A Daring Rescue at Princes Gate

How commandos ended the siege at the Iranian embassy

It was a stunning success, a national triumph. In an explosion of flames and gunfire, British commandos stormed the Iranian embassy in London last week, rescuing 19 people who had been held hostage for almost six grueling days. In a skillfully executed operation that lasted barely a quarter of an hour, members of Britain's elite Special Air Service Regiment killed five of the six Iranian Arab terrorists who had been holding the embassy. Taken by surprise, the gun men had time to kill only one of their captives, although they had murdered another shortly before the operation began.

Millions had watched the commando operation on television, and when it was over, all Britain was in a mood to celebrate. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher hailed it as "a brilliant operation, carried out with courage and confidence," which made her countrymen "proud to be British."

For the most part, Britons refrained from drawing parallels between the success of the S.A.S. assault and the failure of the American attempt to rescue the U.S. embassy hostages in Iran, but the point was inescapable. Newspaper editorials, though glowing with patriotic fer vor, noted the vast logistical differences between the two operations. As the Lon don Sun put it in a headline: O.K., SO WE WON, BUT LET'S NOT MAKE TOO MUCH NOISE ABOUT IT.

The assault was indeed a measure of last resort, undertaken after attempts to negotiate the release of the hostages had failed repeatedly. The gunmen who had seized the embassy at Princes Gate, in the fashionable Kensington district of London, were bitterly opposed to the regime of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini in Tehran. They had demanded the release of 91 Iranian Arab political prisoners who were being held in Iran, as well as some form of autonomy for the largely Arabic-speaking province of Khuzistan. During the early days of the embassy siege, the terrorists treated their prisoners reason ably well and released five of them, mainly for medical reasons. Said one of the British hostages, Embassy Employee Ronald Morris, 47: "We were on first-name terms, swapping cigarettes and even joking eased." in moments when the tension But on Sunday, the gunmen began to taunt their Iranian hostages by scrawling slogans on the embassy walls: DEATH TO KHOMEINI and DOWN WITH THE NEW SHAH. This particularly enraged the embassy's assistant press attache, Abbas Lavasani, 29, who argued with his captors and defended Khomeini's Islamic revolution. At one point, one of the gunmen was ready to shoot Lavasani but was dissuaded by another hostage, British Police Constable Trevor Lock, 41, who had been overpowered at the embassy entrance on the first day.

Lock had played a moderating influence from the beginning, telling his captors: "Look, if you start shooting people, if you kill even one of us, you know you will have no chance after that, don't you?" Lock wore his policeman's tunic throughout the siege, and even put on his hat when he spoke to his superiors through the embassy windows. The reason for Lock's formality: his .38-cal. revolver was hidden beneath the tunic. Lock told the other two British captives about the gun, but felt that if he tried to use it, he could not hope to shoot more than two of the gunmen before they got him, and the action would endanger the lives of all the hostages.

Monday the mood of the terrorists changed sharply for the worse. They announced that they would kill one hostage every 45 minutes until their demands had been met. Having successfully dramatized their cause to the world, they now seemed mainly intent on securing safe conduct for themselves to a friendly country--a concession that the British government had decided not to grant them under any circumstances.

The government was determined, Home Secretary William Whitelaw said later, not to allow "terrorist blackmail to succeed." Whitelaw, who served as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, was in charge of the government's handling of the crisis from the beginning.

Shortly before 7 p.m., the terrorists pushed the body of a dead hostage out the door of the embassy. It was Lavasani; he had volunteered, to be the first victim. By murdering a hostage, the terrorists apparently thought they could force the British government to meet their safe conduct demand. Instead, at Whitelaw's command, the killing triggered "Operation Nimrod," for which the S.A.S. force had been preparing for several days. Within 30 minutes, some 20 S.A.S. commandos, clad in black and wearing hoods, gas masks and armored vests, attacked the embassy from the roof and from adjoining town houses. They carried submachine guns, pistols and stun grenades, whose "thunderflash" blinds and deafens its victims for several seconds. Some slithered down ropes from the roof and threw grenades through the back windows. Then they leaped in after the explosions; others made a similar assault from the front balcony.

The explosion that blew out the front windows of the embassy was apparently caused by one or more stun grenades, thrown by a commando. The interior of the embassy was quickly reduced to near rubble as it caught on fire from the explosions. According to some reports, S.A.S. men also broke through a brick wall from an adjoining building when the assault began.

Inside the embassy, meanwhile, Hostage Morris said later, "there was smoke, screaming, explosions and gunfire." Bursting into the room where most of the male hostages were kept, the gunmen opened fire on their Iranian prisoners, killing one of them and wounding two others, including Charge d'Affaires Gholam Ali Afrouz. Given the amount of terrorist fire occurring at that moment, said Morris, it was a miracle that only one man was killed. When one gunman took careful aim at an S.A.S. commando entering through a window, Constable Lock tackled the terrorist, and the commando shot the gunman dead.

Continued Morris: "I put up my hands and shouted, Tm British, I'm British!' I was grabbed by an S.A.S. man, who hurled me through the door. Had he arrived literally two seconds later, I would not be here to tell this story."

As flames broke out, Hostage Simeon Harris, 33, a British Broadcasting Corp. technician, ran onto the front balcony and waved, but a commando outside the window shouted to him, "Get down, get down!" When Harris replied, "I'm going to burn to death," another commando ordered, "Come here, come here," and helped the technician to the adjoining town house. Said Harris, who re-entered the embassy through another room: "They didn't lead us out, they threw us out, tossing us from one commando to another in a chain." The S.A.S. also took the precaution of tying the hostages' hands while checking their identities. Four of the terrorists were killed in the attack, and a fifth died on the way to the nearest hospital. The sixth, a Khuzistan dockworker named Fowzi Badavi Nejad, 23, tried to hide among the hostages but was quickly identified and taken into custody. The next day he was charged with taking part in the shooting of Lavasani and another Iranian hostage whose body was later found in the wreckage of the embassy.

Speaking to a jubilant House of Commons, Mrs. Thatcher expressed the hope that "the way this operation was carried out will have an effect on the future position of American hostages in Iran." She noted pointedly, in reply to a message from Iranian President Abolhassan Banisadr, that it was the responsibility of "each and every government to look after the safety of diplomats on their territory."

A5 expected, the authorities in Tehran remained unmoved. Khomeini, who had previously blamed the London embassy seizure on the CIA, said nothing at all. Banisadr, who had been willing to accept "the martyrdom of our children in England," now declared merely that "the brave resistance of our children" had brought "its sweet fruit." Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh insisted, as before, that the London incident was a "terrorist act," while the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran was "a legitimate outcry against 25 years of oppression." Even more bluntly, one of the Revolutionary Council's leading zealots, Ayatullah Seyyed Mohammed Beheshti, told a journalist who asked if the London incident could lead to a settlement of the Tehran crisis: "If you think that, it is your first mistake."

Thus the plight of the American hostages, who have now been moved from the Tehran embassy to some twelve locations throughout Iran, remained the same. In a flurry of witch hunting last week, the Tehran authorities interrogated several Western journalists and detained an American freelance writer, Cynthia Dwyer of Buffalo, as a "CIA spy." As for the hostages, their fate will be settled by the newly elected parliament, due to meet sometime in June, in the Iranians' own sweet time.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.