May 2, 2025 • 14 mins
Ben Macintyre captivates readers with true stories.
He expertly unravels complex historical events, explaining sharp subplots and side characters while artfully deploying dry humour to make the true stories he tells digestible.
His most recent non-fiction work is The Siege – a story of how in April 1980, six men stormed the Iranian embassy in London and took 26 hostages they held for six days.
Macintyre told Jack Tame he was 17 when the situation took place, and since that point he’d always wanted to write about it.
“It was the most dramatic thing I’d ever seen on television,” he said.
“It was one of those stories that entered mythology very quickly – it became a sort of story of, sort of SAS daring do, and kind of you know, fighting against the odds, and you know, the story itself is much more complicated than that.”
“I've really enjoyed writing this one.”
Macintyre is coming to New Zealand for the Auckland Writer’s Festival, delving into his work at three different events across the festival.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Team podcast
from News Talks at b.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Ben McIntyre is an author who captivates readers with true stories.
He expertly unravels complex historical events, explaining sharp subplots and
side characters, while artfully deploying dry humor to make the
stories he tells come to life. His most recent nonfiction
work is The Siege. It's a story of how in
April nineteen eighty six men stormed the Iranian embassy in
(00:36):
London and took twenty six hostages for six days. Ben
is coming to New Zealand for the Auckland Writers' Festival
and it's joining us this morning. Kaldo, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
He's delightful to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
We are just so thrilled that you are going to
be here for the Writers' Festival very soon. But I
wondered if we could start by talking about your latest work, Besiege.
You have written about all sorts of interesting subjects over
the years, from Kim Philby to the rogue Heroes. How
do you settle upon a subject like this?
Speaker 4 (01:07):
Well, this is one I've always wanted to write because
I was seventeen when this happened, and it was the
most dramatic thing I'd ever seen on television. It was
an incredible sort of dramatic, real life performance. It broke
into the snooker, which we were all glued to, you know,
it was an incredible moment. And so I've always wanted
to write about it because it's one of those stories
(01:28):
that entered mythsology very quickly. It became a sort of
story of sort of sas daring do and kind of
you know, fighting against the odds. And you know, actually
that the story itself is much more complicated than that.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
It's much more interesting.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
It's a much more dense and conflicted story about individuals
really and about characters and personality.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
So I've really enjoyed writing this one. It's been great fun.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, it's a remarkable the amount of detail you're able
to extract from all sides of the of you know,
of the crisis. But just to remind our listeners, can
you just give us the basic outlines of the of
the hostage crisis? What happened?
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Absolutely?
Speaker 4 (02:08):
So, this was in April nineteen eighty, the US embassy
hostage crisis was still going on in Tehran and six
armed gunmen burst into the Iranian embassy in London and
took twenty seven hostages. They were young Arabs from a
part of Iran. They were actually deeply opposed to the
(02:31):
Ayatolla's regime. They were bankrolled by Saddam Hussein. This was
an Iraqi plot, a deliberate attempt to destabilize the Ayatolla
and the Iranian regime, and it led to this astonishing
six days standoff between the gunmen inside that building and
the police and eventually the Sas on the outside. I
(02:55):
don't want to give it away for your readers, but
the final denumar moment of this story is extraordinary, when
the Sas end up assaulting the building in a full scale,
full military assault.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
As cameras watch on, I suppose, is one of the
kind of critical moments, right, This is one of those
moments when you know that the full capacity of the
essay is there for the world to see.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
That's right, And you know, the ESAs had never really
been heard of before this. I mean, it was still
a very secretive organization at this point. And of course
we're kind of used to this now. It's a live
rolling news to seeing things happen in real time. This
was filmed by the television cameras as it took place,
and in nineteen eighty that was completely unprecedented. No one
(03:42):
had ever seen news relayed this way before. I remember
it as a seventeen year old watching these kind of
black clad figures ab sailing down the outside of this building,
throwingly explosion inside, armed with machine guns and then attacking
the building. I thought it was a film. I thought
that accidentally they'd moved across from the Zennigga to a film.
But so it's a very significant moment, and it had
(04:04):
a dramatic impact on Margaret Thatcher's premiership.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
You know, in a way it's set the tones.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
She'd only been in power for a year by this point,
and it's set the tone for the rest of of
her premiership in many ways. Her relationship with the military
at the Falkland Islands conflict, all of this, in a
way starts from this event.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
I was gonna say, is there an argument to be
made that the Falkland's conflict might have been avoided, or
at the very least that Missus Stetcher might have had
a different approach to that conflict had this not happened.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Yes, I think you can make that point many in
the SAS do.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
I mean, she believed that she had forged a particular
relationship with the military.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
And the SAS played a very important role in the Falklands.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
And so yes, I mean I think some of her
kind of you can see it now these days there's
rather gung ho attitude towards both terrorism and indeed towards
international conflict was.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Born on this day in May. Was you don't see
it for May when this thing really came down. So
it was very important.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
For her, I think, and she alluded to it throughout
her premiership with great pride.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
It's so more broadly being, I mean, your subjects, in
your various different roles and with various different heads, your
subjects have always had a kind of boy's own quality
to them. You know, whether it's the British Intelligence Services
or the likes of the Essas. What do you think
has driven your personal interest in and in conflict, in
(05:37):
intelligence services and spying and that kind of thing.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Well, I love those kind of stories. I mean, they are, yes,
they're boys own paper in a way. They're kind of
you know, they're incredibly exciting and adventurous and all of
that is wonderful. But actually when you dig into those stories,
they're often much more fascinating than simply stories of daring
do because these are really stories about what ordinary people
(06:02):
do in extraordinary situations. And that is absolently true of
the Iranian embassy seeds. There were twenty six people inside
that building. None of them got up that morning expecting
they were going to be thrust into this terrifying drama.
And a lot of the story is really about how
different people respond to terrifying situations they can't control. And
(06:25):
in a way, that is the story of war, that
is the story of espionage, That is, in a way,
the sort of secret story behind all conflicts is how
do individuals react when it really comes down to the wire.
And I think that's probably what has always interested me.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
One of the individuals who doesn't necessarily cover themselves in
glory and not for the first time in the siege
is Prince Andrew, who rushed down to the embassy almost immediately.
Speaker 4 (06:54):
This is one of the more absurd aspects of this
story that I knew nothing about before I started writing it. Yes,
I mean, but the one moment when the police commissioner
who was in charge of the whole operation.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Actually lost his temper was.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
When Prince Andrew, then the kind of young helicopter pilot,
demanded Nate insisted that he'd be allowed to come down
to police headquarters and witness the siege in operation. He
was told in no uncertain terms, and indeed in terms
that one didn't usually.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Use towards royalty, that that was not going to happen.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Yeah, you obviously have forwards really strong and trusting relationships
with people who either have been or are still in
pretty secretive worlds. So how do you go about nurturing
those relationships, whether it's in the intelligence agencies or with
special force of soldiers and the like.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
Well, it's difficult.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
But that said, everyone in the world wants to tell
their story, and that goes for people in the secret
world as much as anyone else. Really, they may be
kind of prevented in a way by convention and in
some cases by law, but they're a basic human interest,
in instinct thing.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
To tell our own narratives.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
So I've been very lucky over the last thirty years
I've met lots of people from this world. I could
not have written this book without the cooperation of the
Ministry of Defense in the UK, the SAS is not
supposed to talk about operations ever, that's a kind of
a firm rule. In this occasion, After a certain amount
(08:29):
of badgering from.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Me, they agreed to allow the.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
People directly involved in this operation to talk about what
had happened. And that's really never happened before, and so
I was hugely grateful for that. It allowed me to
talk to these people who and there aren't that many
of them still alive, who had actually witnessed at first
hand what happened in the closing eleven minutes of Operation Nimrod.
(08:53):
And without that, I think this book would have been
impossible to write, because that really gave me the kind
of warp and weft of what that experience felt like.
So yes, I mean, those personal relationships are absolutely crucial
to write narrative nonfiction like this.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Do you ever worry that, you know, people in those
kind of positions of secrecy but also power are trying
to you know, they're put up the facad and say, oh,
you know, we never tell our stories, never tell us stories. Okay,
all right, Bean, will tell you our story. And it
just so happens that we look fantastic out of us.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
Well, you make a very good point.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
I mean, you know, spies and special operations people like
to tell their stories. When those stories reflect well of them,
they're much less willing to do so. You know, if
Operation Nimrod had failed, I don't think the Ministry of
Defense would be anything like as keen.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Oh it wasn't that keen anyway.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
But you know, to to sort of share the story,
what has to be a bit careful of that. I mean,
I'm always a bit nervous and a bit tentative about
dealing with sort of official bodies, because you know, this
is not.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
An authorized book.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
I mean, it's different from SAS Rogue Heroes, which I
wrote before, which was an authorized the history of the SAS.
And when I started that project, I made it absolutely
clear that while the SAS was allowed to have an
opinion about the manuscript, it did not have editorial control.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
In this case, it's even firmer.
Speaker 4 (10:14):
They had no control over what I wrote in the
end at all, and to their credit, they really didn't
try to do. There was only one or two elements of
what they call contemporary capability. I thinks that would still
be done today that were done in nineteen eighty and
as your listeners can imagine, there are a precious few
of those. There were a few of those where they said, look,
(10:36):
please don't put that in the book because you know
you don't want to, you don't want to enable the
other side. And look, I'm not in the business of
helping terrorists do anything. So I was perfectly happy to
do that. But it's surprising in a way how little
control really they both have and can have over a
project like this.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
You am I right and thinking when you were a student,
you were approached about potentially joining the intelligence citizens.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
Yes, this is one of the reasons why I've made
a hopeless spy. Is I've kind of revealed this supposed it. Yes,
I was. I was approached by by six and I
went through just the initial stages of recruitment. It became
pretty clear pretty quickly to both sides. I think that
I was really not I was not the type to
make a good spy. I like to reveal secrets, I
(11:24):
don't really like to keep them. That's why I've had
That's a lovely time, you know, as a journalist and
as a book writer, kind of digging into the secret past.
So yeah, I was briefly touched and or tapped up,
as they say in UK parlance, but it was clearly.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Never going to go anywhere. But I think it did.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
Leave me with a kind of residual fascination with the
secret world. I think there's a there's a story to
be told about the secret world in which a non
fiction writer can write about true stories in a way
that nonetheless feels like fiction, And that's almost unique to.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
The spy world, the narrative nonfiction. Right, it's a yeah, yeah,
how does the approach work? Does someone just look, you've
got tepic?
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Is it?
Speaker 3 (12:05):
I mean that it was literally the old fashioned way.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
It was my last university in Cambridge, a nest of spies,
they say. And I was just approached by one of
my lecturers who said, you know, there are certain people
I think you ought to meet.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
I mean he never.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
Actually said what it was I was going to do,
but I was perfectly clear what was going to happen.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
And I went through a couple of interviews, but.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
And I did it more really out of sort of curiosity,
and I think I slightly wasted their time. But it's
you know, it's I mean, my contacts in that world
are always quite amusing about They all know that. I
that was sort of at one point briefly kind of
mentioned as a possibility.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
What do you think, I mean, your fascination is shared
by so many people, including me. But you know, obviously
the nature of espionage in the secret world, as you
term that has massively changed, you know, and continues to
change as technology evolves and that sort of thing. What
do you think is something that people misunderstand about the
(13:06):
operations or capacity of intelligence services.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
It's a very good question.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
I mean, I think a lot of people assume today
that the whole of intelligence takes place digitally, that really
this is now a story about intercepting telephone messages, texts, emails,
that it's all taking place in a kind of cyber world,
and to a considered extent, that is the great development
of modern espionage.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
You know, it does take place up there, and.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
A lot of it, but not all of it, because
human intelligence is as important today as it ever was,
in fact arguably even more important. You know, knowing who
your enemy is, being able to put a face to
him or her, being able to talk to people in
crowded bars and work out whether they are telling you
(13:57):
the truth that is still I would say, the essence
of all espionage, and without it, cyber espionage doesn't work. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
Well, Ben, we love your work. We love all of
your work, including the stuff that we've also seen on
TV and at the cinema. We're delighted that you are
going to be appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival and
look forward to hearing from you very soon.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
Well, I'm thoroughly looking forward to it, and indeed I
have a special guest in Auckland which is one of
the participants in the Sas Embassy Siege, a New Zealander,
will be joining me on stage for that event, which
I'm thoroughly looking forward to.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
That's going to be so special. Thank you, Ben. So
Ben's going to be in New Zealand speaking at the
Auckland Writers Festival, which begins on the thirteenth of May,
and of course there's more information and tickets available at
writers Festival dot co dot nz.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
For more From Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
to Newstalks B from nine am Saturday, or follow the
podcast on iHeartRadio.
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Team podcast
from News Talks at b.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Ben McIntyre is an author who captivates readers with true stories.
He expertly unravels complex historical events, explaining sharp subplots and
side characters, while artfully deploying dry humor to make the
stories he tells come to life. His most recent nonfiction
work is The Siege. It's a story of how in
April nineteen eighty six men stormed the Iranian embassy in
(00:36):
London and took twenty six hostages for six days. Ben
is coming to New Zealand for the Auckland Writers' Festival
and it's joining us this morning. Kaldo, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
He's delightful to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
We are just so thrilled that you are going to
be here for the Writers' Festival very soon. But I
wondered if we could start by talking about your latest work, Besiege.
You have written about all sorts of interesting subjects over
the years, from Kim Philby to the rogue Heroes. How
do you settle upon a subject like this?
Speaker 4 (01:07):
Well, this is one I've always wanted to write because
I was seventeen when this happened, and it was the
most dramatic thing I'd ever seen on television. It was
an incredible sort of dramatic, real life performance. It broke
into the snooker, which we were all glued to, you know,
it was an incredible moment. And so I've always wanted
to write about it because it's one of those stories
(01:28):
that entered mythsology very quickly. It became a sort of
story of sort of sas daring do and kind of
you know, fighting against the odds. And you know, actually
that the story itself is much more complicated than that.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
It's much more interesting.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
It's a much more dense and conflicted story about individuals
really and about characters and personality.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
So I've really enjoyed writing this one. It's been great fun.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, it's a remarkable the amount of detail you're able
to extract from all sides of the of you know,
of the crisis. But just to remind our listeners, can
you just give us the basic outlines of the of
the hostage crisis? What happened?
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Absolutely?
Speaker 4 (02:08):
So, this was in April nineteen eighty, the US embassy
hostage crisis was still going on in Tehran and six
armed gunmen burst into the Iranian embassy in London and
took twenty seven hostages. They were young Arabs from a
part of Iran. They were actually deeply opposed to the
(02:31):
Ayatolla's regime. They were bankrolled by Saddam Hussein. This was
an Iraqi plot, a deliberate attempt to destabilize the Ayatolla
and the Iranian regime, and it led to this astonishing
six days standoff between the gunmen inside that building and
the police and eventually the Sas on the outside. I
(02:55):
don't want to give it away for your readers, but
the final denumar moment of this story is extraordinary, when
the Sas end up assaulting the building in a full scale,
full military assault.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
As cameras watch on, I suppose, is one of the
kind of critical moments, right, This is one of those
moments when you know that the full capacity of the
essay is there for the world to see.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
That's right, And you know, the ESAs had never really
been heard of before this. I mean, it was still
a very secretive organization at this point. And of course
we're kind of used to this now. It's a live
rolling news to seeing things happen in real time. This
was filmed by the television cameras as it took place,
and in nineteen eighty that was completely unprecedented. No one
(03:42):
had ever seen news relayed this way before. I remember
it as a seventeen year old watching these kind of
black clad figures ab sailing down the outside of this building,
throwingly explosion inside, armed with machine guns and then attacking
the building. I thought it was a film. I thought
that accidentally they'd moved across from the Zennigga to a film.
But so it's a very significant moment, and it had
(04:04):
a dramatic impact on Margaret Thatcher's premiership.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
You know, in a way it's set the tones.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
She'd only been in power for a year by this point,
and it's set the tone for the rest of of
her premiership in many ways. Her relationship with the military
at the Falkland Islands conflict, all of this, in a
way starts from this event.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
I was gonna say, is there an argument to be
made that the Falkland's conflict might have been avoided, or
at the very least that Missus Stetcher might have had
a different approach to that conflict had this not happened.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Yes, I think you can make that point many in
the SAS do.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
I mean, she believed that she had forged a particular
relationship with the military.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
And the SAS played a very important role in the Falklands.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
And so yes, I mean I think some of her
kind of you can see it now these days there's
rather gung ho attitude towards both terrorism and indeed towards
international conflict was.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Born on this day in May. Was you don't see
it for May when this thing really came down. So
it was very important.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
For her, I think, and she alluded to it throughout
her premiership with great pride.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
It's so more broadly being, I mean, your subjects, in
your various different roles and with various different heads, your
subjects have always had a kind of boy's own quality
to them. You know, whether it's the British Intelligence Services
or the likes of the Essas. What do you think
has driven your personal interest in and in conflict, in
(05:37):
intelligence services and spying and that kind of thing.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Well, I love those kind of stories. I mean, they are, yes,
they're boys own paper in a way. They're kind of
you know, they're incredibly exciting and adventurous and all of
that is wonderful. But actually when you dig into those stories,
they're often much more fascinating than simply stories of daring
do because these are really stories about what ordinary people
(06:02):
do in extraordinary situations. And that is absolently true of
the Iranian embassy seeds. There were twenty six people inside
that building. None of them got up that morning expecting
they were going to be thrust into this terrifying drama.
And a lot of the story is really about how
different people respond to terrifying situations they can't control. And
(06:25):
in a way, that is the story of war, that
is the story of espionage, That is, in a way,
the sort of secret story behind all conflicts is how
do individuals react when it really comes down to the wire.
And I think that's probably what has always interested me.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
One of the individuals who doesn't necessarily cover themselves in
glory and not for the first time in the siege
is Prince Andrew, who rushed down to the embassy almost immediately.
Speaker 4 (06:54):
This is one of the more absurd aspects of this
story that I knew nothing about before I started writing it. Yes,
I mean, but the one moment when the police commissioner
who was in charge of the whole operation.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Actually lost his temper was.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
When Prince Andrew, then the kind of young helicopter pilot,
demanded Nate insisted that he'd be allowed to come down
to police headquarters and witness the siege in operation. He
was told in no uncertain terms, and indeed in terms
that one didn't usually.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Use towards royalty, that that was not going to happen.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Yeah, you obviously have forwards really strong and trusting relationships
with people who either have been or are still in
pretty secretive worlds. So how do you go about nurturing
those relationships, whether it's in the intelligence agencies or with
special force of soldiers and the like.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
Well, it's difficult.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
But that said, everyone in the world wants to tell
their story, and that goes for people in the secret
world as much as anyone else. Really, they may be
kind of prevented in a way by convention and in
some cases by law, but they're a basic human interest,
in instinct thing.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
To tell our own narratives.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
So I've been very lucky over the last thirty years
I've met lots of people from this world. I could
not have written this book without the cooperation of the
Ministry of Defense in the UK, the SAS is not
supposed to talk about operations ever, that's a kind of
a firm rule. In this occasion, After a certain amount
(08:29):
of badgering from.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Me, they agreed to allow the.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
People directly involved in this operation to talk about what
had happened. And that's really never happened before, and so
I was hugely grateful for that. It allowed me to
talk to these people who and there aren't that many
of them still alive, who had actually witnessed at first
hand what happened in the closing eleven minutes of Operation Nimrod.
(08:53):
And without that, I think this book would have been
impossible to write, because that really gave me the kind
of warp and weft of what that experience felt like.
So yes, I mean, those personal relationships are absolutely crucial
to write narrative nonfiction like this.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Do you ever worry that, you know, people in those
kind of positions of secrecy but also power are trying
to you know, they're put up the facad and say, oh,
you know, we never tell our stories, never tell us stories. Okay,
all right, Bean, will tell you our story. And it
just so happens that we look fantastic out of us.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
Well, you make a very good point.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
I mean, you know, spies and special operations people like
to tell their stories. When those stories reflect well of them,
they're much less willing to do so. You know, if
Operation Nimrod had failed, I don't think the Ministry of
Defense would be anything like as keen.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Oh it wasn't that keen anyway.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
But you know, to to sort of share the story,
what has to be a bit careful of that. I mean,
I'm always a bit nervous and a bit tentative about
dealing with sort of official bodies, because you know, this
is not.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
An authorized book.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
I mean, it's different from SAS Rogue Heroes, which I
wrote before, which was an authorized the history of the SAS.
And when I started that project, I made it absolutely
clear that while the SAS was allowed to have an
opinion about the manuscript, it did not have editorial control.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
In this case, it's even firmer.
Speaker 4 (10:14):
They had no control over what I wrote in the
end at all, and to their credit, they really didn't
try to do. There was only one or two elements of
what they call contemporary capability. I thinks that would still
be done today that were done in nineteen eighty and
as your listeners can imagine, there are a precious few
of those. There were a few of those where they said, look,
(10:36):
please don't put that in the book because you know
you don't want to, you don't want to enable the
other side. And look, I'm not in the business of
helping terrorists do anything. So I was perfectly happy to
do that. But it's surprising in a way how little
control really they both have and can have over a
project like this.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
You am I right and thinking when you were a student,
you were approached about potentially joining the intelligence citizens.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
Yes, this is one of the reasons why I've made
a hopeless spy. Is I've kind of revealed this supposed it. Yes,
I was. I was approached by by six and I
went through just the initial stages of recruitment. It became
pretty clear pretty quickly to both sides. I think that
I was really not I was not the type to
make a good spy. I like to reveal secrets, I
(11:24):
don't really like to keep them. That's why I've had
That's a lovely time, you know, as a journalist and
as a book writer, kind of digging into the secret past.
So yeah, I was briefly touched and or tapped up,
as they say in UK parlance, but it was clearly.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Never going to go anywhere. But I think it did.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
Leave me with a kind of residual fascination with the
secret world. I think there's a there's a story to
be told about the secret world in which a non
fiction writer can write about true stories in a way
that nonetheless feels like fiction, And that's almost unique to.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
The spy world, the narrative nonfiction. Right, it's a yeah, yeah,
how does the approach work? Does someone just look, you've
got tepic?
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Is it?
Speaker 3 (12:05):
I mean that it was literally the old fashioned way.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
It was my last university in Cambridge, a nest of spies,
they say. And I was just approached by one of
my lecturers who said, you know, there are certain people
I think you ought to meet.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
I mean he never.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
Actually said what it was I was going to do,
but I was perfectly clear what was going to happen.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
And I went through a couple of interviews, but.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
And I did it more really out of sort of curiosity,
and I think I slightly wasted their time. But it's
you know, it's I mean, my contacts in that world
are always quite amusing about They all know that. I
that was sort of at one point briefly kind of
mentioned as a possibility.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
What do you think, I mean, your fascination is shared
by so many people, including me. But you know, obviously
the nature of espionage in the secret world, as you
term that has massively changed, you know, and continues to
change as technology evolves and that sort of thing. What
do you think is something that people misunderstand about the
(13:06):
operations or capacity of intelligence services.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
It's a very good question.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
I mean, I think a lot of people assume today
that the whole of intelligence takes place digitally, that really
this is now a story about intercepting telephone messages, texts, emails,
that it's all taking place in a kind of cyber world,
and to a considered extent, that is the great development
of modern espionage.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
You know, it does take place up there, and.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
A lot of it, but not all of it, because
human intelligence is as important today as it ever was,
in fact arguably even more important. You know, knowing who
your enemy is, being able to put a face to
him or her, being able to talk to people in
crowded bars and work out whether they are telling you
(13:57):
the truth that is still I would say, the essence
of all espionage, and without it, cyber espionage doesn't work. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
Well, Ben, we love your work. We love all of
your work, including the stuff that we've also seen on
TV and at the cinema. We're delighted that you are
going to be appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival and
look forward to hearing from you very soon.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
Well, I'm thoroughly looking forward to it, and indeed I
have a special guest in Auckland which is one of
the participants in the Sas Embassy Siege, a New Zealander,
will be joining me on stage for that event, which
I'm thoroughly looking forward to.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
That's going to be so special. Thank you, Ben. So
Ben's going to be in New Zealand speaking at the
Auckland Writers Festival, which begins on the thirteenth of May,
and of course there's more information and tickets available at
writers Festival dot co dot nz.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
For more From Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
to Newstalks B from nine am Saturday, or follow the
podcast on iHeartRadio.
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