How one call broke the ice and set up deal

It was a telephone call from Iran's top negotiator to a senior adviser of Tony Blair on Tuesday night that finally broke the ice and produced the hostages' release with breathtaking speed.

Astonishingly, the phone conversation was the first between the British Government and an influential member of the Iranian government and came on the 12th day of the hostage crisis. But even arranging the call had taken some effort.

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At the Foreign Office, morale was low on Tuesday after Mr Blair said the next 48 hours would be "fairly critical". A request for a meeting with Iran's Foreign Minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, had gone unanswered since Saturday.

The Iranians had gone to ground, having let it be known that they were very irritated by Britain's approach to the UN Security Council and the European Union which last week demanded the hostages' immediate release.

Yet Iran's national security chief, Ali Larijani, had been on television discussing the way forward with a British journalist on Channel 4 News on Monday evening. At 6pm on Tuesday, a Foreign Office minister, Lord Triesman, read the riot act to the Iranian ambassador, Rasul Mouahedian-Attar, at their eighth meeting since Revolutionary Guards snatched the 15 sailors and marines at gunpoint on 23 March.

The Government was getting fed up with mixed messages coming from Tehran, he said; one minute we're told the female hostage, Faye Turney, will be released, the next her freedom has been put on hold.

How come Mr Larijani had personally contacted Channel 4 News and not the Government, when we want to talk to Mr Larijani, the minister wanted to know.

The envoy agreed at that meeting to arrange the call between Mr Larijani and Sir Nigel Sheinwald, Mr Blair's chief foreign adviser. Margaret Beckett appears to have been elbowed aside. The Iranian official told Mr Sheinwald during their hour-long conversation that people should pay attention to the Iranian President's intervention at a press conference until the very end.

It was the only hint of yesterday's announcement that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was pardoning the hostages as an "Easter gift to the British people". But nobody in Downing Street, the Foreign Office or Ministry of Defence could be sure of the outcome until he pronounced those words. Even the Iranian Foreign Ministry was reportedly taken by surprise.

The surprise "gift" was the culmination of a rollercoaster of global diplomacy aimed at freeing the service personnel who were seized in disputed waters between Iran and Iraq.

Last Monday, with hardliners calling for the captives to be put on trial, Iran submitted "corrected" coordinates placing the incident inside Iranian waters. This prompted Mr Blair to warn that the crisis would move into a "different phase" if diplomatic efforts failed.

Iran's response was to torment the Government by dripping out letters from the hostages, and by broadcasting "confessions".

Britain ratcheted up the pressure by securing UN and EU support. The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon urged the hostages' release at a meeting on the sidelines of an Arab summit in Riyadh.

Pope Benedict XVI added his voice, sending a letter yesterday appealing to Mr Ahmadinejad for a "goodwill gesture before Easter".

But other forces were in play. Syria, Iran's strategic ally in the region, claimed yesterday that it played a critical role in securing the hostages' release.

And the beginnings of a deal were in sight. The Iraqi government, eager to conserve strong relations with its neighbour, began exerting pressure on the US in the hope that it would release five captured Iranian Revolutionary Guards whose detention in January was considered to be at the root of a proxy war between the coalition and the Guards. The Iranians have now been given access to their detainees for the first time by the Americans.

Britain denies there was any link to the Iranians held in Iraq, but the truth will only be known when the classified papers on the episode are released in 30 years' time.