Ben Macintyre’s The Siege: A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation that Shocked the World is both a densely detailed account of a particular siege. It is also a necessary rumination on matters that exceed the specificity of the six days about which he writes.
Macintyre is often described as an historian with a cinematic eye — his 2014 book, A Spy Among Friends, became a miniseries starring Damien Lewis — or with the sensibility of a novelist. In fact, Sarah Lyall interviewed him and John le Carré, the late writer known for his espionage novels, together for The New York Times. Macintyre’s newest book kept me in mind of these descriptions. For my part, what makes Macintyre’s histories of espionage so compelling is how his telling always but always foregrounds people in their complex particularities. He ends the preface this way: “This book offers just one universal truth: no one knows how they will respond to lethal jeopardy, until they have to.”
Macintyre’s book centers on the events from Wednesday, April 30, 1980, to Monday, May 6, 1980, at 16 Princes Gate, when six gunmen took hostages at the Iranian Embassy in London in an effort to bring attention to the cause of Arabistan.
The siege at the heart of The Siege took place in the fancy heart of London at an historical moment when hostage-taking was very much in the news because of the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran. The Group of the Martyr, as the Arab Iranian hostage-takers called themselves, sought political rights in Iran. The group was backed and trained by Iraqi intelligence, with the Palestinian Abu Nidal as mastermind. The hostages themselves were British, Iranian, and Pakistani. The British included BBC employees and embassy workers, including a Metropolitan policeman who guarded the embassy. The Iranians were made up of embassy workers — including women who were secretaries and a member of the Revolutionary Guard — and a banker and tourist who happened to be in the building when the siege began.
The combination of tension and boredom characteristic of potentially catastrophic interactions and the shifting moods among the people caught up in the events all define The Siege. In this way, the book is more interested in what it was like to be caught up in the siege than in its geopolitical stakes.
In fact, in Macintyre’s treatment of the incident, the felt experience and the geopolitical are not opposed to each other. So, while world events and ideological commitments certainly get their due in The Siege, it’s the case that the ineluctable specificity of the time, place, and people carry the day. The specific demands of the hostage-takers, why they were what they were and what it would mean if they were granted, matters less in The Siege than the various efforts of Towfiq Ibrahim al-Rashidi (“Salim”), the leader, to get the demands broadcast to the British people.
Being caught up in the siege, of course, was most keenly felt by those actually in 16 Princes Gate, but also extends beyond them. Diplomats and spies, UK service members, officers with the Metropolitan police, members of the press, political figures, heads of government and heads of state, and even the writer Rebecca West (owing to the proximity of her flat to 16 Princes Gate) all experienced the siege in some way.
“Being caught up in the siege, of course, was most keenly felt by those actually in 16 Princes Gate, but also extends beyond them.”
Macintyre organizes his account chronologically. He begins with the beginning, at the start of the siege and ends at the end, with its conclusion. This may sound standard enough, but it’s worth noting. Unfolding of a story with high human and geopolitical stakes set in a confined area but that has a global reach certainly demands attention to the moment-by-moment happenings. The very complexity of such a story, though, equally demands that details be provided and their meaning be made clear so that the nature and significance of events are intelligible. Providing these specifics interrupts the flow of the events, but the flow of the events doesn’t really make sense without them.
To pull the story forward, Macintyre carefully selects and orders his details so that the people experiencing and shaping them are brought forward in ways that foreground both the nature and the importance of discreet happenings. His depiction of people is central to his handling of the events at the center of the story. The personal and professional backgrounds of individuals are more filled in than fleshed out. Macintyre conveys just what is necessary at that intersection to interweave people and events so that they are mutually illuminating.
Tension builds throughout the narratives as he braids together chronology and people. The intensive focus on the minute-to-minute action creates suspense around both what will happen next, but also how the standoff gets resolved. Macintyre doesn’t write as though the ending of the story is known even though its events are in the past, are within living memory for some readers, and are readily accessible.
This immersion in the events themselves heightens the significance of any individual action. Whether that action will lead to escalation of violence or to something else is in the balance at every turn. Without the end in view, what side of the scales are weighted heavily isn’t clear. This kind of immediacy, of course, reproduces the uncertainty of the events themselves. The people caught up in them and shaping them didn’t themselves know what would come next.
Macintyre, of course, does also work backwards to move forward. By turning his eye to the past, Macintyre rounds out what needs telling to make sense of the current moment he’s narrating. He quickly sketches in relevant details ranging from the geopolitical to the bureaucratic to the personal. By providing this kind of context Macintyre doesn’t so much draw a straight line between then and now, past and present, yesterday and today as he does suggest what was informing people, the goings-on, and people’s understandings of the goings-on.
The Siege immerses itself in the happenings of a particular time and place populated by particular people. But at least some of those happenings resonate with our own moment, something that is shot through Macintyre’s entire telling, and that he occasionally makes explicit. He describes the siege in this way: “it is a tale of human error and unintended consequences, the self-replicating tragedy of man’s inhumanity to man, and the collision of intolerant beliefs in an era of political, ethnic, and religious violence,” a description of the siege, certainly, but also of any number of today’s tragedies. So it is that The Siege reproduces something that is entirely its own, but not just its own.
