The Iranian Embassy Siege: Six Days That Shocked the World and Changed Britain Forever
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It was a bank holiday Monday evening, and millions of Britons were settling in to watch snooker. Within minutes, their television sets would show something none of them had ever seen before: armed men in black balaclavas abseiling down the front of a burning London building in real time. The Iranian Embassy siege of 1980 wasn't just a hostage crisis. It was a defining moment that transformed the SAS from a secretive regiment into a global legend, launched the career of one of Britain's most celebrated journalists, and gave Margaret Thatcher's government one of its greatest propaganda wins. And it had its roots in a conflict most people in Britain had barely heard of.
What Started It All: The Little-Known Conflict Behind the Siege
The six gunmen who stormed the Iranian Embassy at 16 Princes Gate, South Kensington, at 11:30am on 30 April 1980 weren't random terrorists. They were members of the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan (DRFLA), Iranian Arabs from the province of Khuzestan in southwest Iran, a region sitting on vast oil reserves that had made Iran wealthy under the Shah but whose Arab-speaking population felt colonised and oppressed.
After the 1979 Iranian Revolution swept Ayatollah Khomeini to power, Arab protests in Khuzestan were violently suppressed. Hundreds were shot in the streets. Thousands were imprisoned. The siege leader, a 27-year-old known as "Oan" (his real name was Towfiq Ibrahim al-Rashidi), had been imprisoned and tortured by SAVAK, the Shah's feared secret police, and bore the physical scars to prove it. His brother Naji had been executed.
What's rarely discussed in popular accounts is just how deeply Iraqi intelligence had its fingerprints all over the operation. The siege had been wholly planned and organised by Saddam Hussein's Mukhabarat intelligence service, which had recruited and trained the gunmen as part of an escalating campaign of subversion against Iran. Iraq smuggled the weapons into Britain inside a diplomatic bag, and the entire operation was, as one historian put it, an early battle in the war between Iran and Iraq that would officially begin just five months later. The six men weren't freedom fighters acting alone. They were proxies in a geopolitical conflict that would eventually kill half a million people.
The Gunmen Arrive in London
Using Iraqi passports, Oan and three other members of the DRFLA arrived in London on 31 March 1980 and rented a flat in Earl's Court, West London, claiming they had met by chance on the flight. Over the following weeks the group grew, with as many as a dozen men staying in the flat at certain points. They were careful. On the morning of 30 April they told their landlord they were heading to Bristol and wouldn't need the flat anymore, arranging for their belongings to be shipped back to Iraq. They left at 9:30am, collected their weapons from a prearranged location, and arrived outside the embassy just before 11:30.
Their arsenal, predominantly Soviet-made, included pistols, submachine guns, and hand grenades. In their holdalls they also carried Browning automatic handguns loaded with Winchester hollow-point ammunition. Six young men carrying enough firepower to start a small war walked up to a grand Kensington townhouse on a Wednesday morning and simply walked in.
PC Trevor Lock: The Policeman Who Ate Toothpaste to Survive
The first person they encountered was Police Constable Trevor Lock, 41, of the Diplomatic Protection Group. Lock had been looking forward to a treat that evening: perfume from Harrods and a West End show for his wife Doreen. Instead, he looked up from an Iranian coffee with the embassy doorman, saw a face at the glass door panel, assumed it was a student, and moved to let him in.
The man pulled out a machine pistol and fired. Lock was hit by flying glass. Within minutes, all six gunmen had seized the building and taken 26 people hostage.
Miraculously, during the initial search of the hostages, Lock's Smith and Wesson .38 revolver was missed. He kept his police overcoat on throughout the entire six-day siege, telling the gunmen it was to "preserve his image" as a police officer. His real reason was to hide the gun tucked underneath it.
He also refused every offer of food for the full six days. The reason was straightforward and grimly practical: if he had to go to the toilet and a gunman escorted him, he might have to drop his trousers, and the gun would be seen. He went without food for six days. Towards the end of the siege, someone handed him a tube of toothpaste. He squeezed every drop into his mouth. He later described it as delicious.
Lock had planned the whole siege to use his weapon at some point but agonised over it constantly. When the gunmen eventually led press officer Abbas Lavasani away to be executed, Lock stood helplessly nearby as Lavasani told him, "Please Mr Trevor, don't worry. I'm not afraid to die." Lock heard three shots shortly afterwards. He didn't draw his gun. He would later say he didn't like himself for it.
PC Trevor Lock died on 30 March 2025, just one day before the 45th anniversary of the siege beginning. He was 85.
Inside the Embassy: 26 Hostages, Six Captors
The 26 people taken hostage were a remarkably varied group. Most were Iranian embassy staff, but the group also included two BBC employees who'd come to apply for visas: Chris Cramer, a sound organiser, and Sim Harris, a sound recordist. There was a Syrian journalist named Mustapha Karkouti who'd been there for an interview, a British-Pakistani editor, a carpet dealer, a banker, an embassy cook, and Ron Morris, a 60-something Londoner from Battersea who'd worked at the Iranian Embassy in various capacities since 1947.
The gunmen demanded the release of 91 Arab prisoners held in Iranian jails and their own safe passage out of the UK. The British government's position was set from the beginning by Margaret Thatcher: they were going nowhere. UK law applied. Safe passage wasn't on the table.
On day two, Cramer managed to bluff his way out by dramatically exaggerating symptoms of an existing illness. He staggered to freedom and immediately briefed police on the layout of the building and the positions of the gunmen. His colleague Sim Harris remained inside and became an important go-between during negotiations.
Karkouti, the Syrian journalist, became ill on day five. There were genuine suspicions among the hostages that the police had spiked the food being sent in. The police commander John Dellow had indeed consulted a doctor about whether drugging the gunmen's food was viable before concluding it wasn't practical. So the food was clean. Karkouti was genuinely unwell and was released.
The Negotiators, the Noise, and the Ruse About Aircraft
Behind the scenes, the police were running a brilliantly improvised intelligence operation. On the evening of day two, one of the gunmen heard suspicious sounds coming through the wall from the Ethiopian Embassy next door. Engineers were drilling holes to plant listening devices. Lock, when asked what the noise was, calmly told the gunman it was mice.
The police then instructed British Gas to start drilling in the road outside to create cover noise. The gunmen grew more agitated, not less, so the drilling stopped. Instead, the British Airports Authority was contacted, and planes approaching Heathrow were diverted to fly low over the embassy. The noise of low-flying aircraft drowned out the sound of the engineers finishing their work.
On day three, an SAS team quietly crept across the embassy roof in darkness, discovered a skylight, and unlocked it. They also attached abseil ropes to the chimneys for later use. Nobody inside noticed.
On day four, Foreign Office officials tried to convince Arab ambassadors from Algeria, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria, and Qatar to help broker a deal. The Jordanian ambassador refused immediately. The others consulted their governments and stalled. The British government wouldn't allow the ambassadors to offer safe passage, which was the only thing that might actually have worked, so the talks went nowhere.
The Killing That Made the Assault Inevitable
By day six, the gunman Oan was exhausted, frustrated, and increasingly convinced the British were stalling. He was right. At 13:00 on 5 May, he threatened to kill a hostage unless he could speak to an Arab ambassador within 45 minutes.
Abbas Lavasani, the embassy's chief press officer, was a devoted follower of Khomeini who had been provoking his captors throughout the siege. He reportedly volunteered himself as the martyr. He was taken downstairs, tied to the bannisters, and shot three times. His body was thrown out of the front door at around 19:00 that evening.
A forensic pathologist examined the body at the scene and estimated Lavasani had been dead for at least an hour, meaning he'd been killed at around 18:00, before the final shots fired during a telephone conversation with an imam. Police initially feared two hostages had been killed.
This was the moment the operation shifted from negotiation to assault. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir David McNee formally requested that control be handed to the army. Thatcher agreed immediately. At 19:07, the police commander signed over authority to SAS Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Rose. Within minutes, Operation Nimrod was authorised.
Operation Nimrod: Seventeen Minutes of Television History
The SAS had been ready for days. Two teams, Red Team and Blue Team, had rehearsed constantly. The soldiers had trained so intensively that SAS trooper Robin Horsfall later admitted that they didn't actually want the negotiations to succeed. "We wanted them to stay there so we could go in and hit them," he said. "That was what we lived for and trained for."
The SAS had departed Bradbury Lines in Hereford in seven white Range Rovers at irregular intervals from three different exits to avoid attracting attention, with men lying under blankets on the back seats. They were followed by two Ford Transit vans and two large yellow furniture trucks, carrying 45 soldiers in civilian clothes and enough weaponry to fight a medium-sized war.
At 19:23 on 5 May 1980, the assault began.
Four men from Red Team abseiled from the roof down the rear of the building. Another team lowered a stun grenade through the skylight that had been unlocked three days earlier. Almost immediately, something went wrong: one of the abseiling soldiers became entangled in his rope and dangled helplessly against the building's exterior. His colleagues couldn't use explosives to get in without risking injuring him, so they smashed the windows with sledgehammers instead.
A fire started during the assault, travelling up the curtains and out of the second-floor windows. The tangled soldier was severely burned before a second wave of abseilers cut him free. He fell onto a balcony below, made his way inside, and continued the mission. He was later treated at St Stephen's Hospital in Fulham and made a full recovery.
Blue Team, slightly behind schedule, blew in a first-floor window at the front of the building. Sim Harris, who'd just run into the room, had to dive for cover. His subsequent escape across the first-floor balcony was captured on camera and became one of the most iconic images of the decade.
Inside, Lock tackled Oan on the first-floor landing the moment the soldiers appeared, holding him in a bear hug to stop him attacking the SAS team. He finally drew his revolver and held it to Oan's head, reportedly telling him, "It's your fault, you bastard. You caused all this." Then an SAS soldier shouted Lock's name and told him to get clear. Oan was shot dead.
The gunmen holding the male hostages in the telex room opened fire on their captives, killing Ali Akbar Samadzadeh and wounding two others. Samadzadeh was a temporary employee at the embassy, one of the most junior people in the building, and the only hostage to die during the assault itself rather than before it. He hadn't been part of the embassy's permanent staff and was simply in the wrong place at an extraordinarily wrong time. While Lavasani had in some sense chosen his fate by volunteering himself as a martyr, Samadzadeh had no such story. He was killed in the chaos of the final moments by the very men who had held him captive for six days, with rescue literally seconds away One of the remaining gunmen tried to hide a hand grenade as the SAS entered. A soldier pushed him to the bottom of the stairs, where two others shot him. Another gunman hid among the hostages as they were evacuated, was identified in the garden by Sim Harris, and was dragged away by the SAS.
The entire raid lasted seventeen minutes. Five of the six gunmen were dead. The sole survivor, Fowzi Badavi Nejad, eventually went to trial and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was paroled in 2008 after 27 years. Because the British government accepts he'd face torture or execution in Iran, he couldn't be deported. He now lives somewhere in south London under an assumed identity.
The TV Battle Behind the Cameras
The assault was broadcast live on all three channels, but the full story of who got it on air first has only recently been properly documented. For decades the accepted version was murky at best. It's now been confirmed that ITN on ITV got there first.
ITN's outside broadcast director David Goldsmith had secretly installed a live-linked camera at the back of the building and was shouting "Put me to air, put me to air, this is incredible!" down the line as the assault began. ITV went live at the end of Coronation Street. The BBC interrupted its snooker coverage approximately six minutes later, broadcasting simultaneously on BBC One and BBC Two from 7:31pm.
The delay was later discussed at length in an internal BBC debrief two days after the siege. The head of BBC Drama Series, who had no responsibility for news, pointed out rather pointedly that "ITN seemed to have had some camera coverage that was nearer and better placed." The BBC's Controller of BBC Two didn't dispute it.
Kate Adie, who'd been called in early because the reporter on shift had gone to a dinner party, reported live and without a script from behind a car door as smoke bombs went off behind her and soldiers abseiled into the burning building. BBC executives praised her in that same debrief, noting that a female head of features "welcomed the fact it was taken for granted a woman reporter would cope as well as she had done."
Adie went on to become Chief News Correspondent for BBC News between 1989 and 2003, reporting from war zones around the world including Tiananmen Square, the Gulf War, Rwanda, and Bosnia. The Iranian Embassy siege was the night that made her. She later said it was simply a matter of luck: she'd come in early to cover someone else's shift, and it happened.
David Goldsmith and his ITN team won a BAFTA for their coverage the following year.
The Aftermath: What the Siege Changed Forever
The impact of Operation Nimrod spread in almost every direction.
The SAS went overnight from being a little-known, somewhat embattled regiment that had been at genuine risk of disbandment to becoming the most famous special forces unit in the world. Applications flooded in from across the armed forces. Both the TA regiments linked to the SAS (21 SAS and 23 SAS) received hundreds more applications than in any previous year. The SAS Director, Brigadier Peter de la Billière, remarked wryly that applicants seemed convinced that a balaclava and a submachine gun would be handed to them over the counter.
Foreign governments started requesting SAS assistance with their own counter-terrorism training programmes. It became genuinely fashionable for politicians to be seen associating with the regiment. The images of black-clad soldiers in gas masks became a global symbol of elite military capability.
For Margaret Thatcher, the siege was a political gift. She'd authorised the assault immediately and without hesitation. The success reinforced her reputation as a leader who wouldn't capitulate to terrorism. She visited the SAS at Regent's Park Barracks afterwards, reportedly still wearing her Estée Lauder Youth Dew perfume according to one soldier's vivid recollection. Denis Thatcher allegedly expressed mild disappointment that one gunman had survived.
PC Trevor Lock received the George Medal, the UK's second-highest civil honour, along with the Freedom of the City of London and a motion in the House of Commons. Warrant Officer Class 1 Tommy Goodyear received the Queen's Gallantry Medal for shooting a terrorist who was apparently about to throw a grenade into a crowd of hostages.
The embassy building itself didn't reopen until December 1993, after Britain and Iran finally agreed that the UK would repair the London embassy while Iran paid to fix the British Embassy in Tehran, which had been damaged during the revolution.
The surviving gunman Fowzi Nejad was tried and convicted in 1981. He became eligible for parole in 2005 but wasn't released until 2008, partly due to the political complications of his status as a foreign national who couldn't be safely deported. PC Lock personally wrote to the Home Office to oppose his release.
The Conspiracy That Complicated Everything
The most neglected aspect of the entire saga is what it revealed about the coming Iran-Iraq War. The siege took place on 30 April 1980. Iraq's full-scale invasion of Iran began on 22 September 1980, just under five months later.
The operation was wholly planned and organised by Saddam Hussein's intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, as part of a rapidly escalating series of violent incidents Iraq was staging in the first half of 1980 as a prelude to its invasion. The DRFLA's cause, the autonomy of Khuzestan's Arab population, was used by Iraq as a convenient vehicle for destabilising Iran. Once the war began, the Khuzestani cause became irrelevant, the DRFLA dissolved into obscurity, and the men who died at Princes Gate were eventually forgotten as proxies of a conflict much larger than themselves.
Iran, for its part, accused the British and American governments of orchestrating the entire siege as revenge for the ongoing American hostage crisis in Tehran. The Iranian government declared the two hostages killed to be martyrs for the revolution, and the siege poisoned British-Iranian relations for years.
Quick Facts You Might Not Know
The snooker connection: The BBC was broadcasting the Embassy World Snooker Championship final when the assault began, featuring Cliff Thorburn against Alex Higgins. Viewers across Britain later recalled switching from snooker to the siege and back again. The championship's sponsor, fittingly, was Embassy cigarettes.
JFK's old neighbours: The Iranian Embassy at 16 Princes Gate sat next door to where John F. Kennedy had lived when his father was the US Ambassador to Britain. The Ethiopian Embassy was on the other side.
The hidden camera: The ITN camera that captured the rear of the assault had been secretly installed by technicians who posed as guests of a local resident to get past the police cordon. Nobody had authorised it.
The SAS's first counter-terrorism deployment: The CRW Wing's first overseas deployment had come during the 1977 hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181, when two SAS officers were sent as liaison advisers to assist Germany's GSG 9. Operation Nimrod was their first domestic deployment.
The weapons they brought: Each SAS soldier carried a submachine gun with four 30-round magazines, a 9mm pistol with two 12-round magazines, stun grenades, and a respirator. The MP5 submachine gun fires at around 800 rounds per minute, and the magazine empties in under three seconds.
Thatcher wasn't in the room: When the siege began, the emergency COBR committee was chaired by Home Secretary William Whitelaw because Thatcher was unavailable. She was kept informed throughout and gave all key decisions, but she wasn't physically present at COBR for most of the siege.
Legacy: A Moment That Keeps On Echoing
The Iranian Embassy siege is still generating content more than four decades later. Ben Macintyre's definitive account "The Siege" was published in 2024 and became a bestseller. A major Paramount+ documentary was produced around the same time. The event has inspired films, TV dramas, novels, and countless video games involving fictional SAS operations.
The 17-minute raid remains one of the most analysed special forces operations in history, studied in military academies worldwide and used as a template for counter-terrorism doctrine. The images of soldiers in black, gas masks on, fire behind them, abseiling into a burning building in central London on live television, are now part of the visual language of modern Britain.
The men who planned and carried out the operation are mostly in their 70s and 80s now. Some have written memoirs, given interviews, and acknowledged the moral complexities of what happened in the telex room. PC Trevor Lock, who went to work on what was supposed to be an ordinary shift and found himself at the centre of one of the most dramatic events in British history, died peacefully in March 2025.
He went six days without food for Britain. He never got his Harrods perfume trip or his West End show. Some could argue he deserved both.
Sources
National Army Museum: Iranian Embassy Siege [https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/iranian-embassy-siege]
Ben Macintyre, The Siege (Penguin, 2024)
London Review of Books, Patrick Cockburn: "Every Bottle Down the Drain" (April 2025) [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n07/patrick-cockburn/every-bottle-down-the-drain]
Wikipedia: Kate Adie [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Adie]
WBUR / Here & Now: Interview with Ben Macintyre on The Siege [https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/09/11/the-siege-iranian-embassy]
Grey Dynamics: Operation Nimrod [https://greydynamics.com/operation-nimrod-the-iranian-embassy-siege-2/]
RFERL: Dramatic Hostage Rescue in London [https://www.rferl.org/a/dramatic-hostage-rescue-in-london---the-iranian-embassy-siege-40-years-ago/30580814.html]
BBC Written Archives (cited in document 2, original BBC internal debrief minutes, 7 May 1980)
IWMF: Kate Adie profile [https://www.iwmf.org/community/kate-adie/]
