The main part of my job with SIS was infiltration and exfiltration of agents. Normally I put together contingency plans to provide escape routes for them out of countries around the globe, in the event of them becoming compromised, and their lives, or the lives of their close families, coming under threat.
I also worked closely with the ‘Increment’, a very small and most secretive element of Special Forces often referred to as ‘The Wing’, or RWW, Revolutionary Warfare Wing. There were many times over the previous few years when individuals or, more likely, four-man teams from the Increment needed to be inserted into a foreign country without passing through any official channels.
One such operation in the summer of 1997 springs to mind.
It was a fairly straightforward task. Fly into PATA, Pontrilas Army Training Area, just south of Hereford, with the civilian registered Agusta 109 helicopter, and make myself available to the Increment for the following few days.
I arranged to meet up with the ‘Wing’ sergeant major at nine o’clock the following morning, Tuesday the 19th of August, for a briefing.
Although there were fuel and accommodation available at PATA, I decided to fly down that evening and spend the night at a very pleasant hotel just outside Ross-On-Wye, where I could land on the front lawn and park up for the night. I arrived there in good time for dinner, a few drinks and a comfortable bed at the expense of Her Majesty.
As I lifted off the next morning I got a less than friendly wave from a naked man as I climbed slowly past his open bedroom window, before setting the course for the five-minute flight to Pontrilas.
The task was to get four members of RWW onto the island of Sardinia as discreetly as possible.
I decided that the best option was to take off, at about five that evening, and land at Compton Abbas Airfield in rural Dorset. From there the team and I would transfer to a small twin-engine aeroplane, with my old mate Richard as captain and myself as co-pilot, for the remainder of the route into a small airfield north of Cagliari, planning to arrive there just after last light.
The team turned up dressed, pretty much, in the standard rig for SAS soldiers at that time. Jeans, T-shirts, bomber jacket and each carrying a medium sized rucksack.
On any of these sorties I refrained from asking my passengers what was in their baggage – I didn’t care. They were quite likely to be hauling surveillance equipment aids, radios or other technical devices and possibly weapons and explosives. As pilots, we paid no heed to the regulations imposed by the Civil Aviation Authorities regarding the carriage of Dangerous Air Cargo. Or any other regulations for that matter. We considered it was our job to simply get our passengers into a foreign country, with ultimate discretion in any way we could. And that is exactly what we usually managed to do. Most times we would file no flight plan and would fly at ultra-low level to avoid detection by radar. Flying over water in total darkness and displaying no lights we would never climb more than one hundred feet above the surface. Over land we would try to route down valleys in order to use the surrounding hills to provide protection from foreign Air Defence Systems.
After landing at the small, unlit, airfield on the outskirts of Cagliari, I quickly opened the door and, with the engines still running, the guys jumped out and disappeared into the night. The doors were immediately closed, take-off power applied, and we were on our way back to the UK after a visit of less than a minute.
Why a four man SAS team would want to sneak onto the island of Sardinia was no concern of ours. Richard and I parked up at Compton Abbas and made our way to the Fontmell pub in the village just down the road, for the usual drinks and a bed for the night.
Ten days later I was back in the same hotel near Ross-On-Wye tasked with a similar trip to the one to Sardinia. The following morning, I lifted off but was a little disappointed not to have the angry, naked man waving me off on my way to my next MI6 mission.
This time the task was for a different four-man team to be dropped off in a field just outside the French capital, Paris. I didn’t consider it was necessary to use Richard’s fixed wing aircraft for this trip. I would be able to get a quick squirt of fuel at Shoreham just before coasting out and, pop over to Paris and back, with just myself flying the helicopter.
An hour, or so, before darkness my four passengers arrived, looking remarkably like last week’s bunch. Again, no questions were asked. Simply pile on board and wait to be dropped off in the field using no lights and Anvis Night Vision Goggles. (I was one of only a handful of pilots in the UK qualified to fly as single-crew using Night Vision Goggles). After a quick exit, the team again disappeared into the night and I made my way back to the airfield in Dorset where I was met by Richard and Clive, the airfield owner, who rushed me down to the pub before last orders.
The next day I was back at home, now divorced and living on my own. Just like millions of other people around the world, I was stunned when I turned on the radio and learned that Princess Diana and her partner Dodi Fayed, had been killed in a tragic car accident in Paris shortly after spending a few days on a yacht moored off the island of Sardinia.