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 sai
d 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.
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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.
Death Before Dishonour - True Stories of The Special Forces Heroes Who Fight Global Terror Page 4
