00:00:00.23 talalaban And we're live studio.

00:00:03.54 alexei sayle ah Well today we have ah Ben McIntyre noted author and he is here to talk about his latest book and I sound like a radio for proper radio for art person I think it's an unusual position for me to be in.

00:00:17.95 Ben ah

00:00:20.20 alexei sayle Ben's here talk about his label. Hi Ben. um hi

00:00:22.16 Ben Hello.

00:00:26.06 alexei sayle um this This book is of particular interest to to Lyle and we'll get to that at some point. But first of all, I'd like to be interested. I've followed your career.

00:00:39.64 alexei sayle from a distance, particularly as a fan of military history, myself from World War II, particularly history of World War II, I've followed your books, seen the movies and so on and so forth. So I suppose I would just like to, I mean, also, I think your kind of career trajectory. So I guess we just start at the start, really, and tell us how you became a bestselling author.

00:01:07.59 Ben but What a nice, and what a nice intro. um Well, i didn't but I didn't start by becoming a best-selling author. I wrote a lot of books that are very forgotten now.

00:01:13.61 alexei sayle No.

00:01:15.88 Ben um But I was a journalist for years, so I was a foreign correspondent in New York and Paris and then Washington. um Not exactly hardship postings, but completely lovely places to be. And then I started writing ah books about 25 years ago, and I got sort of drawn

00:01:29.92 alexei sayle Who were you? Who were you a journalist for? Was it the BBC?

00:01:33.05 Ben I work for The Times, and i still I'm still a columnist for The Times.

00:01:34.52 alexei sayle Times. All right. OK.

00:01:36.12 Ben I mean, that's been my my professional home for 35 years.

00:01:39.76 alexei sayle Mm hmm.

00:01:40.11 Ben so that's So I was trained as a journalist. but And in a way, a lot of my books have kind of journalistic elements to them. They are kind of reporting but or trying to get the as close to the truth as you can with a kind of limited amount of material.

00:01:52.85 Ben but I guess um my sort of world changed a lot when I started writing about espionage.

00:01:54.67 talalaban Thank you.

00:01:57.30 Ben and i'd i been ri When I was at university, I was actually tapped up by MI6, so I had a kind of brief experience of that world. Disasters, really.

00:02:07.89 Ben I was useless at it. But um but I found it

00:02:10.40 alexei sayle You actually went and you, well, I don't know how much you can save it.

00:02:11.85 Ben Yeah, we i think interviews and so on. um And it was, you know, they very quickly worked out that, as I've just demonstrated, I wouldn't make a good spy because I can't keep a secret.

00:02:14.91 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:02:21.17 Ben um but the he um but i But I was fascinated by that world. And and then about 15 years ago, a little more, actually, I wrote a book called Agent Zigzag, which was about a um a criminal, a professional criminal called eddie's Eddie Chapman who had been recruited by German intelligence in the Second World War and they called him Zigzag because they could never be sure whose side he was on because he he was he was trained by the Germans and then parachuted into Britain and his story was incredibly exciting um and he kept sort of swapping sides really um and actually he ended up as the crime correspondent of the Daily Telegraph which I rather like

00:02:55.71 alexei sayle three Right Right Yikes

00:02:56.23 Ben um But so his story he kind of sent me into the world of espionage. And I've been writing about espionage and military stuff, usually sort of secret military stuff ever since. um I mean, in a way, the immediate precursor to this book, although it's not chronologically the precursor, was a book about the wartime SAS, SAS Rogue Heroes, that was called, which was done with the authorization of the SAS, so I had full access to their wartime archive, which was absolutely fascinating because that had been kept pretty much secret up until that point.

00:03:25.90 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:03:29.81 alexei sayle um I mean, I suppose, what what do you feel about the security services? I mean, I think, I mean, as somebody from the left, we tend to see them as a kind of monolithic, I think, force for, well, not for good necessarily. But I think it's more, it's perhaps more complex than that. And certainly, I've known I've known, I've not, I don't know if I've been directly friends with active agents, but I've certainly known people who've had family members or agents and they're kind of, I mean, it's, it's, um, I think the people who are drawn to that world are, uh, it's a very complicated people and, uh, the most is very complex.

00:04:10.93 alexei sayle I don't know. What do you think?

00:04:11.36 Ben I think that's absolutely right, Alexey, and that's one of the reasons why I love writing about them, is that they are not straightforward, one-dimensional, black and white people.

00:04:18.93 alexei sayle Hmm.

00:04:19.76 Ben refugees are the extremely complicated, morally fraught, difficult situation. And, but you know, the security service, of course, when one talks about the security service, when he's talking about MI5, we're talking about the people who

00:04:32.84 alexei sayle I always get, which which one's foreign and which one's domestic? I always get it mixed up.

00:04:35.30 Ben MI6 is foreign. MI6 is agents recruited abroad by British intelligence to spy on their own countries.

00:04:44.68 alexei sayle Right.

00:04:45.02 Ben That's what MI6 does.

00:04:46.33 alexei sayle So it'd be MI5 that comes for me.

00:04:48.58 Ben MI5 comes from you, Alexei. They've got a dossier so foul they don't even know where to put begin.

00:04:54.84 alexei sayle I always thought, well, I know I've got a special branch file, but do you think I'll have an MI5 file as well?

00:04:54.77 Ben um

00:04:59.86 Ben I don't know what you do in your private time, next he say you might but um the truth is MI5 are the people who stop you from being blown up in your bed.

00:05:09.58 alexei sayle Alright.

00:05:09.65 Ben I mean, they are, which doesn't mean they always do it well, doesn't mean they're always brilliant at it, but they are the security service. They are here to counter threats to this country.

00:05:20.40 Ben um I sound like I'm a shill for MI5. I'm not really, because I i realized that, you know, they are open all security services are open to dangerous manipulation and excess and who is an enemy perceived as an internal enemy to- today may not be an enemy tomorrow.

00:05:39.70 talalaban Mm.

00:05:39.93 Ben But I mean the modern MI5 is particularly preoccupied with cyber threats from China, ah personal threats from Russia, Iranian dissidents, and you know remnants of of irish violent Irish republicanism. they're they're They're not really spying on you and me.

00:05:59.82 Ben They may they have to do that in order to get to the people they need to get to. um But they are they are what they say. They're a security service. um that They are extremely effective policemen, if you like.

00:06:11.57 Ben um But it's complicated. But you know that was never always the case. you know The Gestapo would have described itself as a security service as well. So you know it's it's not this is not a simple one-size-fits-all category.

00:06:18.70 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:06:22.51 Ben and you know, different intelligence services behave in different ways at different times. So in a way, that's why I love it. It's, you know, it allows me to write about the sort of stories that novelists usually commandeer.

00:06:37.35 Ben So I can write about loyalty and love and betrayal and adventure and romance, but it's all true, you know, because those intelligence service files are astonishingly rich.

00:06:45.51 alexei sayle Yeah. Yeah.

00:06:51.03 Ben in the elements of betrayal and disloyalty that are central to all forms of espionage. MI6, its job is to persuade foreign people to break the laws of their own country. There's disloyalty absolutely woven into the whole operation.

00:07:06.76 alexei sayle Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, a couple of that, I mean, the, the um I mean, I suppose the mean ah agent zigs, I mean, that whole, I mean, that was an exemplary piece of intelligence wasn't in the British intelligence rolled up all German agents in Britain and then was feet feet and then got them to feedback false information to the Germans, didn't they?

00:07:31.18 Ben That's right.

00:07:32.40 alexei sayle So that was

00:07:32.61 Ben did i mean it was It was an astonishing feat. It would have been absolutely impossible without Bletchley Park.

00:07:39.90 alexei sayle Right.

00:07:39.92 Ben i mean the The breaking of the Enigma Code enabled MI5 to know ahead of time what German intelligence was planning to do.

00:07:50.73 Ben So when the Germans were sending in agents to this country, including Eddie Chapman, who'd been recruited by German intelligence, they knew when they were coming, so they were able to intercept them.

00:08:03.29 alexei sayle Right.

00:08:03.38 Ben and They were able to make a choice between either executing them, 14 of them were executed, the so-called unlucky 14. It was rather an understatement, really. um They were shot by firing squad in the Tower of London. ah Or they were turned, they were they were used, and their wireless isn't whatever other method of communication they had with the Abwehr, the German intelligence service, was then manipulated by British intelligence. Or they were kept in prison and they were impersonated.

00:08:33.20 talalaban Huh.

00:08:33.34 Ben MI5, it was a brilliant operation, would pretend to be the agent that had been dropped in or parachuted in. And at one point, they believed that they had total control of the German intelligence system in this country.

00:08:47.92 Ben They believed they controlled the whole thing until they had a terrible shock when they realized that one agent had got through, who went by the unimproveable name of Engelbertus Fucken,

00:08:58.70 alexei sayle yeah

00:09:00.64 Ben And his body was found in a ah disused um bomb shelter in Cambridge, and no one has ever been able to work out how Engelbertus Fucken got into the country without being caught.

00:09:11.65 alexei sayle Right.

00:09:15.61 talalaban I think we found the episode title.

00:09:16.27 alexei sayle ah

00:09:19.70 alexei sayle And also Operation Mincemeat, of course, is one of your...

00:09:24.23 Ben Well, that again, is so it's a story that would be impossible to write if MI5 had not released, declassified its archives. i mean we are

00:09:31.93 alexei sayle Because it was a film, wasn't it? I mean, the man who never was in the film.

00:09:34.78 Ben um you know but The Man Who Never Was, while it's a wonderful film, is nonetheless more or less fantasy.

00:09:38.36 alexei sayle Yeah. Right.

00:09:42.01 talalaban ah hu

00:09:42.61 Ben Much of it is completely invented. But we're funny about secrecy in this country. We we we sort of we regard it as being dangerous and people who keep secrecy somehow are working against us.

00:09:52.88 Ben Actually, secrecy is really important. You need to have secrecy or you can't function as a state. um But I would never have been able to write Operation Mincemeat if MI5 had not declassified its MI5 files.

00:10:04.53 alexei sayle Mmhmm.

00:10:04.97 Ben Just wonderful. I mean, they're extraordinary. They tell you minute by minute how this mad operation was mounted. It was the one where they got a dead body um and used it to try and um but successfully to pass false information by floating it off the coast of Spain into the hands of a particularly ah brutal German spy who was operating there. And and they they gave him a completely false identity, this character. Actually, he was a homeless man from Wales.

00:10:32.75 Ben um But they turned him into into Major William Martin of the Royal Marines and gave him a completely false identity and um and shipped him ashore. And it was an astonishingly successful... In fact, it was so successful that the makers of it got panicked at one point because they never they didn't really believe it was ever going to work.

00:10:49.16 alexei sayle Yeah, because they're taking a hell of a chance just floating a body from a submarine and hoping that it will be picked up and then that information will be passed on to the Abwehr.

00:10:55.36 Ben Yeah, yeah and the danger is the danger is if the Abwehr rumbled it, So the idea was to to divert German attention from the looming assault on Sicily and try and persuade them that the attack was coming in Greece and Sardinia.

00:11:12.91 Ben Now the danger was that if the Germans rumbled the ruse, worked out that this was false information being fed to it, they would read it backwards. And they would therefore realize that in fact, instead of it not being Sicily, it was gonna be Sicily.

00:11:25.75 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:11:26.31 Ben It would reinforce Sicily and thousands of people would potentially be be killed as they as they went ashore. So it was an enormously high stakes gang gamble, which is why they sort of panicked halfway through. The only person who didn't panic at all was Churchill. Churchill said, churchill said if if this doesn't work, we will just float him again, he said.

00:11:46.80 alexei sayle but but

00:11:52.30 alexei sayle ah So I suppose, well, I don't know. I mean, do you want to move on to um your latest book or?

00:11:58.31 Ben Sure, yeah.

00:11:59.16 alexei sayle I mean, OK, yes.

00:11:59.08 Ben with i mean This one, in a way, leads on from the SAS Rogue Heroes story. It's a story I've wanted to write for years. um And it's the story of the Iranian embassy siege in 1980, when half a dozen armed Arab gunmen with machine guns and and grenades, attacked the Iranian embassy in London um and took it over and took 26 hostages for a week or six days. um And it's a fascinating story. I was i was a little boy when when this happened. And I was watching the snooker final with my dad. um And it was Hurricane Higgins against

00:12:39.08 Ben um Cliff Thorburn and it was coming down to the two final frames and suddenly they cut away it was a bank holiday Monday and they cut away from the snooker to live footage of SAS soldiers in Balaclava helmets at sailing down the outside of the and and embassy and and

00:12:47.98 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:12:52.78 alexei sayle Yes. Yeah.

00:12:56.99 Ben blowing blowing up the windows.

00:12:58.85 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:12:58.77 Ben and yeah And it had a real effect on me. I mean, I wasn't alone. There were 14 million people watching the snooker at that point.

00:13:02.98 alexei sayle Right.

00:13:04.92 Ben Some of them were enraged to be moved to the other channel, to the other to the live footage.

00:13:06.62 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:13:09.48 Ben But it's one of the reasons, I think, why I became a journalist, actually, was that I found, I thought that was so extraordinary to be able to watch a news event of that kind of drama taking place.

00:13:21.60 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:13:22.27 Ben ave wed None of us had ever seen anything like that before.

00:13:24.66 alexei sayle now well just my My personal experience, we lived in a on the 12th floor of a tower block in Fulham at the time. And I saw a plume of smoke going up from, I just saw this, but I said to Linda, they've gone in.

00:13:34.17 Ben Wow.

00:13:39.72 Ben whether you were following it closer than I was, Alexei, because, I mean, I was only a little boy, so I wasn't hadn't really followed the siege itself that closely.

00:13:41.78 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:13:46.18 Ben And it's one of those stories that has became a legend almost immediately. ah It became part of British mythology and it became, I mean, the way I inherited it was that it was rather a simple story, a sort of British daring do, you know, tough SAS blokes go in and beat the baddies and save the hostages.

00:13:52.73 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:14:04.94 Ben And of course, that is partly true, like all myths.

00:14:05.93 alexei sayle That's true, yeah.

00:14:08.73 Ben has an element of truth to it. But the real story is so much more complicated and so much more interesting. So I think if you ask the average person in the street, what was the Iranian embassy siege about?

00:14:21.66 Ben Most people would say, well, it was Iran, so it it was Islamic fundamentalist.

00:14:25.47 alexei sayle Yes.

00:14:25.50 Ben right you know try The truth is that's not that's not right at all.

00:14:27.82 alexei sayle Because it wasn't. No.

00:14:29.41 Ben I mean, the Iranian revolution had just taken place in 1979. These These were Arabs from Iran who were fighting for political rights as a minority within Iran.

00:14:40.34 Ben They were opposed.

00:14:40.78 alexei sayle There were sunnies, yeah. Yeah.

00:14:42.83 Ben You know, they were they were trying to make, I mean, it was a brutal and violent statement. I'm i'm not pretending that they were, you know, good people, although they were interesting people. They were, you know, they were highly educated. The leader spoke three different languages, each of them extremely well. You know, these were not sort of cardboard cut out, you know, villains. um The leader, Tawfiq al-Rashidi, had a very clear political plan. He he didn't want to kill anyone.

00:15:07.62 Ben um

00:15:08.28 alexei sayle And also they wear and um um we an R, presumably, in a press minority with it within Iran.

00:15:13.23 Ben Oh, absolutely. No, I mean, they had taken part in the revolution. They supported the revolution and they believed quite genuinely that they would be granted, that the Ayatollah would grant them political rights as a result. On the contrary, what happened was, as soon as the Ayatollah and his mullahs were in power, they clamped down on the Arab minority. And there was an appalling bloodbath in southwest Khuzestan, where these guys came from. And they all lost family members. I mean, the leader's brother a man called Najib, was captured by the Iranian security services, tortured and then murdered.

00:15:48.84 Ben and that is that you know Those are the motivations, the sorts of motivations. That's how you make a terrorist.

00:15:53.28 talalaban Hmm.

00:15:54.38 Ben How do you make a man kill? You kill the thing that he loves.

00:15:57.57 talalaban Hmm.

00:15:57.74 alexei sayle Mmm.

00:15:58.39 Ben And we see that all over the Middle East now.

00:16:00.40 alexei sayle We certainly do.

00:16:00.68 talalaban Hmm.

00:16:00.75 Ben It's a very simple way to turn somebody to extreme violence. And I'm not just trying it.

00:16:05.82 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:16:06.48 Ben I'm not saying it excavates it at all.

00:16:08.67 alexei sayle No.

00:16:08.67 Ben But there is there are hidden stories here. And that goes for everybody involved, not just the gunmen, the hostages, the policemen, the politicians, and the SAS. Nobody is a hero.

00:16:20.53 Ben And nobody is a villain in this world. And things go wrong. And a lot went wrong inside that embassy.

00:16:27.34 alexei sayle Yes. So, I mean, tell us about that, I guess. I mean, so.

00:16:32.51 Ben Well, ah once the six the first thing that happened was they attacked the embassy and they burst in through the front door and the policeman who was on guard there, a man called Trevor Locke, PC Trevorlock, who was the Diplomatic Protection Officer there.

00:16:46.41 Ben Still, I'm delighted to say very much with us and has been a great help on this story. He's a wonderful man. He's he's not a Sweeney type cop. He's a Dixon of Doc Green cop.

00:16:56.12 alexei sayle Yes.

00:16:56.65 Ben He's what he himself would say. he said He said he joined the police to help old ladies cross the road. That was what he was supposed to do. And the gunman attacked the embassy. He had a gun on him, ah which he did not pull.

00:17:07.77 alexei sayle No.

00:17:07.82 Ben Had he done so, the story would have been completely different.

00:17:10.78 alexei sayle Yes.

00:17:11.23 Ben that gun on him secretly for the next six days. They bundled into the embassy. 26 people ah were taken captive. Most of them were Iranians. ah Some of them were senior diplomats, appointees of the Ayatollah.

00:17:24.57 Ben These were people who believed in the fundamentalist mission of the of the Ayatollah. There were several British citizens. There were several

00:17:31.42 alexei sayle and Well, we should at this point, I suppose, throw to our co-host here. and one One of the other hostages was a Syrian journalist called Mustafa Kharkouti, the father of young Talal Kharkouti here, and then an old friend of mine from the, I think, from my student days, really.

00:17:41.36 talalaban Daddy.

00:17:50.06 alexei sayle so

00:17:51.59 talalaban Yeah, it's it's quite it's fascinating listening to you talk and and and ah from what I've read so far in the book. because this is something this is a story I've grown up with. My dad was in there and as a hostage. ah I always need to specify that. ah But, um because this is just a story that that surrounded me growing up. And every year there would be hostage reunions at my house and sometimes the SAS blokes would show up. And I'm very much familiar

00:18:24.40 talalaban with the emotional story, the the human story. And in particular, my dad's point of view of of what happened in there. And then when you talk about the actual like biographical facts of the gunman,

00:18:40.17 talalaban and even the way you describe Trevor, it's it it's not a way that i've yeah and I'm familiar with the story, you know, and even reading your book. And it was, so it's really, it's still as if I'm hearing it for the first time, because I'm hearing facts that I might've heard once or twice here or there, but the thing that is so ingrained in my psyche is is the the emotional impact and the lifelong PTSD that my dad had from this whole thing.

00:19:04.73 talalaban And, um

00:19:04.83 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:19:07.56 talalaban and

00:19:07.55 Ben I mean, Mustafa Karkouti, I don't need to tell you this, I'm sure I don't need to tell you that, Alexey, is an absolutely pivotal figure in this story. I mean, you you will tell his past much better than I will, but he was ah he was a Syrian-born journalist. He was the only person in the embassy able to speak the three principal languages in which this story takes place, English, Arabic,

00:19:31.75 Ben and Farsi. I mean, his Farsi was not brilliant, I think that's right to say Talal, but he spoke enough.

00:19:34.75 talalaban Yeah, yeah.

00:19:36.89 Ben So he became the key interlocutor in this story. The person who is dealing with the police negotiators, the person who is dealing with the Arab gunmen inside is Mustafa Karkouti, your old friend Alexei, and your father Talal.

00:19:49.80 Ben And I mean, this story, ah very early on in the research, Talal's family very kindly let me read Mustafa's own account of what had happened inside that embassy. And it's an astonishing document. It's so it's ah ah's a proper first-person account of what it felt like for him. And it contained, for me, some astonishing revelations. ah It deserves to be published in its own in its own right. I mean, it is it is a remarkable piece. And it's not the only one, actually. I mean, one of the bizarre things about this story is it's 1980, so everybody is writing everything down.

00:20:26.56 talalaban Yeah.

00:20:26.99 Ben It's not like today where we all think we're all keeping a record, we're not.

00:20:27.23 alexei sayle Right.

00:20:31.37 Ben um But then they were, and and there I have four unpublished accounts from people who were involved in this story. One policeman who kept a diary, the the senior policeman, John Dallow,

00:20:43.25 Ben the the man who organized Operation Nimrod, who's never been revealed before, he who also kept the diary, Hector Gullin, then there's Mustafa's own astonishing account, and Sim Harris, another of the hostages. So there's a huge amount of material in there, but but i mean there's an argument to be made that without Mustafa in there, this story could have ended really brutally.

00:21:01.78 Ben i mean would have ended in the way these things normally end, not normally, but can end, with total miscommunication between the various parties.

00:21:09.75 talalaban Hmm.

00:21:10.10 alexei sayle Right.

00:21:10.30 Ben The former was the one who enabled these people to keep talking to each other.

00:21:14.81 alexei sayle So yes, so take us through the carry on with the timeline and sort of thing, I think.

00:21:19.07 Ben Well, so the first day, um and and let me just also say there were two other key journalists in there. One is a man called Sim Harris, again, I'm delighted to say still with us, who was a BBC fan recording.

00:21:28.86 alexei sayle Yeah, we we we know same. Yeah.

00:21:31.17 Ben and And the other was a man called Chris Cramer, who was a BBC producer, last no longer around. um And then the other the other British citizen was a man called Ron Morris, who was the sort of major domo in the in the in the operation.

00:21:43.97 Ben He was a caretaker and he was the longest serving um employee. Many of the captives were women whose stories have never been told before.

00:21:52.82 alexei sayle Yes, I actually that's something I didn't know I didn't sort of, I never cared.

00:21:56.19 Ben six of them were Iranian women. They were, as the times were, they were secretaries and clerks, they were they were not diplomats.

00:22:03.15 talalaban Hmm.

00:22:03.10 Ben But they also played an absolutely vital role in in what happened. So so the government's intentions were to force the Iranian government to release political prisoners, 91 of them, 91 Arabs held in Tehran,

00:22:19.18 Ben to um to get their message out to the world. So there was a media intention here. they wanted They wanted the world to listen to them to understand their position. Then they expected to be given a plane and then they would fly home.

00:22:35.77 Ben That was the plan. Now, when we look it sounds unbelievably naive that that this was ever going to happen. The truth is it was not without precedent. um in In the Arab world, particularly, this you know um Carlos the Jackal, a character who may be familiar to you, had pulled off a stunt like this against the OPEC oil ministers in 1975. This had happened. you know Governments were often prepared to negotiate over hostages. And sometimes, even the British government was prepared to allow people of violence to fly home.

00:23:07.38 Ben Edward Heath, under Edward Heath, a particular Palestinian gun woman called Leila Khaled, had hijacked a plane, but then she had been released and allowed to fly home back, and she's still around.

00:23:17.53 alexei sayle yes Right.

00:23:17.50 Ben um so so So they weren't, it's not like they were mad. they had They had a plan.

00:23:21.89 talalaban Mm.

00:23:22.83 Ben I mean, what nobody knows, and what was in fact revealed by Mustafa's document is that the entire plot, the entire plan, had been cooked up by Saddam Hussein.

00:23:36.21 Ben This was an Iraqi organized, financed, armed operation.

00:23:40.84 alexei sayle Right.

00:23:41.87 Ben And this was Saddam Hussein's way of destabilizing Iran. This was the first battle, if you like, in the Iran-Iraq War, and it was taken

00:23:51.00 alexei sayle At the time when Saddam was an ally of ours, to a degree, I mean, yeah, I can't, I mean, not entirely.

00:23:53.92 Ben Right? Well, a sort of ally. You know, we were sort of trusting him.

00:23:58.25 talalaban You, you...

00:23:58.18 Ben But so it's complicated. And the person who actually masterminded it was a man called Abu Nidal, who was then the most wanted terrorist in the world. He was responsible for killing hundreds of people.

00:24:09.34 Ben And he was working at that point as a sort of freelance advisor to Saddam Hussein. He was living in Baghdad. I mean, he was a man of extreme violence. But he's the person who organized all this.

00:24:20.70 Ben That's never been revealed before. That's, you know, this is

00:24:22.91 alexei sayle No, no.

00:24:24.19 Ben was an international plot. so so i

00:24:25.93 talalaban But you you mentioned, you said earlier, you were describing the gunmen as as ah you know and inel intelligent and put together, but the story I've always heard is that maybe apart from their leader, is that they were just kids and they were naive and they were they were kind of shaky and dangerous in their unpredictability.

00:24:27.31 Ben sorry

00:24:46.22 talalaban How much truth is to to that deal?

00:24:46.17 Ben i think that That is true of some of them. I mean, they were different characters. They really were. So if you like, and it's a bit of a sort of obvious thing to do, you can divide them up. I mean, Taofik Al Rashidi was highly intelligent. He knew what he was doing. He'd been properly briefed. He spoke very good English. He came from an educated background. So he, if you like, is the kind of officer class. Then there were two other guys who were kind of NCOs, if you like. They were they were clever They were clever.

00:25:08.98 talalaban Hmm.

00:25:09.45 Ben They were organized. They knew what they were doing, but they weren't educated. that you know they but But they were committed to the cause. And then the remaining three, two of them were manipulated, really. They were they were they were not of high intelligence.

00:25:21.80 Ben they had They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their families had been brutalized. They had been brutalized. They'd lost people. They were they were easy meat, if you like, to be to be used in an operation like that.

00:25:33.95 Ben And the final one was it was really a child. I mean, he he had no real idea what he was doing. um He believed believed them when they said, oh, they'll get out. And but and one one of them was clearly highly mentally unstable, not the youngest of them, one of the others. He was, he was as as often people are, and people don't tell you this, but you know there is a high incidence of mental illness associated with terrorist acts.

00:25:58.40 Ben Those are that yeah those are those other the people that the manipulators of terrorism target because they can be manipulated.

00:25:58.77 talalaban certainly yeah my dad always said that about uh about terrorism and and that they who would who would drive themselves to go and blow themselves up for a cause it you've got to be particularly mentally and you mentioned carlos the jackal earlier my dad had a fist fight with him

00:26:06.10 Ben And that is as true of this story as it is of any other.

00:26:09.59 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:26:20.34 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:26:25.04 talalaban uh back in the day because uh my dad's girlfriend at the time was friends with Carlos and they were all you know pro-palestinian activists and Carlos was in London and him and my and and my dad's girlfriend invited Carlos around for supper this is before the the big incident that made him infamous but uh my dad and Carlos my dad disagreed with Carlos's um really extreme methods and and you know

00:26:33.01 Ben Yeah.

00:26:51.78 talalaban ah motivation and like you just they didn't they both I guess agreed on the same cause but my dad thought he was far too extreme and what he wanted to do and he ended up fighting him and then when the big uh you know incident happened with Carlos Sajakul my dad's house ended up getting raided by the police because they knew he'd spent a night there and um so he's

00:27:15.75 Ben Well, you raised a very interesting point, which again, um you you may know, but most do not, which is that because of your father's associations with the Palestinian cause, because he had trained in in Palestinian camps, because he had friends on that side of the story, because he had met Carlos Ojakal, when it emerged that Mustafa Kharkouti was inside that building, the police understandably jumped to a fairly obvious conclusion. They thought he must be in on it.

00:27:43.64 talalaban Oh, shoot. No way.

00:27:45.36 Ben So from the beginning, they suspect there is an MI5 file on your father, um because once it transpired that he was inside, what the hell was an Arab journalist doing in there at that point?

00:27:56.11 talalaban Yeah.

00:27:58.12 Ben And what's more, and and your father was very concerned about this. I know this because he wrote it down. When he began to kind of interpret for the police what the Arab gunman wanted, he began using the first person plural.

00:28:12.03 Ben At points, he said, we.

00:28:15.19 talalaban Oh, right.

00:28:15.06 Ben That sent off huge alarm bells inside the police.

00:28:18.40 talalaban But he was just translating.

00:28:18.77 Ben in He was translating. He wasn't espousing their cause.

00:28:21.52 talalaban Oh my God.

00:28:23.18 Ben He was very worried that the police might think he was espousing their cause. He was in a really difficult position ah because he knew, and he as you know, he had another passport too.

00:28:34.65 Ben um And he was extremely worried that MI5 might come calling and find that and and begin to think that he must have been part of the plot. Obviously, he wasn't. you know He played a brilliant role in in kind of trying to keep the sides talking to each other. But at the time, the police were dead worried, and so was MI5.

00:28:55.84 alexei sayle Fascinating.

00:28:57.05 talalaban Yeah.

00:28:57.15 alexei sayle So I mean, I mean, I was just I mean, I mean, it's it's like, I mean, this do you it's always seemed to me that um this seed certainly in the UK mark the kind of turning point in so many different ways that technologically that a seed should be broadcast live.

00:29:16.18 alexei sayle And why was that? Is that just because press cameras were a time to get set up outside the embassy?

00:29:23.72 Ben Yes, and but that was partly just a practical thing that there was the technology was available on

00:29:28.05 alexei sayle They'd be big bulky outside broadcast cameras, presumably linking back to a van or something.

00:29:33.55 Ben sort of gantries and in places on these cherry pickers looking down on the embassy.

00:29:35.08 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:29:38.38 Ben I mean, you wouldn't be allowed to, yeah because actually they were within range.

00:29:38.93 alexei sayle Right.

00:29:41.37 Ben I mean, they could have been picked off by the gunman and you'd never allowed to do it today.

00:29:44.09 alexei sayle Right.

00:29:45.62 Ben So they had a kind of, I mean, quite literally, they had a bird's eye view.

00:29:46.22 alexei sayle No.

00:29:49.78 Ben ITN brilliantly and completely sort of wickedly had smuggled a camera into the back of the building, ah into the but some of the flats behind and was secretly filming footage. The police didn't even know they were there when it was happened. And this was a huge security problem because if the terrorists had been watching television,

00:30:09.63 Ben inside the empathy they would have realized what was happening and they could have prepared for it there was a real fear that that was that might happen the truth is two things that happened one is the terrorist never thought to turn on the telly and the second is that in fact mi5 had had snipped the cables they'd they'd already um cut them off the only other group this always makes me laugh of people in the entire country who were not watching this on television were the cobra committee in whitehall

00:30:11.20 talalaban Oh.

00:30:11.39 alexei sayle Right.

00:30:21.22 alexei sayle Right.

00:30:36.21 Ben um being chaired by Willie Whitelaw. Although there were televisions around the room, no one thought to turn them on. So really the only people in Britain who were making the final decision about what should happen were the people who weren't watching it.

00:30:50.01 Ben They were having it relayed by sort of sound via ah Special Forces leader Peter de la Belière. So that shows you just how new the technology was that the leaders of this country, the top officials, never thought that it was possible.

00:31:02.49 talalaban Jesus.

00:31:02.62 Ben Didn't cross their mind that it might be. broadcast live they weren't what Nuka so they didn't know like you and me um that's exactly right

00:31:05.20 alexei sayle start

00:31:09.01 alexei sayle The other, the other thing is if you're a, if you're a weapons, not the other thing is it's the, it's the first time that the heckler and Koch MP5 was brought to our attention. And then later went on to feature in many, many movies, I think probably starting with, um, the Bruce Willis film.

00:31:28.57 Ben yeah yeah i know the Yeah, this was the SAS weapon of choice.

00:31:29.51 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:31:32.56 Ben was This is what they used.

00:31:33.16 alexei sayle yeah

00:31:34.74 Ben They had two different versions. They had a sort of silenced version than ah and a non-silenced version. But of course, this is the other thing that people don't really know is that the SAS had been training for this moment. for many, many years. um Secretly, ah at the Hereford headquarters, since 1972, a special projects team was always on standby to deal with a hostage situation, to deal with a terrorist situation. They didn't know it would be in an embassy. They thought it might be in any number of different places. But since the Munich Olympic Massacre of 1972, the government had put in place provision for the military to take over, namely the SAS, to take over

00:32:14.89 Ben when the civilian authority could not cope and that is

00:32:18.30 alexei sayle Because that was a step change as well, wasn't it? That the Munich massacre was different elements of the German police. And you can see that they're on with like rifles and, uh, yes.

00:32:28.41 Ben and then lit a complete cock up of it. I mean, it got it completely wrong.

00:32:30.53 alexei sayle And that as well. Yeah.

00:32:32.67 Ben And why you know so many people died in that appalling situation.

00:32:35.78 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:32:36.50 Ben you know The government at the time in this country very sensibly actually said, we have to be we have to be ready for this.

00:32:41.99 alexei sayle Right.

00:32:42.02 Ben We have something ready to do it. And the Iranian embassy siege, you talk about historical turning points, is the first time in in the history of mainland Britain, and twentieth modern 20th century history, that civilian authority was surrendered to the military.

00:32:44.39 talalaban Mm.

00:32:57.00 alexei sayle Yes, which is...

00:32:57.81 Ben For 11 minutes, control of that situation was handed over to the SAS. It had never happened before. And it's you know the historical significance of that going forward is is very great. i mean Thatcher had only been in power for a year by this point.

00:33:14.99 Ben um Her hold on power was not very strong. Nobody really knew who who she was. Well, they did, but they didn't know enough about her. Had this raid, had this assault gone the other way, Thatcher would have been in deep, deep trouble.

00:33:29.24 Ben And the SAS itself would probably have been disbanded. I mean, they were called to be disbanded anyway.

00:33:32.58 alexei sayle right

00:33:34.62 Ben um So the stakes were pretty high.

00:33:36.40 talalaban Wow.

00:33:37.00 Ben And ever afterwards, Thatcher used this event as her calling card. I mean, I don't even recall, but in, you know, whenever she did something particularly tough, Thatcher would be, the cartoonists would picture Thatcher in SAS gear, in balaclava helmets, sort of going down.

00:33:50.99 alexei sayle Right.

00:33:55.17 Ben abseiling down the outside of of Westminster.

00:33:55.37 alexei sayle Jesus.

00:33:58.15 Ben So it became, you know, the SAS became her kind of army and she was forever posing with them, you know, these are my guys.

00:34:05.01 alexei sayle Hmm

00:34:06.93 Ben And you can argue that, you know, her incredibly robust approach to the Falklands that came up pretty soon afterwards was partly informed by what had happened. The SAS played a key part in the Falklands.

00:34:18.92 Ben Her attitude towards terrorism, you know, she felt that this event vindicated her stance never to negotiate with terrorists. ah Now you can ah we can argue whether that know worked, and but but that is what became British policy and and and ah much of that was founded on the success of Operation Nimrod, the assault on the Iranian embassy.

00:34:44.75 alexei sayle so i mean take us through the i mean further through the timeline then but

00:34:49.94 Ben So inside the embassy, it ebbs and flows. There are moments when the hostages believe that they're getting on very well with the gunman. There is a certain amount of Stockholm syndrome going on inside there, a phrase which I'm sure your listeners will be aware of, you know, where where a certain affinity begins to develop between the hostages and gunmen. It happens in most hostage situations. there is the The flip side of Stockholm Syndrome is something called Lima Syndrome, which happened which is named after a terrorist event that took place in Lima when um terrorists attacked um ah the Japanese embassy there and took hostages. Lima Syndrome is when the gunmen developed sympathy for their hostages.

00:35:32.37 alexei sayle Right.

00:35:32.43 Ben It's the other way around.

00:35:34.14 talalaban Oh.

00:35:34.41 Ben And there is lots of evidence that this was beginning to happen inside the embassy. What happens is that the gunmen and the hostages begin to find common cause and begin to blame the police for the situation that they are in.

00:35:48.67 Ben And Sim Harris will tell you this.

00:35:52.27 Ben Mustafa himself became very frustrated with what they perceived as the slowness with which the police work were called. The fact is the police had very little to negotiate with. I mean, Thatcher had made it absolutely clear that these guys were not coming out. They were not going to be Arab ambassadors sent to to to negotiate with them. They were going to be tried under British law. They were not going to climb into an airplane and fly home, which which left the police with very little to talk about. You know, they could talk about food,

00:36:22.24 Ben They could talk about cigarettes, they could talk about arranging a certain amount of media contact for the gunmen inside, limited, but they did in fact in the end broadcast the statement that the gunmen wanted. But in the end, the gunmen were not going to get what they wanted.

00:36:38.06 Ben If you talk to the psychiatrist, a man called John Gunn, who was brought in by the police to help them with negotiations, he believes that if the negotiations had been allowed to continue for even another 24 hours, that the gunman would have given up. They would have laid down their guns and walked out.

00:36:56.48 Ben um

00:36:56.88 alexei sayle And that again would not necessarily have been what Thatcher wanted. I mean, do you think, I mean...

00:37:02.62 Ben I don't know. I don't think she wanted a shootout. I think she, you know, I think she felt she had little choice. I mean, even the SAS was warning her there will be 40% casualties. If we go through on this, a lot of people are going to die and a lot of people are going to be killed. So in a way, whatever you think about Thatcher, her decision was a bold one. You know, she decided that if one person was killed, one of the hostages was killed,

00:37:28.92 Ben that negotiations could continue but she ruled with advice that if two were killed that was evidence of a systematic pattern and they had to send in the SAS and they believed

00:37:41.38 alexei sayle ah that So as I mean, but ah what I gleaned, I remember from watching the documentary was that and it was certainly one of them was was a very, was very pro ah regime, Iranian regime and was very, um was very aggressive towards the host the terrorists.

00:37:58.35 alexei sayle Is that right?

00:37:59.17 Ben That is correct. he he yeah So this is a man called Abbas Lavassani, who was a press officer there.

00:38:00.24 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:38:01.64 talalaban Yeah.

00:38:04.87 Ben He was an absolutely devoted follower of Khomeini. He was a he was sort of extreme Islamist. And moreover, again, this is only this will only just now be revealed, he was actually an officer in the Revolutionary Guard.

00:38:12.75 talalaban Oh.

00:38:19.51 Ben He was part of the Ayatollah's praetorian team. And he was a spy. He was there to spy on the other members of the embassy and make sure that they were sticking to the rules. So he was ah he was ah he was in a way as much of an extremist as any of the gunmen. and And perhaps inevitably, it came to a confrontation between he and the deputy leader of the gunmen, a man called Jassim. And when Jassim started writing anti-Ayatollah graffiti all over the walls of the embassy,

00:38:47.76 Ben um Abbas-Lavassani confronted him and said, if you want a martyr, I'm your martyr, martyrdom was very deeply kind of embedded in the whole Shiite tradition.

00:38:55.97 talalaban Yeah.

00:38:58.80 Ben And that is what he became.

00:38:59.08 alexei sayle Yes

00:39:00.32 Ben I mean, when it came, when when when it became are totally, the tension just reached a cracking point at the end. um He was executed. He was taken downstairs and tied to the banisters and killed. Now, what made that complicated was that because MI5 and the police had got bugs inside the embassy, they could hear what was going on. They heard this gunfire taking place, but they couldn't be sure the that anyone had been killed. And it wasn't for another six hours

00:39:32.04 Ben they then heard another burst of gunfire and minutes after that the body of Abbas lani was pitched onto the front doorstep now the police had by that point heard two sets of gunfire and one body and they believed that they must therefore be they were wrong as it happened they believed there must be two people who've been killed and that is the moment faithfully that

00:39:44.58 alexei sayle Right. yeah

00:39:55.15 Ben John Dello, the police commissioner, relayed to the to to Willie Whitelaw in the home office, said, we believe there are two people. We believe we've crossed a red line here. What do you want to do? And Thatcher at that point was driving back from Chequers.

00:40:10.02 Ben and Willie Whitelaw managed to contact her on the radio telephone, and from a lay-by north of High Wycombe, she gave authorization for this to go ahead. um And it was a pretty high-stakes gamble. I mean, they they genuinely thought it was going to get... The the terrorists, call them what you will, had had threatened to blow up the entire building.

00:40:32.07 talalaban Yeah.

00:40:32.03 Ben the the The police had no evidence that they had not done that.

00:40:36.23 alexei sayle Right.

00:40:36.19 Ben I mean, there was a decent likelihood that the minute the first shot was fired, the whole thing, the whole building could go up in flames with everybody inside it.

00:40:43.23 alexei sayle All right.

00:40:45.33 Ben So this was a gamble but to put it.

00:40:47.98 alexei sayle And by that, by then to allow your father was, a was out, wasn't he?

00:40:52.61 talalaban Yeah, he fell ill the day before the SAS stormed in.

00:40:56.67 Ben That's right.

00:40:57.97 talalaban um I think the stress got to him, you know, having

00:40:57.92 Ben Yeah.

00:41:02.80 talalaban spending half the time with his head out the window with a gun on the back of his head ah translating and um and watching Lavasani hell-bent on becoming a martyr. I think yeah at that moment, there was a moment he ripped his shirt open and said, make me a martyr. i'll be um And then my dad tackled him to the ground and slapped him in the face and said, you're going to get us all fucking killed. Can you stop?

00:41:29.35 talalaban um

00:41:30.30 Ben Again, a and if Mustafa hadn't done that, God only knows what would have happened.

00:41:30.79 talalaban and

00:41:35.70 talalaban Yeah. and ah And I think Dad managed to secretly publish in The Guardian from within the, from within.

00:41:45.03 Ben but he was

00:41:45.76 talalaban He telefaxed, what's the technology that he had at the time?

00:41:48.74 Ben select there was a still a telex operating in there and the gunman did allow Mustafa and one other person to to to send message one message out and that it was actually to his home um to to to the Beirut area Arab language newspaper that he worked for so yeah I mean they were able to get them out I mean Mustafa your father was actually

00:41:55.35 talalaban Telexed.

00:42:02.13 talalaban A saffir. A saffir, yeah.

00:42:12.45 talalaban He didn't get something in the Guardian or was that after the...

00:42:14.64 Ben i think I think they copied it.

00:42:16.60 talalaban Oh, right, yeah.

00:42:16.87 Ben Great British tradition. I think they they they ripped it off and pretended they'd got it. the guard The Guardian actually, though, did manage to make direct contact, a man called John Hooper, just by chance kept ringing the telex number. And astonishingly, it was picked up to his astonishment at the other end.

00:42:30.88 Ben um And he got the world-exclusive interview with the lead gunman. Soon after that, the police cut off all contact with it. They cut off all the telephones and all the the telex machines.

00:42:36.63 talalaban Wow.

00:42:38.84 Ben But your father was was actually chosen by Taufik. to be released. And it followed an all-night conversation that the two of them had had about Arab politics. And it is my belief, I haven't put this in the book, but I do think there is something, it's quite likely that Tawfiq wanted your father to survive because he believed that of all the people inside the embassy, your father was going to give them the fairest hearing.

00:43:09.67 Ben that he was likely to it when he told his and this is true he did i mean when he left the embassy he he he was fair to all sides and i think taufic recognized that and i think he was ill i think he had also fallen ill but he wasn't that we wasn't the only person who was ill inside there and he probably wasn't illest um but i think taufic wanted him to go and and wanted him to be and it was partly a sort of

00:43:24.94 talalaban yeah Interesting.

00:43:32.09 Ben and expression of goodwill. He wanted to keep the negotiations going at that point. um The police had demanded the release of a hostage in return for broadcasting this statement and your father was chosen as the person to do it but I think it was also because as a fellow Arab the gunmen believed that he would be fair to them.

00:43:41.91 talalaban That's

00:43:52.58 alexei sayle So what happens next?

00:43:53.71 talalaban wild.

00:43:55.52 alexei sayle So they so so Thatcher gives the go ahead for the building to be stormed and it is.

00:43:59.27 Ben gives the guy Yeah, the SAS unbeknown to anybody but about three people in the police command, the SAS had been in the next door building from the beginning.

00:44:10.71 alexei sayle All right.

00:44:11.96 Ben A team of heavily armed SAS were ready to go right from the beginning. Within hours of the attack, they had moved into the College of General Practitioners, the GP's um central headquarters, which just happened to be right next to the embassy.

00:44:28.85 Ben And they had a full plan in place, a thing called Operation Nimrod, which had been drawn up by a man called hector Major Hector Gullen, who was the commander of B Squadron of the SAS. And it's a I've got it. I mean, it's an amazing document. And it is a six-pronged attack on the embassy, from behind, from in front, and from above.

00:44:49.76 Ben um And the idea was that one team would assault the front of the embassy by blowing out the armour-plated windows and then blasting their way inside. A second team would abseil down the back of the building to the second floor balcony, believing that that is where the hostages were being held. As it happened, they weren't. That was a failure of intelligence. They'd actually been moved to another room.

00:45:13.15 talalaban Oh gosh.

00:45:13.62 Ben At the same time, yet another team would explode a bomb in the middle of the embassy, um lowering it down the central shaft of the embassy. which which was above a kind of metal and glass atrium, they believed that the gunman, Taufik, if they could make sure that he was on the field telephone, so they put a special telephone in, which was also a bug, by the way, it had an eavesdropping device in it, they put a special telephone in with a measured cord so that they would know that if Taufik was speaking on that telephone, they had a pretty clear idea of where he was.

00:45:47.66 Ben In fact, they got it wrong. They got it wrong, but he wasn't where he was supposed to be. He'd actually wound the wire up to the first floor. So when this bolt went off, two and a half tons of glass and metal went smashing down into the hallway, they believed they were going to be able to flatten him. They didn't. They missed him.

00:46:04.77 Ben he was in that he was in a different place at the same time the basement team was going to go in through the basement and and yet another team was going to come down through the interior shaft and go in through the internal windows so it was going to be attacked literally from all sides and the signal for this was the bomb going off in the central shaft it didn't go exactly according to plan i'm not sure how much you want me to give away of what actually happened but

00:46:07.07 talalaban Huh.

00:46:22.34 alexei sayle right.

00:46:27.83 alexei sayle Well, it's you don't want to spoil it.

00:46:31.29 Ben Well, i will have thought the final assault, which takes up one third of this book, covers 11 minutes.

00:46:31.43 alexei sayle Let the readers.

00:46:37.11 alexei sayle Right.

00:46:40.49 alexei sayle Right.

00:46:40.95 Ben That's roughly the time it takes to cook a hard-boiled egg.

00:46:44.23 alexei sayle Okay.

00:46:44.68 Ben um So it's over very, very fast, but there are there are about six or seven different gun battles taking place simultaneously around this building. And you know one of the incredibly lucky things I've had is that the the Ministry of Defense allowed the surviving SAS soldiers, of whom there are roughly about a dozen left,

00:47:09.98 Ben to talk to me, and they've never talked before. They've never been allowed to speak openly about what happened. So I've been able to piece together those 11 minutes more or less.

00:47:21.85 Ben um and I mean, I wouldn't let me not blow my, not second by second, but certainly minute by minute, I can tell the story of what was going on inside them.

00:47:26.04 alexei sayle yeah that's very exciting all the terrorists are killed apart from one is that right where's he now is he still in prison in britain now

00:47:35.47 talalaban who No.

00:47:35.77 Ben That's right.

00:47:38.49 Ben No, no, he's out. He's out. He served his time um and is now is now at liberty. Yes, I mean, he survived by... din't and And at this point, I have to make this point very clearly. The the job of the SAS was not to kill terrorists. The job of the SAS was to liberate the hostages.

00:47:57.80 Ben If that required neutralizing, to use the word the terrorists, that is what they were authorized to do.

00:48:02.37 alexei sayle Mhm.

00:48:04.72 Ben So it's a very important distinction is because they're one of the myths that persists about this is that somehow the SAS went in with a plan to execute people.

00:48:13.32 alexei sayle Yes.

00:48:14.26 Ben It did not. Its job was to to to capture the hostages if possible, the hostage takers if possible, but above all to release the hostages. And in order of priority, you know, the policeman was to be gone out first. This is the age we lived in then.

00:48:30.32 Ben The police were to be got out first, then the British citizens, then the foreigners who were non-Iranians, and then the Iranians, you know the people of color.

00:48:38.66 alexei sayle but Yeah.

00:48:39.11 Ben we would If they had to be got out, well, fine. you know i'm I'm exaggerating, of course. But there was there was a list of priorities here. um So the the surviving gunman, a man called Fauzi Badavi Nejad,

00:48:51.03 Ben managed to survive really by hiding among the hostages. um He was brought out um among the women. ah He'd been guarding the women for most of the time. In fact, he he had a sort of semi flirtatious time with them. The others all called him the ladies man. He got on very well with with the women. And there is a key moment at the end of this story when it looked as if Some believe that the SAS, once they'd identified who Fauzi was, were were preparing to drag him back inside.

00:49:21.36 Ben That's never been proven. But undoubtedly, some of the women hostages believed that was what was going to happen. And they gathered around him ah to and said, he is our brother. He's been kind to us. So I mean, Fauzi Nejad survived by the skin of his teeth.

00:49:33.09 talalaban Jesus.

00:49:35.65 Ben I mean, the truth is, of course, the SAS did not drag him back in and did not try to do that. But you know it's ah it's a key moment.

00:49:40.06 alexei sayle Alright.

00:49:41.75 Ben yeah yeah

00:49:43.50 talalaban And while he was towards the end of his ah prison sentence, he wrote my dad a letter begging for forgiveness and apologizing.

00:49:52.62 Ben o

00:49:56.08 talalaban And my dad couldn't bring himself to forgive him. He wrote him back and said, thank you for apologizing. I understand your point of view. I understand you were young, blah, blah, and that you've served your time in prison, but the I can't ever forgive you for what you put us through.

00:50:11.41 Ben I think that's a very reasonable

00:50:14.16 talalaban It's wild.

00:50:14.23 Ben position on the part of your father. I mean, he ass he wrote to pretty much everybody who was still alive, um asking and asking them to to forgive him. I mean, forgiveness is a funny thing, isn't it?

00:50:25.97 Ben I don't really, in a way, I don't really understand what forgiveness is. I think it's one of those things that is often knocked around as a sort of easy way of making people at ease with their conscience.

00:50:29.43 talalaban Yeah.

00:50:38.95 Ben Fousy is not at ease, I suspect, with his conscience. He knows, but he was incredibly naive. He was 21, or I think he was 20, yeah, I think he was just 21. he He didn't know what he was doing.

00:50:51.71 Ben i'm not trying to make it I'm not trying to make excuses for him. He should never have done that, but he was an idiot.

00:50:54.32 talalaban No no.

00:50:56.56 Ben I mean he was you know he wasn't a i don't think he was a man.

00:50:56.77 talalaban Yeah.

00:50:59.38 talalaban Did you speak to him?

00:51:01.00 Ben um I've spoken to lots of people in this story, and i you know um i don't I'm not really revealing who I've spoken to and who I haven't, but his is an interesting case. we When we're 21,

00:51:13.21 Ben We all do so really stupid things. And we think we're invulnerable. We think we're just going to live forever. And i don't want I do not want to pretend that what he did is excusable in any way.

00:51:26.05 Ben It really isn't. But he did serve his time. He served a very, very long sentence ah for being involved in a murderous terrorist plot. So so you know if justice works, justice works.

00:51:38.29 Ben But I completely understand why your father would would feel that he couldn't

00:51:39.27 talalaban yeah Yeah, I was always baffled by it because yeah, I guess forgiveness is a concept of We decide what the definition of it is when we do it.

00:51:52.23 talalaban But um I was like, so you accept his apology, you thank him for the apology, but you're not forgiving him. And I was always a bit baffled by this by what that actually meant. But I think it was just a boundary he set.

00:52:02.66 talalaban It was just ah a red line, a line he drew in the sand. He couldn't he couldn't go that far.

00:52:05.60 Ben Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, I can't understand. How would you, I mean, let me ask you a question tonight. I mean, how, I've talked to your your sister and your mother about this, but I'd love your thought on it. I mean, how did your father cope with the experience, do you think?

00:52:22.09 talalaban um for the following years he was traumatized like a loud noise would would trigger him and he'd go run and hide in a cupboard you know um if he was ever alone at home you know while my mom was out with the kids or something he would he would hide behind doors until she returns like he did not like being alone

00:52:41.15 Ben Hmm.

00:52:47.79 talalaban It's he was not, you know, you mentioned he would trained in the Palestinian camps, as but he wasn't a soldier ever.

00:52:53.45 Ben yeah No.

00:52:54.33 talalaban He was an activist um and a supporter of certain campaigns, but he was never a soldier and he never advocated violence and never, ah you know, he'd obviously being from the Middle East at a certain time, he'd seen his first share of shit, you know, and

00:53:13.30 Ben Yeah. Yeah.

00:53:14.47 talalaban You know, he'd been in and he'd been in prison and been beaten up in prison by the guards and tortured and stuff, but he'd never experienced something quite like that. And later, you know, into his later years, so I was born seven years after this, um ah but ah in his later years, he still didn't like gun violence.

00:53:35.65 talalaban He didn't like it. He didn't like it being glorified and in film and TV.

00:53:37.18 Ben Yeah.

00:53:40.59 talalaban um Yeah, it's it's it it stayed with him forever and I think it gave him, you know, he had chronic ah illness in his in his guts, in his tummy and um I think that was likely triggered by the stress of the situation because, you know, the timeline lines up quite well with that.

00:53:42.74 Ben do he ever allowed ah know

00:53:57.13 Ben yeah

00:53:59.75 Ben yeah yeah Do you think he ever allowed himself a measure of pride, though?

00:54:01.50 talalaban um

00:54:07.27 Ben Because the truth is, Mustafa actually was a very, very i from what I know of him, what I've read about him, what I've written about him, was an extremely brave man. and And bravery comes in all sorts of unexpected ways.

00:54:21.42 Ben people do People find, and courage is a sort of odd thing, because we we all like to think that we would be brave in the moment that we do the right thing, that somehow we have whatever, but what's that terrible thing, the right stuff in us, but nobody really knows.

00:54:29.83 talalaban Yeah.

00:54:35.46 Ben And Mustafa Karkuti was astonishingly brave in a way that he didn't have to be. I mean, not everybody in that building stepped up and said, okay, I will,

00:54:47.43 Ben I will I will act as the interlocutor here. I will do what I can. And when he left the building, I mean, Sim Harris, for one, when he was when Mustafa was release said we are in real trouble now without Mustafa, you know, we've we've lost our main person here.

00:55:01.97 Ben So I do hope that although I mean, obviously they were all traumatized horribly by this, that at some point in his life, he may have been able to look back and think, actually, when the chips were down, I did something pretty good.

00:55:15.26 Ben I did something pretty well.

00:55:16.18 talalaban We're all very proud of what he did in there. he wasn't yeah um He wasn't a proud man. He was so humble, but he was very aware that he saved some lives in there. um yeah Sadly you didn't get to meet him, yeah he passed away in 2020 and he would have loved to have been more involved in this but so glad he had those writings and yeah he was never proud and like he didn't he never puffed up his chest about it it was always he's just very pragmatic dude he was a very pragmatic guy

00:55:54.33 Ben Well, he's one of the, I mean, it's a terribly overused word, but he is one of the unsung heroes of this story.

00:55:54.47 talalaban um

00:56:01.86 talalaban yeah and mate you write about ah ah Your writing style is so good if our listeners aren't aware.

00:56:01.74 Ben i mean and on

00:56:07.13 talalaban um ah I was reading your introduction to my dad and every character when they come up in the story you give them a nice passage and introduce their kind of background and bring them into the story.

00:56:21.09 talalaban And it's it's so nicely done. it's It's like your writing style is like non-fictional novels almost, isn't it? And it's really beautifully done.

00:56:28.00 Ben Well, that's sort of in a way what...

00:56:29.58 talalaban And i when i when I got to the bit about my but dad's introduction, i it set me off. I started trembling and it was it was really beautifully done. And just seeing his life kind of in one or two paragraphs, he kind of summarized it really nicely.

00:56:43.91 talalaban And um yeah, thanks for that, man.

00:56:46.21 Ben ah well, thank you, Tom. I'm touched by that. I mean, these stories are... are i you know I suppose if they do one thing, they ask a simple question, one that none of us can really answer with without knowing. But you know, these are people, these 26 hostages and the police and the government and even the SAS were thrown into a situation none of them could have anticipated.

00:57:09.45 Ben No, but you can't train for this. You can't train to be hostage. You can't, you know, imagine how much training you do as a hostage you negotiator. You can't can't know what will happen. And I guess this book, like many of my books, I hope, asks a very simple question, which is, what would you do?

00:57:26.75 Ben I mean, I never express it openly that way, but which of the people in this story would you have been?

00:57:29.01 alexei sayle Yeah. Yes.

00:57:33.52 Ben Would you have sat tight? Would you have tried to get out? Would you have been the have-a-go hero? Would you have sat there for six days like Trevor lot with a gun at your side knowing that you you might be able to change?

00:57:44.76 Ben I mean, which would you have been? i Don't ask me that question because I've written the book and I don't know the answer, but yeah I guess that's what, in a way, I hope that's what these sort of stories do.

00:57:49.26 alexei sayle No, I suspect no.

00:57:54.45 alexei sayle Right. Well, I think a good place to end. What's the book called?

00:58:00.46 Ben It's called The Siege, very simply, The Siege.

00:58:02.20 alexei sayle All right. the And it's published. It will be published. It's published now.

00:58:06.33 Ben It's published in September.

00:58:06.76 alexei sayle ah

00:58:07.41 Ben No, it's out on the 14th of September. You can pre-order now.

00:58:11.43 alexei sayle so Yeah, we will.

00:58:11.43 Ben ah and hopeful will be Available the available bookshops. So yeah, no, son it's been ah it's been an absolute, you know, it's been a joy to write this book. I was very, I was nervous of it to begin with because this is a story that many people, including many of the participants, believe they know back to front.

00:58:29.10 Ben But the truth is, they often, that's exactly how they do know it is back to front.

00:58:29.27 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:58:32.60 alexei sayle Right.

00:58:32.69 Ben You know, the some of the things that they believe to have happened simply did not happen.

00:58:37.28 alexei sayle Great.

00:58:38.43 Ben um You know, and so i've it's there's been a certain amount of demythologizing in this story, which some will find will find difficult.

00:58:39.36 alexei sayle Yes.

00:58:46.90 Ben Some of the things even the participants have believed for many, many years,

00:58:47.58 alexei sayle Yeah.

00:58:52.74 Ben they will They will get a different picture. I'm not necessarily saying that mine is absolutely right, but they will definitely get a different picture from the one that they may have they may have lived with.

00:58:54.90 alexei sayle Yes.

00:59:00.69 alexei sayle Right.

00:59:01.43 talalaban Well, just pause.

00:59:02.61 alexei sayle Extraordinary. Well, that yeah.

00:59:04.95 talalaban We're about to say goodbye and wrap up. I didn't tell you earlier, Ben, when we say goodbye, I need to don't close the website, please. I need to stop the recording and let everything upload. All right.

00:59:14.17 Ben Understood, yep, no, understood, lovely.

00:59:15.11 talalaban Okay. Thanks. Carry on, Alex.

00:59:17.79 alexei sayle Thank you very much, Ben. This will make ah an amazing piece of whatever, it's podcasting, I suppose, whatever, whatever we call this thing that this is, it will, I think it'll be a extraordinary, we very different, slightly different from us.

00:59:23.93 talalaban Yeah.

00:59:33.78 talalaban First time I've cried on the podcast, so thanks for that Ben.

00:59:36.75 alexei sayle We usually, we specialize in either comedians or dour Marxist theoreticians. So, now no, no.

00:59:41.70 Ben I'm afraid that neither of those involved in this story. But it just like it's been a great pleasure, guys.

00:59:46.47 alexei sayle So,

00:59:48.06 Ben Thank you.

00:59:48.26 alexei sayle Yeah, no, it's been extraordinary. It's been amazing the whole hour has been, yeah, unprecedented for me.

00:59:52.33 Ben like Thank you so much. or

00:59:54.82 alexei sayle Thank you, Ben. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you to Lao for arranging this as well. she

00:59:59.57 Ben here here And thank you Mustafa Kakudi, your dad, for the role that he played.

01:00:01.90 alexei sayle Yeah, yeah, much, much missed.

01:00:02.89 talalaban Oh, don't stop. Thank you. Yes, indeed. Thank you, everyone.