The Regiment Read online

  Michael Asher

  THE REGIMENT

  The Real Story of the SAS

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Maps

  Prologue

  Part One: North Africa 1941–3

  Part Two: Europe 1943–5

  Part Three: Small Wars and Revolutions 1947–80

  Part Four: Black Ops and Green Ops 1980–91

  Illustrations

  Epilogue

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  By the same author

  NON-FICTION

  In Search of the Forty Days Road

  A Desert Dies

  Impossible Journey: Two Against the Sahara

  Shoot to Kill: A Soldier’s Journey Through Violence

  Thesiger: A Biography

  The Last of the Bedu: In Search of the Myth

  Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia

  The Real Bravo Two Zero

  Get Rommel: The Secret British Mission to Kill Hitler’s

  Greatest General

  Khartoum: The Ultimate Imperial Adventure

  Sands of Death

  Sahara (with Kazuyoshi Nomachi)

  Phoenix Rising: The United Arab Emirates, Past,

  Present and Future (with Werner Forman)

  FICTION

  The Eye of Ra

  Firebird

  Rare Earth

  Sandstorm

  To the men of all ranks and nationalities

  who have served in our Regiment

  List of Illustrations

  Section One

  1. David Stirling (photo Lorna Almonds Windmill)

  2. Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne (from Bradford and Dillon, Rogue Warrior)

  3. John Steel ‘Jock’ Lewes (photo John Lewes and IWM)

  4. Bill Fraser with Colonel Gigantes and General Leclerc (photo Countess Jellicoe)

  5. SAS mobile patrol, North Africa, 1942 (IWM E 21338)

  6. Johnny Cooper and Reg Seekings, Cairo, 1942 (from Cooper, One of the Originals)

  7. Mike Sadler (photo Lorna Almonds Windmill)

  8. Some early members of L Detachment. Back left to right, Rose, Austin, Reg Seekings, Charlie Cattell, Johnny Cooper; front row, Rhodes, Baker, Ted Badger (from Cooper, One of the Originals)

  9. Bob Bennett (from Bradford and Dillon, Rogue Warrior)

  10. New Year’s Eve at Aghayla, 1942. Left to right, Trooper Jeffs, Charlie Cattell, Bob Lilley, Malcolm Pleydell and Johnny Wiseman (photo Gavin Mortimer)

  11. Bob Melot (photo Gavin Mortimer)

  12. Charles ‘Pat’ Riley (photo Lorna Almonds Windmill)

  13. George, Earl Jellicoe (photo Countess Jellicoe)

  14. L Detachment sergeants at Kabrit (from Strawson, History of the SAS)

  15. LRDG truck in Gilf el Kebir (photo Mike Sadler)

  16. SAS jeep equipped with machine guns (IWM NA 676)

  17. Wrecked SAS vehicle at Termoli (Gavin Mortimer)

  18. Battle of Termoli (from Geraghty, This is the SAS)

  19. Ian Wellsted, left, and Alex Muirhead in France 1944 (from Wellsted, SAS and the Maquis, photo Alex Muirhead)

  20. Kipling patrol in the Morvan, France, 1944 (from Bradford and Dillon, Rogue Warrior)

  Section Two

  21. ‘Gentleman’ Jim Almonds, front left, with Gain patrol in the Orleans Forest, 1944 (photo Lorna Almonds Windmill)

  22. Johnny Cooper, Johnny Watts and Tony Jeapes, c. 1960 (photo Tony Jeapes)

  23. John Woodhouse instructs recruits in Malaya (from Strawson, History of the SAS)

  24. J. M. ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert (from Bradford and Dillon, Rogue Warrior)

  25. Johnny Cooper in Malaya (from Cooper, One of the Originals)

  26. Sergeant Hanna with parachute harness, Malaya (IWM BF 10694)

  27. Helicopter landing in jungle clearing, Malaya (IWM FEM/62–24-26)

  28. B Squadron, 22 SAS, before a jump in Malaya (IWM MAL 070)

  29. SAS Patrol in Malaya (IWM FEB/64–16-5)

  30. Wadi Maidan, Jebel Akhdar, Oman (photo Tony Deane-Drummond)

  31. Sabrina or the ‘Twin Tits’, on Jebel Akhdar (photo Tony Jeapes)

  32. Tanuf Slab, Jebel Akhdar, Oman (IWM MH 28050)

  33. Johnny Watts and Peter de la Billière on Jebel Akhdar, Oman (from Strawson, History of the SAS)

  34. Alf ‘Geordie’ Tasker, the Radfan, Aden (from Strawson, History of the SAS)

  35. SAS forward operating base, Habilayn/Thumier, the Radfan (IWM ADN/64–260-30)

  Section Three

  36. Billy White, Borneo (from Peter Dickens, SAS Jungle Frontier)

  37. Edward ‘Geordie’ Lillico (from Strawson, History of the SAS)

  38. Aerial view of the Borneo jungle (IWM MH 28978)

  39. Tony Jeapes in Dhofar with a firgat (photo Tony Jeapes)

  40. ‘Lab’ Labalaba, hero of Mirbat (Soldier Magazine)

  41. SAS patrol searching the scrub, Dhofar hills (photo Tony Jeapes)

  42. Mirbat Fort, Dhofar (from Geraghty, This is the SAS)

  43. SAS patrol withdrawing across Jarbib, Dhofar (photo Tony Jeapes)

  44. Peter Ratcliffe in Dhofar (photo Peter Ratcliffe)

  45. Simba position, Qamar mountains, Dhofar (photo Peter Ratcliffe)

  46. The Iranian Embassy siege (Metropolitan Police Archives)

  47. The Iranian Embassy siege (Metropolitan Police Archives)

  48. Falklands War, 1982. The damaged airstrip and Argentine planes at Pebble Island (Crown Copyright)

  49. Royal Navy Sea King helicopter, Falklands War (P.A. Photos)

  50. SAS mobile patrol, Gulf War (photo Peter Ratcliffe)

  51. Peter Ratcliffe, RSM, 22 SAS, holds a meeting in the Wadi Tubal in Iraq, at the height of the Gulf War (photo Peter Ratcliffe)

  52. Candidate for 23 SAS Regiment (TA) on selection, Brecon Beacons (Press Association)

  53. The aftermath of the Loughgall ambush, Northern Ireland (P.A. Photos)

  54. 21 SAS Regiment (Artists’) (TA) on parade at the Royal Academy of Arts. (Soldier Magazine)

  55. The clock tower at the SAS base in Hereford, engraved with the famous lines from Flecker’s Hassan, is a monument to fallen SAS comrades, and to the everlasting honour of the Regiment (from Geraghty, This is the SAS)

  Maps

  Egypt, 1941–3

  Libya, 1941–3

  Italy, 1943–5

  France, 1944–5

  Northern Europe, 1945

  Malaya

  Oman

  Assault up the Jebel Akhdar, Oman

  Southern Arabia, 1960s–70s

  Borneo

  Northern Ireland

  Falkland Islands

  Tierra del Fuego

  The term SAS was never used in Hereford, and to turn it into one sound – ‘sass’ – was sacrilege. It was referred to as ‘The Regiment’ by anyone who had actually been part of it.

  Robin Horsfall, Fighting Scared, 2002

  Prologue:

  ‘I always knew you would do a good job, but I never knew it would be this good’

  On the morning of 30 April 1980, Major Clive Fairweather, second-in-command, 22 SAS Regiment, received a phone call from an old mate named Dusty Gray. Fairweather knew Gray from the secret SAS campaign in Dhofar – an experience that had forged a special bond among the so-called ‘Storm Veterans’ who had shared it. An ex-D Squadron corporal, noted for his Groucho Marx moustache and his sense of humour, Gray was now out of the army, working as a dog-handler with the Metropolitan Police. He told Fairweather that a terrorist situation was building up in central London.

  This was the second call Fairweather had received about conditions in the capital that morning. M
inutes earlier, his fiancée had reported that there were ‘lots of police about in Princes Gate, Kensington’. She was having a hard time getting round the roadblocks. Fairweather knew that the Princes Gate area was favoured by foreign embassies. He had a feeling that something serious was going down.

  Fairweather was holed up in the ‘Kremlin’ – the ops room at Bradbury Lines, the Regiment’s base in Hereford. His main job that day was to move the SAS Special Projects counter-terrorist team, codenamed Pagoda, to Catterick in Yorkshire. It was scheduled to spend the rest of the week on a hostage-negotiation exercise. The four sabre squadrons of 22 SAS, A, B, D and G, rotated through the counter-terrorist role in six-month tours. It was currently the turn of B Squadron, which had taken over from G at the start of the month. The SP (Special Projects) unit was divided into Red and Blue Teams. One generally remained on stand-by at Hereford, while the other was out rehearsing terrorist scenarios in different parts of the country. At that moment, the Pagoda boys were drinking tea in the Blue Team stand-by area with their Range Rovers and Ford Transit vans lined up outside.

  Fairweather, ex-King’s Own Scottish Borderers, a thirty-six-year-old Scotsman from Edinburgh with a long record of service in the Regiment, was faced with a dilemma. Though he now had two bites of information about a possible terrorist scenario in Princes Gate, neither was official. If he sent the team to Catterick, and a job did develop in London, the extra two hours’ driving time might prove of life-and-death importance. After pondering it for a minute, he phoned B Squadron’s OC, Major Hector Gullan, and told him that the exercise was postponed. Then he went home for a bowl of soup.

  He never finished it. While he was eating, he heard a report on the radio about an incident that had occurred at about 1120 hours. Half a dozen Arabs had stormed the entrance of the Iranian Embassy in Princes Gate. Momentarily repulsed by the sole guard, forty-one-year-old Police Constable Trevor Lock of the Diplomatic Protection Group, one of them had fired three rounds from a Browning 9mm pistol. The shots had shattered the glass doors and temporarily blinded the policeman. Lock hadn’t managed to draw the six-shot .45 calibre Smith & Wesson revolver he wore under his overcoat. Instead, he set off an alarm concealed in his lapel. Unheard by the terrorists, the alarm alerted the Diplomatic Protection Group HQ in New Scotland Yard.

  The Arabs took Lock hostage. His face streaming blood, he was bundled into an upstairs room together with BBC producer Chris Cramer and sound-man Simeon Harris, who happened to be at the embassy chasing up visas. There were twenty-two other hostages, including chauffeur Ron Morris, other embassy staff, and visiting journalists.

  The terrorists claimed to belong to an organization called the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan, an ethnically Arab province of western Iran, known officially as Khuzestan. Their spokesman, twenty-seven-year-old Baghdad-born trader Awn ‘Ali Mohammad, made three demands. The first was the restoration of human rights to the people of Arabistan. The second was freedom, recognition and autonomy for the region. The third was the release of ninety-one Arabistan political prisoners in Khomeini’s jails. If these demands weren’t met by noon on Thursday 1 May, he said, the embassy and all the hostages would be blown up.

  Rushing back to his office, Fairweather called off the Catterick exercise. He phoned his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Hugh Michael Rose, who had been out of camp that morning. A forty-year-old ex-Coldstream Guardsman, Rose had been CO of 22 SAS for less than a year. The Indian-born stepson of author John Masters, of Night Runners of Bengal fame, he had studied at both Oxford and the Sorbonne, and had done stints in the Territorial Army and the RAF Volunteer Reserve before joining the Guards.

  Rose did two things. First, he put a helicopter on stand-by to fly him to London for an immediate recce. Then he contacted the Director of the SAS Group, Major-General Peter de la Billière, at Group HQ in King’s Road, Chelsea. He asked the Director for official confirmation from the Ministry of Defence that a major terrorist incident was brewing. De la Billière was as keen to get Pagoda in the picture as Rose was. A forty-six-year-old SAS veteran, he had served as squadron commander, second-in-command and CO of the Regiment, and had been instrumental in setting up an SAS counter-terrorist role almost a decade earlier.

  At noon, the SP team was given a preliminary briefing in the tea-room by B Squadron OC Hector Gullan, a gruff ex-Parachute Regiment officer who had helped set up the first SAS counter-terrorist squad seven years earlier.

  The men were raring to go. ‘[We were] secretly hoping beyond hope that this would really be it,’ said a member of Blue Team, Trooper Robin Horsfall, a twenty-three-year-old former boy-soldier and ex-Para. ‘… Such an incident had never happened before in the UK.’1

  By early afternoon Mike Rose was on the ground liaising with the police. No answer had come back from the Ministry, but Rose ordered Fairweather to move Red Team nearer the capital anyway. An official from the Cabinet Office phoned Bradbury Lines six hours later, requesting SAS assistance at Princes Gate, and Fair-weather took great satisfaction in telling him, ‘We’re already there.’ Hearing the 2IC’s Scots brogue, the official inquired disbelievingly if he could talk to ‘a proper officer’.

  The team had split up into small groups and left Hereford by different routes. They met up at the Army School of Languages at Beaconsfield, on the outskirts of the capital. ‘Surprise was the key to success,’ Fairweather recalled, ‘… and I didn’t want to alert the media that the SAS were en route to London … I worried that the Range Rovers would be spotted … but we succeeded in getting the whole team in without any fuss.’2 By midnight they were setting up a tactical HQ at Regent’s Park Barracks, in Albany Street. Peter de la Billière had spent most of that afternoon attending an emergency session at COBR – the Cabinet Office Briefing Room – with Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw. He was certain that the siege would end in carnage. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had made it clear that, though she expected the police to negotiate for as long as it took to achieve a peaceful solution, the terrorists were subject to British law, and there was no way they would leave the country. De la Billière believed that the Arabs would never surrender because of the loss of face it would entail.

  Mike Rose was carrying out an unobtrusive recce around Princes Gate, looking for a forward holding area nearer the target – now referred to as ‘the Stronghold’. The embassy itself was one of a terrace of solid early Victorian town-houses on the one-sided road running parallel with the main thoroughfare, Kensington Road. The main road fell gently past the rotunda of the Albert Hall on the left, Kensington Palace on the right, and the church of St Mary Abbots, where it merged with busy High Street Kensington. On the opposite side of the road lay the lawns, lakes and maples of Hyde Park. The trees weren’t yet in full leaf, but since the front windows of the embassy faced squarely across Kensington Road, Rose thought they would make perfect hides for snipers. The Stronghold was bigger than it looked from outside. Built in the 1850s, it contained fifty-four rooms on four floors, its façade embellished with a pillared portico, huge sash windows and ornate balconies.

  Rose finally chose the Royal College of General Practitioners, at Nos. 14–15 next door, as the team’s holding area. The college could be approached by a concealed route through some flats, across a garden, and down a basement passage. He knew it would be crucial to keep the movement of the SAS under cover, not only for their protection, but also to prevent the media spotting them. There were at least three television sets in the embassy, and the last thing Rose needed was for the terrorists to learn what the SAS was doing on TV.

  In the early hours of 1 May, the two dozen men of Red Team brought up their equipment in Avis rentatrucks. They smuggled it into the college by the concealed route. Two hours later they had installed themselves in their new forward holding area, and were kitting up for a possible assault.

  At this stage the SAS had two plans, a hasty one and a deliberate one. ‘The hasty plan required speed and stealth,’ Fairweather sai
d. ‘[It] would have been carried out if hostages were imminently at risk in the first few hours. This plan would [probably have] involved a frontal assault.’3 Nobody wanted to use the hasty plan if it could be avoided. It would mean going in blind without reliable intelligence or a detailed knowledge of the target’s layout. The casualty projection for the hasty plan was ninety per cent.

  The deliberate plan required the gathering of detailed information. ‘We needed to know how many rooms there were,’ Fair-weather commented, ‘how many storeys, what were the buildings either side, could we get along the balconies, could we get on the roof, what the light was like inside, which ways the doors opened … And we needed to know how many people were inside, how many terrorists, who they were, what weapons they had, what they wanted – the list went on and on …’4 Both plans would be in a continuous state of revision as new intelligence came in.

  The team’s intelligence section, run by Sgt. Joe ‘S’, had already started constructing a model of the Stronghold. Shortly, Sgt. ‘S’ was able to give the team an initial intelligence brief, with an outline of the building plan, and mug-shots of the six terrorists. ‘We spent a lot of time studying them in order to be able to separate the bad from the good if we went in,’ Horsfall recalled. ‘… One mistake and I could find myself shooting a hostage, or get shot myself as a result of hesitating.’5

  ‘Shooting a hostage’ was the SP team’s bête noire. They had practised hostage-rescue drill day-in day-out in the close-quarter battle range at Hereford, known as the ‘Killing House’. With their preferred weapon, the MP-5 Heckler & Koch 9mm sub-machine gun, SAS shooters could put a three-round burst through a 10cm circle at five metres without using the sights. The Special Projects team had drilled with it until the weapon became an extension of themselves. Over and over again they had practised in rooms where dummy ‘terrorists’ had to be instantly distinguished from dummy ‘hostages’, and taken out with a four-inch group to the head. They had also rehearsed different scenarios with live ‘hostages’, each of the team playing ‘hostage’ in turn.