The Siege

1

16 Princes Gate

At 19:30, on Wednesday, April 30, 1980, a small, secret, and exceptionally well-equipped army rolled out of Bradbury Lines, the Special Air Service camp at Hereford.

Locals tended to be overly curious about the goings-on at the SAS camp, and so, to avoid attracting attention, the seven white Range Rovers departed at irregular intervals from the three exits, three men lying under blankets on the back seat, with two in the front. These were followed by two white Ford Transit vans and two large yellow furniture trucks.

This small convoy carried forty-five soldiers in civilian clothes, and enough weaponry to fight a medium-size war.

Each man had a green carryall packed with his personal weapons and gear: a submachine gun with four 30-round magazines, a 9mm automatic pistol with two 12-round magazines, a respirator, gloves, a balaclava helmet, body armor, boots, a belt, and a weapons-cleaning kit. In addition, each soldier had a prepacked long-stay bag with toiletries, sneakers, a tracksuit, and a sleeping bag. The vans carried extra ammunition, tear-gas launchers and canisters, stun grenades, frame charges, sawed-off pump-action shotguns, explosives, weapon-mount flashlights, food, water, radios, medical equipment, and spare weapons. The trucks contained the heavy gear: scaling ladders, ropes, and abseiling (rappelling) gear, lighting rigs, screens, thermal lances for cutting through metal, smoke machines, generators, and battering rams.

The SAS Special Projects team might have been setting out to repel the invasion of Britain—which, in a way, they were.

Shortly before 11:00 that morning, six young men had gathered beside the Albert Memorial, Queen Victoria’s ornate memorial to her late husband, opposite the Royal Albert Hall in London’s Kensington Gardens, west of Hyde Park. They were Middle Eastern, students or perhaps tourists, wearing smart new sneakers, clean hooded jackets, and backpacks. Around their necks each wore a keffiyeh, the traditional Arab cotton scarf with a red or black fishnet pattern. The PLO leader Yasser Arafat wore the keffiyeh, as did Westerners to signify sympathy for the Palestinian cause. The park was almost deserted on a weekday morning, with a handful of mothers wheeling strollers in the light rain and the occasional jogger. The men sat on the steps and listened intently as one of their number, a slim, wiry man in his late twenties with a goatee beard and thin mustache, spoke rapidly in Arabic.

At 11:12, the six men rose and picked up their bags. Then they split into two groups of three and headed for Princes Gate, a stuccoed terrace of large houses set back from Kensington Road, separated from the main thoroughfare by an eight-foot-high brick wall and a service road with parked cars. One group entered the road from the east, the other from the west. As they neared the door to Number 16, they wrapped the keffiyehs around their heads so that only their eyes showed. “Yalla,” said their leader. “Go!”

To say that Police Constable 469K, Trevor James Lock, was “guarding” the Iranian Embassy implies rather more focus and energy than the task demanded. Lock was an officer of the Diplomatic Protection Group, the Metropolitan Police unit responsible for security at the 138 foreign embassies and high commissions dotted around London. Most of these premises did not need protection. The DPG was largely diplomatic decoration, symbolizing Britain’s duty to safeguard foreign dignitaries. Lock’s primary function was to nod in a friendly but official manner to visitors and diplomats as they passed in and out of the building.

The job was one of the least stressful and most boring in British policing. This suited PC Lock just fine.

At forty-one, portly, patient, and placid, Lock was a far cry from The Sweeney, the popular 1970s TV show in which tough, gun-wielding cops screeched around London in fast cars apprehending villains. He was closer to Dixon of Dock Green, another policeman familiar to British television viewers, policing with common sense by standing around on street corners, being avuncular. Some join the police to fight crime and improve society; Lock became a policeman, as he put it, “to help old ladies across the road.”

Born into a working-class East London family, Lock had spent most of his life in the borough of Barking, where he knew every road (and almost every old lady). During National Service with the army, he volunteered for deployment to Tripoli, in the mistaken belief that it was in Italy. In Libya, he learned how to handle firearms, and how to swear in Arabic. After a stint in the Ford Dagenham factory, he joined the police at the age of twenty-six. Lock worked out of Barking Station, patrolling the world he had known since boyhood. He was part of the street furniture, as familiar and unchanging as the lampposts: everyone knew Trev. Lock’s first wife died in 1971, and he now lived in a council house with his second wife, Doreen, another native of Barking, and their six children, three from her first marriage and three from his. She was a devout Catholic. He worshipped West Ham United Football Club. He also believed in fair play, British cultural values (though he would be hard put to say what these were), and the police. Beneath his mild exterior, Lock was tougher than he seemed, or knew.

After fifteen years on the beat, in January 1980, Lock had requested a posting to the DPG, which was better paid: Trevor and Doreen were saving up for a holiday with the children on the Costa Brava. British police did not carry guns in 1980, but Diplomatic Protection officers were an exception. After three days of weapons training, Lock was issued with a Smith & Wesson .38 Regulation Police revolver, which fit into a leather holster on his belt. Lock was confident he would never have to fire it. “Police and guns don’t go together,” he said.

It was chilly and drizzling when Lock left his home in Dagenham that Wednesday morning, and Doreen insisted he dress warmly since he would be standing outside on the porch of the Iranian Embassy all day: he wore two pullovers and his police tunic, beneath a waterproof gabardine coat. It was Doreen’s birthday, and Lock had planned a night out in town. After work they would go shopping at Harrods for perfume, followed by a surprise treat: two tickets for Ipi Tombi, the hit musical playing at the London Astoria Theatre in the West End. Doreen liked surprises.

At 11:18, the Iranian doorman Abbas Fallahi popped his head around the front door and offered Lock a cup of coffee. According to police regulations, a DPG officer should not be seen eating or drinking while on duty, and Lock was not supposed to leave his post on the front step. Besides, Fallahi’s Persian-style coffee, strong, black, and sweet, was “a cup of yuk” in his opinion. But “to refuse might offend,” and so Lock slipped into the space between the oak outer door and the inner security door of glass and wrought iron, and accepted the steaming cup.

Abbas Fallahi had worked at the Iranian Embassy for nine years. His first job, fresh from Tehran, was driving the ambassador around London in a gleaming Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. His Excellency Parviz Radji represented the Shah of Iran, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, and Sovereign of the Order of the Red Lion and the Sun. The ambassador lived a sumptuous life of parties and receptions, and he entertained lavishly at Princes Gate, where Fallahi doubled as a waiter, serving caviar and champagne.

The shah was then the West’s favorite Middle Eastern despot, modernizing, cooperative, and oil-rich. He was also haughty, luxury-loving, and autocratic. The CIA and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, had conspired to strengthen his rule in Iran by overthrowing the democratically elected government in 1953, when it threatened to nationalize the oil industry. The shah’s courtiers flattered and fawned over him, while many of his subjects loathed him; all opposition was suppressed with ruthless brutality by his secret police, the Bureau for Intelligence and State Security, known as SAVAK.

The embassy at 16 Princes Gate symbolized the shah’s wealth and power: a huge Victorian town house built in 1849, with fifty-six rooms, five stories, and a basement, in an Italianate row of eleven houses overlooking Hyde Park to the north. It had thick Persian carpets, molded ceilings, marble flooring, swagged curtains, polished banisters, and an air of lofty grandeur befitting the monarch of the Peacock Throne. Former residents of Princes Gate included Joseph Chamberlain and Field Marshal Douglas Haig. The neighbors were illustrious: John F. Kennedy had lived next door when his father was U.S. ambassador; the Ethiopian Embassy was on the other side, at Number 17.

In 1979, the shah was toppled by the Islamic Revolution, an event that took him, his Western allies, and most of the rest of the world by surprise. Iran’s proud monarch was forced into ignominious exile, and the secular Pahlavi imperial dynasty was replaced with an anti-Western, authoritarian, Islamist theocracy under the hard-line cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini: a militant regime determined to spread Shia Islam across the Middle East and establish Iranian dominance.