The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - FREEMIUM： Epochs #244

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome back to Epochs. Now if you remember a little while ago, looking two months

00:00:26.640 ago, I'd started a series about Verdun, the Battle of Verdun. I will be returning to that later in

00:00:32.460 January but because of scheduling reasons, Christmas and New Year, I won't bore you with

00:00:36.600 the details but because of scheduling reasons I've got this window where I have to fill it with

00:00:40.480 one episode but I will be returning to Verdun. So this story I want to tell today is something

00:00:48.060 I've had in mind to always do an Epochs on but I've never really found the perfect slot for it so

00:00:53.360 right now seems about right to do it. It's actually a story which is the most up-to-date,

00:00:59.860 most modern story I think I've told on Epochs, the closest to the present I mean. It's a series

00:01:05.500 of events that happened in 1980. I'm pretty sure I haven't done anything more modern than that on

00:01:11.300 Epochs. Let me know if I'm wrong. Some of you guys know the back catalogue better than I do.

00:01:16.260 So I want to tell the story of Operation Nimrod which happened in May, early May 1980 in London

00:01:25.300 and what it is, is it's an SAS operation, Operation Nimrod. So the SAS doing stuff in London

00:01:35.740 in 1980. Now anyone who knows about the SAS is that they're special forces, right? They're soldiers,

00:01:42.000 okay? It's the army. What were they doing carrying out operations in the middle of London? Well,

00:01:50.880 so that's the story I want to tell. And the brief overview is that there's a certain part of London

00:01:58.840 where there's loads and loads of embassies in west, just west of central London. And there was an

00:02:03.980 Iranian, the Iranian embassy there, which is on a road called Prince's Gate, just near Hyde Park.

00:02:13.160 And it's a really tall sort of Georgian townhouse, three or four stories tall, very ornate building.

00:02:18.920 If you wanted to live in one of those buildings, it would cost you millions and millions and millions

00:02:23.040 and millions and millions of pounds. And in fact, very few of them are private residences.

00:02:28.200 But in that area where there's loads and loads and loads of different embassies, one of them was,

00:02:33.260 is still, I believe, the Iranian embassy. Next door is like the Ethiopian embassy, for example.

00:02:39.920 And it's like a terraced, terraced building, so a whole street of connected buildings. But each one

00:02:46.100 is actually quite tall and quite deep. So they're actually quite large buildings inside. They don't

00:02:51.980 necessarily look all that massive from the outside, but there's a lot to them. A bit like Downing

00:02:55.960 Street. It looks like just a normal, fairly large house, home, but actually it's really deep and

00:03:02.620 there's loads and loads of space in there. So, okay. In 1980, a team of six terrorists,

00:03:10.380 Iranian terrorists, and I'll get into all the details at the moment of exactly who they were

00:03:14.480 and what they wanted in a moment. Six Iranian terrorists on the 30th of April storm that building,

00:03:22.440 take control of it, take everyone inside hostage, about 25 people. And in the end, negotiations

00:03:29.380 collapsed. And super army soldiers, the special air service, the army was called in, special

00:03:38.980 forces operators were called in to end the siege with extreme prejudice. So that's the overview.

00:03:46.680 That's what happened. So I want to tell you the story of that, all the details of that.

00:03:49.220 I've always been fascinated by the SAS. What British chap, what boy who's interested in daring

00:03:59.160 do and bloody adventure isn't interested in the history of the SAS. I've been fascinated

00:04:03.920 ever since I was about, I don't know, 12 or 13. For Christmas, I was given the book Bravo

00:04:09.160 2-0, Andy McNabb and his gang of SAS soldiers deep behind enemy lines in the first Iraq war

00:04:17.940 in the winter of 1990 to 1991. Perhaps one day I'll tell the story of Bravo 2-0, both Andy

00:04:27.840 McNabb's account and Chris Ryan's, the one that got away and further evidence that has emerged

00:04:32.840 since, which cast some doubt on some of the elements that were told in that story. Nonetheless,

00:04:38.380 perhaps I'll do all sorts of stories about the SAS. But to begin with, for today, we'll

00:04:43.880 do Operation Nimrod. Now, the way I thought I'd tell, because I've thought about this ever

00:04:47.640 since I started Epochs, or perhaps ever since I started History Bro many years ago, I always

00:04:52.640 thought I wanted to tell this story. But I've always thought how best to tell it. Well,

00:04:57.180 what I've decided is, I've got an account here from a book called True Stories from the SAS

00:05:04.520 and Elite Forces, edited by John E. Lewis. And in this quite thick book, there's like a dozen

00:05:12.820 or two dozen stories all about the SAS and other special forces operations. And each one's

00:05:18.980 quite short. Some of them are only like, this one's only like eight pages long. It's only a

00:05:23.100 couple of thousand words. So it's like an overview of what happened. So I'll read the whole

00:05:27.160 thing and just interrupt myself loads and to pad out and give you more detail as we go

00:05:32.780 along. So I thought that's one way of doing it. I thought that's not a bad way of doing

00:05:37.020 it. For anyone that's interested after watching this, there are lots and lots of documentaries

00:05:42.860 and even books written all about this. So if you want even more detail, you can find it.

00:05:48.160 But hopefully I'll give you more or less the whole story. All right. So John Lewis begins

00:05:56.000 his account with a little, very, very, very broad overview of the history of the SAS up

00:06:02.540 to this point. This book came out in, I think, 1993. So it's actually already quite old book,

00:06:08.180 but you can see it's very well thumbed, very well read by me. And so he starts with just

00:06:15.160 a few hundred words just about the SAS. So I thought I'd read that first and then we'll get

00:06:20.580 into exactly what happened in 1980. So John Lewis says this, the special air service of the British

00:06:28.940 army burst into the world headlines in May, 1980, when it stormed the Iranian embassy in London to

00:06:35.260 three, 26 hostages held by Arab gunmen. So just to say, the SAS is actually supposed to be secret,

00:06:43.800 completely secret. It's not nowadays, because we live in sort of a media age, don't we, where

00:06:50.220 things are very difficult to keep secret. And since the 80s, or certainly since the 90s,

00:06:55.560 there's been a change of policy where, you know, ex SAS operators write books about their career

00:07:02.760 afterwards and things. But back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and even 80s, it was supposed to be secret.

00:07:10.680 Now, if you was in the British army, or if you was in the know, if you was in the, you know,

00:07:15.060 like Department of Defence or something, you would know. It wasn't completely, completely secret.

00:07:22.040 But most people, the vast majority of people, wouldn't have heard of the SAS. If he was a

00:07:27.800 military history buff, you would have, right, because it was already a matter of record of what

00:07:33.340 the SAS did in World War II, and David Sterling, and the founding of the SAS. Again, if he was a

00:07:39.680 military history buff, you would have heard of it. But the vast majority of people would not have heard

00:07:44.200 of the SAS until this. That's what lots and lots of people say. First I ever heard of it was the

00:07:49.920 Iranian embassy siege in 1980. So there you go. It wasn't common knowledge, just basically

00:07:55.160 wasn't common knowledge back then. Okay. So John Lewis says they burst onto the scene

00:08:00.400 in May 1980. He goes on to say, it was an unusually public appearance for the SAS, most of whose

00:08:07.520 operations since its foundation in 1941, in the deserts of North Africa, have been deep behind

00:08:14.920 enemy lines or in the more shadowy areas of counter-revolutionary warfare.

00:08:20.160 The man most responsible for the foundation of the SAS was David Sterling, Colonel, in the end,

00:08:25.360 Colonel David Sterling, who survived the war, by the way, a young and junior officer of the Scots

00:08:30.880 Guards in 1941, that is, who tricked his way into the British Army Middle East HQ in Cairo in 1941

00:08:38.600 in an effort to talk to the chief of staff about, quote, a matter of operational importance, end

00:08:43.780 quote. He ended up in the office of the deputy chief, Major General Neil Ritchie, who, impressed

00:08:49.920 with Sterling's audacity, gave him a hearing. The subaltern's idea, Sterling's idea, was to destroy

00:08:56.220 Axis aircraft in the desert while they were on the ground using a small mobile land unit.

00:09:02.620 Just to say, first of all, they decided to try and parachute in, parachute deep behind enemy

00:09:06.640 lines near-ish German airfields in North Africa and try and blow up German aircraft on the ground.

00:09:15.720 That was a complete failure. Most of the men died attempting that, and it was a failure.

00:09:20.700 So after that, they decided to not use parachutes again for that theatre of war, and instead decided

00:09:29.980 to famously just use jeeps, heavily armed jeeps, yeah, taking on the idea that even Lawrence of

00:09:36.900 Arabia in World War I had had, that you can just drive an armoured car across the desert, again,

00:09:43.020 deep behind enemy lines, blow stuff up, and get out again in the car. So anyway, that's what they

00:09:48.800 decide they start doing. Ritchie gave the scheme his approval, Major General Ritchie, gave the scheme

00:09:53.560 his approval, and L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade, was born. There was in fact

00:09:58.920 no brigade. It was a bluff to fool German intelligence into thinking that the unit was larger than

00:10:04.200 it was, namely, a handful of men, three tents, and one three-ton truck. So humble beginnings

00:10:10.640 for the SAS. The badge of the SAS, the Sword of Damocles and Wings, with the motto, Who Dares

00:10:16.320 Wins, was formally approved in 1942. Most of L Detachment's initial troopers were disbanded commandos

00:10:23.000 who, under Stirling's training and leadership, and in close liaison with the Long Range Desert

00:10:27.580 Group, those are the guys with, like, jeeps, basically, that would scout behind enemy lines,

00:10:33.780 proved to be formidable desert raiders. In January 1943, the 1st Special Air Service Regiment was

00:10:40.660 formally recognised, and three months later, the 2nd SAS Regiment was formed. In the same

00:10:45.680 year, Stirling himself was captured by the Germans in Tunisia. He spent the rest of the war

00:10:50.220 in German captivity. After Africa, the regiments fought in Italy and North West Europe in World

00:10:56.620 War II, that is. With the war's end, the SAS, along with several other, quote, private armies,

00:11:02.300 quote, were disbanded. In 1947, however, it was reformed as 2-1 SAS, with a Malayan scouts

00:11:10.020 unit coming into being in 1950. As its name implied, its chief purpose was to fight in the jungles

00:11:16.680 of Malayan against the communist insurgency. The scouts were officially recognised as the 22nd SAS in

00:11:23.460 1952. Since that time, 2-2 SAS has been involved in campaigns in Borneo, Aden and Oman. Following the

00:11:30.760 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, its counter-revolutionary warfare training

00:11:36.880 and role was stepped up considerably, with the regiment playing an active, if covert, part in the

00:11:42.780 war against the provisional IRA in Ireland and mainland Britain. It has also worked alongside

00:11:48.600 the counter-revolutionary warfare units of other nations, including the West German GSG-9 at Mogadishu.

00:11:55.820 It therefore went in to break the siege of the Iranian embassy at Prince's Gate in 1980, the story of

00:12:02.040 which is related below, and they went in with a wealth of CRW experience, counter-revolutionary

00:12:07.700 warfare experience. So CRW, counter-revolutionary warfare, is that thing of sort of urban fighting,

00:12:15.620 room clearing. If you've got to go into a building, exactly like this, if you've got to break a siege,

00:12:20.740 there's a building being held by terrorists and you're going to go in, you're going to storm it,

00:12:24.500 that. Or an aeroplane, say there's an aeroplane on the tarmac and it's being held by hostages and you

00:12:30.180 decide, the powers that be, decide we're going to storm it and kill all the terrorists, try and save the

00:12:35.700 hostages. That's counter-revolutionary, that's classic sort of CRW work. So the SAS, I'm not 100%

00:12:43.540 sure if it's still the case, but certainly it was the case for a long time, and at this point it was

00:12:47.060 the case that there's four squadrons of the SAS. One is counter-revolutionary warfare, CRW, and like,

00:12:54.180 you know, ones to do with jungle warfare, ones like mountain warfare, like arctic warfare, and so on.

00:13:02.820 And as I understand it, it might not be the case now, but it certainly used to be the case,

00:13:06.580 that the individual troopers, operators of the SS would spend a bit of time, a few months or a year

00:13:13.700 or two, in each squadron and move around. So the idea is that you get, in the end, the most all-round

00:13:19.380 special forces operator you could imagine, right? That you're trained and used to jungle warfare,

00:13:24.580 and mountain, arctic warfare, and CRW, and everything else, right? So that's the idea. I've got,

00:13:31.140 just out of, in case you're interested, there's an interesting book, a very good book, again by

00:13:35.860 Andy McNabb, his second book, called Immediate Action. Now Andy McNabb, not his real name,

00:13:42.820 went on to write loads and loads of fiction about special forces. But his first two books are,

00:13:50.340 are they supposed to be? Non-fiction. His first book, Bravo to Zero, is again, supposed to be

00:13:56.020 a true account. And his second book, Immediate Action, is about, more about his life, his earlier

00:14:02.180 army career, because you can't just apply to be in the SS, you already have to be in the British Army,

00:14:06.900 and a number of other things. You have to have, back then anyway, in Andy McNabb's time,

00:14:11.300 in the 70s and 80s, you had to have seen some firefights. I think he, I think it was,

00:14:15.860 if I recall, you had to have been in two live firefight encounters, before you could even

00:14:21.060 apply to be in the SS, before you were even allowed to attempt the selection of SAS.

00:14:27.140 Things might be a bit different now, but I've read Immediate Action a couple of times,

00:14:30.980 a very, very interesting book. If you're interested in SAS selection, which I am,

00:14:36.820 when I was like 15, I had dreams of being in the SAS. Of course, I gave that dream up,

00:14:42.980 not long after, realising that I just didn't have the cardio.

00:14:48.740 One of the main things to be in the SS, despite being in the British Army and having been in

00:14:54.820 firefights, is that you just need insane endurance, insane cardio. You need to be able to wear a

00:15:00.980 ridiculously heavy Bergen rucksack and run up and down hills all day long. That's like one of the main

00:15:07.380 things to begin with. That's one of the main things. So in other words, unless you're insanely fit,

00:15:14.180 insanely fit, it's just off the cards for you. And even though I was into sports, played loads

00:15:20.980 of football in my time, I was a bit sporty, I just knew there was, that there would be no way.

00:15:27.140 So okay, anyway, carrying on here. So the 1970s were filled with terrorist events. You might think

00:15:35.060 that today, in these days, post 9-11, our world is sort of drowned in terrorist events. And although

00:15:41.620 that's true, there is lots and lots of terrorism goes on these days, in the 2020s, the mid-2020s.

00:15:48.740 Even if you go back decades, it's still the case. The 1970s particularly, there was lots of terrorism.

00:15:55.620 If you go on Wikipedia and try and find a list of all the terrorist events that happened in the 1970s,

00:16:00.500 it's a long list. It's a long list. One of the pivotal ones was mentioned there in the 1972

00:16:08.420 Munich Olympics massacre. And there's actually a film about it, isn't there, with Eric Banner,

00:16:13.060 is it? And I actually haven't seen that film. But I have read all about the true events of that

00:16:20.180 massacre from a number of different accounts. And anyway, the takeaway for that, from that,

00:16:26.980 for this story, is that it was basically a failure from the point of view of the German police,

00:16:34.900 in terms of trying to save the hostages. Because all the hostages were killed. When they tried to

00:16:41.140 break the siege, you know, storm the building, the Palestinian terrorists just mowed down and killed

00:16:48.420 all their hostages. So from the point of view of, you know, the authorities trying to

00:16:54.660 save the hostages, it was just a failure. Right? That's just a failure. So from that point onwards,

00:17:00.500 it was decided that, because it was an amateur shambles really, it was decided that we need to

00:17:07.620 get serious all over the world, the Western world, certainly in the West. It was decided,

00:17:12.420 you know, what we need, because something like that might happen again, or will happen again.

00:17:15.620 So what we really want is some specialist badass dudes that are trained just for this. CRW,

00:17:23.060 counter-revolutionary warfare. The idea that we'll just send in some police units, armed police units,

00:17:28.580 that have never trained specifically for this. That's not good enough. That's not going to cut the

00:17:33.380 mustard anymore. So in Britain, it was decided that we've got this, we've got our crack special forces

00:17:43.140 regiment, 22 SAS. What we'll do is we'll train up those guys to do this sort of thing, if needs be,

00:17:50.820 if it ever arises. And so that's exactly what happened. That's like eight years earlier. And in fact,

00:17:56.900 even in London, there'd been terrorists. Earlier in the 70s, there was a siege in the middle of London

00:18:02.340 with the IRA. There was the, I believe, if I've got this right, the Yemeni Prime Minister was

00:18:10.660 assassinated while sitting in his Mercedes outside, I think it might have been outside their embassy,

00:18:17.940 in the middle of London, earlier in the 70s. And a number of other things, a number of other things.

00:18:23.620 There's lots and lots of terrorism going down, including in Britain. So when this event happens,

00:18:28.820 we've got somebody to call upon, should we decide, should negotiations break down? And should we

00:18:34.820 decide we are going to storm the building? We have got some chaps we can call upon to do the job.

00:18:43.460 And, and that's how it played out. Okay, so the first paragraph then talking about the actual story

00:18:48.740 from, from John E. Lewis, he says this quote, at 1125am on the morning of Wednesday, the 30th of April,

00:18:55.460 1980, the tranquility of Prince's Gate in London's leafy Kensington district, very nice bit of London,

00:19:01.620 incidentally, was shattered as six gunmen wearing chemargs over their faces sprayed the outside of

00:19:08.260 number 16 with machine gun fire and stormed through the entrance. The leading gunman made straight for

00:19:14.580 an astonished police constable standing in the foyer, Trevor Locke of the Diplomatic Protection Group,

00:19:21.060 while the rest of the terrorists, the five other terrorists, shouting and waving their machine

00:19:26.500 pistols, rounded up the other occupants of the building, end quote. So there was one British police

00:19:34.420 officer sort of standing at his post, basically at the entrance of the foyer of this, of the building.

00:19:41.060 Trevor Locke, PC Trevor Locke. Incidentally, he survived. And he's on record talking about it many,

00:19:48.340 many, many times. And he was actually armed with a gun. He had a revolver, a six-shooter,

00:19:56.420 is it .38 caliber revolver and six spare shots, right? So he's got this, this small caliber pistol

00:20:05.060 and, and in 12 rounds. And it's loaded and it's on him, but they stormed in so quickly, so overwhelmingly,

00:20:13.540 that he just simply didn't have time to even draw it, let alone fire on them or anything. So poor old,

00:20:20.900 poor old Trevor Locke. I mean, what can you do? I've seen interviews with him later sort of saying,

00:20:26.980 you know, I feel bad. I feel really bad. I feel like I failed. It was my job to protect that building.

00:20:33.380 And I just, in minute one, second one, I failed. And, you know, on one level, that's true.

00:20:41.380 On another level, don't beat yourself up, mate. Come on. I mean, that's what everyone said. That's

00:20:45.780 the consensus of the historians and my feelings. Don't beat yourself up, Trev. There was not really

00:20:51.300 anything you could do. You're not expected. He wasn't expected to start gunning them down as they

00:20:57.860 come in the front door. Absolutely not. So no one really, but I certainly don't blame Trevor

00:21:05.460 Locke in any way for failing to shoot them immediately. Again, they had machine pistols.

00:21:13.220 They had submachine guns. What are you going to do? And, and as I say, it was, it was quick.

00:21:18.260 It was overwhelming. It was like that. So one thing though, they frisked him. The terrorists frisked him,

00:21:24.020 but they frisked him really poorly. I think he was on record with saying it was more of a gesture.

00:21:28.420 They didn't really, they didn't search him properly. And so all throughout the siege,

00:21:32.980 which lasts six days, he had this pistol on him loaded the whole time. They never, I mean,

00:21:41.220 these terrorists, you'll see, they're kind of rank amateurs, really. They're not like, they're not

00:21:47.780 crack ex-Iranian special forces dudes or anything like that. They're, they're jabronis really.

00:21:55.620 They weren't really, really professional. I mean, right there, they don't even properly search

00:21:59.540 PC Locke and find out that he's got a gun. They never do. So, okay. Bear that in mind. Trevor Locke's

00:22:08.500 got a pistol. 38. Okay. We'll carry on here. Lewis writes, quote, the gunman, Faisal, Hassan,

00:22:17.060 Shia, Maki, Ali, and Salim were members of the Mohiaddin Al Nasser Martyr Group, an Arab group

00:22:25.060 seeking the liberation of Khuzestan from the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran. Number 16 was the

00:22:30.820 Iranian embassy in Britain. The siege of Prince's Gate had begun. Okay. So let's talk a little bit,

00:22:36.820 then, about the terrorists or what's going on. So one of the things to mention is in 1979, so just

00:22:43.620 the year before, there was the, the Iranian revolution in Iran, Persia. And what that was,

00:22:50.980 they had a king, Iran, Persia, had a king, the Shah. And he was, he was, to be fair, he was something of

00:22:57.380 a, of a Western puppet in all sorts of ways, making sure that the US and the Brits got all the oil they

00:23:04.500 wanted. And eventually the Iranian people, or this is the narrative anyway, had enough of that.

00:23:11.140 And there was a coup against him, a revolution, and it brought in the Mullahs and the Ayatollah

00:23:17.780 in 1979. And it's been the same regime ever since, to this day, to 2025. Or you'll be watching this

00:23:24.100 in the first days of January, 2026. To this day, it's the same regime. We've got the Ayatollah. The

00:23:29.140 first Ayatollah was Ayatollah Khomeini. In fact, the modern Ayatollah has got a very, very similar

00:23:34.500 name. It's spelled slightly differently, but anyway. Now, lots of people in Iran weren't necessarily

00:23:40.980 on board with that. I mean, to this day, there are lots of people in Iran and expats that are not

00:23:47.380 happy with that regime. And so at the time, in 1979, 1980, there was some uprisings against it. It

00:23:55.540 didn't just go smoothly. It wasn't like everyone loved the fact that the Shah had been removed and

00:24:00.900 that now they've got a theocracy, an Islamic religious regime. And anyway, one of the groups

00:24:11.060 that weren't happy with it were some of the Arab people. Now, just to say, Persians, Iranians,

00:24:18.580 they're not Arabs, okay? I think probably most people watching this will know this, but some

00:24:24.500 people aren't necessarily completely aware of that. But being Persian is completely different to being

00:24:30.660 an Arab. However, there are still Arabs living in Persia, right? And there's this area right down in

00:24:40.180 the southwest of Iran called Khuzestan. I think that's what the Iranians call it. They're their

00:24:46.660 province of Khuzestan. But it was a sort of a heavily Arab populated, relatively heavily Arab

00:24:53.620 populated region. And when the Iranian revolution happened, there were separatists in that area,

00:25:01.380 Arab separatists, that wanted that bit of land to break away from Iran and be independent.

00:25:08.020 They called it Arabistan, the land of Arabs. And it's right next to, we'll put a map up so you can see,

00:25:14.340 and it's right next to Kuwait, and it's right on the Iraqi border. Okay, so going forward slightly

00:25:20.820 in time, a few months after this, beginning in 1980, not long after these events, they kicked off

00:25:27.460 the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted like eight years. A bitter, bitter war between Iran and Iraq, which is,

00:25:35.300 you know, just about to start. It was Saddam even back then, leader of Iraq was Saddam even back then.

00:25:40.420 And I mean, the conflict in broadest sense of the term between Iran and Iraq goes back to

00:25:46.820 literally ancient Mesopotamia. The borders between modern day Iraq and Iran, that mountain range,

00:25:53.460 was it the Zagros Mountains? That's been an area of conflict literally since the dawn of

00:25:59.860 civilization almost. And so, Saddam was pretty much the aggressor in that one. But it lasted eight

00:26:05.460 years and was a terrible stalemate and loads of people died. Is it a million or millions of people

00:26:10.020 died in that? And it was very, very bitter and nothing was really resolved by that war. But anyway,

00:26:16.500 that's slightly in the future. But it gives you the idea that Iran and Iraq already had giant tensions,

00:26:24.740 sort of endless giant tensions. So a lot of these Arabistanian or Khuzistanian terrorists,

00:26:34.260 which did this in London, were actually backed by Iraqi intelligence. It seemed like their handler

00:26:42.100 was an Iraqi intelligence bod. Okay, so quickly to finish up on this aspect of it. Once the Iran-Iraq war

00:26:51.060 kicked off, the whole question of Khuzistanian or Arabistanian independence sort of went by the

00:26:58.740 the wayside. So this is really a moment in time when there were terrorists going around the world,

00:27:06.420 trying to fight for the independence of Arabistan. To this day, it's not really a thing, right?

00:27:12.900 There's no real question at all that Iran would ever relinquish sovereignty over that bit of land

00:27:19.380 in southwestern Iran. It's just it's just not on the cards. But okay, these people at this time

00:27:26.340 hoped it would be. They also asked for the release of 91 prisoners that Iran had had got, you know,

00:27:34.900 after the Iranian Islamic revolution in 1979. The powers that be in Iran had arrested a bunch,

00:27:44.340 a whole bunch of 91 at least, of pro-Arabistanian separatists. And these terrorists in London

00:27:53.300 were saying, we want you, the UK government, to get the Iranians to release those guys from prison

00:28:01.380 and get Iran to accept the sovereignty of an independent Arabistanian state.

00:28:08.900 Now, with the best will in the world, the British government had no power to do that. We were on

00:28:17.140 terrible terms with the mullahs. And even if we weren't, even if it was still the Shah, the British

00:28:23.540 government might be able to ask something like that through the Foreign Office. We can't force them

00:28:28.020 to do anything like that. No way. We can't even really put hardly any pressure on them really to do

00:28:33.380 something like that. So the new regime in Iran would just, it's just not on the cards for the

00:28:39.940 British government to do anything like that, even if they were so inclined. Turns out the British

00:28:44.260 government under Maggie, Maggie Thatcher, weren't even inclined to do that if they could, it seems.

00:28:50.020 Okay, so a little bit about the powers that be in the British government at the time. So,

00:28:53.860 as I say, the PM was the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher. And she'd only been Prime Minister,

00:29:01.620 she'd only got in there, I think, in 1979. This was like her first year. I think this was,

00:29:05.780 if memory serves, she'd been Prime Minister pretty much bang on one year, right? And this is before

00:29:11.060 the Falklands War as well. Falklands War was not until 1982. So this is the first sort of existential

00:29:17.860 threat she's had to face, the first sort of real proper test of her, of her metal. And she'd always

00:29:25.380 talked tough about terrorism and about foreign policy and things. And this is her first real test.

00:29:32.740 How are you going to deal with this? Are you going to be a nicely, nicely catchy monkey? Are

00:29:37.220 you going to try and, you know, placate them, appease them? Or are you just going to go hard

00:29:41.620 lying and we don't negotiate with terrorists and all that sort of thing? So, you know, the ball's really

00:29:47.060 in her court, the final word, the buck stops with the PM on this sort of thing. When it first happened,

00:29:53.540 literally within minutes, the police know that something, there's, you know, there's some sort

00:29:59.140 of terrorist incident going on in Kensington, in Prince's Gate. And the word gets to the government,

00:30:04.660 the powers that be, the Home Secretary and the PM very, very quickly, within minutes,

00:30:08.420 it's known that this is going down. And apparently Maggie's response was very hard line. I mean,

00:30:17.060 pretty hard line anyway. It wasn't like sending armed policemen or the SAS right now, get them

00:30:24.180 there this instant and storm it immediately. It wasn't that, but it was, we're absolutely not going

00:30:29.300 to let them get away with it. Because one of the things they wanted, they wanted the release of 91

00:30:32.900 prisoners. They wanted Iran to recognize an independent Arabistan and they wanted safe passage

00:30:40.660 out of the UK, back to their, back to Arabistan, essentially. They wanted us to sort of ferry

00:30:46.580 them to an airport, put them on a plane back to the Middle East. Maggie says, that first one,

00:30:54.180 particularly, that you're ever going to get out of this, that we're going to let you go

00:30:58.580 on an airplane back home. Whatever happens, that's not happening. That's a hard line in the sand.

00:31:07.300 Whatever happens, even if everyone dies in that building, they're not getting out when they're

00:31:11.700 not getting out of this. They're either going to end up in a UK prison or dead. That was her,

00:31:16.740 that was her line in the sand. And well, I mean, I don't blame her. You know, I don't blame her.

00:31:23.060 You should never negotiate with terrorists, ultimately. I mean, you can pay for time and pretend

00:31:28.340 you're negotiating with them and all that sort of stuff, which is basically how we played it.

00:31:33.380 So, okay, the news gets to the powers that be quite quickly. And actually, Maggie Thatcher was

00:31:39.300 aware of what was going on, but wasn't actually in the first COBRA meeting. So,

00:31:43.140 whenever there's a terrorist incident like this, or anything even close to it, there's a committee

00:31:48.980 that's formed at the top of government called COBRA. And that will be usually like, you know,

00:31:53.460 the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, maybe someone from Defence, the Cabinet Secretary,

00:31:59.940 the Chief of Police, the Metropolitan Police. The Police for London is the Met, the Metropolitan

00:32:04.900 Police. All the most important players that can manoeuvre the levers of power to make the ultimate

00:32:12.900 big decisions. So the Home Secretary at the time was Willie Whitelaw. I say Willie Whitelaw like I know him,

00:32:19.780 William Whitelaw, or he was later enoble. The Lord Whitelaw, First Viscount Whitelaw. But at the time,

00:32:25.940 he was just Willie Whitelaw. So he is sort of the most important person at the initial COBRA meeting.

00:32:34.820 And he says, immediately, pretty much immediately, he says, call the SAS. He was obviously in the know,

00:32:43.380 right? Because anything like this, any domestic thing like this, ultimately, it's the Home Secretary.

00:32:50.580 I mean, the true, true buck stops with the PM, but it will come under the purview of the Home Secretary.

00:32:55.300 The Home Secretary is in charge of all police, right? Anything like this, anything that goes on

00:32:59.620 domestically on this island, it'll be the Home Secretary. And so Willie Whitelaw says, right, call the

00:33:05.460 SAS and their base is Stirling, like it was, it's not anymore, but it was Stirling Lyons in Hereford,

00:33:12.980 which is right on the Welsh border. So right out west of England. It's not in London or anything,

00:33:21.060 or in the home counties. So the word goes out to the SAS boys at Hereford, get down here now,

00:33:29.300 right now, get your CRW counter-revolutionary warfare dudes, B squadron, send them to London.

00:33:37.140 Some shit is going down right now. We need you, Johnny on the spot. So that's what happens.

00:33:42.500 The word goes out to them. They send down a couple of different teams, a few guys.

00:33:49.540 What are we talking? In the first instance, it's something like 40 or 60 odd guys.

00:33:54.260 Ultimately, the building is stormed by between 30 and 35 SAS dudes. But so yeah, they just drive,

00:34:02.500 they make their way to London ASAP. And they put together their first plan, their quote unquote,

00:34:09.140 immediate action plan. That's where that Andy McNabb title of his second book comes from. And that plan

00:34:15.220 is, the immediate action plan is that if we have to go in right now, if the Home Secretary and the PM

00:34:24.260 decide they want the SS to storm the building now, they want it done five minutes ago, what are you

00:34:31.380 going to do? Have we got a plan? Because ideally, you want to have an elaborate plan that you've had

00:34:36.820 time to work out and drill and, you know, winkle out any wrinkles in it you possibly can and have it

00:34:45.940 as the most professional job you could possibly do. That's ideal. But if you don't have that option,

00:34:51.940 again, if the powers that be say, go now, what are you going to do? That's your, quote,

00:34:56.980 immediate action plan. So they put together that. The leader of the SAS at the time was

00:35:04.020 Peter de Billiae, who is a real legend in the SAS. He was dropping into Malaya in the 50s, Peter de Billiae.

00:35:12.740 General Sir Peter de Billiae. He was actually head of all special forces, I believe, British special forces

00:35:19.060 at the time, a real legend. And so de Billiae sends a bunch of B squadron chaps to London and puts

00:35:30.660 together an immediate action plan. Well, it's devolved down to Mike Rose. Again, I say Mike Rose,

00:35:36.820 like our name is a general Sir Hugh Michael Rose, who at the time was a lieutenant colonel.

00:35:45.780 He goes on to become knighted and a general. And I believe he was in charge of all forces in

00:35:53.300 Gulf War One. But at the time, Mike Rose was a colonel in the SAS. And so he's the actual guy on the

00:36:02.260 spot. It's not like Peter de Billiae is sitting outside Prince's gate, telling individual operators

00:36:09.060 what they're going to do. That devolved down to Rose. OK, so they go there and they make their

00:36:15.620 immediate action plan. What are we going to do? And you have guys from that moment onwards,

00:36:20.500 as soon as they get there, there'll be guys ready to rock and roll literally at a second's notice with

00:36:25.380 the full gear on, with their Heckler & Koch 9mm submachine guns, locked and loaded,

00:36:32.820 ready to go at quite literally a moment's notice. So that's in place now.

00:36:37.860 But then they start working on their better plan for how they're going to, if they're called

00:36:44.820 upon to actually do it, you know, a more sophisticated plan. And it turns out they've got

00:36:49.780 five, six days to work on that. So they set themselves up in a barracks in central London

00:36:55.700 as their base. But they also have sort of what you might call forward operating base in the building

00:37:01.700 next door to the Iranian embassy. So within minutes of it or within an hour or two or whatever of it,

00:37:09.700 starting the police, sort of the normal police, clear out all the buildings in the whole street.

00:37:15.780 And in fact, you know, roughly a two-mile radius around the whole area, or a box,

00:37:22.100 a couple of kilometres wide. They just clear it out entirely, close all the roads.

00:37:26.900 You know, no civilians are allowed near. You know, a few press people are allowed near-ish.

00:37:34.020 But you know, it's all cleared out. And so one of the buildings next door was the Ethiopian embassy.

00:37:38.820 And, you know, some SAS dudes camp up in there. So that's important to know. And from there,

00:37:44.980 they've got access to the roof. And they try and install microphones in the wall to try and hear

00:37:50.660 what's going on. But we'll get into all of that in a moment. I'll let John Lewis continue the narrative.

00:37:56.820 He says this, quote,

00:37:58.100 The police were on the scene almost immediately, alerted by an emergency signal by Trevor Lock.

00:38:02.980 Oh yeah, Trevor Lock didn't have time to draw his pistol and fire anything. But he did have a sort of

00:38:07.220 a panic button right where he was. And he was able to press that. Okay.

00:38:13.460 So the emergency signal by Trevor Lock and was soon followed, the police, and was soon followed by

00:38:17.780 Scotland Yard specialist units, including C-13, the anti-terrorist squad, and D-11, the elite

00:38:25.860 blue beret marksman. They're called something else now, D-11. But yeah, so the police have got

00:38:32.500 guys that are trained for this sort of thing. Of course, they've got specialist firearms officers.

00:38:38.900 And so they were called and they were on the scene before the SAS were. They were on the scene like,

00:38:42.580 you know, bang, right away. I mean, they're stationed in London. So they're there first.

00:38:47.460 And they, you know, they like secure the perimeter and do all the sort of regular,

00:38:52.420 I say regular, it's a very irregular situation, isn't it? But they do all the

00:38:56.420 regular things that the police, armed police would do in such a situation.

00:39:00.820 The building was surrounded and Scotland Yard hastily began putting in motion its siege

00:39:05.700 negotiation machinery. While no siege is ever the same as the one before or after it,

00:39:11.380 most follow a definite pattern. In stage one, the authorities try to pacify the gunmen,

00:39:17.220 usually with such provisions as cigarettes and food, and allow the release of ideological

00:39:22.180 statements. In stage two, the hostage takers drop their original demands,

00:39:26.340 well, hopefully, and begin negotiating their own escape. Stage three is the resolution.

00:39:31.860 The Prince's Gate siege moved very quickly to stage one with Salim, who's the leader of it.

00:39:38.500 In fact, his name, that's a bit of a nickname, but I'll call him Salim all the way through this.

00:39:43.300 His real name was Taufik Ibrahim Al Rashidi, but we'll just call him Salim. He's sort of the main

00:39:49.460 character, the main protagonist out of this band of six terrorist desperados. So remember the name,

00:39:58.740 Salim. Okay, move quickly to stage one. With Salim, the head Arab gunman, announcing his demands over

00:40:04.980 the telephone just after 2.35pm. Autonomy and human rights for the people of Kuzistan, Arabistan,

00:40:13.140 and the release of 91 Arab prisoners held in Iranian jails. If his demands were not met,

00:40:18.740 he would blow up the embassy, hostages and all, at noon the following day. Now, just to say,

00:40:24.660 turns out they didn't have any giant bombs, massive bombs for blowing up the building. That was a

00:40:30.660 complete bluff. And we'll get into, but you know, the bluff was called. But yeah, so his demands were,

00:40:37.300 you know, you've got less than 24 hours. It's half past two in the afternoon on the 30th of April,

00:40:42.100 noon the next day. He doesn't get what he wants, which was impossible. Remember,

00:40:46.740 the British government couldn't make the Iranian government do that. And the Iranian government

00:40:50.420 got no intention of doing that, releasing 91 of their prisoners, what they consider, you know,

00:40:56.020 terrorists, enemies of the state, recognizing the whole bit of their land as independence. It's not

00:41:01.620 going to happen. There's no way in a million years. And so, but he's saying, Salim is saying,

00:41:05.700 he's going to blow up the whole building, if he doesn't get that, in less than 24 hours.

00:41:10.500 You know, nonsense, nonsense. Okay. The SAS, meanwhile, had been alerted

00:41:16.260 about the siege within minutes of its start. Dusty Gray, an ex-SAS sergeant, now a metropolitan

00:41:22.660 police dog handler, telephoned the officers' mess at Bradbury Lines, or Stirling Lines,

00:41:27.860 the SAS's HQ next to the River Wire in Hereford, and said that the SAS would probably be required at the

00:41:34.900 Iranian embassy, where gunmen had taken over. That night, SAS troopers left for London in

00:41:40.260 Range Rovers, arriving at a holding area in Regent's Park Barracks in the early hours of Thursday

00:41:45.860 morning. Regent's Park Barracks, by the way, is very, very close to Kensington. Stone's throat.

00:41:51.860 It's right there, really. The official authority from the Ministry of Defence approving the move of

00:41:56.660 the SAS teams to London arrived at Bradbury Lines some hours after they had already left.

00:42:03.220 Over the next few days, the Metropolitan Police continued their softly, softly approach,

00:42:08.340 while trying to determine exactly how many hostages were in the embassy and where they were located.

00:42:13.540 So that's a thing to say. The next thing you do, after trying to, you know, calm the gunmen down,

00:42:19.220 the terrace down, try and prevent them from just, you know, killing loads of people right away. That's sort

00:42:24.900 of job one of police negotiators, you know. Say whatever you need to say, really. Give them

00:42:30.740 whatever they need, within reason, to just calm them down. And after that, once real negotiations start,

00:42:38.260 basically, what you want to do from the point of view of the authorities, the police, is to find out,

00:42:46.100 if you can, exactly what's going on inside the building, as best as you possibly can,

00:42:51.380 where the terrorists are within the building, where they usually place themselves within the building,

00:42:57.700 where the hostages are being held, if they're being moved around, you know, if you can, what's being

00:43:03.300 said inside the building. What you want is as much information, as much intelligence as you can

00:43:08.900 possibly get from inside that building. That's the main thing that the authorities want.

00:43:15.780 And so the process of that, the job of that, teasing that out through fair means or foul,

00:43:22.180 that's the main job of the police at this stage. The story continues. Scotland Yard's technical squad,

00:43:27.140 C7, installed microphones in the chimney and walls of number 16, covering the noise by faking gas

00:43:33.780 board repairs at the neighbouring Ennismore Gardens. That was another thing they did. So you want to know what's

00:43:40.100 going on inside, right? So one way of doing that, without, you know, trying to infiltrate an actual

00:43:46.180 spy, an actual human man, that's not likely to go undetected. So they want to try and get microphones

00:43:52.740 in there and just listen in, bug it if you can. So they did. They dropped mics, as you just said there,

00:43:57.140 they dropped mics down the chimney. And one of the walls, there was a joint, as I said, it was a terraced

00:44:04.820 row of buildings, i.e. the buildings one next to another. There's not a gap in between them. It's literally one wall

00:44:10.260 separates one building from the other one. So what they did in the building next door, directly next door to it,

00:44:16.740 as quietly as possible, drilled holes in the wall, like to the point where you're very, very, very nearly bursting a hole through

00:44:26.500 to the other side, but stopping just short of that, because of course if a hole suddenly appears in the

00:44:31.220 wall, the terrorists are probably going to see that. Well, they will see that and know that something's

00:44:35.220 up and it might send them crazy and they start killing hostages. So you drill a hole right up to

00:44:40.100 the plaster on the other side of the, through the brick, from the other side, through the brick,

00:44:45.140 right up to the plaster. So there's only really wallpaper and some, a thin bit of plaster between you

00:44:51.540 and the building with all the terraces in. And then you put a microphone, a sensitive microphone,

00:44:55.940 in that hole and hopefully you can hear what's going on inside. So that's what they did. One

00:45:02.820 problem with that though, is it's very, very difficult to drill those holes completely silently

00:45:09.220 with the best will in the world. I have often thought, didn't they do it with like a hand drill,

00:45:13.860 very, very, very slowly. But nonetheless, it still created noise and the authorities,

00:45:20.820 the power that be, Cobra and the police, tried to sort of cover that noise in a couple of different

00:45:27.140 ways. One way was where it just said there, by saying that there's lots of maintenance work going

00:45:31.860 on very nearby in the next road. And it's the gas works, British gas are doing work. And that's

00:45:37.220 why you can hear all this banging and things going on. Another thing they did was got Heathrow to fly

00:45:44.820 aeroplanes, commercial aeroplanes, I believe, very low, very low over, because Heathrow is very close to

00:45:52.260 central London, fly the aeroplanes very, very low over that part of Kensington. And of course,

00:45:58.100 that's very loud, isn't it? And hope the idea is hopefully that will muffle some of the sounds

00:46:04.020 of this drilling going on and other things they were doing, which we'll get into in a moment.

00:46:10.340 Now, that only worked to an extent. The terrorists were not entirely fooled by that,

00:46:17.460 or they seem to have been to some extent. It didn't enrage them to the point where they started spraying

00:46:22.500 hostages, but they weren't completely fooled by that. They knew that things were going on

00:46:28.500 and they were suspicious. But nonetheless, that's what they did with these microphones.

00:46:32.580 All right. Lewis continues, quote, gradually it became clear that there were about 25 hostages

00:46:38.420 as they discovered at the end of the siege. The exact number is 26, most of them Iranian embassy

00:46:43.300 workers. Also hostage were PC Trevor Lock and two BBC sound engineers, Sim Harris and Chris Kramer.

00:46:50.900 The latter, Chris Kramer, who became seriously ill with a stomach disorder, was released by the

00:46:56.820 gunman as an act of good faith. It was a bad mistake by the Arab revolutionaries. A debriefing of Kramer

00:47:03.540 gave the SAS vital information about the situation inside the embassy, as they planned and trained in

00:47:09.460 a new holding area only streets away from Prince's Gate itself. So that's a thing to say. If the

00:47:16.180 terrorists ever release a hostage, for whatever reason, that person is now a gold mine for the

00:47:22.740 authorities that may storm the building. Because that person knows, that person's got the most best

00:47:29.220 up-to-date intelligence of what it's like inside, what's going on. Again, where the terrorists are

00:47:35.140 placing themselves, how many hostages there are, where they are, that even like the mood of the

00:47:41.300 terrorists, you know, whether they're extremely belligerent and aggressive or not, whether they're

00:47:47.300 sort of dumb or not, whether they're hyper vigilant or not. You know, what type of man is the leader,

00:47:52.980 Selim? What type of man is he? Is he a crazy mad dog or is he like a reasonable intellectual? All these

00:48:00.020 things, right? It's just a, it's a, that person is a gold mine. And so that BBC chap, Chris Kramer,

00:48:09.060 who I believe was ill with a genuine stomach problem, but I believe he played it up, you know,

00:48:16.420 made out that he was at death's door sort of a thing. And so Selim let him go. And so of course,

00:48:24.820 he's debriefed by both the police and the SAS. Um, absolutely. Of course you would do that.

00:48:31.300 So a little bit to say at this point about the hostages themselves. Most of them, as you can

00:48:35.140 imagine, were Iranian embassy employees. It's the Iranian embassy. So the vast majority of these 26

00:48:40.980 people are Iranians and the terrorists are Iranians. They're Arab Iranians, right? They're speaking Arabic,

00:48:51.060 the terrorists, not Farsi, not speaking the Persian dialect. They're speaking Arabic. They consider

00:48:56.740 themselves Arabs, Persian Arabs. Um, if that makes any sense. Um, so they're on the same side in the,

00:49:04.340 in one sense, right? They're all compatriots. They're all Iranian. Um, but of course the members of the,

00:49:13.060 the employees of the Iranian embassy are pro the current regime. They're pro the Ayatollah and pro

00:49:21.060 the Mullahs in Iran. And the terrorists are the opposite of that, right? They hate the Mullahs.

00:49:26.820 They hate the Ayatollah with a vengeance. He's their enemy. He's the person they hate most.

00:49:31.940 That's why they're here because they hate him so much. Right? So, so although they're all Iranians,

00:49:37.060 actually, of course, you know, you can imagine there's massive animosity between the terrorists

00:49:41.780 and the average Iranian embassy employee. And there's a few others. Like I say, there just

00:49:46.660 happened to be two BBC dudes in there. They were trying to get a, I don't believe the story is,

00:49:51.540 they're trying to get visas. They were applying for visas because they wanted to visit Iran to cover,

00:49:58.980 uh, the, the, the, the fledgling Iranian revolution that had only happened the year previous.

00:50:04.420 No, they're just journalists that want to, want to visit Iran, sort of legally, formally,

00:50:09.620 have all the T's crossed and the I's dotted and you go to the Iranian embassy to,

00:50:14.340 so the regime green lights it. That's why they were there. They just happened to be there.

00:50:19.060 But they were BBC journalists. Um, of course, there's Trevor Lockman. There's one or two other

00:50:23.220 people. There was a couple of just visiting guests and things. There was a doctor there, an Iranian doctor,

00:50:29.060 a medical advisor. There happened to be a, um, uh, uh, uh, a Pakistani journalist there.

00:50:36.500 You know, like the, the odds and sods of different people. One dude was a, a carpet dealer, an Iranian

00:50:42.740 carpet dealer. Another dude was just a banker, an Iranian banker. You know, people that just happened

00:50:47.140 to be there on that day. John Lewis continues saying this. Inside the holding area, a scale model

00:50:52.660 of the embassy had been constructed to familiarise the SAS troopers with the layout of the building

00:50:58.020 they would assault if the police negotiations were to break down. Such training and preparation was

00:51:02.900 nothing new. At the Bradbury Lions HQ, SAS counter-revolutionary warfare teams use a close

00:51:09.060 quarter battle house for experience of small arms fire in confined spaces. One exercise involves

00:51:15.300 troopers sitting amongst dummy terrorists while others storm in and riddle the dummies with live rounds.

00:51:20.980 And yeah, that's the thing, uh, Andy McNabb talks about in immediate action. In Hereford,

00:51:26.020 they had this mocked up house building, uh, where, yeah, they practice room clearing. They practice

00:51:30.900 storming a building, you know, throwing flashbangs in and then storming in and they do it with live

00:51:36.500 rounds. And, uh, it's all very, it's all very special forces stuff. Uh, pretty cool, you know. Um, well,

00:51:44.580 I say cool. Um, it's deadly serious, right? It's deadly serious stuff. Uh, but they've been practicing for

00:51:50.660 it for years already, right? So they are actually highly trained. There's no doubt about that.

00:51:58.580 As the police negotiating team located in a forward base at number 25, Prince's Gate,

00:52:03.860 of all places, the Royal School of Needlework anticipated, the gunmen very quickly dropped

00:52:08.660 their original demands. So yeah, after the first deadline that Saleem had imposed, he said,

00:52:15.300 on noon the following day, we're going to blow up the whole building. Well, that deadline came and

00:52:19.860 went because apart from anything else, Maggie Thatcher had no intention of doing what they

00:52:23.940 wanted. But even beyond that, it couldn't be done. Even if Maggie Thatcher made it her top priority,

00:52:29.300 it was not going to happen. So one way or another, that noon deadline comes and goes,

00:52:34.260 you know, everyone fears, oh shit, like this building's getting blown up at the stroke of noon.

00:52:40.580 Well, it just didn't happen. We called their bluff. I mean, unintentionally. We had no other option

00:52:45.060 but to call their bluff on that one. Just wait and see if they do it. I mean,

00:52:48.900 so, but they didn't because they didn't have giant bombs. That was always,

00:52:52.340 that was always just a bluff from Saleem. So the gunmen very quickly dropped their demands,

00:52:56.580 their original demands after that. By late evening on the second day of the siege,

00:53:00.740 the gunmen were requesting mediation of the siege by Arab ambassadors. So what they said is,

00:53:07.620 we want to talk to proper ambassadors from other Arab nations like Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia,

00:53:14.500 you know, all those countries. We want to speak to the British authorities through them.

00:53:20.020 Okay. Well, we asked, the British government asked those ambassadors, if they would do that,

00:53:27.140 would they help? And they all said, no, thanks for that. Thanks for nothing. The Jordanian,

00:53:33.380 the Jordanian ambassador, just in and of his own volition said, no way. No, that's an absolute no

00:53:40.180 from us. Anything else? And all the other Arab nations, I think four or five other Arab nations

00:53:44.980 said, the ambassadors said, well, we'll ask our government. You know, I haven't, me, the ambassador

00:53:50.500 in London, the Qatari ambassador or whatever, I haven't got the authority to say yes or no to that.

00:53:54.820 Let me ask my government and I'll get back to you, which they all did. And the answer came back from

00:53:59.540 all of them, no. Thanks for nothing. Thanks for nothing there, Arab nations. You might have been

00:54:05.620 able to help out here, but they didn't. And what the terrorists Salim and his five terrorists really

00:54:12.180 wanted at this point was just safe passage back to the Middle East. And that was the one thing,

00:54:18.020 really the one thing, Thatcher was just not going to allow to happen. John Lewis says,

00:54:24.340 the British government under Margaret Thatcher refused to countenance the request. To the anger

00:54:29.300 of the gunmen, BBC News Radio made no mention of their changed demands, the broadcast of which had

00:54:35.140 been a concession agreed earlier in the day. Finally, the demands were transmitted, but the BBC got the

00:54:40.980 details wrong. So what happened was the terrorists said, we've got this statement, right? This list

00:54:48.100 of demands we want, and we want the BBC to broadcast it. And that's our demand. If we don't get that,

00:54:56.660 we're going to start killing hostages. So what the police had already done on day one, we're already

00:55:01.460 in day two here. On day one, quite quickly, the police had cut the telephone lines into that building,

00:55:08.740 into number 16, Prince's Game. Because what had happened was, I think, again, it was a reporter,

00:55:14.500 I think it was a BBC reporter, when he finds out, because it's quite, it's common knowledge,

00:55:18.820 again, within minutes of this happening, it's common knowledge that this is going down,

00:55:23.380 right? It wasn't kept, it's impossible to keep it secret in a city like London. So within hours of the

00:55:28.820 first day, the BBC and everyone knows that it's happening. So that, on the first day, the BBC,

00:55:36.260 cheeky bastards, the BBC ring up the Iranian embassy, they just ring it up on the normal

00:55:42.180 telephone line, and get through to Salim. And I believe there's a recording of it, and they're,

00:55:48.980 you know, it's a BBC man on one end of the phone saying, you know, so what, let's talk, what's your,

00:55:54.660 tell us, what's your demands, da-da-da-da-da. And Salim's talking to him saying, you know,

00:55:59.620 we want, we want Rabastan to be independent, da-da-da-da. And so when the police realised this

00:56:05.540 has happened, they're like, we can't have that. That's insane. That's ridiculous. So they cut the

00:56:10.980 telephone lines to the building. Now, you might think that would enrage the terrorists. Well,

00:56:15.380 it did anger them. Salim wasn't happy with that. But the police felt like, and you know,

00:56:20.580 I think correctly, they had no other choice. We can't have the subversive BBC, just with a direct

00:56:26.900 line to Salim in the middle of an ongoing siege. Can't have that. So they cut the line. And what

00:56:32.340 they did, they, they gave Salim a sort of a military style telephone, a wireless military telephone.

00:56:43.940 And they pass it to him through the window at the end of a long stick. So now Salim's got a telephone,

00:56:51.060 but it's only to and from the police negotiation team. Right. So that's what they've got. But the

00:56:56.500 terrorists inside have also got a television, of course. So they say, we've got these demands,

00:57:03.540 we want the BBC to broadcast it. And the police making the calculation that if we don't make some

00:57:11.300 concessions, they might, they very well, very may well start killing hostages. So it's no skin

00:57:19.460 off our nose, really, ultimately, to let the BBC and the wide world know kind of what's going on here.

00:57:27.140 Right. It's not Britain in 1980. It's not the Soviet Union. We're not going to try and pretend it's not

00:57:31.620 happening. Right. It's the modern world, 1980. So, so the BBC broadcast Salim's statement, but they,

00:57:41.620 they, they bugger it up like it's a, like it's a truncated version. It's not the, it's not exactly

00:57:47.220 what Salim had written. So they were very annoyed by that. The terrorists were very, very annoyed by

00:57:53.540 that. Yeah. So John Lewis said the BBC got the details wrong for some tense moments on Saturday,

00:57:58.740 the third day of the siege, it looked as though the furious Salim would start shooting. The crisis

00:58:03.540 was only averted when the police promised that the BBC would put out the demands accurately that

00:58:08.740 evening. The nine o'clock news duly transmitted them as its first item. And they correctly,

00:58:15.300 this time, the gunmen were jubilant, apparently inside when the, the second BBC announcement went

00:58:23.060 out on the nine o'clock news, it was exactly basically what Salim had written. And so they,

00:58:30.020 the terrorists inside the building at that point were, were overjoyed. Apparently they were like

00:58:34.580 whooping and shouting in delight and hugging each other and all that sort of thing. They saw that

00:58:39.860 as a massive win, right? They might not get their 91 brothers in arms released from Iranian prisons,

00:58:46.740 and they might not get Arabistan recognised by Iran as a sovereign independent state. But at the very

00:58:53.380 least, they got the BBC in Britain to highlight their struggle. Because the whole world watches the BBC,

00:59:01.780 or used to. And so to have it go out on the BBC nine o'clock news, that goes around the world.

00:59:06.980 Okay. So where most people, even the, uh, the Kabbalist secretary had never heard of the Arabistanian

00:59:14.260 struggle. Never heard of it. No one had really outside of the region. Certainly most people in Britain,

00:59:19.620 most people in the West. Never, never, never, never heard of it. But now they will have done. Now they had

00:59:25.140 done. So from a terrorist point of view, that's a, that's a big win. It's sort of the best they could hope

00:59:29.780 for probably, other than getting safe passage home, which they, they still thought they could get.

00:59:35.460 They were pretty sure they could get. Their Iraqi handler had promised them that the, you know,

00:59:41.380 it's a lie. It was nonsense. It was manipulation. But their Iraqi intelligence handler had promised

00:59:46.500 them that the, the, the British government would capitulate on that and ultimately put them on a

00:59:51.940 flight home. He had told them things like, you'll be home within 24 hours. Another thing to mention,

00:59:57.140 a broader context is that during this whole time, there's the Iranian hostage crisis.

01:00:02.820 If anyone knows about that, uh, the US embassy in Iran, in Tehran, um, had been stormed by

01:00:12.500 terrorists from the American point of view, from the Western point of view, terrorists.

01:00:16.260 And, uh, loads of people, mainly Americans were being held hostage with inside their own embassy

01:00:21.860 in Tehran. And that siege lasted ages, like well over a year. It lasted 444 days or something,

01:00:30.580 right? It lasted ages and ages and ages. So you can imagine that maybe Salim and his terrorists in

01:00:37.460 Kensington might think, might hope that their version of it, of that might go on for weeks and weeks and

01:00:45.220 weeks and months. They probably did hope that. If they weren't going to get on a plane within 24 hours,

01:00:50.420 they might hope they can just draw it out for a very, very long time because the authorities were

01:00:55.060 just terrified of anyone getting killed and just didn't have the, the ability and all the balls

01:01:01.060 to storm the building with special forces. That was obviously what they, they hoped.

01:01:05.620 Uh, yeah. Well, Maggie Thatcher is a bit, a bit stronger than that, but so anyway, the US embassy siege

01:01:12.500 in Tehran, uh, had already been going on for months by this point and didn't end for months after this.

01:01:19.140 So that's just something to bear in mind. There's a bit of context for real.

01:01:22.900 Okay. So the Lewis continues saying the gunmen were jubilant as they congratulated themselves.

01:01:28.260 However, an SAS reconnaissance team on the roof was discovering a way into number 16 via an improperly

01:01:35.380 locked skylight. Next door at number 18, the Ethiopian embassy, bricks were being removed from

01:01:41.540 the dividing wall, leaving only plaster for an assault team to break through. So that's a very

01:01:47.620 interesting thing. And it comes, it becomes an important point of it. There's one thing to drill

01:01:50.980 holes, you know, small holes through the brickwork and put a microphone in there. What they decided to

01:01:59.620 do, what the SS decided to do is, well, if, and when they're called upon to storm the building,

01:02:06.260 the idea is Mike Rose's Lieutenant Colonel Mike Rose's plan was to storm it from every point that

01:02:15.220 they possibly could all in the same instance. So when the, the, the go sign is given, they'll come

01:02:22.180 down through the skylights from the roof. They'll abseil down from the roof through as many different

01:02:27.540 windows as they can and go in the back door and do this thing where they remove loads of bricks

01:02:36.900 from the adjoining wall, enough bricks so that a man, you know, one abreast, but a man can just

01:02:43.940 bust through, you can just shoulder through. So yeah, there's this whole bit of the wall where it's

01:02:51.700 just the wallpaper and a bit of plaster and nothing else. Okay, so to do that, though, that is going

01:02:58.260 to be noise, again, with the best wheel in the world, that's going to create noise and any sort of

01:03:03.860 noise like that is going to be suspicious, really suspicious. I'll jump ahead slightly to mention this

01:03:09.940 to finish, finish up the story on the, this brick removal wall bit of the story, is that they removed so many

01:03:17.700 bricks or had to remove so many bricks that the actual plaster itself and the wallpaper can't really

01:03:24.020 support its own weight properly. And so from the inside of the Iranian embassy, the wall was visibly

01:03:31.940 like sort of sagging and bulging out. This is like shortly before the moment of, of Operation Nimrod.

01:03:39.860 That's what the SS called it. The code word was Operation Nimrod. Just, just before, shortly before

01:03:45.140 Operation Nimrod is a go, the wall is sort of sagging and bowing out visibly. Well, that's terrible,

01:03:54.180 right? You're giving the game away. That's, um, they obviously didn't mean to do that. They didn't

01:03:58.500 want to do that. That's a, that's a problem. But anyway, that's what happened. That was one of the

01:04:03.140 main giveaways where the terrorists had a tiny bit of notice because Selene became massively suspicious of

01:04:09.540 that, you know, correctly, massively suspicious. There's something going on with that wall. Like,

01:04:13.300 what the hell is that? You know, obviously there's something amiss there. And incidentally, it was,

01:04:18.900 uh, well, not incidentally, very deliberately. It was the wall of the room where all the male hostages

01:04:26.820 were being kept. Nearly everyone here is a male hostage. There are a few women, but, um, um, they're all

01:04:32.740 being kept in one particular room. And we knew this from where Kramer, the BBC guy had told

01:04:40.100 everyone that the male hostages were being kept in this one particular building, uh, one particular

01:04:44.580 room, which was adjoining to the Ethiopian embassy. And with the microphones and various other little

01:04:50.020 bits of intelligence, we knew that they were still being held in that room. So if we're going to bust in

01:04:57.620 to try and save as many hostages lives as possible, give the terrorists sort of zero opportunity just

01:05:03.380 to spray down all the hostages, like what happened in the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. Um, the best

01:05:10.900 possible thing we could do is, is that we want to be able to, you know, one second after the go signal

01:05:18.740 is given, be in that room. So it's a great plan really, tactically. You can't ask for much better

01:05:26.820 than that. Problem was the plaster and was, was sagging and it gave the game away a bit, but okay,

01:05:33.620 we'll get to that when we, we reach the, the ending of the, uh, of the events. Lewis carries

01:05:40.660 on saying this quote, on Sunday, the 4th of May, i.e. one day before, like the actual final SS operation

01:05:46.740 Nimrod was on the 5th of May, on the Monday, the bank holiday Monday. Uh, so on Sunday, the 4th of May,

01:05:53.300 it began to look as though all the SAS preparation would be for nothing. The tension inside the

01:05:58.180 embassy, i.e. after the BBC had correctly read Salim's statement, uh, the tension inside the

01:06:05.060 embassy had palpably slackened and the negotiations seemed to be getting somewhere because the police

01:06:12.020 are on the phone to Salim all the time. You know, what can we do? What do you want? We'll send you in

01:06:16.420 food. We'll send you in cigarettes. It's that softly, softly, nicely, nicely catchy monkey tactic.

01:06:23.380 Okay. So the negotiations seemed to be getting somewhere. The gunman's demands were lessening

01:06:28.500 all the time. Arab ambassadors had agreed to attend a meeting of the Cobra committee

01:06:33.620 in order to decide who would mediate in the siege. We never ended up happening, but there you go.

01:06:39.620 And then, on the morning of bank holiday Monday, 5th of May, the situation worsened rapidly. Just

01:06:45.540 after dawn, the gunman woke the hostages in a frustrated and nervous state. Bizarrely, Salim,

01:06:51.940 who thought he had heard noises in the night, sent PC Lock to scout the building to see whether it had

01:06:57.140 been infiltrated. Apparently Salim was convinced that there was a man, you know, like a spy or,

01:07:03.300 you know, maybe even a special forces operator or a policeman or whatever, was inside the building.

01:07:07.220 There wasn't. He was just sort of spooked by suspicious noises and things and the sense of

01:07:13.540 tension. But there actually wasn't, you know, an operator inside the building. But Salim was

01:07:19.540 convinced that there was. And he made PC Trevor Lock try and find him, but there wasn't anyone to find.

01:07:27.220 John Lewis continues,

01:07:27.940 The hostages in room 9 heard him report to Salim Trevor Lock, report to Salim that there was nobody

01:07:33.700 in the embassy but themselves. Conversations among the gunmen indicated that they increasingly believed

01:07:39.540 they had little chance of escape. It's not actually necessarily the case where they was never going

01:07:45.060 to escape to freedom, but where they were going to escape with their lives. You know,

01:07:49.540 the order hadn't been given for the SAS to go in yet. Because just to say, if you're not already aware,

01:07:57.140 that when the SAS go in, yeah, it is with extreme prejudice, right? They're not negotiating with you

01:08:04.260 anymore. They're not shouting at you to put your guns down. No, no, no. There's nothing like that.

01:08:10.580 They will shoot you dead on SAP. It's as simple as that. They're not interested in anything else.

01:08:16.500 You've had your chance to negotiate, right? We're not the police.

01:08:23.060 We're not even normal soldiers. We're not going to try and win any hearts and minds.

01:08:29.140 We're there to kill you. Simple as that. Now, of course, Salim doesn't necessarily know,

01:08:34.820 well, he certainly doesn't know that it's 22 SAS that he's up against. So he doesn't necessarily

01:08:41.860 know that. Well, he definitely doesn't know that. But, you know, still, any storming of the building,

01:08:46.580 even if it's by police, it's quite likely to be a shootout. But for whatever reason,

01:08:53.300 they'd got spooked. Well, for various reasons, they got spooked on the morning of the 5th of May.

01:08:58.980 At 11am, Salim discovered an enormous bulge in the wall separating the Iranian embassy from the

01:09:05.540 Ethiopian embassy. Extremely agitated, he moved the male hostages into the telex room at the front of

01:09:11.700 the building on the second floor. 40 minutes later, PC Locke and Sim Harris, that's the BBC guy,

01:09:18.740 appeared on the first floor balcony and informed the police negotiator that their captors would start

01:09:24.900 killing hostages if news of the Arab mediators was not forthcoming immediately. Again, there's footage

01:09:31.140 of that. So the authorities, the police, allowed a press corps to set up further down the road,

01:09:39.060 you know, out of harm's way. But there is footage from, you know, probably from the TV reporters,

01:09:46.180 ITN and BBC, from down the end of the road. And they've got, you know, quite long lens cameras.

01:09:54.660 And anything that happens at the front of the building was caught on TV. So if anything comes

01:10:00.420 in and out of the front door, or anyone pokes their head out of the windows on the front of the

01:10:05.620 building, it's caught on camera. And we've got footage of it and stuff. So that's one of those

01:10:10.820 instances where you could see them poking their heads out. The police played for time,

01:10:15.620 saying that there would be an update on the midday BBC news. The bulletin, however,

01:10:20.580 only served to anger Saleem, announcing as it did that the meeting between Cobra and the Arab

01:10:25.940 ambassadors had failed to agree on the question of who would mediate. Again, thanks for that,

01:10:31.140 Arab countries. Incensed, Saleem grabbed the telephone link to the police and announced,

01:10:36.980 and these are Saleem's words. You have run out of time. There will be no more talking.

01:10:41.620 Bring the ambassador to the phone, or I will kill a hostage in 45 minutes. End quote.

01:10:47.380 And this time, he wasn't mucking about. That's what the police negotiators had been saying to him

01:10:53.460 all along. You know, truly, correctly, they were saying, look, you haven't hurt anyone,

01:10:57.940 actually. You haven't killed anyone. They'd also let a woman out in the meantime. She'd said she was

01:11:03.220 pregnant. I'm not sure if she really was, but she certainly wasn't heavily pregnant. Anyway,

01:11:07.540 they'd let another woman out in the meantime. Again, another treasure trove of intelligence of

01:11:12.580 what's going on in there. But anyway, they'd said, look, you haven't actually killed anyone or even

01:11:16.900 hurt anyone really yet. So, you know, if you give up now, you're not going to get any of your demands,

01:11:22.740 and we're not going to send you back to Iran. But, you know, you'll spend a bunch of time in prison,

01:11:29.220 but you won't spend the rest of your lives in prison, and you will certainly live, right?

01:11:35.380 Let's not have a shootout. One way or another, whether it's with the police or whoever,

01:11:40.260 let's not have a shootout. You know, you haven't crossed the Rubicon yet. But Salim's saying now,

01:11:46.740 you've got 45 minutes to get an Arab ambassador on the phone to me, or I'm killing someone. And he

01:11:54.500 meant it, John Lewis continues saying. Outside in the police forward post, the minutes ticked away

01:12:00.260 with no news from the Cobra meeting, the last negotiating chip of the police. 42 minutes,

01:12:06.020 43 minutes, the telephone rang. It was Trevor Locke to say that the gunman had taken a hostage,

01:12:11.540 the Iranian press attache, and were tying him to the stairs. They were going to kill him. Salim came on

01:12:18.500 on the phone, shouting that the police had deceived him. At precisely 1.45pm, i.e. exactly

01:12:24.260 as he'd said, 45 minutes later, the distinct sound of three shots were heard from inside the embassy.

01:12:30.420 The name of that guy, incidentally, the chief press officer, or the press attache. His name was Abbas

01:12:40.100 Lavasani. And he was one of the guys inside the embassy who, kind of crazily, had been goading the

01:12:48.900 terrorists quite a lot. He'd been rude and dismissive to them, and just shown that he wasn't afraid of

01:12:55.140 them. In fact, apparently he'd said a number of times, if you're going to kill anyone, kill me.

01:12:59.780 He said, I'm happy to be a martyr for the Iranian regime. He was a very, very pro Ayatollah person.

01:13:06.820 Right? He was like, I'm happy to be a martyr. Kill me. Do it. Screw you guys. I'm not afraid

01:13:13.060 of you guys. That was his attitude. This Lavasani, Abbas Lavasani. So when Salim decides he is going

01:13:19.540 to kill someone, they pick him. Yeah. So they tied him to the stairs and shot him. They killed him.

01:13:29.460 Lewis continues saying this. The news of the shooting was immediately forwarded to the SAS teams

01:13:33.940 waiting in their holding area. They would be used after all. Operation Nimrod, the relief of the

01:13:39.300 embassy, was on. The men checked and cleared their weapons. Nine millimeter Browning HP automatic

01:13:44.820 pistols and Heckler & Koch MP5A3 submachine guns. The MP5, a favorite SAS weapon, first came to prominence

01:13:53.940 when the German GSG-9 unit used it to storm the hijacked airliner at Mogadishu. It can fire up to

01:14:00.020 650 rounds per minute. The order for the assault teams to move into place was shortly forthcoming.

01:14:05.620 So yeah, nine millimeter isn't, you know, a big round. But, and these little Heckler, really small

01:14:13.860 submachine guns are not very accurate over any sort of range. But the rate of fire is super high.

01:14:20.900 And you don't need them to be accurate over a range. You're going to be shooting at people within a

01:14:26.020 single room or perhaps across an atrium within a single building. It doesn't have to be accurate,

01:14:32.980 particularly. It needs to be, it needs to be wieldy. The weapon itself needs to be small and quick to

01:14:40.020 spin round with. You don't want it to be heavy and unwieldy. So anyway, that's what the SS went with,

01:14:46.900 the Heckler & Koch. At 6.50 pm, with tension mounting, the gunmen announced their demands again,

01:14:53.620 with the codicil that a hostage would be shot every 45 minutes until their demands were met.

01:14:58.660 In fact, another burst of shots was heard. The door of the embassy opened and the body of Lavasani

01:15:05.140 was flung down the steps. The new burst of shots was a scare tactic. So to say the exact sort of timing

01:15:12.180 of events that happened here. It's all coming to a head now. So shots were heard ringing out,

01:15:16.500 and those were the shots that had killed the press attaché. But the outside authorities don't know.

01:15:21.780 They've just heard shots. They don't know exactly what's happened. Then shortly after,

01:15:25.220 they hear more shots. But those second three shots, I believe it was, that were heard,

01:15:31.380 were a red herring. But where they throw the body of this Abbas Lavasani out of the door,

01:15:38.420 they literally just throw his body out of the front door, down the steps. And again,

01:15:42.340 it's caught on camera. And our people, you know, police or ambulance people go and gather the body

01:15:49.380 and take it away on a stretcher and things. But as far as we're concerned, they may well have killed

01:15:54.420 two people now. And they're going to, and we've got to take him at his word that he's going to keep

01:15:58.900 killing people every 45 minutes now. We've got to take that seriously, because we've got definite,

01:16:03.380 absolute proof that he's killed at least one person.

01:16:05.700 At seven o'clock, armed police moved in front of the embassy. Two men ran forward with a stretcher

01:16:14.660 and went into the porch. A body was put on the stretcher and undercover from the marksman,

01:16:20.420 taken out towards an ambulance.

01:16:47.300 So we can't make the calculation that we'll,

01:16:50.100 we'll bluff him out in any way. He's killed at least one person. That's it.

01:16:54.180 The Rubicon has been crossed. The line has been crossed.

01:16:56.900 So, you know, negotiations are at an end, really. Well, they are at an end.

01:17:03.220 The SAS are given the green light at that point. And the police negotiators, their only job now

01:17:10.020 is to just stall for time. Whilst the SAS, the final few minutes it takes for them to get to their final,

01:17:16.020 final jumping off points. It only takes a few minutes because they're ready to rock and roll.

01:17:21.300 Okay. So, so that's what they do. The head of the Metropolitan Police, the overall head shed in charge of

01:17:28.020 everything, police-wise, asks Cobra and the Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, if he can hand over

01:17:35.620 authority for the whole thing to the army, to Lieutenant Colonel Mike Rose and the SAS.

01:17:43.780 So he formally asks to do that. Willie Whitelaw just looks over to Maggie. He obviously needs the green

01:17:49.380 light from the, the, the actual leader of the country to do that. She immediately just says,

01:17:55.300 yes, go. And so it comes down to Mike Rose, go. John E. Lewis continues by saying this,

01:18:01.860 The police phoned into the embassy's first floor, where the telephone link with the gunman was

01:18:06.340 situated. They seemed to cave in, seemed to cave in to Salim's demands, assuring him that they were

01:18:12.820 not tricking him and that a bus would be arriving in minutes to take the gunman to Heathrow Airport,

01:18:17.700 from where they would fly to the Middle East. But by talking on the phone, Salim had signaled his

01:18:22.740 whereabouts to the SAS teams who had taken up their start positions on the roof and in the two

01:18:27.620 buildings either side of number 16, the Ethiopian embassy and the Royal College of Physicians.

01:18:32.980 At around this time, formal responsibility, via a handwritten note, passed from the Metropolitan

01:18:38.580 Police to the SAS. Now, remember, this is a bank holiday Monday. By anyone who's not British,

01:18:44.660 that just means a national holiday. No one's at work. Well, nearly, nearly no one is at work.

01:18:50.820 It's a national holiday. So everyone's at home. It's about seven o'clock in the, or very nearly seven

01:18:55.380 o'clock in the evening. There was the World Snooker Championships were on TV. And this is 1980,

01:19:02.020 so everyone's watching the same very, very small number of channels there are. They interrupt the

01:19:07.620 snooker to put this live on the telly on a bank holiday Monday. In other words, millions of people

01:19:13.700 watch what happens live next. Quite remarkable. And there's a famous bit of footage where you can see

01:19:21.380 on the front of the building, one of the SAS teams, there was a red team and a blue team.

01:19:26.340 We can't really see what happened on the roof or what happened behind the building. They're all

01:19:29.300 abseiling down the height at the back of the building. On the front of the building, coming out

01:19:33.860 of the windows onto a little balcony from the next door building, come these black clad dudes, all clad in

01:19:41.300 black, black gas masks on. Again, this is on TV. They come out of the window and scramble across the

01:19:50.980 balconies at the front of the building on the first floor. And these are SAS dudes. One of them's Mac,

01:19:58.340 John McAleese, later to become a very well-renowned ex-SAS man. He's passed away now. He comes out with his

01:20:07.300 mate Mel and they hop across the balcony to the first story balcony of the Iranian embassy building

01:20:14.980 with this like this sort of contraption thing, this thing they're holding. And it's a shaped charge.

01:20:21.140 It's a bomb, essentially, type of explosives that they put up against the window because these windows

01:20:28.180 actually had reinforced glass, bulletproof glass. And so they knew that the idea of just busting

01:20:35.380 through it with your shoulder or kicking it in with your boot isn't going to work. Even with like

01:20:40.660 sledgehammers and crowbars, it might take quite a bit of time to smash in through the windows. And

01:20:46.660 that's too slow. That would give the terrorists enough time Munich style to just kill the hostages.

01:20:53.780 That's too slow. They need to get in immediately. That's the idea. Once the green light, once the zero

01:21:01.940 hour has come and the moment to attack has come, they want to get into that building within seconds.

01:21:10.180 So they decide. It's Mike Rose's idea. They have this shaped charge. They just place it against the

01:21:16.180 window and then retreat a little bit, just a few yards away. And it blows up, blowing in the window,

01:21:22.980 just creating a big hole inside of the building, really. It totally blew in the windows, more than enough

01:21:27.860 to blow in the window. But as soon as that's blown in, four guys, Mac and his little gang, that's what

01:21:35.460 they call it, a gang. Mac and his gang immediately just go into the building and start doing their job.

01:21:43.140 But seeing them on the balcony there and that explosion is sort of a famous bit of footage.

01:21:48.740 So we'll play it for you so you can see it.

01:21:50.820 Then some men were seen heading across from adjacent balconies on the first floor.

01:22:08.740 That was a bomb. That was a bomb.

01:22:18.420 The explosion ripped through the building.

01:22:42.020 A pall of smoke covering the front of it. The SAS had moved in.

01:22:48.420 And so it's a go. Operation Nimrod is on. The guys on the roof go down through the skylight.

01:23:06.660 Other guys on the roof abseil down the back of the building and smash into the windows. There's guys

01:23:11.380 on the ground floor at the back of the building. There's a back door to the building. They all rush in

01:23:16.180 all at once. All at once. The idea is to overwhelm them. To completely overwhelm the terrorists. Oh,

01:23:22.420 and they bust through that wall adjoining to the Ethiopian embassy. It's all go all at once. That's the plan.

01:23:32.100 And you know, it's risky really because, well, it's very, very risky for the operators themselves.

01:23:37.700 They could, of course, get shot by a terrorist. But really, for the hostages, if the terrorists were quick enough,

01:23:44.500 when they start hearing stun grenades go off or flashbangs go off, they start hearing windows being

01:23:49.380 smashed in. They start hearing the sounds of the building being stormed. They could just

01:23:56.020 spray all the hostages and kill them all. It only takes a few seconds to do that, right? So the next few

01:24:01.300 moments are just completely critical if the hostages are going to be saved, or as many as

01:24:07.460 possible of them can be saved. That's the idea. Lewis says this, quote, suddenly, as the world watched

01:24:13.860 Prince's Gate on TV, black clad men wearing respirators appeared on the front balconies and

01:24:19.780 placed framed charges against the armoured glass windows. There was an enormous explosion. The time

01:24:26.100 was exactly 7.23pm. At the back of the building and on the roof, the assault teams heard the order,

01:24:32.260 go, go, go. Less than 12 minutes had elapsed since the body of the press attaché had appeared on the

01:24:37.780 embassy steps. The assault on the building came from three sides, with the main assault from the rear,

01:24:43.140 where the three pairs of troopers abseiled down from the roof. One of the first party accidentally

01:24:48.660 swung his foot through an upper storey window, thereby alerting Selim to their line of assault.

01:24:54.820 That was a mistake, right? Looking back on all of this in hindsight, it was a near perfect operation

01:25:01.380 by the SAS. Near perfect. But it wasn't perfect. These things seldom go absolutely perfectly.

01:25:08.580 And that is one of the things that they buggered up. As one of the guys at the back of the building

01:25:13.220 was abseiling down, he accidentally, obviously accidentally, put his foot through a window,

01:25:18.420 you know, moments before, the moment where everything was going to happen and go off.

01:25:24.180 And so that gave the terrorists a tiny, tiny bit, just a few seconds really, of notice that something

01:25:30.260 was happening, that it was happening. The pair dropped to the ground and prepared to fight

01:25:34.900 their way in, while another pair landed on the balcony, broke the window and threw in stun grenades,

01:25:41.140 flashbangs. That's the idea. You throw that stun grenade or flashbang into a room. It goes off.

01:25:46.740 The idea is that that just completely disorientates everyone in that room with a super light flash and

01:25:53.140 a super, super loud bang. And at least for a few seconds, at least for a second or two or three,

01:25:59.380 no matter who you are, you're shocked by that, right? Only a very, very, very highly trained

01:26:06.900 special forces person would that have like no effect on it. Pretty much every normal human being

01:26:13.460 would be taken aback by that. Their vision blurred and their hearing gone and just don't know what's

01:26:18.820 going on. And in those seconds, that's when the SS come in or any special forces dudes

01:26:25.140 come in to clear the room. So you throw a stun grenade in, let it go off, and then the instant

01:26:30.900 after it goes off, you go in and kill any terrorists, you see. That's the MO. So the SS start doing that

01:26:39.140 all over the building, right? All at once. Again, it's supposed to be overwhelming and is, you know.

01:26:44.580 A third pair also abseiled down from the roof, but one of them became entangled in the ropes. This is

01:26:51.700 the other thing they sort of bugged up. One of the guys, you know, threw no fault of his own. Well,

01:26:57.140 he probably should have. It was a mistake. It was a mistake. He got entangled in the ropes, his own

01:27:02.020 abseiling ropes, which meant that the rear assault could not use frame charges to blow in the bulletproof

01:27:07.620 glass because he was there. He was dangling upside down directly above where they were going to

01:27:13.460 blow the windows in, just like what happened at the front of the building. They can't do that because

01:27:17.060 that's going to kill him or at the very least terribly wound him or maim him. They couldn't

01:27:22.180 do it. And also a bit later, a few moments later, a minute or so later, fires were enveloping the

01:27:28.420 building a bit here or there because these explosive charges and flashbangs. I mean, a flashbang

01:27:34.900 is no little thing. It's not like a firework. It's not like a banger. It's a proper bit of explosive.

01:27:40.340 You know, if you're right next to one, you're in trouble. It's that sort of serious.

01:27:43.620 And they can start fires or did, can and did start fires as well. You know, inside an embassy,

01:27:49.460 there's lots of, you know, deep carpets and lots of ornate curtains and things which are fire hazards.

01:27:55.700 And they caught a lot. There's a famous picture again of this guy, this SAS trooper dangling upside

01:28:00.500 down on his own abseiling ropes. And there's fire licking out of the window just below him. In fact,

01:28:05.380 he got quite badly burnt. His legs got burnt after all this is over. He has to go to hospital

01:28:11.300 because he burnt his own legs. Anyway, just to finish up on that story,

01:28:14.900 at the back of the building, he's trying to, as he's like nearly getting burnt alive, he's trying to

01:28:21.300 swing out from the building, swing himself out from the building to try and get away from the flames.

01:28:26.660 If the guys above him, the guys above him want to cut him down, cut the guys on the roof still,

01:28:31.620 cut the abseiling ropes and let him drop a few feet to the balcony below. But where he's swinging

01:28:37.700 himself out, if they cut the rope at the wrong moment, he's not going to fall a few feet to the

01:28:42.660 balcony. He's going to fall like 40 feet. He's going to fall two stories plus to concrete below.

01:28:48.260 And that will kill him or seriously, seriously wound him, end his career sort of thing, you know.

01:28:53.460 So eventually the guys on the roof, his SAS buddies on the roof, they cut the abseiling rope at just

01:29:00.420 the right moment when he's on the in swing so that he falls down just a few feet. And actually that

01:29:06.340 trooper, I believe, got up and carried on entering the building, even though he got his legs badly

01:29:10.740 burnt. He carried on with the mission afterwards. So yeah, again, another little mistake, one of just

01:29:18.180 really two little mistakes the SAS made. And it was with the guys abseiling down the back of the

01:29:23.220 building. It would have been quite embarrassing if that was caught on. They'd done that on the

01:29:27.300 front of the building and had been caught much more on camera and gone down in history a lot more

01:29:33.060 because it was a bit of a bugger up, to be perfectly honest. It's not super, super slick, is it?

01:29:40.660 Anyway, in the scheme of things, relatively minor. When we find out in a minute at the end,

01:29:45.060 exactly the final numbers, how many hostages they saved and all that sort of thing. In the end,

01:29:50.420 it didn't really matter too much beyond that own, that actual guy's burnt legs. I'm sure he didn't

01:29:56.180 appreciate that, but there you go. Okay. So it's on. The SAS are storming the building from every

01:30:01.220 angle they possibly can all at once. So they couldn't use framed charges to blow in the windows

01:30:06.660 at the back. And John E. Lewis says, instead, a call sign from a rear troop in the garden sledgehammered

01:30:12.340 the French windows open with the troops swarming into the building on the ground floor. They,

01:30:17.300 quote, negotiated, quote, a gunman in the front hall. And what that means is they just shot him dead

01:30:23.540 immediately. As I say, the SAS aren't there to negotiate. They're not there to demand you put

01:30:30.980 your weapon down or anything of the kind. They're there to end you. And that's what they did.

01:30:38.420 So they see the first gunman and just immediately just riddle him with bullets. There's no challenge

01:30:44.260 given. Nothing. It's just, you're dead now. So they negotiated a gunman in the front hall,

01:30:52.260 cleared the cellars and then raced upwards to the second floor and the telex room.

01:30:56.660 Now this telex room is where the vast majority of the hostages or the male hostages were being kept.

01:31:02.340 Nearly all the hostages were being kept in this one room, the telex room, where they had been in

01:31:07.460 another room, but where the wall had been bulging out and Salim had become rightly suspicious. He'd

01:31:12.580 moved them to the telex room. Now this is where a lot of stuff goes down. Lewis says they were moved

01:31:19.220 to the telex room where the male hostages were held by three gunmen. Meanwhile, the pair who had come in

01:31:24.900 through the rear first floor balcony encountered PC Locke grappling with Salim, the head gunman,

01:31:31.060 who had been about to fire at an SAS trooper at the window and shot the gunman dead. So what happened

01:31:36.660 there? Salim was with PC Trevor Locke when it started, when it became clear that stone grenades

01:31:44.260 were going off and windows were being broken and the sound of firing and it was definitely all happening.

01:31:49.380 At that moment, PC Trevor Locke was with Salim and at that moment, Trevor Locke decides to act.

01:31:56.900 He starts, he grabs, physically grabs Salim and like he's grappling with him, fighting with him,

01:32:03.220 making sure he can't bring his machine gun, submachine gun to bear. And in fact, Trevor Locke

01:32:08.580 says he even pulled out, finally pulled out his own .38 revolver that they still remarkably

01:32:15.300 throughout the whole time hadn't discovered on him. He finally draws it and he said he even put

01:32:20.340 it to Salim's head. And they're only grappling for a few minutes, for a few moments, sorry,

01:32:24.820 a few seconds really before SAS operators are on the scene. And apparently the story goes that they

01:32:32.740 just yell, they know who he is, right? They've been training for this for a few days. They know

01:32:36.900 exactly who Trevor Locke is. And they shout at him, Trevor, move out of the way, or words to that effect.

01:32:42.260 Trevor, get out of it, you know. And so Trevor Locke doesn't know who they are. Well, you know,

01:32:47.140 you can guess, but he doesn't know them personally in any way, shape or form. But he knows that,

01:32:52.180 you know, he knows what's likely to be going on here. And so when he shouted at,

01:32:56.420 Trev, get out of the way, he just immediately does, just rolls away. And at that instant,

01:33:01.700 Salim is riddled with bullets. SAS 9mm Heckler and Kosh rounds, just sprayed up and down with bullets,

01:33:10.020 and he's dead. So that was the end of Salim. Lewis goes on. Almost simultaneously with the rear

01:33:17.300 assault, the frontal assault group stormed over the balcony on the first floor, lobbing in stun

01:33:22.500 grenades through the window broken by their frame charges. Amid gushing smoke, they entered and also

01:33:28.420 moved towards the telex room. Another SAS team broke into the building through the plaster division,

01:33:34.100 left after the bricks had been removed from the wall with the Ethiopian embassy. So between 30 and 35

01:33:40.020 SAS dudes have all entered the building in one shot. They're inside, they're clearing rooms as

01:33:46.500 quickly as possible. Incidentally, one small detail is that when Mac, John McAleese goes to put his frame

01:33:52.740 charge against the window on the balcony at the front, the bit of footage we see, when he goes up to the

01:33:57.300 window, on the other side of the window, immediately facing him, is Sim Harris, the other BBC reporter

01:34:05.460 person who's been a hostage for these five, six days. He's just confronted by Sim Harris standing right

01:34:11.060 there, which isn't ideal because he's just about to blow that part of the building in. If Sim Harris is

01:34:17.620 standing there when that charge goes off, he's going to get blown up. So Mac, like, waves, like, get out of

01:34:22.740 the way, get out of the way. And thank God, Sim Harris had the presence of mind enough to understand

01:34:28.980 what he meant. I've always wondered how he really perfectly understood that, but he got the message,

01:34:35.460 just get away, get, get away from this immediate vicinity. So Sim Harris does. He's still in the room,

01:34:41.220 I believe, but he gets away from that window. You know, seconds later, it's blown in. Apparently Sim Harris

01:34:46.580 did have scratches and bruises and things, but it was basically fine. And yeah, and Mac and his gang

01:34:54.020 flood in. Lewis continues, outside, at the front, the SAS shot CS gas canisters into an upstairs room

01:35:01.140 where one of the gunmen was believed to be hiding. This room caught fire. Again, CS gas canisters,

01:35:07.380 cartridges, can be, like, they're no joke. There's all different types, all different grades of CS gas,

01:35:13.460 some that will just, like, make you cough and make your eyes water a bit. And the higher up you go,

01:35:19.220 CS gas can just be lethal. So, you know, obviously the SAS are using the type which is obviously not

01:35:25.380 lethal, but it's still, you know, it's not a party trick, right? It sets fire to stuff. It starts fires.

01:35:33.940 Lewis says, this room caught fire, the flame spreading quickly to other rooms. The trooper caught in the

01:35:39.060 abseil rope, suffered burns at this point, but was then cut free and rejoined the assault. The SAS

01:35:44.740 converged on the telex room as planned. The gunmen had started shooting the hostages. So yeah, a couple

01:35:50.980 of the gunmen in there did start spraying the hostages, but not all of them and not sort of

01:35:56.020 systematically or anything. I believe they shot, they wounded a few, but they shot badly two people.

01:36:02.180 One of them, of the two that they shot up badly, one of them died right there and then on the spot.

01:36:08.100 And then the other one survived. He was taken to hospital with multiple gunshot wounds, but lived.

01:36:12.420 So one of the hostages was killed by the terrorists in the moments immediately following the SS storming

01:36:19.780 the building. One out of 26. That guy was just a temporary employee of the embassy. I believe,

01:36:28.340 I think his name was Ali Akbar Samadzadar, probably pronouncing that name terribly, if in fact I've got

01:36:35.460 the right guy, but I believe that was who it was. Okay. John E. Lewis says it was the assistant press

01:36:41.140 attache who was shot and killed and the charged affairs wounded before the SAS broke in. By then,

01:36:48.580 the gunmen were lying on the floor, trying in the smoke and noise to pass themselves off as hostages.

01:36:54.500 Apparently they killed a couple of guys or tried to kill a few people, did kill one. But then at

01:36:59.300 that point, apparently the story goes from accounts later from the hostages. They said,

01:37:04.260 all the hostages were saying to the two terrorists, look, stop, give in. It's all over. The authorities,

01:37:11.140 again, they don't know it's 2-2 SAS, but the authorities, the police, whoever, they're going to be here

01:37:15.700 in a matter of moments, seconds probably, and you're definitely going to get killed if you're

01:37:21.140 standing there with your guns. So stop and give up, put your guns down. And apparently the two

01:37:26.820 terrorists did. Apparently, when the SAS break into that Tenex room, the two terrorists haven't

01:37:33.460 got their guns. They're unarmed. They decided to stop shooting and put their weapons down, put their

01:37:39.940 weapons somewhere else in the room. And they were unarmed. And according to John Lewis's account,

01:37:44.420 the gunmen were quote, lying on the floor, trying in the smoke and noise to pass themselves off as

01:37:48.580 hostages. What then happened is the subject of some dispute, but the outcome was that the SAS

01:37:55.220 shot the two gunmen dead. So basically what happened is, it seems, it seems the SAS broke into the room,

01:38:03.620 the other hostages sort of immediately pointing out those, those two guys, they're hostages,

01:38:09.300 they're terrorists. And apparently the SAS dudes picked them up, either just shot them right there

01:38:14.580 and then on the floor, or picked them up, put them against, some say, picked them up, put them

01:38:18.820 against the wall and then shot them there. Executed them. Because the SAS are not messing about.

01:38:26.260 Don't mess with the SS. Just, you're not going to have a good day, right? They're soldiers.

01:38:35.300 Counter-revolutionary warfare, special forces operators. They're soldiers. They're there to

01:38:40.820 end you. That's it. So, I mean, that's what happened. Later, after all this happened,

01:38:47.060 there was an inquest into it all. And it was decided that they were lawful killings.

01:38:53.220 Those two, those two killings. Apparently the SS soldiers involved said, oh, we didn't know they

01:38:58.420 didn't have explosives on them. We didn't know they didn't have a pistol in their belt they were

01:39:02.580 about to go for. We thought it was an immediate threat. And so we took action to end that immediate

01:39:10.260 threat. Make of that what you will. I mean, I won't shed a tear for them. Put it that way.

01:39:16.100 Johnny Lewis continues saying, afterwards, some of the hostages said that the gunmen tried to give

01:39:20.420 themselves up, but were killed anyway. In the event, only one gunman escaped with his life.

01:39:26.500 The one guard in the woman in room nine. The woman refused to identify him as a terrorist,

01:39:31.540 and he was handed over to the police. So there's one other story. Nearly all the terrorists,

01:39:36.980 all but two terrorists have been taken out now by the SAS. One survived. I'll tell you his story

01:39:41.860 in a moment. The other one is pretending to be a hostage as well. And the way the SAS do it,

01:39:48.900 decided to do it, was that when they storm into the building and they find people, they don't

01:39:54.820 immediately know really if you're a terrorist or a hostage, especially if you're a terrorist

01:40:00.420 pretending to be a hostage. So the idea is everyone that they can, who isn't obviously armed and obviously

01:40:06.740 isn't a threat to them. They treat everyone equally, i.e. they frog march you down as quickly as possible,

01:40:13.300 down through the building, down out of the building, into the back garden. There's a big,

01:40:17.540 lovely back garden area behind that building. Everyone gets treated the same. Everyone gets

01:40:24.260 taken into the garden, handcuffed, hand behind your back, lay on the ground, face down.

01:40:29.780 That's what's going to happen to everyone in that building until they know for 100% sure who you are

01:40:35.300 and what's going on, right? So they're doing that. And at one point in like the main foyer,

01:40:41.220 the main atrium of the building, there's like a big staircase and things, you can imagine an embassy

01:40:45.220 building. At one point, whilst all the people are being ferried out through that way, again,

01:40:50.580 the details of this are a little bit sketchy and different accounts are slightly different,

01:40:54.900 but this is essentially what happened. Some of the hostages start shouting or yelling,

01:41:00.740 that guy there, he's a terrorist. They're like pointing at one of the guys or motioning,

01:41:05.620 making it clear to the SAS troopers that one of the people is a terrorist on the stairwell as they're

01:41:12.820 going down the stairs. And as that happens, it sort of becomes clear to everyone that they're not

01:41:18.580 lying. It is true because this guy, who is one of the two remaining terrorists, he's got a grenade in

01:41:25.380 his hand. He hasn't pulled the pin out yet, but he's holding a grenade, right? That's all the SAS need.

01:41:31.380 They don't need any more information than that. They're not interested in making 100% sure you're

01:41:36.740 a terrorist or not, or what's going on. Is there some shenanigans? Is there some sort of 4D chess being

01:41:42.740 played by the terrorists to fool them into thinking an innocent person is a terrorist? Nothing like

01:41:47.540 that. No, no, no. They've seen a guy with a grenade. That's it. Now, they would have immediately fired

01:41:54.340 on him at that point, but apparently just the way it was, the way the angles were, they couldn't fire

01:41:59.060 on him immediately because it might just go through him and kill hostages. So again, the details are a

01:42:05.460 little bit sketchy, but one way or another, what seems happened is the SAS guy closest to that terrorist

01:42:11.700 just pushes him or kicks him down the stairs, at which point he's sort of away at least a little

01:42:18.340 bit from the rest of the hostages and other SAS guys. So he's sort of on his own a little bit,

01:42:24.660 at which point he's riddled with 27 rounds. Again, I don't want to sound like a broken record,

01:42:32.260 but the SAS aren't there to negotiate. They're there to kill you with extreme prejudice. So a few different

01:42:38.340 SAS guys all at once, but do a little burst on him and he's hit 27 times in like one second or

01:42:45.620 whatever, two seconds. So he's dead. Tango down, tango down. So there's only one terrorist left,

01:42:54.100 but he has successfully merged in amongst the hostages. And he's one of the people taken out

01:43:00.820 to the back garden and, you know, handcuffed and put on the ground. And now very quickly,

01:43:05.940 again, within moments, within a minute or so, he's identified as the last remaining terrorist.

01:43:11.780 Some of the details are slightly sketchy on what happens at this point. It said that one unnamed SAS

01:43:17.380 operator picks the guy up and starts to walk him back into the building. Now, the suggestion is that

01:43:26.100 that SAS trooper was going to walk him back into the building, put him against the wall and just shoot

01:43:31.220 him. Now that didn't happen because other SAS troopers with a little bit more clear thinking,

01:43:38.420 clearer thought, realize that there's like choppers overhead and the whole world is watching

01:43:45.780 to an extent. In fact, there was a building, a residential building overlooking those gardens.

01:43:51.220 And even though it's supposed to be completely clear of any press, some, I think, ITN press people

01:43:56.740 had smuggled themselves into that building and got a camera up there and were looking down, could look

01:44:01.460 down onto that garden. And in fact, there are images of like people lying in the back garden there,

01:44:07.380 handcuffed, you know, being prepared to be processed. So the world, if you like, could see what was going

01:44:13.940 on at that point. So a couple of other SAS guys stop that one guy from walking in back, walking that

01:44:20.260 terrorist, last terrorist back into the building and perhaps, perhaps just executing him at that

01:44:25.620 point. They stop him from doing that. And that one surviving terrorist is taken into custody alive.

01:44:31.780 The only one that survived. Just to finish up the story on that, his name was, is Nijad,

01:44:37.940 Fawzi Badawi Nijad. He was just known as Ali at the time. So he survived and he was put on trial,

01:44:45.540 successfully convicted of terrorism, spent 27 years in prison and was eventually up for parole

01:44:52.100 in 2005 and eventually released in 2008. And now, and when he was released in 2008, wasn't deported.

01:45:01.220 He now lives in, he's alive to this day, I believe. He lives in South London somewhere under an assumed

01:45:07.220 name. Great. So there you go. That's the story of him. So one last thing to say, a few last points

01:45:15.140 to say, because there's the siege is over. Operation Nimrod is now over. It took somewhere between 11

01:45:20.980 and 17 minutes from start to finish. I think all the firing was over and done with within about 11

01:45:27.060 minutes. But the whole thing was over and done within 17 minutes. So it's very quick, very slick.

01:45:34.260 One hostage was killed by the terrorists. A few others wounded and injured, but one, they lost one

01:45:41.220 hostage. No SAS guys were killed. Only one guy got his legs a bit burnt and all but one of the terrorists

01:45:48.180 was killed and the one that wasn't was apprehended. So in the scheme of things, a shining success,

01:45:54.900 you couldn't ask for it to go too much better than that. You know, they did lose that one hostage.

01:46:02.580 So it's not perfect. One SAS guy did get injured. So it's not perfect, but it's about as good as you

01:46:10.180 could hope for. I'll let John Lewis, John E Lewis, finish off his narrative. He says this after a brief

01:46:18.260 assembly at number 14, i.e. next door, for emotional congratulations from Home Secretary William

01:46:24.420 Whitelaw, the SAS team sped away in rented Avis vans. Behind them, the embassy was a blaze of fire

01:46:31.700 and smoke. The breaking of the siege had taken just 17 minutes. Of the 20 hostages in the building at

01:46:37.860 the time of the SAS assault, 19 were brought out alive. The SAS suffered no casualties, although mistakes

01:46:43.940 were made in this in the assault. Part of the main assault went in via a room which contained no

01:46:48.660 gunman and was blocked off from the rest of the embassy. The speed, daring and adaptability of the

01:46:54.340 SAS assault proved the regiment an elite amongst the counter-revolutionary warfare units of the world."

01:47:00.980 End quote. So yeah, he's not wrong. Apparently later that evening, uh, Maggie Thatcher and Dennis Thatcher

01:47:07.860 uh, went and, uh, not partied with, but they went to the, to the SAS, uh, sort of debriefing area, which

01:47:15.940 was sort of a party. They were all drinking beers and whooping it up and, uh, watching the news on the

01:47:22.340 TV, watching themselves on the news of the TV. And, uh, you know, like a cabinet secretary was there. I

01:47:27.060 think Pete, I think maybe Peter de Billier himself turned up, but certainly Maggie and Dennis turned up to

01:47:32.420 that and watched the evening news with the SAS guys.

01:47:37.860 And so, yeah, basically a very, very close to a perfect success as far as Operation Nimrod was

01:47:45.860 concerned. And so, and we're left with the accounts of all the people that survived and the famous bit

01:47:51.380 of footage on the balcony of this shaped charge blowing in the window. And so that's the story.

01:47:56.660 That's the story. Um, I hope you've enjoyed it. Let me know in the comments, um, any other little

01:48:03.060 tidbits of information, you know, about it. Um, and, uh, perhaps in the future, I'll do more SAS stories.

01:48:09.140 I would like to do stuff about the SS in North Africa, the beginning of the SAS and L detachment

01:48:15.860 and the long range desert patrol group and all that sort of thing. If you're interested in that,

01:48:18.980 let me know. I would like to do that at some point. Um, and perhaps even other famous special forces,

01:48:25.460 raids and missions, not just SAS ones, perhaps other, other ones as well. Um, so, okay. Um,

01:48:32.340 as I say, I hope you've enjoyed that. And until next time, take care.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - January 04, 2026

FREEMIUM： Epochs #244 ｜ SAS： Operation Nimrod

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