How commandos ended the siege at the Iranian embassy
It was a stunning success, a national triumph. In an explosion of flames and gunfire, British commandos stormed the Iranian embassy in London last week, rescuing 19 people who had been held hostage for almost six grueling days. In a skillfully executed operation that lasted barely a quarter of an hour, members of Britain's elite Special Air Service Regiment killed five of the six Iranian Arab terrorists who had been holding the embassy. Taken by surprise, the gun men had time to kill only one of their captives, although they had murdered another shortly before the operation began.
Millions had watched the commando operation on television, and when it was over, all Britain was in a mood to celebrate. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher hailed it as "a brilliant operation, carried out with courage and confidence," which made her countrymen "proud to be British."
For the most part, Britons refrained from drawing parallels between the success of the S.A.S. assault and the failure of the American attempt to rescue the U.S. embassy hostages in Iran, but the point was inescapable. Newspaper editorials, though glowing with patriotic fer vor, noted the vast logistical differences between the two operations. As the Lon don Sun put it in a headline: O.K., SO WE WON, BUT LET'S NOT MAKE TOO MUCH NOISE ABOUT IT.
The assault was indeed a measure of last resort, undertaken after attempts to negotiate the release of the hostages had failed repeatedly. The gunmen who had seized the embassy at Princes Gate, in the fashionable Kensington district of London, were bitterly opposed to the regime of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini in Tehran. They had demanded the release of 91 Iranian Arab political prisoners who were being held in Iran, as well as some form of autonomy for the largely Arabic-speaking province of Khuzistan. During the early days of the embassy siege, the terrorists treated their prisoners reason ably well and released five of them, mainly for medical reasons. Said one of the British hostages, Embassy Employee Ronald Morris, 47: "We were on first-name terms, swapping cigarettes and even joking eased." in moments when the tension But on Sunday, the gunmen began to taunt their Iranian hostages by scrawling slogans on the embassy walls: DEATH TO KHOMEINI and DOWN WITH THE NEW SHAH. This particularly enraged the embassy's assistant press attache, Abbas Lavasani, 29, who argued with his captors and defended Khomeini's Islamic revolution. At one point, one of the gunmen was ready to shoot Lavasani but was dissuaded by another hostage, British Police Constable Trevor Lock, 41, who had been overpowered at the embassy entrance on the first day.