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thank you so much for coming to tonight's program with ben mcintyre, i am andrea grossman, the founder of writers walk now in our 29th season, i want to say thank you to the ebell, it is a membership organization built by women, for women, and they built this place over 100 years ago, they provide a rich array of cultural and social events, including writers block. so it is obviously terrific. before we get to tonight's discussion which i can't wait to hear, i want to remind you that writers block is committed to 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 disruption but i need to point out that tonight, the floor

belongs to ben mcintyre and to david kevin, if there is any behavior that makes our participants feel threatened or uncomfortable, we reserve the right to ask you to leave in the nicest way possible, we don't want yelling and screaming about what you are going to see. for tonight, when ben mcintyre releases a new book, it is a cause for great personal celebration, and i couldn't possibly come up with my best books without saying he made the cut and has stayed there. the new book, the siege contains every element of any great thriller, terrorist driven by ideology, taking over the iranian embassy in london and holding 26 people hostage, ordinary run-of-the-mill people

in the wrong place at the wrong time, he gives us context to their demands, sketching some background into iranian conflict over the centuries. but it is not that part that tethers me to this book, it's the characters involved in this massive park, what a cast it is, too. the bdc guys who happen to be there for the visa and overweight pakistani man whose snoring drove the hostages nuts and it was his snoring who saved his life, which saved his life. anyway, an arab journalist who sympathizes with the plo who would have avoided the embassy had his domestic squabble delete him just a bit more than he already was delayed. the terrorists themselves are so out of their element, i cringed reading about them, as this crisis played out, it was covered in real time, and it

was, as he argues, sort of the development of 24 hour news coverage. i'm not giving away anymore except i can't help myself, it is his motif to show in full what turns a shop into a hero. i love this book, think about it, hostages, iran, rescue oppositions, all of this stuff of our painful headlines every day. speaking of heroes, david kevin is a hero, a former book critic and director of literature for the national endowment for the arts, he now runs a storefront lending library called legros- shmigros. he's the author of some terrific books, including dear california, the golden state

diaries and letters, david and ben will chat for a while, and when they are through, feel free to ask some questions. i can pass around the microphone and we would appreciate your waiting for me to do that because we want the audio covered for c-span. when they are through, ben will sign copies of the siege and david will sign copies of his books. it is now my great pleasure to introduce ben mcintyre and david kippen. >> thank you. lovely. wonderful. well, thank you for coming. it is lovely to see you here and thank you andrea. good, thank you for inviting me to do this because i'm incredibly honored to be here with ben mcintyre whom many of

you know about his work and you get to listen to him. it has been a thrill reading this book on which i complement you, and you are every interviewers dream, not only because of fear area of talent, but you also brought a slideshow for show and tell. >> on my holiday. >> how long did you work on this book? >> i have been working on this for quite a long time, i first wanted to start writing about eight years ago but i started in earnest about 2 1/2 years ago. well, that is a long holiday. >> yes, by all means, show us what you did on your 2 1/2 your summer vacation. >> okay, so thank you very much for inviting me again, it is

great to be back. let me paint a picture. so, on may 5th, 1980, i was 17 years old and i was watching the final in the uk, if you are 17 in 1980, it was incredibly exciting, there were 14 million people that were tuned in to watch, it was the embassy final because it was sponsored by embassy cigarettes. >> this is by the way, billiards on a tiny child sized table. >> yes, and if you were like my father, you would get a colored television, it is hard to watch because you can't tell which balls are which, it was sponsored by embassy cigarettes, back in those days, everybody smoked all the time, including the players. if we listen to the song --

soundtrack, all you could hear is coughing. and suddenly they cut away to this. that live news. and so you see this is the s.a.s., the elite special f >> and this, by the way, is in real time when we were watching it, this is the first time with live news, this is the elite special forces team going into try to liberate the hostages, 22 of them still in the building, we were held there for six days. the building immediately burst into flames, and in a second, you will see the first hostages being brought out of the back. the five brigades arrived, but it is still on fire as you will

see, and in a second, you will see the crouching police snipers, he is leaning out of the window and beckoning to one of the hostages who was a bdc sound record is to, that is what he called his balcony scene, and at that point, his jacket was on fire. you can't quite see it from the footage, i have never seen anything like this before, nobody had ever seen anything like this before, i think it's the reason i became a news journalist later in life, because there had been exciting film footage of news events before, the moon landing, the killing of jfk and so on, but never before had live television arrived in sitting rooms across the world, actually this was broadcast in america, too. and all three channels, there were three channels in the uk,

all three of them moved from this, from john wayne on bbc one, and they all moved to this footage. and it had a permanent effect on british cultural life. >> how would you characterize that effect? >> i think anybody who watched it would remember it forever, in britain, if you are over 50, this event laid on national consciousness. margaret thatcher had been appointed for a year or so, this was the first test of her resolve, if it had gone another way, if she was told before it happened, if this embassy had been cleared out by force, you can expect 40% casualties. four out of 10 people in the building will be killed or injured as a result. if that had 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 luck out and write on the cartels? >> both, it was a very bold gamble that she took, that was characteristic, but it also empowered her in a way to think the military could do magical things, it is one of the reasons why subsequently, i think over the war, she was gung about that, partly because i think this experience with the elite unit had convinced her that the british army was somehow an all-powerful force, it also had an impact on terrorism generally because this was the height of the troubles in northern ireland and everybody was watching this and it had an impact. it had a deterrent effect on

i.r.a. hostage taking, it didn't end there troubles in any way but it was a signal moment or for watch thatcher was going to be like. >> the next slide, so, to put this into context, the year before in 1979, the west's favorite oil-rich dictator was overthrown by the islamic fundamentalist government, revolutionary movement. it was bitterly opposed to the west and one of the first events which i'm sure many of you will remember was the taking over of -- i'm pressing the wrong one here. the students that took over the emssy in tehran, they weren't

actually students, they were militia and properly organized by the iranian government, that led to a standoff that would last a long time, the hostages, 55 of them, american diplomats and soldiers held inside that building, and six days before the attack on the iranian embassy in london, american special forces had attempted to 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 marked the administration om then on, arguably his revocation ner recovered. this took place six days before the attack on the emssy and in some ways it was a reciprocal operatn. the point is to be made however that the sixth gunman that

attacked in 1980, they were bitterly opposed to the government, they were arabs, part of the oppressed arab minority in iran who had been depressed and brutally by the security service, so each of these six men, and this was a photograph never published before, taken just a few hours before they attacked the embassy. >> how do you get a photograph that has never been published before? >> the arabs of iran, refer to themselves as ahuwasi, they have been a part of the oil- rich part of iran, and this photograph was given to me by the relative of one of the people involved, and how it was

smuggled out, it is not clear to me because it must have come from the person organizing the operations as well, in fact, saddam hussein. this whole operation was an iraqi plot to destabilize the iranian government. so, he could use this arab protest movement as a way of getting at them, so in a way, the story we are about tell is really the first battle of the iran/iraq rule -- war which would corrupt five months ter this, so suffice to say, they grow, finance, equipped and encouraged this operation, and he did it through three people, the man in the middle that would become to be the world's most wanted terrorist, who organized a string of appalling terrorist atrocities in the late 70s and 1980s. he was living in baghdad and

working force it on as a freelance terrorist consultant, so he was the mastermind who organized the whole thing, and the man on the right is an iraq he intelligence officer, i'm pretty sure he is still around. >> he didn't answer his phone's for interviews. >> oddly enough, he didn't want to talk to me. and he accompanied this group of men to london, he arranged for them to get explosives and submachine guns and pistols, and the weapons all came through the iraqi diplomat and about 15 minutes before the assault took place on the embassy, he climbed onto a plane to paris and was never seen again. >> that's that great line in the book where you say most operations are planned by very intelligent man and executed by

morons. >> that is probably true actually, it is not as quite as true as this one because actually the two leaders of the group, of the six gunmen were in themselves intelligent men. they spoke multiple languages but they would be manipulated, they had been promised that what happened was very simple, they would take hostages, they would take iranian hostages, the diplomat hostages and 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 incredibly naove now. actually in the context of 1970s terrorist spectaculars, there were precedents for this. other groups had persuaded governments, including the british government actually, to exchange prisoners for freedom and that is what they thought was going to happen.

they had not calculated with one extremely important factor and that was margaret thatcher. >> is this book translated or will it be translated, i don't know that is a part -- >> there is already an arabic translation underway, which it'll be fascinating to see how it is received in that part of the world. the protest movement by arabs in iran continues today, i mean it is brutally put down but it is still going on, it is still very much a part, it is one of the many opposition groups that exist towards the fundamentalist theocratic government. >> andrea, do you want to book an event in iran? paris, fair enough. who is this gentleman? >> this is one of my favorite characters in the whole book, this is a man called pc trevor

locke who is the policeman guarding the door during the attack, trevor was standing around having a cup of coffee, inside, he is a wonderful character, he is straight out of the central because he joined the diplomatic protection group which is a part of the metropolitan police guard of the embassies come he joined it because it was boring, he was one of those policeman, standing around on the front step, that is what he wanted to do. and he said, i didn't join because i wanted to be a local body, i wanted to be the person that helped old ladies across the road, he was the last person to be a hero in this situation, and yet he plays an absolutely critical role in what happened because for many reasons really, but the main one is perhaps he became a

symbol of solidity, the other reason is that he had a gun, most british policeman in the 80s were unarmed but diplomatic protection offices, he kept it hidden under his tunic for the next six days, that gun plays a very part in part in the final scene of this story, but trevor locke is still around, i'm delighted to say. and without him, the whole thing would have ended in had n interviewed before. partly because i think he's now in his 80s. he never wanted to talk about it. like many of the interviews i did for this book, these are men and women of older age, the

catharsis of being able to talk about this thing was extremely beneficial. i don't want to give away too much of the book, but he's a wonderfully modest man, trevor locke. he was awarded the high oes award for civilian gal antry the queen could bestow. he immediately lost it because he put it in his wife's sewing box and forgot where it was for about 15 years. that gives you an idea of how sort of how modest and humble he is about the whole thing, but without him it would have been a different sort of story. >> and 50 years of holes in his socks. i wonder -- i was saving this question and now i can't resist it because we're talking about him. he's such a fascinating man. plays a wonderful role in the book. all of us reading the book have to ask how we would react in a

situation like this, under tremendous stress, at risk of death at any moment. some of them you think would be heroic turn out cowardly. some you expect to be cowering in the corner, turn out to be heroes. how do you think you would behave in similar circumstances? >> thank you, dave. in a way, that's the core question of this book. growing up as a teenager, i thought it was a simple story in some ways. a story of brave british soldiers burse into this building and liberating the hostages 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 -- over which they have no control. that's not just trevor. there were british hostages inside there. we'll move onto some of them. how would i have responded to it? i don't know.

i don't know. i think i would have kept my head down. i don't think i was the sort of person that was brave. i certainly wouldn't have taken on the gunmen. i think i would have tried to help in the negotiations. that is what quite a lot of the hostages ended up doing, particularly the british ones. there were four british people in there. in a way, they began to develop -- this is one of the elements, ing elements to me, of stockholm syndrome that began to take place in that building is they began to find common cause with the gunman. they saw the police and authorities outside as the enemy. so this man you see on the top left here -- is it top left for you? yes, top left. began to sort of speak on behalf of the gunman to the authorities. i think i might have been one of those. i think i might have tried to help in that way. the one on the top left is one of the people who just wandered

into the embassy by accident, really. he was interviewing one of the press attache. he was a frequent visitor and got caught up in. pe i mrass a crucial part because he's the only one who could speak arabic, his native language, and english perfectly, and farsi. he was able to intercommunicate between the key three elements. without him, i think it would have been a very different story. another one for whom that can also be said is the woman you see in this picture. there were six women inside the embassy. their stories have never been told before. no one ever asked to tell them. they were never interviewed, never invited to testify at the trials -- >> where was fleet street? >> it's a male story. it sounds mad to us now, but this is the -- lives in australia now, she was the

senior secretary in the embassy. now, anyone who's ever been inside an embassy knows the senior secretary is, frankly, the most important person in the building. she knew exactly how everything ran. she was wonderful at keeping everybody calm, finding food, trying to explain one side to the other. there was a terrible cleavage already going on in the embassy because the two men you see on the right were both iranian diplomats. the one on the top was the charge d'affaires, the most senior, but the one on the bottom was a man who was a press attache but a secret revolutionary guard. he was there to inform, and he was a much feared figure, in fact. he had actually taken part in the storming of the american

embassy in tehran in the previous year. in his own way, he was just as fanatical as the gunmen who attacked that embassy. it's the collusion he's building over these six days between those two sides that eventually erupt in brutal violence. >> one of the things i really marvel at in this book, you think, what an exciting story, it would tell itself, we know better. and the way you individuate the characters, there's 26 of them -- >> some you never hear about. >> how do you focus on? how do you juggle the story lines? >> that was one of the difficult things with this book. i kind of ended up with an embarrassment of riches. there were so many people and so much evidence, much of it hidden and and unused. for example -- and this is 1980. so, everybody was still writing everything down.

with pencil and paper or typewriters in a way it lasted. 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. at this time people were very literate and keen to leave some sort of record. so, i found no fewer than four unpublished manuscripts written by different participants. one policeman, one sas 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 in inside that jacket a diary he had been keeping almost minute by minute of what was going on inside. he just gave it to me. so, to answer your question, i kind of privilege those whose voices i felt i could hear. of course, that's not everybody. the gunman, for example, left no

record. they didn't write it all down. but yet they were faceless figures. i think no one really tried to find out who they were and why they had done this thing. 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 they don't become characters in the story, they simply become symbols of something else. that doesn't work, i don't think. >> for an event that seems to have traumatized the country and stayed with them for so long, i assume that this book is tremendously successful in britain because it's exposing a story they thought they knew and didn't know the first thing about. >> i think it's number two on the best seller list at the moment. so -- but i think that is

because it was for many british people, and many around the world, actually hundreds of press people gathered when this started. it really was a kind of where were you when it happened moment. no fewer -- by the end of it there were something like 450 journalists had gathered and were corralled into a melt pen in hyde park to try to stop them from breaking out and trying to get inside the embassy and didn't work, of course they broke out the whole time. 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. in fact, if the gunman had been watching television, they would have seen what was happening, as the place was assaulted. so, yeah, i mean, it's -- for british people, it went incredibly deep. partly because it also catapulted the sas, which had hither to been a shatter of an organization. most britons had not heard of

the sas. overnight it became a kind of sensation. and as we say, solidified margaret thatcher's hold on power. they became almost a cultic group in britain. >> you quoted someone else saying it was the worst thing that happened to the sas because they operated in the shadows and 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 my second. i don't think of them in that way. i think they're all -- like everybody in this story, the sas are also complicated people. they operate from a variety of motives. they're not these kind of butch heroes that go in and solve everything. i sort of added to it, i guess. i think the sas has -- the person who made that remark was the person who commanded the sas on this occasion, michael rose went on to become a general. he does feel the sas sort of

never recovered from it. he's right in some ways because that group, as special forces around the world, delta force, navy s.e.a.l.s, struggle with the tension between their own celebrity and the need for secrecy. 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 of a book which became a documentary and a series, i think, which is going into its second season about the sas. you want to talk a little bit about that? they're wonderful. >> delightfully, that's the second season of sas rogue heroes is about to hit your screens. i don't know 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 sas is an airline. >> that's been hugely successful. that's made by steve knight, who is the man that made "peeky blinders."

>> and a great screenwriter. >> some people refer to "sas rogue heroes" as "cocky blinders." in a way it is, the incredible energy he brought to "peaky blinders" he brought to "rogue heroes." it's a sufficiently series. >> what do you have next? >> i can't even remember. so, yeah, one of the things the police had to do was to try to work out who these people were. the metropolitan police, for all of its virtues, had never heard of arabistan. this was a completely unknown conflict taking place in a distant land. the learning curve was very steep, indeed. these were the photos, inciting reports, for police to work how the who they were, who were the hostages, who was inside that building? they were a very mixed bag. one of the other things they had to do, and much of the

intelligence they were gathering, was based on audio probes. right from the beginning, mi5, equivalent to the fbi, and police technicians began drilling microprobes through the adjoining walls from either building on either side. also they began lowering eavesdropping devices down the chimneys. every package of food that went in there contained a listening device as well. this was an attempt to get an audio picture of who was in there to try to work out both where the hostages and gunmen were located, who were the leaders, who were organizing this, who -- 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 technology to us today because today it would have been easy to beam in eavesdropping devices. then you had to drill them into the walls. and that was difficult.

you had to use hand drills. the hand drills made a noise. >> tell them about the 1812 overture. >> so, they were acutely aware the gunmen were listening to what was going on. there is this weird, climactic moment at the end, albert hall, only 200 yards away, a performance of the 1812 overture was planned. some bright spark in the police thought, hang on, when the cannon bit happens, the famous bit of the 1812 overture, the gunmen are going to think they are attacked. a surreal conversation took place with the conductor where the policemen approached and said, would you mind not doing that bit? he said, of course we're going to do that bit. eventually though did and nothing happened. but the audio probes also nearly went drastically wrong because the gunmen could hear this squeaking noise in the walls. trevor locke was summoned by the lead gunman to where the noises

were happening and said, mr. trevor, mr. trevor, we're about to be attacked. and trevor locke knew exactly what that was but he listened to the wall and said, i think we have mice, which was total nonsense. the audio probes, the police picked up that conversation and decided that they would have to cover the noise somehow. the first thing they did was to call the gas board and arranged for two men in overalls with large pneumatic drills to arrive about 100 feet from the front door of the embassy and start digging a very large and completely unnecessary hole. in the pavement to try to cover the noise of the drills. the noise was absolutely deafening. nobody could do anything. even the police were driven bonkers by it so they had to stop that. the next thing they did was stronger. they contacted the civil aviation office at heathrow and arranged for planes to be

diverted from the usual flight paths to fly low over the embassy. about 1,000 feet lower than they would normally fly. those planes were noisier then than they are today. but it worked. strangely, the technicians would work until they could hear the rumble of a plane coming and drill like mad into the wauldz and wait until the sound stopped. but by the end, a lot of these citing reports were based on what they were hearing inside the embassy. 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. much of the dialogue in the book comes from the eavesdropping devices. >> i don't want to misrepresent you, between this and "rogue heroes" one might think you're a specialist exclusively in stories about commandos. yes, that's something you do very well. but you also write about spies.

a wonderful book was made into a movie called "spy among friends" which was the cambridge spies. what's more fun to write about, commandos or spies? >> that's very difficult. in a way the sas are themselves a form of espionage unit. they do operate under covert rules, but for me, es pea yaj, spying is the first. i don't know why i'm particularly attracted to that species of skullduggery. you can write about -- spying for a nonfiction writer, spying is such a rich resource. when you write about espionage, you can write about the sorts of things that novelists usually -- often write about, loyalty and love and betrayal and adventure and romance. and they're all true. spies are wonderfully indiscreet.

they love telling you their stories. particularly if they're not really supposed to. they're also extremely unreliable narrators of their own lives, so you have the challenge of trying to fill out what is true and what is not. so, that's why i'm sort of attracted to that world. if you can find a sufficient density of 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'm very, very rigorous about that. if i say the room smelt of stale bread and she had a headache, that's because i know it was true. in a way, the spy stories allow you to do that because those often, particularly if you have declassified files, there's access to this real richness of material. >> so, was your introduction to that world through fiction, like many of us?

>> yes. i read a lot of somerset morm, but these are also spies, these people. spy and novel writing are not so different. both are weaving a sort of artificial world and trying to lure other people into it. there's a reason why david cornwall, ian fleming, morm, graham green, john buckham, they had all been in the spy service at some point. yes, that was my introduction. that is sort of how it started. i was briefly recruited by mi6 when i was at university. >> how did that go? >> well, not very well, really. i enjoyed it. i i wanted to be recruited. so i sort of hung around the particular tutor i knew was the recruiter. eventually he sent me off to meet the man in white hall. i did it for a brief while. it became clear quickly, as

demonstrated, i can't keep a secret. i don't really like keeping secrets. i like revealing them. it's much more fun. so, it left me with a long fascination for that world. i think it's a wonderful world. it has built into it a kind of moral -- a central moral conundrum. spies do bad things sometimes for good reasons. >> who's your favorite among the novelists? and who comes the closest to getting it right? past or present. >> past, john lecarie. he was also a friend of mine. he was incredibly helpful to my writing. you mentioned "a spy among friends," that story came from him. he gave me that story on a walk in hempstead east one day. i said, i don't know what to write. he said, i have a good idea. he knew one of the protagonists

in that story and he was incredibly generous. nobody since have quite dug into the psychology of spying with his acuteness and his style and brilliance. he was the best. mick herron of the current lot is brilliant, too. >> do you know mick herron? he's the guy who writes the slow horses novels. i believe you have a connection with that show. >> yes, i do. have you watched "slow horses"? i don't know what channel it's on here. all right. i adore it. i think it's completely brilliant. in a way what herron has done, and will smith, the screenwriter, have created a new world of spying. it's the sort of anti-bond. they're wonderful because they're all so completely hopeless. they turned out to be rather good but they all smoke and fart all the time.

the whole thing is a deliberate undermining of the kind of glinting 007 genre. it's completely brilliant, i think. i absolutely love it. i do have a connection. which is will smith, the screenwriter of that series, is writing the screenplay of this one. he's doing it at the moment. they're going to do a six-part series. it will be a day an episode, i think is how they're going to do it. it will be a gradual tick tock. >> do you get -- do you leave that to the pros? >> i haven't been told yet. i'm executive producer. >> is that right? obviously a very demanding role. >> a madeup title. i haven't dared asked them what it means. i've discovered being involved in a few of these things, what that means depends entirely on the director and screenwriter. you either stand around nodding, looking pretty or they do want you to have some input on how it's done.

i'm happy either way, really. i would like to have a bit more to do, but i think will, who i met a few times and he's extraordinarily brilliant, is interested in character and personality. i know he doesn't want to make this another short them up story. it's going to be a story about -- done, i think, from all the different vantage points, which is not just the sas. it's the police and the gunmen and the hostage negotiators and the politicians and america. there are all these different ways of looking at these stories. i hope he's going to make it -- i know he will make it into a sort of multifaceted story. >> i can't wait. which i suppose we'll always have to do because these things take forever. >> i'm going to open it up to questions in a couple of minutes. >> i have the mic and i'll pass it around. >> please. >> by all means. yes, you have more slides. >> i'm going to show you darin i'm going to take you quickly through the final moments.

that's the frontal assault. that's sim escaping. those are the -- some of the hostages being laid out on the back lawn as they escape. >> because they couldn't be sure who was a hostage and -- >> the one on the right, i don't knowhow much i want to give away, the one in the red jacket is one of the gunmen. >> these photos are captioned very cagily in the book so you can't skip ahead and read the photos and have it spoiled. >> this, of course, is margaret thatcher posing with their favorite military university. >> second from the left, right? >> yes. this just after a -- this is not giving too much away but after the assault on the embassy, the sas troopers all gather in regents park barracks for a party. the beer is flowing. they're all completely up to their ears in testosterone. they're all still wearing the

overalls soaked in tear gas they've been -- they've gone into the building on. and margaret thatcher and dennis thatcher, her husband, turn up. they begun wondering among the troopers and shaking hands. someone noticed margaret thatcher had tears running down her face. everyone thought it was actually tear gas. she wasn't moved by what was going on. she's much too tough for that. there's a great moment in that scene, i think, when the story comes onto the television and the footage is all playing and all the troopers, the soldiers are watching themselves on fwigs for the first time. and a figure moves in front of the screen and they all shout, get down, will you sit down whoever that is, and it's margaret thatcher. no one talks to margaret thatcher like that. but she dutily ducks out of the way. it's one of my favorite ways. she was not used to being talked to like that.

>> you save that for the end of the chapters. most of these chapters end -- the risk with a book like this is everybody is fascinated by the story and they don't happen to notice how brilliantly it's told. what else have you got? >> that's it. >> that's it? oh, we're there. i hope everybody has some questions. >> i do. so, before i get to all of you, i'm -- well, i guess i could have you guys asking questions but i'll forget my question if i wait. you said -- i'm so glad you didn't become a spy. i'm sew 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 make up and then, you know, give to the bad guys? >> well, i think that would have been fun. you're right. i'm not sure i'd be good on the front line. i would be good in the back room

making up mad deception plans. that would be wonderful. for example, i would have loved to have been involved in operation mince meat, which is one i read about. they were all frustrated writers. all the people who planned that bonkers plot, which was to give a dead body, false identity, ship it to shore where the germans would find it and divert german attention from the assault on sicily. it was a completely mad, mad plot. all the people involved were frustrated novelists, so they treated it adds if they were writing a novel. they gave this character a back story and a girlfriend and a bank manager and angry father. they stuffed all this stuff in his wallet. in fact, they went completely over the top. as they said at time, they said, we're not trying to convince everybody. we're trying to convince germans. they thought the literalness would work. but that weirdly has been made

into a musical, believe it or not. it's an all singing, all dancing musical in the west end. it's totally mad. i loved it. i went to see it the other day determined not to like it and i thought it was brilliant. six actors playing 23 parts but it's about a dead body. >> i just caught up with the television version. i thought that was very good. >> it was wonderful with colin firth and maddy mcfadden. i was quite closely involved in that. >> congratulations. >> no, but that was such fun. to answer your question, i think i would have loved to have been one of those people cooking up odd plots. i don't think i would have been good behind the iron curtain trying to ferret out secrets from military officials. >> like the honorable school boy or something. >> interviewer's prerogative. you have a journalistic background. no journalist would omit to ask the question, are you a

frustrated novelist? >> i would love to have a dry one day. i've never dared. >> who dares wins. >> who dares wins or loses catastrophically, in my case. but i guess -- i think nonfiction gives me a structure. there's a middle, beginning and end. if i was unleashed on fikdz, i don't know where to stop. >> you would pull a ruth rendell and have many names. >> i would love to try one day. >> would it be fiction? >> i think it would have to be. >> it's an honor to be here. thank you, mr. macintyre, for bringing this information. i was 14 years old during the 79 year revolution. and when i read that email, i have never in my life heard of this incident. >> where were you at the time? >> in iran.

1980. i was 15 years old. and that was during the hostage taking, american hostages in iran. my family and my father was military in the shaw's army so we were the westerners. >> had your family managed to get out? >> we couldn't. >> no? >> no, it was very difficult. anyway, it was -- honestly, i don't know how -- what percentage of people in iran really know about this incident. i'm not sure. >> more than you would think. it was quite big news at the time in iran as it was around the world. iran's government immediately lept to the conclusion it must have been organized by the cia. they immediately blamed america for this. it wasn't. it was done by saddam hussein.

but the immediate assumption is it must be a kind of reciprocal revenge attack for what was happening at the american embassy in tehran. when it became clear that wasn't the case, the iranians began to put great pressure on great britain to bring it to an early conclusion to save their diplomats to get them on it. america simultaneously was also putting pressure on britain in the hope if it could be solved bloodlessly, that that would sort of in a way curry favor with the iranian regime and that that might then be used as a kind of lever to try to get the hostages out of the american embassy. all of these things were linked up. and it was daily news in the iranian press as well of what was going on. it was mostly on the imperial powers but it was quite a big story. also the other thing that the iranian government said was, all the iranians in this building will be happys martyrs,

which was not true. never had no intention of dying as martyrs. >> i bet they didn't. one thing you mentioned, maybe i'm the complete ignorant person who lived in iran as a teenager, but i never have heard of arabistan. >> to iranians is saudi arabia. not -- and i never knew there were arabs in iran. we knew there were kurds. the kurds problems. >> i think that's absolutely fascinating. there were 4 million of them. there's a sizeable majority in a province which iranians refer to athat as oil-rich region. arabistan was the named used by arabs of that party. wouldn't have been used or heard by iranian -- by

persian-speaking iranians. but is still used today. the kind of protesting minority still refer to it as arabistan. it briefly had been arabistan in the 19th century. there was a small shakedom known as arabistan, which was initially supported by the british and americans, and then support was withdrawn. had arabistan continued it would be have been a qatar. a very small, very rich arabic oil state. it was an accident it didn't happen. >> so, thank you for entertaining everybody. it was wonderful. so, the sas was 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 them that story?

>> you tell the story because i didn't put it in the book. the one where she -- where she tells douglas herd not to be so scared? >> yeah. well, margaret thatcher went to the sas and she went to the killing room where they actually practice with live ammunition. and had the secretary with her. the sas burst in and open fire and the secretary basically jumped under the chairs and was -- and apparently the sas said that margaret thatcher didn't bat an eyelid. she just sat there -- what did she say to him? basically -- >> i sort of half believe that story. >> exactly. >> that sounds like the sort of story margaret thatcher would have told and the sas would have told about margaret thatcher. one i know to be true -- the killing house is a kind of nondescript, one-story building in the center of sas headquarters that, as you rightly say, used for practice

hostage situations. ever since 1972, following the munich olympics massacre, the sas had been preparing and had a unit constantly on standby to do this. 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 representing either gunmen or hostages. and the royal family was taken there, and still are, to see what would happen in a hostage situation. there definitely was a moment, because i've had corroboration of this, when prince charles, then prince charles and princess diana, went to witness an episode in the killing house. with a thunder flash, they accidentally set fire to her hair. i know this is true because i have two witnesses to it. and the palace was very nice about it. >> right. another question is, is it true that the sas wanted to drag one

of the terrorists back into the building again? >> this is the most controversial element of this whole story, is that right at the end, the man in the red jacket that you saw lying face-down on the lawn there, had managed to escape really by hiding among the hostages. particularly the women hostages, who had become sort of fond of him. there is this moment when one of the other hostages, sim harris, spotted this man, spotted he got out and said, that's a terrorist, that's a terrorist, grab him. the sas got to him, lifted him up and then the women had gathered -- they hadn't been handcuffed by this point, gathered around and said, don't hurt him, don't hurt him, he's our brother. now, whether the sas would have dragged him back inside and killed him, as some eyewitnesss believe, or whether that was -- the senior officers at the scene say that never would have

happened. there were too many witnesses. it's not what they were trained to do. that wasn't their job. they weren't there to kill people. they were there to save lives. so, in the book it's one of the few moments i am ambivalent about. i think it will probably never be solved. certainly the man himself seems to have feared he was going to be killed. some of the troopers have described the red mist that comes down when those things happen. what we know for absolutely certain is that it didn't happen. they did not -- they did not execute that last person. >> thank you, ben. i thought i knew this story. but i didn't. fascinating details. two things, i was living in knightsbridge, 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 was great. >> fantastic.

>> it really was. and i was 22. boys own stuff. the second point i'm going to make with this audience is very impolite, and i'm much ruder than you. you were too polite to emphasize it. a large part of the reason why the brits loved this is because the americans had failed six days earlier. >> yep. >> honestly. we absolutely loved it. that's huge. >> you make a very good point. you're absolutely right. also garet thatcher was not above crowing to the americans immediately after. she sent these wonderful faux polite cable it is saying, if you ever need any help, we're here to help. yeah, absolutely. it was a bit of one upmanship. it was a moment when britain appeared to be, for good or ill, kind of batting above its own

weight in some way. it proved that the brits still had it in them. it does also -- perhaps the downside of that is that i think it did lead to this kind of gung-ho attitude towards the falklands. you're the first person i know that heard it live going off at the same time. one of the tricky elements of this book has been sort of trying -- particularly among the sas, working out who was really there and who wasn't. there's an old joke that goes, if everybody who claimed to have been on that balcony had been on the balcony, it would have fallen off. so, there is a great tradition in british -- saying, i was part of that. i was there at the me half the fun has been -- not the fun, but one of the privileges has been that the surviving sas people who were involved were given formal military authorization to talk to me.

the military of defense issued them with sort of passes to talk to me. they've never -- that's never happened before with the sas because they're not -- officially they're not supposed to talk about any kind of secret operations they took part in. for this -- i think there are 18 still alive and i've interviewed 14 of them. >> do we have any more? >> i'll sneak -- >> so many. >> you can sneak one. >> your -- i don't know how many books but at least half a dozen by now, they all seem to focus on espionage or commando actions in the past. do you take an interest in more contemporary subjects? would you just as soon steer clear of them? are there events you would love to get your hands on but they're still top secret? >> oh, yes. god, there are plenty of those. i don't -- on the whole, you know, commenting on the current sas operations is -- there are big investigations going on at the moment into the sas in

afghanistan. i try not to draw parallels between that time and this. yes, you know, my earlier books were much earlier, actually. the wartime stuff, when i started 30 years ago, there were still living witnesses. i could ask people what it was like in room 13 where they cooked up operation mincemeat. there was still -- obviously they're all gone now. so, i am becoming more modern, as it were. i'm sort of moving up into the cold war. this is really the most modern one i've ever done. this is the one i found most living witnesses. i need that combination, to have the combination of written material and declassified material and somebody who can tell me what it was like in that room. that's when it really gels together, i think. >> i was wondering if you interviewed the surviving -- the man in the red? >> i've sort of not -- it's not

a question i can really answer because i've sort of tried to cover the identities of quite a lot of people in the book. so, i'm sort of under no names, no pact drill. i've covered the names of many of the sas people. even though they talked to me. in a way, this is a measure of modesty. most of them did not want me to use their real name. i'm going to slide away from that question because i haven't identified anybody particularly. [ inaudible ] >> he served 27 years in a british prison. again, if you don't mind, i'm going to slide away from that question. he served his time. you know, i mean, he did -- he's an interesting character it. he was 20 when it happened. he had no real idea what he was doing. he had never left kyrgyzstan, he was manipulated by the others, he was excited.

if anyone has a 20-year-old son who knows what they're like, they think they're invulnerable and run the world. i'm not making excuses for him. he was a fool. but he did serve his time. he still lives in britain. he can't go back to iran. he's stuck. he's stuck where he is. yes, sir? >> i wanted to ask about the future of spying and maybe what you might write your fiction about. i've read some of your stuff, and all spycraft of the old days, going to a foreign country with a fake identity that was fabricated. can that even happen in the modern world where you have a digital footprint from when you're born and under surveillance everywhere? current spying has to be completely different based on the digital technological revolution, but people aren't going to stop. what is it going to look like? >> good question. >> that's a really good question. i think the answer is, there's always been signals intelligence

and human intelligence. going right back to the war, intercepting telegrams, reading other people's mail, signals intelligence, has to be combined with human intelligence. even if you have a digital trace on someone, you still need to have someone 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 to work out whether they're lying to you, whether they're on the other side. i think human intelligence, in some ways because the digital story is so huge, is more important than ever. it's rarer. it doesn't happen nearly as much. but recruiting foreign agents is as vital as it's ever been. and you're right. we have a digital footprint from the moment we pick up a mobile phone. but actually that's also falsifiable. there's a training program at

gchq, our equivalent to the nsa, government communication center, there's a training program there called "operation mincemeat," believe it or not. that is where they make false digital identities. so, in the same way the dead body in "operation mincemeat" was a completely made-up character, the modern operation mincemeat is about creating false people. people who don't exist but have perfect digital backgrounds. they have facebooks, instagram accounts, emails. those can all be falsified. they have to be because the other side is also digging in. the russians are trying to find out who is who. if you're trying to hoist a false agent on someone, you better make sure the digital wallet letter, as it is then, is as convincing as it was for "operation mincemeat." i think those are the future. the one i would love to crack,

and -- is the chinese digital espionage. that's incredibly sophisticated. and so -- certainly to me and i suspect to most people. it's really, really hard to get a proper handle on that. but that, i think, will increasingly be the story. >> hole ello. this has been enjoyable. like many others here, i had never heard of this event before. it's fascinating. can't wait to read the book. basically, maybe a larger question about craft. you mentioned lecarie telling you "the spy among friends," giving you the story. how do you decide -- there are so many stories out there. you were talking about the sas and the middle east and things being declassified. how do you decide between a good story and a story worth writing about? >> i have a bottom drawer filled with books i'm never going to write because i got sort of into

the research and realized it wasn't enough. you have -- it only works if you have enough warp and weft of the story. 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 a difficult story. david cornwall, one of the pieces of advice he gave me and i've never forgotten it, he said, what we have to do is ensure there's jeopardy on every page we write. i know what we meant by that. he didn't mean, will the bomb go off or the hero get killed, not -- although that can 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 keep them engaged in what you're doing here? and i have -- as a novelist in a way, to answer your question about fiction, that's -- you have carte blanche to do that.

with nonfiction it's more difficult because you have this wealth of information, half of which you're never going to use because -- i'm ruthless. if it doesn't interest me and doesn't keep the jeopardy going, it goes in the waste paper basket. so, these are not scholarly tones where i'm trying to get everything in there with all the footnotes. i'm trying to write a story that will entertain and engage. above all, keep that kind of jeopardy going. so that in the end is the -- is the final arbitrator for me, on whether it's a book i can write and live with for two or three years, or whatever, or one i'm going to be struggling. i don't know about you, but i always feel with narrative nonfingers you can sort of tell when the author has run out of road, when they just don't have enough. and they -- often it's dressed in a language that says, we may imagine he thought at this point, or perhaps further down the road he spotted -- i mean,

those are kind of weasely words, the perhaps, speculate, imagine this or that. by that point you know you're stuffed. you've run out. you haven't got enough to write this and you're making it up. so -- and when you feel that -- when i have felt that on the few occasions it's come to me, i thought, i need to stop this because it's -- i'm not going to be able to tell the story in the way i want to. >> are all the next books in the drawer or is there one on the table? >> i have one on the table. in fact, it's more than on the table. it's half in the laptop already. i'm doing 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 sort of middle eastern

intelligence in the early '80s, but it's also -- i find it completely fascinating because it's also strange psychosexual story because his motives are very bound up with his emotional and his sexual life, which makes him, i think, tremendously interesting. and it's run in a quite complicated way. >> if you haven't -- if it hasn't been told before, how did you find out about it? >> sources. >> they must be knocking on your door. >> oh, i wish. >> people seem this think mi6 will say, we have the next one for you here. it doesn't work like that. this is not one that the intelligence services will find very easy, i suspect. i wish they sort of came to one. no, so this comes from a sort of -- a tip-off, yeah. [ inaudible ]

>> i get sort of criticism. but, yeah, sometimes they disagree with my conclusions or -- i mean, so the one i wrote about the spy and the traitor, that was interesting because that one i had considerable cooperation from mi6 for that. they didn't prevent me from interviewing their officers who had been involved. some they are more sensitive about, absolutely. i mean, some affect national security. this story i did allow the sas, one particular person in the sas, to read it. they had no editorial control. but the only thing i took out of this book was some contemporary capability, as they call it, that there are things they did -- one particular thing they did at this embassy that they would do again if a similar situation arose. they simply said, please, don't put it in because it will compromise that capability. that seemed to me to be a

perfectly reasonable thing to ask for. but other than that, no, i don't get much pushback. >> i wanted to ask another craft question. on this particular project, what was the most difficult or challenging thing you had to solve as a writer? the biggest problem that it posed? >> in terms of craft, the trickiest element i had with this was trying to work out which memories are true and which are not. memories are such a strange thing when you're talking to people about events that took place 43 years ago. they think they have recall of what happened, but actually memory isn't truth. and it's definitely not reality. memory is the story we tell ourselves, the narrative we tell ourselves to make sense of the past. and often our memories are

borrowed. we may have heard somebody else say something about an event we were at, and we will sort of absorb that and take it on, and it will become part of our memories. there were several examples of this in this story where individuals would be at the same event, at the same time, and have completely contrasting memories of what had happened. no one was lying. no one is deliberately misleading, but that is sort of the way memory works. you know, more than one of the officers told me about an incident where towards the end of the assault a sniper had taken a shot from a hidden position in hyde park and killed one of the gunmen through an open window. 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, those are tricky moments when people have been kind

enough and generous enough, and in some cases sort of -- they're quite emotional way of telling you what happened. and yet you know or you think you know that 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 be unhappy that i have not taken their version, that i've taken a different version. 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 thing of saying, this is the one i belief and this is the one i don't. that can cause -- that can cause real upset to people. but you have to do it. and the more interviews you have, the more interviewees you have, the better pattern of what is going on. it's -- particularly groups like the sas who were not allowed to talk about it outside their group, developed a kind of narrative that they all sort of shared, even if some didn't

really remember it. so, that's one of the things you have to fight against. >> perhaps the last question or two will have to wait until mr. macintyre, as he's so good -- >> of course. >> to join you outside -- >> delighted, delighted. in the meantime we want you to race home as quickly as possible, back to your desk, and inform us about your kgb agent. but if they applaud loudly enough, will you, in fact, come out and sell a few books and sign them? >> i would be thrilled to. thank you. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you, david. nonfiction book lovers, c-span has a number of podcasts for you. influential interviews on the

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