They are also taught how to live off the land while evading any human contact. They are taught what can be eaten safely and what to ignore. During the spring and summer in most countries there are edible plants, such as berries, some plants and the tops of ferns. On most continents there are also small edible animals, such as rabbits, hares, rats, mice, birds, fish and other small mammals, many of which are plentiful in broadleaf woodland.
The SAS survival course trains a man to make a range of animal traps and snares, but the instructors point out that luck is a very important element, no matter how carefully such devices are constructed, and in fact advise soldiers to concentrate more on catching fish. They have great fun in ordering trainees to catch snails, slugs and insects, and cook them, together with wild plants, in a large pot and then eat the succulent stew.
Men evading the enemy in farming areas are encouraged to eat a variety of root crops, and fowl (and their eggs), which are a great source of vitamins. But the instructors warn against killing and eating part of a sheep, lamb or goat, because that could be noticed by a sharp-eyed shepherd. These animals are also too large to cook and hide in secret. In any case, trainees are warned, it is unusual not to find dogs where there is livestock.
The most difficult and hazardous task facing all those evading capture is when the enemy is in hot pursuit and tracker dogs have been brought into an area where the evader is desperately trying to get back to his own lines. In such circumstances, SAS instructors are adamant, those on the run must eat raw food for fear that smoke might be seen. In addition, all rubbish and human waste must be buried deep enough to leave no trace for tracker dogs. It is better still, wherever possible, to put waste into a plastic bag, weight it down with stones and place it gently in water so that it sinks out of sight, leaving no smell for the dogs.
It is vital for a man who is being hunted to take meticulous care to leave no clues whatsoever. Throughout the hours of daylight he must lie still under a groundsheet, moving as little as possible and, importantly, should breathe down into the ground rather than into the air, so that the earth absorbs his body odour.
During the night, when he will be on the move, he should keep to lanes and tracks used frequently by the local people to confuse the tracker dogs, as well as taking every opportunity to walk along streams and any other water obstacle, so as to throw them off the scent.
If a group of men are trying to escape, they will find it easier to confuse the following tracker dogs by repeatedly taking off in different directions, coming together again and then moving away, criss-crossing one another’s tracks. This not only confuses the dogs but makes the handler believe that his dog has lost the scent.
SAS men trying to make their way back from hostile to friendly territory are also taught the best way to behave and dress if it proves absolutely necessary to come out of hiding and mix unobtrusively with the local people. The advice is to walk confidently and obtain non-military clothing, such as overalls or jeans; remain clean-shaven; use bicycles and trains but keep away from railway stations; beware of dogs and children; and never walk along roads.
Trainees are told to assume that the enemy – both troops and police – will be actively searching the area for an escaper or evader. For this reason great caution must be taken in crossing roads, railways and rivers. They are advised never to cross a bridge, even at night, but to ford or swim a river, no matter how cold the water.
They are also taught how to improvise using everyday materials. As every potential boy scout knows, fire lighting can be carried out with the help of a magnifying glass, waterproof matches, a flint stone or a cigarette lighter. Bootlaces can be used as fishing lines and needles and small pieces of wire as hooks or snares. Water can be carried in condoms or a plastic bag. Animals and birds can be skinned with any knife or even a wire-saw. Discarded tin cans make satisfactory mugs or mess tins for cooking. A sock filled with sand makes a good water filter; a small, hollowed-out piece of wood makes a spoon; old sacking makes a windproof coat; and string is a substitute for a belt.
And there are more potentially life-saving tips. Trainees are told about the best places to hole up in during daytime without expending effort or time constructing a proper hide. This ploy also has the advantage of making detection of the escaper’s presence in an area more difficult. To keep dry and relatively warm, a soldier can bed down in a bramble bush, a hedgerow, a small cave or a cleft in rocks, or a hollow log. He can also nestle down in the shelter of a dry-stone wall, or in an animal burrow, a dry stream bed or a hollow tree. And dry leaves packed around him will not only act as camouflage but also keep him warm.
During training, SAS recruits are taken blindfold on a long journey in the back of an army truck and deposited in the middle of nowhere wearing army fatigues and supplied with a sparse amount of food and water. The trainee is given no map or compass, and must learn to navigate by night using the stars or the moon. Navigation by these means is difficult to learn and is not exact, but it does work.
Throughout their years in Northern Ireland the SAS became the thorn in the side of the Provisional IRA. Political apologists for the Provos tried their damnedest over many years to try to blacken the name of 22 SAS because it always beat the Provos at their own game. When the Provos took over from the less violent Official IRA after a vicious turf war in the early 1970s, the SAS were secretly dispatched to Northern Ireland to take out the Provo gunmen and bombers.
Because of the amateurish manner in which the Provos then planned and executed shootings and bombings, the SAS had no problem in picking up and dispatching a number of young Provos whose imagination and fervour had been filled with the songs and tales of heroic Irishmen who had died in a vain bid to kick the British out of Ireland. The Provo leadership concentrated on this kind of traditional propaganda in sing-songs in pubs and clubs where the cap would be sent round for funds for the boys in the front line. As a result, scores of young Irishmen were only too happy to join the ranks of the Provos to continue ‘the fight for freedom’.
But the SAS stood in the way of the gunmen and the bombers. Though the SAS were quite capable of taking out Provo terrorists in the fields and byways of Northern Ireland, senior SAS officers believed that Special Force soldiers should not be used for patrolling high streets and main roads.
As Robin Neillands writes in his book In the Combat Zone:
As far as the Army and the SAS in particular are concerned, Northern Ireland has been a mixed blessing. Patrolling with ‘a bullet up the spout’ and learning to soldier when your life is at risk, however remote that risk, is a good way to give an army that extra little edge, but actions ‘in aid of the civil power’ should be undertaken only when all else has failed and will always carry the risk that soldiers will become involved in actions for which their training and their temperament has left them less than well equipped.
Most of the soldiers, even those in SF [Special Forces] and SOF [Special Operations Forces] units, are quite young and of junior rank, for terrorist wars are ‘corporals’ wars’, and these young soldiers have to take on tasks that might be, or should really be, the responsibility of the police. One lesson that comes out of the Northern Ireland business is that soldiers should be committed to counter-terrorism tasks in an urban environment only in certain circumstances and as a last resort – a lesson underlined by what happened when an SAS unit went into action on the Rock of Gibraltar in March 1988.
Ironically, in the light of this observation, the killing of three Provos – Sean Savage, Daniel McCann and a young woman named Maraid Farrell – was a classic Special Forces operation from beginning to end. Not only was the shooting of the three terrorists carried out by an SAS brick, but other SAS bricks were directly involved in related surveillance, guard duty and undercover recces over a period of five months.
Another SAS brick, working in plain clothes and under cover, was tasked with watching a well-known building contractor, Eric Martin, the Managing Director of H. & J. Martin, a firm which carried out many buil
ding projects for the security forces all over Northern Ireland. Building contractors and their workers – including secretaries, bricklayers and plumbers – had always been a principal target of IRA killer squads. Indeed more than a hundred innocent building workers had been killed by IRA gunmen during the first fifteen years of the troubles.
Eric Martin was a prime target because he employed some two hundred men from all over Northern Ireland and the IRA leadership believed if they could execute him, then the firm would fold and the Security Forces would be severely disadvantaged.
The Tasking and Co-ordination Group, who met on a daily basis, comprised senior Intelligence co-ordinators from MI5 and MI6, Special Branch, Army Intelligence, the RUC and the SAS. They decreed that a high-priority twenty-four-hour guard should be kept on Martin, and this task was given to the SAS.
The soldiers were housed in the double garage of Martin’s home near Belfast, living there day and night and taking it in turn to stand guard during the hours of darkness. They never went near the house, some twenty yards away, but ate, cooked, slept and washed in the garage while keeping a watch over the Martin household. At night they also patrolled the grounds. Every day Martin was taken to and from work by armed members of the Headquarters Mobile Support Unit (HMSU) of the RUC.
Four weeks after the security net was thrown around Martin, HMSU officers noticed a young man acting suspiciously outside the premises of H. & J. Martin in Belfast’s Ormeau Road. Photographs were secretly taken of the man and he was identified as Daniel McCann, aged thirty, a butcher from the city’s Lower Falls area who had been jailed in 1980 for possession of explosives. In 1986 McCann had been promoted to IRA commander for the Clonard district of West Belfast.
From that moment a ‘Det’ team – a four-man SAS unit on Detachment operating in plain clothes – was tasked with watching McCann twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In the following days McCann was sighted in and around the lane leading to Martin’s house and making a number of visits to the Ormeau Road. The Det team were certain that he was planning a raid for the Provo Active Service Unit (ASU).
As the days became weeks the team noticed that an attractive young, dark-haired woman would frequently accompany McCann during his recces and, from photographs, discovered that she was Maraid Farrell, a first-year student in the Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences at Queen’s University, Belfast, who lived at home with her parents. One of her subjects was political science.
Independently, but around the same time, Gibraltar police became aware of a young, dark-haired woman who was paying frequent visits to the Rock from Spain, walking through the town and the area around Government House for an hour or so before driving back to Spain. Photographs were taken of her, sent to MI6 in London and passed to Northern Ireland. The woman was Maraid Farrell.
And in November 1987 a Spanish undercover team at Madrid airport spotted and photographed two suspicious-looking young Irishmen arriving from Málaga, in southern Spain. The two men were Daniel McCann and Sean Savage, another known Provo gunman, travelling under false identities. SAS bricks continued to watch over McCann, Savage and Farrell, who went to Gibraltar on two further occasions, in January and February 1988.
The IRA visits to Gibraltar were discussed at 10 Downing Street by the Central Intelligence Committee, the government’s most secret committee, comprising the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, the chief officers of MI5 and MI6, and members of Special Branch, Northern Ireland’s Special Branch, and Army, Navy and Air Force Intelligence.
Britain had been constrained from arresting or killing any members of IRA ASUs operating in mainland Europe because International Law had to be respected. But Gibraltar was a different matter. Its defence, internal security and foreign affairs are controlled by the British government-appointed Governor. His authority was above that of the local legislature, the House of Assembly, which had limited powers. With the Governor’s permission, British forces could operate freely on the Rock.
At the meeting it was decided to keep the three IRA suspects under constant surveillance and to have a unit from the SAS’s Special Projects Squadron on permanent standby, ready to fly to Gibraltar at an hour’s notice. A MI5 close surveillance team was sent to Gibraltar to draw up a list of possible IRA targets. They concluded that an IRA ASU would probably try to explode a powerful bomb somewhere on the Rock, but most likely at Government House.
On March 4 Maraid Farrell arrived in Málaga to join McCann and Savage. From that moment the three were kept under constant surveillance by the SAS and MI5 surveillance units. MI5 were convinced that the three would adopt the IRA’s tried-and-tested method of using two inconspicuous cars. One clean car, devoid of explosives, would enter the Rock and park somewhere near the target and the ‘bomb car’ would arrive just before zero hour and take the parking place of the clean vehicle.
McCann was not spotted as he drove a car from Spain on to Gibraltar and, again undetected, he parked the ubiquitous white Renault 5 in the plaza. The SAS and the Security Services were very nervous. They had lost track of the three Provos and had found no bomb car. And the clock was ticking towards 4 pm, when the weekly ceremony of Changing the Guard, attended by hundreds of visitors, was due to take place. And this was the target which MI5 were convinced the IRA ASU planned to bomb.
At 2 pm two SAS bricks were patrolling the streets of Gibraltar in plain clothes and armed with Heckler & Koch sub-machine guns. They had seen many photographs of the three IRA terrorists and knew exactly who they were searching for. But they didn’t know their whereabouts or the whereabouts of the bomb car.
Out of the blue came the vital breakthrough. Savage had been sighted fiddling with something inside a white Renault 5. The assumption was that he was priming the explosive charge ready for detonation by a radio signal. Minutes later the HQ that had been set up in the Gibraltar police chief’s headquarters was informed that McCann and Farrell had been spotted crossing from Spain into Gibraltar. After Savage had left the car, an explosives expert quickly examined it and reported that it probably contained a bomb.
A radio message was flashed to one of the SAS bricks to tell them what had happened. They were ordered to take out the three Provos before they could explode the car bomb. McCann, Savage and Farrell were being tracked by four armed SAS men in civilian clothes who were only some twenty yards behind them. When Savage suddenly left the others and headed towards the town, two SAS men followed him while the other two continued to track McCann and Farrell.
Then the noise of a police siren shattered the peace and quiet of that sunny Sunday afternoon as crowds were gathering to watch the Changing of the Guard. McCann looked around him, wondering if the siren had anything to do with their bomb plot, and caught the eye of one of the SAS men some thirty feet behind him. The terrorist realised that the man was after him, and the SAS soldier knew that he had been spotted. The months of trailing and surveillance were over. It was the moment of action.
According to the evidence given to the inquest by the four SAS men, McCann was shot dead only after he put his hand inside his jacket – as if to draw a gun or detonate a bomb. Farrell was shot dead after attempting to open her handbag and Savage was shot dead only after putting his hand in his pocket.
But, on the day after the shooting, the government made a statement to the House of Commons revealing that none of the three Provos was armed, none of them was carrying any triggering device and there was no bomb in the Renault 5. Allegedly, a car packed with Semtex was discovered in a hotel car park in Marbella the following day.
As a result, controversy over the shootings went on for months. The main point of argument was whether the three Provos should have been shot dead rather than simply arrested and detained for questioning. In reality, was the killing simply the SAS putting into practice the Thatcher government’s alleged shoot-to-kill policy? There was another problem. The SAS is, quite rightly, seen as the protector of the moral high ground and will act only within the law. There were those w
ho suggested that the SAS could have very easily arrested the three without firing any shots.
But those SAS men didn’t know the Provos weren’t armed. They had been trained to shoot first and ask questions later rather than put at risk their own lives, and maybe those of innocent people, by seeking to ask questions first.
Throughout the raging controversy there was one major problem for the SAS soldiers which has never been adequately answered. As the three Provos had no guns and no triggering devices, why would any of them reach into their pockets or handbag? Evidence was also given at the inquest that a witness had seen the shooting from her apartment and said that both McCann and Farrell had both raised their arms as if surrendering seconds before the SAS soldiers opened fire. As a result, most people came to the conclusion that the four SAS men were under orders to shoot to kill, whatever the circumstances.
The shootings left many Members of Parliament uncomfortable with the government’s policy of using the SAS in a plain-clothes, counter-terrorist role. Most would have preferred such incidents to be carried out by specially trained police units rather than the SAS. As a result of the Gibraltar killings, the SAS has been keen to pull back from its role as an arm of the political executive, preferring to leave such work to the police. Nevertheless, it does want to retain its involvement in counter-terrorism, which it sees as a most important element of its military duty, but it does not want to become embroiled in political arenas which could see its soldiers being used as hit squads.
Today all Special Forces in the Western world tread a very narrow path. In carrying out their duty to uphold democratic principles in support of an elected government, especially in the fields of surveillance, intelligence-gathering and ambushes, they risk usurping police roles and using excessive military force, which could well bring them into disrepute in the eyes of politicians and the public.
CHAPTER 8
Death Before Dishonour - True Stories of The Special Forces Heroes Who Fight Global Terror Page 15
