The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  The prototype team was ready in the five weeks de la Billière had requested, but no one was really satisfied with the result. Sgt. Ken Connor, who was brought in by Massey to improve standards, felt that many of the techniques already acquired on bodyguard and VIP training had been ignored. Under Massey and Connor, the team was reduced to a sixteen-man troop. They were equipped with black overalls, without body-armour, and wore their 9mm Browning pistols in standard belts. Technology was kept deliberately simple, on the ‘Spartan’s sword’ principle – that the key to success was high-level training rather than hi-tech kit.2 Shortly, the Special Projects team was placed under the counter-revolutionary warfare cell, which was expanded by four NCOs and charged with the further development of anti-terrorist methods.

  Anti-terrorist operations were broken down into phases. The first necessity was gaining entry into the building, ship, train, aircraft or bus. Remington shotguns were acquired to blow off locks or hinges, and plastic-explosive ‘frame-charges’ developed for blowing in doors and windows. The CRW cell also went to work, Jock Lewes style, on a ‘stun-grenade’ that would be powerful enough to disorient terrorists without wounding or killing hostages. The final product, developed by the British army’s nuclear-biological-and-chemical warfare establishment at Porton Down, was a six-inch by three-inch ‘flashbang’ made up of magnesium particles and fulminate of mercury. The bomb wouldn’t harm hostages, but delivered a tremendous detonation and a fifty-thousand-watt flash. Later models were designed to detonate six times in succession.

  Gas would play a major role in hostage-type scenarios. Like all British soldiers, the SAS were already trained in operating in CS and CR gas environments, but worked on improving their resistance without respirators. The Pagoda team was issued with the US-made Ingram M10/11, and later the Heckler & Koch MP5, which fired from a fixed bolt position, and could be dropped or bashed without going off. Porton Down also developed a special anti-terrorist bullet that would lodge in the enemy’s body rather than passing through it and killing a hostage.

  As commanding officer, it was de la Billière’s job to sell the new CRW concept, not only to VIPs, but also to the police. The SAS might be highly trained, but they lacked police powers. The police would retain primacy in any terrorist situation, and the SAS couldn’t be called in unless the chief police officer on the ground requested their assistance directly from the Home Secretary.

  One of de la Billière’s first actions was to invite senior police officers to Bradbury Lines to see the anti-terrorist team in action, and to work out ways of operating in concert. From these early visits there developed a regular two-day seminar for senior police officers. ‘There were a thousand and one details to be tied up,’ de la Billière recalled. ‘We had to be able to communicate with the police efficiently by radio, and, at the ordinary human level, to get to know our opposite numbers.’3

  The association with the police eventually blossomed into monthly joint exercises, controlled at high-level from COBR – the Cabinet Office Briefling Room – sited in a subterranean vault beneath Whitehall, where a junior cabinet minister would preside over representatives of the various services, military and civil. One vital command innovation was that during a terrorist threat, the Director, SAS, would sit on the Cabinet Office Committee with the Prime Minister and Home Secretary, in place of the army’s Chief of the General Staff.

  The SP team – eventually redesignated the Anti-Terrorist team – wasn’t entirely secret. From the start, it entertained visiting VIPs, who would take the part of ‘principals’ or ‘hostages’ in live firing exercises in the Killing House. Over the next three years, it worked out a modus operandi. If a terrorist incident occurred, the team would be recalled to camp on a bleeper device with a thirty-mile range. After a briefing by the team-leader, they would move fast to the scene of the incident in Range Rovers, which were fitted with strengthened chassis and anti-roll bars. If the site was more than three hours’ driving away, the team would be moved by helicopter or Hercules C130 transport aircraft. On arriving at the target area, they divided into a ‘method of entry’ squad, who would deal with locks, doors and windows, a back-up squad, consisting of trained snipers, who would secure the perimeter, and an assault squad, who would enter the tactical area. The ultimate aim was to secure the release of the hostages, not take out the terrorists, though there was always an Immediate Action plan should they start killing hostages. ‘The IA plan would be very simple,’ wrote an early member of the SP team, Barry Davies, ‘close with the terrorists as quickly as possible, and kill them.’4

  83. ‘Not a very pretty sight!’

  Sgt. Peter ‘Billy’ Ratcliffe didn’t hear the mortar-bomb that killed his mate Tpr. Chris Hennessy and wounded two others. The adoo were using straight high-explosive bombs that made hardly any noise until an instant before impact. Ratcliffe, on his third tour in Dhofar, knew it was no use throwing yourself down – if the bomb was near enough you’d be vaporized just the same. Ratcliffe was a career soldier whose life had begun the day he’d joined the Parachute Regiment. Born in the slums of Salford, the son of a bread-delivery man, he had enlisted to escape from a broken home and numerous run-ins with the police. In the Airborne Forces Depot he’d passed out champion recruit. Now he was a senior NCO in the world’s top special forces unit, ‘a far cry,’ he wrote,’… from the snotty-nosed kid who had grown up in abject poverty … with a more than even chance of ending up in jail’.1

  He had been filling sandbags about twenty-five metres from the main sangar when the bomb struck. One moment he was watching three men shovelling sand, the next they were all bowled flat by the blast. Ratcliffe staggered back to the sangar to find that Hennessy had been shredded – his guts and bits of his flesh were smeared across the rocks. The mortar-bomb had grooved down his torso, hit the deck and blattered apart, scattering body parts up to sixty feet. Next to what was left of Hennessy’s body, the signaller lay squirming and shrieking in shock and pain. He’d been right next to Hennessy when the bomb clumped, and had taken shrapnel fragments all over – his face, legs, chest and arms looked as if they’d been flayed. His skin was a moonscape of raw flesh. Later, it was the smell that Ratcliffe remembered. ‘The smell of fresh blood and splashed-about entrails is much stronger than most people could possibly imagine,’ he wrote, ‘and it is not only extremely unpleasant but also extremely unsettling … [it’s] something you never ever get used to.’2

  Ratcliffe grabbed the medical pack and broke it open, trying to staunch the signaller’s worst wounds with one hand while he fished for a morphine syrette with the other. At that moment he clocked the third man, Tpr. ‘Killer’ Denis, who was sprawled out inside the sangar. He was huddled against the stone wall, stark naked but for his boots and socks. For some reason the blast had shagged off his uniform, but left him unhurt except for a peppering of shrapnel in the backside. Ratcliffe stared at Denis for a second, and then felt his body quaking with laughter. An instant later, he was almost rolling around, roaring with mirth. ‘Fuck me, Denis,’ he grunted. ‘That’s not a very pretty sight!’

  Denis exploded, both of them bellowing and snorting until the tears streamed down their cheeks, their howls of glee fusing with the signaller’s shrieks. Ratcliffe reflected later that anyone listening to the noise would have thought they’d taken leave of their senses. It was no disrespect to the dead Hennessy or the wounded signaller: Ratcliffe later realized the explosion of laughter was caused by the after-effects of shock.

  In was October 1975, and D Squadron was on its last tour in Dhofar. The war was almost over – all but fifty or sixty adoo had evacuated the jebel and withdrawn back across the border. Ratcliffe and his patrol were manning the ‘Green Five’ sangar at Simba in the Qamar mountains – a two-kilometre square redoubt of bunkers and machine-gun posts on the arid western end of the Dhofar range, overlooking the coastal settlement of Hauf. From these crags, the Arabian sea looked like finely tempered ultramarine glass, the buildings of Hauf like clay models, the
roads like dark pencil-lines. D Squadron’s main task was to watch and eventually cut the supply-route that ran within a mile of their position, along which the enemy moved camel-trains laden with weapons to the last knots of resistance on the mountains.

  Hauf currently belonged to Yemen, but was traditionally part of Dhofar, and Sultan Qabus had claimed it back. His main offensive was due at the end of the monsoon, but the previous day Ratcliffe and his mates from D Squadron had watched a preliminary assault on the town by Hawker Hunters of the Sultan’s Air Force, and a bombardment by the Sultan’s artillery.

  Ratcliffe’s troop on Simba had worked as forward air-controllers, vectoring the jets in. Not a single bomb missed its target. The bombing and a ten-hour barrage from five-and-a-half-inch guns had made the rebels hopping mad. The next day they’d opened up on Simba with 81mm mortars and Russian-made Katyusha rocket-launchers, from four kilometres away. By luck or good-shooting they’d managed to lob a bomb right on to Green Five.

  Chris Hennessy’s body and the two wounded men were choppered out that night, and replaced a couple of days later by two more – a fresh-faced trooper called ‘Ginge’ and another named ‘Ian’ – like Ratcliffe, an ex-Para. When they arrived, Ratcliffe and three other men from his troop were still filling sandbags, trying to strengthen the sangar. The replacements hadn’t been there more than ten minutes when the position was hit by a pair of Katyusha rockets.

  Unlike the mortar bombs, you could hear the Katyushas twanging two seconds before they hit. One of the rockets whamped into the rocks about two hundred metres away, and erupted in a blotch of fire. Ratcliffe heard the second whining in, and realized it was heading for the sangar, where the two replacements were just dumping their Bergens. ‘Incoming!’ he screeched. The two men scooted in opposite directions – Ginge straight into the missile’s trajectory. To Ratcliffe it looked as if an invisible hand had scooped him up and dashed him against the wall. By the time the bomb exploded, Ginge was already dead from the impact.3

  Like Hennessy, Ginge had been ripped apart by the explosion. Ratcliffe’s immediate reaction was the feeling that he wanted to grab his weapon, rush down into the hills and slaughter any adoo he came across. He had the strength to control himself, though, knowing that he’d never find the rebels – even if he tasked a chopper to seek them out, it would be shot down. All he and his mates could do was wait for the big offensive.

  Between November and December that year two hundred and twenty-two adoo surrendered to the Sultan – a record number, more even than during the amnesty three years earlier. Defensive lines, with wire and minefields, were set up, and by January the supply-line from Hauf was finally cut. On the jebel, mopping-up operations revealed huge arms caches and complete field hospitals set up inside caves. At last, after fourteen years of conflict, and centuries of neglect, Dhofar was declared safe for civil development. 22 SAS had suffered a dozen dead and many wounded, but no one in the outside world even knew they’d been fighting there.

  Peter Ratcliffe, who’d seen two of his comrades blown to pieces within forty-eight hours, felt that the experience had changed him. After this there would be nothing war could throw at him that he couldn’t handle.

  84. ‘Al Capone gangsterism’

  The Anti-Terrorist team was first sent into action under de la Billière’s successor as commanding officer Lt. Col. Tony Jeapes – one of the architects of SAS success in the Dhofar campaign. Jeapes had taken over in early 1974. By then, the Pagoda team had grown to a full squadron. Rather than having a permanent specialist unit, the SAS head-shed had decided to rotate squadrons through the role in turn – this system meant that every man in the Regiment would acquire counter-terrorist training and experience, and the constant turnover would ensure that the squad didn’t get stale.

  Within a year the SP team was called out on its first mission – an aircraft hijacking at Manchester. The hijacker, an Iranian, demanded to be flown to Paris. The Pagoda team suggested flying him to Stansted, where they had the plane talked down by a French air traffic controller and posted men on the ground in the uniforms of French police. When the aircraft came in, they stormed aboard, took the Iranian down, and bundled him out. It turned out that his pistol was a replica.

  That winter, a Provisional IRA unit that had been active in London for months tried to assassinate ex-Prime Minister Edward Heath by placing a bomb under his car. The bomb failed to go off, and was spotted by a taxi-driver who pulled into Heath’s parking-space as he drove out. Only days later, the same four men – Tom O’Connell, Edward Butler, Henry Duggan and Hugh Doherty – bombed Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair, killing two customers and injuring a dozen more. Angered by the fact that the restaurant had promptly reopened, the gang made the mistake of hitting the place again in December, opening fire on it with a 9mm Sten-gun from the window of a stolen Ford Cortina.

  Unfortunately for them, the restaurant was under observation by a couple of plainclothes police officers, who immediately jumped into a caband ordered the driver to give chase. They trailed the vehicle into Balcombe Street, a cul-de-sac near Marylebone Station, where the terrorists abandoned the car and broke into a flat owned by John Matthews and his wife, whom they took hostage. The street was quickly cordoned off by armed police. The SAS Special Projects team was called in.

  The siege went on for six days. As it happened, the chief police negotiator had been involved in SAS operations before most of the SP squad were even born. He was Assistant Commissioner Ernest Bond, formerly Sgt. Ernie Bond of L Detachment, who had served under David Stirling in 8 Commando and had been on the ill-fated Bombay flown by Charlie West, shot down on Operation Squatter. Bond believed that the PIRA-men holed up in the Matthews’ flat were responsible for forty bombings and fifteen murders, and wanted to capture them alive. His opportunity came when the terrorists heard a BBC radio announcement that the SAS team was poised to strike. They surrendered the same day.

  Though the Balcombe Street siege ended without violence, it sparked off a new wave of terror in Northern Ireland. On 19 December, three Catholics were gunned down by Loyalists in a bar at Silverbridge, County Armagh. Two weeks later, the Provisional IRA bombed a bar at Gifford, County Down, killing three Protestants. At Whitecross, Loyalists slaughtered five Catholic members of the Socialist and Democratic Labour Party. The following day, a band of twenty Provos stopped a bus carrying Protestant linen-workers from Bessbrook, at Kingsmills Junction. The workers were dragged out, lined up in the road and mown down with sub-machine guns. Ten were shot to pieces; the eleventh was badly wounded, but survived.

  The ‘Kingsmills Massacre’ – condemned by Northern Ireland Secretary Merlyn Rees as ‘Al Capone gangsterism’ – was one of the most vicious mass-murders of the Troubles. It provoked outrage from Loyalist politicians, who demanded that Prime Minister Harold Wilson take immediate steps to deal with the escalating violence, especially in the border area, where the Provisional IRA was out of control. Within forty-eight hours of the Kingsmills incident, Wilson had announced that the SAS would be deployed on patrol and surveillance duties in South Armagh.

  85. ‘Never a happy hunting-ground’

  Around noon on 7 January 1976, the second-in-command of 22 SAS, Major ‘G’, was enjoying a quiet drink in the Cross Keys pub in King’s Road, Chelsea, when he heard Wilson’s announcement on televison. He gulped down his drink and hurried back to SAS Group Headquarters in nearby Duke of York’s Barracks, where his phone shortly buzzed. It was the Director, SAS, Brigadier Johnny Watts, who inquired if he’d heard the report on TV and if he knew anything about the deployment of the SAS in Northern Ireland. Major ‘G’, temporarily in command of the Regiment while the CO was wrapping up in Dhofar, confessed that he didn’t.

  He was not alone. Watts was soon carpeted at the Ministry of Defence, where an irate Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Michael Carver, virtually accused him of going over his head to get the SAS sent into action in Armagh. In fact, Watts was no more in the Prime Minister’s l
oop than anyone else in the MoD. His real concern was that 22 SAS simply didn’t have the men to meet Wilson’s pledge. Of the Regiment’s four squadrons, one was still in Dhofar, another on a key NATO exercise in Europe, a third on Pagoda duties, and the fourth, D Squadron, dispersed on courses and small-group missions all over the world. Though the press speculated that the number of SAS-men sent to Northern Ireland was in the hundreds, the initial party consisted of only eleven sabre personnel, mostly instructors from the Training Wing, or men on convalescent leave after being wounded in Oman.

  The SAS party was allotted quarters at Bessbrook Mill, a British army base since the early 70s, currently the HQ of the local battalion, 1 Royal Scots. A former linen-mill, it was a solid, castle-like structure with watchtowers, anti-mortar screens and a helipad, set in the rolling green meadows and undulating gorse-covered moors of South Armagh. Nearby Bessbrook village was a Quaker enclave in a largely Catholic border area that was known as ‘Bandit Country’. The Provisional IRA units in the area were the most ruthless in the Province, and had to date taken out forty-nine British soldiers, the majority by radio-controlled bombs. They hadn’t suffered a single casualty.

  The SAS planned to change all that. They drew up a list of eleven top PIRA chiefs in South Armagh, planning to hunt them down and arrest them if possible, or shoot them if necessary. On the surface, their task didn’t seem far removed from the counter-insurgency work the SAS had done in Malaya, Borneo and Dhofar. In practice, the crucial ‘hearts and minds’ element was missing. They had won over Ibans and Muruts in Borneo, and Jebalis in Oman, but the Catholic population of Armagh nursed a hatred of British forces that had become ingrained in their culture over generations.