The SAS explode from the shadows in six days that shook Britain

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Andrew Lycett has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Ben Macintyre has a knack of distilling impeccably sourced information about clandestine operations into clear, exciting narrative prose. His latest book, about the April 1980 Iranian embassy siege in London, starts as it means to go on – with a snapshot of seven Range Rovers, two Ford Transit vans and two furniture lorries pulling out of Bradbury Lines, the then headquarters of the Special Air Service (SAS) in Hereford. Lying low inside were 45 soldiers and ‘enough weaponry to fight a medium-sized war’.

Each man carried a submachine gun, mostly the ‘reliably lethal’ Heckler & Koch MP5, which fires 13 rounds a second, with four 30-round magazines of 9x19mm parabellum bullets. (Macintyre helpfully provides the Latin derivation – si vis pacem, para bellum: if you seek peace, prepare for war.) Additional paraphernalia included gas launchers, stun grenades and other gizmos, with heavy kit such as scaling ladders following in the pantechnicons.

This elite unit was bound for London, where little more than eight hours earlier six gunmen calling themselves the group of the Martyr Muhyiddin al-Nassr had stormed the Iranian embassy at 16 Princes Gate, Knightsbridge. They all came from Khuzestan, an oil-rich but otherwise peripheral Arab-speaking region in the south-west of the new Islamic Republic of Iran. They demanded the release of 91 Khuzestan activists who had festered in Iranian jails since Ayatollah Khomeini had taken power 15 months earlier.

The Middle East was experiencing a period of unusual instability. The oil price rise of 1973-4 had brought vast new wealth and fuelled demands for social change which often boiled over into opportunist acts of terrorism. A new breed of ‘guns for hire’ emerged, among them the Palestinian renegade Sabri al-Banna, known as Abu Nidal.