said. ‘They’re winding us up. To heighten the tension.’ ‘I cannot take that risk,’ said Dellow. Two deaths was the threshold for a handover to the military, for which the police needed the highest political authorisation.

There was silence as Dellow prepared to make a momentous decision. In the next few minutes, because of the orders he was about to issue, people would die; perhaps many people; possibly everyone. Barely disguising the tremor in his voice, he called Scotland Yard and advised the Commissioner of Police, David McNee, that, in his opinion, ‘the circumstances that dictated a military assault now obtained’.

McNee informed the Home Secretary in the Cobra meeting room. Whitelaw put a call through to the Prime Minister.

Margaret Thatcher was in her car returning from Chequers, her country residence, and at that moment driving through a valley in the Chilterns where the phone reception was poor. She instructed the driver to pull over.

Sami Muhammed Ali from the book – The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama

Saddam Hussein at a press conference in Baghdad, Iraq in 1982 

Mel Parry and John McAleese clamber from the balcony of Number 15 on to the embassy balcony

‘The hostages’ lives are now at risk,’ Whitelaw told her. ‘I want your permission to send in the SAS.’ ‘Yes, go in,’ said the Prime Minister. Operation Nimrod, as it had been named, was triggered from a lay-by north of High Wycombe. It was unprecedented. Democratic governments like the UK’s are rightly wary of deploying soldiers in civilian circumstances, but seven years earlier the mounting terrorist threat had led to special measures in the form of a Military Aid to the Civil Power order. This now went into force for the first time. The soldiers took over.

‘Get your guys ready,’ Rose told the commander of B Squadron SAS, Major Hector Gullan. ‘You have control.’ On the sixth floor of Kingston House, a block of flats overlooking the embassy garden, Gullan and his team took up position, their high-powered rifles with telescopic sights trained on the windows and doors of the embassy.

He was feeling the pressure. It was his plan they were about to enact. Operation Nimrod would be a stronghold assault, attacking all floors simultaneously with guns, gas and explosives, the largest peacetime military engagement ever attempted on the British mainland.

He’d advised it should ideally take place in late afternoon or early evening, when both gunmen and hostages would be thinking of another night and day to come, and during a period of negotiations when Salim would be speaking on the field telephone in the ground-floor hallway. It would begin with the detonation of a large bomb over the skylight in the central void running down the middle of the building. Hopefully, the cascading glass and ironwork would land directly on top of the leading gunman in the hall.

The explosion would be the signal for five separate SAS teams to go into action, entering from different points. Fifty men would take part in the assault: 34 inside the building and 16 in the reception area and on sniper detail.

During the assault, two pairs of snipers would fire CR-gas canisters through second-floor windows and saturate the area where the hostages were being held with fumes.

As he waited for the off, inside his own head, Gullan issued orders to himself. ‘Whatever you do, ice cold. In your voice, dead cold, dead calm. Ruthless. You’ve got to get the hostages out, cost what it will.’

Then he gave the first order – the codeword ‘Bank Robbery’ – into his radio handset, and at 19.10, the SAS abseiling team climbed on to the roof of Number 15 and made their way silently across to the rear parapet of Number 16, the embassy.

In the communications room alongside the Cobra meeting room, de la Billière listened in through headphones to the radio network and relayed each step to the rapt committee from the open doorway. ‘They’re on the roof.’ ‘They’re laying out their ropes.’ ‘They’re getting the charges down the light well.’ ‘They’re ready.’

De la Billière remembered how the talk died away until no sound remained except that of a digital clock on the wall.

Whitelaw rocked back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. ‘I felt very lonely and yet strangely calm,’ he recalled. ‘I knew there was really no alternative.’ A police negotiator took a deep breath and rang the radio phone. ‘Hello, Salim,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk.’ Up until now, the negotiator’s job had been to act as honest broker establishing a level of trust with the gunmen. Now his role was to lie and to keep Salim on the telephone so that several tons of glass and steel could fall on top of him in the ground-floor hallway.

Salim was suspicious. Having been stonewalled and stalled for six days, he now found the police suddenly prepared to discuss in fine detail his demands for an ambassador, a bus and a plane to safety. He warned that if there was an attack on the embassy, all hostages will be killed.

The negotiator insisted that he was simply trying to make arrangements, getting a plane on standby and a coach to take the gunmen and the hostages to the airport.

‘What kind of bus do you want?’ he asked. ‘How many seats? Twenty-five?’ ‘Yes,’ said Salim, and then corrected himself, realising he had inadvertently confirmed the number of people in the building. ‘No, make it 37.’

At 19.14, Gullan gave the next go-word, ‘Road accident’, on the radio and the SAS moved into their assault positions.

At 19.22, the order ‘Hyde Park’ crackled through the SAS earpieces: ‘Groups in position; explosives primed; abseilers hitched and ready.’ The leader of each team indicated their readiness.

‘London Bridge’ barked Gullan, and they were underway, into the unknown, no one able to predict for sure what would happen in the next few minutes.

The objective of Operation Nimrod was clearly laid out. ‘Mission: To Rescue Hostages’.

But the plan did not say whether the gunmen would be killed, stating only that the soldiers should use the ‘minimum force necessary to achieve aim of releasing hostages unharmed’.

In practice, any ‘X-ray’ – code for a gunman who resisted or appeared to pose a threat would not be given a warning or the benefit of the doubt. Gullan expressed the terms of engagement as he saw them:

‘If you’re a terrorist and you surrender, the police have got you. But if you look at me and you’re aggressive, I’ve got three children, a wife at home. I’m going home, you’re dying. It’s as simple as that. Don’t f**k with me. I’ll kill you and I mean it.’

– Adapted from The Siege by Ben Macintyre (Viking, £25). To order a copy for £22.50 (Offer valid to October 26 UK p&p free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.