Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad by Tony Geraghty Page B

just six days after the disastrous failure of Operation Eagle Claw to rescue U.S. diplomats in Iran, a new siege began. This time the victims were seventeen Iranian diplomats working at their country’s imposing London embassy across the road from Hyde Park, plus eight visitors and an unassuming London policeman, a “Bobby,” armed with a revolver. Their captors were six Iranian Arabs, armed with submachine guns and hand grenades and sent by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The terrorists had arrived in London on 30 March, time enough to do some energetic shopping in the belief that their mission would be successfully completed within twenty-four hours. On British television, they watched reports of Delta’s doomed operation at Desert One. The stage was now set for yet another hostage spectacular in London, in which Western security forces, constrained by tight rules of engagement (no indiscriminate shooting, etc.) would be perceived as odds-on losers.
    The British had handled two sieges in the recent past, one in London, the other in Belfast, both linked to the Irish War. They had ended with the surrender of IRA terrorists to the SAS, which had been training in close-quarter battle for just such an operation for years beforehand. They developed special snap-shooting techniques on the move, in a crowded environment, that no Wild West shooter could match, except in the movies. Some of the soldiers admitted, privately, to a sense of anti-climax when there was no gunplay. Their practice runs, in a concrete building known as The Killing House, used real VIPs as hostages who were bound and held as “prisoners” during an assault in which hundreds of rounds of live ammunition were fired. This high-risk training had taken the life of at least one instructor.
    Saddam’s purpose in seizing the Iranian embassy was to enforce his claim to the Iranian province of Khuzestan—which the Arab minority described as “Arabistan”—and the release of Arabs imprisoned in Iran. Khuzestan was oil-rich. Ten years before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Saddam’s claim to Khuzestan was another megalomaniac gesture by the Iraqi dictator. It was mid-morning when the terrorists rang the bell on the outer door of the London embassy, then wrestled Police Constable Trevor Lock to the ground. One of the intruders started the operation clumsily, firing a bullet through the glass of the inner door. Lock, bleeding from a face wound, managed to send an emergency signal on his personal radio before he was overcome. The SAS, at their Hereford base 150 miles to the west of London, were alerted unofficially by one of their own veterans now serving with the police. Within thirty minutes, before the public was aware of the drama building inside the embassy, a troop of twenty-four men led by a captain from the regiment’s Counter Revolutionary Warfare Wing, at a peak of training for just such an emergency, was on its way to London. By early evening, it had moved covertly into a building adjoining the embassy. At a location nearby, a hastily constructed mock-up of the building was being assembled. The soldiers called it Operation Pagoda.
    Storming the embassy was close to mission-impossible. As one of the planners told the author: “Basically, we were facing a fortress situation here. You have to bear in mind this was a big, mid-terrace building on six floors (four above ground) with fifty rooms, easily defended at the front and back because of the open spaces on either side of it; twenty hostages and six terrorists who got increasingly jumpy as time went by, moving the hostages from one room to another.”
    The drama followed two paths that converged, after five tense days, in an explosion of violence. At first, the London police, faithful to a scenario practiced many times, called in a hostage-negotiator to seek a peaceful end to the confrontation. He was also buying time for the SAS to get prepared, should the worst happen. The “worst” would be clear