On 5 May 1980, just before 7:30 PM, the British SAS Special Forces executed a strategic operation known as the Iranian embassy siege in central London. A group of six terrorists were holding 25 hostages. Their leader, Oan Ali Mohamed, had thrown the body of one of the hostages out of the embassy an hour earlier after negotiations with the police had failed and threatened to shoot them all if they did not comply with his demands. He demanded the release of 91 prisoners who had campaigned for the secession of his province from Iran. Half an hour later, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave the order for SAS Special Forces to storm the embassy.
When their commander, Michael Rose (who fourteen years later commanded UNPROFOR troops in Bosnia during the Yugoslav wars), judged that waiting was becoming dangerous, he ordered the Red and Blue to attack. The plan was for the first group of four Special Forces to descend from the roof of the embassy by ropes, and the second to blow out the second floor windows where the terrorists were holding hostages with a hand grenade. Meanwhile, Oan Ali Mohamed was negotiating with the police by telephone.
One of the Specialists of the first group to descend from the roof got entangled in the ropes. His colleagues rescued him, but in the process one of them broke a window frame with his foot. The terrorist leader, surprised by the noise above him, dropped the receiver of his phone and ran up the stairs to the second floor to check what was happening. But it was too late for him and his cronies: SAS special forces had already entered the embassy through the windows. For the next seventeen minutes, the building was filled with gunfire and grenade explosions.
After 17 minutes, the noise stopped. Although Commander Rose feared that the terrorists would shoot the hostages if things went badly, his well-trained men managed to rescue 24 of them, killing only one and seriously wounding two.
On the other side, four terrorists were permanently killed in a shoot-out, two of them trying to mix with the hostages and smuggle them out of the embassy. Both were exposed. The first, with a hand grenade in his hand, started to threaten to blow himself up, but fell down the stairs during the scuffle and was shot dead in the witness box without having managed to activate the grenade beforehand. The other was identified only in the fading daylight in the Embassy’s back courtyard and taken to prison. After his trial, he spent the next 27 years there.
Once again in its thirty-nine-year history, the SAS has proven its effectiveness in the fight against terrorism, this time at home.
David Stirling and the Iranian Embassy Siege
At first sight, a spectacular hostage rescue in the middle of London may seem a far cry from the Western Desert on the border between Egypt and Libya, where the first SAS unit was formed. But it is only at first sight. The Special Forces of many European militaries began active training after 1972 for the sometimes filigree fight against terrorism, in which the most powerful weapon is timely and verified information.
Then, during the Munich Summer Olympics, members of the Palestinian terrorist organisation Black September, with logistical support from German neo-Nazis, armed with weapons, easily entered the Olympic Village and captured 11 Israeli athletes in their hotel rooms. In a bloody drama, every last one of them was slaughtered in the Olympic Village and later at the airport during a failed police rescue attempt, which also resulted in the deaths of five of the eight terrorists. Two months after the Munich attack, the then West German Federal Police set up its first special counter-terrorism unit, GSG-9, which is still in operation today.
The British SAS (Special Air Service) was established as an elite military special unit in July 1941, thirty-one years earlier. It was created not to fight terrorism as we have known it in Europe since the 1970s, but to smuggle its small, barely four-strong units far into the rear of German and Italian troops in the Sahara Sea sands of the Western Desert on the Libyan-Egyptian border during the Second World War. And inflicted maximum damage on the enemy.
In the summer of 1941, the British Army and its allies in Australia, New Zealand, India and other parts of the UK were getting bogged down in North Africa. Having succeeded in driving the Italian 10th Army out of Libya’s westernmost province, and later completely defeating it, capturing tens of thousands of its soldiers, Hitler sent General Rommel to Libya with strong German reinforcements. Nicknamed the Desert Fox, Rommel launched an offensive six weeks after his arrival in North Africa, pushing the British back into Egypt with his mechanised units.
The British attempted a counter-offensive, but failed. They suffered heavy losses in tank battles in the Western Desert. Something had to be done. The only British enclave that continued to resist the Germans in Libya was the city of Tobruk.
At the same time, David Stirling, a 25-year-old Scottish commando of noble birth, was lying on one of the metal bunk beds at the British Military Hospital in Alexandria, suffering from injuries sustained in a parachute jump accident. He had a lot of time on his hands and a lot to think about. Mostly about why the British army in North Africa had reached an impasse.
The main feature of warfare in the Western Desert was the vast distances involved. For example, the German headquarters in Tripoli, Libya, and the British headquarters in Egypt were separated by more than 1500 kilometres. Stirling understood that this meant that Rommel’s supply routes were vulnerable enough to be cut. The same was true of arms and ammunition depots and military airfields. However, as Rommel’s army was alert to any possible landings on the Mediterranean coasts, it was virtually impossible to destroy them with the help of the British navy, and the navy had more than enough to do just controlling the still powerful Italian battle fleet and supplying the rebellious Tobruk and Malta.
Stirling concluded that the enemy’s weak points could be destroyed by small and mobile commando units parachuting out of planes and sneaking undetected into the enemy’s rear. They could destroy a significant part of their military infrastructure with diversionary actions.
But the 25-year-old commando, the Catholic-raised, Cambridge-educated son of a Scottish brigadier-general, had a problem. He realised that in the complex labyrinth of military bureaucracy, his idea would get him nowhere. So he decided to try it at the very top.
One day he turned up at the British Middle East Force headquarters and tried to get past the guards and secretaries to the Commander-in-Chief of the British Middle East Force, General Auchinleck. He was unsuccessful, but as he fled from office to office, running from the guards who were chasing him through the corridors, he bumped into his first deputy, General Neil Ritchie.
Ritchie was clearly in a good mood that day, because he listened to Stirling and his idea. After a few minutes, and after reading a handwritten memorandum in which Stirling outlined the composition and operation of the new Special Forces, he was enthusiastic about them. A few days later, he convinced General Auchinleck of the soundness of Stirling’s idea, and he signed the order for the new units, agreeing to recruit men for them from the best-trained British commandos. The first SAS unit was born. It was late summer 1941.
Operation Crusader
Stirling, who had permission to recruit six officers and 60 other commandos to the SAS, began to gather his close associates. The first to join him was Jock Lewes, who was renowned for his organisational and logistical skills, and who had already carried out effective sabotage operations in Tobruk, Libya. Next on his list was Colonel-General Blair Paddy Mayne, who had been one of Ireland’s best rugby players before the war, and who had made a name for himself in the army for always being ready for battle and for fighting in Syria against French Vichy troops who were on the side of the Nazis.
The first SAS outpost was Kibrit Air Base, near Cairo. There, one of the friendly New Zealand troops, with a few pirate tricks, had their tents and some other basic equipment stolen, as they had nowhere to sleep. Despite the raised eyebrows of the New Zealanders, the wily Scotsman, after exposing their petty theft, managed, with much persuasion and some Quarto-piracy manoeuvring, to get the New Zealanders to let them have the tents. Although they did not give the impression that they believed his claim that they had received such an order from the very top. In any case, it was simply not appropriate for an elite special unit to sleep under the stars, even desert ones. Prestige was an important thing in any army; in the British army especially so.
Stirling had a very unconventional training plan for his men over the next few weeks, as he wanted his units to be the best of the best. They were trained in parachute jumping, learning about the enemy’s firearms and learning techniques for surviving alone for long periods in the desert. The men were divided into small groups of four. Two, otherwise independent units, always worked in pairs. Each of the commandos in each unit was a specialist in one or two areas: one, for example, was in charge of logistics and the acquisition of sensitive information, another was a paramedic and jeep driver, a third an explosives expert and a fourth in radio communications and planning diversionary operations in the field.
One of the characteristics of these small four-man units was that they had no leader, but each man did his own part of the job and the rest was decided by the headquarters. The insignia of the SAS units was a sword with wings, with a writing underneath: He who dares, wins.
Stirling and his men soon got their first chance to prove themselves. In November 1941, the British were preparing a new offensive called Operation Crusader. General Auchinleck intended to liberate Tobruk from the German ring and to reconquer other parts of the Libyan western province of Cyrenaica. His plan was for four SAS units to parachute into the vicinity of two German airfields at Tmimi and Ghazala two days before the start of the operation and destroy as many German aircraft as possible in a diversionary action using high explosives. Once the Special Forces had completed their mission, the mechanised units of the Long Range Desert Group would transport them back to base in their vehicles.
On the evening of 16 November 1941, their part of Operation Crusader began. Unfortunately for them, a sandstorm hit the Western Desert that day. Stirling was determined to carry out the operation anyway, so he ordered the five aircraft with his men on board to fly anyway.
His Special Forces were lost in a sandstorm after jumping out of their planes, losing most of the equipment they needed to carry out their operations. The diversionary attack on the two airfields was called off, and 44 of Stirling’s men fell into German captivity. The remaining 19 were found in the desert before the German patrols by the Desert Long Range Group and taken in their own vehicles to one of the oases, where, completely exhausted, they recovered at least a little.
After receiving the bad news, Stirling feared that the Operation Crusader debacle would lead to the disbanding of his forces. But the generals had other things on their minds in the midst of an offensive that had also gone wrong, and gave the Scotsman a chance to try again. Brigadier Denis Reed asked him to have the rest of his men try to destroy Agadabia airfield near Benghazi, Libya, before the attack. Stirling added to his original plan to launch sabotage attacks on two other airfields along the Mediterranean coast.
In the following days, his right-hand man Paddy Mayne and a few men managed to sneak into one of the airfields and blow up 37 German planes. When they ran out of explosives, Mayn climbed into other planes and smashed instruments in the cockpits. Another SAS unit also managed to blow up some planes at another airfield. Only Agadabia airport, the third target, was empty. In the following weeks, Stirling and his assistants attempted to penetrate deeper into enemy territory, with some success. The price for his daring actions was paid by his other close associate, Jock Lewes, who was killed during an Italian bombardment of a column of vehicles in which his unit was trying to smuggle its way to its next target.
Although the SAS’s baptism of fire Operation Crusader began with a fiasco and the enemy’s capture of two-thirds of their Special Forces, these successes justified their continued existence. Stirling, on his return to Cairo, began, with General Auchinleck’s approval, to recruit new commandos and to fill the thinned ranks of his men. Among the new recruits were French Resistance commandos, as well as the Scotsman Fitzroy Maclean, who later took charge of Churchill’s war mission to Tito in Yugoslavia.
Deadly desert jeeps
At the end of January 1942, Rommel and his army managed to push the British out of Libya and back towards Egypt once more. During the British retreat, the SAS carried out several actions in the strategically very important Libyan port of Benghazi and at several airfields in the vicinity. Some of the actions were successful, others failed due to poor intelligence.
In the following months, the Germans made further advances, and by the end of May 1942, they had pushed the British out of Libya once more. Fears therefore crept into the minds of the British generals that Rommel might attack Malta, where they had a Mediterranean base. German and Italian bombers could fly over Malta from their air bases in Crete and other islands in the Aegean and from southern Italy. Stirling was tasked with trying to destroy as many German airfields in the Mediterranean as possible with his troops. He sent a French SAS unit to Crete, where it carried out several diversionary actions, but with limited success.
But it has given his troops a new lease of life in North Africa. US General Patton was convinced that SAS units could continue to operate with Desert Long Range Desert Group vehicles, but Stirling thought otherwise. SAS units needed their own desert-adapted vehicles. They would allow his men to stay in the desert longer, as they would be self-sustaining, while at the same time allowing them to search for new targets in enemy territory and plan diversionary operations on the ground, without having to return to base.
Stirling, who already had his own armoured desert jeep, was able to obtain several similar American Willys jeeps, which had already proved to be durable enough in the desert. He had them converted and mounted on each one two ordinary and one anti-aircraft machine guns, plus an additional fuel tank. Thus equipped, the new jeeps were able to cover long distances and, with the anti-aircraft machine gun, to destroy any enemy aircraft, either in the air or at night, standing unprotected by the airstrip.
General Auchinleck was at the time preparing an offensive against the rapidly advancing German troops at Al Alamein in Egypt. In order to weaken Rommel’s air superiority, he ordered Stirling to carry out diversionary actions against German airfields. Stirling crossed a part of the desert unobserved in his jeeps with his four-man force, and first began planning a night attack on the airfield at Bagush.
After first getting a good look at him in the reconnaissance room, four of his troops with 16 men one bright night got into their jeeps and simply drove between the rows of enemy planes and hit them with anti-aircraft machine guns. The surprise effect they had counted on was so strong that the German guards did not fire a single shot at them.
Several more identical attacks on German airports followed in the days and weeks that followed. SAS units inflicted irreparable losses on the German air force at the end of July 1942. In a night diversionary action on an airfield near Haneisha alone, two units destroyed 40 German bombers and fighters. The SAS’s jeep attack tactics were more than clearly working.
The SAS Special Forces have returned to their base in Kibrit, near Cairo. In early August 1942, Winston Churchill visited the British Army in North Africa. Convinced that General Auchinleck was exhausted and that he had not lived up to expectations at the Battle of Al Alamein, he decided to replace General Harold Alexander at the head of the Middle East Staff. General Bernard Montgomery took over command of the 8th Army, which included SAS units. Stirling feared that his troops might lose their independence as a result of these changes. But he was able to meet Churchill and persuade him that the SAS remained independent and that its units, now enjoying notable successes, were further strengthened and equipped.
Not long after Churchill’s visit, Stirling received Montgomery’s orders to prepare a plan for a new diversionary attack on the Libyan port of Benghazi, Rommel’s main supply point. He moved the SAS base to the Kufra oasis in southern Libya. But the co-ordination of the attack by his troops with the simultaneous bombing by British bombers went wrong, as Stirling arrived in his jeeps near Benghazi after the bombing had finished. To make the full measure of things, they also fell into an Italian ambush, losing their first jeeps in the process.
Stirling realised that the failure of the operation was inevitable and ordered a retreat back to the oasis. On the way back, a squadron of German Luftwaffe tracked them down in the middle of the open desert and destroyed 25 of their jeeps and 50 other vehicles. The operation turned into a complete disaster, as many of Stirling’s men were also killed in the air raids. Those who managed to escape managed to make their way back to base after a few days. They were at the end of their strength.
Despite the painful losses, General Montgomery did not blame Stirling for the disastrous fiasco. On the contrary, he congratulated the rest of his men for their courage, formed the new 1st SAS Regiment and promoted Stirling to lieutenant colonel. Montgomery had good reason for these moves, as he was planning a new offensive at Al Alamein. In it, SAS units would once again play a key role as a shock advance force, cutting the enemy’s lines of communication and supply routes.
When the offensive began, British Special Forces launched a series of attacks on enemy lines, most of which were successfully broken. During one of the attacks on the railway near Barani, one of Stirling’s men became separated from his unit during the fighting, and the unit subsequently withdrew without him. Over the next eight days, he walked more than four hundred kilometres across the desert, equipped only with a compass and a canteen, until his colleagues came across him and rescued him.
SAS in Italy and the Greek islands
While Montgomery’s troops were pushing the Germans deeper and deeper into Libya from the east, new Anglo-American forces landed in Morocco and Algeria in early November 1942. They quickly defeated the French Vichy troops, and then began to press on Rommel from the west, who had received new reinforcements across the Mediterranean. Fierce fighting for every kilometre of desert also began in Tunisia, where SAS troops were redeployed.
In January 1943, David Stirling, now nicknamed the Invisible Major, of course went with them to Tunisia. Shortly after his arrival, he and one of his troops fell into a German ambush. When they tried to hide, they were completely surrounded by German soldiers. After several hours of exchanging fire, some of his men managed to escape by a lucky accident, but Stirling and the others were captured, disarmed and taken prisoner. He managed to escape a few days later, but was recaptured, this time by Italian soldiers. He tried to escape at least four more times until the Germans finally imprisoned him in their Renaissance castle Colditz, near Leipzig, where he lived to see the end of the war.
The SAS Special Forces, which had earned the respect of both British and enemy generals during its fifteen months of operation, was left without its first commander and founder. Even his steely General Montgomery said of Stirling on one occasion that he was “mad, quite mad”. He was referring, of course, to Scotland’s daring actions, which often seemed almost suicidal. For example, during his time in charge of the SAS, David Stirling had single-handedly strangled 42 enemy soldiers and was fond of boasting of this achievement. But even more important than that for Montgomery was the fact that SAS Special Forces had destroyed more than 250 enemy aircraft and dozens of airfields, railways, weapons and ammunition depots, telecommunications and other German and Italian military infrastructure in just fifteen months of operations in North Africa. It was more than clear that after Stirling’s capture, the SAS Special Forces would be given a new commander and would continue to strike fear into the bones of the Germans with their sabotage operations.
After a short reflection, Montgomery put Stirling’s former closest associate Paddy Mayne in charge of the first reorganised SAS squadron. In the coming months he was put in charge of new sabotage operations in Sicily and Italy. Another part of the regiment, under the new commander George Jellicoe, was transformed into a Special Naval Squadron, the SBS, and deployed to the occupied Greek islands in the Aegean Sea.
At the beginning of July 1943, the Allies landed in Sicily by invasion. Paddy Mayne managed to smuggle his Special Forces onto Sicilian shores before the offensive began, and together with the 2nd SAS Regiment, formed and commanded by David’s brother Bill Stirling, destroyed two key artillery batteries that could have prevented the Allies from landing in the south of the island. His troops also took the strategically important town of Augusta in the following days, when the main landing began, and defended it until the arrival of the main Anglo-American army.
Over the next five weeks, the Italian army was completely driven out of Sicily, and Mussolini lost power in Rome. This opened the door wide for the Allies to launch a new invasion of the southern Italian boot, and Hitler was forced to call off the new offensive in Russia, withdrawing some of his troops from the front there and diverting them to Italy. The scales of war were now finally tipping in favour of the Allies in Europe too.
In early September of the same year, it was SAS troops who, as a precursor to the first paratroops, parachuted into Calabria in the far south of Italy and captured the town of Bagnara. This facilitated the disembarkation of part of the main body of Montgomery’s army from Sicily over the next three days in the coming invasion of Italy.
As the invasion continued, Paddy Mayne and his Special Forces managed to infiltrate deep into the enemy rear, near the town of Termoli on the Adriatic coast. They were soon joined by other units who landed further south and continued north. The SAS was now working more closely with regular Allied troops than ever before, something that had not been common before due to the clandestine nature of their operations. A few weeks later, Bill Stirling’s Special Forces also parachuted into northern Italy, first blowing up railways and bridges, and later preparing the ground for the arrival of the main body of their army.
Their sabotage operations, in which many SAS Special Forces fell into German hands or were killed, continued at the end of January 1944, when the Allies continued to push the Germans northwards and 36,000 Allied troops with more than 3,000 vehicles landed at Anzio near Rome.
While Paddy Mayne and his men were conducting sabotage operations in Italy in 1943, George Jellicoe and his naval SBS units were doing it successfully in the Greek islands. They usually sailed in ordinary fishing boats and disguised as fishermen. Although they managed to occupy several islands near Crete and successfully defend them for a few months, they were constantly short of supplies, which was one of the main reasons why the Germans again started to occupy the islands one after the other. Despite the fact that the SBS units suffered heavy losses in these fierce battles, Jellicoe persisted.
Liberation of France and Norway
In the spring of 1944, when Roosevelt and Churchill were already agreeing on a joint Allied landing in France, SAS units were moved from Italy and Greece to the UK, where they began to prepare for D-Day.General Montgomery reinforced them with new commandos, bringing their numbers to over 2,500 men. The previously proverbially small SAS units were no longer small.
Montgomery’s plan was for the Special Forces to parachute into central France, link up with the French Resistance there, and then proceed as usual to destroy key German supply routes and lines of communication in rapid action.
On 6 June 1944, as the Normandy landings began, the plan was put into action. Using small jeeps and other equipment, they found a perfect hiding place in the vast forests of central France and, over the next few days, launched night raids on German depots and military bases. Their favourite tactic was to drive the jeeps through the occupied areas, destroying enemy bunkers and fortified outposts as they went. In this way, they ensured that many German soldiers remained in French towns, which meant that they were unable to come to the aid of other German troops in Normandy.
In early July, one of the SAS units was tasked with trying to assassinate General Rommel at his headquarters in northern France. The attempt failed because the Special Forces discovered that Rommel had been wounded a week earlier during one of the Allied bombing raids and was being taken to Germany for treatment.
To prevent sudden and unexpected attacks, German soldiers began combing the forests near French towns. On several occasions, they surprised British special forces, capturing and killing dozens of them. On one such occasion, the Germans completely surrounded 35 SAS Specials. All those who survived the several hours of shelling were shot down in cold blood, along with the captured American pilots.
Despite these isolated incidents, the SAS managed to strike fear into the German army, even in the French countryside. Their attacks made it much easier for the bulk of the Allied army to break out of Normandy and on to Paris and other parts of France in the following weeks.
Once Paris was liberated, it seemed that there was no longer any real work for the SAS in this part of Europe. To avoid any problems, the British generals decided to send one of the squadrons back to Italy, where fierce battles with the Germans were still taking place in autumn 1944. Several units jumped out of RAF planes in the north of the country, joining the Italian partisans there. Their attacks on railway lines and bridges were often very effective, but the Germans also retaliated with harsh measures. Meanwhile, in the Balkans, the SBS helped to conquer Greece and, together with other Allied troops, made a triumphal entry into Athens.
Nevertheless, by the beginning of 1945, the existence of the SAS and SBS was becoming increasingly questionable. Some were sent by British generals to Germany to carry out counter-intelligence duties and hunt war criminals. Others were sent to help liberate Norway, but when they got there, they were left without any real work to do.
In March 1945, Brigadier Mike Calvert took command of the SAS. As commander of British troops in Burma, he was considered an expert in covert special operations deep in the enemy’s rear. He was able to persuade his superiors to send SAS units east of the Rhine as a precursor to the final operations, where they took part in the final operations on German and Dutch soil, once again suffering heavy casualties due to numerous German ambushes. Most SAS units met the end of the war in Norway, where their men took part in the disarmament of the last remaining German units.
SAS after the war
In October 1945, the SAS Special Forces were disbanded. The British generals judged that there was no real work for them after the war was over. But just two years later, with the Cold War intensifying, they changed their minds and in 1947 the SAS was re-established. From then until today, they have been involved in numerous covert and not-so-clandestine special military operations in the Malay Peninsula and elsewhere in Asia, in the Falklands War, in the liberation of hostages in Sierra Leone in Africa and in the first Gulf War. In that war, they again used their famous armed desert jeeps and carried out some successful reconnaissance sabotage operations against the Soviet Scud missile launch pads with which Saddam Hussein threatened the Americans and their allies at the time. To a lesser extent, SAS Special Forces were also involved in the NATO interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and much more intensively, of course, in the recent, as yet unfinished, wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
For example, they fought in the Malay Peninsula during the struggle against the communist insurgency, where new tactics were developed in the 1950s for fighting deep in the jungle. They fought again in the desert in Oman, where they helped the Sultan of Oman, among other things, to train local tribes to fight against leftist revolutionaries. During the short-lived war between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands in the spring of 1982, SAS Special Forerunners succeeded in disabling Argentine warplanes on Pebble Island, enabling the British to land on the East Falklands four days later without any aerial threat. The whole operation was very reminiscent of those carried out by Stirling and his men in North Africa forty years earlier. They parachuted inconspicuously onto the island in the middle of the night, snuck onto the airstrip, planted explosives under the enemy planes and blew them up without any significant loss of life.
One of their POW rescue operations took place in September 2000 in Sierra Leone, where a brutal civil war raged for ten years, with militias from different sides fighting for control of the rich diamond mines. At the end of August, a paramilitary militia calling itself the Western Boys captured 12 Irish soldiers on a humanitarian mission, stripped them of their weapons and detained, interrogated and tortured them in brutal conditions in one of their outposts in Gberi Bana. During the two weeks of negotiations, the commander of the drunken and cocaine-soaked men, Foday Kallay, demanded conditions in exchange for their extradition, which were becoming more unrealistic by the day. In the end, six of them were released, but five Irish and one Sierra Leonean soldier, who had been particularly brutally beaten and humiliated by Kallay’s drunken men, remained in their hands. Fearing that this was just a delaying tactic and that the leader Kallay might lose control of his men at any moment, the British negotiators ordered the SAS troops at the very top of the British government to free them in Operation Barras.
A few days after the prisoners were brought to the Western Boys’ outpost, SAS Special Forces began to observe the outpost at close range. Exposed to all kinds of insects, they lay motionless for days in the tall grass of the surrounding forest, eating and sleeping, and reporting back to base what was happening in the outpost.
The hostage rescue operation began on 10 September at exactly fifteen minutes past six in the morning, when two large Chinuk transport helicopters flew from Hastings towards Gberi Bana. Fifteen minutes into their flight, they swooped down on the building where the rebels, still dazed from the night before and surprised, were holding their prisoners. SAS and SBS Special Forces descended from the helicopters on ropes, one of them seriously wounded. He later died while being transported to hospital.
Once on the ground, the Special Forces cleared the outpost in a lightning-fast 20-minute firefight, boarded the first helicopter with all six freed hostages and flew back to base. In the second and third, after another successful operation in the nearby village of Magbeni, the second unit loaded the bodies of 25 militiamen and 22 civilians who had been killed, including both men who had been abducted from the surrounding villages and trained to fight for them later, and young women who had been held as sex slaves in the now completely destroyed outpost. On the same day, 371 more frightened militiamen surrendered to Jordanian UN peacekeepers, who fled into the forest and threw down their weapons during the two blitzkrieg operations. Many of those captured were women and children.
In Sierra Leone, Operation Barras was instrumental in ending a period of intimidation by various paramilitary gangs after a decade of civil war. The Western boys were completely wiped out and no longer posed any threat. Forday Kallay, who was among the first to surrender without a fight and was dragged drunkenly from his room to a helicopter by special forces, radioed for the remaining scattered rebels to surrender and helped identify the bodies of those who had lost their lives in the fighting. He was held in police prisons until 2006, when he was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment.
Recruitment today
The selection of recruits to train and serve in the SAS and its sister units requires those who apply and pass the initial psychophysical tests to have more than above-average physical strength and mental endurance. The specially trained instructors, all former members of elite units who have themselves endured tough field trials in enemy rear areas in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the world, are not lenient with the applicants. On the contrary.
The induction training is deliberately designed to push candidates to and beyond the brink of psychophysical exhaustion and despair through sometimes seemingly pointless testing. The vast majority of candidates therefore resign before the induction training becomes more difficult, more stressful and, above all, more unpredictable with each passing day. The instructors deliberately expose the candidates to situations in which their psychological defences and masks fall down one after the other.
The selection is only the first sieve for the long training that follows. During it, the instructors first exhaust the boys and men physically and then escalate the psychological pressure to the limits of their endurance. Out of 125 candidates, no more than 10 make it through this initial sieve of three stages. The others go home with new insights into their extreme psychophysical abilities and the breaking point.
The first phase of the test is called Stability and Navigation. Candidates shoulder a 20-kilogram rucksack and other military equipment and embark on a 65-kilometre mountain hike. They have to climb up and down the same mountain in Wales twice in a row, with no rest, major meals or sleep in between, looking for navigation checkpoints. During the hike, which requires a great deal of intrinsic motivation and perseverance, the candidates are constantly given new and new instructions and commands by the instructors, who deliberately humiliate them by shouting and insulting them, and sometimes encourage them in kinder tones. Immediately after completing the 20-hour march, called the Fun Dance, the candidates have to run another 6.4 kilometres and swim a distance of 3.2 kilometres in the next two hours.
The second phase, known as Jungle Training, takes place deep in the tropical jungles of Belize, off the east coast of Central America. Recruits in small units of four must survive for weeks in simulated conditions, without any outside help, deep in the enemy’s rear, while staying safe and, of course, alive. Anyone who breaks down is transported to safety and, if necessary, medically treated, but is eliminated from further selection. Anyone who wants to make it to the final stage must persevere until the end of the jungle ordeal, knowing that no one but the instructors knows when it will end. Stoically enduring uncertainty and constant change of conditions and instructions is one of the cornerstones of SAS training and that of its sister SBS units.
The few candidates who manage to make it to the third and final level without breaking down, getting themselves eliminated or having their instructors do it, will face the toughest test of all, called Escape, Evasion and Tactical Interrogation. In it, candidates are subjected to extreme mental strain without sleep or rest, followed by a simulated capture with extremely stressful and ambiguous interrogation techniques.
Candidates know that it is still just a training exercise, but their exhausted bodies and psyches no longer distinguish well between the real and the apparent under such conditions. This puts them under pressure, most of which they succumb to and either drop out or are eliminated by the instructors. They are ordered to stay motionless for long hours in stressful physical positions with the hood on their heads, not allowed to fall asleep, and played so-called ‘white sound’ loud music which makes them even more restless. The instructors do this after they have been chased by enemy troops for days on unfamiliar terrain, deprived of food, sleep and rest, and finally captured in a simulated surprise attack.
Every few hours, in special rooms set up for the purpose, interrogators take them in for questioning that is at first seductively friendly, but immediately afterwards brutal and humiliating. After hours of pressure from the interrogators, stressful body positions and nerve-wracking sounds from large loudspeakers, candidates often lose some or all of their sense of time and reality. It is extremely rare that those who remain sufficiently focused are not confused by the interrogators and forced to divulge details about themselves, their colleagues or the field operation during which they were captured in the simulation. The only difference between real interrogation techniques and those to which the candidates are subjected towards the end of the selection process is that they know they will not be executed. In real wars, of course, this possibility exists.
Candidates who pass all three stages of selection training receive a beret embroidered with the SAS symbol and Stirling’s famous motto “He who dares, wins”. Of course, that’s when the real training really starts. It lasts as long as the Special Forces remain in the SAS.
