by Shaun Clarke
Formerly of the Blue Team, now part of the Red, Sergeant Inman was standing in the chain, next to Baby Face, about halfway down the main staircase linking the first floor to the ground, when he heard the sounds of what he thought was a scuffle above him and shouted a warning to the Red Team members up on the landing.
To his relief, it was only the last of the hostages stumbling down the stairs, most of them looking frightened and dishevelled, their eyes streaming from CS gas. Then Inman, with eighteen years of hard experience behind him, saw a face that was calculating rather than scared. That was all he needed to see.
‘That one’s a terrorist!’ he bawled.
The sound of his voice cut through the fearful atmosphere like a knife as those dark eyes under an Afro hairstyle stared down in panic. Instantly recognized as a terrorist by his green combat jacket – Inman’s outburst had merely confirmed it for the doubtful – the man was struck on the back of the head by the butt of Phil’s MP5. After crying out and stumbling forward a few steps, he advanced down the broad stairs almost at the crouch, his hands over his head as he was punched and kicked down by the chain of soldiers.
When he drew level with Inman, the latter saw a Russian fragmentation grenade with the detonator cap protruding from his hand. Without thinking twice, the sergeant removed the MP5 from his shoulder and slipped the safety-catch to automatic. Unfortunately, his own mates were in the line of fire and prevented him from shooting at the terrorist. Frustrated, he raised the weapon above his head and brought the stock down on the back of the Arab’s neck, hitting him as hard as he could. The terrorist’s head snapped backward.
At that moment, the four Red Team members at the top of the rubble-strewn stairs opened fire simultaneously, emptying their magazines into the terrorist as he fell. First convulsing wildly in the murderous hail of bullets, then rolling down the stairs and coming to rest on the floor, the terrorist spasmed and vomited blood. He then opened his hand to release the RGD5 grenade, which rolled a short distance across the floor and then came to a stop, making a light drumming noise on the tiles.
Luckily its pin was still in its housing.
After hurrying down the stairs to frisk the dead man, Inman withdrew a wallet containing an identity card and some other papers.
‘Shakir Abdullah Fadhil,’ he pronounced after studying the items in his hands. ‘Also known as Feisal. Aged twenty-one, born in Baghdad, and another Ministry of Industry official. I’ll bet he was.’ Pocketing the identify card and papers, which he would pass on to Military Intelligence, Inman leaned over the body to make a rough count of the bloody wounds. Straightening up again, he said to the soldiers still on the stairs: ‘There are almost forty bullet holes in that bastard and he deserves every one of them.’ Grinning, he added a few last words: ‘And the pubs haven’t closed yet.’ Then the sergeant sauntered through the library and out onto the rear lawn.
For some time after that incident, more shots echoed throughout the building as the SAS men blasted away locks to check other rooms. The fires that started with the burning curtains had now engulfed the top of the building and the smoke was forming black clouds that drifted all the way down.
The integral UHF radio headsets in the men’s respirators crackled into life as the Controller informed them that the building was ablaze and must be abandoned.
‘The Embassy is clear. I repeat: the Embassy is clear.’
Outside on the lawn, most of the hostages were lying face down on the grass, their feet and hands bound. Those remaining were being processed the same way.
Sim Harris, also bound hand and foot, but grateful to have escaped with his life, was asked to identify any surviving terrorists. There was only one left. Identified by PC Lock and Harris, as well as the other survivors, he was Badavi Nejad, also known as Ali Abdullah. Dragged roughly to his feet by Inman and Baby Face, he was handed over to the police and driven away without delay.
Sim Harris, as he lay on the rear lawn, listening to the complaints of another trussed-up hostage, said: ‘Think yourself lucky.’
Inman heard the remark. Grinning, he turned to Baby Face and said: ‘Now doesn’t that make it all worth while?’
‘Go screw yourself, Sarge,’ Baby Face said with a grin. Then he walked away, heading back to the FHA next door to meet up with his mates.
17
The SAS assault on the Iranian Embassy at 16 Princes Gate, London, ended approximately fifty minutes after it began.
Fifteen minutes later, back in the Forward Holding Area in the Royal College of Medical Practitioners, next door to the Embassy, those who had taken part in the operation stripped off their CRW assault kit, packed it into their civilian holdalls, and wrapped their Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine-guns in plastic bags to be taken away for examination, this being the first time they had been used by the Regiment.
‘The shortest battle I ever fought,’ Jock said. ‘It must be some kind of record.’
‘Right,’ Harrison replied. ‘Fifteen minutes to clear the building, thirty-five minutes to check the premises and conduct an undiplomatic reception for the poor sods we rescued – won’t they love us? – then another fifteen minutes to pack up our gear and move out of the FHA. Sixty-five minutes from start to finish, then back to Hereford. Not bad at all, mate.’
‘We’ll be in the Guinness Book of Records,’ Jock said. ‘Take my word for it.’
‘No, we won’t,’ Harrison replied, being more of a realist than his Scottish friend, ‘because we don’t exist. At least, not officially.’
‘We didn’t exist,’ Jock emphasized, ‘but we certainly do now. We’re all TV stars.’
‘Then God help us, Jock.’
Just before leaving the college to enter the Avis vans that would take them back to their temporary bashas in Regent’s Park Barracks, the SAS men received a visit from the Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, who, with tears in his eyes, thanked them for all they had done.
Approximately two and a half hours after the siege had ended, the Commanding Officer of 22 SAS handed back control of the cleared, though badly damaged Embassy to the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, thus officially ending SAS involvement.
Out of a total of twenty-six hostages taken in the Embassy, five had been released before the assault, nineteen had been rescued, and only two had died, neither killed by the SAS.
The survivors included the caretaker, Ron Morris, and PC Lock, who was awarded the George Medal.
There were no SAS casualties at all.
Five of the SAS men were personally decorated by the Queen. Four received the Queen’s Gallantry Medal, and one received the George Medal.
Those facts reflected great credit on the SAS and, combined with the fact that most of the operation had been viewed by television viewers worldwide, made theirs, virtually overnight, the most renowned regiment in modern military history.
The sight of those sinister, hooded, well-armed, black-clad figures entering a smoke-filled building in the middle of London captured the public imagination and turned the SAS, formerly anonymous, into the focus of relentless public and media scrutiny, for good or for ill.
The deterrent effect of Operation Pagoda was evident from the fact that no similar event occurred in the United Kingdom for more than a decade afterwards. That single SAS operation had, in effect, protected London from a particularly odious brand of international terrorism.
Ironically, after the inquest and the trial of the surviving terrorist, there was media criticism of the force used by the SAS. The official response from Hereford was that the object of the operation was to rescue hostages and that to do so in a burning building reported to have been wired for a ‘Doomsday’ explosion did not leave the assault force any other option.
Though the Regiment then tried to sink back into its former anonymity, concentrating on intelligence gathering and security in the absence of a major military task, it never fully regained its former, generally preferred anonymity.
Indeed
, twelve months later, at a private bar in Hereford, some of those who had taken part in the Embassy siege could still be heard excitedly discussing it while drinking their beer and Scotch.
‘My first time on TV,’ Jock Thompson said. ‘When I clambered across that first-floor balcony, I almost found myself posing.’
‘You should have blown the press a kiss,’ Phil McArthur told him. ‘They would have loved you for that.’
‘A disaster,’ someone else said out of the blue, having just arrived, unexpected, at the bar. ‘They should have kept the press out of there altogether. That’s my opinion.’
All those in the small group stared in surprise at the quietly spoken Baby Face, who looked like an innocent schoolboy but was known to be deadly.
‘A disaster?’ Alan Pyle repeated, as if not hearing right. ‘Are you kidding us, Baby Face?’
‘This Regiment’s supposed to work in secrecy,’ Baby Face informed him, ‘and that means we should never be seen on TV, discussed on the radio, or even read about in the papers. All that’s gone since the Princes Gate siege and I think it’s a bad thing.’
‘Aren’t you proud of what you did there?’ Corporal George Gerrard asked. ‘I mean, what we all did there was something pretty special, so you shouldn’t resent the world knowing about it.’
‘I just mean …’ But Danny could not explain it. Even back home, in Kingswinford, where he was willing to admit that he had fought in Northern Ireland, he refused to let anyone know that he had been one of the sinister, black-clad figures on the roof of that Embassy. He was certainly proud of what he had done, but he disliked the way the operation had been blown up by the papers. The SAS had always taken pride in staying in the background, but the Iranian Embassy affair had destroyed its anonymity and even made it notorious. Baby Face hated the thought of that.
‘I loved it,’ Sergeant Inman confessed. ‘It made me feel like a star. I used to feel like a dick-head, just another faceless soldier, but now everywhere I go, when I say I’m in the SAS, women cream at the sight of me, men burn up with envy, and everyone wants to know what we get up to. I think I’m going to write a bestseller about it.’
‘Better be quick,’ Jock said. ‘You might have left it too late. That Trooper Andrew Winston – the big black bastard from D Squadron – has already had some of his bloody awful poems published and now thinks he’s Tolstoy.’
‘Who’s Tolstoy?’ Ken asked.
‘I know him,’ Bobs-boy Quayle said. ‘Not Tolstoy – Andrew Winston. He fought in Defa and Shershitti, in Oman, in the mid-1970s. He’s a fucking good bloke.’
‘Good man or not, he’s getting his poems published,’ Jock said, ‘and he claims he’s going to write about the Regiment and make his name overnight.’
‘It just goes to show what this Regiment’s becoming,’ Inman muttered, licking his moist lips. ‘There was a time when no one knew we existed, but Princes Gate changed all that.’
‘Not for the best,’ Baby Face said. ‘I’m certain of that. As for you, Sarge’ – he looked straight at Inman – ‘you wouldn’t be thinking of wasting your time writing if you had another decent war to fight.’
‘I think you’re right,’ Inman replied, ‘but alas, there won’t be another war. Those days are gone for good.’
‘God help us,’ Jock said.
That conversation took place during a celebratory drink in the Paludrine Club at the SAS base, Bradbury Lines, Hereford, on 5 May 1981, precisely one year after the Princes Gate siege. Eleven months later, on 2 April 1982, a garrison of British Royal Marines guarding Port Stanley, capital of the Falkland Islands, was forced to surrender to Argentinian forces. Three days later, a Royal Navy Task Force sailed for the Falklands. The very same day, but in secret, D Squadron, 22 SAS, flew out of England on a C-130 Hercules transport plane, bound for Ascension Island and another war.
Discover other books in the SAS Series
Discover other books in the SAS Series published by Bloomsbury at
www.bloomsbury.com/SAS
Soldier A: Behind Iraqi Lines
Soldier B: Heroes of the South Atlantic
Soldier C: Secret War in Arabia
Soldier D: The Colombian Cocaine War
Soldier E: Sniper Fire in Belfast
Soldier F: Guerillas in the Jungle
Soldier G: The Desert Raiders
Soldier H: The Headhunters of Borneo
Soldier J: Counter Insurgency in Aden
Soldier K: Mission to Argentina
Soldier L: The Embassy Siege
Soldier M: Invisible Enemy in Kazakhstan
Soldier N: Gambian Bluff
Soldier O: The Bosnian Inferno
Soldier P: Night Fighters in France
Soldier Q: Kidnap the Emperor!
Soldier R: Death on Gibraltar
Soldier S: The Samarkand Hijack
Soldier T: War on the Streets
Soldier U: Bandit Country
Soldier V: Into Vietnam
Soldier W: Guatemala – Journey Into Evil
Soldier X: Operation Takeaway
Soldier Y: Days of the Dead
Soldier Z: For King and Country
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
First published in Great Britain 1993 by Bloomsbury Publishing
Copyright © 1993 Bloomsbury Publishing
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eISBN: 9781408842263
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