Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  But now he was asking if, after all, I could get down to Portsmouth, where the Quadrangular was being held, by 3 pm that same afternoon. I still stank of CS gas, as well as being unshaven and badly in need of a shower. Nevertheless, I promised that I’d be there by 4 pm, which would at least give me time to clean myself up a bit.

  That afternoon, I drove to Portsmouth and, ten minutes after arriving, found myself on court playing Sean Hobbs, a police inspector from Nottingham. The matches between the police and army teams would decide the overall winners, and it would be nice to be able to say that I won. I didn’t; I was so whacked out that I barely even saw the ball, and Sean completely slaughtered me. Even so we won the Quadrangular overall, so at least something of my pride was saved.

  The tournament ended at 5 pm, and I then drove all the way back to Hereford. And neither Chris Wilson nor anyone else involved had any idea where I had been between Friday night and Saturday morning. For me, though, it was all in a day’s work.

  Seven months later, when the three ringleaders of the Peterhead riots appeared in court, they were sentenced to a total of a further twenty-seven years in gaol. In the course of hearing evidence, the court heard that Peterhead prison staff had never been told who ended the siege and freed the hostage unharmed. Giving evidence, one prison officer, David Guthrie, remarked in a masterpiece of understatement, ‘Some unidentified gentlemen came and took the matter to a conclusion.’

  I couldn’t help wondering what the ‘hard men’ in the gaol might have said.

  Chapter Fifteen

  WITHOUT warning, on 2 August 1990 the President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, launched his country’s sneak invasion of its oil-rich neighbour, Kuwait. Yet although Saddam issued no ultimatum or any other notice of his intentions, all the danger signs had been there, plain to see, and still he had taken the West by surprise.

  At that date Iraq was in debt to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, largely as a result of its eight-year war with neighbouring Iran, which had proved immensely costly not only financially, but in terms of men’s lives and destroyed material. In addition, the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–8 had left Saddam with a vast battle-trained army which he could barely afford to pay; he also had easy access to a weak, immensely rich little emirate on his southern border to which he owed most of his throttling debt. On 28 August Saddam declared Kuwait to be Iraq’s nineteenth province.

  The sudden and, as it turned out, brutal invasion brought the immediate censure of the United Nations. What sent shudders down the spines of most Western leaders, however, was not the immediate fate of Kuwait but the threat to Saudi Arabia and its vastly rich oilfields. For, once Iraq had mobilized, there was little to stop Saddam’s forces from sweeping straight through what was, to the West, the most important of the desert states to the Red Sea. With the prospect of Saddam in control of the oilfields of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the threat to the West became not just very real, but very immediate.

  George Bush, one of America’s most decisive presidents since the war – perhaps not surprising in a former head of the CIA – did not wait to see whether the United Nations would take action. He ordered a rapid-reaction force to Saudi Arabia to bolster the existing defences there, and placed the whole of the mighty US military machine on red alert.

  By then I was the Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant to 22 SAS, responsible for over four hundred ammunition accounts, and with not a hope in hell of firing a single round of any of them in anger myself. But suddenly Bush was wielding a big stick, Margaret Thatcher (in what would prove to be the last three months of her time as Prime Minister, for she was ousted as leader in a Tory Party coup in November) was talking tough, and to a long-service soldier like me it meant just one thing. The Regiment would be going to war.

  This was what we were there for, what all the years of training were about. However useful we had proved ourselves in dealing with terrorists, only in a war could we ever put that training to full use, and only in a war would we get the chance to prove conclusively that we were worth our pay.

  The buzz around Stirling Lines was almost tangible. People were smiling. Everyone seemed to be walking with a lighter step. There was a sudden sense of urgency about the place. War was definitely coming – it was only a question of time. And somewhere in that war there was going to be a role for the SAS. Even though it was not immediately obvious to any of us exactly what that role might be, we were all utterly certain that one would be found. Behind enemy lines? Almost certainly. Extremely dangerous? Undoubtedly. But then, we were the best, and as the best could only expect the most hazardous assignments.

  When the Iraqis swept into Kuwait 22 SAS had G Squadron undergoing desert training six hundred miles south of the action, at the other end of the Persian Gulf. They were operating out of our permanent base in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in a huge desert wilderness in southern Saudi Arabia known as the Empty Quarter (Rub‘ al-Khali), which extends along the country’s borders with Yemen and Oman. The Regiment’s secret training there falls under Britain’s military assistance commitment to the UAE and Oman. What G Squadron was doing there at the time, apart from training, was testing a new fast attack vehicle (FAV), as well as a few other tricky items which no one was supposed to know about.

  The FAV had originally been developed for the US Special Forces, but a British company had built a modified version based on SAS specifications. They were tough enough to travel across country at up to 60 mph carrying two men and their equipment as well as a mounted weapon, and yet light enough to be inserted deep behind enemy lines by helicopter. Unfortunately, the G Squadron guys who put the FAVs through their paces in the desert found that the suspension wasn’t quite as tough as the rest of vehicle, and they were not deployed by the SAS during the Gulf War.This proto-type fault was later rectified and the FAVs are now in favour with the Regiment, two being issued to each four-man patrol for certain desert operations.

  News of the invasion of Kuwait brought these desert tests to a halt, and the CO decided to rotate each of the Regiment’s remaining three Sabre Squadrons to the UAE in turn. Once there, they would concentrate on mobility training, navigation, desert survival, vehicle maintenance and weapon training.

  Meanwhile, in Hereford everything slipped smoothly into top gear as the Regiment was put on standby. One section – the Intelligence Corps unit permanently attached to 22 SAS – went into hyperdrive. Intel spewed out of their office twenty-four hours a day. There were endless written and verbal briefings on every aspect of the impending fight, as well as on what we could expect to face in Kuwait and Iraq when we were deployed. Knowing your enemy’s strengths and weaknesses may not be half the battle, but it’s a very important part of it, and what we had hammered into us time and again by the intel experts was that Saddam’s forces had considerably more strengths than weaknesses.

  Like most of us, I had more or less dismissed the Iraqi Army as an ineffectual rabble of jabbering clowns in cloth headdresses, but that idea was quickly jettisoned after just a couple of intel briefings. One I Corps officer told us at an early briefing, ‘You may be tempted to think of them as mere camel dung, but that would be a big mistake. These particular dungheads are battle-hardened veterans with eight years’ war experience under their belts.

  ‘They fought Iran, which is a well-armed country five times Iraq’s size, to a stalemate and forced the Ayatollah to throw up his arms and sue for peace.

  ‘They are a ruthless, well-trained and highly disciplined force – especially Saddam’s personal bodyguard troops, the Republican Guard – and they not only enjoy killing their enemies, they are very good at it, as well.

  ‘These guys are not at all squeamish about using nerve or poison gas, either. They found out, while screwing Iran, that these gases are both effective and indiscriminate killers, and you don’t even have to be a sharpshooter to get them on target. They just go off and everyone in the area simply falls down dead.’

  We were certainly getting to know our enemy, althoug
h what we were learning was nothing like what any of us had expected. Saddam’s soldiers had suddenly become a fighting force to be reckoned with, and jokes about ‘towelheads’ and camels rapidly went out of the window. The message was clear: there would be no easy rides. Yet that was not the biggest problem we faced once it became clear that the West and its Arab allies would fight to liberate Kuwait. For the SAS, the most important question now was whether or not we would get a chance to test our skills against Saddam’s forces at all.

  Soon after the invasion the UN Security Council passed its resolutions supporting Kuwait and giving Iraq a deadline of 15 January 1991 for the complete withdrawal of all its forces from the emirate. As a result, Desert Shield was created – a coalition spearheaded by the United States and with Britain and France heading the other thirty nations which eventually provided troops and other aid.

  The SAS was just one of a number of Special Forces outfits to be dispatched to the Gulf, and all were left kicking their heels because of the attitude of just one man. He was, unfortunately for troops like us, the top man, the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied forces in the Gulf, US General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. As a highly experienced Vietnam veteran he had seen Special Forces in operation during that war, and had been distinctly unimpressed. In fact, he repeatedly let it be known that he thought Special Forces stank, maintaining that other, more valuable, resources had been jeopardized in Vietnam pulling the specials out of trouble on too many occasions.

  Desert Shield, he emphatically declared to all and sundry, was going to be principally an air and missile war, backed up on the ground by massed armoured and infantry divisions. ‘What the goddamn hell,’ he was fond of asking those around him, ‘can a goddamned Special Forces unit do that a Stealth bomber or F-16 can’t do a darned sight better?’

  And of course, when you think about it logically it’s not a bad question, given the sophistication of modern aircraft and missiles, and the payloads they can deliver. Nevertheless, it meant that our prospects of getting into the war looked distinctly bleak. In the months leading up to the Coalition making its first aggressive move against Iraq, however, two lucky breaks occurred. One was personal, but the other affected the whole Regiment.

  In September it was announced that I was to be appointed Regimental Sergeant-Major, with effect from December. This meant that I would have a substantial personal involvement in directing and planning any operations in which we might become involved. The second lucky break was the news that Lieutenant-General Sir Peter de la Billière, that much decorated SAS hero, had been appointed overall British commander in the Gulf, and effectively Schwarzkopf’s deputy.

  In the end it all came down to personalities. The American and British generals swiftly established a rapport, so that by October our secret weapon, DLB, had become one of Schwarzkopf’s most trusted colleagues. Among Sir Peter’s priorities was finding a worthwhile role for his former regiment, still languishing in Hereford, and he got rapid results. The order came through from the Allied Coalition HQ in Saudi Arabia: the SAS was to examine ways of rescuing the thousands of British, other Western and Japanese citizens trapped or held hostage in Iraq and Kuwait, all of whose lives were at risk from Saddam’s regime. In order to deter any Coalition attack on Iraq and Kuwait, Saddam had already ordered most of these hostages to be dispersed to military and other strategic locations throughout the two countries to act as human shields.

  In theory, of course, this was an ideal task for the SAS. We had practised just this kind of extraction exercise, in combination with RAF helicopter squadrons and the Royal Marines, on numerous occasions. Even if teams had to be sent deep behind enemy lines there was still a high probability of success – provided the operation involved the rescue of just a single group, or very few groups. In the case of there being several groups of hostages, the rescues could be carried out simultaneously.

  In the scenario we were talking about, however, which took in some 3,500 hostages split into groups in hundreds of different locations scattered across two countries, we faced the very ugly reality that even with the best possible intelligence, we could not expect to trace the places where even 50 per cent of the hostages were being held. This in turn would mean launching a vast, half-cocked operation involving all the troops in British and US Special Forces, as well as units and even whole battalions from some of the other countries involved in Desert Shield, plus hundreds of helicopters. And all of these must go deep behind enemy lines, to a hundred or more different locations, with no proper backup available other than a degree of air support. Casualties among the human shields and their rescuers would be horrendous, and those hostages who were not located would probably be slaughtered by their Iraqi guards at the first sign of any rescue attempt.

  It was a wonderful, almost romantic, dream of an idea, but it didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding. Those of us who had the facts recognized this from the start. I felt extremely sorry for all those hostages, and for their worried relatives, but I can now admit that, however desperate their situation, the plan to rescue them was never realistically considered by any of us as being even a remotely feasible option. As a plan it gave the troops something definite to train for, and that was about all that could be said for it. It also caused Schwarzkopf to think about us – if only briefly – as participants in his war. Among the US Special Forces, Delta Force – roughly the American equivalent of the SAS – were also going crazy trying to carve out a role for themselves in the Gulf. Most of them were still back in the States and, like us, rehearsing the liberation of the human shields, while being just as certain as we were that it was an absolute non-starter.

  Luckily, on 6 December Saddam released most of the hostages and we were able to drop the ridiculous rescue charade which, had it been attempted, could only have ended in bloody nightmare, and many of us being shipped home in bodybags. The only trouble was, with the operation now cancelled, we were once more left without a meaningful role in the coming conflict.

  We had good cause, though, to bless our luck in having General de la Billière as the British commander. He was not to leave us kicking our heels for long. On 12 December new orders came through from Coalition HQ in Saudi Arabia. We were to start planning deep-penetration raids into Iraq, the type of operation on which the fledgeling Regiment had cut its teeth after its formation in the Western Desert in 1941. Saddam had been given a deadline of 15 January to get out of Kuwait. DLB gave us the same deadline, by which time we were to be ready to go in to Iraq. What we didn’t know at the time, however, was that DLB had not cleared these plans with General Schwarzkopf. So far as we were concerned he was the man in charge of the British forces in the Gulf, and we were a British regiment – so we would do whatever he ordered. At least preparing for operations behind enemy lines would get us up to full battle readiness.

  Within a week of my taking over as RSM the Regiment was officially committed to going to war in the Gulf, or at least believed itself to be, which in the end came to the same thing. The announcement to move came in a special meeting convened by the CO in Stirling Lines. The entire staff of regimental head-quarters was present. This included the regimental 2IC, the ops officer, adjutant, intelligence officer, quarter-master and myself, as well as the squadron commanders and sergeant-majors and all heads of department. In addition, the motor transport and signals officers and the masterchef were also present. There was an air of expectancy, even excitement, although, typically, every thing was understated. The CO’s message was equally brief. With the exception of G Squadron, who were to man the SP team, the whole Regiment would deploy to the Gulf between 27 December and 3 January. It was to be the biggest gathering of SAS personnel in a battle zone anywhere in the world since the end of the Second World War.

  There was a quite mind-boggling amount of planning and preparation to get through before we could move out, and I spent virtually every waking hour – including Christmas Day – until our departure in my office at the camp. For myself, I couldn�
��t wait to get to the Middle East, although the last formality for everyone in the Regiment – to make out a will – tended to focus the minds of us all on the fact that we weren’t shipping out for a vacation. Indeed, there was a very good chance that some of us would not be coming back, something the Intel guys drummed into us at every available moment – just to keep us on our toes, of course, they explained gleefully. Wills could either be drafted by the documents office on base, by a private solicitor in the town or by simply filling out a suitable will form. It had also become compulsory for each of us to take out an army insurance policy, which pays on death only. There is no limit as to how much one can insure oneself for, but there is a minimum, which is the estimated cost of supporting a soldier’s family until his children come of age. For SAS men without families, the policy pays out a lump sum to his next of kin or some other named beneficiary.

  The pay sergeant-major also issued each man with twenty gold sovereigns, and a piece of paper printed with a text in both English and Arabic. The sovereigns were intended to be used to bribe Iraqi citizens or military personnel if the need should arise. Since gold sovereigns are an internationally accepted currency, and since each one is worth, not its nominal £1 face value, but around £80, they are an extremely useful and compact way of carrying a large sum of money. The statement printed on the paper was to the effect that after the war the British Embassy would pay the bearer £50,000 or its equivalent in Iraqi currency if he or she helped the owner of the paper to evade capture. This was supposed to benefit an SAS man if he had been stranded or even captured behind enemy lines, but ignored the fact that many Iraqis, and most of the nomads and bedouin, could not read or write. It also seemed to take for granted that any Iraqi was prepared to sell out his country to a hated enemy just on the dubious promise of riches to come at some unspecified date in the future. The sovereigns had to be handed back after the war unless you could prove to have had a legitimate use for them. No one did use them. We tended to steal or hijack what we needed, rather than barter for it. Better to rely on our own, admittedly rather anti-social, tactics among the indigenous population than on some Iraqi’s possible greed. I might add here that, contrary to what has been said in several accounts of the SAS in the Gulf War, most of the sovereigns were accounted for after the end of the war.