SAS Operation Storm Read online

  About the authors

  Roger Cole was born in 1944. He joined the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC) in 1964, his first posting being to Germany. In 1968 he passed his SAS selection course and joined B Squadron, 22 SAS in Hereford. He did various tours in classified areas, including Dhofar, Oman. He returned to the RAOC in 1977 and rose to the rank of Staff Sergeant Major, Warrant Officer Class 1. He has served with the British Army in Germany, Cyprus, and the Falkland Islands. He retired from the army in 1986.

  Richard Belfield is an award winning television producer/director, author and playwright. He has made documentaries for every major British broadcaster, as well as Discovery, National Geographic, the Arts and Entertainment Network and WGBH in the USA. His television programmes have won prizes on both sides of the Atlantic. As well as Terminate With Extreme Prejudice (Constable & Robinson) he is the author of Can You Crack the Enigma Code? (Orion). He is a Director of Fulcrum TV.

  SAS Operation Storm

  Roger Cole & Richard Belfield

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Spellings of Arabic names and places vary according to source.

  The authors have been as consistent as possible throughout the book.

  Picture Acknowledgements:

  Most of the photographs are courtesy of Roger Cole.

  Additional sources: Bob Podesta, Pete Scholey.

  Photo of BAC 167 Strikemaster © NA3T

  Photo on page v © Roger Cann

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Roger Cole and Richard Belfield 2011

  The right of Roger Cole and Richard Belfield to be identified as

  the Authors of the Work has been asserted by them in

  accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Maps © Rosie Collins

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

  without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise

  circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition

  being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781444726992

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  This book is dedicated to Labalaba, Tommy Tobin

  and all the soldiers and airmen on both sides who were

  killed during the Dhofar War – and to Walid bin

  Khamis al-Badri and the hundreds of others

  with wounds they have carried ever since.

  Together, they won a war.

  More importantly,

  they built a sustained peace in Oman.

  ‘After the battle I was asked to write a dispatch. Having interviewed Mike Kealy and the survivors of his team, it became very clear that I was privileged to be hearing an account of inspired leadership, devotion to duty and great bravery. Modesty, the mark of brave men, was evident. Those I spoke to were anxious to tell of the bravery of others but showed a reluctance to talk of events where their own courageous actions took place.

  I concluded my dispatch with these words: It may appear that an unusually large number of names have been recorded. This is because there were, on 19 July, an unusually large number of gallant actions of Mirbat.’

  Colonel Bryan Ray, the commander of the Northern Frontier Regiment in the Sultan of Oman’s Army, speaking to a crowd of about 300 at the Battle of Mirbat Memorial dedication in the Allied Special Forces Grove at the National Arboretum, Lichfield, Staffordshire, 19 July 2009.

  Acknowledgements

  As always, especially in a book like this, there are many people to thank for their time, their candour and their memories.

  First of all, there are the survivors of the battle, all of whom talked to and shared their memories and their insights – Bob Bennett, Fuzz Hussey, Jeff Taylor, Pete Warne and Sekonaia Takavesi.

  As well as the soldiers there are the pilots. Neville Baker, Sean Creak and Nobby Grey all welcomed us into their homes, with tea and sandwiches. David Milne-Smith shared his recollections by email. All were remarkably self-effacing in describing their extraordinary heroics on that day back in 1972. But as they all pointed out in their wonderfully low-key way, taking bullets on board was a routine matter in the Dhofar War.

  Back at Um-el-Ghawarif, the army headquarters during this war, several shared their recollections of that day and the wider conflict. David Venn was the Operations Officer that morning and was the first off the mark, dispatching choppers and planes. Lofty Wiseman was the B Squadron Staff Quartermaster Sergeant, who raided the stores of every gun, bullet, grenade and mortar, while Trevor Brooks and Tony McVeigh ran the radios. Bernard Shepherd, Jeff Ellis and Sam Houston all helped shape a richer account of the role G Squadron played on the day of the battle.

  Other SAS soldiers provided valuable insights and experiences into the wider Dhofar War. Pete Scholey, Bob Podesta, Mel Townsend and Big J – known to everyone in the regiment as Valdez – were all rich sources of recollection and information. Animated by tea and chocolate biscuits, Pete Scholey was especially helpful in painting a vivid portrait of the everyday conflict of the war. Other members of the regiment helped us but do not wish to be mentioned. We know who you are. Hopefully your former employers do not. You have our grateful thanks.

  The Intelligence Corps, far too often ignored in war books like this, were very helpful. As well as David Venn, David Duncan and Alan Abbott, who ran the intelligence operation in the latter stages of the war, all provided many valuable insights. John Condon, the Chair of the Intelligence Corps Museum Trustees, and the staff at the Museum were very helpful in finding some priceless material in their archives.

  Helen Tobin and her sisters, Theresa and Marie, kindly shared their memories of their brother, and painted a vivid portrait of their family life, growing up as poor Irish immigrants in West London. It was a fascinating insight. He is Thomas to them, Tommy to everyone in the regiment, but a hero to them all.

  As ever, Colin Wallace, who was one of the key organisers of the Battle of Mirbat Memorial dedication in 2010, was terrific. He shared his recollections of his own visit to Mirbat, where he laid small wreaths for Laba and Tommy Tobin, provided valuable material and helped put us in touch with former SAS soldiers.

  Abdallah Homouda, the great Middle Eastern journalist and commentator, was helpful throughout, especially in reminding us that this was a civil war, where loyalties were tribal rather than political. Professor Clive Jones at Leeds University very kindly shared some of his excellent academic research on the war.

  For the paperback, the authors visited the Middle East Centre Archive at St Antony’s College, Oxford to read the papers and diary of Brigadier John Graham, who ran the war for the Sultan’s Armed Forces in the early years. The resident archivist, Debbie Usher, was wonderfully helpful and her ritual of an enforced break for tea and biscuits, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, is a civilised addition to the investigative process. One to be recommended to every archive.

  The authors also went to see Lord Ashcroft in his London office. He is the great champion of the British soldier, a tireless campaigner for the proper recognition of valour, courage and bravery. He has taken up the campaign, in the House of Lords, for Tommy and Laba to both get the medals they deserve.

  Roger Cole’s wife, Pauline, was tenacious in scouring the Hereford newspaper arc
hives and assiduously read every draft.

  People often ask two collaborators, ‘How did you meet?’

  For this we have to send a final special thanks to the two sets of people who brought us together.

  For years, Roger Cole had the picture of The Battle of Mirbat, painted by David Shepherd, over his mantelpiece. His children, Natasha and Gareth, and his daughter-in-law Katrina, constantly nagged him to write a book of that day. Then an extra troop of his grandchildren, Aliyah, Alfie and Ellis, arrived and continued the prolonged shellfire of tiny voices. Nigel McCrery then introduced Roger Cole to Robert Kirby, Richard Belfield’s agent.

  The two authors had already met at the Lichfield Memorial, where Richard Belfield was filming the day’s events at the request of Pete Scholey, Pete Warne and Colin Wallace.

  Robert Kirby then played matchmaker and brought us together. Since when we have become lifelong best of friends.

  We met Rupert Lancaster from Hodder & Stoughton, whose opening line to us in the foyer of United Agents was: ‘The great thing about this proposal is . . .’ Neither of us can remember what he said after that, as we had both decided he was a man of great perception and immaculate judgment. From day one, he has been full of fizz and enthusiasm, the ideal executive. The other staff at Hodder & Stoughton – Kate Miles, Camilla Dowse and Mark Read, who designed the cover – were uniformly fabulous.

  At United Agents, Charlotte Knee was, as always, a model of super-efficiency.

  We have done our best to piece together an accurate 360 degree account of the day. Inevitably, memories were sometimes confused and dim, but the remarkable thing was that over the months a consistent and coherent timeline finally emerged, full of surprises and a long way from anything previously published.

  Note: The names of certain people have been abbreviated to initials to disguise their identity.

  Contents

  Map of Oman

  Mirbat Battlefield

  Foreword

  1 Cutters and Choppers

  2 A Little War in the Middle East

  3 From the North-East to the Middle East

  4 Room Service?

  5 Batts and Cats

  6 The Great Texan Cattle Drive of 1971

  7 The Big Push

  8 And Then The Rains Came

  9 Wagin Rubsha!

  10 82.82. This is Zero Alpha. Radio Check. Over.

  11 Open Fire!

  12 Much Adoo About Nothing

  13 Enter the Duke

  14 Caught in the Net

  15 'I've Been Chinned!'

  16 'Has Time Slipped a Gear?'

  17 'Where's the Chopper Now?'

  18 Foxhound, Foxhound, This is Star Trek.

  19 Bollocks the Cat

  20 'How Many Bullets Have You Got Left?’

  21 'How Many Did You Lose Today?’

  22 The Worst Handover in Regimental History

  23 Follow the Yellow Shoes

  24 Compare the Mirbat . . .

  25 Conclusions

  26 Class War

  Plate Section

  Foreword

  Thomas Tobin’s death only made the inside page of the local papers, bracketed between stories about Dave Bonning, a Somerset farmer from Yeovil who had just won one of Hereford’s most prestigious ploughing trophies, and Mrs G Hunter Blair, whose six-year-old gelding, Roulette, had been sold at auction for 1,800 guineas after winning the prize as Small Hunter of the Year.

  Before his death, aged just twenty-five and a few days, Thomas Tobin was a married man with a small child, living in Hinton Road on the outskirts of Hereford. One of six children, four sisters and two brothers, his story was typical of hundreds of other poor Irish families who came to England to try and escape the clinging poverty back home. His mother was a cook and housekeeper in a big country house where she met his father, a driver cum labourer working for the same family. In the early 1950s they married and left domestic service to make their lives in West London. Even today, his sisters remember seeing signs in the windows of the lodging houses reading: ‘No Blacks, no Irish, no dogs.’

  Welcome to the mean streets of post-war Britain.

  In the slums of every major city, a pinched white English working class had to move aside to accommodate waves of immigrants. Whites from across the Irish Sea and blacks from the West Indies arrived in the sort of high numbers no one had seen since the 1890s. Thomas Tobin’s father was hard working, dapper and always well turned out, a habit acquired by his son. His mother had ambitions for young Thomas and he was pushed in to Sir Thomas More’s School in Chelsea. But then he left school at sixteen and joined the Army Catering Corps. From here he joined the Parachute Regiment before finally ending up in the Special Air Service, 22 SAS.

  A devoted son and brother, his sisters remember him as big-hearted and generous, always bringing presents back from his tours. Here were Beatles albums with German covers from his time in Berlin, a huge white teddy bear and a gold clock in a glass dome – a regular fixture on fireplaces all over working-class Britain. Visits back home meant going to mass on Sunday to keep his mother happy and then bantering with her in the kitchen over how to make the best pastry for apple turnovers. He was the best of the SAS breed, quiet and contained in himself, not flashy. Super fit, he breezed through selection without difficulty. On the outside, he was confident and assured. He was also the envy of every hot-blooded male in Hereford, as he drove a Mark 2 Jaguar in British racing green with leather seats. Not surprisingly, every time he came home, there was a new and very pretty girl on his arm.

  To his extended Irish Catholic family, many of whom still live in West London, he was – and still is – Thomas Tobin, soldier number 23966442. To his fellow soldiers in the SAS, he is remembered today as Tommy Tobin, a top man and all-round hero, killed in action.

  After he died, one of his fellow soldiers in B Squadron of the SAS, Austin Hussey, told the Coroner’s Court that Tommy was shot while they were training ‘the sort of local gendarmerie’ in Mirbat, Oman. Three months before, on 19 July, they had been ambushed by rebels and Tommy Tobin was hit in the face. Austin Hussey gave him medical assistance and called for help.

  His Commanding Officer, Major Richard Pirie, explained to the court that Trooper Tobin was a member of a small British Army unit sent to a tiny coastal hamlet called Mirbat, where they were helping train the Sultan of Oman’s Army. The first he knew about the incident was when he received a radio message telling him that Trooper Tobin had been injured. He immediately arranged for a helicopter to fly him to hospital. After initial treatment in Oman, Tommy was then flown back to Britain.

  His physician at the King Edward VII hospital in Midhurst, Surrey, Air Commodore Ian Ross-Cran, told the Coroner’s Court that Tommy Tobin had injuries to the face, lower spine, shoulder and hand.

  Once they got him back to England, he was conscious but unable to speak, with multiple bullet wounds. Missing two fingers he was now a time bomb of infection.

  His family visited him frequently but he was unable to speak. All he could manage was an occasional thumbs up and to write a few words on a piece of paper for his mother.

  All the time he was lying in bed, a small piece of broken tooth, shattered by a bullet in the attack, was working its way into his lungs. In September, the surgeons operated on him to remove it, but it became clear that his wounds were too many, the brain damage too severe.

  Tommy finally died on 5 October 1972, just twelve days after his twenty-fifth birthday.

  The impression given to the Coroner’s Court was that this was a small group of British soldiers on a peaceful mission in a faraway country, ambushed by a handful of crazies.

  Just one of those things that happens.

  The Coroner’s verdict was that Tommy Tobin died from an acute chest infection and brain damage as a result of multiple gunshot wounds, while on military service – which was one way of describing one of the greatest acts of heroism in the long and glittering history of the SAS.

  The
true story of Tommy Tobin’s injuries was concealed from the Coroner’s Court at Chichester.

  It had to be.

  This was a very secret war.

  This was no random ambush by a bunch of insurgents, but one of the greatest battles in the history of the SAS.

  The Coroner was not told that Tommy Tobin, one of the SAS platoon medics, had run nearly half a mile across the desert, with several hundred men shooting at him. Together with his Commanding Officer, Captain Mike Kealy, he had gone to rescue three of their fallen comrades, who were trapped and surrounded by enemy fire.

  Amazingly, the two ducked, dived and scrambled across the desert, Tommy Tobin carrying his rifle as well as his medical kit. Somehow, just somehow, they managed to dodge every bullet that screamed angrily past their heads or bounced off the rocks, zinging, pinging and whining past their chests and legs as they pumped every last muscle and sinew to get across to their wounded comrades.

  Against all the odds, Tommy made it to his injured comrades, but as he moved towards one of the survivors, a round from a Kalashnikov AK-47 smashed into his head.

  Over the next three hours he was hit by more bullets, as well as grenades and mortars. By the time Austin Hussey reached him, Tommy was hit in the shoulder and in his lower back. Shrapnel from a grenade had ripped his hand, removing two of his fingers.

  For Tommy Tobin, the Battle of Mirbat, 19 July 1972, was finally over.

  Even after the Coroner’s inquest, few back in Hereford knew what really happened that summer morning in a tiny fishing village no one had ever heard of, in a country far, far away.

  This was – and still is – the most secret of secret wars. Even today, there is no official history and virtually nothing in the public record about the role of the SAS in this war.