Ben MacIntyre’s thrilling account of the siege that gripped the world offer some astonishing new details.
It takes me about 11 minutes to walk to the train for my commute into town. This, according to Ben Macintyre, is the amount of time that in April 1980 was needed by soldiers of the British SAS regiment to storm the Iranian embassy in London and rescue 19 hostages and kill or capture six heavily armed gunmen. One hostage was killed by the terrorists during the assault and two others were wounded.
The spectacular assault was broadcast live on television at around the same time as the final match of the World Snooker Championship was being played between Cliff Thorburn and Alex “Hurricane” Higgins. In an epic contest notable for the tension and rancour it produced, the mercurial Higgins eventually succumbed to the relentless Thorburn.
Although the gunmen’s cause was little known, Macintyre sees continuities in our world: “The underlying forces that produced the crisis in London more than 40 years ago still agonise and destabilise our world, from Gaza to Iran to Ukraine.”
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