Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  One of these myths concerns the so-called ‘fighting knife’. In actual fact, there is no such weapon issued in the British Army, despite what other accounts may say, although individuals within the SAS may choose to carry a knife they have acquired themselves. Nor is there much use for them: wielding a knife in combat, rather than a firearm, is likely to get you killed sooner rather than later, and for clandestine operations, or those requiring a high degree of stealth, members of the Regiment are issued with silenced weapons. Where a knife could be useful, though, is in situations in which a soldier is forced to live by his wits in a hostile environment, and without the usual support in the way of weapons, rations, transport, and so on.

  Make no mistake, though, the Special Air Service is the best-equipped regiment in the British Army. No other unit has better kit than we have. The system is brilliant; in effect, the Regiment has carte blanche on weapons purchase, and on all sorts of other equipment besides. Thus whatever the SAS wants, the SAS gets. If they want to try out a new weapon, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) makes sure that they have the opportunity. And if they like it, then it is purchased for them.

  But there is absolutely no need for anyone ever to have a personalized weapon. In fact, it would be a hindrance in battle because we have to have standardized ammunition that everyone can use. A soldier using a 7.62mm-calibre rifle when his comrades are all using weapons of 5.56mm calibre will be left with a useless piece of junk when he runs out of ammunition, quite apart from the problems of resupplying ammunition in several different calibres.

  Each weapon used by a man in the field is issued by the Quartermaster. Its serial number is logged, and no weapon or ammunition is ever issued without the man signing for it. It is true that there was a time when men were allowed to keep personal weapons in the camp armoury, because there was then an SAS pistol club and people liked to do combat shooting as a sport. That has long gone, however. Today there is simply not the remotest likelihood that any member would be allowed to use his own weapons in the field. A man gets to use the same weapon from the armoury, until such time as another is issued to him for whatever reason.

  The weapons bought by the SAS are mainly American, British or German. There are some weapons from manufacturers in other foreign countries, notably the Belgian-built Minimi 5.56mm machine-gun and the Swiss-built Sig Sauer automatic pistols, but nobody uses Beretta automatics, as numbers of secret agents do in movies, because these and similar weapons are regarded as ‘ladies’ pistols’ with little stopping power.

  Our main weapons remain the American-built 5.56mm M16 rifle, the standard-issue US service rifle, and the Browning High Power 9mm pistol, built by the giant Belgian FN concern, which owns Browning. The German company Heckler & Koch also produce good weapons which include the 9mm MP5 range of subma-chine-guns. The handguns used by the SAS are always automatics because revolvers, although far less likely to jam, are both less powerful and less accurate. The police use.38 Special revolvers, but the magazine capacity of such a weapon is simply not great enough, the most telling point against their use by the SAS. An automatic pistol can take magazines loaded with twelve or twenty rounds, compared with six for most revolvers, and the rate of fire is higher, factors which make automatics* far more useful in a firefight.

  The selection of weapons on offer to the SAS is vast, and it has been said that each man in the Regiment has eight weapons. Naturally he doesn’t carry them all with him at any one time, but they are available to him according to circumstances. Generally, though, he will have his M16, or otherwise a machine-gun, and a pistol, and there is then a whole range of other weaponry on which he can draw. Even in an anti-terrorist operation, however, it is the patrol commander, not the individual soldier, who chooses what weapons will be needed for a given situation, and these will then be issued according to his directions.

  You simply do not have people saying, ‘Right, I’m going to be using so and so weapon.’ The patrol commander weighs up the task, and will then tell his men, ‘You carry an M203 and take x amount of ammunition, you take an M16, you take the Minimi or the GPMG. I’ll take an M16 and a pistol. OK?’ (An M203 is a 40mm grenade launcher fixed beneath the barrel of an M16, thus making two very effective weapons in one; the GPMG – general-purpose machine-gun – is the standard-issue 7.62mm machine-gun of the British Army – a relatively light, powerful and accurate belt-fed weapon capable of being used in a sustained-fire role.) Each man then draws his weapons according to the patrol commander’s orders – a call for a 2-inch mortar, for instance, means each man taking two rounds apiece for it as well as his own weapons and kit – no more and no less. Reports that men are invited to ‘pick your weapon’, like so much else that is written about the SAS, belong to the realms of myth, not reality.

  If there are many myths about the Regiment’s weapons and equipment, as well as about which operations it has or has not taken part in, there seem to be even more about who has actually served in the SAS. If you were to add together everyone who claims to have been badged, the total would come to far more than the strength of the entire Royal Artillery, the largest regiment in the British Army, and way, way above the very modest establishment of the SAS. The reasons for this slightly sad habit of making false claims are not difficult to work out, but it does seem to be very widespread. Indeed, in his book Ghost Force, Ken Connor, one of the Regiment’s longest-serving members, estimates that the number of people who claim to have been on the balcony of the Iranian Embassy in Princes Gate in May 1980 comes to about 15,000 – and rising.

  I have only been twice to the Special Forces Club in London, and I have to say that I will never go again. For obvious reasons, the club has a CCTV camera over the door and an entryphone system for letting members and their guests in, once identified. It doesn’t identify fakes, though. More genuine heroes and heroines have walked through that door than you can shake a stick at – and, sadly, some Walter Mittys, too. The latter hang around the bar, telling tall tales about their exploits and generally bullshitting each other. Meanwhile the real people who have been there and have the scars to prove it listen and don’t say a word. These people are known to each other and don’t need to lie. They also know perfectly well when what they are hearing is a tissue of lies, boasts and half-truths.

  There are even a number of elderly women who are members of the club, though sadly fewer each year. These are the courageous female SOE agents who were parachuted into Occupied Europe during the Second World War, and for them I have enormous respect. As for the Walter Mittys, however, they get right up my nose. I was in the Special Forces Club on Burns Night in 1993, and had enjoyed a good evening with a bunch of friends. After dinner I was standing at the bar with the Regimental Sergeant-Major of 21 SAS, one of the Regiment’s two Territorial units, when a guy came over and introduced himself. I shook his hand and told him that my name was Billy Ratcliffe.

  He looked at me a moment, and then, to my astonishment, said, ‘You’re not Billy Ratcliffe.’ I assured him I was, whereupon he emphatically repeated that I wasn’t. For a moment he almost convinced me that I was not who I thought I was. He went on to say that he had been talking, only the previous week, to ‘Billy Ratcliffe of the SAS’. By this time I was getting pretty angry. ‘He’s over there, in that picture,’ he said, pointing to a print of the painting, which I had commissioned, of the Sergeants’ Mess meeting we had held behind enemy lines in the desert during the Gulf War, when I had been RSM of 22 SAS.

  ‘That’s me in the picture,’ I said. ‘No, it isn’t,’ he replied. Clearly I was not going to convince him, so I left him talking to the RSM and walked out into the night before my anger got the better of me, musing on the strange feeling of knowing there’s somebody out there claiming to be you. In my view, the club’s committee needs to take much greater care in approving applicants for membership.

  I sometimes meet people in Civvy Street who know of my background. Often they will say that they know somebody else who was in the SAS. I tell them to
go back and ask their friend which squadron he served in and the name of his squadron commander. And the odd thing is, they always come back and say that their friend has told them that he can’t give out that kind of information.

  There are hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of SAS phoneys around. Between them, they spin enough yarns about the Regiment to knit every badged member – former or still serving – a good-sized sweater apiece. And that is probably the only thing about these people that is true.

  * In fact, semi-automatics, to be strictly accurate, in that they fire a single shot each time the trigger is pressed, rather than firing continuously as true automatic weapons – machine-guns, for instance – do.

  Chapter Six

  IF our politicians had to go out and keep their own promises, honouring our often dubious treaties of friendship in parts of the world that will never feature in the holiday brochures, we would have a House of Commons full of pacifist isolationists.

  Unfortunately for the common soldier, however, we are still a long way from such a happy turn of events, which is why, in 1973, I found myself, by way of a very tortuous and clandestine route, bound for Oman, the independent sultanate on the Arabian Gulf. Or to be exact, for Dhofar, a province in the south of Oman which 90 per cent of British schoolchildren couldn’t point to on an atlas.

  Oman then was a country with very little to recommend it, at least to our eyes. Its borders were, and are still, largely undefined, its people were among the most poverty-stricken in the world. There were a great many poisonous snakes, scorpions and spiders, while the ubiquitous mites, lice and flies carried diseases such as dysentery and scrub typhus. Temperatures ranged from over 120 degrees Fahrenheit on the low ground during the day to below freezing at night on the plateaux. Dehydration and sunstroke could be fatal, while sunburn was just extremely painful. You needed to drink at least a gallon of water a day simply to feel more or less normal.

  A five-month tour in these conditions would have finished off most of our politicians, and that was before I come to the real danger, and the reason for our being there: the continuous war being waged against the Marxist-backed rebels, or People’s Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf, to give them their full name. Locally these brutal, cold-blooded, uncompromising killers were known as the adoo, which, predictably, means ‘enemy’ in Arabic. They were also, to a man, convinced atheists.

  Until 1970, Oman had been ruled by a despotic and cruel Sultan whose almost medieval tyranny had made him deeply unpopular among the people. It was then that his Sandhurst-trained son, Qaboos, took over in a bloodless palace coup inspired, if not actively backed, by the British.

  Bloodless, that is, except for the old Sultan himself, who decided not to go gently. Not being quite the trusting father Qaboos imagined him to be, he had an automatic pistol concealed in his robes. On being told that he must abdicate, he drew this and fired off the whole magazine, managing to kill one servant, wound a senior courtier and shoot himself in the stomach and foot. That evening, after abdicating, he was flown to London in an RAF Viscount. Once recovered from his self-inflicted injuries, he spent the last two years of his life there in glorious exile.

  Within hours of taking over, Qaboos’s first act, under Oman’s treaty with Britain of 1789, was formally to request British assistance in putting down the Marxist-inspired insurgency. He asked specifically that the SAS be sent to support the Sultan’s forces in crushing the adoo. The first of our guys were on the ground there by the following day.

  Not that the British public became fully aware of this piece of latter-day gunboat diplomacy until a considerable time later. But Britain, in the shape of the Foreign Office and the Conservative government of the then Prime Minister, Edward Heath, had as compelling reasons for supporting Qaboos as she had for encouraging the coup in the first place.

  Oman is one of the southernmost nations in the Middle East. In the south-east it is bordered by the Arabian Sea, and its north-western border faces Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Its western border, however, marches with Yemen, a Marxist state that had recently incorporated the former British protectorate of Aden, where British troops, badly supported if not actually betrayed by Whitehall, had been kicked out in an inglorious and politically bungled fiasco. The Yemeni government was now supplying Russian-sponsored weapons, ammunition and equipment to the adoo, as well as providing them with training and a safe haven once they crossed back into Yemen from Oman.

  Victory for the adoo in Oman would leave the communists controlling the Gulf of Oman, which forms the country’s northern border, the entrance to the busiest and richest sea lane for the world’s oil tankers – the waters of the Persian Gulf. To this would be added the not inconsiderable oil reserves of Oman itself, which had been operating with increasing efficiency and output since 1964. These were rich prizes, and their loss to the communists would be a severe blow to the West in general, and Britain in particular.

  The young Sultan was not so naive as to imagine that he would not have to pay for all this assistance. So for the next six years, mainly in secret and personally supported by Heath and, after 1974, by the Labour government of Harold Wilson, the SAS maintained a presence in Oman under the codename ‘Operation Storm’. It was they, who, in the end, were principally responsible for putting down the insurrection on the jebel – and for most of that time men of the Regiment never went for more than forty-eight hours without coming under serious enemy fire. Having done three tours on Operation Storm, I have to say that no matter how many bushels of riyals, bars of gold or barrels of oil the Sultan was paying, or the goodwill that accrued to Britain in this strategically vital part of the world, it wasn’t enough.

  By the time I arrived for my first tour in Oman in January 1973 the ‘hearts-and-minds’ campaign implemented by the former CO of 22 SAS, Lieutenant-Colonel Johnny Watts, was already paying dividends, beginning to win over the locals in favour of the young Sultan. Coming as it did after the Regiment’s stunning successes in Malaya and Borneo during the 1950s and 1960s, this campaign would confirm the SAS as the most successful counter-insurgency unit in the world.

  Its basic idea was to supply medical and veterinary care for the half-million or so people in the arid and mountainous province of Dhofar – where the adoo were at their most active and dangerous – and their animals, and to drill for new sources of water. The veterinary aid was particularly inspired, as the Dhofari’s main concern after himself was his livestock – his family and his tribe came much further down his list of priorities. We also set up a local radio station broadcasting propaganda for the Sultan and his government, to counteract the communists’ Radio Aden, and organized the printing of thousands of leaflets explaining the new Sultan’s policies and attacking communist methods and ideology. The leaflets were dropped from the air in selected areas of Dhofar.

  Most telling of all, perhaps, was our offer to arm and train any of the Muslim tribesmen who wanted to protect themselves and their property against the increasingly vicious and ruthless adoo. Certainly the insurgents had some very strange ideas about how to win friends and influence people. If any of the people they liberated refused to deny the existence of God, and these were most frequently the elderly, they were tortured, often to death. In this respect, and although operating on reversed principles, the adoo would have given the Inquisition an extremely good run for its money.

  Children were snatched from parents and sent for reschooling in Yemen, and the young of both sexes were shipped off to training camps in China and Russia, to return thoroughly indoctrinated in Marxist theory and dogma. Among the ordinary Dhofaris, anyone suspected of supporting Qaboos, or anyone denounced by a fellow tribesman for holding similar sympathies, would be tried and executed on the spot, usually by beheading.

  All in all, the province was a kind of ‘lost world’, a hellhole with a lunar landscape and an unforgiving climate. But then, we were hardly being sent there for a holiday, or for the good of our health. We were there
because, in their wisdom, the Foreign Office and the government of the day had decreed that that is where we should be.

  I left for my first tour in Oman in January 1973, by which time the SAS had been involved there for nearly three years. D Squadron were flown out from RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire to Cyprus, and from there by way of a couple of other destinations before finally landing at Salalah in Dhofar, the province’s principle town. It was a small place with a population of about ten thousand, and apart from the airport, which by then was being used mainly as a military base by the Sultan’s forces, seemed to our eyes to have very little going for it. The men there may have been on the side of the angels when it came to loyalty to the Sultan and his government, but they all looked pretty villainous to me, while the women had all their assets completely hidden from view. They may have had hour-glass figures to rival Monroe and faces to match, but if so we never got to see them. The Muslim majority were always muffled up in voluminous hanging garments and yashmaks. Nevertheless, the local young men must have found ways of penetrating all those outer wrappers, for the birthrate in Oman was nearly twice the world average, and 41 per cent of the country’s population were under the age of fifteen. At the time, I reckoned that if screwing were to be made an Olympic sport, then the Omani team would have won every medal in every category. It was obviously their main national pastime.