As the American hostage crisis in Iran boiled into its seventh month in the spring of 1980, six heavily armed gunman barged into the Iranian embassy in London, taking twenty-six hostages. What followed over the next six days was an increasingly tense standoff, one that threatened at any moment to spill into a bloodbath. As police negotiators pressed the gunmen, rival protestors clashed violently outside the embassy, and as MI6 and the CIA scrambled for intelligence, Britain's special forces strike team, the SAS, laid plans for a dangerous rescue mission. Inside, the hostages used all the cunning they possessed to outwit and outflank their captors. Finally, on the sixth day, after the terrorists executed the embassy press attachâe and dumped his body on the front doorstep, the SAS raid began, sparking a deadly high-stakes climax. A story of ordinary men and women under immense pressure, The Siege takes readers minute-by-thrilling-minute through an event that would echo across the next two decades and provide a direct historical link to the tragedy on 9/11.
[A] masterly account ... It has never been recounted so pleasurably as it has been here. In Macintyre’s telling, the gunmen are sympathetic and deceived, idealists ensnared in a dark world of Middle Eastern trickery ... Threaded with complex side characters and sharp subplots.
Macintyre adds real value to our understanding of what occurred in those six days with his deeply humane and encyclopedic book. He is particularly compelling in the portraits he puts together of the dramatis personae ... Macintyre’s portrait of Towfiq Ibrahim al-Rashidi, the leader of the terrorists, is exquisite ... The most original parts of Mr. Macintyre’s book are those in which the author explores the relationships that emerge between the captors and their hostages.
Gripping ... Macintyre’s latest is a cracking procedural ... One of the strengths of The Siege is its three-dimensional portraits of the terrorists. Macintyre offers crucial background that both explains their commitment to their cause and demonstrates their wrongheadedness ... Given that most of those involved were men, the story is at times marked by period chauvinism ... But he’s also a clear-eyed narrator and knows when to offer notes of mild reproach.
