by Jon E. Lewis
As soon as the action starts slide to the floor under your seat and stay there. Do not move into the aisles, any assaulting troops will flatten you in their rush to dominate the aircraft.
Obey all orders from the assault team without question or protest. They’ll treat everyone as potential threats so you’ll be handled very roughly until positively cleared.
Tear gas will probably be used, so bury your head in the seat cushions. Do not rub your eyes – especially if you wear contact lenses.
Non-provocative stance
Do not pick up weapons as you flee the aircraft – you may be shot as a suspected terrorist when you get outside. As you exit, fall to the ground as though injured with your arms outstretched, and stay there until instructed to move by security forces.
The passengers can be removed from the aircraft as soon as the hijackers are cleared from a major exit. Station members of your team by the exits to make sure no hijackers try to sneak out the same way and to co-ordinate the security forces outside the aircraft. There have been cases when escaping passengers were shot by mistake as they fled from the fighting.
Assault team moves out
After the hijackers have been dealt with and the aircraft declared “clear” the assault team moves out. It is sensible to keep a low profile, because you do not want your arrival during a future crisis to be observed by the press and blasted over the TV and radio. This is why all special forces preserve the anonymity of their men. It may save their lives one day – and it may save yours.
SIEGE AT PRINCES GATE
The Special Air Service of the British Army burst into the world headlines in May 1980 when it stormed the Iranian Embassy in London to free 26 hostages held by Arab gunmen. It was an unusually public appearance for the SAS, most of whose operations since its foundation in 1941 have been deep behind enemy lines, or in the more shadowy areas of counter-revolutionary warfare. Jon E Lewis gives the following account.
At 11.25 am on the morning of Wednesday 30th April, 1980, the tranquillity of Princes Gate, in London’s leafy Kensington district, was shattered as six gunmen wearing shamags over their faces sprayed the outside of No 16 with machine gun fire and stormed through the entrance. The leading gunman made straight for an astonished police constable standing in the foyer, Trevor Lock of the Diplomatic Protection Group, while the rest, shouting and waving their machine pistols rounded up the other occupants of the building.
The gunmen – Faisal, Hassan, Shai, Makki, Ali and Salim – were members of Mohieddin al Nasser Martyr Group, an Arab group seeking the liberation of Khuzestan from Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. No 16 was the Iranian Embassy in Britain. The siege of Princes Gate had begun.
The police were on the scent almost immediately, alerted by an emergency signal from Trevor Lock, and were soon followed by Scotland Yard specialist units including C13, the anti-terrorist squad, and D11, the elite blue beret marksmen. The building was surrounded, and Scotland Yard hastily began putting in motion its siege negotiation machinery.
While no siege is ever the same as the one before or after it, most follow a definite pattern: in stage one, the authorities try to pacify the gunmen (usually with such provision as cigarettes and food), and allow the release of ideological statements; in stage two, the hostage-takers drop their original demands, and begin negotiating their own escape; stage three is the resolution.
The Princes Gate siege moved very quickly to stage one, with Salim the head Arab gunman announcing his demands over the telephone just after 2.35 pm; autonomy and human rights for the people of Khuzestan, and the release of 91 Arab prisoners held in Iranian jails. If his demands were not met he would blow up the Embassy, hostages and all, at noon the following day.
The SAS meanwhile had been alerted about the siege within minutes of its start. Dusty Gray, an ex-SAS sergeant now a Metropolitan Police dog handler, telephoned the Officers’ Mess at Bradbury Lines, the SAS’ HQ next to the River Wye in Hereford, and said that the SAS would probably be required at the Iranian Embassy where gunmen had taken over. That night SAS troopers left for London in Range Rovers, arriving at a holding area in Regent’s Park Barracks in the early hours of Thursday morning. The official authority from the Ministry of Defence approving the move of the SAS teams to London arrived at Bradbury Lines some hours after they had already left.
Over the next few days the Metropolitan Police continued their “softly, softly” negotiating approach, while trying to determine exactly how many hostages were in the Embassy and where they were located. Scotland Yard’s technical squad, C7 installed microphones in the chimney and walls of No 16, covering the noise by faking Gas Board repairs at neighbouring Ennismore Gardens. Gradually it became clear that there were about 25 hostages (as they discovered at the end of the siege, the exact count was 26), most of them Iranian embassy workers. Also hostage were PC Trevor Lock and two BBC sound engineers, Sim Harris and Chris Cramer. The latter, who became seriously ill with a stomach disorder, was released by the gunmen as an act of good faith. It was a mistake by the Arab revolutionaries; a debriefing of Cramer gave the SAS vital information about the situation inside the Embassy as they planned and trained in a new holding area only streets away from Princes Gate itself.
Inside the holding area a scale model of the Embassy had been constructed to familiarize the SAS troopers with the layout of the building they would assault if the police negotiations were to break down. Such training and preparation was nothing new. At the Bradbury Lines HQ, SAS Counter Revolutionary Warfare teams use a Close Quarter Battle house for experience of small arms fire in confined spaces. (One exercise involves troopers sitting amongst dummy “terrorists” while others storm in and riddle the dummies with live rounds).
As the police negotiating team located in a forward base at No 25 Princes Gate (of all places, the Royal School of Needlework) anticipated, the gunmen very quickly dropped their original demands. By late evening on the second day of the seige, the gunmen were requesting mediation of the siege by Arab ambassadors – and a safe passage out of the country. The British Government, under Margaret Thatcher, refused to countenance the request. To the anger of the gunmen, BBC radio news made no mention of their changed demands, the broadcast of which had been a concession agreed earlier in the day. Finally, the demands were transmitted – but the BBC got the details wrong.
For some tense moments on Saturday, the third day of the siege, it looked as though the furious Salim would start shooting. The crisis was only averted when the police promised that the BBC would put out the demands accurately that evening. The nine o’clock news duly transmitted them as its first item. The gunmen were jubilant. As they congratulated themselves, however, an SAS reconnaissance team on the roof was discovering a way into No 16 via an improperly locked skylight. Next door at No 18 the Ethiopian Embassy, bricks were being removed from the dividing wall, leaving only plaster for an assault team to break through.
On Sunday 4 May, it began to look as though all the SAS preparation would be for nothing. The tension inside the Embassy had palpably slackened and the negotiations seemed to be getting somewhere. The gunmen’s demands were lessening all the time. Arab ambassadors had agreed to attend a meeting of their COBRA committee in order to decide who would mediate in the siege.
And then, on the morning of Bank Holiday Monday, 5 May, the situation worsened rapidly. Just after dawn the gunmen woke the hostages in a frustrated and nervous state. Bizarrely, Salim, who though he had heard noise in the night, sent PC Lock to scout the building, to see whether it had been infiltrated. The hostages in Room 9 heard him report to Salim that there was nobody in the Embassy but themselves. Conversations among the gunmen indicated that they increasingly believed they had little chance of escape. At 11.00 am Salim discovered an enormous bulge in the wall separating the Iranian Embassy from the Ethiopian Embassy. Extremely agitated, he moved the male hostages into the telex room at the front of the building on the second floor. Forty minutes later, PC Lock and Sim Harris appeared on the first floor bal
cony and informed the police negotiator that their captors would start killing hostages if news of the Arab mediators was not forthcoming immediately. The police played for time, saying that there would be an update on the midday BBC news. The bulletin, however only served to anger Salim, announcing as it did that the meeting between COBRA and the Arab ambassadors had failed to agree on the question of who would mediate. Incensed, Salim grabbed the telephone link to the police, and announced: “You have run out of time. There will be no more talking. Bring the ambassador to the phone or I will kill a hostage in forty-five minutes.”
Outside in the police forward post, the minutes ticked away with no news from the COBRA meeting, the last negotiating chip of the police. Forty-two minutes, forty-three minutes . . . The telephone rang. It was Trevor Lock to say that the gunmen had taken a hostage, the Iranian Press Attache, and were tying him to the stairs. They were going to kill him. Salim came on the phone shouting that the police had deceived him. At precisely 1.45 pm the distinct sound of three shots was heard from inside the embassy. The news of the shooting was immediately forwarded to the SAS teams waiting at their holding area. They would be used after all. Operation Nimrod – the relief of the Embassy – was on. The men checked and cleaned their weapons, 9mm Browning HP automatic pistols and Heckler & Koch (“Hockler”) MP5A3 submachine guns. The MP5, a favourite SAS weapon, first came to prominence when a German GSG9 unit used it to storm the hi-jacked airliner at Mogadishu. It can fire up to 650 rpm. The order for the assault teams to move into place was shortly forthcoming.
At 6.50 pm, with tension mounting, the gunmen announced their demands again, with the codicil that a hostage would be shot every forty-five minutes until their demands were met. Another burst of shots was heard. The door of the Embassy opened, and a body was flung down the steps. (The body belonged to the Press Attache shot earlier in the day. The new burst of shots was a scare tactic.) The police phoned into the Embassy’s first floor, where the telephone link with the gunmen was situated. They seemed to cave in to Salim’s demands, assuring him that they were not tricking him, and that a bus would be arriving in minutes to take the gunmen to Heathrow Airport, from where they would fly to the Middle East. But by talking on the phone Salim had signalled his whereabouts to the SAS teams who had taken up their start position on the roof, and in the two buildings either side of No 16, the Ethiopian Embassy and the Royal College of Physicians. At around this time, formal responsibility – via a handwritten note – passed from the Metropolitan Police to the SAS.
Suddenly, as the world watched Princes Gate on TV, black-clad men wearing respirators appeared on the front balconies and placed “frame charges” against the armoured-glass window. There was an enormous explosion. The time was exactly 7.23 pm. At the back of the building and on the roof, the assault teams heard the order “Go. Go. Go.” Less than 12 minutes had elapsed since the body of the Press Attache had appeared on the Embassy steps.
The assault on the building came from three sides, with the main assault from the rear, where three pairs of troopers abseiled down from the roof. One of the first party accidentally swung his foot through an upper storey window, thereby alerting Salim to their line of assault. The pair dropped to the ground and prepared to fight their way in, while another pair landed on the balcony, broke the window and threw in stun grenades. A third pair also abseiled down, but one of them became entangled in the ropes, which meant that the rear assault could not use frame charges to blow-in the bullet proof glass. Instead a call sign from a rear troop in the garden sledgehammered the French windows open, with the troopers swarming into the building on the ground floor. They “negotiated” a gunman in the front hall, cleared the cellars, and then raced upwards to the second floor and the telex room, where the male hostages were held by three gunmen. Meanwhile the pair who had come in through the rear first floor balcony encountered PC Lock grappling with Salim, the head gunman, who had been about to fire at an SAS trooper at the window, and shot the gunman dead.
Almost simultaneously with the rear assault, the frontal assault group stormed over the balcony on the first floor, lobbing in stun grenades through the window broken by their frame charges. Amid gushing smoke they entered and also moved towards the telex room. Another SAS team broke into the building through the plaster division left after the bricks had been removed from wall with the Ethiopian Embassy.
Outside, at the front, the SAS shot CS gas cartridges into an upstairs room where one of the gunmen was believed to be hiding. This room caught fire, the flames spreading quickly to other rooms. (The trooper caught in the abseil rope suffered burns at this point, but was then cut free and rejoined the assault.)
The SAS converged at the telex room as planned. The gunmen had started shooting the hostages. The Assistant Press Attache was shot and killed and the Charge d’Affaires wounded before the SAS broke in. By then the gunmen were lying on the floor, trying in the smoke and noise to pass themselves off as hostages. What then happened is the subject of some dispute, but the outcome was that the SAS shot two of the gunmen dead. Afterwards, some of the hostages said that the gunmen tried to give themselves up, but were killed anyway. In the event, only one gunman escaped with his life, the one guarding the women in Room 9. The women refused to identify him as a terrorist, and he was handed over to the police.
After a brief assembly at No 14 for emotional congratulations from Home Secretary William Whitelaw the SAS teams sped away in rented Avis vans. Behind them the Embassy was a blaze of fire and smoke.
The breaking of the siege had taken just 17 minutes. Of the 20 hostages in the building at the time of the SAS assault, 19 were brought out alive. The SAS suffered no casualties. Although mistakes were made in the assault (part of the main assault went in via a room which contained no gunmen and was blocked off from the rest of the Embassy), the speed, daring, and adaptability of the SAS proved the regiment an elite amongst the counter-revolutionary forces of the world.
HOSTAGE-RESCUE: EQUIPMENT AND TRAINING
Rescuing hostages is a dangerous business. Dangerous for the hostages, dangerous for the rescuers. The aim of the SAS is to make it terminally dangerous for the hostage-takers – whilst allowing the innocent to get out alive.
Although all SAS troopers are trained in hostage-rescue, the Regiment has a specialist anti-terrorist team under the wing of the Counter-Revolutionary Warfare unit. Variously code-named the “Pagoda Team” and the “Special Patrol Team”, the anti-terrorist team is comprised of two “watches”: Red and Blue. Together they give “24 hour cover” and all members are required on pain of “platform four” (being Returned to Unit) to carry an alert bleeper. Team members also have their movements restricted to a tight radius of Hereford to ensure quick recall in the event of an emergency. Training is mostly undertaken at the SAS camp at Pontrilas, southwest of Hereford, where facilities for hostage-rescue “games” include trains, a bus and even an aircraft fuselage. Needless to say, members of the anti-terrorist team are highly familiar with the “Killing House”, the building dedicated to learning the skills of room combat. One particular skill honed is “the snatch”, where a “hostage” is extracted by an anti-terrorist assault team. VIPs sometimes find themselves in the “hostage hot seat” – those having done so include the Queen and Prince Charles – but “hostages” no longer endure live rounds whizzing around them. An accident in 1985, when Sergeant Raymond Abbots of G squadron was killed brought in a new training practice in which the anti-terrorist team fires at “virtual” life-size terrorists imaged on to bullet-absorbent walls in the Killing House.
In any hostage-rescue situation, the anti-terrorist team has a veritable arsenal of special weapons and equipment. Essentially, kit falls into three types: protective clothing for the SAS; devices to ensure quick “breaking-and-entering”; plus weaponry to eliminate the terrorists.
SAS anti-terrorist troopers wear clothing that keeps out bullets, fire, smoke and gas. Almost total protection, in other words. As standard issue comes t
he black assault suit made from flameproof Arvex SNX 574 material, with the knee and elbow joints reinforced by retardant Pantotex felt, enabling the wearer to crawl over hot and jagged surfaces. Extra protection comes from flameproof gloves and underwear. To keep out the bullets, troopers wear, over the assault suits, Kevlar assault vests and ‘hard armour’ consisting of contoured ceramic composite plates. This body armour is designed to defeat all 5.56 mm and 7.62 mm rounds. A CT-12 respirator, meanwhile, not only looks Darth Vader-menacing, it filters out (through carbon and wool sieves) gas and smoke, while communication is enabled by mini-ear phones and a microphone. Other standard issue assault clothing includes a ballistic helmet and an assault belt rig, made of leather, to carry personal weaponry.
If an SAS rescue is ordered, entry into the building, aircraft, train or bus commandeered by the enemy is by any means possible – as long as it’s fast. The quicker the SAS can get to the terrorists, the greater the chance of saving the hostages. The best entrance of all, is the surprise one which lands the SAS right on top of the terrorists, thus dramatically reducing the latter’s ability to act.
To force doors, the SAS employs everything from mini-hydraulic battering rams to a hefty kick of the boot. Remington 870 pump-action shotguns (see page 48) loaded with Hatton rounds are sometimes used to blow off door locks, and if the door won’t open then another American import is used – on the windows. This is the ‘hooligan bar’, a metre-long metal bar which smashes out most of the window, with a pronged-end that then removes debris. Explosives are usually avoided, because of the danger of blast damages to the hostage – who are exactly the people the SAS are trying to save. Even so, frame-charges have found their place in SAS operation (one was used to blow-in the French windows of the Iranian Embassy). Much the most effective means for a hole-in-the-wall entry is the so-called ‘Harvey Wallbanger’. This is a wall-breaching cannon that fires, using compressed air, a water-filled plastic projectile. The projectile breaches the wall, but as soon as it has done so its energy is dissipated and it falls harmlessly to the ground.
