Crown Publishing Group (NY)
The Siege: A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World
Key Metrics
- Ben Macintyre
- Crown Publishing Group (NY)
- Hardcover
- 9780593728093
- -
- 1.25 pounds
- History > Modern - 20th Century
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
True-life espionage master Ben Macintyre takes readers on a thrilling tick-tock recounting one of the most daring rescue attempts of our time. As the American hostage crisis in Iran boiled into its seventh month in the spring of 1980, six heavily armed gunman barged into the Iranian Embassy in London, taking twenty-six hostages. What followed over the next six days was an increasingly tense standoff, one that threatened at any moment to spill into a bloodbath.
Policeman Trevor Lock was supposed to have gone to the theater that night. Instead he found himself overpowered and whisked into the Embassy. The terrorists never noticed the gun hidden in his jacket. The drama that ensued would force him to find reserves of courage he didn't know he had. The gunmen themselves were hardly one-dimensional--all Arabs, some highly educated, they hoped to force Britain to take their side in their independence battle against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Behind the scenes lurked the brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who had bankrolled the whole affair as a salvo against Iran.
As police negotiators pressed the gunmen, rival protestors clashed violently outside the embassy, and MI6 and the CIA scrambled for intelligence, Britain's special forces strike team, the SAS, laid plans for a dangerous rescue mission. Inside, Lock and his fellow hostages used all the cunning they possessed to outwit and outflank their captors. Finally, on the sixth day, after the terrorists executed the embassy press attaché and dumped his body on the front doorstep, the SAS raid began, sparking a deadly high-stakes climax.
A story of ordinary men and women under immense pressure, The Siege takes readers minute-by-thrilling-minute through an event that would echo across the next two decades and provide a direct historical link to the tragedy on 9/11. Drawing on exclusive interviews and a wealth of never-before-seen files, Macintyre brilliantly reconstructs a week in which every day minted a new hero and every second spelled the potential for doom.
Author Bio
Ben Macintyre is a columnist and Associate Editor on The Times. He has worked as the newspaper’s correspondent in New York, Paris and Washington. He is the author of nine previous books including Agent Zigzag, shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Galaxy British Book Award for Biography of the Year 2008, and the no. 1 bestsellers A Spy Among Friends, Operation Mincemeat, Double Cross and SAS: Rogue Heroes.
In 2019, The Spy and the Traitor, which tells the story of double KGB agent Oleg Gordievsky and was a No.1 Sunday Times Bestseller and shortlisted for the Ballie Gifford prize and National Book Awards. Ben’s new book Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy tells the story of Ursula Kuczynski – codename Sonya – the greatest female spy of the 20th Century.
Source: benmacintyre.com
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