@@ Story of Arab terrorist attack of Iran's embassy in London in 1980 @@
Arash
July 19, 2002
How anyone came out alive I'll never know
by Catherine O'Brien
When the SAS stormed the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980 ending a six-day
siege by Arab terrorists, they were rightly regarded as heroes. But it was
negotiator Max Vernon who kept the hostages alive and bought the Army time
to plan their attack.
If you are over 30 and British, the chances are that the Iranian Embassy
siege is your equivalent of the JFK moment. Just as a previous generation
remembered exactly what it was doing on the day that the American President
was assassinated, so anyone born before the 1970s is likely to be able to
recall, with absolute clarity, images of SAS troops storming the building in
Princes Gate in which 26 hostages were being held.
Television images of men in black abseiling down the white stucco frontage
as smoke from grenades billowed over Hyde Park were broadcast to a nation
agog that such live drama could be played out in their living rooms. It was
the first television “event” of its kind, viewed through a news flash that
established the career of the cool, clipped-voiced reporter on the spot,
Kate Adie. Within 11 minutes all but one of the hostages inside had been
rescued and five of the six terrorists were dead. The message to the world
was clear: Britain, under its newly elected Prime Minister, Margaret
Thatcher, did not capitulate in the face of terrorism.
Next week the BBC returns to this pivotal moment in national and
broadcasting history for a 90-minute documentary. SAS — Embassy Siege claims
to tell for the first time the inside story of Britain’s most audacious
terrorist assault. There are interviews with some of the SAS soldiers
involved, several of whom admit how much they relished the challenge. As one
of them puts it, going in for the kill was “what we lived for, what we
trained for, what we wanted to do”.
The high profile of the siege exposed the obsessively secretive SAS to a
wider public but also, in a way, served to perpetuate its mystique.
Indisputably, these shadowy men were the heroes of the day; yet what emerges
from the BBC programme is how equally crucial the police negotiators were to
the successful outcome of the operation.
Max Vernon has never given an interview about his role, for the simple
reason, he says, that he has never been asked. But it is obvious on meeting
him that, 22 years on, the events of those six days in which he tried to
persuade the gunmen to surrender are indelibly seared in his mind.
Unlike the SAS, whose raison d’être was training for such incidents, the
Metropolitan Police template was then in its infancy. Vernon, a detective
chief inspector attached to the fraud squad, had played a background role in
the Spaghetti House siege — in which armed robbers held the staff of a
Knightsbridge restaurant hostage for six days — in 1975. Later that year he
was involved, at arm’s length, in the Balcombe Street siege, in which a gang
of IRA terrorists took refuge in the home of an elderly couple. He had been
on a negotiators’ training course, but had never, until he was summoned to
Princes Gate on the afternoon of Wednesday, April 30, 1980, had to deal
directly with a genuinely life-threatening situation.
“It was the first time I had spoken to a man with a gun,” he says. “You
train and train, but there is nothing like doing it for real. They were
holding a lot of hostages and I knew that if I made one mistake, said one
silly thing, they could all die.”
Vernon, now 66, was then in his mid-forties. Standing 6ft 4ins, with a
mellifluous voice and intensely focused, but reassuringly calm, manner, one
can understand why he was one of those picked to communicate with the
volatile and, as it transpired, politically naive terrorists.
The negotiating centre was set up in a needlework school two doors down from
the embassy building. In a room no more than 10ft square, a phone line was
installed that could be hung up at the police end, but was constantly open
inside the embassy, so police could hear, at all times, what was going on
through a loudspeaker. All other phone lines to the embassy were cut, as was
the electricity. “Terrorists think they are in control, but the reality in a
hostage situation, if you play the psychological game right, is that they
are not,” says Vernon. “The trick is to make them dependent on you for
everything, and the first step towards doing that is isolation: you clear
the crowds from the streets outside and make sure the terrorists have no
contact with the outside world except through you.”
Vernon was one of a three-man team working the day shift, from 9am to 9pm.
On the hostage-takers’ side, the point of contact was Salim, a teacher in
his early twenties and the only one of the six to speak English. “The first
conversation I had with him was 35 minutes long, and it felt like 35
seconds — the pressure was that enormous,” recalls Vernon. Within 24 hours,
a member of his team had to be moved off because he could not cope, and
Vernon and a detective superintendent colleague found themselves carrying
the additional burden. “We took it in turns. Each time one of us finished
talking to Salim we would collapse into the chair, mentally drained, but
knowing that the next time the phone buzzed it was the other one’s turn to
speak. It was our coping mechanism.”
A key element of the negotiations was establishing trust. Vernon and his
colleagues were so successful that the terrorists stipulated that only they
could approach the embassy building with supplies of food and cigarettes.
Vernon, a married man with three daughters, was seen on television — by his
wife, as well as millions of others — tendering parcels as a gun was held to
his head. “It was the first she knew about my involvement in the job, and
she wasn’t best pleased,” he recalls wryly.
Almost everyone can remember the siege happening, but few can recall the
complex reasons behind it.
The gunmen were Arabs — they came from the oil-rich southern Iranian region
of Khuzestan — but opponents of Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime.
Iraq — Iran’s sworn enemy — had trained and bankrolled them to carry out the
attack.
Their immediate demands were that the Iranian Government release 91
political prisoners from Khuzestan. It was a hopelessly unrealistic
expectation because Britain had no diplomatic influence. But Vernon and his
colleagues were not expected to have any expertise.
“We were the good guys, not politicos. We didn’t have to pretend to grasp
the situation. When they wanted something we were there to ask for it on
their behalf. Our line was always ‘I don’t know about that, but I’ll ask the
boss for you’. It is the best time-waster of all.”
By the end of day three, however, it was becoming clear to the terrorists
that their plan was going awry. Intelligence sources had discovered that
there was a seventh man, an Iraqi military officer called Sami Mohammed Ali,
who had recruited the gunmen and supervised their training in Baghdad before
accompanying them to Britain. He had fled back to Iraq as the embassy was
seized, and the more panic-stricken the gunmen became, the more it became
obvious that the Iraqi officer had duped them all. “It was clear from the
way Salim talked that they hadn’t expected to be there more than 24 hours.
They had thought that the British Government would capitulate and put them
on planes home. But that wasn’t going to happen.”
On day four, Vernon negotiated for the BBC to broadcast a prepared statement
from the terrorists in exchange for the release of two hostages. If the
statement were not broadcast, the flip side was that the terrorists would
kill somebody. The deal almost went horribly wrong when the BBC broadcast
the statement on the World Service instead of the agreed domestic frequency,
but, mercifully, the terrorists managed to tune it and hear it.
On day five, the atmosphere intensified as one of the gunmen clashed with
one of the hostages, Abbas Lavasani, a press attaché and a devout disciple
of Khomeini’s regime. On day six Lavasani was executed. “We told Salim ‘This
changes the game’ and his voice was very flat. He said ‘Yes, I know’.”
Most of the hostages were staff from the embassy, but among them was a
British police constable, Trevor Lock, who had had the misfortune to be on
door duty the day the terrorists attacked. “Trevor was a nice, competent
officer who did a great job of protecting the others, but he had no skills,
he knew nothing,” says Vernon.
As zero hour neared, Lock presented Vernon with one of his biggest headaches
of the siege. The SAS was preparing to move in, but the negotiating team had
to persuade the terrorists that they were relenting after all, that an
aircraft was being prepared for their flight home and a coach was on its way
to take them to the airport. Because Salim felt uneasy, he put Lock on the
phone. “Trevor said ‘They’re going to attack, aren’t they?’ and I had to lie
to him. But he was a nuisance; the trouble was, he knew certain things
couldn’t be true, but didn’t know enough to understand why we were saying
what we were saying. And the longer he stayed on the phone, the less chance
we had of distracting Salim.”
Salim eventually came to the phone to ask about suspicious noises overhead
(caused by SAS troops scaling down the building from the roof). As he broke
off to go to the window to check them out, there was a huge explosion and
the SAS moved in.
“From that point on, I was totally redundant. My job had finished, there was
no more I could do,” says Vernon. “And I remember thinking ‘Oh my God, we’ve
failed’. We couldn’t see what was going on but we could hear it, down the
phone line and through the loudspeaker, and the noise was unbelievable.
Gut-wrenching screams, shouting, machineguns — how anyone came out of there
alive, I will never know. I felt awful. I was almost crying.
Thinking about it now brings it all flooding back.” He places his thumb and
forefinger on the bridge of his nose and squeezes hard.
At one point, the Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, came to the negotiating
room, hopping from one foot to another. “I have never seen a man so agitated
with excitement,” says Vernon. Shortly afterwards, a uniformed commander ran
in to say the building was on fire. “He told us we had exactly 30 seconds to
talk to our families on the phone and then get out. I called my wife, and
probably frightened her to death because I was quite speechless.”
Once outside, he grabbed a cup of tea, then drove home. The next day he was
back at the fraud squad. Only years later did he learn from a police
psychiatrist that that should never have been allowed to happen. “We were
like elastic bands that had been wound and wound and then, ping, let go. We
should have been taken home and talked to, but no one had the experience to
realise that then.
“I felt guilty about my feelings for a long time. It was like a huge, dense
cloud that dropped on me. Things that I had been responsible for had gone
badly wrong and, having heard what I heard through that loudspeaker, it was
difficult to rationalise that it wasn’t my fault. I suspect that a couple of
the others were in the same boat, but nobody said anything.”
Vernon served six more years with the Metropolitan Police, rising to the
rank of chief superintendent. He travelled to the US to study FBI siege
tactics and, back in London, helped to run the force’s negotiators’ course
at Hendon. He never met any of the hostages from the Iranian Embassy,
except, of course, Lock, who was often drafted in to talk to officers on the
negotiators’ course. Lock was awarded the George Medal; Vernon and his
colleagues received no official recognition for their role. “Nor did we
expect any. We were doing what we were paid for. It was our job.”
The terrorist who survived, Fowzi Nejad, owed his life to one of the women
hostages. Displaying a classic case of Stockholm syndrome, she had become so
attached to him that she told the SAS he was her brother. He is serving a
life sentence. Vernon has no interest in him, but does admit to an enduring
curiosity about Salim. “I had no sympathy for him, but having talked to him
under those pressures for so many days, I would have liked to have met him
afterwards.”
Tragically, Vernon’s wife Betty died of breast cancer two weeks before he
retired. Today he shares his home in Orpington, Kent, with a new partner,
Lucy. His memories of the siege are mostly where they belong, “in their box”
. But he no longer believes that the SAS intervention signalled a failure on
the part of the negotiators.
“Our objective was to string it out as long as possible to give the SAS
every chance. By the end of six days, they had a wooden model at Wellington
Barracks with replicas of even the window catches so they knew which way
they opened. When it came to the crunch they knew as much as they possibly
could about what they were going to find inside. We had helped them to
gather that minute information and we had kept the hostages alive. So, no,
we didn’t fail.
Watch SAS — Embassy Siege, July 25, 9pm, on BBC 2
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-359344,00.html
atal
Marg by Akhond, Marg bar bachehaye akhods, Marg bar akhond terrorist agents.
"Arash" <ary...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:QX4_8.1252$v1.2...@newscontent-01.sprint.ca...
La6red9nec
>1980 @@
>From: "atal" at...@jupiter.com
>Date: 7/20/2002 7:50 AM Pacific Daylight Time
>Message-id: <ahbtbg$hnl$1...@knossos.btinternet.com>
>
>
>
>Marg by Akhond, Marg bar bachehaye akhods, Marg bar akhond terrorist agents.
>
Go suck on your amoo saddam's flute ablah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!