The Siege
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  • Published: 17 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241675687
  • Imprint: Viking
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $40.00
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The Siege

The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
17 Sep 2024
EBook
12 Sep 2024
Audiobook
12 Sep 2024
Hardback
12 Oct 2024
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Britain’s best-selling historian writes the first definitive account of the famous televised SAS storming of the Iranian embassy in London in 1980

On April 30, 1980, six heavily armed gunmen burst into the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate, overlooking Hyde Park in London. There they took 26 hostages, including embassy staff, visitors, and three British citizens. A tense six-day siege ensued as millions gathered around screens across the country to witness the longest news flash in British television history, in which police negotiators and psychiatrists sought a bloodless end to the standoff, while the SAS – hitherto an organisation shrouded in secrecy – laid plans for a daring rescue mission: Operation Nimrod.

Drawing on unpublished source material, exclusive interviews with the SAS, and testimony from witnesses including hostages, negotiators, intelligence officers and the on-site psychiatrist, bestselling historian Ben Macintyre takes readers on a gripping journey from the years and weeks of build-up on both sides, to the minute-by-minute account of the siege and rescue.

Recreating the dramatic conversations between negotiators and hostages, the cutting-edge intelligence work happening behind-the-scenes, and the media frenzy around this moment of international significance, The Siege is the remarkable story of what really happened on those fateful six days, and the first full account of a moment that forever changed the way the nation thought about the SAS – and itself.
  • Published: 17 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241675687
  • Imprint: Viking
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Ben Macintyre

Ben Macintyre is the multimillion-copy bestselling author of books including Agent Sonya, SAS: Rogue Heroes, The Spy and the Traitor, Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat and A Spy Among Friends. He is a columnist and Associate Editor at The Times, and has worked as the newspaper's correspondent in New York, Paris and Washington. He regularly presents BBC series based on his acclaimed books.

Also by Ben Macintyre

SAS
Colditz
Agent Sonya
The Spy and the Traitor
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Praise for The Siege

Ben Macintyre has established himself as the pre-eminent historian of the secret world, his work opening doors most of us didn’t know were there. His books have set the gold standard for accurate historical reporting, but read like heart-pounding thrillers.

Mick Herron

Macintyre has a knack for finding the most fascinating storylines in history

David Grann, author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon

Macintyre writes with the diligence and insight of a journalist, and the panache of a born storyteller.

John Banville, The Guardian 

The definitive account of what happened . . . so gripping that I literally could not put the book down.

Jack Straw, Independent

Unforgettable

Robert McCrum, Independent

A fresh and gripping read . . . A masterful big-picture narrative, drawing on interviews, news archives and unpublished personal memoirs by those who survived. Macintyre preserves the hostages’ story in magnificent, humane style – and offers another swashbuckling tribute to their rescuers

Colin Freeman, Telegraph

There have been plenty of books written in the aftermath and intervening years, most claiming to be the "true story", but none as exhaustive or gripping as Ben Macintyre's The Siege

Observer

In The Siege Macintyre has access to SAS sources including, in one of his customary coups, Major Hector Gullan, who planned the raid. Yet he gives greater room to the feelings of the hostages, the shifting emotions of their captors and the interplay between the two groups. Macintyre’s achievement is that his account is the more gripping for it.

Sunday Times

Gripping…a cracking procedural...it’s another hit for [Macintyre]…a remarkably immersive account of what happened…Macintyre’s superb reconstruction restores it to vivid, complex life

Washington Post

A master storyteller…Macintyre adds real value to our understanding of what occurred in those six days with his deeply humane book. He is particularly compelling in the portraits he puts together of the dramatis personae

Wall Street Journal