CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

OPERATION BARRAS—THE FINAL PHASE IN SIERRA LEONE

As Tim Butcher recalls in an article he did for the London Daily Mail, ‘It was a famous military coup de théâtre—the spectacular SAS rescue of British troops held by vicious Sierra Leone guerrillas.’ The real story, he maintained, ‘was 200 rebels killed, their corpses hidden, and the truth buried by Tony Blair’.¹

Neall Ellis is more forthright because he was there. He was a participant in the one of the most successful rescue efforts in recent times, which, he reckons, was as good as it got because of the incredible level of planning that went into getting the British hostages back.

The main problem facing Whitehall was that Operation Palliser, the British Armed forces operation in Sierra Leone, was over and Foday Sankoh’s rebels were all but vanquished, with Sankoh himself having been taken prisoner. Therefore, almost all British forces and their air assets, including helicopters, had been withdrawn.

Then came disaster, as a small contingent of British troops were taken hostage by a rebel group. Almost overnight, the Ministry of Defence had to set in motion a major West African rescue operation. Nellis remembers:

Apart from two Lynx helicopters, which arrived on HMS Ocean and HMS Illustrious, the British had to fly in three Chinook HC2 heavy-lift, transport helicopters from Britain. It had been done before. The first time that British forces went in, four Chinooks were flown out to Africa, and at the time the effort was regarded as the longest single transit by Chinooks ever attempted.