The Defence of the Realm (127 page)

Following the Service's well-rehearsed procedures for dealing with terrorist hostage-taking, an intelligence team together with a large A Branch technical support group was quickly deployed to the scene of the embassy siege to support the Metropolitan Police and to obtain intelligence to help plan an assault on the Iranian embassy.
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A variety of ingenious eavesdropping devices were used to gather intelligence on the state of mind of the terrorists and their captives, as well as to identify their precise locations in a six-floor embassy with over fifty rooms.
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The Arabic- and Farsi-speaking transcribers who listened in to the conversations inside the embassy were asked to work long and exhausting shifts in the belief that ‘it was preferable for a small number of linguists to build up a detailed mental picture of the gunmen and their hostages, their attitudes and actions, rather than a larger number of linguists being deployed with a resulting loss of continuity'.
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A Branch deployed a total of thirty-five staff in its technical support team, supplemented by sixteen staff seconded from other parts of the intelligence community.
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Thanks to astute negotiation by the police, assisted by intelligence from the Security Service, a series of deadlines set by the terrorists came and went without incident. Once it became clear to the terrorists, however, that their demands were not going to be met, eavesdropping revealed the growth of acute tensions between them. On 5 May they announced that two hostages would be shot, and others killed at regular intervals unless their demands were met. Shots were heard from within the embassy later the same day but negotiations continued because it could not initially be established whether anyone had been killed. However, when the body of a hostage was pushed through the front door, Whitelaw rang the Prime Minister, then on her way back to Downing Street from Chequers, to seek her authority to send in the SAS. Given the sophistication of the eavesdropping operations in Prince's Gate, it was ironic that, because of poor reception on Mrs Thatcher's car-phone, she was unable to hear what the Home Secretary said. Once she had told her driver to pull into a lay-by, however, she was brought up to date with the critical situation in the Iranian embassy and replied with characteristic decisiveness, ‘Yes, go in'
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– thus authorizing the first ever use of the SAS in Britain to resolve a crisis by the use of force.

The Security Service post-action assessment concludes that its intelligence from within the Iranian embassy ‘played a vital part'.
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As de la Billière later recalled:

The aim was to attack every floor of the building simultaneously, and to break in so fast on all levels that the gunmen would not have time to execute anyone. Success depended on every SAS man knowing his task precisely: the soldiers had to be able to pick out the terrorists, recognise every hostage (from memorizing photographs), and keep within pre-set boundaries so that there was no risk of shooting each other.
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When the assault began, de la Billière was the only person in COBR to be in touch, via headphones, with Prince's Gate, and kept up a running commentary: ‘They're on the roof . . . They're laying out the ropes . . . They've got the charges down the light-well . . . They're ready.' Next came the codeword ‘Hyde Park', telling the abseilers on the roof to hitch themselves to their ropes, ready for the signal ‘London Bridge', instructing them to drop down from the roof and break in through the windows on every floor. Unlike much of the nation which was glued to live coverage of the break-in on television, no one in COBR saw the storming of the embassy. It did not occur to any of those present that, if they had switched on one of the row of television sets fixed to the wall above head-height, they would have been able to see the assault team in action. De la Billière was soon able to report to COBR that, after a brief struggle, five of the terrorists had been killed and the sixth captured alive. Of the twenty-six hostages, five had been released during the siege, one had been killed by the terrorists before the attack and a second after it began; the other nineteen were freed by the SAS. As de la Billière gave the news, everyone in COBR leaped to their feet, papers flew in the air and bottles of whisky appeared from a cupboard.
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The successful ending of the siege and the enormous publicity given to it, shown on television around the world, may well have deterred other terrorist attacks in London.
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Willie Whitelaw sought to reinforce the deterrent effect of the assault by telling the Commons: ‘The way in which this incident was conducted and resolved demonstrates conclusively the determination of the British Government and people not to allow terrorist blackmail to succeed.'
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Twenty years later (or less) the Home Secretary would have paid public tribute to the role of the Security Service in bringing the siege to an end. But in 1980 public mention of its role was still taboo. Whitelaw, however, wrote privately to the DG to express ‘deep appreciation' of the part played by the Service and ‘the enormous value of the intelligence which was being produced'.
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The DG and his senior management, however, were criticized
within the Service for their failure either to appear on the ground during the siege to provide moral support for hard-pressed staff or to express adequate thanks for their work after the siege was over.
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The Iranian embassy siege provided further evidence of the remote management style of Sir Howard Smith and his DDG, John Jones.
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Aircraft hijacks were as difficult to predict as the attack on the Iranian embassy, but proved less of a problem in the early 1980s than a decade earlier. The contingency planning developed during the 1970s
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was first put to the test on British soil in 1982. On 26 February an Air Tanzania Boeing 737 on an internal flight was hijacked by a group claiming to be representatives of the previously unknown Tanzanian Youth Democratic Movement. The aircraft with about eighty passengers was diverted to Nairobi, where inconclusive negotiations took place, then to Jeddah for refuelling, then to Athens, and finally to Stansted, where the plane landed on 27 February.
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COBR convened, initially chaired by the Prime Minister for the only time during her years in office,
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and the other elements of the contingency plan were put into action, including the assistance of an A Branch technical support group and Security Service intelligence analysis. Though the motives of the hijackers appeared confused, their principal demands were for the resignation of President Nyerere of Tanzania and for a meeting with Oscar Kambona, a former Tanzanian foreign minister living in exile in London. Eavesdropping on the hijackers suggested that there was a good prospect of a peaceful settlement. After patient negotiations, the passengers were released in groups and the hijackers surrendered. There was no damage to the aircraft and the only injury was to the co-pilot, who was accidentally shot in the back by one of the hijackers. Five hijackers were tried, convicted and sentenced to prison terms of between three and eight years. Among the Security Service team at Stansted was a former member of the Colonial Service who was one of the few people in England able to understand the local Tanzanian dialect used by some of the hijackers in their overheard conversations.
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Also difficult to predict was the extent to which foreign authoritarian regimes would use state-sponsored terrorism to silence dissidents who had fled abroad. The most persistent, though not quite continuous, statesponsored terrorist threat in Britain during the 1980s came from Colonel Qaddafi's Libya.
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Qaddafi's vanity was exemplified by a flamboyant wardrobe which enabled him, for example, to change in the same day from naval uniform adorned with gold braid and medals to Arab dress with exotic Bedouin headgear to a gold cape over a red silk shirt. Its more vicious side was shown by a determination to hunt down critics of his
personal dictatorship (misleadingly entitled the ‘Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya') who had taken refuge abroad. Qaddafi was responsible for a series of attacks on Libyan émigrés in Britain, which included three killings at the beginning of the decade. By the spring of 1980 F Branch possessed ‘conclusive evidence' that the Libyan embassy in London (renamed the ‘Libyan People's Bureau') was ‘directing operational and intelligence gathering activities against Libyan dissidents'.
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The first dissident to be killed was Muhammad Ramadan, who was shot dead outside the Regent's Park Mosque in April 1980. The gunman, Ben Hassan Muhammad El Masri,
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and his accomplice, Nagib Mufta Gasmi,
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were arrested near the scene of the killing by two passing police officers and later sentenced to life imprisonment. A fortnight later another of Qaddafi's assassins, Mabrook Ali Mohammed Al Gidal, murdered the dissident Libyan lawyer Mahmoud Abbu Nafa in his Kensington office. Al Gidal had formerly shared a flat with El Masri and Gasmi; like them he was caught and sentenced to life imprisonment.
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The assassinations were intended as a warning to other Libyan dissidents to obey Qaddafi's demand for them to cease their opposition and return to Libya. The deadline for their return on 11 June was marked by a dissident demonstration outside the London People's Bureau which caused predictable outrage in Tripoli. Reliable intelligence revealed that the Libyan Foreign Liaison Bureau (Foreign Ministry) reprimanded Musa Kusa, the effective head of the London People's Bureau, for failing to use force to disrupt the demonstration. He was told that, in order to demonstrate that all opposition would be mercilessly crushed, at least one of the demonstrators should have been killed. Probably in response to this reprimand, Kusa gave an interview to
The Times
declaring that Libya was prepared to support the IRA and approving a decision by the Libyan ‘Revolutionary Committee' in the UK to sentence two dissidents to death. Following the publication of Kusa's interview on 13 June, he was given forty-eight hours to leave the country. That night there was a petrol-bomb attack on the British embassy in Tripoli. No one was hurt and the Libyan authorities absurdly blamed the damage on an electrical fault.
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After Kusa's expulsion, reliable intelligence continued to suggest that the People's Bureau was engaged in the surveillance of dissidents in the UK and planning assassinations. Potential targets were warned by the police, and the Service passed intelligence on likely Libyan assassins to the MPSB.
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The fact that no leading dissident was killed or wounded by the People's Bureau hitmen in the remainder of the year strongly suggests that this was a case in which intelligence saved lives.

Late in October F Branch received further reliable intelligence that the People's Bureau had poison in powder form with which to assassinate dissidents.
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The first Libyan hitman to attempt to use the poison appears to have been Hosni Sed Farhat, who was reported to be targeting dissidents in the Portsmouth area.
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Though F Branch was aware of Farhat's activities, it had no means of predicting that his first target would be Farj Shaban Ghesouda and his British wife Heather Clare, who were not members of any dissident group and appeared to be low in the rank order of Qaddafi's émigré opponents. Farhat probably selected the Ghesoudas partly because the precautions taken by leading dissidents had made them hard targets, partly because his previous acquaintance with the Ghesoudas gave him a pretext for a social call. During Farhat's visit on 7 November he quickly aroused suspicion by offering to go into the kitchen and prepare coffee. Fearing a poisoning attempt, the Ghesoudas declined his offer but did not suspect that a packet of peanuts which he brought as a present might have been tampered with.
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As Mrs Ghesouda said later, ‘Arab visitors usually bring nuts or sweets with them.' The peanuts, however, were laced with thallium. After the Ghesoudas' children ate them, their central nervous systems were affected, their hair fell out, and only prompt diagnosis and treatment saved their lives. The family's pet Pekinese, which picked up some of the peanuts from the floor, died. Farhat was arrested four days after his visit to the Ghesoudas and, like the assassins of Ramadan and Abbu Nafa, sentenced to life imprisonment for attempted murder.
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The final victim of Qaddafi's hitmen in Britain during 1980 was Ahmed Mustafa, a Libyan student at Manchester University, who was found murdered on 29 November. According to the police, there were elements of ritual killing in the murder.
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The assassins were believed to be Libyan language students who returned to Tripoli immediately after the killing. This time the People's Bureau was not thought to be involved. ‘Our intelligence', the future DG, Patrick Walker (then F3), told the police, ‘suggested that the attack on Mustafa was initiated from Libya.'
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An FCO assessment concluded that Mustafa's assassins might have chosen the wrong target.
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After the killing there was an unexpected lull in Qaddafi's assassination campaign in Britain, perhaps reflecting irritation that his hitmen during 1980 had either been caught or had killed the wrong man.

Among the known terrorist targets in London were several ambassadors, the Israeli and the Turkish chief among them. On 3 June 1982 the Israeli ambassador, Shlomo Argov, was shot in the head by a gunman as he was leaving a diplomatic reception at the Dorchester Hotel. The gunman was then himself shot and wounded by the ambassador's police protection
officer.
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Two other men left the scene rapidly by car but were later arrested. All three were convicted of attempted murder, and sentenced to prison terms of at least thirty years. The ambassador survived, though with terrible injuries. The Service quickly identified as the group responsible for the attack the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO), then sponsored by Iraq, later by Libya,
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which subsequently admitted responsibility.
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