Michael Asher (6 page)

Hexamine cooker about the size of a Walkman, some kind of shelter � a poncho, bivvy�bag or space-blanket � mugs, mess tins, water-bottles, an individualized escape kit containing useful items such as waterproofed matches, and dry rations for twenty-four hours. The radio had been dumped, and when McNab asked Legs about it, the patrol signaller replied that it was in his Bergen, which had 'probably been shot to fuck by now anyway'. McNab thought the loss of the radio no problem at all, because they had their four TACBE radio beacons and could get a fifteen-second response from patrolling AWACS, although both he and Ryan had pulled the tabs on their beacons during the contact and no response had yet come. McNab wasn't worried about navigation either, because Coburn (`Mark') had a Magellan GPS unit. What they did not have, though, was what they needed most: motor vehicles. The Saudi border, beyond which lay their forward oper-ating base (FOB), was about three hundred kilometres to the south, while the Syrian border lay only 178 kilometres to the west. Jordan was nearer than either, but the SAS had been warned not to head there as the Jordanians sup�ported Iraq and had recently handed over a downed American airman to the Iraqis. As the patrol rallied after the attack, McNab says, he decided that their best option was to tab (march) west to Syria, though first they would put in a dog's leg feint to give their pursuers the impres�sion they were going south. Even disregarding Abbas's and Hayil's testimony that there were no pursuers, and that no Iraqi vehicles turned up until about seven hours after the firelight, McNab's account is problematical. According to his own story, the Chinook was due to fly in at 0400 hours the following morning to the drop-off point, which according to his sketch-map lay twenty kilometres due south. If this was correct, the SAS had at least nine hours to make the heli-copter rendezvous � a breeze for an unladen patrol. Why did McNab decide suddenly to head for Syria if, as far as he knew, the helicopter would be coming in to rendez�vous due south of them in nine hours' time? The answer may lie in Ryan's account. If, as Ryan and the Bedouin all testified, the helicopter RV actually lay only a kilometre from the site of the ambush, and if, as Ryan says, it was timed at midnight, then it had now certainly been com�promised by the enemy. Had they been able to make the RV unscathed, Ryan thought, they could have held off the enemy till nightfall, but if the Chinook came in now, it would be spotted by the Iraqis and perhaps shot down. As it turned out � perhaps fortunately for the RAF � the Chinook did not arrive that night, but without radio con�tact, McNab could not possibly have known this at the time. The decision to make for Syria is also questionable for two other reasons. First, although Ryan said that they had no written escape and evasion plan, Peter Ratcliffe, the Regimental Sergeant Major at the time, has stated for the record that there was such a written plan, and that it was filed with the Operations Officer at the FOB, al-Jauf. The plan, devised by McNab himself, was that, on com�promise, Bravo Two Zero would head south for Saudi Arabia. Though Ryan admits that to head back to Saudi was the Regiment's official policy, he suggests, as does McNab, that the patrol had decided to make for Syria before they even left base. Moreover, their attitude to the escape and evasion plan, like the question of sleeping-bags, demonstrates a sad underestimation of the problems of the desert. Ryan says that he had considered packing a pair of shorts, because, talking the matter over at the FOB, they had decided that, walking and jogging, they could make the Syrian border in two nights. Such a plan made no provision whatsoever for the inevitable water-loss that such exertion would bring. A man walk�ing in the desert will require at least five litres of water a day in the cold season to maintain homeostasis. Running, he would obviously require much more � perhaps ten litres. For two days, each man would need twenty litres, weighing twenty kilos, plus his weapon, ammunition and other necessities, adding up to a minimum of a further twenty kilos. Running with forty kilos would require even more water, because of the extra exertion, and so the weight would keep spiralling upwards, and the speed of march down. It is this equation which makes travelling long distances on foot in the desert such a hazard. If the patrol had decided to change the E and E plan at al-Jauf, why didn't they tell someone? Ryan and McNab indicate that they did mention it to one of the intelligence staff, but there was no guarantee that the man would even be present when they had to instigate it. In normal cir�cumstances, it would have been perfectly acceptable to adjust the written plan, even on the ground, but this was a highly dubious strategy for a patrol that was out of con-tact with its base and had no means of informing it of the change. Though Coburn has accused the SAS command of betraying the patrol by failing to send in a rescue mis-sion, in fact two helicopters � one British and one American � did fly in and search the area on the night of 26 January. By that time, of course, the patrol was on its way to Syria and out of the area specified on its own writ- ten escape and evasion plan: there was no way the heli pilots could have known that the plan had been changed. In heading for Syria instead of Saudi Arabia, as Ratcliffe has commented, 'McNab disobeyed his own orders.' The second dubious aspect of the plan to go for Syria lay in its practicability. The route the patrol eventually chose � north towards the Euphrates Valley, then due west towards the Syrian border � was certain to take them into highly populated regions. In the Middle East, river valleys are always densely inhabited, and likely to be the sites of industry, military defences and high concentra�tions of troops. The chances of an eight-man patrol slipping intact through those areas were not good. Saudi Arabia was further, but the way there was all sparsely inhabited desert, and the very fact that the Chinook on which they had infiltrated had made it in unscathed sug�gested that the area to the south was clear. Why, again, the decision to go for Syria, when all the odds appeared stacked against them in that direction? ACCORDING TO THE DRAWN-TO-SCALE sketch- map in McNab's book, the first leg of the escape and evasion route took the patrol twenty kilometres due south, though in the text, McNab says it was twenty-five kilometres. Abbas and Hayil had told me that the team had run off to the south-west, and Ryan's map shows a squiggle going first a few kilometres south-east, then south-west, then due west, and finally north. What both Ryan and McNab do agree on is that their objective was to circle back to the road on which Abbas's house was sit- uated and then head north into the desert beyond in an attempt to put their pursuers off their trail. With such conflicting accounts to contend with, I knew I could not hope to find the exact route the patrol had followed, but I could certainly get an idea of the country by walking due south. My first day's walk almost turned into a disaster. From Ryan's and McNab's accounts, I had got the impression that the landscape south of the road was uniformly flat; it was, in fact, extremely rugged, with rocky spurs and whaleback ridges cutting across it from west and east. This was the same area McNab said they had crossed going north on the night of 22/23 January, carrying 95 kilos per man, and which the blurb of his book describes as 'flat desert'. The going underfoot was difficult, the sur�face a rubble of polished limestone pebble-dash with beds of bristling desert grasses and occasional soft beds of pillow-sand thick with tamarisk and brilliant scarlet desert roses. After several kilometres the land dipped into a wide, sandy gulch: the dried bed of the great Wadi Hawran, whose banks were lined with strips of wheat Abbas's family had planted. I understood now why Abbas needed his bulldozers. It was immensely hot, with a baking wind blowing in my face � conditions very different from the ones Bravo Two Zero had endured. I was dressed in a . military-style shamagh, an SAS smock of 1942 vintage �a genuine antique with Bakelite buttons � tracksuit bot�toms and desert boots. I was also wearing an escape-belt of the type the patrol would have carried, with water- bottles, dry rations, a bivvy-bag, map, compass and GPS, and a walkie-talkie to keep in touch with the vehicles car�rying the crew and the Iraqi minders, who were supposed to remain within a kilometre of me. I crossed the wadi and struggled up into the hilly coun�try beyond and had already covered about twelve kilometres from the LUP when things started to go wrong. Squatting by a red-hot cairn of stones for a drink and a piece of pre-cooked flapjack, I received a message from my associate, Nigel Morris, who was with the con�voy, saying that the GMC vehicles were unable to cross the wadi and, in fact, had got stuck in the sand. Nigel told me that only the lighter pick-up belonging to the military escort could get across, and suggested sending it to fetch me. I cursed the GMCs, which I had never trusted as real rough-country vehicles, and told him not to bother. I was just about to add that I would make for his position when the walkie-talkie went dead. Suddenly, without warning, I was experiencing precisely the same problem that Bravo Two Zero had experienced: I was totally cut off from my support in the desert. I had told Nigel not to send the military escort vehicle, but had not been able to say that I was heading back to the convoy. Now I was stuck. If the vehicle did not come as I'd instructed, I would be sepa�rated from the convoy. If I returned, I had no assurance that they would still be there. I decided to go back, and by the time I had trudged the three kilometres up hill and down dale in the dehydrating wind, my water was down to a few mouthfuls. When I arrived back at the place where I had last seen the vehi- cles, there was nobody there. This was a blow My water would soon be finished and I knew that in temperatures like these � mid-forties Celsius � a human being without water would be fried to a crisp in twenty-four hours. I was in no immediate danger because I could have walked the nine kilometres back to Abbas's farm, but I was certain the vehicles had gone on south-west, probably looking for an easier way across the wadi. After a few moments' rest I decided to return to the cairn from which I had made my last transmission. The blast furnace wind was in my face again, and I knew I had to conserve what little water I had. As I stumbled wearily up and down the ridges, it suddenly occurred to me that water must have played a vital role in the patrol's escape and evasion plan. Indeed, Ryan admits that their original plan of making a dash for Syria directly in run-ning shorts had to be modified to one taking them north to the Euphrates and then west along the river because they had dumped their jerrycans with their Bergens and now had only a few litres of water each. Though it was bitterly cold then, the patrol was moving very fast on foot and losing large quantities of moisture which had to be replaced. As McNab himself points out, once a body has lost five per cent of its weight through dehydration, it begins to seize up, and if the deficit is not made up at this point, death will quickly follow. I did not find the vehicles, but I did see a shadow on the desert surface some kilometres away which looked like some kind of habitation. As the minutes ticked by and I moved closer, I realized that it was a nest of Bedouin tents, with a three-ton truck parked outside. By now my mouth was parched dry and full of mucus and I felt exhausted from moisture-loss; my feet were staggering and stumbling over the stones. The wind felt like a heavy overcoat on my back, a weight pressing down on me, and my breath was evaporating like a vapour. I could almost feel the moisture being sucked from my pores. The tents were perhaps a kilometre away, but that felt like infinity in this stifling wind. I must have been about five hundred metres from the tents when a spectral white figure appeared. He held something shiny in his hand, and for a moment I feared it was a pistol. The Bedouin are hos�pitable people, but after what had happened near here ten years previously, you couldn't blame them for being on their guard. Even from that distance it must have been obvious that I was a stranger, dressed in quasi-military gear, and after all, this was still a country at war. I con�tinued warily, and it was only as I got close that I realized the figure was a Bedouin boy and that what he was car�rying was an aluminium bowl of water. With the hawk eyes of the Bedouin he must, have perceived from more than a kilometre away that I was suffering from thirst, and he had ventured out into the heat to meet me with this offering. The water was cool and clear � and was probably the best water I have tasted in my life. After I had drunk, the boy led me to a tent where I was received graciously by an oldish man in a dishdasha and headcloth. Luckily, he had been at the feast at Abbas's place the previous night and recognized me. Within min�utes he was offering me tea and coffee, and shortly after brought me a tray laden with goat's milk cheese, butter, ghee and flaps of unleavened bread. As I ate, I reflected on how welcoming the Bedouin were � probably the most welcoming people on earth. One of the problems the SAS had in the desert was that they regarded it as a hostile environment. Even Peter Ratcliffe admitted that 'none of us felt completely at ease in the desert, for all our training, and for some of us years of experience.' This unease was exacerbated by the fact that there were now few Arabic speakers in the Regiment, though back in Dhofar in the 1970s, there had been many who spoke the language fluently. Bravo Two Zero included not a single Arabic speaker, though even a lim�ited knowledge of the language might have enabled them all to escape and might even have saved their lives. True, McNab's patrol had been compromised by Bedouin, but Abbas insisted that they had attacked the interlopers solely because they felt their home was under threat. The SAS had discussed the problem of what to do about the Bedouin before being deployed in the desert, and some individuals had. been in favour of killing or abducting any tribesman who saw them. In the event, this never happened, because there were enough moderate souls in the Regiment to realize that the tribesmen didn't have much interest in politics or war or who was fighting whom, as long as they were left alone. A Bedouin's loy�alty is always to his tribe, and though he may
be forced to work for someone else, or do so for money, his employer will always be regarded as a foreigner, even if it is his own government. 'After a few chance encounters with the Bedou,' one sergeant of A Squadron wrote, 'they realized that the patrols were treating them a lot better than the Iraqis. To my knowledge they never compromised us �we were never followed up by Iraqis after meeting Bedou � they just let life go as it was. They stopped and chatted with us to pass the time of day. We'd give them tea, food and blankets, they'd give us information about where the Iraqis were and then they would leave. In the end, if there were Bedou about we actively let them know we were there rather than trying to hide.' " Hiding like bandits in a wadi only 600 metres from a house, Bravo Two Zero were certain to be seen as a threat, yet even then Abbas and his two companions had given them the benefit of the doubt by firing warning shots, following Bedouin custom. If the patrol had kept its cool and realized that those first two shots had not been aimed at them, or simply waved and made some answer in Arabic, they might have got away, or at least gained the advantage. As it was, their nerves drawn tight from the knowledge that they were alone and cut off in the fearful void of the Syrian Desert, they had over�reacted, and in the end their own fear of the environment had defeated them. After I had eaten and drunk tea, I explained my predicament to the old man and at once he offered to take me back to Abbas's farm in his truck. I accepted, even though I knew I could offer him nothing in return � to have offered money to a true Bedouin would have been a deadly insult. As we bounced and bumped back towards my starting-off point, I decided that this must not happen again. I could find my way across the desert all right, but the vehicles would not be able to follow me without a guide who knew the area like the back of his hand. By the time we had arrived back at Abbas's place I knew I had already met the person I needed: the ideal guide would be Abbas bin Fadhil himself, the 'idiot on the digger' who had turned out to be anything but an idiot, the man who had compromised the Bravo Two Zero patrol. CHAPTER nine AT THE FARM, ABBAS AND HIS brother welcomed me enthusiastically, ushered me into the guest hall and brought tea. They chortled when I told them of the mis-adventure. 'There are very few places where you can cross the Wadi Hawran with a car,' Abbas said. 'And you have to know where they are. Only the Bedouin know. I wanted to tell you that yesterday and to offer to be your rafiq, but you seemed so set on doing things your own way that I didn't say anything.' I nodded, realizing that I had been so determined not to be deflected that I had forgotten the Bedouin tradition of taking a rafiq or companion from the local tribe when crossing their territory. The office of rafiq was almost sacred to the Bedouin. He acted not only as a guide, but also as a sort of ambassador from the local tribe, franking the foreign party across its neighbourhood. Once he had 'eaten bread and salt' with his travelling companions, he would be obliged to defend them to the death, even against his own people, and to steal from them or injure them in any way was considered bowqa or treachery � the worst crime in the book as far as nomads were concerned. If a man couldn't be trusted as a rafiq, he was worthless and would soon find himself being avoided by his rela�tives. In a Bedouin tribe, no one actually had the authority to 'expel' a tribesman, but people would simply stop cooperating with him, which meant that he was on his own. Traditionally, to be 'on your own' in the desert was a death sentence, because it meant that blood ene�mies could bump you off without fear of revenge. I acknowledged my fault and asked Abbas if he would consider acting as guide and rafiq for the convoy in his own vehicle. He accepted enthusiastically. 'I think you should wait here for a couple of hours,' he said. 'If they don't return we'll take my pick-up and go to look for them: There's no chance we'll lose them. I know the country here blindfold � I was brought up here. My brother and I know all the country as far as Damascus in the north, Amman in the west and Kuwait in the south. You get to learn a lot when you travel by camel, and that's what we did when we were boys. We used to smuggle sheep across the borders. In those days, if you were a Bedouin no one asked you what country you belonged to, because the Bedouin had no country. The Anazeh � our tribal confederation � used to move their herds right from Syria down to Saudi Arabia at different times of the year. It's different now, of course.' While we waited, I went over Abbas's account of the Bravo Two Zero story once again with him and Hayil, but the details did not alter. `What's the matter?' Abbas enquired at one stage. `Don't you believe us?' `It's not that,' I said. 'But I have to be sure. Are you cer�tain that there were no Iraqi soldiers involved?' Abbas pointed solemnly at the ceiling. 'As God is my witness,' he said. 'Bedouin do not lie. It is the greatest of all sins. Why, even when I met the President himself I told him the truth.' I was startled. 'What?' I said. 'You mean you met Saddam Hussein?' `Yes,' Abbas said. 'It was while the war was on. He heard about our story � how we had spotted the com�mandos and taken them on alone, and he wanted to hear it from us and to reward us. We met him in Baghdad and he was very polite and friendly. There were two other people there: a man called al-Haj Abdallah from Ani, who belongs to the same tribe as I do, and who was involved in capturing one of the commandos, and another called Adrian Badawi, a Christian from Mosul, who had been hijacked by them.' I gasped. Adnan Badawi was the same man who had told his story of being hijacked by British commandos to an Iraqi newspaper � I had the very article in my bag. This revelation opened up an entirely new can of worms, though. I had left Baghdad thinking no one had ever heard of Bravo Two Zero, and now I was learning that its defeat had been celebrated by Saddam himself. 'What did he give you?' I asked. `He didn't give me anything personally, because he con�sidered my father the head of the family. He gave him a Toyota pick-up � a brand-new one.' `Good grief.' As I thought about it, I realized that Abbas's admission did alter the picture significantly. It meant that he had been celebrated as a hero in his own country, just as McNab and Ryan had in theirs It gave them a motive for exaggerating what they had done. On the other hand, I reasoned, it also tended to confirm their story. Why should Saddam have rewarded them if the major part in the drama had been played by the Iraqi army? `What did you mean,' I asked, 'when you said that you told Saddam the truth?' Abbas shrugged. 'He asked me why I did it, expecting me to say that I did it for the country. I told him that I did it because those men were threatening my home and fam�ily. Like I said, it is wrong to tell a lie.' THE CONVOY TURNED UP LATER that afternoon, and Abu Omar was so furious that I had got separated from the vehicles for several hours that he insisted that we all returned to Baghdad. He was, he said, not happy with the conditions he had to work under anyway � he didn't like the food, couldn't sleep at night, and had not been able to have a shower in the past two days. He hadn't brought with him so much as a blanket or a water-bottle, and I wondered what kind of army officer would venture into the desert so unprepared. After a blazing row in Arabic, during which both of us probably said things we regretted later, the rotund Ali came to my aid and smoothed it over. To my surprise, he told me that he was the senior of the two minders and took priority over Abu Omar, so was perfectly within his rights to overrule him. Abu Omar, he informed me expansively, was only here to make sure we did not film where we were not allowed to. He did tell me that I should not have engaged Abbas as a guide without consulting him first, but in view of the problems of the day he thought it was, generally speak-ing, a good move, and would let it ride. The following morning, with Abbas now leading the convoy in his Toyota pick-up, I set of on foot from the Bedouin tent I had arrived at the previous day. It was still hot, but the wind had dropped and the going evened out into a flat, stony plain, melting at the horizon into a radiant sky. There were the tents of Bedouin families like dark stains on the landscape and, in places, thousands of black dots that were their flocks of sheep. Now the rough country was behind us, the terrain was ideal for four�wheel-drive vehicles, and I wondered again why McNab and his team had elected to go without them on this operation. Ryan points out that B Squadron, being the reserve unit, had no proper desert vehicles like the Land Rover One-Tens or 'Pinkies' which A and D Squadrons had brought with them from Britain. The only vehicles avail�able were what they derisively called Dinkies': short-wheel-base Land Rover 90s without weapon-mountings. They had tried these vehicles out in their training ground in Oman and pronounced them 'crap' � it was impossible to fire a general-purpose machine-gun (GPMG) from them, and since there were no safety-belts, when put into a racing reverse, the passengers would be thrown out. Stan himself had been flung out and narrowly escaped being badly injured on a training run in Oman. Ryan admits that the team were alarmed at the idea of having to use these vehicles behind enemy lines. Of course, they would have been better than nothing. The main problem was striking a balance between escape and compromise. 'The most important reason for taking a Land Rover,' Peter Ratcliffe wrote, 'is that it provides a rapid means of escape from a contact, and the chance to return to the objective at a later date. Retreat-ing on foot with full kit is never fast, or easy. And that means that in a situation where your patrol is threatened, the only way out is to ditch most of the gear and run . . . Even if you managed to get clear, however, there is no way you can ever make another attempt to fulfil the mission . . . ' 18 If Abbas's claim that no Iraqi military pursued the patrol was correct, they could quite easily have reached a vehicle cache on the night of 24 January and beat a retreat to the border. The Iraqi air force was laying low anyway, and they were unlikely to have been hit from the air. Even at thirty kilometres per hour (twenty mph), the patrol could have made Saudi Arabia by vehicle in a day's hard drive. They would also have been able to carry the cold-weather equipment and supplies they needed more than anything in the Arctic temperatures, and enough heavy weaponry � Milan missiles, Browning machine-guns, mortars � to give a good account of themselves if things went noisy. McNab writes that the vehicles would have stuck out like sore thumbs, or 'like balls on a bulldog', as he puts it, yet the country around the MSR was very broken, as I had discovered, full of wadis and re-entrants, and didn't flatten out for at least twelve kilometres to the south. There would have been plenty of places in which to con�ceal Land Rovers in that area. McNab, of course, did not know this before the mission, and had judged the ground from satellite pictures, which showed height but not depressions. 'Once you're on the ground,' Peter Ratcliffe wrote, 'you can usually find depressions to hide the vehi�cle in.' 19 This was certainly the experience of the Long Range Desert Group, which in 1942 had carried out vehicle-supported OPs in North Africa in country as stark and featureless as the Syrian Desert, and had never been compromised. SAS founder David Stirling had realized that foot patrols wouldn't work in the desert the hard way, when, on the Regiment's very first operation, things had gone badly awry and two-thirds of a squadron, dropped in the desert by parachute, had died of thirst. As both Lawrence and Stirling knew, and as I had personally learned years ago, mobility is essential in the desert, where anything that stands still, dies. The distances involved are too vast for human legs alone: in summer or winter, in heat or cold, a man in the desert on foot unsup�ported has virtually no chance. The Commanding Officer of 22 SAS had probably realized this when, on 21 January, the day before the mission, he tried to persuade the patrol to take Land Rovers. Peter Ratcliffe, who encountered the CO that day 'mad as hell' after his abortive discussion with Bravo Two Zero, felt that McNab was playing silly buggers. Asked by his boss to go and knock some sense into him, the RSM suggested strongly that McNab should take the Colonel's advice. 'If it comes to a firefight, (motor vehi�cles) could well save your arse,' he told him. 'So . . . don't be a fool.' Ratcliffe noted that the rest of the patrol, including Ryan, seemed to support the decision. It was a course, the former RSM wrote, which he could not com�prehend, but could do little to change. Although he outranked McNab and could theoretically have ordered him to take the vehicles, in SAS tradition, patrol com�manders make their own decisions as to how they will go about their task, since they have to live with those deci�sions on the ground. `I believed then � and I still do,' Ratcliffe wrote, 'that most, if not all, of Bravo Two Zero's misfortunes resulted from "McNab's" refusal to take advice before he even left base.' He was incensed that McNab made no reference to the advice given to him by the CO and Ratcliffe himself before the mission in his book Bravo Two Zero. `Considering what were, I'm convinced, the results of not following our advice,' Ratcliffe wrote, 'I find it odd that he didn't feel the meetings worth mentioning. After all, the failure of that mission ultimately cost the lives of three men, and led to four others being captured and tor�tured. That's a casualty rate of nearly ninety per cent.'� It might be worth adding that while another B Squadron patrol, Bravo Three Zero, also declined to take a vehicle, the patrol commander aborted the mission immediately on seeing the terrain. The only B Squadron patrol to take a Land Rover, Bravo One Niner, was indeed compromised, but, thanks to its vehicles, man-aged to escape. THE ONLY THING THAT SLOWED my progress was the hospitality of the Bedouin whose camps lay in my path. If I passed within 300 metres of a tent, a dog would bark and soon a dark-swathed figure would appear and insist that I come in to think tea. Traditionally, Bedouin are very prickly about hospitality and to pass a tent with�out stopping is considered an insult. Although it would be unheard of for a Bedouin to offer violence to someone who refuses his entreaties, his last resort would be the