part0010

I was covered in frost, lying deep inside a bramble bush, on a freezing, dark November morning. It was not yet dawn but I could hear people talking and saw lights shining from the camouflaged tents.

I was very nervous but tried to stop myself shaking with the cold and the tension. I was surrounded by the enemy. I knew that if I was found, I would be interrogated, but it was too late now to escape. I was committed and would have to stay there for the rest of the day. With luck I would be able to exfiltrate and escape that night, but meanwhile I had to gain the maximum possible intelligence.

The words of my instructor, the Bosun, ran through my brain. ‘From now on go where the enemy least expect to find you and get as close as possible. The closer you get, the less they’ll expect you.’

It had sounded good advice a long way from the action. It was rather less reassuring now that I actually found myself in the middle of an enemy base.

The previous night I’d seen lights in the distance. The other three members of the patrol and I had decided to split up and try to infiltrate the enemy camp. We arranged to meet the following night and pass on any intelligence gained to our headquarters.

I’d moved closer and closer. As I penetrated each layer of the defences, my confidence grew at the realisation that the impossible really was possible, until I found myself where I was now — and did not want to be.

Slowly dawn broke. Within six feet of me a table was laid for breakfast. This was completely alien to anything I had seen either in my old para unit or the unit I was trying to join, where breakfast — if there was any — was eaten on the hoof.

I raised my head a fraction and glanced around. I could see more tents, and sentries strolling in the distance, looking outwards. I was behind their backs. There was more movement as people started to come out of the tents. They were all officers. I realised that I was in the middle of a major headquarters.

Orderlies were laying out water for them to wash and shave and the field kitchen started up, making lots of noise. Before long I could smell sausages and bacon, toast and coffee. My mouth started to water. I had no food and my only equipment was my personal weapon, belt kit, map and compass. It was going to be a long, cold and very hungry day.

Suddenly an officer detached himself from a group and shouted for his orderly to come and clean his boots. He walked towards the bush and I was sure I would be seen. Directly in front of me, no more than six inches away, was a sawn-off tree stump. The officer plumped his foot down on it.

I looked up through the tangle of brambles and saw the three pips of a captain and the flash of the Coldstream Guards. His orderly came bustling across. He knelt down, his right knee within inches of my nose, and went to work with the boot-polish.

The officer surveyed the surrounding landscape like the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, then said to the orderly, ‘Keep your eyes peeled, Perkins, the bastards are out there somewhere.’

It was only an exercise, but the fundamental lessons the SAS was pumping into me were being learned: go where they don’t expect you to be, stay for longer than they expect you to stay and get all the information you possibly can.

The campaign in the Jebel Akhdar had saved the Regiment’s life — for the moment at least — but the SAS returned to England to find the armed forces in upheaval, still struggling to come to terms with savage cuts and changed defence priorities imposed by the new Macmillan government.

Suez had proved that Britain could no longer support sterling and fund the defence of a global empire. The attempt to sustain both aims merely put both at increased risk. Something had to give. [25]

That realisation forced Macmillan into a ‘spontaneous conversion: after 1956, the advocate of empire and coercion stood four-square behind sterling and peace’. [26]

Eden’s resignation in January 1957 had brought Macmillan to power and he took immediate steps to slash defence expenditure. In the five years to 1956 it had absorbed 10 per cent of Britain’s gross domestic product. Macmillan’s new Defence Minister, Duncan Sandys, was instructed to cut that by a third.

The chiefs of staff and their political protectors had fought off all previous attempts at comprehensive reform, either of their own services or of the defence establishment. Each service had its own secretary of state, and in this bedlam of special pleading a neutral and streamlined decision-making process was all but impossible.

Sandys’s solution was to sideline the chiefs of staff. He prepared his May 1957 White Paper, Defence : Outline of Future Policy , without even consulting them. When it was published he and Macmillan simply ignored their howls of complaint.

Sandys imposed swingeing cuts on manpower levels and equipment, particularly on the army, which was to be almost halved in strength from 690,000 to 375,000 men over the next five years. Conscription was abolished and overseas bases were closed. The wholesale reductions, including the disbandment of many units, meant that a huge overseas operation on the scale of Suez could never again be contemplated.

Sandys’s most far-reaching reform, however, was to initiate moves to bring the three services under a single controlling body: the Ministry of Defence. The process he had begun was completed by Lord Mountbatten. As First Sea Lord he had vigorously opposed Sandys’s plans for cuts in the Royal Navy. When appointed Chief of the Defence Staff two years later the naval poacher became a gamekeeper, forcing through the later stages of the ruthless reorganisation and centralisation of the MoD.

The reforms did not go far enough however. A further shotgun marriage would have greatly benefited the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. Their policies impinged directly on each other, yet they have remained resolutely independent of each other from 1945 to the present day. The shambles of Suez and the withdrawal of HMS Endurance from the Falklands in 1981, which, at the least, contributed to Argentina’s decision to invade, were just two of the occasions when the Foreign Office was either excluded from key decisions or ignored.

The Sandys White Paper also set Britain’s defence priorities in stone. Secure in the knowledge that a test of an air-launched hydrogen bomb was about to be held — it took place at Christmas Island in the same month as the White Paper was published — Sandys reinforced the role of the nuclear deterrent as the cornerstone of British defence.

The original Strategy Paper advocating a shift to nuclear deterrence had been rapidly diluted under pressure from the navy and army chiefs of staff, who (rightly) saw it as heralding the virtual extinction of their own services.

As a result a compromise was reached and the bizarre assumption was made that the initial nuclear exchanges would not produce a decisive result, but would be followed by a period of ‘broken-backed’ warfare. This had far less to do with any military reality than with providing a continuing role for conventional forces to justify their share of the defence budget and support a top-heavy ratio of generals and admirals to troops. In an all-out nuclear conflict, the only realistic role for conventional forces would be helping to bury the dead.

Sandys took the nuclear policy a significant step further in 1957. The enforced climbdown over Suez had helped to reinforce the British obsession with an ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent. It had become a talisman, a virility symbol that would allow Britain to stand up to the bullies kicking sand in its wrinkled old imperial face.

Nuclear weapons were now to be not only the last line of British defence but also the first, even against an attack by conventional forces. The threat of nuclear devastation of an aggressor nation’s own territory would substitute for conventional forces on the ground.

Sandys saw it as a cheap way to continue Britain’s world role. Whatever the strategic considerations, the country’s financial plight might well have forced him to the same conclusion, but the policy was deeply flawed.

The development of tactical, lower-yield nuclear weapons that could be used in ‘limited war’ had allowed proponents of a nuclear-first policy to argue that it could cater for any scale of conflict. This was manifestly untrue and skated over the real fear that any use of nuclear weapons, however tactical, would inevitably escalate into full-scale nuclear conflict.

It also ran counter to NATO strategy, which was shifting to the idea of using nuclear weapons only in response to a nuclear attack. Instead a conventional ‘forward defence’ of Western Europe was planned along the River Weser in West Germany, close to the inner German border.

NATO planners had come to realise that a West Germany abandoned to Soviet invasion or nuclear destruction in the event of war had no great incentive for continuing NATO membership. It took British planners some considerable time to draw the parallel conclusions about Britain’s remaining colonies.

The nuclear-first policy allowed for little gradation of response to provocation and ignored the political lesson from Suez that any unsanctioned British military action, including the use of nuclear weapons, would not be tolerated by the US.

Britain’s policy was also increasingly called into question by its inability to maintain the necessary investment, as the financial economies from a nuclear-first policy rapidly proved to be illusory.

The technological complexity of the weapons and their delivery systems — and therefore their cost — had entered an endless upward spiral. Missile-firing destroyers, for example, now cost twice as much — £28 million — as the largest Second World War battleships. [27]

Military equipment took longer and longer to design, develop and commission. Along the way costs rose exponentially, and when delivery was finally taken the product had often already been made redundant by newer technologies. The first squadron of the strategic force of V-bombers came into service in 1955, but the rapid advances in missile technology had already rendered them obsolete.

If further proof were needed that Britain was already losing the arms race, it was offered just six months after Sandys published his 1957 White Paper. The Sputnik launch in October of that year threw the US into a blind panic at the (false) belief that the Soviets had opened a ‘missile gap’ on them, but it also emphasised how far Britain had fallen behind both superpowers.

That harsh reality was reinforced three years later, in June 1960, when the government was forced to admit it could no longer afford the cost of full membership of the nuclear club. The home-produced Blue Streak was cancelled and replaced by American-built Skybolt missiles. That decision in turn rebounded on Britain when the Kennedy administration axed Skybolt in 1962.

The Cuban missile crisis had put America and the Soviet Union on ‘the brink of nuclear disaster and having looked over into it, seemed resolved never to approach it again’. [28]

In the wake of it, Kennedy was initially determined to reduce the potential for nuclear conflict by forcing Britain to give up its nuclear weapons. Only Macmillan’s tacit threat to follow the French lead and withdraw from NATO persuaded him to change his mind.

Macmillan had mended fences with the US after Suez, granting permission for Thor missile silos to be constructed in the UK in 1957 and allowing US Polaris submarines to be based at Holy Loch on the Clyde from 1960 onwards.

Now Kennedy reluctantly agreed that Britain would also be given Polaris missiles, but only on condition that they were assigned to NATO. Macmillan extracted a face-saving formula allowing Britain to act independently in circumstances where NATO refused to take action. In practice, given Britain’s dependence on the United States for the supply of warheads and missile systems, the British nuclear deterrent was about as independent of American policy as Rhode Island.

Britain’s illusions of nuclear independence continued, however, and were even strengthened by Macmillan’s role in helping to secure the partial test-ban treaty signed on 5 August 1963. His importance to the negotiations was not much greater than that of a dealer in a no-limits poker game between two billionaires, but Macmillan was so delighted with his contribution that he even thanked Kennedy and Khrushchev for ‘helping to make the negotiations a success’. [29]

Sandys’s attempt to balance the defence books had proved fruitless in both the medium and long term, doomed to failure by rising costs and by his refusal to reduce Britain’s overseas commitments in line with them. The withdrawal from east of Suez finally forced on Harold Wilson’s government in the next decade was a bridge too far for Sandys and Macmillan, but Britain’s retreat from a world role could only be delayed, not reversed. The hammer and anvil of ongoing economic crises and the ever-rising cost of defence forced a series of progressively deeper cuts to the armed forces as Britain haltingly but inexorably gave up the last trappings of imperial power.

Although Britain was now irrevocably committed to fast-tracking all its remaining colonies to independence, counterinsurgency operations were a continuing — and growing — feature of the withdrawal from empire.

The obsession with a nuclear strategy had blinded many British politicians and military strategists to the continuing need for conventional forces to undertake such tasks, and the huge reductions in army manpower came at the very time when the nuclear threat was encouraging both East and West to adopt less overt uses of aggression in client and other states.

As the Foreign Office, if not the MoD, had realised, insurgency and counter-insurgency needed a rapier like the SAS, not the bludgeon of nuclear weapons, however low-yield they might be.

US Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s comment in 1962: ‘Britain has lost an empire, but not yet found a role,’ was a few years out of date. By then the Foreign Office strategy was in place. Diplomacy backed by the covert use of deadly force were to be the twin arms of a policy to maintain Britain’s power and influence in key strategic areas. The Sabre Squadrons — the fighting troops — of the SAS were to be the cutting edge of that policy.

The Regiment’s A and D Squadrons had returned to the UK from the Jebel Akhdar in triumph, but any misconceptions about the heroes’ welcome awaiting them were very quickly dispelled.

They had been totally at home in the jungle of Malaya and had come to terms with the desert of the Jebel Akhdar. After ten years away, they now had to adapt to another alien environment. Their newly allocated base, Merebrook Camp in Malvern, Worcestershire, was dilapidated even by army standards.

The site, once an emergency hospital, had been unoccupied since the war. The ground was low-lying and the camp and its decaying Nissen huts were regularly flooded. The toilets, baths and showers did not work, and the whole place was fit for nothing but demolition.

The living conditions added to the feeling of uncertainty and impermanence that had permeated the Regiment since its re-formation, but the Jebel Akhdar campaign had overcome at least some of the MoD’s reservations and in 1960 the SAS was moved from Malvern to a former boys’ training unit for the Royal Artillery, Bradbury Lines in Hereford.

A rare interlude of peace after a decade of war offered the chance to assess the present condition of the Regiment and its future direction — if it was to be allowed a future at all.

As the rebels in Malaya and Oman could testify, the SAS was already a formidable weapon, but it was a blunt instrument at the time. Its troopers were a bunch of grizzled veterans, brilliant soldiers, but rough, tough and unsophisticated.

Action was needed to develop further the unique potential of the Regiment. Its men would continue to be ferocious fighters when the occasion demanded but the primary function of the SAS would in future be intelligence-gathering.

In the three years before the uprising in Brunei that marked the start of its next spell on active service, the SAS was transformed into something like its modern form.

It was immediately apparent that the traditional regimental way of doing things was not appropriate for a special forces unit. After a lengthy series of ‘Chinese parliaments’ — think-tanks involving all ranks of the Regiment — where a lot of midnight oil was burned, the regimental format was scrapped.

Each squadron was broken down into a headquarters comprising an officer, a clerk, a sergeant-major and a squadron quartermaster sergeant in charge of stores, and four sixteen-man troops. Each troop was in turn composed of four four-man patrols.

The ideal number in a patrol had originally been envisaged as five. The rationale was that if one man was wounded, three could not carry one, but four could. However, combat experience showed that the morale of a patrol was more important than their ability to carry a casualty.

Operating in small groups for months at a time, hundreds of miles from the nearest friendly forces, required complete trust and confidence between patrol members. An odd number of men in a patrol invariably left one as an outsider and on long operations that would have a potentially damaging impact on the patrol’s morale and efficiency.

Having fought opponents inspired by political ideology in the jungle of Malaya and religious belief on the Jebel Akhdar, there was also a belief that SAS men needed some inner motivation to sustain them in their stressful, dangerous and isolated operations behind enemy lines.

Many officers made a point of attending church services, hoping their example would inspire their men to find God, but SAS men were too sophisticated — or too cynical — to swallow political or religious creeds.

Most of us shared the opinion voiced in 1781 by Private Jack Careless: ‘Fine talking of God to a soldier, whose trade and occupation is cutting throats.’ [30] One of the first army padres posted to the SAS had left shouting, ‘This Regiment doesn’t need a padre, it needs a missionary.’

Instead of religion, the Regiment’s own creed became what American cops call ‘the buddy system’. SAS men formed a bond with the other members of their patrol that was as close as a family. The men of a four-man patrol — two pairs — would do anything for their mates: even die for them.

Having made the crucial decision after much soul-searching to adopt the four-man patrol, there was then a certain wry amusement when scarcity of manpower often meant that patrols became three-man rather than four.

The four-, sometimes three-man patrol was the building block from which everything else was constructed. It was the ultimate machine that could function anywhere in the world, in any environment and any type of terrain: arctic or desert, jungle or savannah, travelling by land, sea or air.

Each patrol consisted of a patrol commander, not necessarily the highest-ranking man in the group. The second man was a signaller, for there was no point in collecting intelligence unless you could transmit it. The third member had another skill such as demolitions, and the fourth was designated as a language specialist, although in practice most SAS men could speak at least one foreign language. One of the four — though never the signaller, a full-time job in itself — also doubled as the patrol medic.

Having established the right format, the Regiment then began an intensive training period. SAS Selection had already been introduced during the Malayan campaign but continuous training was also imperative if the Regiment was to progress and evolve, and not merely stagnate.

Selection was complemented by the establishment of training cells and intensive, highly specialised training programmes were introduced to refine existing skills and develop new ones. The two Sabre Squadrons were rarely in base together, for one or the other — and sometimes both — were almost permanently away on exercise, somewhere in the world.

In addition to advancing purely military techniques to previously unknown levels, SAS men also acquired expertise in a wide range of other skills including long-range communications, languages and paramedicine.

To practise their individual and collective skills the SAS would take on any task. One of the most infamous was a job demolishing factory chimneys in Coventry. The demolitionist in the Regiment loaded a pile of explosives on to a truck and took a team up there.

They blew down the first chimney with consummate skill. The only problem was that they also blew out every window in the adjoining terraced street. They rang Hereford for help and the rest of the boys turned up and spent several days perfecting an unexpected new skill, replacing all the broken windows.

Escape, evasion and counter-interrogation training was of rather more direct use. If general war against the Soviet Union was declared, the SAS would be operating deep inside Eastern Europe. In the event of capture they faced interrogation and torture. There was little doubt in anyone’s mind then that sooner or later there would be a war, we would be operating in the Urals and we would be captured.

The Regiment took advice on counter-interrogation techniques from SAS members who had been captured in Korea while serving with their former units and even from the Bishop of Birmingham, who had also been interrogated by the North Koreans.

It had had a powerful effect on him. On leaving the army he had joined the Church, believing that the only way to beat Communism was with a greater faith. This caused some soul-searching in the Regiment, because the bishop was an impressive man and far from alone in his belief that you needed some creed to cling to during a very violent interrogation.

The theory that strong religious beliefs would help a man to resist Communist interrogators was not helped by the fate of Cardinal Mindszenty, the head of the Catholic Church in Hungary. After the Soviet invasion in 1956 the KGB subjected him to sensory deprivation and Mindszenty cracked within days, becoming one of the chief apologists for the Soviet action.

The creed the SAS chose to follow was the same as they relied on when patrolling in hostile territory. It was no good trying to plead to God, Queen or Country, or indeed the army or the Regiment. It came down to man to man, to not wanting to let down your mates in your patrol. All SAS men pledged to their mates that they would not crack for at least twenty-four hours after capture, and all escape and evasion plans were predicated on having that time.

For a couple of years the SAS did its own counter-interrogation training, then the Joint Service Interrogation Wing was set up as an extension of the Intelligence Corps. They had studied interrogation techniques and trained the army — on paper — in countering them. To be given living, breathing SAS men as interrogation subjects was a heaven-sent opportunity for them. They often wore Soviet uniforms for added authenticity and their treatment of their subjects was every bit as brutal.

They spent a great deal of time studying the Regiment, reading local and national newspapers, and any source of intelligence that would give them an edge in the interrogation. They could then unsettle a subject by gradually revealing more and more knowledge of his activities, suggesting that one or more of his colleagues was collaborating with them. They could also puncture his cover story that he was merely a medic or an infantryman by producing a newspaper photograph of him wearing SAS uniform.

If they could do it, the Soviet Union could certainly do it too. Part of the Regiment’s defence from then on was to retreat further into monastic silence. The new emphasis on total secrecy extended to troopers’ wives and families, and even other SAS men.

To ensure secrecy, SAS men were put into isolation as soon as a job was planned. The Sabre Squadron and all the necessary support personnel were separated from the rest of the Regiment and no home visits were allowed. Any persons attempting to breach the wall of silence were themselves held in isolation for the duration of the operation and then subjected to disciplinary action.

Need to know became the guiding principle in all operations. If you didn’t, you didn’t get told. Any breach of security, no matter how slight, was punished by an automatic RTU. One man was RTU’d simply because his wife was overheard telling someone, ‘My husband’s abroad at the moment.’

It was brutal and probably unfair, but it sent a powerful message.

The Regiment’s public face was similarly silent. No information about SAS personnel or activities was released, no comments or public statements were made on anything and no photographs were permitted. The modern, slightly surreal development of this has been that no photograph of an SAS man, whether serving or retired, is ever published without a black bar obscuring his face.

Prevention by escape and evasion (E&E) was always preferable to the cure of counter-interrogation and the ability to evade capture with little or no kit was the supreme test of soldiering skill. The punishment for being captured was a trip to the interrogators for another gruelling session. Experienced SAS men were hard to capture on field exercises and, to keep the interrogators in work, arrangements were made to ambush patrols at their prearranged rendezvous (RV).

For years afterwards it was impossible to get an SAS patrol on exercise to give an accurate position over the radio. Patrol members would routinely fix a secret RV point, up to a mile from the one they notified, and they gave a very wide berth to any RV known to HQ.

Escape and evasion exercises became a regular pattern of Regimental life, taking place about once a month. Many of them were held in Denmark, where the Danes entered into them so wholeheartedly that they effectively closed the whole country down. The exercises were advertised on television and there were discussion programmes on what to look for, showing typical hides and bootprints.

It was like a forerunner of the TV show Wanted . Prizes were offered for information leading to our capture and the schoolkids were given a holiday to take part. It seemed like the whole population of Denmark was out combing every inch of spare ground. It was the ultimate test: you were good or you were caught.

During escape and evasion exercises the CO, John Woodhouse, would usually swap identities with one of the other ranks in the Regiment. His preferred swap was with Corporal Bert Perkins, who had been captured and interrogated for real while serving with the Gloucester in the Korean War.

During one exercise the real John Woodhouse was captured and interrogated but maintained his cover as Corporal Perkins. At the end of it his interrogator remarked, ‘I’m not surprised the Koreans let you go and it’s no wonder you’re still a corporal. You’re as thick as a plank.’ Sadly, history does not relate how Bert Perkins fared in his role as commanding officer.

Escape and evasion was important, but the development of close-quarter battle (CQB) shooting and combat techniques was arguably the most significant event in the history of the Regiment. It was a much neglected field, last used with any great expertise by Second World War commanders and other specialist troops.

The first close-quarter battle house was a sandbagged enclosure on the slopes of Mount Kenya. The Mau Mau rebellion was long since over by 1960, even though the state of emergency had only just been lifted, but D Squadron had been sent to Kenya on exercise, partly to establish what changes were needed to the jungle-fighting techniques used in Malaya to make them effective in African conditions.

At first they used the then standard method of shooting, the Grant Taylor system, in that first CQB house. Grant Taylor was an American Office of Strategic Services instructor. The method he devised involved holding the pistol just below your navel, keeping it tight against the body, at right angles to the stomach wall and parallel to the ground. Holding that position, you jumped round to face each different target; if you were square on to it when you fired, you would hit the target just above the navel.

It soon became apparent that the method was not suitable for SAS purposes. On their return to Hereford a small group of soldiers was given the task of devising a new system and training programme. Over a very short time they created a more fluid, instinctive method of shooting and self-defence.

Under the SAS system the pistol is held at shoulder height with the arm extended and swept across the centre of the target. The pistol becomes an extension of the hand and the index finger which pulls the trigger points the way to the target. Anyone — young or old, male or female, right- or left-handed — could be taught to shoot accurately with the method; if you could point you could hit the target.

That one innovation had the most far-reaching implications for the future of the SAS. Almost overnight it made possible the change from a purely military force into a unit capable of carrying out all the covert and clandestine operations for which it is now world-famous.

Until then, the army pistol had been a purely defensive weapon. Only half a dozen were issued per battalion and they were carried only by senior officers and those — such as tank crews or pilots — operating in confined spaces that made a rifle impractical.

The SAS method made the pistol into an aggressive weapon, giving a trained user the ability to draw a concealed weapon and kill multiple opponents, even if they had already drawn their weapons and were covering you.

There were three basic modules in the training system: fitness, self-defence and shooting. SAS men were already extremely fit from their general training, but the pistol training developed hand and arm strength so that you could control the pistol at all times. It was a heavy piece of hardware and without that strength training it could drag your hand around even when you were not firing.

Self-defence was based on the use of multiple blows to create the space that allowed a person under threat to escape or draw his pistol and fire. It was used to build up the self-confidence needed to allow a situation to develop, knowing that whatever the outcome you were going to win.

The weapon was carried concealed in a quick-draw holster. There was nothing suitable on the market, so each of us made our own. It was worn under apparently normal clothing, but shirt buttons were purely decorative. Our shirts were actually fastened by press-studs, now superseded by Velcro. They could be ripped open and the pistol drawn in a second. Firing it took only fractions of a second more.

Everyone in the Regiment was issued with a pistol, which we then modified to suit our own particular physical characteristics. I had quite small hands so I reduced the size of the grip to allow me a firmer hold on the weapon. I also removed the sights, which were superfluous using this shooting method and hampered a quick draw. I smoothed down the profile of the weapon for the same reason.

Army pistols were not designed for left-handers, who previously had to learn to shoot with the wrong hand. Left-handed SAS men simply moved the safety catch to the other side of the weapon, allowing them to shoot with their natural hand. Army regulations forbade anyone but an armourer to carry out modifications, but we knew more about our weapons than any armourer and did the work ourselves.

The training took only ten days, but was designed to be very intense and required total dedication: you had to live it as well as do it. You practised indoors and outdoors, by night and day, beginning with a lot of dry-training using mirrors and then going on to fire well over 1,000 rounds as you perfected your skills.

The aim was to achieve 100 per cent accuracy, not in the sterile conditions of a normal firing range, but while being pushed, jostled and threatened, or while operating among crowds of innocent people.

In many circumstances we might have to move bystanders aside or use street-fighting techniques to clear a space in which we could then draw our weapon and fire, or make an escape, depending on the situation. We also learned how to roll with a push or punch, drawing our weapon as we did so.

For that short training period, everything we did — the way we walked down a street, got out of a car, entered a building or sat in a room — was conditioned by the fact that we could be attacked at any moment. Once we had learned the method, those habits stayed ingrained for ever. To this day, I carry out the drills without even thinking about them.

By the end of our training we had the confidence to deal with almost any scenario. Even an assailant pointing a pistol at our guts at point-blank range was not seen as a problem. We could knock his pistol aside, drawn our own weapon and shoot him before he had even had time to make the decision to fire.

It is no exaggeration to say that the new system revolutionised pistol shooting throughout the world. What had once been a purely defensive weapon — the last resort to try and get you out of trouble — was now used as an aggressive weapon, allowing you to go out looking for trouble in territory too dangerous for any conventionally equipped soldier.

That instinctive method of aggressive attack developed at the start of the 1960s was to become the backbone of all the subsequent plain-clothes bodyguard and counter-terrorist operations for which the Regiment became justly famous. It was the last major change in the evolution of the SAS. For all the sophistication of its modern equipment, the same methods are still used today both by the SAS itself and by the many SAS-trained forces throughout the world.

Two individuals deserve most of the credit, one for devising the method, the other for having the vision to see in it the potential to carve out a hugely influential world role for the Regiment.

We christened the man who invented the method ‘the Master’, in deference to the Kung Fu movies of the time. He was a thin, wiry Scot, barely five foot five inches tall. Born and raised in Edinburgh, he joined the Seaforth Highlanders as a national serviceman, but his early career was less than glorious: he was involved in three courts martial while on national service, including one in the Far East.

While in the military prison in Singapore he met a fellow inmate who had served with Ferret Force in Malaya. As soon as he was released, the Master volunteered to join the Malay Scouts that Mike Calvert was forming.

One of the founder members of the reborn SAS, he served until the 1970s and from the day he joined to the day he left, his career was unblemished. He retired as a staff sergeant, but was denied the long service and good conduct medal he richly deserved because of his courts martial almost thirty years before. He still teaches self-defence today and I long for the day when some yob tries to mug this particular OAP as he walks around Hereford.

As in so much else in the development of the supreme fighting force, the drive to create the new shooting system had come from the bottom not the top, but one of the finest and most forward-thinking officers the Regiment ever produced had the wisdom to see the value of what had been created and act on it.

The squadron commander, John Slim, later commanding officer of the Regiment itself, had given every encouragement to his men’s relentless programme of re-evaluating old techniques and introducing new ones. He played the crucial role in marketing the new plain-clothes roles of the SAS, using his contacts and influence both in Britain and abroad.

He arranged a series of demonstrations at which initially sceptical army officers were won over, and used his family name and the contacts made while serving with the Aden brigade to lobby for the extensive use of the Regiment in its new roles of bodyguard training and counter-terrorism.

When the Master’s group were developing the new method of shooting, they built a twenty-five-yard range from sandbags and railway sleepers on some farmland outside the confines of the camp at Hereford. It was used extensively for a number of years, infuriating the army staff officers, but bureaucratic hurdles were just more obstacles to be overcome.

The next development, following hard on its heels, was a permanent CQB house, soon christened the Killing House, where troops could train with the new shooting system, using live ammunition in realistic conditions. Sheets of thick rubber were hung over every wall to kill ricochets and the building could be blacked out completely and adapted to almost any conceivable scenario. It is still in use today and the £30,000 it cost to build is the best investment the British army ever made.

The Killing House had one slight design flaw, however. It was built right next door to the Regimental chapel, a further sign that organised religion was not high on most SAS men’s list of priorities.

Sunday was just another working day, but there were constant complaints from the churchgoers as their services were disrupted by the bangs, thuds and explosions from next door.

Jungle warfare remained an important part of every SAS man’s training, but each troop within a squadron began to specialise in a particular method of infiltrating enemy countries over every kind of terrain. Free-Fall Troop practised parachuting, Boat Troop used sea-entry by surface and submarine craft, Mobility Troop learned to infiltrate overland using vehicles and Mountain Troop practised infiltration in arctic conditions, through mountains and snow.

Although they now had a permanent home, the SAS men saw very little of it. Exercises were carried out in Europe, the Arctic, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Troops were set different tasks to hone their infiltration skills and it was expected, indeed required, that they would be the best in any discipline they took up. As proof, SAS squads won events as diverse as the World Military Free-Fall Championships and the Devizes to Westminster Canoe Race. Others enrolled on the Alpine Guides course or navigated through the Libyan or Omani deserts in Land Rovers.

There were also many less formal tests of SAS men’s infiltration skills. On one memorable occasion a trooper broke into the Operations Centre, then the ops officer’s office and opened the top-secret safe. As proof of his success he left a trail of ‘one-legged chicken’ prints — like the arrows on a convict’s uniform — leading through the Ops Centre and the office to the safe. Inside was a broken egg and the word ‘Oops!’ chalked on the inside of the safe door. [31]

The pursuit of excellence also had its darker side. In an exercise on Salisbury Plain in which a squad from the Regiment set a new high-altitude free-fall record of over 30,000 feet, one of the men, Corporal Keith Norry, was killed when his parachute failed to open.

The colonel of the Regiment at the time, also a free-fall parachutist, suggested that we all contribute a day’s pay to purchase a regimental clock tower for the base in memory of Keith. None of us objected to the idea of a memorial or the contribution of a day’s pay, but we were adamant that there should not just be one name on it, but the names of every SAS man who had died while serving with the Regiment.

A clock tower was duly erected, though in the light of the Regiment’s uncertain future it was designed to be dismantled and moved to another site if necessary. The names of all the SAS men who had died in training or on operations were inscribed on the base and ‘beating the clock’ became the standard SAS euphemism for staying alive. Too many did not; well over 100 names are now engraved there.

Although the SAS demanded the highest levels of skill and dedication from its men, the commitment to excellence did not extend to pay. Many men were actually losing money by serving with the Regiment, having given up the rank they had achieved to join the SAS.

The rules were strictly applied; no matter what your rank when applying to the SAS, you had to revert to trooper on successful completion of the Selection course. For most soldiers and NCOs that meant a loss of rank and money. Paradoxically, the rules did not apply to officers, who were promoted and had an increase in pay on joining the Regiment.

The sole consolation for the other ranks was that officers were only passing through. They did a three-year tour and then returned to their former regiments. Only the troopers and NCOs were permanent fixtures in the SAS.

On passing Selection, the new SAS troopers were given a number of promises by the commanding officer. ‘Rank: forget it, you’re not getting any. Career: if you stay here, you won’t have one. Pay: if you want money, you’ll get none.’

Our loss of money and rank was called a disincentive incentive; if you really wanted to be there it didn’t matter what the circumstances were, you would accept them. It was irritating to most of us but undeniably true. The SAS was the place to soldier.

Conscription had been abolished and the British army went fully regular in 1960 but it was still governed by national service attitudes. People were still forced to paint coal and cut grass with knives and forks, and once you signed on the dotted line you were committed. For those with enough nous, the only thing to do was get out, and one of the few places worth going was the SAS.

Having been notably unsuccessful at imposing strict army-style discipline in Malaya, the Regiment then took the novel stance of giving individual SAS men responsibility for their own actions. It proved a very astute move; there have been very few group disciplinary problems since then.

Unlike the rest of the army, discipline within the Regiment was maintained by self-discipline, backed by peer pressure. The SAS remained virtually unknown, even within the armed forces, but it proved a magnet for gifted soldiers chafing under the petty restrictions, rules and regulations of the regular army.

The SAS then consisted of no more than sixty-five trained battle troops in two Sabre Squadrons — A and D Squadron. There was also a very small administrative group, but they were not allowed to wear the SAS beige beret and the distinction between badged and unbadged people was strictly maintained.

To be the best — if not the best paid — the Regiment would learn from the best, anywhere in the world. The SAS made use of civilian organisations with special skills, but also began training with special forces worldwide.

An exchange programme with US special forces was instituted in 1960. An SAS captain and a sergeant spent a year with the 7th Special Forces Group and two US soldiers came to Hereford.

The extent of the American commitment to their special forces was enormous. They had seen the potential and were investing heavily in it. But the US special forces had entered a period of massive expansion under Jack Kennedy’s presidency and previous standards were being eroded. This led to an unfair comparison of the physical attributes of the British and Americans.

The 1962 Regimental visit to the headquarters of the US special forces at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, reinforced the SAS belief in the value of their own approach. Working in the swamps of Florida, the SAS men were passing in record times tests that the Americans thought impossible. The lesson that quality not quantity was the goal was obvious to the lower ranks of the SAS, but it was to be several more years before the Americans also reached the same conclusion.

The exchanges with US special forces continue to this day. There are always two members of the American special forces — one officer and one senior NCO — on detachment with the SAS. Charlie Beckwith, the man who led the raids into North Vietnam trying to free US PoWs, trained with the SAS. US special forces even went on active service with the Regiment during the Aden campaign and there are strong though unsubstantiated reports that some SAS men on exchanges with the Americans also went to Vietnam.

After the visit to America, Selection was refined still further and became a little more scientific, but the SAS still rigidly maintained the high standards that had always applied — except in one area.

The dominant feature of the new camp at Hereford was a huge drill square 800 yards long by 400 yards wide. It is hard to imagine anything of less use to the Regiment. SAS men did not and could not drill at all.

An attempt was made to rectify this terrible omission by sending some of the grizzled veterans from the Middle and Far East to do a drill course at Pirbright depot with the Brigade of Guards. Only one person passed it, an Irishman determined to show the Guards that being able to do drill was not beyond an SAS man.

His parting words to the Sergeants’ Mess at Pirbright showed his true opinion of the value of his achievement: ‘The Brigade of Guards is a luxury the British army can no longer afford.’

Many senior figures in the army held similar opinions about the SAS. The happy band of brothers, warts and all, were now the most battle-hardened, skilled and intensively trained fighting force in the world. But their self-confidence was tinged with the fear that the organisation they had built could yet be destroyed at the whim of some staff officer.

The hostility to the SAS did not all come from frustrated bureaucrats. A false notion exists — fostered by the officers — that they were in command of the Regiment. The truth is that it was run by the NCOs.

If there was a troop officer at all, he led only one of four autonomous patrols in the troop. Reports from the other patrols would pass up the line to the NCOs. They were the only people who knew the full picture. If they decided the officers needed to know something they would tell them; if not, they kept quiet.

The reason wasn’t bloody-mindedness. Special forces operations require specialist skills; you need to be fully employed in special forces to understand how to do the job. For an officer from a tank regiment to come in and expect to run SAS patrols was as ridiculous as an SAS man joining the officer’s regiment and expecting to drive a tank into battle.

Except on formal occasions like parades and regimental dinners, SAS men wear no badges of rank. It is a visual confirmation that leadership by ability and example, not rank, remains the SAS rule, but the idea that many officers are not only dispensable but sometimes even an impediment to the efficient operation of the Regiment is not one that was ever going to be popular with the average army officer.

The evolution of the Regiment’s unique decision-making process was also a source of irritation to officers accustomed to having their orders carried out without question. But it was not just a by-product of the traditional hostility felt towards ‘Ruperts’ by battle-hardened NCOs.

David Stirling had laid the foundations of SAS democracy when forming the Regiment.

The SAS brooks no sense of class. We share with the Brigade of Guards a deep respect for quality, but we have an entirely different outlook. We believe, as did the ancient Greeks who originated the word ‘aristocracy’, that every man with the right aptitude and talents, regardless of birth and riches, has a capacity in his own lifetime of reaching that status in its true sense; in fact, in our SAS context, an individual soldier might prefer to go on serving as an NCO rather than having to leave the Regiment in order to obtain an officer’s commission. All ranks in the SAS are of ‘one company’, in which a sense of class is both alien and ludicrous . [32]

SAS democracy was not planned or imposed, however. It evolved naturally out of experience in combat. It was obvious — even to Ruperts — that men being asked to risk their lives in dangerous actions would achieve their goals more often if the teamwork essential to their success in the field was reflected in every aspect of the operation, including the planning.

The Chinese parliament allowed, indeed required, every person involved in a task to contribute to the often heated discussion about how it was to be achieved with the resources available. No one was allowed to remain silent; if you did, you lost the right to criticise afterwards. To say later, ‘I knew this wouldn’t work’ was to invite instant physical retribution; if you knew it wouldn’t work, why didn’t you say so at the planning stage?

Good officers realised the value of the Chinese parliament but not every officer was a good one. Over the first ten years of the reborn Regiment’s life a large number of officers had served with the SAS. Very few of them had a happy relationship with a semi-anarchic group of superb soldiers who did not suffer fools. As those officers’ careers progressed onwards and upwards, they owed the Regiment no favours and in many cases would have done it harm if they could.

Many other officers who had come into contact with the SAS had also been given short shrift. It took an unusual officer to develop an affinity with people who only gave respect to the individual, not the rank.

Some excellent officers served with the Regiment and commanded the absolute respect of their men, but they were a very small minority. John Woodhouse and John Slim were two of the finest special forces officers. Both rose to command the Regiment but they did so at great cost to their own personal careers.

As far as the army was concerned, the SAS at that time was a cul-de-sac. Neither man was promoted beyond the rank of colonel and when their spell in command of the Regiment was over they were virtually forced to leave the army altogether; there was nowhere else for them to go.

There were a number of other outstanding officers but, like John Woodhouse and John Slim, officers who could get on with the SAS usually did not have a career beyond it and were not in a position to support it in MoD power struggles. In those circumstances, no matter what the past achievements and present standards of the Regiment, there was considerable paranoia about its future.

This led directly to the very harsh regime of RTU. The self-discipline that was the cornerstone of the SAS was the only means of preserving the Regiment. Every SAS man was already aware — or was rapidly made aware — that any indiscipline among the civilian population would probably be the last straw for the MoD. It was exactly what the staff officers, civil servants and stuffed shirts were expecting.

They believed that this strange Regiment over which they exercised minimal control would continue to act in Hereford as they had done on active service overseas. When they were not busy fighting the enemy, they would fight among themselves, get drunk, wreck property and upset the civilians.

The Regiment confounded its critics, however, and a strong mutual loyalty and affection grew between the SAS and the local population; hearts and minds work began at home. Hereford was a low-wage, rural community. SAS men had few opportunities to spend their wages when on active service overseas and when back in Hereford their disproportionate amount of cash and their great fondness for spending it was a significant boost to the local economy.

Many men from the Regiment married local women and became close to local families, and a strong bond also developed with the civilian staff working at the camp. Most of the people who came to work there when the Regiment arrived stayed till retirement. Some are still working there in one capacity or another.

There were one or two fraught moments in community relations. The Demolitions Training Wing at Bradbury Lines was sited in a wooden hut; indeed the whole barracks was built of wood. One of the training courses involved producing home-made napalm by boiling a mixture of petrol and soap flakes. It sounded more dangerous than it actually was, provided you took certain precautions.

On one occasion an officer new to the Regiment put the mixture on to boil without the necessary fire-fighting equipment to hand. The whole mixture erupted and set fire to the building, which had to be evacuated.

The local fire brigade arrived, bells clanging and lights flashing. They unrolled their hoses, connected up to the hydrants and began to fight what was now a very intense blaze.

The members of the Regiment watched with considerable interest from the far side of the massive drill square. One of the firemen wandered across and enquired why they were not helping to put it out.

‘It’s the Demolitions Wing,’ one told him helpfully. ‘If you knew what was stored in there you wouldn’t go near it either.’

When the conversation was relayed to the other firemen, they all downed tools and ran across the square to enjoy the view from the same safe distance as the soldiers, leaving the fire to burn itself out.

Firemen excepted, the Regiment was now firmly accepted as a part of the local community, but its future was still far from secure. The reservations that senior army officers had about the Regiment were not shared by the Foreign Office. It was now well aware of the value of a ruthless, effective and unattributable weapon that could be used covertly and deniably anywhere in the world, in support of the British government’s political aims.

The Foreign Office’s plans to employ the SAS in altering the shape of the post-colonial world were now in place. If sympathetic rulers could be installed or maintained in power with the help of the SAS at minimal cost to Britain, former colonies or dependencies would then be virtually self-policing. The empire was fast disintegrating but British influence would remain through rulers who owed their tenure of office and often their lives to the SAS.

The first battle to be fought in support of this new strategy was with the military bureaucracy. The Soviet threat dominated military planning to the exclusion of all else and there were many staff officers who saw no role for 22 SAS other than deep penetration and reconnaissance behind Soviet bloc lines in Central Europe.

When — it was never if — the Soviet attack came, the regular forces on the Rhine would fall back to a prearranged defensive line and the Soviet forces would be targeted and destroyed by nuclear weapons.

The SAS troops would lie up in underground hides while the Soviet forces rolled past or even right over the top of them. Some would then help the targeting of missiles by reporting on Soviet installations and troop movements, while others would co-ordinate the ‘stay-behind parties’ in acts of sabotage.

The Territorial Regiment, 21 SAS, had been training exclusively for those tasks for some time and it seemed for a while that 22 SAS might be restricted to the same role; Britain was the only country using Territorials as its front-line special forces in the Cold War.

A second Territorial regiment, 23 SAS, had also been established in 1959. Twenty-one SAS remained based in London, while 23 SAS took in the north of England and Scotland. It was formed from the Rescue Reserve Unit and took on the role of MI9, running the ‘Rat Line’ escape routes from Eastern Europe.

Although it was given the SAS name, 23 had no formal connection with the parent regiment for several years. It was largely a paper unit, but had one very considerable virtue in the eyes of the senior officers in 22 SAS. By adding it to the SAS establishment they became eligible for ranks that could not have been justified by the size of the regular Regiment alone.

The old threat of absorption by the Parachute Regiment was also raised again around this time, and had the future of 22 SAS been decided only by staff officers, on purely military grounds, the Regiment might not have survived in anything like its present form.

Fortunately the SAS was no longer a purely military force. Henceforth its use would be dictated more by political considerations than strategic requirements, and its orders were as likely to come from the Foreign Office or the SIS as the Ministry of Defence. The Territorials were left to continue to prepare for nuclear Armageddon, but 22 SAS focused on counter-insurgency.

As tensions continued to grow in the region, the Middle East looked the most likely immediate destination for the Regiment and desert training operations were stepped up.

Conflict was simmering in Oman and Aden — where RAF planes had already been involved in attacks on Yemeni-backed rebels — and an SAS squadron was also put on standby after Iraq massed troops on the Kuwait border and announced its annexation on 25 June 1961.

The threat was taken seriously — Kuwait supplied half of Britain’s oil — but the announcement was premature. The despatch of a force of regular British troops from Aden and Kenya solved the problem without the need for SAS involvement.

D Squadron was then diverted on its way back from an exercise in Oman after trouble again flared at the Buraimi Oasis, the scene of the confrontation between Oman, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia in 1955. Encouraged by a nod and a wink from the Americans, a large Saudi Arabian force had occupied Buraimi in pursuit of its territorial claim.

In an attempt to deter them, two SAS troops — thirty men in eight trucks — were sent to the desert just east of the oasis with instructions to act like a large force. They drove their trucks to and fro at top speed until nightfall, creating a dust cloud that spread for miles, then lit dozens of campfires over a wide area of the desert, their glow clearly visible from the oasis. In the morning the Saudi troops had disappeared. [33]

Deception proved enough in that case, but the next call to active service required much more than mere bluff. To our surprise, the destination was not the deserts of the Middle East, but a return to the jungles of the Far East.