Death Before Dishonour - True Stories of The Special Forces Heroes Who Fight Global Terror

by Nicholas Davies

  But further embarrassment would follow for the Italians. In December 1981 US Brigadier General James Dozier, serving with NATO headquarters in Verona, north-eastern Italy, answered his door at home and was immediately attacked and knocked unconscious by four men posing as workmen. The kidnappers drove him away in a truck and later announced they had captured General Dozier. The United States was absolutely furious and sent a six-man Delta Force team to Italy. The Carabinieri and NOCS were beside themselves, desperate to find the kidnapped Dozier, arresting any suspect they could lay their hands on. The anti-terrorist chiefs of the Carabinieri were certain that Dozier was still somewhere in northern Italy and that the terrorists were communicating with one another by wireless.

  This was just the break needed, for the United States was able to provide the latest technical equipment to target the locating transmitters based in terrorists’ safe houses. In a massive electronic surveillance operation, US helicopters criss-crossed the skies over Verona using these tracking devices. The United States also arranged for the orbit of its satellites to be altered so that they passed over northern Italy, and organised for the surveillance data to be downloaded as a matter of urgency.

  Five weeks later the electronic surveillance operation pinpointed a block of flats in Padua. The Americans maintained constant electronic surveillance while the Italian counter-terrorism team kept watch on the ground. A woman employed by the Carabinieri’s counter-espionage unit was sent to the flats, ostensibly selling household goods. Outside the targeted second-floor apartment she discovered a man standing guard and trying to look nonchalant. He told her that there was no one inside and that he was waiting for the owner to return.

  It was agreed that the flat was the prison in which General Dozier was being held, and a ten-man assault team of Leathernecks was assembled at the back of the block, out of view of those holding him. All around the block, Italian sharpshooters kept watch, a US helicopter flew overhead and the Carabinieri arranged for two noisy bulldozers to pass the flats at midday.

  As the bulldozers approached, the Leathernecks, armed with stun grenades, machine pistols and automatic assault rifles, crept up to the apartment. Two of them rushed the guard, silencing him with a blow to his windpipe and all but killing him. Two others, well-built and powerful, ran to the front door wielding sledgehammers and broke it down with four blows, allowing the squad to race into the flat. They hurled themselves at three terrorists who were in the hallway, smashing them to the floor, but one raced into a room where Dozier was chained to a bed, fumbling to grab a handgun. The terrorist was brought down by two officers, the handgun spinning out of his hand as they hurled themselves at him. He tried to make another grab for the gun, but was hit in the face. It was all over.

  The dramatic rescue of General Dozier was rightly hailed as a major success for the Italian counter-terrorist squad and their methods. Dozier’s life had been saved, and the terrorists had not only been caught alive and brought to trial, but they had also been persuaded to give information about other members of the terrorist organisation. It was the end of the Red Brigades.

  It was fortunate that the Dutch government also took the decision to put together an elite counter-terrorist force – the BBE, Special Support Group – and they too took the SAS as their role model. It would not be long before this Special Forces unit was brought into operation.

  In the late 1970s the South Moluccans were demanding independence for their homeland, the islands of the South Moluccas, in the Indonesian archipelago, which had been a Dutch colony before World War Two. After the war the Dutch handed the islands to Indonesia without any consultation about the wishes of the South Moluccans. Having no desire at all to be part of Indonesia, these people demanded their independence. They believed that only the Netherlands could bring about this change of nationality and so formed a pressure group to influence the Dutch parliament.

  After five years of getting nowhere the South Moluccans decided they would need to take positive action to force the Dutch into helping them to achieve independence from Indonesia. As a result, in 1975 a militant group hijacked a train at Wijster, in the Netherlands, taking fifty-seven passengers hostage. Two passengers were killed by the hijackers as they stormed the train. The Dutch Army was detailed to surround the train and keep a permanent armed watch while the BBE were called in to plan and organise a rescue operation if it became necessary.

  Two days later another South Moluccan unit of the same independence group stormed the Indonesian consulate in Amsterdam and held the eighteen staff hostage. The Dutch government and the BBE found themselves operating on two fronts, holding separate talks with the two groups while the BBE planned the best way to end both sieges. The train siege was called off after four days of non-stop negotiations, but the negotiations with the terrorists occupying the Indonesian consulate were far more difficult. The stand-off lasted two weeks and ended in a victory for the South Moluccans when the Dutch government agreed to start talks with their leaders.

  But, as the talks dragged on, the South Moluccans realised that the Dutch appeared to be dragging their feet. And now, after more than two years of stop-start negotiations, they decided to add renewed pressure to the talks to show the government that their demands should be treated with more urgency. So, in May 1977, a group of nine South Moluccans hijacked a train between Assen and Groningen, in the northern Netherlands, holding fifty-one people hostage while another four terrorists occupied a school at nearby Bovensmilde, holding a further one hundred and ten hostages, nearly all of them children.

  This time, the terrorists demanded not only independence from Indonesia but also the release of seven of their countrymen held in Dutch jails. They further demanded that an aircraft should be made ready at Schipol Airport, near Amsterdam, to fly the released prisoners and the two group of South Moluccans to an unknown destination. However, when the opening discussions took place, the hijackers felt the Dutch government negotiators were not taking their demands seriously, so they took the driver from the train, shot him in the head and threw his body on to the track.

  This horrendous act shocked the Dutch government, media and people into a state of grave concern for the train passengers, but even more so for the school children, who, it was now clear, were at the mercy of killers. I was at the siege, watching the terrorists and the passengers on the train through binoculars and also watching the school buildings, but, for most of the time, the children were kept away from the windows and glimpses of the terrorists inside the school were few and far between.

  Although Dutch soldiers were present in considerable numbers around the entire area, they were keeping a low profile so that they could not be seen by either the terrorists on the train or those holding the children. They did not want to frighten or provoke the terrorists into killing more hostages. For its part, the Dutch government was reluctant to send in the BBE, fearing that such a rescue mission could infuriate the terrorists and put both the children and the hostages on the train at even greater risk. As the days dragged on the mood of the nation changed. At first most people had given the government their full backing but now there was a widespread feeling that it should send in counter-terrorist troops to put an end to the sieges and, if necessary, kill the terrorists.

  In the past these stand-offs with the South Moluccans had ended more or less peacefully, but the murder of the train driver had shocked the nation into the realisation that it was dealing with fanatics who were prepared to kill totally innocent people in their bid for independence.

  There was one hope. The terrorists were permitting food and water to be sent into the school and the train. This gave the Dutch government and the professional negotiators reason to believe that there might be a peaceful outcome to the two sieges.

  But the deadlock continued, and most of the people I spoke to demanded action because the wait had become unbearable. Even the mothers of some of the children taken hostage wanted the government to send in the BBE because they could not eat or slee
p for fear of what might happen to their children. They spoke of the daily nightmare they were living, imagining their children terrified or, worse still, murdered by these terrorists, whom they hated with particular ferocity because they were prepared to put at risk the lives of innocent youngsters.

  Debate about the situation raged throughout the country and across the civilised world as the days became weeks. The Dutch government was still fearful about the consequences for the children of using force. By contrast, those who would not have to take the blame if things went wrong were more keen to send in a rescue force. More and more people began to demand action, accusing the politicians of sitting on their hands rather than taking firm and decisive action.

  Then steps were taken on two fronts. In the Netherlands, a train was brought into use so that the BBE unit could practise assault tactics and a school building was handed over to the men so that they could rehearse an attack. In Britain, the SAS was put on standby in case the Dutch government asked for their advice, and, if a rescue operation were to go ahead, their active assistance. At one time the SAS men were moved to an airbase in Britain, in readiness to fly in and lead an assault on both the school and the train.

  And then, totally unexpectedly, came the breakthrough. The terrorists inside the school could no longer take the tears and the pleas for freedom of the young hostages. They agreed to release all the children and hold just four teachers. The scenes I witnessed brought tears to the eyes of everyone, including the police and the soldiers. Most of the children came out walking, desperately searching the faces for their parents, some crying, many in a state of shock, some hardly able to walk while others ran into their parents’ arms. The anxiety and pain on the faces of the waiting mothers turned to joy and smiles, mixed with uncontrollable tears, as they threw their arms around their children, hugging and kissing them.

  After all the children had left the school without injury, the plight of the train hostages took centre stage. The four teachers were still being held, but it seemed that the terrorists at the school were now in a more peaceful frame of mind. However, reports from those permitted to take food and drink into the train spoke of mounting anger and frustration among the terrorists, some of whom appeared to be growing increasingly hysterical and violent at the lack of response to their demands. The negotiators told the government forcefully that the time had come to make a decision – to either accept some of the terrorists’ demands or order an attack on the train to lift the siege. If no decision were taken, the negotiators believed, the terrorists would start killing the hostages.

  Finally, after days of prevarication, the Dutch government gave permission for the BBE to launch simultaneous assaults on both the school and the train.

  Before dawn on June 11 Royal Netherlands Air Force F-104 Starfighters swooped low over the train, using the noise of their afterburners to frighten and confuse the terrorists into thinking the war planes were about to attack the train with rockets. As the jets flew a number of sorties along the length of the train the BBE teams moved to either side of it, unseen by the terrorists and hostages on board. At a given time a green flare was fired into the sky, the signal for the assault teams to detonate the charges they had placed against a number of the train doors. As the charges detonated in a series of crashing explosions which could be heard a mile away, the assault teams, armed with sub-machine guns and handguns, burst into the carriages.

  Shaken and unnerved by the dramatic explosions, some of the hostages screamed in terror, believing the train had been blown up. Two terrorists raced towards the first soldier who entered the train, but as they were drawing their handguns he opened fire, killing both of them in a hail of bullets.

  Other soldiers were yelling at the hostages to get down and take cover. Two more terrorists raced out of the first carriage to come under attack and ran into BBE marksmen running towards them inside the train. The terrorists fired two shots before they too were gunned down. Three others took cover behind two rows of seats and exchanged fire with the BBE men, who were still further down the same carriage. In between the terrorists and the soldiers, some eight hostages were lying flat on the seats in the hope that the backs of these would offer protection from the bullets ricocheting around inside the train. Some hostages were screaming in terror, others shouting for help, while the BBE team kept yelling at the hostages to stay still and keep down.

  By now all the windows of the carriage were shattered, and to the hostages it felt like pandemonium. And then two of them scrambled to their feet in a bid to escape the carnage. Believing they were terrorists bent on attacking them, the soldiers shot both of them dead.

  The three terrorists pinned down at the end of the carriage continued firing at the soldiers, reloading and then letting off another magazine. A decision was taken to attack the trio from the other end of the carriage and another BBE team was sent in to do so. A signal was given to the first team to stop firing the instant the second team crashed their way through the door into the carriage. The terrorists realised what was happening too late and, although they managed to fire off a couple of rounds, they were met by a non-stop rain of bullets from the first two soldiers to burst through the door.

  It was the end.

  At the same time as the green flare had lit up the dawn sky another BBE unit in two armoured personnel carriers had raced through the gates leading to the school, then through the grounds, coming to a halt by the main entrance. The soldiers jumped from the APCs, smashed through the main door and raced to the classroom where they knew the terrorists and hostages would be found.

  They burst into the room, yelling at everyone to lie down. Within seconds eight BBE men were standing in the room, their guns pointing at the eight men there – four hostages and four South Moluccans. All immediately obeyed, and as some of the BBE men kept their sub-machine guns trained on all eight of them, others moved from man to man, checking their clothes for weapons and grenades. One by one the eight men were ordered to their feet and searched again, and then the hostages were separated and handed over to medics and support staff, who took them away to hospital and a meeting with their families. The South Moluccans were handed over to the police and escorted away under armed guard. Not a shot had been fired by the terrorists from the moment the BBE’s assault had begun.

  The Soviet Union was not slow in following western European countries’ creation of Special Forces and, to a certain degree, it too was influenced in this by the success of the SAS. In fact the use of special soldiers was not new to the Russians, for during World War Two the Red Army had developed the Spetsnaz, the Spetsialnoje Naznachenie, or forces of ‘Special Designation’, who had no real equivalent at that time. The original purpose of the Spetsnaz was described as ‘diversionary reconnaissance’, as these units were sent ahead of the main assault force to sabotage the enemy’s installations, defences, ammunition dumps and vital communications.

  During the Cold War the Spetsnaz brigades were trained for even more adventurous missions, such as sabotaging NATO nuclear weapons sites, laying mines in enemy territory, always going ahead of the main army to cause disruption and damage. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Spetsnaz carried out many such operations in that notoriously inhospitable terrain.

  Since Afghanistan, Spetsnaz forces have become a well-established and more open Special Forces unit. Previously they had always worn the uniform and insignia of the Soviet airborne forces, but this has now changed. Their uniform now reveals that they are members of the elite Spetsnaz, and those who join the unit are put through extremely tough training schedules and treated with great respect by the Russian defence chiefs.

  Since the creation of the Russian Confederation of Independent States, most Spetsnaz forces have been withdrawn to within Russia’s borders, while many of the former republics have created their own, smaller Special Forces units. Today the Spetsnaz comprises three main elements. There is a brigade-sized formation responsible for reconnaissance which operates in battalio
n or company strength; a brigade-sized formation which operates in small, eleven-man teams similar to the SAS; and a single battalion divided into two companies, one for long-range reconnaissance and the other for airborne operations.

  The rebellion of Chechnya against the new Russian Federation provided the Spetsnaz with what it saw as an excellent opportunity to show its full expertise and professionalism and to put into practice all its training, which it considers to be among the toughest of any Special Forces in the world.

  In 1991 the fiercely independent people of Chechnya elected Dzhokar Dudaev, a former Soviet Air Force commander, as president of the former Soviet republic. The Muslim Chechens rallied around their new hero-president, who was determined to make the nation a fully independent state. The Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, was equally determined that Chechnya should remain within the Russian Federation and in December 1994 deployed troops and armour against President Dudaev.

  But Yeltsin found the Chechens a tough breed and, despite the Russians’ military superiority in tanks, artillery, aircraft, helicopter gunships and personnel, the Chechens refused to lie down and accept defeat. Within twelve months Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, had been reduced almost to ruins, bombed from the air and shelled from the ground, but still the Chechens held on. They took to the hills and the mountains and began a blistering guerrilla war against the Russian forces on the ground, attacking their camps by night and fading away in the dawn.

  Into this chaos the Spetsnaz forces were frequently sent on special operations. Sometimes they were parachuted into Chechen-held territory in the hills outside Grozny; at other times they went into the city itself on a mission to grab Chechen fighters and retreat to their own lines with their captives.