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Ben MacIntyre
September 29, 2024 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Magic City Books is proud to welcome journalist and bestselling author Ben MacIntyre for a free, in-store event to celebrate his latest book, The Siege: A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World, on Sunday, September 29 at 2:00 pm.
Ben MacIntyre is a columnist and Associate Editor on The Times (UK) where he has worked as the newspaper’s correspondent in New York, Paris and Washington. He is the author of previous bestsellers, The Spy and the Traitor,which tells the story of double KGB agent Oleg Gordiesvsky, and Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy told the story of Ursula Kuczynski – codename Sonya – the greatest female spy of the 20th Century.
The Siege is a thrilling tick-tock recounting one of the most harrowing hostage situations and daring rescue attempts of our time. A story of ordinary men and women under immense pressure, The Siege takes readers minute-by-thrilling-minute through an event that would echo across the next two decades and provide a direct historical link to the tragedy on 9/11.
The Siege will be published by Crown on September 10 and will be available for sale at Magic City Books.
About The Siege
“[Ben Macintyre is] John le Carré’s nonfiction counterpart.”–The New York Times
“Macintyre has a knack for finding the most fascinating story lines in history.” –David Grann
As the American hostage crisis in Iran boiled into its seventh month in the spring of 1980, six heavily armed gunman barged into the Iranian embassy in London, taking twenty-six hostages. What followed over the next six days was an increasingly tense standoff, one that threatened at any moment to spill into a bloodbath.
Policeman Trevor Lock was supposed to have gone to the theater that night. Instead, he found himself overpowered and whisked into the embassy. The terrorists never noticed the gun hidden in his jacket. The drama that ensued would force him to find reserves of courage he didn’t know he had. The gunmen themselves were hardly one-dimensional–all Arabs, some highly educated, who hoped to force Britain to take their side in their independence battle against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Behind the scenes lurked the brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who had bankrolled the whole affair as a salvo against Iran.
As police negotiators pressed the gunmen, rival protestors clashed violently outside the embassy, and as MI6 and the CIA scrambled for intelligence, Britain’s special forces strike team, the SAS, laid plans for a dangerous rescue mission. Inside, Lock and his fellow hostages used all the cunning they possessed to outwit and outflank their captors. Finally, on the sixth day, after the terrorists executed the embassy press attaché and dumped his body on the front doorstep, the SAS raid began, sparking a deadly high-stakes climax.
A story of ordinary men and women under immense pressure, The Siege takes readers minute-by-thrilling-minute through an event that would echo across the next two decades and provide a direct historical link to the tragedy on 9/11. Drawing on exclusive interviews and a wealth of never-before-seen files, Macintyre brilliantly reconstructs a week in which every day minted a new hero and every second spelled the potential for doom.
Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times (UK) and the bestselling author of Agent Sonya, The Spy and the Traitor, A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, Rogue Heroes, and Prisoners of the Castle, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.