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  On the stairs the other SAS teams formed a human chain. They began to shove the hostages roughly down, bundling them from man to man. They were aware there was still a chance of the terrorists detonating explosive devices that would blow everyone sky-high. They wanted to clear the building as soon as possible.

  In COBR, de la Billière was tuned into the net. He was trying to make sense from the confusion of voices and to give a running commentary for Whitelaw’s benefit: ‘At least one hostage is dead … but the majority are alive … The terrorists don’t seem to be doing too well …’12 On the ground floor, Horsfall and his mate, ‘Ginge’, were at the base of the chain. They were feeding the hostages out into the garden, where the reception party was waiting. The five women hostages had been liberated from the cipher room on the second floor by Tak, the injured staff-sergeant. Tak shortly fainted from his burns. He refused to let anyone help him, but got up and made his way down to the door with glazed eyes.

  As the women were stumbling downstairs, Horsfall heard someone shout, ‘Watch out, he’s a terrorist!’ He glanced up to see one of the team, ‘Soldier I’, smash the butt of his MP-5 into the neck of a tall, frizzy-haired terrorist. It was Faisal, who had sprayed the hostages with rounds from his SMG. ‘Soldier I’ had spotted a grenade in his hand but couldn’t shoot because the team in the foyer was in his line of fire. ‘I raised the MP-5 above my head,’ he said, ‘… and brought the stock of the weapon down on the back of his neck. I hit him as hard as I could … He collapsed forward and rolled down the remaining few stairs …’13

  Horsfall saw the grenade and fired a short burst of four 9mm rounds into Faisal’s chest. There was a staccato bipping of fire as his mates also opened up. Faisal jerked and lay still. He didn’t spurt blood or spasm. One of the SAS team grabbed his hand and inserted it under the body so that if the grenade went off they would be shielded from the blast. They waited nine seconds and nothing happened. They relaxed. Faisal lay dead with at least twenty-seven 9mm slugs in his body.

  The shooting petered out. The fire raged. Nineteen hostages lay spread-eagled on the lawn with their hands bound behind them, encircled by police dog-handlers. The second floor was wreathed in flames and smoke. Among the prostrate hostages was the sole survivor of the terrorist gang, Fawzi Badavi Najad, who had been hidden by one of the women. He was fingered by Sim Harris. According to Horsfall, he was pulled to his feet by one of the SAS reception team, ‘Big Tony’, and marched back towards the door of the embassy. Horsfall and another mate, ‘Ivan’, stopped him. ‘We never knew for sure what Big Tony had in mind,’ Horsfall said. ‘But I had my suspicions.’14 The last of the teams was pulling out. At COBR, de la Billière put down his headphones. He told Whitelaw the operation had been largely successful. There were ecstatic cheers, and a round of whisky. Then the Director SAS and the Home Secretary hurried to Princes Gate, where Mike Rose had already handed control back to the police. Operation Nimrod, the most celebrated action in special forces history, had lasted just eleven minutes.

  The teams were back in the holding area, stripping off respirators and body-armour, and giving each other high-five hand-slaps. When Whitelaw arrived to address them minutes later, he was dewy-eyed. ‘I always knew you would do a good job,’ he said, ‘but I never knew it would be this good.’15 He wanted them to go outside and take a bow before the world’s cameras. OC Hector Gullan demurred. Five minutes later, the Pagoda boys were moving in their Avis rentatrucks to Regent’s Park Barracks, where Prime Minister Thatcher called in to see them with her husband, Denis. She shook hands with each man and was filmed cheering along as they watched themselves in action on TV.

  This image, of the heroes applauding their own existence on television, is a curiously apt one. It was a tacit acknowledgement of the truth in the saying that, in our age, ‘nothing is real unless it’s on TV’. Although it was later claimed that the TV coverage had been unplanned, and Mike Rose had deliberately concentrated most of the action away from the mass of cameras, there was clearly a degree of collusion. An astute politician, de la Billière recognized that the government needed full media exposure to convince the taxpayers that the incident warranted the use of military force. He also admitted that for months he had been looking for a way of showing that the SAS were not ‘shady behind-the-scenes operators, but first class soldiers’. The opportunity had fallen like a ripe peach into his hand: ‘All at once,’ he said, ‘the real value of the SAS to this country … was manifest.’16

  Those eleven minutes in front of the TV cameras transformed the SAS. It had never been a secret organization, but until then most people had been unaware of its existence. That had changed. It was not only, as de la Billière said, the ‘surgical precision’ of the operation that impressed the watching millions, but the visual effect, the frisson of menace, of terrible purpose, that exuded from these men in their black suits, hoods and masks. It was something that touched deep into the collective unconscious. Nothing quite like it had ever been seen before.

  Operation Nimrod was the single most important event in SAS history. The TV cameras robbed the Regiment of its anonymity and converted it from ‘a shady presence’ to a national icon. They launched what was to become no less than the great warrior-myth of the late twentieth century.

  In an era when warfare was the domain of ‘smart bombs’, multi-billion-dollar defence systems and hierarchies of faceless technocrats, the SAS soldier was a reversion to the idea of individual chivalry. Invulnerable and unstoppable, swinging on ropes, leaping balconies, rescuing the innocent, doling out death to the villains, SAS-men became instant folk-heroes. Here was a heady mix of true grit, cyber-tech and derring-do that came straight out of a James Bond movie. As Margaret Thatcher proclaimed, it ‘made you proud to be British’. In the public consciousness, the SAS was where Robin Hood and the Knights of the Round Table met Spiderman, the Ninja assassin and the Last of the Jedi: ‘heroes with halos, monkish militiamen’, as one Guardian journalist said.

  While de la Billière revelled in the new high profile, many of the rank-and-file saw the writing on the wall. ‘[The Iranian Embassy] was the best – and worst – thing that ever happened to the Regiment,’ said SAS veteran of twenty-three years’ service Ken Connor. ‘… Everyone and his dog knew about the SAS. From then on every fact, every rumour about the Regiment, would be seized on by the media …’17 ‘Before the siege very few people had heard of the SAS,’ Robin Horsfall commented. ‘Now the whole world wanted to know us … we were turned into a performing circus, demonstrating our techniques to any interested member of the Royal family and their corgis. Our standards dropped appallingly.’18

  From the sublime pinnacle of the super-hero, there was still the mundane question of the inquest to be dealt with. SAS-men had never appeared in a public court before. In February 1981, the Westminster coroner concluded that they had used reasonable force. All five dead terrorists were victims of justifiable homicide.

  Outside the court, though, questions were raised. The first semi-official accounts of what happened in the telex room, for example, suggested that Shakir had been shot while hurling a grenade. Makki had been taken out making a sudden threatening movement while being searched. Later accounts held that the SAS had demanded, ‘Who are the terrorists?’ and executed the two men pointed out to them. ‘Both were sitting there and put their hands on their heads,’ said embassy doctor Ahmad Dadgar. ‘Then several SAS-men came in … they took the two terrorists and pushed them [against the wall] and shot them.’19

  This was never proved. Robin Horsfall claimed that Margaret Thatcher had ordered the team tacitly to kill the gunmen, regardless of the hostages. Clive Fairweather countered that all the team’s orders had been videotaped, and the tapes sealed by lawyers immediately afterwards. Such an order would therefore have been impossible. ‘People thought the message from Thatcher was to waste them,’ he commented, ‘but that wasn’t true. The message was to rescue the hostages, not kill the terrorists. The strategy was to avoid blood
shed.’20

  Horsfall’s statement may be more an expression of the implicit feeling among the counter-terrorist team than a record of actual orders. This interpretation is reinforced by his account of the booze-up that followed the operation back in Hereford. ‘What … caused me to leave early,’ Horsfall said, ‘were the recriminations that were already beginning to circulate … “Ivan” was criticized for preventing “Big Tony” from topping the last terrorist … I realized that because I was involved in saving [him] I too would be a subject of criticism behind my back. It depressed me that such an occasion should be demeaned by such petty minded behaviour …’21

  Ironically, despite the presence of multiple eye-witnesses and TV cameras, what actually happened inside the embassy will never be known for sure. No one, not even those who took part in the assault, experienced more than a small part of the operation. It happened so quickly that a precise ordering of events is impossible. Perhaps the most mysterious factor is that while de la Billière stated that ‘a single shot by a sniper in Hyde Park accounted for one of the terrorists as he leant out of the window, and four were killed by precision marksmanship inside the building’,22 the sums do not add up. Two terrorists were killed on the first floor by the assault teams, two in the telex room, one at the bottom of the stairs: one survived. The existence of the ghostly ‘seventh terrorist’ shot by the sniper at the telex room window has never been explained.23

  For the Regiment such quibbles were now academic. The SAS cult had taken on a life of its own. In the decade before the Iranian Embassy siege, the SAS had been on the verge of disbandment for lack of a role. Now, its future was assured. The same month had witnessed the abysmal failure of the Regiment’s American twin, Delta Force, to rescue hostages from the US embassy in Tehran. Operation Nimrod was a vindication of something the British had always believed about themselves: that they were ‘exceptionally good at this sort of thing’. From now on, everyone else agreed. ‘Shown live around the world on primetime TV,’ a BBC report ran, ‘the storming of the Iranian embassy made the SAS a brand name for military excellence.’24

  In the years following Nimrod, other states began to covet that ‘brand name’. Britain might no longer rule the waves, but now she was number one on the counter-terrorist market-place. SAS training became the beau idéal of every foreign special forces outfit, and turned into a major British export. Training teams started to claw back vast sums for the exchequer. Black-clad, hooded figures popped up on streets all over the world. On the home front, the Iranian Embassy success provided a stark deterrent to terrorists, but above all, it restored national pride. Britain still had something the rest of the world envied: daring, dash and ingenuity – qualities that big bucks alone couldn’t buy. ‘For behind all the specialist weapons, assault equipment, technical devices and so on,’ said de la Billière, ‘are the SAS … a living embodiment of the individualism of the British.’25 The SAS had proved that the right man was mightier than technology, and that small was beautiful in the special forces world.

  It was an axiom that one man, who had watched the assault quietly on TV in the bar of White’s Club that evening, had been extolling all his life. A retired lieutenant-colonel with the Distinguished Service Order, six foot four and remarkably strong for a quasi-pensioner, he was a legend among the cognoscenti. Once known as the ‘Phantom Major’, he had also been called ‘the most under-decorated officer of the Second World War’. A former officer of the Scots Guards, he had first become a member of White’s during his cadet days at the Guards Depot at Pirbright in 1940. By coincidence, Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw had been one of his intake. Whitelaw remembered him as a cadet who would ‘simply ignore duties and go off to a party in London … quite incorrigible’.26

  As the TV coverage came to a close that evening, the ‘incorrigible’ ex-Guardsman may have reflected that it was here, in White’s bar, that a meeting with a man called Bob Laycock had sent him on the journey that had changed his life. The storming of the Iranian Embassy he had just witnessed was, in a sense, the outcome of that journey – the culmination of events that he had set rolling in Cairo, Egypt, thirty-nine years before.

  Part One

  NORTH AFRICA 1941–3

  1. ‘The sort of plan we are looking for’

  In July 1941, the British in Cairo felt they had been granted a reprieve. The summer season was as gay as ever. Officers in starched khaki drill rubbed shoulders over cocktails in the Continental and at the Long Bar at Shepheard’s, tucked into dinners of roast pigeon at the Roof Garden, and packed the belly-dancing cabarets in Ezbekiyya Square. Enlisted men queued to watch talkies at the Metro, quaffed beer and tea in Groppi’s, the Tipperary, or Forest Hills Tennis Club, argued with vendors in the Muski, or played football and cricket on vacant lots near the waterfront, where urchins yelled ‘Sieg heil’ at them and ran away. In the bars there was talk of the attempted suicide of Major Orde Wingate, victor of the Gideon Mission in Ethiopia, who had shut himself in his room at the Continental, and slit his own throat with a bowie knife.

  Middle East Headquarters was sited at 10 Tonbalat Street in the leafy district of Garden City, amid palaces and villas – a five-storey art nouveau block known in dispatches as ‘Grey Pillars’, and to senior officers simply as ‘No.10’. The mood there was sombre but optimistic. Back in April, General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps had been expected at the pyramids any day, but the immediate threat had evaporated. Rommel was obsessed with Tobruk, the only port on the coast of Cyrenaica still in British hands. Though Battleaxe, Commander-in-Chief General Sir Archibald Wavell’s attempt to relieve Tobruk, had failed in June, with the loss of ninety-one tanks and a thousand men, Rommel had baulked at invading Egypt.

  The real reprieve, though, had come on 21 June, when Hitler launched Barbarossa – his invasion of the Soviet Union. The eye of the storm had shifted abruptly away from the Mediterranean, and in London, Winston Churchill was rubbing his hands and urging Wavell’s replacement, General Sir Claude ‘the Auk’ Auchinleck, to hit Rommel while his divisions had no chance of reinforcement.

  Auchinleck, a square-jawed, dignified man with a deep confidence in his own judgement, refused to budge until he was fully prepared. On 15 July he sent a long cable to Churchill, explaining that there could be no offensive until his tank crews had been fully trained – that would not be until the end of October, maybe later. While he was dictating the signal that morning,1 there was a scuffle outside GHQ ME. A tall young subaltern in battledress, wearing the Scots Guards badge on his field-service cap, approached the security barrier on crutches. When the military warden demanded his pass, the officer failed to produce it. Sent packing, he dumped his crutches outside the barbed wire, jumped over the fence, and sprinted to the door with a bawling warden in hot pursuit.

  Outrunning the guard, the officer made his way up to the third floor and barged his way into the office of Major General Neil Ritchie, Auchinleck’s Deputy Chief of General Staff. As Ritchie glanced up in surprise, the subaltern fumbled a salute, stammered apologies for bursting in, and held out a paper for the DCGS to read. Ritchie had a reputation for being ‘an awfully nice chap’, if a little slow. ‘He was very courteous,’ the young officer remembered years later, ‘and he settled down to read it. About halfway through, he got very engrossed, and had forgotten the rather irregular way it had been presented.’2

  When the DCGS had finished reading, he glanced at the lieutenant and said, ‘I think this may be the sort of plan we are looking for. I will discuss it with General Auchinleck and let you know our decision in the next day or so.’3

  The subaltern could hardly contain his excitement. He had entered the office of the third most senior man in the British army in Egypt, without an appointment or even a pass, and had induced him to read a proposal for a new concept in warfare, badly scrawled in pencil. The ‘incorrigible’ young officer had not been prepared for such a swift and positive reaction. His name was David Stirling and he was twenty-six years old. He had just tak
en the first step in the creation of the SAS.

  2. Bands of brothers, packs of hounds

  Although his uncle, Simon Joseph Fraser, had founded the famous Lovat Scouts in the Boer War, few of his comrades would have put money on David Stirling as creator of a unit that would change the face of modern warfare. Among the most enthusiastic revellers at the Continental and the cabarets, his main pastimes were drinking and gambling. On graduation from the Guards Depot at Pirbright, he had been classed as an ‘irresponsible and unremarkable soldier’, who flouted authority, neglected his duties, and spent every free moment partying.

  Stirling had once, it was said, knocked out the horse of a Cairo cabby in protest against the excessive fare. After a night on the tiles he would sleep off his hangovers at the 15 Scottish Military Hospital, reviving himself next morning on shots of pure oxygen begged from a nurse. He would return to duty late, with a doctor’s note citing ‘pyrexia of unknown origin’ as an excuse. Since arriving in Egypt in March that year he had spent so much of his time on sick-leave that he was under investigation for malingering – in wartime tantamount to cowardice.

  Stirling had left Britain the previous January, as an officer in Layforce – the fifteen-hundred-strong commando brigade earmarked for the invasion of Rhodes, off mainland Turkey. The commandos had been forged in Britain’s blackest hour – the summer of 1940 – when Hitler’s armies were massing across the Channel, facing Britons with the prospect of invasion for the first time in a thousand years. Determined that the nation should not sink into the slough of despond that he thought had scuttled the French, Winston Churchill demanded that ‘enterprises must be prepared, with specially trained troops of the hunter class … who can develop a reign of terror on these coasts’.1