Читать книгу Death Before Dishonour - True Stories of The Special Forces Heroes Who Fight Global Terror - Nicholas Davies B. - Страница 9

ONE OF THE MOST influential Special Forces units of modern times, largely because it spawned Britain’s world-famous Special Air Service, or SAS, was the Long Range Desert Group, set up in North Africa during World War Two. Unlike the SAS, however, the LRDG was never intended to carry out offensive operations but to simply gather information about the enemy behind their lines. As the war intensified the LRDG did indeed carry out many offensive missions, harassing German forces in North Africa, but this was always a secondary role.

The needs of those who served in the LRDG provided a valuable guide to what the SAS would require to ensure that the new unit became a first-rate fighting force. In the case of the LRDG, those needs were basic but crucial, for most operations were carried out over weeks or months in desert conditions and in enemy territory, and self-sufficiency in everything from food and water to vehicles, fuel, weapons and ammunition was an absolute necessity. A further challenge was navigation, as there were no accurate maps of the deserts of North Africa and indeed scarcely any maps at all; the only navigational guides were the night stars and a compass.

One of the first offensive operations undertaken by the LRDG took place during the Eighth Army’s major drive against the Germans in December 1941. The unit’s officers were under orders to do whatever they could behind enemy lines to disrupt the Germans’ efforts and distract them from their aims.

In his book Providence Their Guide, a history of the LRDG, Major General David Lloyd Owen writes:

One LRDG unit under Lt-Colonel Tony Hay came across a very inviting kind of target – a troops’ road house – with some thirty enemy vehicles in the car park. That evening, as the sun went down, Tony led his patrol along a track which would join the main road about half a mile from the building. He drove fairly slowly towards it, and in doing so passed several vehicles going north along the road. They were mainly Italian but there was one anti-aircraft gun with a crew of four steel-helmeted Germans sitting to attention!

As they reached the building Tony Hay closed his trucks together and turned into the car park. At this moment they opened fire with their guns and hurled grenades into the trucks wasting no time in escaping from the hullabaloo that they had stirred up. It was getting dark, and he took his patrol off into the desert for the night.

Tony Hay and his small band of men in their eight vehicles continued to harass the enemy, setting fire to petrol tankers, knocking out aircraft on the ground, attacking convoys and terrorising the enemy by swift, night-time attacks on their camps and supply lines. The material damage caused to the Germans and Italians was not great, but these LRDG raids created an alarming effect on the enemy, who, more often than not, believed they were the advanced guard of a much greater British force heading towards them. Such operations gave the senior Axis officers many a headache. They were reluctant to order front-line soldiers to roam the desert searching for the British troublemakers, nor did Luftwaffe officers want their valuable aircraft to be seconded to searching the desert for pinpricks of nuisance.

Then, in 1942, the problem for the Axis desert armies intensified when the SAS and the LRDG joined forces to create a brilliant partnership. The plan was that the LRDG, the more experienced partner, would take several SAS units of four men to carry out raids, sabotage and sometimes parachute operations against the Axis forces. The main aim of both Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief Middle East Forces, and his successor Montgomery was to knock out as many German aircraft as possible because these were having a devastating effect on Allied equipment and troops.

One of the first joint battle plans was to attack two German airfields at Sirte and Tamet, some three hundred and fifty miles from Jalo in Libya. Major Paddy Mayne, a former Irish rugby international, was in command of one patrol of four vehicles and eight men which made its way under cover of darkness to within three miles of the target at Tamet.

Major General Lloyd Owen again:

Mayne found himself with his men, all carrying some 70lbs of explosives on their backs, in full view of an airfield with aircraft parked all around the edges… Paddy Mayne was to take full advantage of the setting.

At the western edge of the airfield Mayne had seen some huts where the aircrews were living, and after dark he decided to deal with the occupants of these before turning his attention to the aircraft. Paddy waited until he thought most of them would be asleep; then he and five others rushed into the huts and with bursts from tommy-guns fired from the hips they made quite sure that there would be no one left alive to prevent them dealing with the aircraft.

He wasted no time. The whole raid only took about quarter of an hour, but this was the SAS method of working, and when they were on their way to the rendezvous a total of twenty-four aircraft and the fuel dump were either blazing or ready to explode into flames.

In fact the powerfully built Mayne personally destroyed one aircraft with his bare hands, climbing into the bomber’s cockpit and tearing out the instrument, which he took back to base as a souvenir. In those raids on that single night sixty-one enemy aircraft were destroyed on the ground. Effusive praise for the daring and brilliance of the joint SAS and LRDG operations came the following day. The fame of the SAS, which has never yet diminished, was born.

The idea of the SAS had come to its celebrated founder, Colonel David Stirling, as he lay, injured in a parachuting accident, in a hospital in Alexandria in the summer of 1941. In a memo written in pencil on reams of paper he argued for deep-penetration operations behind enemy lines in which small units would carry out strategic raids after parachuting into enemy territory. He believed that a small force of saboteurs could inflict a level of damage on enemy airfields equivalent to that of a Commando squad twenty times greater.

Stirling was a Cambridge-educated Scots Guardsman who joined one of the first army Commando units in 1940. Six foot five inches tall and weighing sixteen stone, he had always sought adventure and his principal hobby was rock climbing and mountaineering. The outbreak of war in 1939 gave Stirling the chance of as much adventure as any man could ever want.

Now, as a lowly young subaltern, he faced the formidable task of trying to sell his revolutionary idea to his illustrious army commanders, the only men who had the power to put such ideas into operation. It would not be easy. Knowing it would be all but impossible to gain an interview with the Commander–in-Chief, he decided on a frontal attack. Though still on crutches, Stirling decided to ‘break in’ to the C-in-C’s headquarters, situated in GHQ Cairo, and beard Sir Claude Auchinleck in his lair. He threw his crutches over the perimeter fence and then, somehow, clambered over, only to set alarm bells ringing.

As the Military Police searched for the intruder, Stirling reached the Commander-in-Chief’s block and hobbled into the office of his deputy, Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie, just as the MPs were about to grab him.

‘I think you had better read this, sir,’ Stirling said, handing the surprised Ritchie his memo. Still on his crutches, Stirling then withdrew, helped by the MPs. To his amazement, three days later he was recalled to talk over the idea with both Ritchie and Auchinleck, and within weeks he was promoted to the rank of captain and told to recruit and train sixty-six Commandos for his revolutionary idea. The SAS Regiment was born.

Later Stirling would write about the guiding principles of his brainchild:

Strategic operations demand, for the achievement of success, a total exploitation of surprise and of guile. A bedrock principle of this new regiment was its organisation into modules or sub-units of four men. Hitherto, battalion strength formations, whether Airborne formations or Commandos, had no basic sub-unit smaller than a section or a troop consisting of an NCO plus eight or ten men… In the SAS each of the four men was trained to a high general level of proficiency in the whole range of the SAS capability and, additionally, each man was trained to have at least one special expertise according to his aptitude. In carrying out an operation – even in pitch dark – each SAS man in each module was exercising his own individual perception and judgement at full stretch.

Stirling developed the idea of a module of four men, or ‘brick’, in order to prevent the emergence of a leader of operations. An important result has been to foster a military democracy within the SAS, which, through ruthless selection of volunteers, has traditionally led SAS soldiers to motivate and discipline themselves. Stirling’s revolutionary idea of the four-man brick proved so successful that it has been copied by nearly every other Special Forces unit in the world.

He described the SAS Regiment’s philosophy thus:

1. The unrelenting pursuit of excellence.

2. The maintaining of the highest standards of discipline in all aspects of the daily life of the SAS soldier.

3. The SAS brooks no sense of class and, particularly, not among the wives. This might sound a bit portentous but it epitomises the SAS philosophy.

The SAS’s first parachute operation, during a sandstorm in the desert, was a complete disaster in which both aircraft and parachutists were swept away. But the second operation, undertaken in collaboration with the Long Range Desert Group, was a brilliant success, destroying more than one hundred Luftwaffe aircraft on the ground at a number of German airfields. And what was remarkable about this mission was that it had been conducted by only twenty SAS men. Auchinleck was very happy that he had given his support to the young upstart Stirling and his radical idea. More importantly, that first series of attacks had established beyond doubt the role of the SAS. This new Special Force would spawn, throughout the world, many other similar units which have proved their worth ever since.

The extraordinary success of the young SAS came to the attention of Hitler, who dispatched a personal order to General Rommel: ‘These men are dangerous. They must be hunted down and destroyed at all costs.’

And they were. In his envy, anger and total disregard for the Geneva Convention’s pronouncements on prisoners of war, Hitler decreed in the early months of 1945, when defeat for Germany had become a reality, that every SAS man captured and imprisoned should be tortured and then killed. Indeed his brutality went further. A team of British investigators discovered that, after suffering torture, some SAS men had been flayed to death, others had been roasted alive on a spit.

The SAS was disbanded at the end of World War Two, but those soldiers who remained in the unit made it plain to the military authorities that they had joined it for action and adventure, not to sit on their backsides at home twiddling their thumbs. Given the SAS’s dramatic intervention in many operations during the war, the Ministry of Defence came to recognise that such men could be thrown into the deep end in virtually any military situation. As a result, the SAS began to be used in countless operations where small groups of men could carry out the task with great speed and commitment and, importantly, without the need for supply lines and logistical support.

In fact the services of the SAS were required within a few years of the end of the war. In Malaya, the newly armed communist guerrillas were indulging in a riot of murder, and the British government had to act to protect both the British families who had made the country their home and the indigenous population. By March 1950 the terrorists had killed eight hundred civilians, three hundred police officers and a hundred and fifty soldiers. Something had to be done.

A Special Force along the lines of the disbanded SAS was put together from soldiers and reservists who volunteered, but this was not particularly successful until discipline was tightened and the new SAS groups began to live for periods of weeks, or sometimes months. in the jungles of Malaya. For some six years the SAS maintained a presence in the country, taking part in all the most dangerous missions, tracking terrorists for days or even weeks. By 1956 five SAS squadrons, with a total of five hundred men, were playing an important role in the conflict, and the numbers of deaths in the jungle at the hands of the terrorists had been cut to about one a week. But there were still some two thousand hardened guerrillas hiding out in the jungle and swamps and terrorising villagers and farmers.

By the end of the 1950s the insurgents had been teasing the government forces, and killing or threatening the indigenous population, for almost ten years. Employing great technical skill, the SAS searched them out and destroyed them and their base camps, striking characteristically hard and fast. Now they were finally gaining control, and by 1959 the terrorists realised that they were not going to win the war in Malaya. Slowly but surely, the SAS were forcing them into retreat. The game was up, and groups of terrorists began to surrender. A war which many believed could not be won against such a guerrilla force had indeed been won by the SAS. Military strategists believed that it was the ability of the SAS to alter their tactics and adapt a new approach to jungle warfare that had brought them victory.

But it was not the end. The war in Malaya took on a totally different and more serious aspect when Indonesia decided to intervene in a bid to destabilise the fledgling Malaysian Federation by attacking Brunei, Sabah and Sarawak, to the north of Indonesian Borneo. The Indonesians had a large, professional army trained in jungle warfare and began to use members of this for clandestine guerrilla operations against Malaysian forces in Borneo. Almost unknown to the rest of the world at the time, a war lasting four years was fought by some thirty thousand British, Australian, New Zealand and Gurkha troops against an army of more than a hundred and twenty thousand Indonesians. And the SAS were in the thick of it.

Their task was deep penetration and intelligence gathering in the jungles of Borneo behind Indonesian lines. SAS bricks would be sent to watch and wait, and then to report back and advise those officers at headquarters whose job it was ambush the Indonesian forces or hit them in fast counter-attacks from the air and roads.

After commanding the SAS in Borneo, General Sir Walter Walker commented:

‘I believe that a few SAS bricks were equal to a thousand infantry not because they had the equivalent fire power but because their Intelligence gathering could save that number of lives in battles won without a fight.’

It was an extraordinarily hard life for the SAS men. They would have to live rough for three weeks at a time, surviving on poor, hard rations and very little sleep, and maintaining almost complete silence. They were taught to conceal themselves in the jungle by never smoking or chewing gum, never washing with soap, never cleaning their teeth, and never sneezing or coughing. When they returned to base they were often dehydrated and had usually lost twenty to twenty-five pounds in weight, so that they looked like skeletons. They were permitted just five days’ recuperation before their next three-week sojourn in the jungle. The three arduous years of this conflict, from 1963 to 1966, gave SAS volunteers an invaluable experience of jungle warfare.

Tasked with searching out, hunting down and killing Indonesian troops who had infiltrated into Malaysia along a seven hundred-mile border of jungle, the SAS knew that the only way to police this border was to win the hearts and minds of the Sarawak villagers, the way they had done in Malaya. As a result, the villagers became the eyes and ears of the SAS bricks, feeding them information about the enemy. Without such help it would have been impossible for the SAS and their Gurkha comrades to carry out the allotted task. SAS men would move cautiously into a village bearing gifts of medicine, small portable radios and other nick-nacks and make friends with the families, sometimes staying for six months at a time and becoming useful members of the village. In return, the tribesmen provided valuable information which was relayed back to base. The war came to an end in 1966 after President Sukarno of Indonesia was sidelined by his generals. British casualties throughout the entire period were nineteen killed and forty-four wounded; forty Gurkhas were killed and eighty-three wounded. The Indonesian death toll has been conservatively estimated at two thousand.

In the late 1950s another area of conflict had opened up – in the Middle East and, in particular, southern Arabia – and the SAS would operate there until the 1970s. Early on they were sent into Aden and Oman for a series of hellish operations often referred to as the last wild colonial war. This author served in the private army of the Sultan of Muscat and Oman. Given one hundred and twenty Arab and Baluchi troops, three three-tonners, a jeep and three excellent camels, I had to patrol the desert west of Muscat City and intercept caravans of camels transporting rifles and ammunition to the rebels fighting the Sultan in the famous Empty Quarter, the mountainous region on either side of the Saudi Arabian border. We would ambush rebels and their camel trains, raid their camps in the hills and stop and search anyone we came across in the desert. Every few days we would be attacked by marauding rebels – usually at night – and there would be a firefight lasting perhaps twenty minutes. Never once did we have to pull out of a battle but would usually see the rebels off by sending a five-man patrol to one flank or the other to surprise them. It worked every time. And in the six-month period of operations in the desert we suffered only two men wounded, and they were only flesh wounds which I treated and bandaged.

It was nothing like the tough, hard life the SAS had to endure in the region against substantial and formidable guerrilla forces. In December 1958, in one of the toughest assignments ever given to the unit, two troops of SAS men began the task of rooting out and destroying the main guerrilla headquarters and weapons and ammunition store in the caves of the Jabal Akhdar, the Green Mountain. From this remote, eight thousand-foot hideout in northern Oman, guerrillas had been leading marauding parties against Omani villages and camel trains in an attempt to destabilise the Sultan’s autocratic rule and set up a communist republic.

As the eight SAS men made their way under cover of darkness towards the summit, climbing up a near-vertical rock face, gunfire rained down on them. They were under attack from some forty guerrillas armed with Bren guns and rifles. The onslaught was ferocious and there was virtually no cover, so the SAS men lay still, held their fire and waited. Confident they had killed the raiders, the guerrillas made their way down to where they had seen movement. Only when the enemy were about one hundred and twenty yards away and visible in the star-studded night sky, did the SAS open up with automatic fire. Five guerrillas were killed outright and four wounded. The rest fled for their lives.

Two weeks later, while still trying to penetrate the mountain headquarters, Captain Rory Walker was leading another exploratory raid near the top when his two troops of SAS men were once again detected just before they reached their goal.

An SAS soldier was using a rope to climb up a fault in the cliff when a guerrilla above him shouted, ‘Come on, Johnny’ and opened fire. Walker took the man’s place, climbed up the rope and hurled a grenade over the top into the group of guerrillas gathered there, killing one and wounding some of the others. Walker signalled to the rest of his men and continued up the rope. When they had all reached the top they charged the enemy, firing their Bren guns from the hip as they ran. Eight more guerrillas were killed in the firefight; the rest fled into the caves.

On the other side of the mountain, also controlled by the enemy, Captain Peter de la Billiere, with two SAS troops, made a ten-hour forced march through enemy-held territory in darkness. In his book Who Dares Wins, Tony Geraghty writes:

The SAS crept to a point two hundred yards from the cave mouth (where weapons and ammunition were stored) lined up a 3.5 inch rocket-launcher, and waited. The only point from which the SAS could open fire was below the cave, and this meant that the rocket crew had to kneel or stand to use the weapon. The same firing-point was, for want of something better, a natural amphitheatre whose upper slopes were honeycombed by many small caves sheltering enemy snipers. At dawn, as the first of the guerrillas emerged, stretching his sleep-laden limbs and yawning, the soldiers poured a hail of missiles and machine-gun fire into the main cave.

Describing the action, one SAS officer later wrote:

Even such withering fire did not cause the rebels to panic or surrender. They quickly dropped into fire positions and returned the best they could. Reloading and firing the 3.5 inch from the standing position became interesting. What made it particularly interesting, as well as infuriating, was the failure of many of the SAS to leave the launcher after being fired. They remained unfired but ‘active’ and had to be extracted immediately and replaced with another round, regardless of the necessary safety drills.

The noise of the battle instantly brought down rifle fire from the surrounding hills. Outlying rebel pickets retreated slowly and the SAS picked them off one by one. The rebels still had a mortar firing from a crevice behind the cave, but the SAS laid on air support. As RAF Venom aircraft came swooping in, one of their rockets made a direct hit. Mortar and men were destroyed immediately.

This action now became a fighting retreat, in which men moved back singly or in pairs, using every scrap of cover available. This lasted rather more than fifteen minutes and was covered by a .3 inch Browning machine-gun manned by a regimental veteran.

But the battle on the Jabal Akhdar was not yet won. In addition to an SAS squadron, the conflict now involved an infantry troop of Life Guards, two troops of Trucial Oman Scouts and a few signallers and REME men – a total of some two hundred soldiers. And the conditions were harsh. The winds were incessant and bitterly cold by day and night, when even the water bottles froze during the night.

By the end of December, when the SAS had been on the mountain some two weeks, the commanders knew there was no way they could dislodge the guerrillas, who were in a strong defensive position. One very good reason for the confidence of the defenders was the fact that, historically, the Jabal Akhdar had never been conquered by any force. It was considered to be impregnable. The SAS needed more men if victory was to be achieved.

The newcomers, a further SAS squadron of one hundred and twenty men, were given the task of staging a frontal attack between the twin peaks of the mountain. The assault route was up a narrow track that climbed four hundred feet to a fortified and very easily defended position. However, this assault was a feint, and the main attack would come from the other side of the mountain. The SAS men had to climb for some nine hours in the darkness up a four thousand-foot slope, for which ropes were needed on one traverse. Never before had any force attempted to scale and conquer the mountain from this angle of attack. Each soldier carried on his back sixty pounds of equipment, mainly ammunition. Behind came donkeys, laden with heavy machine guns.

With dawn only an hour away, the SAS men found themselves still some distance from the mountain top. They now faced two choices. They could either keep moving slowly and steadily to the top and pray they wouldn’t be spotted by the guerrillas on guard, or they could dump their heavy ammunition packs and make a dash for the top in the hope of catching the defenders unawares. The second option was a major risk. If it went wrong they could all be wiped out in a blaze of automatic fire from above. And yet they decided to take that risk. This was an attack on a well-defended position which tacticians believed was impregnable. One of the most daring and outrageous assaults ever undertaken by a small group of men, it was to make the SAS into the legendary fighting force the world has come to admire and respect.

They dumped the ammunition and began the suicidal scramble up the final three hundred metres of the steep mountain. There was no cover whatsoever – no trees, no shrubbery, no gorse, nothing to prevent a lookout seeing these forty men with their blackened faces as they struggled, at times on all fours, up the mountain. Ten minutes later they reached the plateau at the top, exhausted and so breathless they couldn’t speak. And there was not person in sight.

Fearing a trap, the SAS men took cover, waited for the anticipated onslaught and called up RAF Venom strike planes to bomb the caves a few hundred metres ahead of them. The Venoms responded and also dropped more ammunition. It seemed that the guerrillas had feared a full-scale airborne invasion and fled their stronghold, leaving behind mortars, heavy machine guns, Bren guns, mines and ammunition. It was indeed a famous victory for the SAS.

The Oman campaign, at first little more than a daredevil series of skirmishes, would, however, point the way towards a new type of war for Britain as it divulged itself of bits of the empire in various parts of the world. From now on British government military policy would focus on strategic mobility, with the SAS and other arms of the British forces acting more like fire brigades racing to douse fires wherever they might break out.

In 1972 a small group of SAS men fought a remarkable old-fashioned battle in the Omani coastal village of Mirbat, a place with two small, crumbling old forts, some fifty flat-topped houses and surrounded by barbed wire. However, Mirbat was only a hundred miles or so from South Yemen, then a haven of Arab communist guerrillas armed with AK47s and other Soviet weaponry, who wanted to overthrow the Sultan of Oman and take control of the country, which they suspected was rich in oil. Small groups of SAS units were in place to support the Sultan’s own forces.

The battle was part of a secret war being conducted by British SAS men in Oman. This war began in the late 1960s and lasted into the middle of the following decade, but at the time the British public had no idea it was being waged by their government. In fact it was a war of which Britain should have been proud and in which SAS soldiers showed great courage and skill fighting far larger forces of determined Soviet-backed rebels. This is the story of one of those awesome battles.

A group of ten SAS men and thirty Omani soldiers, the latter armed with old-fashioned British Lee Enfield .303 rifles, were protecting the villagers of Mirbat and their livestock against occasional mortar bomb attacks from the unseen enemy on the other side of a small range of hills. The SAS had their personal weapons plus a World War Two twenty-five-pound gun, a single Browning machine gun and a single eighty-one-inch mortar. However, in July 1972, the Yemeni guerrillas decided for the first time ever to launch a major attack against Mirbat in a direct frontal assault. Two hundred and fifty guerrillas, armed with anti-tank rifles, rocket-launchers, mortars, heavy machine guns and AK47s, launched a silent attack early one morning before first light. They surrounded the village while everyone asleep and then opened fire, taking both the villagers and the SAS men totally by surprise.

The battle began when dozens of mortars rained down on the village, waking the British soldiers and everyone else. Nothing like this number of mortar shells had ever been fired before. Within minutes the SAS men were in action – two firing the mortar and two firing the Browning machine gun, while the other six kept up precision firing with FN rifles and the light machine gun. The Omani riflemen also took up positions around the perimeter of the village, maintaining a steady stream of fire. A team of three, including two Fijians, manned the twenty-five-pounder, raining shells on the advancing guerrillas. For the next hour the defenders fought a frantic battle, pouring as much automatic fire as possible at the guerrillas as they advanced relentlessly towards the village. The guerrillas, who appeared to be well led, were likewise directing as much firepower as they could at the village.

As the battle raged the women and children trembled in their houses. The noise of gunfire was almost deafening, the explosions of the rockets as they hit their targets loud and unnerving. Never before had the SAS men been subjected to such an onslaught from such a numerically superior force, but their discipline and their reactions never wavered. Their exceptionally tough training showed through.

Occasionally there were lulls in the firing, only for the rebels to launch further withering attacks some ten minutes later. Within three hours the Yemeni guerrillas were within ten yards of the perimeter wire, at three separate places, and showing extraordinary courage in the face of sustained automatic fire from the defenders. From two positions close to the village the guerrillas opened fire on the old fort with rocket-launchers and Soviet RPG rockets. Things were looking desperate for the SAS. There was no chance of air support, partly because the cloud level was low, but also because the attackers and defenders were too close to one another, almost locked together with only a few yards between them.

Nevertheless, the RAF at Salalah, the provincial capital, sent in a helicopter with the intention of taking out the wounded. But the chopper could not land on the small site near the sea and, as bullets pock-marked it, was forced to fly off again.

It was at this point that Captain Mike Kealy, who was in command of the Mirbat operation, realised that the heavy gun and the Browning machine gun had ceased firing over at the old fort. The twenty-three-year-old officer knew that unless he could get these weapons firing once again the entire place would be overrun in no time and the battle lost. He and his medical orderly, Trooper Tom Tobin, ran the three hundred yards from their position in the headquarters building to the Old Fort, stopping every few paces to fire their automatic rifles at the enemy at the wire before sprinting on again, while the rebels poured firepower all around them. Unbelievably, neither man was hit.

The situation they found in the fort was desperate. The Omani soldiers had put up a fantastic fight, but four were lying dead; others were bleeding badly from bullet wounds. One had had half his face blown away; another had lost an arm; another had a gaping hole in his stomach; and yet another’s legs were missing. Yet somehow even the wounded men kept firing at the enemy. Within a minute of Kealy’s arrival at the gun emplacement the rebels were close enough to begin lobbing grenades. He knew that if one grenade landed in the gun pit they would all be dead. One did land, but it failed to go off.

Before making his dash to the gun emplacements, Kealy had radioed Salalah to advise them that he had no idea how long they could hold out unless RAF Venoms could launch a strike against the enemy. He warned of the dangers to his own men and the villagers, but stressed that there was simply no alternative.

The close-quarter battle around the Old Fort and the bunkers had been raging for some two hours when, out of the cloud, came two RAF Venoms, flying at just one hundred feet. By relaying radio messages to the pilots, Kealy directed the bombs to a ditch where many of the rebels were gathered, and to a machine-gun emplacement only about fifty yards from the village which was pouring in non-stop heavy fire, causing many casualties. The Venoms’ timely arrival seemed to terrify the rebels, many of whom turned and fled.

But the battle of Mirbat wasn’t over yet.

It was the pilot of one of the Venoms, which was badly hit by machine-gun fire, who reinforced Kealy’s earlier pleas for help. ‘My God,’ he said over his intercom, ‘there are hundreds of them down there!’ That single comment made the commanders in Salalah realise that unless major reinforcements were rushed to Mirbat there was very little chance that the SAS men could hold out for much longer. It was clear that the base was about to be overwhelmed.

Then an amazing stroke of luck came to Kealy’s rescue. The previous day G Squadron SAS had arrived at Salalah ready to take over from Kealy’s C Squadron and were on the firing range at Salalah testing their weapons when the urgent requests for assistance came over the radio. Within an hour eighteen men of G Squadron had packed into two helicopters and flown at sea level to Mirbat.

The men hit the ground running and, after a quick briefing from Kealy, advanced out of the fortified village in pursuit of rebels sheltering behind a ridge some three hundred yards away. After firing a few rounds the rebels turned and fled, with the fresh, super-fit SAS men on their tails. Two more helicopter flights brought in more SAS men, who advanced on the beach, where rebels had been keeping up a steady stream of fire throughout the battle from three defensive positions.

These rebels, numbering about one hundred, had to be removed, and quickly, to bring the situation under control and restore some sort of calm among the beleaguered villagers. The guerrillas fired their machine guns and lobbed grenades at the SAS, but after ten minutes of a fierce firefight the SAS had moved into positions which forced the rebels to either surrender or risk being shot to pieces. They surrendered.

The battle had claimed the lives of two SAS men, and two were seriously injured. Two Omanis were killed and a further two seriously wounded. The rebels left thirty bodies behind and ten more were taken prisoner. Some twenty more guerrillas had been severely wounded. When the war in Oman ended, some four years later, a tribute was paid to those SAS men who had fought at Mirbat. A guerrilla commander said that they had never recovered from that defeat and were never able to stage any similar attacks again.

Within the emerging military world of Special Forces the courageous exploits of the SAS in Oman were seen as a measure of their competence, skill and determination in the face of overwhelming odds. And there would be more battles which only came to the notice of the general public some years later. The SAS were proud of the fact that the regiment was almost a secret service, their exploits known to only the top military brass, the Secret Intelligence Services and officials at the Ministry of Defence.

The closely guarded world of the SAS would be blown wide open in May 1980 when television news cameras showed live coverage of men in black clothing and balaclavas wielding sub-machine guns and machine pistols on the roof and window sills of the Iranian Embassy in Prince’s Gate, London, a stone’s throw from the fashionable shops and restaurants of Knightsbridge.

Most TV viewers watched in silence, spellbound by the scene unfolding before them. They saw these men place objects against windows of the embassy, and within seconds two explosions filled the air with noise and dust. Seconds later viewers watched as more men in black fatigues abseiled down the rear of the building. More explosions followed as stun grenades were thrown into the rooms, and from inside the building came the muffled noise of machine-gun fire.

The nation was stunned. Who were these men dressed all in black invading an embassy in the heart of London? People knew that some gunmen had been holding officials of the Iranian Embassy for several days. But to most British viewers this action by unknown men was completely alien. Within hours, however, all would become clear, and over the following days television and news media would explain in great detail that these men were members of Britain’s SAS, a secret elite force responsible for counter-terrorism. The existence of the SAS had been known about since the days of World War Two, but this assault brought home just what skill they possessed. Overnight the TV images were flashed around the world and from that moment on the SAS lost its secrecy and gained, instead, fame and notoriety as the world’s most daring, courageous and efficient fighting force. Nearly every SAS man before and since that fateful day would have preferred the unit to have remained behind the scenes, out of view and out of the headlines. It was not to be.

The events of May 5 had begun a week earlier, when six young Arabs from Khuzestan province in Iran walked towards the Iranian Embassy carrying machine pistols, 9mm pistols and Russian fragmentation grenades beneath their coats. Their mission was to bring the struggle for the independence of greater Khuzestan – to be renamed Arabistan – to world attention and to humiliate the Iranian government.

On duty guarding the embassy that day was PC Trevor Lock, armed with a .38 revolver. He opened the front door to be confronted by the six men, who were all wearing Arab headscarves over their heads and faces. Slamming shut the door, PC Lock managed to sound the alarm on his personal radio as the gunmen opened fire, shattering the glass door and blinding him with flying splinters of glass. Firing their weapons, the gunmen rampaged through the building, rounding up everyone and locking all twenty-six hostages in Room 9 on the second floor.

By the end of the first day communication with the terrorists had been established by a secure landline and the area cordoned off by armed police. The BBC had also been requested by one of the hostages, directed by one of the terrorists, to make known that the group were demanding the release from Iranian jails of ninety members of the Democratic Revolutionary Movement for the Liberation of Arabistan. Three hours later the BBC received another call from the terrorists, this time with a threat: ‘Unless the Iranians free the DRMLA prisoners by noon the following day the embassy will be blown up and the hostages killed.’

In his book Secret Soldiers Peter Harclerode details the dramatic sequence of events in the SAS’s involvement, which began just hours after the hostages were seized. Before dawn the following day Lieutenant Colonel Michael Rose, Commanding Officer of 22 SAS, was in a building next door to the embassy, surveying the scene and planning an operation for immediate action if the terrorists did start killing the hostages. The SAS planned to make an entrance through the roof of the embassy and upper floors and then clear the building of terrorists from the top downwards, in the hope that they could reach the hostages before they were massacred.

Two days later the terrorists inside the embassy were becoming agitated as none of their demands had been met, and the gunmen informed PC Lock that, as a result, they would shortly have to begin shooting the hostages. In fact they appeared to be wavering in their resolve, for they now demanded that the group be allowed to leave Britain for an unspecified destination in the Middle East with only a few of the hostages. The remaining hostages would be left in the bus when the group boarded the aircraft at Heathrow.

Unbeknown to the terrorists, however, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her senior advisers had summarily dismissed their demands for safe passage. On the fourth day of the siege one of the demands was carried out – the BBC broadcast a statement dictated by the group’s leader, who went under the name Salim, a highly intelligent twenty-seven-year-old member of a middle-class Khuzestan family, university-educated and fluent in English, German, Arabic and Farsi. Two hostages were released and, in return, the police sent in a meal from a Persian restaurant. The terrorists and the hostages were jubilant, believing there would now be a peaceful outcome to the raid.

But they did not hear two SAS men on the embassy roof, who silently removed the glass from a skylight, opened the skylight and then carefully put everything back in place, to provide access for a possible assault.

When nothing happened the following day, however, the terrorists once again became jittery and fractious, convinced that police or members of the armed forces had gained access to the building. The hostages also became despondent and fearful of their future. Worried that the terrorists’ behaviour was becoming increasingly irrational and that they appeared more desperate than ever, PC Lock persuaded Salim to let him talk to the police negotiators. PC Lock left the negotiators in no doubt that the terrorists’ patience was exhausted and time was running out.

An hour later Salim told the police on the secure phone link: ‘Bring one of the Middle East ambassadors here to talk to me in forty-five minutes or I will shoot a hostage.’

The terrorists reinforced this message by bringing PC Lock to the phone and confirming that a hostage had been selected and would be shot unless Salim’s demand was met. The minutes ticked by and no response came back from the police, who were in fact taking their instructions from COBRA – the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, a crisis committee set up to oversee any major emergencies within the UK and chaired by the Home Secretary and representatives of the Foreign Office, the Home Office, Ministry of Defence and the security and intelligence services.

Harclerode wrote:

Inside the embassy meanwhile Abbas Lavasani, one of the embassy’s two press officers, had been taken to the ground floor and, his hands bound behind his back, tied to the banisters at the foot of the stairs. At 1.45 pm Salim telephoned the negotiators and held the receiver next to Lavasani who identified himself as one of the hostages. No sooner had the negotiators heard him say his name than they heard another voice cut in, shouting, ‘No names! No names!’ Immediately afterwards came the sound of two or three shots followed by a long choking groan. Salim then came on the line again and announced that he had killed a hostage.

This led to feverish activity, for the killing meant that COBRA had misread the situation. Furthermore, now that the terrorists had resorted to killing hostages, experienced hostage negotiators warned that there was every probability that more shootings would follow. As COBRA’s top officials and military advisers decided what action to take, the terrorists announced that another hostage would be shot in thirty minutes’ time.

In a desperate effort to calm the terrorists, a senior officer of the Anti-Terrorist Squad persuaded Dr Sayyed Darsh, the senior imam at the Central Mosque in Regent’s Park, London, to act as a mediator in an effort to save the lives of the hostages. At the same time a meeting of all Arab ambassadors in London took place, and they agreed to issue a press release saying they would also act as mediators. But it was all too late.

No Arab ambassador was ready to hold talks with the terrorists and the attempt by Dr Darsh to calm Salim by reading from the Koran seemed to infuriate rather than placate the terrorist leader. Over the phone the sound of three shots rang out. A few seconds later the front door of the embassy opened and a body was dumped unceremoniously outside.

News of the second shooting was flashed to COBRA, where the Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, telephoned Mrs Thatcher requesting permission for the SAS to carry out an immediate assault. At 7 pm control over the assault phase of the operation was passed to Colonel Rose.

Harclerode again:

At 7 pm as Salim was still talking to negotiators on the phone two large explosions reverberated through the embassy building and the assault began.

The plan called for all floors of the embassy to be attacked simultaneously by the two SAS teams, Red and Blue. Red was responsible for clearing the top half of the building with two groups of four men abseiling in two waves from the roof to the second-floor balcony at the rear of the building where they would force an entry via three windows. Meanwhile, another group would assault the third floor using a ladder to descend from the top of the building to a lower roof. The top floor would be cleared by another group entering via the skylight.

Blue Team was tasked with clearing the lower half of the building comprising the basement, ground and first floors. Explosives would be used to blast through the bullet-resistant glass of the French windows at the rear of the building and the windows on the first-floor balcony at the front. Members of Blue Team would also be responsible for firing CS gas canisters through the second-floor windows…

Dressed in black assault suits and wearing body armour and respirators, each man in both teams was armed with H&K MP5 sub-machine guns and a Browning 9mm pistol. In addition, one group in each team was equipped with a frame charge manufactured from linear cutting charge explosive mounted on a light wooden frame. As the teams took up their positions, an explosive charge was lowered and suspended just above a glass roof covering the building’s stairwell…

The charge above the stairwell’s glass roof detonated with a huge explosion, blowing it in and sending a shock wave through the building. At the same time, members of Blue Team began firing CS gas canisters through the second-floor windows while the rear assault group smashed their way through the French windows with sledge hammers.

Television viewers saw members of Blue Team clambering across from the adjacent house on to the embassy’s first-floor balcony. One SAS man put the charge against the window, blowing it away, and then threw a stun grenade into the room. The four SAS men clambered inside, guns at the ready. They knew that it would become a case of ‘them or us’ and that their reactions would be decisive.

Two SAS men moved from the room on to the landing, but there was no one there. They heard noises of a scuffle coming from a side room and burst in to find PC Lock struggling with Salim. On hearing the explosions, the policeman had gone for the gun he had concealed throughout the six-day siege, but Salim had seen him fumbling for the gun and was desperately trying to rip the handgun from his grasp. One SAS man yelled at PC Lock to ‘get out of it’ as both soldiers opened fire with their MP5s, hitting Salim in the head and chest. He died instantly.

The other two SAS men who had gone in through the front windows opened the door to the smoke-filled Ambassador’s office to be confronted by an armed terrorist. A burst of automatic fire sent the gunman staggering backwards, and he disappeared into the smoke. Cautiously, the two SAS men moved into the room, unable to see more than a few feet. They found the gunman lying on the sofa with his weapon at the ready. He died in a hail of bullets from their sub-machine guns.

The SAS troopers had not yet discovered the exact whereabouts of the hostages, but suspected they were being guarded by the remaining three armed terrorists. They knew they had only seconds to save their lives. One of the SAS men at the back of the building looked through a window to see a gunman lighting newspapers in a crowded room. He smashed the window, threw in a stun grenade and clambered in. The terrorist ran from the room and across the landing to Room 10, where the hostages had been herded. As he entered he opened fire on the huddle of frightened people with his machine pistol and was joined by another terrorist, who also opened fire indiscriminately at the screaming hostages.

A moment later the SAS man ran into the room and shot one terrorist in the head with a single bullet from his Browning. Ali-Akbar Samadzadeh, one of the embassy’s press officers, had been shot dead and Dr Ali Afrouz had been shot twice in the legs. There was chaos in the room, with the SAS yelling at the hostages to lie down; the hostages screaming in fear; and the terrorists shouting for mercy as they threw themselves down on the floor among the hostages. The SAS men had a problem because there was no way they could tell – in a split second – the difference between the Arabistan terrorists and the Iranian hostages. The SAS men shouted at the hostages to get out of the room as they searched out the terrorists, fearful they might make one last desperate effort to kill them. One man lying on the floor made a sudden move and was shot in the back. Under his body they discovered a grenade.

The soldiers were still desperately trying to identify the remaining two gunmen. They lined up on the landing and hurriedly and roughly pushed the hostages down the stairs while checking each of them. One man was being pushed towards the top of the stairs when a trooper recognised his face. The SAS man glanced down and saw that the terrorist was holding a grenade and he shoved him in the back as hard as he could so that he stumbled down the stairs. He had not wanted to open fire because the stairs were crowded with hostages. Another SAS man standing halfway down the stairs clubbed the terrorist on the back of the head as he toppled past him, and the man landed at the bottom of the stairs in a crumpled heap. A second later the SAS soldier guarding the hall shot the man in the head and took away the grenade. The safety pin was still intact.

But the SAS squad were certain there was still one remainingterrorist unaccounted for. They ordered everyone into the rear garden and made them lie face down on the lawn while Blue Team soldiers handcuffed each of them. Within a couple of minutes the hostages identified the remaining terrorist and he was pulled to his feet, searched and handed over to police. The hostages were released but ordered to remain in the garden while the entire building was searched and declared safe by the soldiers. Only then did the SAS men leave, driving away in unmarked vans back to obscurity.

Those sensational TV pictures, flashed around the world, made the SAS’s reputation. From that day the unit had become the world’s foremost anti-terrorist organisation, praised for its courage and professionalism. The action had sent a clear signal to all terrorists that Britain would deal firmly with any threats to the community. It also brought many requests from governments around the world seeking the SAS’s assistance in training their own anti-terrorist squads. From the viewpoint of the SAS, however, the publicity was most unwelcome. The last thing the secret force needed was to be the centre of attention amid a blaze of publicity.