The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  The Pagoda crew wore ‘black kit’ weighing about 15 kilos, specially designed for the anti-terrorist role. It included a standard NATO carbon-lined nuclear-biological-and-chemical (NBC) warfare suit with a hood and an SR-6 respirator. They had requested Nomex fireproof overalls, but had been told that they were too expensive. Instead, they wore ordinary black overalls, with body armour that included ‘trauma-plates’ capable of stopping high-velocity rounds. On exercises, few of the Special Projects boys liked to wear the heavy trauma-plate, but now everyone was scrabbling for one. They became, commented Horsfall, ‘as rare as rocking-horse shit’.

  Over the ‘flak-jacket’ came a suede utility vest with pouches for a pair of ‘flashbang’ stun-grenades and a shell-dressing, a leather belt carrying a pouch that held three thirty-round magazines for the MP-5, and a quick-release holster holding a 9mm Browning automatic pistol with a special twenty-round magazine. They also wore personal radios with earpieces and throat-microphones that were tuned to a communal net, so that everyone could hear everyone else talking.

  In this ‘black kit’ the SAS looked more like aliens from a Star Wars epic than down-to-earth regular soldiers. This was no coincidence. The ‘Darth Vader’ style kit was tailored as a psychological weapon – a return to pre-camouflage days, when the idea of military dress was to intimidate the enemy.

  Next morning, Home Secretary Whitelaw belatedly authorized the SAS to move nearer the target. In a hangar at Regent’s Park barracks the Assault Pioneer Company of the Irish Guards had started constructing a flimsy full-sized mock-up of the Stronghold out of plywood and hessian, aided by blueprints and the embassy’s caretaker. Later that day they were supplied with up-to-date information from one of the hostages, BBC producer Chris Cramer, who had been unexpectedly released. Cramer and the other three British captives had decided that one of them had to get out. Finding himself ‘rather conveniently ill’, Cramer – a future managing editor of CNN International – ‘ramped it up a little’ by collapsing into screaming convulsions. Alarmed, the gunmen agreed to let him go.

  The police had cut the embassy’s communications with the outside world. That morning they handed in a field telephone and opened negotiations with the terrorists’ spokesman, Awn ‘Ali Mohammad. The noon deadline passed without incident, but Awn – codenamed ‘Salim’ by the police – continued to make demands. Red Team were up and down like yo-yos. It was not until 0330 hours the following morning that they were relieved by Blue Team. By then, they had been on stand-by for twenty-three hours. From now on, Red and Blue would alternate on eight-hour shifts.

  The following day officers of Scotland Yard’s C7 technical support division attempted to drill into the Stronghold’s thick granite walls to insert microphones and fibre-optic cameras. They requested COBR to find ways of increasing ambient noise to cover the operation. They were obliged by a gas company team, who got a pneumatic drill thumping in Princes Gate. When this only succeeded in irritating the terrorists, COBR had civil aircraft change their flight-path into Heathrow and zoom low over Hyde Park instead. Neither of these measures prevented the terrorists from detecting noises in the walls. When one of them asked Sim Harris what he thought the noises were, he put his ear to the wall and told them gravely, ‘Mice!’

  The observation devices weren’t entirely successful. They did reveal, though, that the gang were occupying all three upper floors of the building. The hostages had been divided into male and female groups in two separate rooms on the first floor. If the SAS went in, they would have to enter these rooms at precisely the same moment to stop the gunmen murdering the hostages. It became clear that the enemy were well armed, with sub-machine guns, Browning 9mm pistols, a .38 revolver and some Russian-made grenades. Whether they had the means of blowing up the building remained unknown.

  The ‘deliberate plan’ had been formulated by last light on Saturday, when both teams assembled for a briefing by squadron commander Hector Gullan. If an assault was ordered, Gullan told them, the large number of rooms to be cleared meant that the entire team would have to be deployed. Standard operating procedure required a ‘fire group’ covering the attack. This would have to be supplied by trained SAS snipers who were not part of Pagoda. They would be sited in adjacent buildings, and in nearby Hyde Park.

  The task of raising the additional men wasn’t easy, as the other three regular SAS squadrons were occupied elsewhere. Fairweather, whose job it was to provide them, was also concurrently managing a delicate SAS anti-terrorist operation in Northern Ireland. ‘One of my biggest headaches was finding all the extra manpower,’ he said, ‘as we had guys scattered throughout the world.’6 In the end, he managed to pull in a dozen permanent staff instructors from 21 and 23 SAS, the Regiment’s territorial units.

  The plan was for a standard building-assault on a vertical plain. The main difficulty would be to breach every entrance point, on each of the floors, at the same time. A major complication had come from the information that the first- and ground-floor windows were bomb-proofed. The SAS had themselves done an inspection of the building in the days when it belonged to the Shah. They had recommended that such windows be installed, but no one knew if their advice had been taken. It was a small but vital point. If the windows were bomb-proof they would need to be blown in by specially designed ‘frame-charges’. If not, a sledgehammer would suffice. The SAS decided to play it safe and make up the frame-charges anyway.

  The assault group would be backed by a support group tasked with pumping CS gas shells through the windows. The assault group itself was divided into five teams of four men each. Team No. 1 would cross the roof and lower two special stun-charges down into the stairwell that occupied the centre of the building. They would detonate with ear-splitting thumps that would distract the terrorists from the other entrances. The SAS team would move down a staircase from the roof and clear the top floor.

  Team No. 2 would abseil down the rear of the building from the roof, alight on the second-floor balcony, blow in the windows and clear the floor. Team No. 3 would jump across from next door’s balcony at the front, and clear the first-floor area. Team No. 4 would blow in the rear doors on the ground floor and secure the stairs, while Team No. 5 would enter via the same doors and clear the basement. A reception party of two men would remain outside to receive the hostages. ‘Success depended on every SAS man knowing his task precisely,’ de la Billière said, ‘the soldiers had to be able to pick out the terrorists, recognize every hostage … and keep within pre-set boundaries so that there was no chance of shooting each other.’7

  The aim of the assault, if sanctioned, was to rescue hostages, not take out the gunmen. Army legal experts were brought in to remind the SAS troops that the law only permitted them to kill the ‘bad guys’ if their lives or those of others were threatened. ‘In our hearts we wanted to kill the terrorists and then save the hostages,’ Horsfall admitted. ‘What was important was that we knew what to say if something went wrong.’8

  Police dialogue with the Arabs followed a well-rehearsed pattern. Never losing their cool, the police negotiators, ‘Ray’ and ‘Dave’, played cat and mouse, making offers, stalling, then offering again. The object was to chip away at morale. The police believed they were slowly winning the psychological battle. On Sunday 4 May, though, the mood changed abruptly. A hostage – embassy chief press officer Abbas Lavasani – became incensed over graffiti insulting the Ayatollah Khomeini that the gunmen had sprayed on the walls. He hurled himself at one of them. His fellow hostages overpowered him, but Lavasani became a marked man after the attempted assault.

  The following day was a Bank Holiday. At about noon, Peter de la Billière visited the control room in the college, where he met Mike Rose. The Director had a feeling that events were about to accelerate. ‘All morning the terrorists had been giving out new deadlines for action,’ he said. ‘They had grown extremely edgy. Salim, the leader, came on [the phone] to say that they proposed to kill one of the hostages.’9 Twenty-five minutes later, de la
Billière and Rose heard two shots from the direction of the embassy. The shots were separated by a twenty-second interval, and from their timing, Rose was certain that someone had been killed. De la Billière hot-footed it back to COBR to meet Whitelaw, who had just been driven at breakneck speed from his official residence at Dorneywood, near Slough. The Home Secretary had already laid down that the SAS would not be deployed unless at least two hostages had been executed. This seemed like squinted logic, but the rationale was that one death ‘might be an accident’.

  No one knew at this stage if a hostage actually had been killed. Rose was sure of it, and if he was right it increased the likelihood of Pagoda’s intervention. De la Billière explained to the Home Secretary that despite the care they had taken with the plan, they could still expect 40 per cent casualties. Whitelaw told him graciously that once the SAS were in play he would not interfere, and that he would take responsibility if anything went wrong. Although Rose had managed to hide the SAS presence from the media, there had been speculation in the press for days that the Regiment would be called in. Reporters had even stationed themselves outside Bradbury Lines in Hereford, waiting for the teams to emerge. On the ground, police had confined TV cameras to a small area called ‘Pressville’, about a hundred metres west of the Stronghold. They had considered screening off the entire area, but decided against it. The official reason for this was tactical – it might alert the terrorists to the fact that an assault was building up. Others later claimed that the exposure was deliberate policy. The government, they said, wanted the world at large to see how it dealt with terrorists.

  The lack of screening meant that, if the SAS went in, it would be operating for the first time in its history in the full glare of the world’s media. The story was being covered by all the networks. It was a Bank Holiday, when millions of Britons would be at home with their TV sets on. De la Billière said later that he accepted the necessity of ‘a degree of public presentation’. Neither he nor Rose could possibly have predicted the massive impact these TV cameras, and this day, would have on their lives, their Regiment, and the world.

  At 1820 hours that evening, while Awn was in the middle of an argument about Islam with the Imam of the Regent’s Park mosque, three more gunshots were heard from inside the building. Awn announced that a hostage had been executed. Another, or others, would be killed within half an hour: ‘all the hostages together,’ he added. Ten minutes later the embassy door opened and the body of Abbas Lavasani was flung into the street.

  The cadaver was spirited away by police, and an autopsy later showed that Lavasani had been dead for hours. He was not the victim of the most recent gunshots, which turned out to be a bluff. The police, though, had heard two sets of shots and had one body. It seemed enough to fulfil Whitelaw’s ‘two deaths’ rule.

  At COBR, Whitelaw phoned Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was in her car being driven from Chequers to London. Thatcher didn’t respond immediately, but answered on the second attempt. She gave her consent. Whitelaw put the phone down. ‘Right,’ he told de la Billière, ‘you can send them in.’10 At precisely seven minutes past seven, the senior policeman on the spot, Chief Superintendent John Dellow, handed Rose written permission to unleash Pagoda.

  Police negotiators went all out to engage the attention of the terrorists, promising them a bus to Heathrow. The SAS encroached on the Stronghold. They lowered the stun-charges into the stairwell. They fixed their abseiling ropes. They sneaked along the basement alley. They prepared to cross to the front balcony with their specially designed frame-charges. In Hyde Park, and on the roofs of nearby buildings, the snipers took up their posts.

  Robin Horsfall was with Team No. 4, at the rear of the embassy. He thumbed the safety-catch on his MP-5 to make sure it was off. The only sounds he was aware of were the mush in his radio earpiece, the thump of his heart, and the howling of police dogs in the college. He wished to hell they would shut up. ‘My greatest fear now was of making a mistake that might endanger a life,’ he wrote, ‘especially mine.’11 As his team moved out towards the back door, time wound to a halt. Sounds were magnified. There was a sudden tinkle of glass above him, and he looked up to see four men of Team No. 2 rappelling down from the roof. The Red Team leader, ‘Tak’ Takavesi, a Fijian staff-sergeant, had stuck on his rope five metres down. He had put a rubber-soled boot through a window.

  Awn, in the middle of a dialogue with police negotiators, also heard the smashing glass. ‘There is suspicion!’ he snapped. He broke off the conversation and stalked off to investigate with his .38 revolver and a grenade. Trevor Lock and Sim Harris tagged along behind him. Realizing the assault was a hair’s breadth from compromise, Hector Gullan, in the control room next door, grabbed the microphone from his operator and yelled. ‘Go! Go! Go!’

  That instant a deafening wallop ripped through the stairwell. One of the two stun-charges went off, so loud that it was heard miles away. On the front first-floor balcony, Team No. 3 – Lance-Corporals Mac‘A’ and Mac‘D’, and two troopers – were setting their frame-charge in the full view of whirring TV cameras. The ghostly face of Sim Harris materialized suddenly on the other side of the window. They screamed at him to get back and down. At that moment, a window on the second floor above them creaked open and a terrorist leaned out and dropped a grenade. It was his last move. A split-second later a deadly accurate single round from a sniper in Hyde Park smacked into his skull. The grenade bounced off the balcony but failed to explode – he had forgotten to pull the pin. A policeman in the street below saw it clatter across the pavement. At the same time he noticed a kitbag being lowered from a tree in Hyde Park, followed by a figure in a camouflaged suit. The camouflaged shooter collected his gear and walked briskly away.

  Mac‘A’ detonated the frame-charge. It exploded with a whoomph and a mushroom of smoke, taking out not only the window but, unseen by the TV cameras, part of the balcony floor. The team had to jump across the gap to get into the building.

  At the back, Blue Team couldn’t blow in the ground-floor doors for fear of injuring the staff-sergeant dangling above them. ‘Tak’ roared to the men still on the roof to cut him down. The rest of his team landed on the second-floor balcony. They demolished the windows with sledgehammers and lobbed flashbangs into the room. A second later they were inside. Their grenades had set the curtains ablaze, and as the fire licked upwards, it enveloped the hanging team-leader’s legs. Tak kicked frantically outwards to avoid being roasted alive.

  Horsfall looked up to see that two men on the roof were trying to saw through Tak’s nylon rope. The pendulum motion made it difficult. If they severed the rope at the wrong moment, he would miss the balcony and plummet twenty feet to the concrete steps beneath. Horsfall heard his screams, but realized there was nothing he could do. He and his oppo, ‘Ginge’, focused on the stairs, waiting to see what would come down. Awn and Lock were in the room at the front, next to the one where Team No. 4 were making their entry across the balcony. Awn, at the window, drew a bead on Mac‘A’ and his men. Suddenly Lock leapt on him, deflecting his aim and pinning him down. To Awn’s astonishment, Lock produced a pistol from under his overcoat. He held the muzzle to Awn’s head. Just as Lock was wondering whether or not to pull the trigger, the door burst open. Lance-Corporal Mac‘D’ and his mate stepped in coolly and yanked Lock out of the way, yelling, ‘Trevor, leave off!’ As Awn tried to get up, they pumped fifteen rounds into his head and chest.

  Across the landing, at the door of the ambassador’s office, Mac‘A’ and his comrade found themselves facing twenty-one-year-old Thamir Mohammad Hussain, armed with a Browning 9mm pistol. Mac‘A’ threw a flashbang, and his comrade fired his MP-5 twice. Thamir retreated, probably wounded, and disappeared into the smoke.

  Moving into the room, Mac‘A’ suddenly got a whiff of CS gas through his respirator and backed out, coughing. A sergeant from Team No. 4, who had just come up the stairs, joined his mate, and they entered the room together. Thamir crouched on a sofa by the wi
ndow, pointing his pistol at them. They opened fire with their MP-5s, drilling his body with twenty-one rounds.

  Team No. 2 had broken into an empty office with locked doors. The flames were spreading and the room was already filled with smoke. A moment later Tak’s rope was cut. He crashed on to the balcony behind them, and staggered in through the broken windows. The team shot out the door locks with their MP-5s, but the doors were barricaded from outside, and refused to give.

  One of the team, Trooper Robert Palmer, backtracked to the balcony and leaned over to peer in through the window of the next-door room. He clocked one of the terrorists, twenty-three-year-old mechanic Shakir Sultan Said, attempting to set fire to a pile of paper with matches. Palmer smashed the glass and tossed in a flashbang. Shakir leapt up and grabbed his pistol. Palmer squeezed the trigger of his MP-5, but there was a dry click as the weapon jammed. Growling with frustration, Palmer drew his Browning 9mm. He burst through the window and pursued Shakir out of the room.

  In the first moments of the siege, twenty-one-year-old ‘Faisal’ Shakir ‘Abdallah Radhil, No. 2 in the terrorist team, and his comrade, Fawzi Badavi Najad, had opened fire on the male hostages in the telex room. They killed one of them, ‘Ali Samad Zade, and badly wounded two others, including embassy medical officer Ahmad Dadgar. A third was miraculously saved when a round was deflected by a fifty-pence piece in his pocket. Shakir ramped through the telex room door with Palmer in hot pursuit, and found that Faisal and Fawzi had gone. They had left another man, Makki Hanun ‘Ali, to guard the surviving hostages. Exactly what happened there in the next few minutes is uncertain. It must have been a scene of utter confusion – shrieks of pain and terror, bodies writhing, blood pooling on the floor, smoke and CS gas swirling about. All that is known for sure is that neither of the terrorists left the room alive. Shakir’s body was found to have a single entry wound under the left ear, with an exit wound in the temple. Both wounds were caused by a round from Palmer’s 9mm pistol. Makki was shot in the back, his body riddled with bullets from Red Team leader’s MP-5.