Six Days at Prince's Gate

A Story of Operation Nimrod, 30 April – 5 May 1980

A work of historical fiction

Part One: The Call-Out

The telephone in the corridor outside the squadron interest room rang twice before anyone moved, because in Hereford in the spring of 1980 a ringing telephone on a Wednesday lunchtime was, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, somebody's wife asking when he'd be home for tea.

Trooper Daniel Prosser was not thinking about telephones. He was thinking about the line of a nine-millimetre group he'd put into a photorealistic target twenty minutes earlier on the range behind the Kremlin — the operations block the regiment had nicknamed for its secrecy long before Daniel had passed Selection — and about whether Colour Sergeant Hollis had noticed that two rounds had drifted low-left. Hollis noticed everything. That was the trouble with Counter Revolutionary Warfare wing; a man could fire ten thousand rounds a year and Hollis would still find the one group that wasn't good enough.

It was Corporal 'Mac' Fenwick who took the call, and it was the shape of his shoulders when he set the receiver down — not fast, not dramatic, just a settling, like a man deciding not to waste energy — that told the room something had happened.

"Right," Fenwick said. "B Squadron. Battle kit, personal weapons, twenty minutes. We're wanted at Regent's Park."

Nobody asked wanted for what. In four years in the Regiment, Daniel Prosser had learned that the question answered itself soon enough, and that the men who asked it too early were usually the ones who hadn't yet understood that soldiering was ninety per cent waiting and ten per cent knowing exactly what to do when the waiting stopped.

It stopped now.

By the time the Range Rovers and the four-tonner were loaded — assault waistcoats, respirators, the black coveralls that lived folded at the bottom of every CRW man's grip, the Heckler & Koch MP5s racked and covered — the story had reached them in fragments over the radio and from a runner sent across from the ops room. Six armed men had stormed the Iranian Embassy at 16 Princes Gate, South Kensington, at half past eleven that morning. They were holding twenty-six people. Among the hostages was a uniformed constable of the Diplomatic Protection Group, a man named Trevor Lock, who had been standing his post on the embassy steps when the gunmen arrived and had not managed to get a radio call out before the door went in behind him.

Daniel had been to London twice in his life outside of this trade — once with his mother to see the Changing of the Guard when he was nine, once with a girl from Aldershot who hadn't lasted the year. Now he was going a third time, in the back of a covered lorry with twenty-two other men and enough ordnance to fight a small war, and nobody in the vehicle said very much at all.

Beside him, Sergeant 'Geordie' Watts checked the action of his Browning Hi-Power for the third time since Hereford, not because it needed checking but because his hands wanted something to do. Watts had been a corporal in the Dhofar mountains a decade before, hunting Adoo guerrillas in country so hard and so hot that men had gone through boot leather in a fortnight; he did not talk about it unless pressed, and nobody in the back of that lorry pressed him. What he said now, to nobody in particular, was: "Embassy job. Won't be quick, this one. Buildings like that, you go in when the talking's finished, not before." Nobody argued with him. Nobody had reason to.

Part Two: Prince's Gate

They did not go to the embassy. They went to Regent's Park Barracks first, and then, in the deepening dusk of that first evening, small groups of them were walked — never driven, never in convoy, always in ones and twos so as not to draw the eye of a television crew or a curious neighbour — into the building next door.

Number 15 Princes Gate belonged to the Royal College of General Practitioners, an elegant stucco-fronted house that shared a party wall with the embassy and, by extraordinary luck, an identical floor plan. Within hours of arrival, Royal Engineers were up in the roof space and down in the cellars with masonry drills, working in careful, muffled bursts timed to the traffic noise on Kensington Road so the sound would not carry through brick to the ears of the men holding the building next door. Where a drill broke through into a chimney breast or a disused flue, a fibre-optic probe went in behind it — dry-mouthed technicians from the intelligence corps calling them "gnomes" — no bigger than a pencil, feeding grainy black-and-white pictures and a thin trickle of sound back to a bank of monitors that within two days would tell B Squadron more about the inside of the Iranian Embassy than the men living in it could have told you themselves.

Daniel spent that first night, and most of the five that followed, in a borrowed room three floors up, sleeping in snatched hours on a camp bed between watches, waking to the low murmur of the surveillance detachment's headphones and the particular quality of tension that comes from a job with no fixed end date. Six days, as it turned out, though nobody could have told you that on the first.

Negotiation was the Metropolitan Police's show, and rightly so; the SAS were there, in the phrase every man in the building had heard a hundred times in briefings, "in support of the civil power" — ready if called upon, invisible if not. A police negotiator worked the telephone line into the embassy hour after hour, buying time in small, patient increments: water for the hostages, a little food, the broadcast of a communiqué on the BBC's nine o'clock bulletin in exchange for the release of a heavily pregnant hostage and, later, others judged by the gunmen to be of least use — a sick man, an Iranian journalist, a woman near her time. By the end of the fourth day, five of the original twenty-six had come out through the leaded double doors, blinking into the television lights on Princes Gate, and twenty-one remained.

The gunmen — six armed members of a group calling itself the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan, Khuzestani Arabs demanding autonomy for their province and the release of prisoners held in Iran — had a leader the hostages knew as "Salim," a hard, watchful man in his twenties who alternated between civility on the telephone and increasingly ragged threats as the days wore on and Whitehall gave him nothing of substance. Through the gnomes, B Squadron's intelligence cell built, room by room, a floor plan annotated not with furniture but with human beings: which room held how many gunmen, which held the hostages, where PC Lock — who had somehow kept his own service revolver concealed beneath his tunic throughout the entire ordeal, a fact none of them yet knew but would come to admire enormously — was being held, and where, on the second floor, the embassy's press attaché, a slight, anxious man named Abbas Lavasani, sat separated from the others because he had told his captors, more than once and with a stubbornness that would cost him everything, that he did not want special treatment as an official of the Iranian government he privately despised.

Daniel rehearsed. That was the truth of those five days, stripped of anything a newspaper might later make of it: rehearsal, endlessly, on a mocked-up timber frame the engineers threw together in a gymnasium at Regent's Park, its rooms taped out to match, as closely as the gnomes and the original architect's drawings could establish, the actual dimensions of 16 Princes Gate. They practised the assault by day and by torchlight, in respirators that fogged with breath and turned the world to a green-tinged blur, until the movement from stack to doorway to first man through was no longer a sequence of decisions but a kind of reflex, indistinguishable from instinct. They practised the placement of frame charges against window frames judged too strong to force by hand. They practised throwing the stun grenades — flash-bangs, the newest tool in the CRW wing's kit, capable of temporarily blinding and deafening anyone in an enclosed room without killing them — through a window ahead of the entry team, timed so the disorientation peaked in the half-second before the first man's boot came through the frame.

And they waited on the negotiators, because the plan, the assault, existed the whole time as a contingency the politicians devoutly hoped they would never need. Every man in that building next door understood the arithmetic of it: that they were the last resort precisely because the first resort — patience, talk, time — was so very much preferred by everyone whose job was not to go through the window.

Interlude: How a Man Becomes a Blade

On the second night, unable to sleep between watches, Daniel found himself thinking — as men in that trade often do, in the hours before a thing they cannot yet know the shape of — about Selection, five years behind him now but never far beneath the surface of his mind. It had taken him five months to become the man lying on a camp bed in a borrowed room above the Iranian Embassy, and he remembered most of it in the particular, unsentimental detail that only genuine suffering leaves behind.

He remembered the Fan Dance, the brutal preliminary test over Pen y Fan that broke men before they had even reached the real test beyond it, and the final march they called simply Endurance — sixty-four kilometres over the wet black shoulders of the Brecon Beacons, rifle and weighted bergen and rations, twenty hours to do it in or be quietly, unceremoniously RTU'd, Returned to Unit, with no explanation owed and none given. He remembered the Jungle Phase in Brunei that followed weeks later, learning to read a trail the way the Iban trackers read it, to move through triple-canopy forest making no more noise than the animals that lived there, and the strange, humbling lesson — hearts and minds, Woodhouse's old doctrine, older than Daniel himself — that half the war was won or lost in whether a headman trusted you enough to tell you the truth. He remembered the week of SERE that came last, hunted across open country and then broken down, deliberately and clinically, in the Resistance to Interrogation phase that taught a man exactly how much of himself he could keep from the people trying to take it, and exactly how much it would cost him to keep it.

He remembered the beret. Sand-coloured, the Excalibur badge catching the light in a way no other cap badge in the Army did, handed to him without speeches by a quartermaster who had seen a thousand men earn it and a great many more fail to. He remembered that his parachute wings had sat on his right shoulder for the better part of two years, the plain unearned position, until three operational missions — nothing so dramatic as this one, small deniable jobs in places that would never make a newspaper — had won him the right to move them to the left breast, above where medal ribbons would one day sit if he lived long enough to be given any.

None of that, he thought now, staring at the water-stained ceiling of a Royal College of General Practitioners guest room three floors above a street full of television vans, had prepared him for the particular, grinding patience of six days spent waiting to see whether other men's talking would make his own rehearsed violence unnecessary. Selection had taught him what he could endure. It had not taught him how strange it would feel to hope, every single hour, that none of it would be needed at all.

By the second day, the routine of the operation had settled into something almost domestic in its rhythm, for all that a war might start on the other side of a nine-inch party wall at any moment. Daniel and two others from his troop took it in turns on what the surveillance detachment called simply "the wall" — four-hour stretches sitting with a headset clamped over one ear, logging in a plain school exercise book every voice, every footstep, every scrape of a chair leg that came back down the fibre-optic gnomes the Engineers had fed through into the embassy's chimney breasts and disused flues. It was tedious work, and it was also the most important work being done in that building, because every scrap of it fed the model — updated hourly on a whiteboard in the makeshift operations room — of exactly which room held how many gunmen and exactly which held the twenty-one hostages who remained.

"Two voices, second floor front, that's your telex room," muttered Trooper Kenny Ash, passing the headset across to Daniel on the third afternoon without looking up from his own notebook. "Woman's crying again. Been at it on and off since this morning." He did not say anything else, and Daniel did not ask him to. There was nothing to be gained from dwelling on the woman crying in the telex room, except perhaps the understanding — never spoken aloud, but present in every man who sat at that wall — that whatever B Squadron eventually did in that building, it would be done for her as much as for the flag on the roof or the pride of the Regiment.

Word came through the wall, too, of small things that would matter enormously later and seemed at the time like no more than curious detail: that the police constable taken hostage on the embassy steps, Trevor Lock, appeared throughout to be behaving with peculiar calm for a man held at gunpoint, engaging Salim in long, oddly civil conversations about football and about families; that nobody among the gunmen appeared to have searched him with any thoroughness after the first chaotic hour. Nobody in the operations room knew yet that Lock had kept his own .38 revolver concealed the entire time, tucked against his body beneath his tunic, a fact he would reveal to absolutely no one until the siege itself was over. Had they known, Daniel thought afterwards, it would have changed nothing about the plan and everything about how they thought of the quiet, sandy-haired policeman logged on the whiteboard simply as HOSTAGE, MET POLICE, DPG.

By the fourth day the pattern of concession and stall had become almost ritual: the negotiator's flat, patient voice on the telephone line; Salim's demands, restated with mounting frustration; small trades of food and water for the release, one at a time, of hostages the gunmen judged least valuable to them — a heavily pregnant Iranian woman, a hostage taken suddenly and seriously ill, a journalist whose captors seemed to tire of his questions faster than they tired of anyone else's. Five came out that way, walking free through the leaded double doors into a wall of camera flashes on Princes Gate, and each release was greeted in the operations room not quite with celebration — that would have been premature, and every man there had learned better than to celebrate anything before it was entirely finished — but with something close to it: a held breath released, a name crossed off the whiteboard, one fewer person Daniel and the other twenty-two men of B Squadron might, before this was over, have to go through a burning window to save.

Part Three: The Sixth Day

On the morning of the sixth day, the mood in the embassy changed, and the change reached B Squadron within minutes through the microphones the Engineers had planted in the party wall.

Salim had grown convinced, not unreasonably, that the British government was simply running the clock, spinning out concessions that amounted to nothing while it waited him into exhaustion. His demands — safe passage out of Britain for himself and his men, with hostages as insurance — had been met with delay after diplomatic delay. Sometime after midday, his voice on the intercepted line took on an edge the listening detachment had not heard before: flat, final, no longer negotiating.

Sometime after half past six that evening, three shots rang out inside the embassy. Salim's men had taken Abbas Lavasani from the room where he had been held separately and murdered him at the head of the stairs. Shortly before seven o'clock, his body was pushed out through the front door onto the pavement of Princes Gate, in view of the police cordon and, by then, the assembled press of half the world.

Daniel was in the mock-up room at Regent's Park, going through the assault sequence for what felt like the hundredth time, when the order to move came down. There was no ceremony to it. A senior officer put his head round the door and said, in the flat, unhurried voice the Regiment prized above almost any other quality in a leader, that the Home Secretary had that evening formally authorised military intervention, with the Prime Minister's full support behind the decision, and that B Squadron would be going in as soon as final preparations were complete.

Nobody cheered. Fenwick, checking his own kit for the last time by the door, said only, "About time," in the tone of a man remarking on a late bus, and went back to his webbing. Watts, beside him, said nothing at all, which from Watts was its own kind of statement. Daniel found that his hands, when he looked down at them lacing his boots, were entirely steady, and was mildly surprised by it; he had half expected, after five days of waiting, that the moment the waiting ended his body might betray some emotion his mind had kept carefully in check. It did not. Five months of Selection and four years since had built exactly this: a man who, when the order finally came, simply did the next correct thing, and then the thing after that.

Outside, Princes Gate had filled over six days with an audience nobody had invited — camera crews from three continents, a crowd held back behind police tape that stretched further every evening, ordinary Londoners on their way home from work who stopped to watch a siege the way earlier generations might have watched a public execution, unable quite to look away. None of that crowd could see into the gymnasium at Regent's Park, or the borrowed rooms of Number 15, and none of them yet knew that the patient, talkative phase of the operation was, as of that evening, finished.

They moved back into position at Princes Gate under cover of darkness — full darkness now being their friend where it had been the enemy of the negotiators for six days — dressed head to foot in black assault coveralls, S6 respirators pushed up on their foreheads, abseil kit checked twice and then checked again by the man standing beside you, because in this trade you trusted your equipment because you had trusted the hands that checked it, not the other way around. Some carried the silenced variant of the MP5; most carried the standard weapon, along with a Browning Hi-Power in a thigh holster as backup. Every man's kit included CS gas canisters and at least two of the new stun grenades. Frame charges, pre-cut and pre-wired by the Royal Engineers to blow specific window frames without bringing down the surrounding masonry, were distributed to the teams tasked with forcing entry.

The plan split the assault force in two. Red Team would go up onto the roof of Number 15 and cross by ladder onto the roof of the embassy itself, descending on abseil ropes secured round the chimney stacks to force entry through the rear windows on the first and second floors. Blue Team would approach from the front, using a frame charge to blow the first-floor balcony window and force entry there, timed to the same second as Red Team's assault at the rear, so that no gunman anywhere in the building would have more than an instant's warning before contact was made everywhere at once.

Daniel was Red Team, third man on his rope.

At nineteen minutes past seven in the evening — nineteen twenty-three, as it would be recorded afterwards in the after-action reports that Daniel would never personally read but would hear referenced for the rest of his career — the first man on the lead rope began his descent from the parapet of Number 16.

It went wrong within seconds, in the way that the best-rehearsed plans always find one thread to snag on. The abseiler ahead of Daniel became entangled in his own rope midway down the rear face of the building, hanging helpless a few feet above a first-floor window that had, moments before, been shattered by a stun grenade thrown ahead of the assault. The grenade had done its job on the men inside — but the magnesium-based flash composition had also caught the curtain behind the broken glass, and the curtain had gone up in a sheet of flame that now licked directly at the trapped man's legs. Above him, on the roof, two of his mates fought the tangle by touch in the smoke and the dark, hauling and cutting rope with a folding knife until he came free and dropped, unceremoniously and painfully but alive, onto the balcony below.

Daniel came down past the fire a few feet to the man's left, closer to the flame than he would have liked, the heat of it a hard slap against the exposed skin of his jaw below the respirator seal, and put his boots through the frame of a smoke-blackened window two floors up. Glass and charred curtain fabric came in with him. Somewhere below and ahead of him, nearly simultaneous with his own entry, the flat crack of Blue Team's frame charge went off at the front of the building, blowing the first-floor balcony window inward in a single shattering exhalation of overpressure that every man in the street outside would describe afterwards as feeling, more than hearing, in the middle of their own chest.

Within the building, in the smoke and the CS gas and the strobing white light of stun grenades still detonating room to room, the assault became what every hour of rehearsal had been designed to make it: fast, brutal, and — for the men doing it — almost silent inside their own heads, a narrowing of the whole world down to a doorway, a weapon's foresight, and the half-second judgement of who in that doorway was a hostage and who was not.

It was in a front room on the first floor, in view of the pavement and the cameras that had been trained on the embassy's façade for six days and were now, by pure chance of timing, still rolling, that one soldier's black-clad figure appeared briefly on the balcony under the smoke, MP5 levelled, before going back inside to finish the room. That image — a masked, anonymous figure against flame and smoke — would run on television bulletins around the world within the hour and become, more than any other single photograph, the public face of the Special Air Service for a generation. The man himself would not be named in public for years, and even then only by his own choice; that evening, on the balcony, he was simply one more Blade doing exactly what he had rehearsed a hundred times in a gymnasium in Regent's Park.

Deeper inside the building, in the room where PC Trevor Lock had spent six days as a hostage with his own revolver hidden beneath his tunic, Salim moved to draw a pistol as the assault team came through the door. Lock, unarmed in every sense the gunmen believed and every sense but the one that mattered, threw himself bodily onto the terrorist leader and wrestled him to the floor, holding him down and clear of the line of fire long enough for the entry team to identify their man and end the threat he posed. It was an act of raw physical courage from an unarmed policeman who had spent six days as a captive and chosen, in the one moment that counted most, to fight rather than simply wait to be rescued; the George Medal he was afterwards awarded, though he never spoke of the siege as though he had done anything unusual, recognised precisely that.

The fighting inside 16 Princes Gate lasted, start to finish, under twenty minutes. When it ended, five of the six gunmen were dead. The sixth, a young man named Fowzi Nejad, had tried in the final moments of the assault to hide among the fleeing hostages, discarding his weapon in the hope of passing himself off as one of the captives; he was identified, restrained, and taken alive to face trial rather than the summary justice a hostage or two might, in the heat of the moment, have wished on him. Of the hostages, all but one came out of the building alive. One man, killed in the chaos of gunfire inside the second-floor room where several captives had been held together with their captors, did not survive; a bitter, quiet cost set against a rescue that could, on the numbers alone, have gone very much worse.

Part Four: Afterwards

Daniel Prosser stood in the wreck of a first-floor room twenty minutes after it was over, breathing hard inside a respirator he had not yet had the composure to remove, listening to the extraordinary quiet that follows any violent event — the ringing hush in which a man first becomes aware again of his own heartbeat. Below, in the street, a crowd that had waited six days for an ending was cheering in a way that had nothing to do with him personally and everything to do with the fact that twenty of the twenty-six people taken hostage on a Wednesday lunchtime six days before were now, at last, going home.

Nobody in B Squadron gave interviews that night, or any night soon after. That was not how the Regiment did things, then or for years afterward; the men who had gone through the windows of 16 Princes Gate went back to Hereford within days, back to the range and to Colour Sergeant Hollis's unforgiving eye for a group fired low-left, and the story of what they had done belonged, from that evening onward, to newspapers and historians rather than to the men themselves.

Daniel found Fenwick outside, on the pavement, watching the last of the hostages being helped into ambulances under blankets that did nothing to stop them shaking. Neither of them said anything about the trapped man on the rope, or the fire, or the room where it had ended for the one hostage who did not walk out. There would be a debrief for that, clinical and thorough, in the days that followed, the kind of exhaustive after-action reckoning the Regiment insisted on precisely because looking hard at what had gone wrong was how you made sure less went wrong the next time. For now, standing on a pavement in South Kensington with the smell of a dead fire still in the air, there was only a tired, wordless nod between two men who had gone in through the same building from different directions and come out again, both still breathing.

The drive back to Hereford, when it came a few days later, was as quiet as the drive down had been. Somewhere behind them in London, the beige-bereted anonymity the Regiment had guarded so carefully for nearly forty years was already beginning to slip; within the week, newspapers the world over would run the same handful of photographs — the balcony, the smoke, the masked figure at the window — again and again, and recruiting offices from Hereford to Fort Bragg would field a sudden flood of young men wanting to know exactly what it took to become one of those anonymous, competent shapes in black. None of that mattered yet to Daniel Prosser, sitting in the back of the same four-tonner that had carried him down six days before, watching the Cotswolds give way to the Welsh Marches through a gap in the canvas.

But something had changed regardless, and every one of them knew it, even in the hush of that homeward drive. For six days a regiment that had spent nearly forty years operating in deserts and jungles and the deniable shadows of small colonial wars, largely unknown to the public that funded it, had stood next door to a burning embassy on primetime British television and, in seventeen minutes, answered every question anyone might ever again ask about whether it was worth the money.

David Stirling had chosen the regiment's motto in the deserts of Libya nearly forty years before Daniel Prosser was born, and had chosen it, so the story went, because it captured a precarious and necessary balance — between the valour to act and the confidence that the action was sound. On the sixth of May 1980, watching the crowd below the smoke-blackened windows of Princes Gate, Daniel understood, for the first time in four years of wearing the sand-coloured beret, exactly what that balance had cost, and exactly what it had bought.

Who Dares Wins. He had always known the words. That night, walking away from Princes Gate in the dark with the smell of CS gas and burnt curtain still caught in the fabric of his coveralls, he finally understood what they weighed.

— END —

Author's note: Daniel Prosser is a fictional composite created for this narrative. All named historical figures — including John McAleese, PC Trevor Lock GM, Abbas Lavasani, Fowzi Nejad, and the political principals involved in authorising Operation Nimrod — appear only in connection with their documented, historically recorded actions during the siege. Timeline, tactics, and sequence of events are drawn from the historical record of the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege and Operation Nimrod.