How the SAS snookered the Iranian embass siege terrorists

And why the definitive story, as revealed by bestselling author Ben Macintyre in his thrilling new book, is even more extraordinary than the national myth

- Matt Nixson

AFTER an increasingly tense six-day standoff, in the end it was all over in just 11 minutes. The SAS cleared the Iranian Embassy killing five out of six terrorists who had taken 126 hostages in about the same time as it takes to hard boil an egg.

That day - May 5, 1980-17-year-old Ben Macintyre was one of 14 million fans watching steady Canadian Cliff Thorburn take on the mercurial Alex Higgins in the World Snooker Championship final when the BBC interrupted coverage shortly after 7.20pm to go live to the scene of the hostage drama in London's South Kensington.

What followed was jaw-dropping: explosions, gunfire and instantly iconic images of black-clad troopers abseiling down the front of the embassy and into action - the first hostage crisis resolved in real time in front of millions of viewers. And as Macintyre, now 60 and a bestselling historian, reveals in his extraordinary, definitive new account, as the triumphant SAS team were climbing into vans waiting to hurry them away, one of the troopers turned to a policeman and asked: "Who won the snooker?"

Nine minutes earlier, it emerged, Thorburn had sunk the pink ball with a 51-point break to take the world title. A moment in sporting history watched live by exactly nobody - the huge TV audience instead witnessing the SAS smash the siege.

"I'd never seen anything like it," says Macintyre today. "It was on the same level as footage of JFK's assassination, the Moon landings and Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald but those weren't live news events that broke in suddenly into our world."

Almost wholly successful two hostages were, in fact, killed by the terrorists, with two SAS men injured, one by shooting the top off his own finger - Operation Nimrod as it was codenamed became a national myth, burnished Margaret Thatcher's "Iron Lady" credentials and made Britain's shadowy SAS a household name.

Not everyone was happy about the latter.