Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (33 page)

This was not a war in which black operations played a part. It saw the SAS back in its original role as a reconnaissance and sabotage force. Nevertheless, there were some novelties, two of which originated in the U.S. thanks to a friendship between the long-serving Ken Connor and a veteran of Delta Force, possibly its renowned first deputy commander, Lieutenant Colonel L. H. (“Bucky”) Burruss, an ally of the SAS. Connor and another SAS NCO, Paddy O’Connor, were on a training job in America as the South Atlantic campaign started. They made contact with Delta and were offered the use of two of U.S. Special Forces’ most secret new toys: an anti-aircraft, shoulder-fired missile named Stinger and satellite communications that gave SAS teams in their hides instant, secure voice links to their headquarters in England as well as to their field commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Mike Rose. It is unclear whether the Pentagon or any other part of U.S. government ever approved of this release. What is certain is that it provided the outnumbered Brits with an edge they badly needed. The threat to the U.K.’s amphibious force by Argentine bombers equipped with sea-skimming Exocet missiles (supplied by France) was lethal. The SAS made repeated, unsuccessful attempts to strike at air bases on the Argentine mainland. In a daring raid on East Falkland island, however, they destroyed the greater part of Argentine air power. The Stinger was used more than once to intercept low-flying Argentine attackers.

The end of this campaign had much to do with Rose’s use of psychology. In peacetime, the islanders used citizens’ band (CB) radio to talk to one another. Rose employed a Marine captain who spoke fluent Argentine-Spanish to call up a doctor in Port Stanley to open negotiations with the Argentine high command. Eight days of negotiations followed during which Rose seduced his enemy with the proposition that Argentine honor was satisfied by its courageous resistance and that further slaughter of civilians as well as exhausted Argentine soldiers would serve no purpose. In truth, as a British admiral admitted later, the U.K. offensive was running out of steam. The jesuitical dialogue, the work of an Oxford graduate, worked. It was time to talk face to face. Rose, in a helicopter flying a white flag, was put down on the wrong landing zone in the capital, Port Stanley. He had to make his way through a series of enemy fortifications, on foot, accompanied by a signaler, to reach enemy HQ. There, two more hours of detailed negotiations led to the Argentine surrender. A seventy-four-day war, won after an opposed landing, requiring a forced march of around sixty miles across boggy West Falkland and a series of uphill assaults, ended with 649 Argentine dead, 1,068 wounded, and 11,313 taken prisoner. The respective British losses were 258 killed (including more than twenty SF personnel in a single helicopter crash), 777 wounded, and 115 taken prisoner.

Back home, the victory restored the fading popularity of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, propelling her to re-election in 1983. It also reinforced the personal alliance between Mrs. Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan. But soon after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the political landscape had changed. Mrs. Thatcher was out of office and the SAS was out of favor with the architects of the war to liberate Kuwait. The allied commander, U.S. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, known as “The Bear,” had little faith in Special Forces operations thanks to his experience of Vietnam, and the escape route used by Vietcong into the sanctuary of Cambodia. Kicking the desert sand, he told journalists: “When you go to war, you’re going to war all the way…. No more Cambodian border situations for me.” During the five-month buildup known as Desert Shield, virtually no role was allotted to SF teams.

That changed on Scud Sunday, 2 December 1990. Saddam Hussein’s army wheeled three Scuds into the desert, after dark, for a demonstration shoot, within Iraqi territory but toward Israel. The first missile was six minutes into a seven-minute flight before a U.S. satellite detected the flare from its rocket motor. A member of an allied headquarters staff in Riyadh that day witnessed “concern amounting to bewilderment that the high-tech solution to the Scud threat we had been assured was foolproof, had failed even before the fighting began.” Not for the first time, when there is no alternative, the high command turned to Special Forces to salvage the situation, in this case to track and kill the Scuds before they could strike Israel or Saudi Arabia.

SAS patrols, with virtually no time for preparation, were hurled at the problem as the air offensive started in January 1991. A senior officer later told one of his men: “I would have sacrificed a squadron of men for a Scud.” This was a desert war tailored for the SAS, yet it was to prove a turning point for the regiment, in the wrong direction. Lack of reliable radios, GPS satnav devices, rescue beacons, detailed maps, night vision goggles, weapons, and desert vehicles put the three SAS squadrons into the field to roam around almost randomly looking for targets of opportunity. Frontline reconnaissance was in the hands of U.S. Special Forces. The SAS was increasingly starved of resources while being maintained as a propaganda weapon by successive British governments. It was a pattern to be repeated after 2003 in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Texas, the syndrome is known as “all hat and no cattle.”

In 1991, three eight-man patrols were to cover Iraqi movements in a “Scud box” of 340 square miles in Western Iraq. Around fourteen mobile missile launchers were thought to be in the area. RAF Chinooks attempted to place the three teams at twenty-mile intervals in the box, around 180 miles inside Iraqi territory, on a north-south axis. By this time, Scuds were hitting the suburbs of Tel Aviv and there was a real danger that Israel might hit back with nuclear weapons.

The SAS commander of the South road watch team did not release the Chinook before he had checked the ground in which he would operate. A wigwam parliament of the team concluded instantly that this was a potential death trap. There was no hope of concealment. The team returned to base. The Central Road Watch team called down an A-10 air attack by USAF on an Iraqi radar station. Flawed communications meant that the team was almost hit in the bombing that followed. After a journey through four freezing nights, this group turned up on the Saudi border, suffering, in some cases, from frostbite and exposure. Road Watch South, known by its call-sign as Bravo Two Zero, agreed to go into action in this wilderness on foot. It was an unwise decision if this was meant to be an offensive mission, rather than simply to maintain a road watch from a fixed position near the landing zone. Each man was carrying around 200 pounds of equipment which had to be hauled to the nearest viable laying-up position in a wadi. One of those involved, known as Chris Ryan, says that the purpose was to set up a ten-day observation post overlooking a main supply route.
²²²
“Mike (Kiwi) Coburn,” a New Zealander on the team, recalls that there were no vehicles left, so, said Sergeant Vincent Phillips, “It’s going to be a case of using the good old size nines” (boots). Staff Sergeant “Andy McNab,” commanding the patrol, suggests that the decision to move on foot was a collective one because, “since our mission required us to stay in the same area for a long time, our best form of defense was going to be concealment and vehicles wouldn’t help us with that at all.” McNab also quotes a briefing given by Phillips (who died on the operation): “The options are to patrol in on foot, take vehicles, or have a heli drop-off.”
²²³
There is nothing in his assertion to suggest that the SAS’s favorite mode of transport in the desert, the long-wheelbase Land Rover, known as the “pinkie,” was not available or that the choice of size nine boots was forced on the patrol as a result, yet again, of equipment shortages.

Once inserted, the patrol was soon spotted by local civilians and came under fire from an Iraqi unit armed with triple-A heavy machine guns. The SAS men fled north. Rescue contingency plans failed completely. As one of the survivors told the author: “The truth is, they [U.K. Special Forces] didn’t have the resources to support the patrols they put on the ground.” After thirty miles on foot, in a blizzard, the team lost its first man, Sergeant Vince Phillips. Disoriented, he collapsed and died of hypothermia. To reduce the risk of detection, the rest of the team split into units of four, two, and even one man. This individual, known as “Chris (Geordie) Ryan,” was a reservist who covered 117 miles in seven nights’ marching and seven days’ concealment before reaching the sanctuary of Syria. Corporal Steven Lane died of exposure after swimming 400 yards across an icy River Euphrates. Trooper Robert Consiglio died of gunshot wounds while covering the escape of two of his comrades. The five others including Staff Sergeant “McNab” and “Coburn” were taken prisoner. “Ryan,” “McNab,” and “Coburn” were later to follow the example of the British commander in the Gulf, Lieutenant-General Sir Peter de la Billiere, in writing books about their service and SAS activities in this war.

The ripples from that would grow to become a shock wave that changed profoundly the nature of the SAS. A carefully worded legal judgment reported: “At the end of 1992 General Sir Peter de la Billiere, commanding officer of the British forces in the Gulf War and himself a former commanding officer of 22 SAS, wrote a book about the war which included a chapter on the Bravo Two Zero patrol. This appears to have been the first time that a member or former member of the SAS had published an account of one of its operations. Until then, the ethos of the regiment had been for its members to preserve total secrecy.”
²²⁴
In fact, other retired SAS officers of earlier generations had written about operations in which they were involved, such as the Oman campaign. In 1996, the SAS introduced a service contract enforceable at civil law, in addition to Britain’s already tight secrecy laws, to halt the flow of post-Iraq and other SAS memoirs. Under new management, the regiment’s headquarters then tried to make the 1996 in-house rule retrospective, binding soldiers who had retired long before 1996.
²²⁵

What made the case of De La Billiere (DLB to his friends) special was that his was the first inside account of an SAS operation after the Gulf War at a time when retired Special Forces veterans with a good story to tell could enter a ready market infested by literary agents waving checkbooks. The Iranian Embassy siege, and my own history of the postwar SAS,
Who Dares Wins
, had clearly signaled that change. Military history was no longer the preserve of the officer class. “McNab’s” account of his disastrous patrol,
Bravo Two Zero
, became a runaway best seller and made him a media lion. It was a very British success.

The toxic controversy that resulted from profitable publication of some works followed by arbitrary suppression of others generated feuds that have damaged SAS morale ever since. As one informed account put it: “Up to fifty former members of the [SAS] regiment have been served with exclusion orders; they have been banned from all Special Forces property, which means they cannot attend reunions, Remembrance Day parades, wedding receptions or even funeral wakes on SAS bases.”
²²⁶
In its attempts to suppress Coburn’s book,
Soldier Five
, the U.K. government spent millions of dollars in courts around the world. It failed. Yet, as the Privy Council judgment cited above demonstrated, this was not an attempt to preserve essential military secrets. The court pointed out that the contract “was intended to prevent disclosures which would not necessarily be in themselves damaging to the public interest and might even be as to matters already in the public domain.
It had the broader object of preventing public controversy which might be damaging to the efficiency of the Special Forces
” [author’s emphasis]. It seemed that after the exposure of the Iranian Embassy siege (a political plus for government) and the Irish War (less good PR) the SAS, under its new management, combining all U.K. Special Forces in one body along lines similar to U.S. Special Operations Command, was a sensitive flower to be sheltered from public controversy at all costs. This was a long way from the regiment’s democratic roots as discovered by the American officer Charlie Beckwith in 1961 and Stirling’s original idea of one company.

After its bad start with Bravo Two Zero in Iraq, the SAS tried again with four mobile fighting columns, each employing a dozen four-wheel-drive vehicles bristling with weapons. A frontal assault, launched on a Scud control complex identified as Victor Two, blew up a control tower while under a hail of enemy fire. After a month in the field, the squadrons were resupplied by a convoy of trucks ninety miles inside Iraq. On 24 February, Special Forces operations were stood down as the major ground offensive by conventional forces stormed across the frontiers of Saudi Arabia and occupied Kuwait. The Pentagon declared a ceasefire four days later.

The SAS claimed four confirmed Scud kills. It could also take credit for two strategic hits during this brief war. One was the capture of a detailed Iraqi army map, taken from a captured artillery officer. The map revealed the current deployment of an entire army division. This and the prisoner were sent back to allied lines by helicopter. American air power decimated the division. The other, less tangible victory was that the presence of Special Forces soldiers deep inside Iraq pressured the Iraqis to pull back their mobile Scuds from positions that endangered Israel.

Some of the lessons of this campaign were disagreeable and not discussed in public, with the exception of the long-serving Ken Connor, who wrote: “The Regiment’s increasingly top-heavy administrative structure meant that, for the first time ever, SAS requests for equipment were subject to interpretation by staff officers who often had no experience whatsoever of special forces operations. If the officer decided that the equipment requested—Global Positioning Systems, claymore mines, .203 grenades, cold-weather gear and the rest—was excessive or unnecessary, it would not be supplied.”
²²⁷
Connor’s candor was not welcomed. The SAS regimental journal,
Mars and Minerva
, barked: “This book should not have been published.” It was an odd response from a regiment whose unusual tradition was to think laterally and learn from its mistakes.