What really infuriated the vets was the fact that the Guards’ Para boys got in through the supposedly non-existent ‘back door’, doing a specially modified form of Selection, designed to ensure that most of them passed. This was a betrayal of the first principle of the SAS concept – of an elite based purely on merit. ‘If you impose the most rigorous demands on those wishing to join the SAS,’ said Ken Connor, ‘you maintain the highest standards within it. Once you start making exceptions – like G Squadron … you cannot maintain or regain those former standards.’1 Though it quickly became obvious that the squadron’s manpower couldn’t be supplied entirely from the Brigade of Guards, and it grew as heterogeneous as the other squadrons, the readiness of the head-shed to grant ‘privileged status’ wasn’t easily forgotten.
In the early sixties the British army had ceased to be a conscript force, and had turned professional. Outside the portals of Bradbury Lines, the post-colonial world that had given birth to 22 SAS was quietly vanishing. The post-war generation was coming of age. The 1960s had seen the USA bogged down in Vietnam, peace rallies, ‘Ban the Bomb’, the Hippies, the Beatles, LSD. Towards the end of the decade, the pacifists had given way to militant urban terrorist groups – the Provisional IRA, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Red Brigades, ETA, the Red Army, the PLO, the PFLP. In 1969, three Palestinian terrorists were arrested attempting to hijack a Boeing 707 at Zurich, Switzerland. It was the overture and beginners of the new age. During the following year alone, the US State Department recorded three hundred cases of terrorism world-wide.
The sun had set on the British Empire, and wars of decolonialization were on the wane. In the UK the main military focus was on Europe and the Soviet threat, but though 22 SAS had a role in NATO in the event of total war, it had been outshone in that sphere by 21 and 23 SAS. The TA might train only at weekends and in holidays, but they trained for a single purpose, and their signallers and spotters were second to none. They frequently thrashed 22 SAS in NATO competitions. This might have caused ex-21 SAS Adjutant de la Billière a wry smile, but it didn’t go down well with those chauvinistic regulars who thought of the TA as ‘amateurs’.
Three years earlier, outgoing commanding officer Lt. Col. Mike Wingate-Gray had suggested a number of alternative roles for 22 SAS in the event of total war, including long-range penetration, raids and reconnaissance behind enemy lines, and the raising, training and direction of guerrillas. Just how many such opportunities there would be in a Europe devastated by nuclear blasts was debatable. After performing their observation tasks, 21 and 23 SAS were trained to don their nuclear-biological-and-chemical-warfare suits, respirators and rubber overshoes, and beat a hasty retreat.
Wingate-Gray had also suggested a short list of roles that were more suited to the new era. These included bodyguarding and VIP protection – techniques that had been under development by 22 SAS since the early 60s, in the specialist Bodyguard Cell. New roles, though, included on the one hand ‘the support of police Special Branch operations’ and on the other, industrial sabotage and ‘blanket’ or black-cell operations. These jobs had one common factor – they would be covert, and would require the efficient use of concealed arms – pistols and perhaps mini-sub-machine guns. The key was the development of close-quarter battle shooting techniques.
22 SAS had gained its first experience of covert urban ops on Operation Nina, in Aden. The ‘brains’ behind these so-called ‘Keeni-Meeni’ actions was counter-insurgency guru Frank Kitson – a future Chief of the General Staff – who had cut his teeth on the Mau Mau ‘pseudo-gangs’ in Kenya. During the Mau Mau emergency, white policemen, dressed African-style with faces blackened, accompanied teams of ‘turned’ ex-terrorists into the bush. The technique worked. Kitson’s plan to try the same thing on the Jebel Akhdar op had been vetoed, but it proved effective on the streets of Aden, where SAS-men disguised as Arabs or Africans wandered the alleys of the Crater District with pistols under their robes, ready to hit opportunity targets.
For Keeni-Meeni ops – Kitson borrowed the term from a Swahili phrase suggesting the movement of a snake in the grass – the Regiment drafted in some of the dozen Fijian SAS-men it had recruited in the early 60s, as well as its star Arabic-speakers, and troopers with dark complexions. The effect, augmented by stage make-up, turned out to be so convincing that when one operator was arrested by a British infantry unit, his cover was never blown and he was released with compliments on his ‘excellent English’. The Keeni-Meeni teams even deployed a man made up as a blonde-haired European woman, who trolled around offering an easy target, with a group of watchers trailing ‘her’. There was no body-armour available, and the female impersonator’s life rested firmly on the speed of ‘her’ colleagues.
On another occasion, a covert SAS team in a battered minibus dogged a uniformed ‘decoy’ squad in a Land Rover in the hostile district of Sheikh Othman. An Arabpoled out of an alley suddenly and lobbed a grenade, which whacked apart, injuring one of the decoys in the arm. The SAS team bagged both the grenade-thrower and his back-up man, but were painfully aware they’d been a split second too late.
The Keeni-Meenies showed that the old Grant-Taylor close-quarter battle shooting system – taught to the SAS during the war – wasn’t effective where perfect timing was required. Grant Taylor, a US Office of Strategic Services officer, had taught aiming by squaring the torso on to the target and firing from the waist. In the late sixties, though, an SAS team came up with the ‘SAS Method’ – a homegrown technique that was more mobile and fluid. Instead of shooting from the waist, the shooter used the pistol at arm’s length, as an extension of the index finger, pointing at a target. The team also developed a self-defence technique aimed at clearing a space wide enough to draw the weapon.
The SAS Method was based on fitness, strength and agility, and was so simple it could be acquired in a fortnight. The shooter would first aim to distract the opponent by a punch or kick to the face, groin or shin, or by the use of an improvised weapon such as a pen, coin or key, jabbed in the eye or kidney, or a spurt of fire from a cigarette-lighter. When a clearance of at least a foot had been acquired, the shooter would draw his pistol from a shoulder-or waist-holster, and fire a double-tap, to make sure that, once engaged, the target stayed down. However, the SAS were trained never to escalate the conflict. They would only draw pistols in response to a deadly threat, but once the weapon was drawn, would shoot to kill. The pistol, usually a ‘High Power’ 9mm Browning, was specially modified to the hand of the individual user, whether left- or right-handed. It was carried under a shirt with press-stud fastenings that would pop open immediately, later with Velcro. Waistband holsters were concealed under a civilian jacket specially weighed down by fishing-weights, to prevent it from flapping open and revealing the weapon.
The prosaic character of the Browning pistol was itself the perfect expression of the no-frills SAS approach – the weapon was solid and reliable rather than ‘hi-tec’, and used ammunition that was readily available. The weapon was not the crucial element in the process – it was next to useless in the hands of a shooter lacking the kind of mental toughness looked for in SAS Selection. The Regiment disliked the US approach to bodyguarding – large numbers of obviously huge, gum-chewing bodybuilders in dark glasses. Once guards could be identified by the opponent, it didn’t really matter how many there were – as the assassination of John F. Kennedy had aptly demonstrated. The ‘grey man’, hidden in a crowd, unseen by the enemy, was worth ten obvious guards – the SAS emphasis on concealment and understatement was an expression of the British character, and a reflection of the prime SAS conviction that the ‘Regiment was the man’, not the technology.
The ‘SAS Method’ was practised at the ‘Killing House’ – a new type of CQB range at Bradbury Lines, whose prototype D Squadron had built of sandbags at Nanyuki in Kenya, during a training exercise there. Designed on a piece of graph-paper and constructed by a local builder, the £30,000 the house cost proved to be a sterling investment.2 The
Killing House consisted of a number of rooms through which shooters would proceed, taking on targets as they popped up. Some targets would be engaged in the dark, others would involve jumping over obstacles, rolling and coming up into a firing position – a loose martial-arts stance with one foot forward and the other trailing. Some targets would require the shooter to change magazines or clear stoppages. The new close-quarter battle techniques didn’t create the urban SAS role which had already been suggested in Wingate-Gray’s paper, but the innovations took it off the drawing-board and made it a practical possibility. ‘Almost overnight,’ wrote Connor, ‘it made possible the change from a purely military force into a unit capable of carrying out all the covert and clandestine actions for which it is world famous.’3
79. ‘Fifteen hundred pistolas’
On Remembrance Sunday, 1969, twenty-eight years after the foundation of L Detachment, D Squadron, 22 SAS, paraded at Newtownards, Northern Ireland, in full uniform, to salute the memory of the man who’d done so much to shape the Regiment – Lt. Col. Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne. Mayne had lived to see the foundation of 22 SAS, though his life after the war had been a let-down. He had worked briefly for the British Antarctic Survey, together with John Tonkin and Mike Sadler, but had been hampered by the back injury he’d sustained in the war, possibly as early as Squatter. He had been appointed Secretary of the Northern Ireland Law Society, but had never succeeded in exorcizing his demons. He had never married and had lurched from one booze-up to the next, frequently involved in brawls that had at least once landed him in jail.
Mayne and Stirling met several times after the war, but Mayne had never got on with the aristocratic types in Stirling’s circle. Neither Mayne nor Stirling had shown much interest in the SAS Association, of which they were the principal officers, but had left the work largely to Brian Franks. Mayne died on 14 December 1955 when he crashed his Riley sports car into a stationary lorry, on his way back from a drinking session.
Paddy Mayne wasn’t the most tragic peacetime casualty among SAS Originals. The ‘unsung hero’ of L Detachment, Bill Fraser, whose strike at Ajadabiyya had done much to establish the unit’s reputation, and who had fought his way through the entire war, had long since been dishonourably discharged from the army, and had ended his days a destitute alcoholic living on the streets.
D Squadron was not in Northern Ireland for purely ceremonial duties. Civil rights marches, demanding justice and equality for the minority Catholic population, had become prevalent in the past year. That August, a Protestant-Loyalist backlash drove a mob from the Protestant heartland of Belfast’s Shankill road into the Catholic Falls Road area. The Royal Ulster Constabulary not only failed to protect the Catholics, but colluded in the disorder, opening fire on Divis Flats in the Falls, and killing a nine-year-old boy. In Armagh, on the border with the Republic of Ireland, the RUC paramilitary reserve, the notorious B Specials, shot dead twenty-nine-year-old John Gallagher. There were riots in Dungannon and the Bogside area of Londonderry.
Six thousand British troops were deployed initially to do the job the RUC had failed to do, and were welcomed by Catholic communities. Though there had already been a split between the traditional or ‘Official’ Irish Republican Army (OIRA), who favoured a peaceful settlement of nationalist grievances, and the ‘new’ or ‘Provisional’ IRA (PIRA), who supported a strong-arm solution, nationalist terrorists were conspicuous by their silence. Behind the scenes, the Provisionals had infiltrated the civil rights movement, and were the backbone of Catholic defence committees. They came out of the closet the following year, when relations between the British army and Catholic communities soured, after the introduction of the Falls Road curfew. It was then that PIRA decided to target British troops.
D Squadron had been deployed in the Province ostensibly to run a ‘training exercise’, but in practice to prevent gun-running by Loyalist paramilitaries. After laying a wreath on Mayne’s grave, and firing a salute, they put a watch on Belfast Lough and began monitoring radio chatter from ships entering the harbour. At one stage they picked up a message from an Argentinian ship carrying ‘fifteen hundred pistolas’ and boarded the vessel, to discover to their great embarrassment that pistola meant a side of beef.
While the Regiment was making its first inroads into urban warfare, 2IC de la Billière was scouring the world for new jobs. One area of focus was the Persian Gulf, threatened by the presence of a Soviet-backed state in the People’s Democratic Republic of the Yemen, which had filled the vacuum created by Britain’s withdrawal from Aden. South Yemen’s next-door neighbour was the Sultanate of Oman, still ruled by the same reactionary Sultan, Sa‘id bin Taimur, for whom the Regiment had put down a rebellion a decade earlier. The SAS had maintained an interest in the Sultanate ever since.
80. ‘Purely for training purposes’
In March 1970 a swarthy-looking man with long dark hair, and a roll-up hanging from the side of his mouth, turned up at Sharjah, a small Sheikhdom in the Gulf. The man’s name was ‘Mr Smith’, and though his journey officially ended there, he continued overland to Muscat, where he sought a meeting with the Sultan of Oman, Sa‘id bin Taimur. ‘Mr Smith’ was Lt. Col. Johnny Watts, commanding officer of 22 SAS Regiment, and he had come to make bin Taimur a proposal.
Salalah, capital of Dhofar – Oman’s southernmost province – lay six hundred and twenty-five miles away from Muscat by road. There had been trouble in the region for the past eight years. The Sultan, who’d built a rambling palace on the beach at Salalah, regarded Dhofar as a sort of personal fief, although the idea that the local tribes had ever really been his ‘subjects’ was a fiction. In fact, his writ had never extended far beyond the coastal plain. The people of Dhofar – cattle-rearing hillmen, camel-riding Bedu, townsmen and fishermen – had been marginalized for centuries. In the early sixties, though, it had begun to dawn on them that while their neighbours were growing affluent, they remained in poverty. They revolted against the Sultan’s rule, forming an organization called the Dhofar Liberation Front.
In the mid-sixties, the DLF was ‘hijacked’ by the Yemen-based Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf (MPFLOAG) – an organization sponsored by the Soviet Union, China and Iraq. Dhofari tribesmen were trained in the Yemen by Soviet military advisers, and sent to the USSR or China for political indoctrination. The insurgency had become an international affair: if the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman fell to the Communists, then the oil-rich Gulf States, Kuwait, and even Saudi-Arabia might well go down like dominoes.
Within four years Chinese-backed insurgents were in possession of all Dhofar but the coastal plain, and were closing in on Salalah. In particular, they controlled the ‘Midway Road’ to northern Oman across the Dhofar mountains – the only land-communication with Muscat. The Sultan’s armed forces and his Baluch mercenaries recruited from Pakistan – both British-officered – had proved incapable of fighting the guerrillas in their mountain heartland. They had developed a ‘Jebel Akhdar’ syndrome – the belief that the jebel was impregnable, especially in the rainy season.
The situation in Dhofar was looking critical, but Watts had drawn up a plan to retrieve it. He offered bin Taimur the use of 22 SAS to set up a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign to win over the Dhofar people, and to train loyal Dhofaris as anti-guerrilla fighters. The Sultan had never been strong on hearts and minds, and baulked at the idea of arming his subjects. Watts’s carefully prepared pitch fell through.
British Consul-General in Oman David Crawford, Political Resident Geoffrey Arthur, and Oman Defence Secretary Col. Hugh Oldham had to face the unpalatable fact that the one certain assurance of Communist victory was the continued rule of Sa‘id bin Taimur. They plotted to overthrow him. They had an asset in Sheikh Braik bin Hamud, son of the Wali – the Governor – of Salalah, and another potential asset in bin Taimur’s only son, Qabus, a Sandhurst-trained officer who had been under virtual house-arrest for the past seven years. They agreed that Qabus would be asked to replace his
father.
Through an enterprising intelligence officer of the Sultan’s armed forces, Tim Landon, they discovered that Qabus had shared a room at Sandhurst with an officer currently serving in 22 SAS. This officer visited Qabus in the name of old acquaintance, and put the scheme to him. Qabus accepted. On 23 July 1970 the Sultan’s armed forces threw a cordon round the palace at Salalah, where the Sultan was sojourning. A small team recruited from the Trucial Oman Scouts, the SAF, the British Army Training Section and 22 SAS, led by Tim Landon and Sheikh Braik, entered the palace. The Sultan and his bodyguard were waiting for them, and immediately opened fire, killing a sentry and wounding Sheikh Braik. The salvo was abruptly cut short when bin Taimur shot himself in the foot. The Sultan was flown to Britain the same day, given medical treatment, and took up residence in the Dorchester hotel. Within a week, Qabus had announced sweeping changes. The people of Salalah danced in the street.
A few days later, a five-man SAS-team arrived in Oman as the new Sultan’s bodyguard, headed by the officer who had been his Sandhurst room-mate. Watts also sent his 2IC, Peter de la Billière, to Muscat to discuss the deployment of 22 SAS in Dhofar. By early September, the first troop of fifteen SAS-men under Captain Keith Farnes, an ex-Para, had arrived at Salalah. Designated the British Army Training Teams – BATT – they established an HQ at Umm al-Gawarif, and four-man sub-bases at the fishing ports of Taqa and Mirbat. Farnes started discreet work on a plan for the defence of Salalah, and the eventual defeat of rebel forces – Operation Storm.
As it happened, this was a propitious time for a Borneo-style campaign in southern Oman. The DLF had never aimed to change the social order, but the MPFLOAG Communists had outlawed the practice of Islam and started wreaking savage reprisals against any who resisted: they abducted children for indoctrination; they blinded men with hot irons; they cut off noses. When resistance continued, MPFLOAG attempted to disarm the DLF. One group of two dozen tribesmen, led by local DLF under-boss Salim Mubarak, fought back. On 12 September, Salim led his men down from the mountains and surrendered to Qabus.
The Regiment Page 44