The government responded by claiming that British intelligence hadn’t known which members of PIRA would be involved in the incident, and that they had not been under surveillance because the Spanish anti-terrorist police had lost them shortly after they arrived at Málaga. The Spanish later retorted that they had not lost the suspects: in fact, they had shadowed them all the way to the border. Margaret Thatcher’s statement that ‘those who live by the bomb and the gun and those who support them cannot in all circumstances be accorded … the same rights as everyone else’ was less than helpful, suggesting as it did that the three unarmed terrorists really had been executed.
The spectre of the SAS as a death-squad once again raised its head, as people began to recall the controversy over the deaths of John Boyle and William Hanna. Paddy McGrory, a lawyer representing the victims’ families, whose knowledge of the SAS derived mainly from his acquaintance with the late Blair Mayne, described the SAS shooters as ‘members of an unholy priesthood of violence’.6
The idea that the SAS had been sent in to execute the three PIRA terrorists is as unlikely as the allegation that the Pagoda team had been ordered to kill the Arab hostage-takers during the Iranian Embassy siege. The SAS-teams were working on the intel supplied in their briefing: that there was a bomb, and that the terrorists were liable to detonate it with a button device. Faced with making a lightning decision, they took the most secure path. To have desisted could have resulted in the deaths of scores of civilians, while a mistake in the opposite direction would result in the deaths of known terrorists. This was regrettable, but to the shooters, the lesser of two evils. Once they opened fire, they were trained to keep on shooting until they were a hundred per cent certain that no such device could be operated.
The apparent ‘setting up’ of the terrorists also caused controversy. The British army had learned long ago in Northern Ireland, though, that failing to catch bombers in the act too often resulted in their walking free. If they had allowed the Spanish authorities to arrest the PIRA trio, or had picked them up at the border, they would probably have been released through lack of evidence. Once they were in Gibraltar, though, they could not be allowed back into Spain, where they could have set off the presumed bomb by radio-control.
The death of McCann, Farrell and Savage was not the most advantageous outcome from the intelligence point of view. It meant that MI5 were unable to locate the explosives immediately, or identify and pick up the PIRA back-up team – including the mysterious ‘John Oakes’ and ‘Mary Parkin’. It also created three more martyrs for the Republican cause. Nevertheless, given the intelligence, the SAS made the only reasonable choice. The coroner agreed. At the inquest in September the verdict was nine to two in favour of lawful killing. At the European Commission in Strasbourg there was an eleven to six verdict that the SAS had not used unnecessary force.
92. Sow fears in the mind of the enemy
Sir David Stirling died on 5 November 1990 after collapsing at a London clinic. The same evening, his coffin was laid in a chapel of St James’s Catholic Church, where the Director, UK Special Forces, draped it with the Union Jack and set on top Stirling’s decorations: his DSO, his recently acquired Knight Bachelor, and an SAS beret. Shortly before his death, Stirling had made arrangements to meet a friend to discuss a wide range of security issues, including the need to start covert operations against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. He was to miss by a few months the first deployment of the SAS in its original desert role since the Second World War.
Three months earlier, Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait with a hundred thousand troops and twelve hundred tanks. His pretext for the invasion was the allegation that Kuwait had been pumping crude oil from the Ramallah field, whose ownership was disputed, and that the tiny but fabulously rich desert princedom had originally belonged to Iraq. He also claimed that the Kuwaitis had contravened an OPEC agreement by overproducing oil, costing Iraq fourteen million dollars in lost revenues.
The real origin of Saddam’s dispute with Kuwait lay in the eight-year war his country had fought with neighbouring Iran, ostensibly over her monopoly of the Shatt al-Arab waterway. The war had been conducted in bloody Somme-style offensives against trenches and machine guns, in which the attackers had been mown down like sheep. Both sides had used chemical weapons and long-range missiles, but Iran had made the mistake of targeting Kuwaiti oil-tankers in the Gulf, bringing down on her the wrath of the USA. Reviled by world opinion, and denied access to foreign arms, Iran was obliged to sue for peace. Though Saddam crowed over the masses of armour and artillery his forces had captured, it had been a pyrrhic victory – almost two million people had died, and not an inch of ground had been gained. Kuwait had supported Iraq during the war and made her extensive loans. When the princedom’s rulers asked for repayment, Saddam replied by occupying Kuwait.
The invasion was denounced by the UN Security Council, which immediately declared a trade embargo against Iraq. Within a fortnight, the spearhead brigade of the US 82 Airborne Division had landed in Saudi-Arabia to secure the nation’s oil reserves. The first phase of operations by Coalition troops – Desert Shield – was defensive: to protect Saudi-Arabia against invasion, and to gain time for a massive concentration of men and materiel from thirty-two countries, including Britain, France, Italy, Egypt, Syria, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, as well as Saudi-Arabia and the USA. Saddam continued to build up his forces, however, and by November the Coalition was facing no fewer than twenty-six Iraqi divisions, comprising four hundred and fifty thousand men. At the end of the month, the UN Security Council authorized the use of force if the Iraqis failed to withdraw from Kuwait by 15 January.
General ‘Stormin’ Norman’ Schwarzkopf, Commander-in-Chief of Coalition forces, had devised a counter-offensive based on air-power. Wave after wave of Allied bombers would hit strategic targets, cut the command infrastructure and gain control of the skies. When this had been achieved, the air force would turn its attention to the Iraqi army, pounding its artillery, armour and static defences, until the morale of Saddam’s troops had been worn down. Only then would Coalition ground-forces go in for the kill.
At first, 22 SAS had found its nose pushed out of joint for lack of a suitable role. The obvious job – reconnaissance on the Kuwait frontier – had been bagged by the US 5 Special Forces Group and the US Marines. The only task available was the rescue of sixteen hundred British hostages held in Iraq and Kuwait. A team briefed to plan a hostage-rescue operation, though, calculated that it would require a force of brigade-strength – more than three times the manpower of all three SAS regiments combined. It would also result in more casualties than the number of hostages released. In December the plan was scrapped when Saddam released the hostages anyway.
D and G Squadrons had been on standby for the Gulf since August, while A Squadron was in Columbia, training local troops to fight the drug barons. B Squadron held down the SP role. G Squadron was sent to the UAE to brush up on desert warfare, but returned to the UK just before Christmas to take over Pagoda duties. A, B and D Squadrons were deployed in the Gulf by 2 January.
There was still no official role for them: C-in-C Schwarzkopf was not a believer in special forces. His campaign would be fought with aircraft and missiles, backed up by armoured divisions and motorized infantry: what the hell could special forces do, he inquired, that a Stealth fighter could not? The Regiment had an ally in the GOC British Forces in the Gulf, Lt. General Sir Peter de la Billière, who had postponed his retirement to take up the job. De la Billière had served in a number of administrative posts since stepping down as Director, SAS after the Falklands, but saw himself as an operational commander, and was determined to have one last bite of the cherry.
Despite having no official sanction, de la Billière instructed the Regiment’s head-shed to start devising plans for deep-penetration raids behind Iraqi lines, to be ready by the UN deadline on 15 January. It was only a couple of days before the deadline that de la Billière was
able to win Schwarzkopf over, with a formal presentation using maps and graphics. The SAS task, he explained, would be to ‘cut roads and create diversions which would draw Iraqi forces away from the main front and sow fears in the mind of the enemy that some major operation was brewing on his right flank’.1 It was a return to the classic ‘golden era’ of SAS operations in North Africa under Stirling and Mayne.
The SAS group had been reorganized in the past decade, and was now UK Special Forces, with a director and deputy-director. It comprised 21, 22 and 23 SAS Regiments, the Royal Marines’ Special Boat Service, 63 SAS Signals Squadron and the Intelligence & Security Group, known as 14 Intelligence Company. The three regular SAS sabre squadrons deployed in the Gulf had been reinforced by a troop from R Squadron, and were supported by the SBS and RAF special forces air squadrons – a total of more than five hundred men.
The first Coalition sorties went in on 17 January, when two Iraqi early-warning radar installations on the Saudi-Arabian border were taken out by a dozen Apache helicopters of the US 101 Airborne Division, using laser-guided Hellfire missiles. The Apaches were followed by a squadron of F-15 fighters tasked to skewer the nearest Iraqi air-defence command centre, opening up a brace of blind corridors through which thousands of Coalition bombers would swarm, to hit two hundred and forty strategic targets all over Iraq.
While Coalition air-strikes continued, A and D Squadrons and half of B Squadron were transferred from their HQ in the United Arab Emirates by Hercules C130s to their forward operating base at al-Jauf in Saudi-Arabia, south of the Iraq frontier. The squadrons were equipped with ‘pinkies’ – Land Rover 110s, fitted with Browning machine guns, GPMGs and Milan missiles, backed up by Unimogs and dirt-bikes. The hundred and twenty-eight men of A and D Squadrons were divided into four half-squadron mobile groups. They were ready to launch their deep-penetration raids as ordered, but wondered if there was really any place for them in this hi-tech circus.2
The mobile groups were already crossing the border when it became clear that they were needed after all. At 0300 hours on 18 January the Iraqis fired seven Scud missiles at Israel, followed later by another three. The Scuds caused few casualties, but succeeded in riling Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, enough to declare that he was sending a hundred aircraft across Saudi-Arabian airspace to bomb Iraq and launching a commando assault. For Schwarzkopf, this was a nightmare scenario. Israeli intervention would cause irreparable damage to the Coalition. Schwarzkopf was obliged to divert a third of his aircraft from their main task, to take out the Scuds.
The Scud was a dinosaur in military terms. Designed by the Russians a generation earlier, it had a speed of five thousand kilometres an hour and flew at an altitude of thirty kilometres. The missiles had been imported by Saddam Hussein during the Iran–Iraq war, and their range extended by cannibalizing parts, to give the weapons the capability of reaching Tehran. Though this had been at the price of reducing the power of its warheads, Scuds had still succeeded in causing at least eight thousand casualties during the war.
President George Bush assured Shamir that evening that all known Scud sites had been blitzed, but the Scuds kept coming. Most of those aimed at Israel had been fired not from permanent sites, but from mobile transporter-erector launchers (TELs) in western Iraq. The Iraqis proved skilful at hiding these launchers, so that not even the most advanced surveillance equipment could trace them. Locating mobile Scud-launchers was a job for the Mark I human eyeball – a task tailor-made for the SAS.
The A and D Squadron mobile patrols received orders to track down Scuds and destroy them if possible, or vector-in strike aircraft. The half of B Squadron left at al-Jauf were given a different task. They would be dropped in the desert of western Iraq to set up covert observation-points on three major roads – known in SAS terminology as main supply-routes (MSRs) – and report the movement of Scud erector-launchers. The B Squadron boys would divide into three eight-man ‘road-watch’ patrols and go in by RAF Chinook helicopter.
93. ‘If it comes to a firefight it could well save your arse’
One of the first things Peter Ratcliffe noticed at al-Jauf was the cold. The ‘Green Slime’ – the intelligence boys – had told them it would be like a spring day in England, but it was more like the Arctic. Polar winds thrashed unfettered across the Iraqi desert, and night temperatures plumped to freezing. The men hadn’t come equipped for Arctic warfare – some of them hadn’t even brought sleeping-bags. Ratcliffe, appointed Regimental Sergeant-Major, 22 SAS only a fortnight earlier, pushed the RQMS to search the local souks for sheepskin coats.
The SAS forward base was a new but as yet unused civil airport about a hundred and fifty miles south of the Iraqi frontier, where Coalition jets were forever screeching in and taking off. The ops room had been set up in the baggage-reclaim hall of the terminal building, using the carousels as desks. It was crammed with radio-equipment, computer terminals, satellite-link decoders and an enormous wall-chart showing the dispositions of SAS units. The four mobile half-squadrons ordered into Iraq to hunt Scuds were represented by four stickers. On the morning of 22 January, Ratcliffe noticed that one of the stickers still hadn’t been moved across the border. It was the A Squadron patrol tagged Alpha One Zero, commanded by the squadron boss, Major ‘Graham’ – an SBS officer both Ratcliffe and the commanding officer had reservations about. At the briefing, Graham had seemed ill at ease and lacking in confidence.
Two days earlier, Graham had reported from the field that his way was blocked by a berm – a man-made barrier of sand. The berm stretched almost all the way along the border, and the other half-squadrons had crossed it without trouble. The RSM wondered what was so special about the berm in Graham’s area. ‘My gut feeling, which began to grow stronger as I stared at that little sticker on the map,’ Ratcliffe said, ‘was that Alpha One Zero was in no particular hurry to join the war.’1
He was distracted by the entrance of the commanding officer, Lt. Col. ‘J’, who was in a foul temper. He told the RSM that he’d just had an unsatisfactory chat with the sergeant in charge of one of the three B Squadron patrols assigned to the road-watch operation: Bravo Two Zero. Against his advice, Sgt. ‘Andy McNab’, or ‘M’, had refused to take a ‘dinky’ – a short-wheelbase Land Rover 90. The patrol had held a Chinese parliament and decided to go in on foot. They had an enormous amount of gear for digging and camouflaging a hide, all of which would have to be jettisoned if they got bumped. With a Land Rover they at least stood a chance of getting out of a contact. Without a vehicle they’d be stuck. ‘J’ asked Ratcliffe to go and ‘knock some sense’ into McNab.
The RSM found the patrol gathered among alps of kit – 5.56mm M16 rifles with underslung M204 40mm grenade-launchers, Minimi light machine guns, ammunition-boxes, LAW 66mm anti-tank rocket-launchers, M204 grenades, L2 hand-grenades, white phos grenades, claymore mines, jerrycans, Bergens, shovels, communications-gear, poles and gunnysacks packed with camouflage-nets, thermal sheeting and hundreds of empty sandbags. It looked as if they intended to lug everything but the kitchen sink. Ratcliffe’s belief was that an SAS patrol should be as light on its feet as possible. He saw at once that they were taking too much.
He buttonholed McNab. ‘I’m strongly advising you to take a vehicle,’ he said. ‘If it comes to a firefight it could well save your arse. So take the Boss’s and my advice and don’t be a fool.’
The RSM could tell from the sergeant’s expression that he wasn’t having any. ‘No way,’ McNab said. ‘We don’t need it and we’re not taking it. It’s a sure fire way of getting compromised.’2
One member of the patrol chipped in that it would be like going into action with an albatross round their necks. Another, Cpl. ‘Chris Ryan’, said that there’d be nowhere to hide it. Ratcliffe knew they were judging the terrain from satellite pictures, which showed elevation but not depression – there would almost certainly be places where they could stash the vehicle. In the Second World War, 1 SAS and the LRDG had cammed-up in landscapes
that looked completely empty. Ryan commented later that in fact they’d read the satellite images upside down, and mistaken low ground for high.
McNab wouldn’t shift on the Land Rover issue, or on the question of equipment. Ratcliffe reckoned they would be carrying loads of seventy-five or eighty kilos each – nearly three times what a candidate carried on Selection. It would be as if each of them was hefting an extra man on his back. The RSM gave them about a dozen paces. He could have ordered them to take a dinky, but he knew that this would be counter-productive. The patrol would follow orders, but would then act like prima donnas – perhaps even getting comped purposely, so they could say, ‘I told you so.’ It was the custom in the SAS that the final decision was left to the man commanding on the ground, whatever his rank. Ratcliffe accepted that there was nothing he could do, and returned to his CO in the same foul mood ‘J’ had been in when he’d first stalked into the ops room.
The three B Squadron patrols went into action that night in two RAF Chinooks. In the end, only one of them, Bravo One Nine, took dinkies. The third group, Bravo Three Zero, was extracted immediately. The patrol-boss took a shufti at the place he was supposed to put in his OP – a uniformly flat gravel plain – and realized a hide would stick out like ‘balls on a bulldog’. He aborted the mission.
Bravo Two Zero had been assigned the most northerly MSR, not a tarmac road but a desert track running along the edge of a low escarpment. Their plan was to land about twelve klicks from the place where the road kinked as it descended the high ground. They would set up a covert OP close to the road and watch for the movement of Scuds. The patrol had been tasked to stay in the field for ten days, and even if they clocked one Scud in that time, it would be priceless intel. They would transmit the details on the SATCOM gear they had with them, to alert fighter-bombers on stand-by twenty-four seven.
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