Barry Manners relives the tale of Flight 149

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Transcript

00:00 You get used to it. I mean it's very strange. You don't go from being a passenger to being a hostage.

00:08 It's kind of like a process of osmosis and eventually as the noose tightens and tightens,

00:15 the restrictions are layered on and layered on.

00:19 At some point you realise that I am basically here just to be shot if America invades

00:27 or be collateral damage if they try to take out this particular facility.

00:31 So you don't feel anything. It's not like anything. It just becomes normal.

00:36 I accepted the fact that I was there to be... that my life was probably over.

00:42 And that was the weird thing looking back. You accept the fact that this is it.

00:47 The only thing that was left to discover was the timing and the exact manner of how I was going to be dispatched.

00:56 It sounds a bit melodramatic to say that in those terms.

00:59 But I played chess a lot as a kid. I was actually playing chess against a computer on the plane going down.

01:06 And when you sort of game it out and you think, well what are the options here?

01:10 There was no possibility of escape from the dam.

01:13 We had secret police guarding us inside the dam.

01:17 We had armed conscripts with Kalashnikovs on the exits. We were locked inside this room.

01:23 The area was incredibly heavily fortified. We're 30 kilometers from the Iranian border.

01:32 Probably the most heavily fortified border in the world.

01:35 Minefields everywhere. Pillboxes, bunkers, foxholes absolutely everywhere.

01:42 No possibility of escape. The only options we were waiting for was for a bomb to come through the ceiling

01:48 or for the door to open and one of us to be taken out and shot.

01:52 The guards had made it quite clear that that was what they wanted to do.

01:56 The only thing that gave us any sort of real comfort there was that we knew the guards wouldn't execute us

02:01 until they had orders from Baghdad to do so.