a riveting conversation. thank you all for attending thank you so much. i hope to see you at the book signing.

hi, everybody, please turn your cell phones off. thank you so much for coming to tonight's with ben macintyre and david kipen. i'm andrea grossman the founder of writer's block now in 29th season, i want to thank the ebell for their usual and customer graciousness. to me, the ebell is a membership organization built by women for women and for people like ben macintyre and david kipen to then they built built this place

over 100 years ago. they provide a rich array of cultural social events, including block so its value is obviously terrific. before we get to tonight's discussion which i can't wait to hear, i want to remind that writer's block is committed free speech. the next few sentences have regrettably become necessary. this is a nice crowd, including some well-behaved english people, so i don't anticipate just eruption. but i need to point out that tonight the floor belongs to ben macintyre. and to david kipen. if there is any, behave here that makes our guests or participants feel threatened or uncomfortable, we reserve the right to ask you to leave in the nicest way possible. we just don't want yelling and screaming about what you're going to see. now for tonight, when ben macintyre releases a new book. it's cause for great personal celebration, where i forced to

rattle off my ten favorite books i've ever read. i couldn't possibly come with that list except to say that i think two of ben's make the cut and stay there, and i'm prone to reading fiction. ben's new the siege contains every element of any great thriller. wild eyed, terrorists driven by ideology take over the iranian in london in 1980 and hold 26 people hostage. ordinary run of the mill people in the wrong place at the wrong time. ben gives us context to their demands, to the terrorists demands some background into iranian conflict over the centuries. but it's not that part that tethers me to this book. it's the character involved in this mess. a budding hyde park. what a cast it is to the nebbish english diplomatic cop who distractive with regard to the front door. the bbc guys happen to be there for a visa and pakistani men who

snoring drove the hostages and their captors nuts and. it was his snoring who saved his life. which saved his life. anyone? an arab journalist who sympathize with the plo, who would have avoided the embassy had his domestic squabble, delayed him just a bit than he already was delayed the terrorists themselves are so out of their element. i cringe reading about them as this crisis played out. it was covered in real time and it was as argues sort of the development of 24 hour news coverage. i'm not giving any away any more, except i can't help myself. it's motif throughout his books to show in full what turns a schlep into a hero. i love this book. think about it. hostage is iran rescue operations all the stuff of our

painful headlines every day. speaking of heroes, david kipen is a hero to many in l.a. a former book and director of literature for the national endowment for the arts. he now runs a storefront lending library in boyle heights called lee broach, mi bros. we in beverly hills call it called boyle heights. the other b h. i think he actually invented that so that it he's the author some terrific books including dear california, the golden state and and letters david and. we'll chat for a while and they're through. feel free to ask some questions i can pass around to mike and we would appreciate your waiting for me to do that because we want the audio covered. c-span when they're through, ben will sign copies of the siege and david will sign copies of his books.

i think the. it is now my great pleasure to introduce ben macintyre and david kipen. thank you. lovely, wonderful. well, thank you all for coming. it's lovely to see you here. and thank you, andrea. where to, andrea? to go. i want to see whether she good. thank you for inviting me to do this because i'm incredibly honored to be up here with ben macintyre, whom many of you know, by his work. and now you get to listen to him. it's been a thrill reading this book, on which i compliment you fulsomely and and you're every interviewer is dream, not only because it's, having met you all of 20 minutes ago, your erudite, engaging and talented, but you've also brought slide show for show and tell.

so some of my holiday of your was it a holiday working on this? how long did you work on this book? well, actually, i've been working on this for quite a long time. i first wanted to start writing it about eight years ago, but i started in earnest about two and a half years ago. it's a long holiday but. well, it's a long holiday. my little holiday snaps, you'll see. yes, by all means, show us what you did on your two and a half year summer vacation. okay. so thank you very much, andrea. thank you very much for inviting me. again, it's great to be back at writer's block. let me paint a picture. so on on may the fifth, 1980, i was 17 years old and i was the snooker final in the uk. now i know that's not a huge sport here, but if you were 17 in 1980 it was credit. doubly exciting. there were 14 million people were tuned in to watch the snooker final. it was the embassy snooker final

because it was sponsored by embassy cigarets. this is, by the way, billiards on a tiny child sized. yeah, no, it's a big old table, but lots of balls. and if you like my father, you were to me to get a color television. it's almost impossible to watch snooker because you can't tell which balls are which. so it was the embassy world championship final sponsored by embassy cigarets. those were the days everybody smoked all the time, including the players chain smoked. in fact, if you listen to the soundtrack, all you can hear is coughing. and as we were coming to the final two slides, suddenly they cut away to this this. they're going to work. and this, by the way is is in real time. when we were watching it, i mean, this was the first time

that live news. and so you see this is the s.a.s., the elite special forces team going in to try to liberate the hostages. there are 22 of them still in the building who've been held there for six days. the building almost immediately burst into flames. you can see it here. and then the you'll see them. these are the first hostages being brought out of the back, policemen in helmets. the fire brigades arrived, but it's still on fire. do you see? any second you'll see a moment coming up. so you can just see the crouching police snipers. that's an ss guy leaning out of the window and beckoning to one of the hostages. sam harris, who was a bbc sound recordist, sort of that's what he very self deprecating because his balcony scene. at that point, his jacket was on fire. you can't quite see from the footage. i'd never seen anything like this before.

no. had ever seen anything like this before? i think it's of the reasons i became a news journalist in life because this really was the there had been exciting film footage of news events before the moon landing. the killing of jfk and so on. jack ruby and lee harvey oswald. but but never before had life of television arrived in sitting rooms across the world. actually this was broadcast live in america too. and all three channels. there were three channels then in the uk. all three of them moved this move from what was john wayne on bbc one, a film. it was coronation street on on on. they all moved to this live footage and it had a permanent effect on sort of british cultural life. how would you characterize effect? what do you mean? i anybody who watched it remembered it forever. i mean, it's quite interesting. i mean, in britain, if you're over 50, this event was kind of seared on national

consciousness, partly was. i mean, we can go into this in more detail. margaret thatcher had only been in power for a year at this point. this was the first series test of her resolve. of what kind? of a premiere she was going to be if it had gone the other way. if, as many predicted, she was told before it happened, if this embassy has to be cleared out by force, you can expect 40% casualties, four out of ten of the people in that building will be will be killed or injured as a result. now, if that had happened and i don't to give away too much of the story, but had that happened, margaret thatcher's premiership would have come to a premature end. do you think she deserves much of the credit, or did she just look out and and write on the essays as go tells both? i mean, it was it was a very bold gamble that she took that was characteristic. it also but it also empowered her in a way to think that the military could do things it's

one of the reasons why subsequently i think over the falklands war, she was extraordinarily gung ho about that. it was partly because i think this experience with the sas, the elite unit, had kind of convinced her that the british army was somehow an all powerful force. it also had an impact on on terrorism generally because this was the height of the troubles in northern ireland and the were watching this too. i mean everybody was watching the snooker and it had an impact. i mean it had to deter and effect on ira hostage taking it didn't end the troubles in any way but it was it was a it was a signal moment for what thatcher was going to be like. i mean, we had as we say in academia, may we have the next slide, please? so so to put this in intercom text the year in 1979, the shah of iran, the monarch of the peacock throne, the west's oil

rich dictator, was overthrown by the islamic fundamentalist government well movement of revolutionary movement of the ayatollah khomeini. now, the ayatollah was bitterly opposed to the west and one of the first events, which i'm sure many of you will, was the taking over of the us that's working by pressing the one rung on him, the student militants who took over the american embassy in tehran. they weren't actually students were actually militia and they were property organized by the iranian governmenthat led to an appalling standoff that would last a long time. the hostages, there were 55 them, american diplomats and soldiers held inside that building. and six days before the attack on the iranian embassy, london american forces had attempted free the hostages in iran the ill fated and ultimately

disastrous operation eagle claw, in which a large number of american servicemen died. it was a complete failure. and of course, it marked carter's from then on, arguably his reputation never recovered from this failure. this took place six days before the attack on the embassy, and in some ways it was reciprocal operation. the point needs to be made, however, that the six gunmen who attacked iranian embassy on the 30th of april, 1980 were no islamic. fundamental lists. they were bitterly opposed to the ayatollahs government. they were arabs, they were part of theppressed arab minority in in iran who'd been repressed, first of all, by the shah and then brutally by the ayatollah security services. so each of these six men and this is a photograph never published before, taken just a few hours before they attacked the embassy. so how do you get a photograph that's never been published

before? well, this comes through members of the al-quds community. so the arabs of iran refer to them of themselves as a quasi they have referred decades have fought for autonomy within the arab of iran. the oil rich part, iran, which they call arabist on which the persians call khuzestan. and this photograph was given to me by the relative of one of the people involved. i mean, how it was smuggled out, it's not clear to me because must have come from the person organizing the whole operation. it was in fact saddam hussein. this whole operation was an iraqi plot to destabilize the iranian government. saddam hussein had worked out that it was an obvious thing to discover that he could use this arab protest movement in kazakhstan as a way of getting at the ayatollah. so in a way, what you're about

to see the story we're about to tell is really the first battle of the war which would erupt five months after this. so saddam hussein bankrolled, financed, equipped and encouraged this entire opetion and. he did it through two people. the man in the middle, who would go on to become the world's most wanted terrorist, abu, who organized a string of appalling terrorist atrocity. it is in the in the late seventies and, 1980s, he was living in baghdad and working for saddam as a kind of freelance terrorist consultant. so he was the mastermind who organized the whole thing and the man on the right is an iraqi intelligence officer, i say is because i'm pretty sure he's still around. really didn't answer his phone for interviews. well, i think i know where he is, oddly enough, didn't want to talk me. he's called sami ali and he accompanied this group of men to

london. he arranged for them to get explosives and guns and pistols via the iraqi embassy, the weapons, all came through the iraqi diplomatic bag. and then about 15 minutes before the assault took place, on the embassy, he climbed onto plane to paris and was never seen again. that's that great line in the book where you say most terrorist operations planned by very intelligent, very intelligent men and executed by -- --. yeah. that is broadly true, actually. it's not quite true of this one because actually the two leaders of, the group that of of the six gunmen were themselves actually rather intelligent men. they were university educated. they spoke languages, but they were being manipulated. they had been promised that what would happen was very simple, that they would take hostages. they would take iranian hostages. they would to take the diplomats hostage, then use these as

bartering tools to exchange for arab prisoners held in iran. and then they were told the british government would provide them with an airplane and they would fly home. i mean, it sounds encourage naive now actually the context of 1970s terrorist spectaculars there were precedents for this other terrorist groups had persuaded governments, including the british government, actually, to to exchange for freedom. and that is what they thought was going to happen. they had not calculated with one extra important factor. and that was margaret thatcher. has. this book been translated or will it be translated, i suppose, in a i don't know if that's first or persian where it can be. it will be. there is already an arabic translator underway, which it will be fascinating to see how it's received in that part of the world. i mean, the protest by arabs in

iran continue today. i mean, it is brutally brutally put down, but it's still going on. it's still very much part of it is one of the many opposition groups that exist towards, the fundamentalist theocratic. now, andrea, maybe you want to book writer's block event in tehran. think that would probably be yeah let's do it. paris okay. the fair enough. who's this gentleman? this is one of my favorite characters in the whole book. this a man called pixie trevor locke, who is the british policeman guarding the front door of the embassy. when the iranian gunmen attacked guardian is a slight guarding is a slightly energetic word for what trevor was doing. trevor was standing around having a cup of coffee inside. he's a wonderful character. he's sort of straight out of central casting because he joined the diplomatic group, which is the part of the metropolitan that guards embassies.

he joined it because it was boring. he was one of those policemen that really he standing around on the front step. that's what he wanted to do. and he once to me, he said, i only joined the police because i wanted to be a sort of local bobby. i wanted to be the the person who helped old ladies across the road. he was the last person to to be a hero, a situation like this. and yet he plays an absolutely critical role in in what happened because for many reasons, really. but the main one is perhaps that he became a sort of symbol of solidity. the other reason is that he had a gun. most british policemen in 1980 was unarmed but diplomatic protection officers did carry weapons. he had a pistol on his holster, a 38 smith and wesson, which he kept hidden under his for the next six days. that gun plays a very, very important part in the final scene of this this story.

but trevor locke still around, i'm delighted to say. and he he really without him, i think the whole thing would have ended, probably in a bloodbath. and without him as an interview the book i think would have been infinitely poorer, i assume, what sort of interview was it? he was wonderful and amazingly had never been before. he he partly, i think because he's now in his eighties and never wanted to talk about it. like many of the interviews that i did for this, these are men and women in older age for whom i think the catharsis of being able to talk about this thing in many cases for the first time was extremely i mean, i don't want to give away too much of the book, but but but he's a wonderfully modest man. trevor locke. he was awarded the george cross, which is the highest award for civilian that the queen then the queen could bestow. he immediately lost it because he put it in his wife's selling

box and forgot where it was. about 15 years. so that just gives you an idea of how sort of how how modest and how sort of humble he is about the whole thing. and yet without him, it would have been a very different sort of story, i think. and i guess he had 50 years worth of holes in his socks. so i wonder, i was saving this question and now i can't resist it because we're talking about him. he's such fascinating man. he's a wonderful role in the book i'm all of us reading the book have to ask ourselves how we would react in a situation like this under tremendous stress at, you know, risk of death at any some of them you would have expected to be heroic, turn out rather cowardly. some of them whom you would expect to be cowering in the corner turned out to be heroes. how do you think you would behave under circumstances? well, thank you, david. i mean that in a way that is the core question of this book growing up as a teenager.

and later, i always thought this was a rather simple story in some ways, that it was a story of, you brave british soldiers bursting into this building and and liberating hostages and and sort of taking out the wicked terrorists. actually, it's a much more complicated story than that. it's really about what ordinary people do in appalling circumstances of which they have no over, which they have no control. and that's not just trevor. there were there were there were british hostages inside there. there were, in fact, we'll move onto some of them. how would i have responded it? i don't know. i don't know. i think i have kept my head down. i really do. i don't think i was the sort of person that would have sort of been particularly brave. i certainly wouldn't have taken on the gunman. i think i might have tried to help in negotiations and that what quite a lot of the hostages up doing, particularly the british ones. there were four british people in that. and in a way, they they began to

develop. and this was one of the elements. fascinating elements to me of stockholm syndrome that began to take place in that building, was that they began to find common cause with the gunmen. they began to see the police and the outside as the enemy. and so so the british hostages and this man you see on the top left here, is it left for you? i can't tell. yes, top left began to sort of speak on behalf of the gunmen to the authorities. i think i have been one of those. i think i might have to help in that way. mustafa kikuchi, the one on the top left is one of the people who who just wandered into the embassy by accident, really he was he was interviewing one of the, one of the press attachés, but he was quite a frequent visitor and he just got caught up in it. now he plays crucial part because he's the only person who could speak arabic in his native language. he was syrian perfect english and farsi. he could speak.

so he was able to inter communicate between the three key elements and again, without him, i think it would have been a very different story. another one for whom that can also be said is woman. you see in this picture there were six women inside the embassy. their stories have never been told because they were never asked to tell them. no one ever interviewed them, no one ever. they were never invited to testify by it. and with the trials that took place when i was fleet street, where was fleet? you were fleet it 1980. this was a male story. i mean, it sounds mad to us now, but this is roger cook, actually, who was the lives in australia now. she was the senior secretary in in in the in the embassy. anyone who's ever been inside an embassy knows that the senior secretary is frankly the most important person in the building. she knew exactly how everything ran and she was wonderful at keeping everybody calm, finding, trying to explain one side to the other. but there was a terrible sort of

cleavage already going on in the embassy because the two the two men you see on the right were both iranian diplomats. the one on the top was the chargé d'affaires, the most senior, but the one on the bottom was a man called ali abbas barzani, who was a press attache but was secretly an iranian revolutionary guard. so he was really the kind of commissar a figure in the embassy he was there to enforce ideological conformity among the iranians and he was a much feared figure. in fact. and he had actually part in the stormy of the american embassy in tehran the previous year in his own way, he was just as fanatic as the gunmen who attacked that embassy. and it's it's the collision that is building over these six days between those two sides that eventually erupts in brutal violence. one of the things that that i really marvel at in this book, i mean, you would think, well, what an exciting story. it would tell itself. we know better.

and the way you individuate the characters, there's 26 of them. some of them, i think we some of them you never hear about. yes, exactly. you've chosen i have read you choose which ones to focus on. how do you juggle all these storylines? well, that was one of the difficult things with this book that i ended up in a way with a kind of embarrassment of riches. there were sort of so people and there was so much evidence so much of it hidden and unused to the two, i mean, so for example and this was 1980, so everybody was still writing down, i, i mean, with pencil and paper or with typewriter towers in a way that meant that it lasted. i mean, we all think we're keeping our history today, writing it down in our computers and on our phones. we're not that's all going to disappear i don't know how anyone is going to write the history of our time, but at this time, people were very literate and very keen to leave some sort of record. so i found no fewer than four unpaid published manuscripts

written by different participants. one policeman, one ss officer, and two of the hostages. i mean, sam harris, the guy you saw leaping across that balcony at the beginning he brought out with him that jacket, a diary that he'd been keeping almost minute by minute of what was going on inside. and he just gave it to me. so to answer your question, i kind of privileged those whose voices i felt i could hear the what. and of course that's not everybody, because the gunmen, for example, left no record. yeah, you know, they didn't write it all down, but yet again, they were faceless figures. i think no one had ever really tried to out who they were and why they had done this thing. i mean, i have no i'm not defending them in any way. these were men of violence who, were prepared to kill and prepared to die. but they have their story.

they have a reason as they see it, for doing what they were doing. and if you don't explain that, if that doesn't if they don't become characters in the story, then they simply become symbols of something. and that's that's that's that's that doesn't work. i don't think for an event that seems to have traumatized country and stayed with them for so long. i assumed that book is tremendously successful in britain because it's exposing a story they thought they and didn't know. the first thing about bill gates brother pleasingly is doing quite well. it's i think it's sort of number two on the bestseller list at the moment. so but i think that is because it really was for many british people and others around the world because actually hundreds of press people gathered when this when they started it really was a kind of where were you when it happened? moment no fewer. by the end of it, there was something like 450 journalists had gathered and were corralled into a kind of metal pen in hyde

park to try and stop them from breaking out and trying to get inside the embassy and find out it didn't work. of course, they broke out the whole time. in fact, one tv camera was set up at the back of the building, filming what was happening? the police didn't even know it was there. and in fact, if the gunmen had been television, they would have seen what was happening as the place was assaulted. so, yeah, i mean, it's i think for british people, it really it went incredibly partly because it also catapulted the sas, which had hitherto been a shadowy organization. most people in britain had never heard of the ss. overnight it became a kind of sensation. i mean, and and as we say, solidified margaret hold on. power but they became almost a sort of cultic group in britain. you say at one point that or you quote somebody else is saying it was the worst thing that ever happened to the sas because they in the shadows and then all of a sudden they became supermen. i guess you've been slightly

complicit in that. how many books have you written about the sas? this is now my second, i think i probably am complicit in it accidentally because actually i don't think of them that way. i don't. i, i think they're all like everybody in this story. the sas are also complex people. they, they operate from a variety of motives. they're not these kind of book heroes that just of go in and solve everything. but yes. so this is so i have sort of added to it, i guess, but i think the sas has, i think the person who made that remark was, the person who commanded the ss on this occasion, michael rose, went on to a general. he does feel that the sas sort of never recovered it. and he's right in some ways because that group as do as special forces around the world, delta force navy seals struggle with the tension between their own celebrity and the need for. secrecy, because you can't run special operations in the limelight it doesn't work. and they've never really worked it out. i should just mention ben is also the author, a book which

became a documentary and a series i think, which is going into its second season about the sas. want to talk a little bit about that because the one. yes, delightfully that's the second season of sas rogue heroes is about to hit your screens. i don't know which which of your screens it's going to hit but on ours it's going to hit the bbc i think they call it rogue heroes here because people think sars is an airline. but you're right. but that's been hugely successful. that's made by steve knight, who is the man who made peaky blinders. i don't know if that was successful here. an a great movie called locke just great screenwriter. yeah. no, it's absolutely brilliant. and some people refer to sas rogue heroes as cocky blinders, which in some ways it's sort of is i mean, that incredible energy that he brought to peaky blinders is very evident in rogue heroes. it's a it's a wonderful series. what have you got next for us? right. well we've got to even remember. so yeah.

so one of the things the police had to do was to and work out who these people were i mean, the metropolitan police for all its virtues, had never heard of a rabbit stan mi6. i'd never of a rabbit start. this was a complete the unknown conflict taking place in a distant land. so the curve was was very, very steep indeed. these are the sort earliest photo fits and sighting reports and attempts by the police to work out who these people were, who the hostages who was inside that building. and they were a very mixed bag. one of the other things they had to do and, much of the sort of intelligence they were gathering was based on audio probes. so right from the beginning, mi5, our service, the equivalent of the fbi and the police technicians began to drill doing micro probes through the adjoining walls from either building on either side. also they began lowering eavesdrop ping devices down the

chimneys every package of food that went in there contained listening device as well. this was an attempt get a kind of audio picture of who was who inside there to and work out both where the hostages and gunmen were located who were leaders who were organizing this ones they at the beginning they felt the hostages some of the hostages might have been complicit in all of this. but the audio picture was a tricky thing because it sounds rather kind of rustic to us today, because today would have been very easy just to beam in eavesdropping devices. then you actually had to drill them into the walls and that was difficult. you had to use hand drills. and the hand drills a noise. tell them about the 1812 overture. yes, i'll come to the 1812. so they were keenly that the gunmen were listening to what was on and there is this sort of weird climax moment at the end when at the albert, which is only about 200 yards away, a performance of the 1812 overture

was planned and some bright spark in the police thought, well, hang on, when the cannons a bit happens, the famous bit of the 1812 overture, the gunmen are going to think they're being attacked. so a surreal conversation took place. the conductor where a policeman approached him and said, would you mind not doing that bit? and he said, well, of course we're going to do that, but it's not the only way. eventually they did it. nothing happened. but but audio probes also nearly went drastically wrong because the gunmen could hear the squeaking noise in the walls. and trevor lott was summoned. the lead gunmen, tawfiq al-rashid, to to where the noises were happening, said mr. trevor. mr. trevor. we're about to be attacked and trevor, who was completely brilliant, knew exactly what that was. but he sort of he his cap on and listened to the wall and said, oh, towfiq, i think we've got mice, which was total. and of course he knew it was, but the audio probes the police picked up that conversation and decided that they would have to

cover the noise somehow. so the first thing they did was to call the gas board and arranged for two men in overalls, large pneumatic drills to arrive about hundred feet from the front door of the embassy and start digging a very large and completely unnecessary hole in the in the pavement to and cover the noise of the drills. but the noise was absolutely deafening. no one could do anything. even the police were being driven bonkers by it. so they had to doing that. so the next thing they did was even stranger really. they contacted the civil aviation authority at heathrow and arranged for planes to be diverted from the usual flight paths to fly over the embassy about a thousand feet lower than they would normally fly. now, those planes were noisier today then than they are today. it worked strangely that the technicians would wait until they could hear the rumble of a plane coming. they drilled mad into the walls and wait until. the sound stopped and then they

stopped. but it meant that by the end i mean a lot of these reports were based on what they were hearing inside the embassy. and those transcripts, of course, for me, those were gold dust, because that allows me to know what was being said among the different people inside. so the dialog in the book, much of the dialog comes from these eavesdropping devices. now i don't want to misread present you i mean, between this and rogue heroes, one might well think that you're a specialist exclusively in stories about commandos and yes that's something that you do very well. but you also about spies yeah wonderful book of his made into a movie called the spy among friends for television which was the story about cambridge spies philby and burgess and mclean. what's fun to write about commandos or spies? oh, that's very difficult. um, in a way, the essays are themselves form of espionage unit. i mean, they do operate under

covert rules, but for me, espionage, spying is, is kind of the first love. i don't know why i'm particularly attracted to that kind of that species of skullduggery. and you could write about spying for a nonfiction writer. spying is such a rich resource because when you write about espionage, you can write about the sorts of things that novelists usually write they often write about loyalty and love, betrayal and adventure and romance, but they're all true. and spies are wonderfully indiscreet. they love telling you their stories, particularly. they're not really supposed to. they're also extremely unreliable narrators of their own lives. so you have that wonderful challenge of trying to fill it out. what is true and what is not. so i think that's why i'm sort of attracted to that world. if you can find a sufficient density material, you really can

tell a story. if it works that feels like a novel and yet is entirely true. i mean, as true as i can make it, i mean, i'm very, very rigorous about that. if i say the room smelt of stale bread and, you know, she had a headache, that's because i know it was true. and that's in a way, the spy stories allow you to do that. there is often particularly if you have declassified files, there's access to this real richness of material. so your introduction to that world through fiction, like so many of us, yes, i read a lot of john le carre. i read a lot of somerset more. i mean this, but these are also spies these people. yeah. i mean, you know, spying and novel writing, they're not so different i mean, both are weaving a sort of artificial world and trying to lure other people into it. i mean, there's a reason why david cornwell, john le carre, ian fleming and somerset

maugham, graham greene, john buchan, they'd all been in the spy services at some point. so yes, i guess that was my introduction that that was sort of how it started. but i was briefly recruited by a miix when i was university. did that go well, not very well really. i, i enjoyed it. it was great and i wanted to be recruited. so i sort of hung around the particular teacher i knew was the recruiter and he sent me off to go meet him out in whitehall. i mean i quite enjoyed it and i did it for a little bit, but it became pretty clear, pretty quickly that as i've just demonstrated i can't keep a secret. so, so i wasn't really the right person to be. i didn't really like keeping secrets. i like revealing them. it's much more fun. so. so, yeah. it left me with a long fascinate passion for that world. i think it's a it's a it's a wonderful world. it has built into it a kind of moral, a central moral conundrum. you know, spies do bad things

sometimes for good reasons who's your favorite among the novelist and. this may not be the same question who comes the closest to getting it right past or present? well past the last past. john le carre yeah. was the naples ultra in my i mean, he was also a friend of mine. he was incredibly helpful to my writing. in fact, you mentioned the spy among friends. that story came from him. he gave me that story on a walk on hampstead heath one day when i was fishing for a new book. and i said, david, i don't what to write. i've got a really good idea. he knew one of the protagonists in his story, and he was incredibly generous. but. but nobody, i think, or since really has has quite dug into the psychology spying with his acuteness and his style and his brilliant sort of prose. he is, i think, was the best of them of, you know, mc heron of of the current lot is it is

brilliant to i think you guys know mc heron he's the guy who writes the slow novels. and i believe you have a connection with that. well, yes, i do. because have you watched slow? i don't know which channel it's on here. oh, there you go. all right. glad. love it. i adore it. i think it's completely brilliant. and in a way, what heron has and and will smith, who's screenwriter, have done is to create a new world of spying which is really the sort of it's the sort anti bond. i mean, they're wonderful because they're also completely and. well, then no, actually they turn out to be rather good, but they all smoke fart all the time. i mean, it's the whole thing is a deliberate undermining of the kind of glinting w seven genre and it's completely brilliant. i think i absolutely love it, but i have a connection which is that will smith the screenwriter of that series writing the screenplay of this one, he's doing it the moment and they're going to do a six part series, which will be, i think it will

be a day, an episode. i that's how they'll do it. so it'll be a kind of be gradual ticked talk. and do you get to kibitz on this or you just assume leave that to press? i haven't been told yet i am this. i'm a am i i'm executive producer, is that right? i've got some sort of obviously a very demanding, made up title, but i haven't dared asked him yet what it means. i mean, i've discovered from being involved in a few of these things that what that means depends entirely on the director and the screenwriter. you know, you either stand around nodding, looking pretty or they actually do want you to kind of have some sort of input on how it's done. i'm happy either way, really. i mean, i'd love to have a bit more to do with this one. partly because i think, you know, i think will i've met a few times and he's extraordinarily brilliant, is interested in character. he's interested in personality. i know he want to make this just another sort of shoot up story. it's going to be a story about, don, i think from all the different points, which is not just the ss, it's the police and

the gunmen and the hostage negotiators and the politicians and thatcher and america, you know, there are all these different ways of looking at these this story. i think we i hope he's going to make it into i know he will make it into a sort of multifaceted story. well, i can't wait, which i suppose we'll always have to do, because these things take forever. absolutely. i've got to open it up to questions in a couple of minutes. i hope people have some i have the mike and i'll all pass it around. yeah. i mean, please by. all means yes. you've got some more slides. well, i'm going to show you just i'm just going to take you very quickly the final moments. that's the frontal assault. that's same escaping those are the some of the hostages being laid on on on the back lawn as they escape because they couldn't be sure who was a hostage in it. well, the one on the right, again i don't know how much of this i want to give away, but with the red one in the red jacket is one of the gunmen.

these photos are captured very in the book. so skip ahead and read the photos and have it and this of is margaret thatcher posing with with her forite military unit second from the left right that's yes she's second from the left. this is just after a there's a there's a this is not giving too much away. but after the on the embassy, the sas troopers all gather in regent's park for a party. so the beer is flowing. it's they're all completely kind of up to there is in testosterone and they're all they've all they're all still wearing the overalls soaked in tear gas that they've been they've you know they've gone into the building on and margaret thatcher and denis thatcher husband turn up they become sort of wandering among among the sort of troopers and shaking hands and somebody noticed that margaret thatcher had tears running her face that everyone thought that that was it was it was tear gas. i mean, she wasn't moved.

what was going on? she was much too tough for that. but there's a great moment in that scene. think when the story comes onto the television and it's like the footage is playing and all the troopers, all soldiers are watching themselves on television for the first time and a sort of before head figure moves in front of the the screen. and they all shall sit down. would you stick down whoever that is? and it's margaret thatcher. no one ever talks to margaret thatcher like that, but she dutifully ducks of the way. it's one of my favorite bits. i mean she was not used to being talked to like that, but. and you save it for the end of the chapter. absolutely where it belongs. some of the chapters most of these chapters end exactly where they want. i mean, the risk with a book like this is everybody's fascinated by the and they don't happen to notice how brilliantly it's told what else you got that's it. well that's it. that's a lot. oh are there i hope everybody has some questions. i, i do so before i get to all

of you. i'm well guess i could have you guys asking questions, but i'll forget my question. i wait. so you said so glad that you didn't become spy. i'm so glad. thank you very much. but you would have been a great one because you like to reveal things you said. what about revealing disinformation? think of all the stuff you could. you could make up and then know give to the bad guys. well, i. that would have been fun. i mean, you're absolutely right. i mean, i think i'm not sure i'd be very good on the front line. i think i would have enjoyed being in the back room, cooking up kind of mad deception plans. that would have been wonderful. and for example, love to have been involved in operation mincemeat, which was which was one that i wrote about, which really was they were all frustrated writers, all of all the people who planned that bonkers plot, which was to get a dead body, give it a false identity, false papers ship to shore where the germans would find and divert german attention

from the assault on sicily. i mean, it was a completely mad, mad plot. but all the people involved were frustrated novelists, so they treated it as if they were writing novel. so they gave this character a back story and a girlfriend and a, you know, a bank manager, a angry father. and they stuffed all this stuff in his wallet litter in his in fact, they went completely over the top. as they said at the time. they said, we're not we're not trying to convince everybody. we're trying to convince germans this is true. and that got the literal this would work but that that weirdly that that one has now been made into a into a musical, believe it or not, it's an it's an all singing all dancing musical in the west end. it's it's totally mad i loved it. i went to see it other day, determined not to like it. and emerged thinking, this is just brilliant. it's got six actors playing 23 part and it's about a dead. i just caught up with the television version. i thought that was very good.

yes, it was wonderful. listen, it was with colin firth and matthew macfadyen. i was quite i was quite involved in that. congratulations there. but that's that was such fun. but to answer your question, andrew, i think i would love to have been one of those sort of people cooking sort of odd plots. i don't i'd have been much good, you know, behind the iron curtain trying to ferret out secrets from from military officials that that wouldn't have been my scene at all in the honorable schoolboy or something. yeah. interviewers prerogative to salt my own in you have a journalistic background journalist worth his salt would omit ask the question are you a frustrated novelist. well if i'm frustrated i'd love to have a try one day i think i've never dared, really. partly because. who dares wins? well, who dares wins or loses catastrophically in case. but. but i guess i narrative nonfiction gives a structure. there's a beginning, a middle,

an end. i think if i was unleashed on, i wouldn't necessarily know where to stop. i pull a ruth rendell and have many names. well, if i c tno i would love to try one day. would it be multifunction, do you think? i think it would have to be. well, yes. hi. well, it's an honor be here. thank you, mr. mcintyre. bringing this information. you know, i was born in iran and i was 14 years old during the 79 revolution. and when i read that email, i have never in my life heard of incident where were you at the time in iran? mm 1980. i was 15 years old and that was during the hostage negotiation, a hostage taking american hostage in iran. and of course, my family, my father was military in the shah's army. so we were we were the westerners. we were the really westerners. but how did your family managed to get.

we couldn't know. no, we couldn't. it was very difficult and it was. but and i honestly. i don't know how what percentage of people in iran really know about this incident. and i'm not sure more than you would think. i mean, it was quite big news at the time. and in iran, as it was around the world, iran's government leapt to the conclusion that must have been organized by the cia they immediately blamed america for this, wasn't it? was it was done by saddam. but the immediate assumption was that it must be a kind of risk, revenge attack for what was happening at the american embassy in tehran when when it became clear that wasn't the the iranians began to put great pressure on britain to bring it to an early conclusion, save their diplomats to get them out america simultaneously was also

putting pressure on britain in the hope that if it could be solved bloodless, ali, if that that would sort of in a way favor with the iranian regime and that that might then be used as kind of lever to try to get the hostages out of the american embassy. so all of these things were linked up and it was daily news in the iranian press. well, of what was going on, it was mostly on the imperialist powers. but but it was it was it was quite a big story. also, the other thing that the iranian government said was all the iranians inside this building will be happy to die as martyrs, which was not true. i mean, very many of the iranians in that building had absolutely no. of dying as martyrs. yeah, i bet they didn't. and one thing you mentioned, maybe i'm i'm the complete ignorant person who lived in iran. i was a teenager, but i never have heard of arabist on a rubbish stump, arabist on arabist on to iranians is, saudi

arabia not. and i never knew there were arabs in iran. we knew there were kurds in doing that. the kurds problem, you see, i think absolutely fascinating that you didn't. i mean, there are there were 4 million of them that i mean there's still a sizable majority in the province of khuzestan, which is what iranian. well persian iranians refer to that region, the oil rich region. arabs stan is the name was used as the name used by arabs of that of that party wouldn't have been used or heard by iranians by persian speaking iranians. but it is still used today. it is i mean, some still deny the kind of protesting minority still refer to it as arabic. stan and it had briefly been arabist in the 19th century. there was a there was a small el sheikh, them known as arabic stan, which was initially supported by the british and, the americans, then in the power

politics of the time, support was withdrawn, had a robust stance, continued. it would have been a kuwait or, qatar, a very small, very rich arabic oil state. it was just an accident of history that. it didn't happen. so so lot. so thank you for entertaining everybody. it was wonderful. so the essays were very impressed with margaret thatcher. so is it true about when margaret thatcher went to the killing room with the secretary, you want to tell him that story? you tell the story because i didn't put it in the book. in the book, the one where she she tells hurd not to be so scared. yeah. yeah. well, yeah, well, i got that right. margaret thatcher went to hereford where the ssr and she went to the killing room where they actually practiced with live ammunition and had the

secretary with her and the ss burst in and opened and the secretary basically jumped under the chair and was and apparently ss said that margaret thatcher didn't bat an eyelid. she just sat there. and what did she say to him? basically, yeah, i sort of f believe story. exactly. that sounds like the sort of story that margaret thatcher would have had and the ss would have told you margaret thatcher. but but one that i know to be true. is that so. the killing house is a kind of nondescript one storey building in center of isis headquarters that you rightly say is used for for practice hostage situations ever since 1972, following the munich olympics massacre, the sas had been preparing and had had a unit constant on standby to do this. so almost every day they would go into that building and different hostage scenarios would play out inside it. the room layout would change. there would be cardboard figures

in the corner that would represent either gunmen or hostages. and the royal family was taken there still are two to sort of see would happen in a hostage situation and there were definitely was a moment because i've had corroboration this when prince charles then charles and princess diana went to witness an episode in the killing house and with a thunder flash, they accidentally set fire to her hair. right. and i know this is true because because i've got two witnesses to it. and the palace was very nice about it. right. and another question was, is it true that ss wanted to drag one of the terrorists back into the building again? this is the most element of this whole story. is that right? at the end, the man in the red jacket that you saw lying face on the lawn there had managed to escape really hiding among the hostages, particularly the women hostages who had become sort of fond him. and there is this moment when

one of the other hostages, harris, spotted this man fawzi but davi nejad spotted that he'd got out and said to them, that's a terrorist. that's a terrorist. grab him, boys. the ss got to him, lifted them up and then the women gathered that because they hadn't been handcuffed by point gathered around him and said don't hurt him, don't hurt him, he's our now whether the ss would have dragged him back inside and killed him as some eyewitnesses believe, or whether that was the senior at the scene say that would never have happened. there were too many witnesses, not what they were trained to do. that wasn't their job. they weren't there kill people. they were there to save lives. so in the book, it's one of the few moments that i am ambivalent about, and i think it will probably never be solved, certainly. but i enjoyed himself. it seems to have said that he was going to be killed. some of the troopers have

described, you know, the red mist that comes down when those things happened. but what we know for certain is that it didn't happen. they did not they did not that that that that last person. thank you, ben. thank you, ben. i thought i knew this story like a of people and i didn't, you know, a tremendous amount of interesting details. fascinating two things. i was living in knightsbridge the time i was about 200 yards away in a friend's house when the bomb went off, the explosion went off. we heard it turned on the tv and watched it so that great. the second fantastic. yeah. oh it really was. yeah. and you know i was 22 boys own stuff. the second point which i'm going to make with this audience is very impolite and i'm much ruder than you. you were too polite to really emphasize it. a large part. the reason why the brits loved this is because the americans had failed six days earlier. yeah, honestly, we absolutely

loved it. yeah, i think that's huge. you make a very good point. very. yeah. and it was sorry we didn't get there. no, you're actually right. and also margaret thatcher was not above crowing to americans immediately afterwards. i mean, sent these wonderfully sort of faux polite cables saying, if you ever need any help, we're here to help, you know. yeah, absolutely. no, it was a bit of one upmanship. and, you know, it really was a moment when britain appeared to be for good or ill, kind of above its own weight in some way, that it proved that the brits still had it in them to kind of you know and better than the americans. but it does also you know perhaps the downside of that is that i think it did lead to this kind of gung ho attitude towards the falklands, whichever way you want to look at that, that, you know, it did lead britain in a certain direction that may or may not have helped the country in the end, but you're the first person i know who actually heard it live going off in the at the

same time it's of the tricky elements of this book been has been sort of trying particularly among the sas working out who really was there and who wasn't. there's an old joke that goes, you know if everybody who claimed to have been on that balcony had actually been on the balcony, it would have fallen off. so there is this a great tradition in sort of british life of saying, oh, always part of that. you know, i was there the time and one of the half the fun here has been a lot of fun. one of the one of the sort of privileges has been that the essay at the survival essays, people who were were involved were given formal military authorization to talk me. the ministry of defense issued with sort of passes to talk to me. they've never done that. that's never happened before with the sas because then they're not the officially they're not supposed to talk about any kind of secret operations that they took part in, but this for this. so there are think there are 18 still alive and i've 14 of them and do we have any more?

i'll sneak one. oh, no, there's so many. you can sneak one. okay. your i don't i don't know how many books, but at least half a dozen of them by now. they all seem to focus on espionage or commando actions in the past. do take an interest in more contemporary subjects. or would you just as soon steer clear of them? are there events that you would love to get your hands on? but they're still top secret? oh, yes, not. there are plenty of those. i took on the whole, you know, commenting on the on the current sars is a mug's game. you know there are big investigations going on at the moment into the sars. you know, in afghanistan. i try not to draw between between that time and this. but, yes, i mean, i you know, my my earlier books were much earlier, actually. i mean, you the wartime stuff when i started 30 years ago, there were still living witnesses. you know, i could ask people what it was like in room 13 where they cooked up operation

mincemeat. there was still obviously they've all gone now. so i am becoming more modern as it were and sort of moving up into the cold war. and then this is this is really most modern one i've ever done. this is the one where i found most living witnesses. i need that combination that to have the combination of of written material and declassified and somebody who can tell me what it was like in that room. that's when it when it really gels together. think. yes. i was just wondering, you interviewed the surviving the man in the red vest. i've sort of not i've it's not a question i can really answer because i've sort of tried to cover the identity of quite a lot of the people in the book. i'm sort of under under a kind of no no pack drill and i've i've covered names of many of the sas, although they all talk to me and this is in a way a kind of measure of them modest, really. most of them did not want me to use their real name, so i'm sort

of i'm going to slightly slide away that question because it's sort of identified anybody really particularly. you know, he he's served 27 years in a british. again, if you don't mind, i'm going to slide away from that question in the. he served his time, you know. i mean, he did. he's an interesting character. you know he was 20 when it happened. he had no real idea what he was doing. he'd never left because this storm. he was manipulated by the others. he was excited. you know, he felt if anyone who has a 20 year old son knows what they're like they think that they think they're invulnerable and they run the world. and so, look, i'm not making excuses for him. he was a fool, but he did serve his time and now he you know, he still lives in britain. he can't go back to iran. he's he's stuck. you know, he's stuck where he is. yes, sir. so i want to ask the future of

spying, maybe when you might write your fiction about, because i've read some of your in the lecture and all spy craft the old days going to a foreign with a fake identity that was fabricated can that even happen in the modern world? we have a digital footprint from when you're born and you're under surveillance everywhere and the you know, current spying has to be so completely different based on that digital technological revolution. but people aren't going to stop. but what will it look like? good question. it's a really good question. and i think the answer is there's always been signals and human intelligence going right back. the war, bletchley park intercepting telegrams, reading other people's mail signals has to be combined human intelligence. because even if you a digital trace on someone, you still need to have somebody in the room to say when they're on the telephone, you still need to

have somebody who can sit opposite your agent and try and out whether they're lying to whether they're on the other side. so i think human intelligence in some because the digital story is so huge, is more important than it's rarer. it doesn't happen nearly as much. but but recruiting foreign agents is is has vital as it's ever been and right we have a digital footprint from the moment we pick up a mobile phone but actually that's also falsifiable. i mean, there's a there's a training at gcc hq, our equivalent of the nsa know it's a sort of government communications center. they do all the sigint, there's a training program, they're called operation mincemeat, believe it or not. and that is where they they make false digital identities. so in the same way that the body in operation mincemeat was invested with a completely made up character in the operate the

modern operation mincemeat is about creating false people. people who don't exist but have perfect digital backgrounds. so, you know, they have facebooks, they have instagram accounts, they have emails. those could all be falsified. and of course they have to be because the other is also digging in. the russians are trying to find who's who. if you're trying to if you're trying to foist a false agent on someone, better make sure that the digital the wallet litter as it as it was then is is as convincing it was for operation mincemeat. so so i think those will be the future i the one that i would love to crack. and it is, is the chinese digital espionage, because that's incredibly sophisticated and certainly to me and, i suspect to most people in the west, incredibly opaque. i mean, it's really really hard to get a proper handle on that. that, i think will increasingly be story. hello. thank you. this has been very enjoyable.

like many people here, i had never heard of this event before. yeah, fascinating. and can't wait to read the book. basically. maybe a larger kind of question about like craft. you mentioned like carrie telling the, you know, spy among friends giving you the story. how do you decide, you know, there's so many stories out there. you were talking about essays and the middle east and things are being declassified. how do you decide between a good story and a story worth writing about? i have a bottom drawer that is filled with books. i'm going to write because i got sort of into the research and realized there wasn't of it only works if you have enough warp and weft of the story. if you've got if you can really drill into what people were thinking and saying and how they were interacting with each other, which is why, you know, it's difficult. it's it's a difficult story. david cornwell, one of the pieces of advice that he gave me

and, i've never forgotten it. he said, what we have to do is we have to ensure there is jeopardy on every page that we write. and i think by that, i know what meant by that he didn't mean will the bomb go off or will our hero be killed? you know, the not that not the although that could be part of it, but not that obvious, exciting jeopardy. but how do you ensure that the reader is invested in turning the next page? how do you how do you keep them in what your what you're doing here. and i have i mean as a novelist in a way to answer your question about about fiction that you carte blanche to do that with nonfiction. it's more difficult because you've got this wealth of information half of which you're never going to use. because i'm riskless. i mean, if it if it doesn't interest me and it doesn't keep the jeopardy going, it goes it goes in the wastepaper basket. so. so these are not scholarly tomes where i'm to get everything in there with all the footnotes.

i'm trying to write a story that will entertain and engage and above all, keep that kind of jeopardy going. so that's that. in the end, is the is the final arbiter for me on whether it's going to be a i can write and live with for two or three years or whatever or one that i'm going to be struggling. i think about you, but i always that with narrative nonfiction you can of tell when the author run out of road when they just don't have enough and they often it's dressed in a sort of language that says we may imagine that he thought at this point or perhaps further down the road, he spotted i mean those those are kind of weaselly words perhaps and let us speculate and let this or wonder that by that point you know you're you're stuffed you've run out, you haven't got enough to write this. and you're you're making it out. so when you feel that when i have felt that on the few occasions that it's come to me, i've thought i need to stop this because it's i'm not going to be

able to tell story in the way i want to. you. last question. you're walking. are all the next books in the drawer? is there one on the table? i've got one on the table. in fact, it's more on the table. it's sort of half in the laptop already. i'm doing a another cold war spy story. it's about a kgb agent who is recruited by western intelligence and unpicks. it's never been told before a huge amount of the sort of middle eastern in the early eighties. it's also it's a i find it completely because it's also a sort of strange psychosexual story because his motives are very bound up with his emotional and his sexual, which makes him, i think, tremendously interesting. and he's run in a quite complicated way, if you haven't

if hasn't been told before, how did you find out about it? sources. oh, they, they must be knocking on your door. the car. oh, i wish. people seem to think that what happens mi6 will bring up after the last war and say, we've got the next one for you here. it doesn't quite like that. this is not one that the intelligence services will find very easy. i suspect. but yeah, i mean, i wish they sort of to one but. but yeah. and i say this this this comes from a sort of from a tip off. yeah. do you ever get back from the intelligence community and the intelligence community? i mean, i get sort of criticism but they yeah. i mean, sometimes they disagree with my conclusions or or i mean, so the one i wrote about like go the ascii, the spot, the spy and the traitor. that was interesting. that one i had. i had considerable cooperation from for that they they they didn't prevent from interviewing

their officers who'd been involved some they are more about i mean some affect national security this story i did allow the sas one particular person in the sas to read it not they had no editorial but the only thing that i took out of this book was some contemporary capability, as they call it, that there are things that they did at this one particular thing that they did at embassy, that they would do, again, if a similar situation and they simply said, please don't put it in because it will compromise that that that capability and that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable thing to to to ask for but other that no i don't get i don't get much much pushback. i wanted to ask another craft question on. this particular project, what was the most difficult or challenging thing that you had to solve as a writer. the biggest problem it posed in

of craft the trickiest element i had with this was eliding or rather trying to work out which memories are true and, which are not. memory is such a strange thing when you're talking to people about that took place 43 years ago that they think they have recall of what happened. but actually memory isn't truth and it's definitely not reality. memory is the story that we tell ourselves, the narratives that we tell ourselves to make the sort of sense of the past. and often our memories are borrowed, you know, we may have heard somebody else say something at about an event that we were at and we will sort of absorb that and take it, and it will become part of our memories. and there were several examples of this this story where individuals would be at the same event at same time and have completely contrasting memories, what had happened.

no one was lying. no, no one is deliberately misleading, but is sort of the way memory, you know, more than of the officers told me about an incident where towards the end of the of of the assault a sniper taken a shot from a hidden position, hyde park and killed one of the gunmen through an open window. and i had to say to them, that didn't happen. i mean, i know that didn't happen because i've read all the forensic reports and nobody died that way. so so those are tricky moments when when people have been kind enough and generous enough and some cases sort of they're quite emotional. they are telling you what and you know, or you think you know, it's not quite what did happen. so that was the trickiest thing for me was to interview dozens of people and some of them will will be unhappy that i have not taken their version that i've

taken a different version. and and that's where it becomes, i suppose, in a way that's a judgment call on my part because i have to do that slightly solomonic thing of saying this is the one i believe and this is the one i don't, and that that can that can cause that can cause relapse to people. but it's you have to do and the more interviews you have, the more interviewees you have, the better pattern you have of what is going on. it's particularly true of groups, i think. i think groups particularly like the sas who were not allowed to really talk about it outside their own group, developed a kind of a narrative that they all sort of shared, even if some of them didn't really remember it, if you see what i mean. so that that's one of the things you have to kind of you have to fight against. perhaps the last question or two will have to wait until. mr. macintyre if so good as to join you outside by the just the last book or two. in the meantime we want you race on home as quickly as possible.

back to your desk. inform us about your kgb agent. but if they loudly enough, will you in come out and sell a few books and? sign them? i'd be thrilled to thank you. thank you you. thank you. david.