2RHPZ
06-01-2004, 03:21 PM
The SAS story they want to suppress: Was the Bravo Two Zero mission in Iraq a
shambles?
An ex-soldier says it was, but Whitehall is determined to gag him -
The NS Special Report
New Statesman, Nov 26, 2001 by Stephen Davis
The war in Afghanistan is not the only one that now preoccupies the Special Air
Service. Seven thousand miles away in New Zealand -- at a cost of [pounds
sterling]7m to the British taxpayer--the SAS is engaged in an extraordinary
series of courtroom battles. The aim is to stop an ex-SAS man talking or writing
about a mission that is already the most publicised undercover military
operation of all time. And despite repeated defeats in the New Zealand courts,
the Ministry of Defence, which is financing the cases, shows no sign of giving
up.
What the British government is so anxious to suppress is the true story of what
happened during Bravo Two Zero, the mission behind Iraqi lines during the Gulf
war. There have been two best selling books on the subject; the more famous one,
by the patrol leader Andy McNab (a pseudonym), has sold more than 1.5 million
copies and made its author a millionaire. McNab portrays the mission as a heroic
one. According to the ex-SAS man at the centre of the New Zealand court cases,
this is almost the exact opposite of the truth. In his view, detailed in the
courts, the operation, in which three SAS men were killed and four others
captured, was a disaster. Important details in McNab's book, including the
extent of torture by the Iraqis, were exaggerated, it was said in evidence.
Worse, the ex-SAS man has damning criticisms of how officers treated their men
both during and after the mission. Most remarkably, he has told the courts that
the SAS commanding officer during the Gulf war considered court-martialling the
survi vors.
The British government's case rests on the unique legal position of SAS men.
They have all signed lifetime confidentiality agreements that override many of
their basic rights as UK citizens. In effect, the contract prevents them, even
after they leave the SAS, from doing what army officers have done for centuries
-- making money from writing their memoirs. It also stops them ever revealing
details of SAS blunders. If they are involved in an operation that ends up as a
shambles, they can never make the truth known. Still less can they complain if,
as allegedly happened during Bravo Two Zero, they are abandoned by their
commanders and left to die when they get into difficulties.
Andy McNab's book refers to Mark the Kiwi, one of those captured and
interrogated by the Iraqis. Assuming that this man would be a New Zealander, I
set out to find him while working on a New Zealand television programme about
the SAS in 1997. McNab, whom I had met in London, proved to be what television
people call "good talent" (good at telling a story on screen), but he never
fulfilled a promise to contact Mark the Kiwi on our behalf. On the contrary,
what details he gave us seemed designed to put us off the scent.
I eventually tracked down "Mark", known as Mike Coburn (another pseudonym),
through contacts in the New Zealand branch of the SAS, where he had served
before going to Britain. I finally met him in the Empire Hotel in Auckland in
early 1998, where he turned up with his wife, a Welsh aerobics instructor. By
then, Coburn had left the SAS and joined what former regiment members call "the
circuit" -- the world of security and bodyguard work. He worked part of each
month at an oil installation in north Africa.
While serving in the unit, he had been ordered to sign one of the new
confidentiality agreements, introduced long after he had first signed up. He was
not allowed to study a copy in advance and neither was he allowed to keep a copy
after signature. Permission to show it to a lawyer was firmly denied. Coburn was
told that if he refused to sign he would be "returned to unit" -- meaning he
would be transferred out of the SAS, losing his status and the special pay that
went with it. The pay cut would be in the region of 40 percent -- at least
[pounds sterling] 20,000 a year.
I later learnt from MoD sources that the confidentiality agreements had been the
subject of wider concern in the British forces. Senior NCOs in the Special Boat
Service, the Royal Marines' equivalent of the SAS, had been suspended for a
period because they refused to sign the contracts, fearing that they were so
widely and loosely drawn that they would jeopardise future employment prospects.
The lieutenant-colonel in charge of the SBS then warned the MoD that the dispute
could "damage or degrade operational capability".
Coburn signed the contract under protest. Soon afterwards, disgruntled by his
treatment, he resigned from the regiment. He agreed to appear in our TV
programme only on the understanding that he would discuss matters that were
already in the public domain. He refused, for example, to discuss any of his
service in Northern Ireland, declining even to confirm that he had worked there
undercover. To this day, he has kept those secrets.
The British government, however, tried to stop the TV programme going to air. It
hired a large legal team, including New Zealand's most expensive QC. It lost in
the High Court. It lost in the Court of Appeal. It was refused leave to go to
the Privy Council. The programme went ahead.
During the programme, stark differences emerged between Coburn's account of the
Iraqi mission and McNab's. The two men were together when they came under fire,
and Coburn was hit in the leg and arm. In McNab's account: "There was certainly
no screaming and no noise coming from him. So as far as I was concerned he was
dead as soon as they opened fire, Thankfully, he's not lying there dying because
you know you tend to hear that, people will make sure you know that they're
alive." In Coburn's account: "This huge wave of nausea went over me. I mean
really intense... but there wasn't any pain and another round went off through
my arm and then the pain sort of came along and I started screaming. I was
screaming my head off." McNab kept going, leaving the New Zealander in the hands
of the Iraqis. Later, McNab himself was captured.
Coburn told us that, in his view, McNab had exaggerated the torture he suffered.
In his book Bravo Two Zero, McNab describes how his tooth was pulled out with
pliers. By the time he was released, he says, he had nerve damage to both hands,
a dislocated shoulder, hepatitis and kidney and liver damage. But Coburn said
that when they were released together in Baghdad, he saw no evidence of torture
and McNab made no reference to it. McNab' s teeth, he insisted, were still
intact. When we put this to McNab, he said: "Well, that's very, very strange ...
the fact is that they were smashed in the back and that's why I'm still getting
them sorted out two weeks ago."
Coburn went on to accuse the SAS command-- including the officer who, in his new
role as director of UK Special Forces, has tried to stop the book being
published -- of abandoning the men. Coburn said: "You have a thing called a
guardnet which means you can communicate directly with your squadron, and that's
a fixed frequency. We managed to get through to say that we were in the **** and
we needed help. Unfortunately it was ignored." The SAS command, it later
emerged, had decided that a rescue mission was too dangerous. Coburn would have
accepted that decision if he and his fellow soldiers had not been told in
advance that help would be sent if they got into trouble. "If they tell you that
beforehand, then you can get that mindset in your head, and then you make your
own contingencies for that, but that was certainly never made clear to us before
we went out."
Later, Coburn told a New Zealand court that it was part of the SAS ethos that,
no matter how much difficulty a patrol got into, the regiment would always take
urgent steps to get it out, regardless of where it was. In the case of Bravo Two
Zero, however, it seems that the need to send more men and aircraft in search of
Iraqi Scud missiles was deemed more important than the plight of the patrol.
Coburn laid the blame for the deaths of his three comrades squarely at the door
of the SAS regimental hierarchy. Moreover, he said in court that, in the post-mission
debriefing in Hereford, the commanding officer admitted that aspects of the
regimental support system had not functioned well, and in some cases not at all.
"Shocking among his revelations to us was the statement that he had decided not
to court-martial the surviving members of the patrol. The reference to court
martial was a shock. It seemed incredible after all we had been through. There
was no justification for even mentioning it and it came completely out of the
blue..." (To this day, Coburn has no idea why a court martial should have been
mentioned.)
Coburn also told the court about equipment failures during the mission. The
risks involved in special forces work was something soldiers prepared for, he
said, but incompetence, including the regimental command's failure to
acknowledge its own faults, was something he did not expect. "Being told we were
expendable after the fact only served to compound the betrayal of trust."
The MoD's failure to prevent the programme going out might have put a lesser
organisation off. Not Whitehall. Although Coburn's story had been made public,
the British government now went after his book. Representatives of the English
publisher, Hodder and Stoughton, were called into Whitehall. They had to agree
not to publish and had to sign a confidentiality contract so that they couldn't
even tell the Coburns what had happened in the meeting. Reed, the New Zealand
publisher, was contacted by an English official, with the same result. Moreover,
the British government's New Zealand lawyers demanded that any money owed to
Coburn for his work on the book be paid to them. When the Coburns hired an
English lawyer, he too was called to an MoD meeting and put under a
confidentiality contract. He still cannot talk to his clients.
In April 1999, the Coburns packed up and left Britain, moving to New Zealand
with their three daughters. They hired a local lawyer, Warren Templeton, to
fight their case on legal aid. Last year, it was back in court, at the High
Court in Auckland, with two British lawyers (or possibly spooks, it was never
clear which) in attendance, sitting behind four local lawyers hired by the MoD.
The case proceeded amid extraordinary secrecy -- extraordinary for a New Zealand
court, anyway. The British flew in a string of witnesses -- known as Soldier A,
Soldier B, XY, ST, Staff Assistant and WO Projects--who sat behind large screens
to protect their identities. The witnesses could not be photographed, televised
(even using image pixellating) or recorded (even using voice scrambling
technology) for fear, the government said, that they might be identified and
they or their families become targets for "sophisticated terrorist attacks".
The government's case was that it was hardly surprising, given the sensitive
nature of SAS activities, that "the ethos within UKSF units was of complete and
lifelong confidentiality ... indeed, in the words of one person, who it is
anticipated will give evidence in this case, those serving were bound by 'a code
of silence'." Publications by SAS insiders were a much greater threat to the
operations of the special forces, and their capacity to undertake operations,
than those written by "outsiders", the government claimed, adding that "the
great majority of members of the UKSF adhere to and wish others to adhere to the
code of silence". It added: "The shadow of doubt that the person serving beside
one in an operational or covert context may one day aspire to join the list of
bestsellers does nothing to inspire trust and confidence."
But another theory for the attempted ban was put forward by one of the
government's own witnesses, who said the contracts had been introduced partly to
help the SAS "retain market share" after the end of the cold war. Soldier ST, a
former warrant officer, told Justice Salmon that the regiment was concerned
about competition from the Paratroops and the Royal Marines. The soldier agreed
with Coburn's lawyer, Warren Templeton, that enforcing the contract was intended
to "safeguard employability", see off competition from other units within
Britain and "protect your market base". Justice Salmon asked: "You are really
saying that secrecy protects your position in the market?" Soldier ST replied:
"That is a good way of summing it up." He also agreed with Templeton that the
SAS was "trying to develop its future role now that the cold war has dispersed".
Soldier ST, who was responsible for assessing damage to the regiment from
various publications, agreed that much of what was in Coburn's manuscript was
already in the public domain.
The trial verdict was another major defeat for the MoD and the regiment. Justice
Salmon agreed that a few minor passages in the book, which contained
confidential information apparently about MoD equipment, would have to be
amended. But he said it was unlawful for the ministry to order Coburn, in
effect, to give up his civil rights. "The Ministry of Defence has used its power
to issue orders for the improper purpose of restricting the defendant's right to
freedom of speech and expression." When he signed the contract, the judge said,
Coburn had been under economic pressure which was "illegitimate and so
constituted duress". It was not at all the same thing as ordering a soldier to
"take that hill". It damaged a man's private law rights. Costs were awarded to
Coburn's side.
This was the British government's third defeat in the New Zealand courts. But
the MoD promptly appealed. A further three day hearing has been held in the
Court of Appeal in Wellington and a decision is expected soon. But even if it
loses again, and legal scholars are betting it will, the government has said it
will appeal again -- presumably to the law lords in the Privy Council in London.
By that stage, the MoD's bill is likely to top [pounds sterling]10m.
One of the ironies of the battle is that, while everything Coburn wants to
publish has already been made public one way or another, he knows secrets that
the British government has reason to dread ever being revealed.
He worked on a tour of what is known as "special duties" in Northern Ireland on
operations against the IRA. SAS men were sometimes transferred into the still-secret
14 Intelligence Company, whose operations are shrouded in mystery. A former IRA
man once told me that 14 Company was feared by the Provisional IRA. Coburn will
say only: "My time in Northern Ireland was really very, very enjoyable, very,
very good work, all under operational conditions and it's something I'm quite
proud of."
Stephen Davis is editor of the New Zealand Herald
shambles?
An ex-soldier says it was, but Whitehall is determined to gag him -
The NS Special Report
New Statesman, Nov 26, 2001 by Stephen Davis
The war in Afghanistan is not the only one that now preoccupies the Special Air
Service. Seven thousand miles away in New Zealand -- at a cost of [pounds
sterling]7m to the British taxpayer--the SAS is engaged in an extraordinary
series of courtroom battles. The aim is to stop an ex-SAS man talking or writing
about a mission that is already the most publicised undercover military
operation of all time. And despite repeated defeats in the New Zealand courts,
the Ministry of Defence, which is financing the cases, shows no sign of giving
up.
What the British government is so anxious to suppress is the true story of what
happened during Bravo Two Zero, the mission behind Iraqi lines during the Gulf
war. There have been two best selling books on the subject; the more famous one,
by the patrol leader Andy McNab (a pseudonym), has sold more than 1.5 million
copies and made its author a millionaire. McNab portrays the mission as a heroic
one. According to the ex-SAS man at the centre of the New Zealand court cases,
this is almost the exact opposite of the truth. In his view, detailed in the
courts, the operation, in which three SAS men were killed and four others
captured, was a disaster. Important details in McNab's book, including the
extent of torture by the Iraqis, were exaggerated, it was said in evidence.
Worse, the ex-SAS man has damning criticisms of how officers treated their men
both during and after the mission. Most remarkably, he has told the courts that
the SAS commanding officer during the Gulf war considered court-martialling the
survi vors.
The British government's case rests on the unique legal position of SAS men.
They have all signed lifetime confidentiality agreements that override many of
their basic rights as UK citizens. In effect, the contract prevents them, even
after they leave the SAS, from doing what army officers have done for centuries
-- making money from writing their memoirs. It also stops them ever revealing
details of SAS blunders. If they are involved in an operation that ends up as a
shambles, they can never make the truth known. Still less can they complain if,
as allegedly happened during Bravo Two Zero, they are abandoned by their
commanders and left to die when they get into difficulties.
Andy McNab's book refers to Mark the Kiwi, one of those captured and
interrogated by the Iraqis. Assuming that this man would be a New Zealander, I
set out to find him while working on a New Zealand television programme about
the SAS in 1997. McNab, whom I had met in London, proved to be what television
people call "good talent" (good at telling a story on screen), but he never
fulfilled a promise to contact Mark the Kiwi on our behalf. On the contrary,
what details he gave us seemed designed to put us off the scent.
I eventually tracked down "Mark", known as Mike Coburn (another pseudonym),
through contacts in the New Zealand branch of the SAS, where he had served
before going to Britain. I finally met him in the Empire Hotel in Auckland in
early 1998, where he turned up with his wife, a Welsh aerobics instructor. By
then, Coburn had left the SAS and joined what former regiment members call "the
circuit" -- the world of security and bodyguard work. He worked part of each
month at an oil installation in north Africa.
While serving in the unit, he had been ordered to sign one of the new
confidentiality agreements, introduced long after he had first signed up. He was
not allowed to study a copy in advance and neither was he allowed to keep a copy
after signature. Permission to show it to a lawyer was firmly denied. Coburn was
told that if he refused to sign he would be "returned to unit" -- meaning he
would be transferred out of the SAS, losing his status and the special pay that
went with it. The pay cut would be in the region of 40 percent -- at least
[pounds sterling] 20,000 a year.
I later learnt from MoD sources that the confidentiality agreements had been the
subject of wider concern in the British forces. Senior NCOs in the Special Boat
Service, the Royal Marines' equivalent of the SAS, had been suspended for a
period because they refused to sign the contracts, fearing that they were so
widely and loosely drawn that they would jeopardise future employment prospects.
The lieutenant-colonel in charge of the SBS then warned the MoD that the dispute
could "damage or degrade operational capability".
Coburn signed the contract under protest. Soon afterwards, disgruntled by his
treatment, he resigned from the regiment. He agreed to appear in our TV
programme only on the understanding that he would discuss matters that were
already in the public domain. He refused, for example, to discuss any of his
service in Northern Ireland, declining even to confirm that he had worked there
undercover. To this day, he has kept those secrets.
The British government, however, tried to stop the TV programme going to air. It
hired a large legal team, including New Zealand's most expensive QC. It lost in
the High Court. It lost in the Court of Appeal. It was refused leave to go to
the Privy Council. The programme went ahead.
During the programme, stark differences emerged between Coburn's account of the
Iraqi mission and McNab's. The two men were together when they came under fire,
and Coburn was hit in the leg and arm. In McNab's account: "There was certainly
no screaming and no noise coming from him. So as far as I was concerned he was
dead as soon as they opened fire, Thankfully, he's not lying there dying because
you know you tend to hear that, people will make sure you know that they're
alive." In Coburn's account: "This huge wave of nausea went over me. I mean
really intense... but there wasn't any pain and another round went off through
my arm and then the pain sort of came along and I started screaming. I was
screaming my head off." McNab kept going, leaving the New Zealander in the hands
of the Iraqis. Later, McNab himself was captured.
Coburn told us that, in his view, McNab had exaggerated the torture he suffered.
In his book Bravo Two Zero, McNab describes how his tooth was pulled out with
pliers. By the time he was released, he says, he had nerve damage to both hands,
a dislocated shoulder, hepatitis and kidney and liver damage. But Coburn said
that when they were released together in Baghdad, he saw no evidence of torture
and McNab made no reference to it. McNab' s teeth, he insisted, were still
intact. When we put this to McNab, he said: "Well, that's very, very strange ...
the fact is that they were smashed in the back and that's why I'm still getting
them sorted out two weeks ago."
Coburn went on to accuse the SAS command-- including the officer who, in his new
role as director of UK Special Forces, has tried to stop the book being
published -- of abandoning the men. Coburn said: "You have a thing called a
guardnet which means you can communicate directly with your squadron, and that's
a fixed frequency. We managed to get through to say that we were in the **** and
we needed help. Unfortunately it was ignored." The SAS command, it later
emerged, had decided that a rescue mission was too dangerous. Coburn would have
accepted that decision if he and his fellow soldiers had not been told in
advance that help would be sent if they got into trouble. "If they tell you that
beforehand, then you can get that mindset in your head, and then you make your
own contingencies for that, but that was certainly never made clear to us before
we went out."
Later, Coburn told a New Zealand court that it was part of the SAS ethos that,
no matter how much difficulty a patrol got into, the regiment would always take
urgent steps to get it out, regardless of where it was. In the case of Bravo Two
Zero, however, it seems that the need to send more men and aircraft in search of
Iraqi Scud missiles was deemed more important than the plight of the patrol.
Coburn laid the blame for the deaths of his three comrades squarely at the door
of the SAS regimental hierarchy. Moreover, he said in court that, in the post-mission
debriefing in Hereford, the commanding officer admitted that aspects of the
regimental support system had not functioned well, and in some cases not at all.
"Shocking among his revelations to us was the statement that he had decided not
to court-martial the surviving members of the patrol. The reference to court
martial was a shock. It seemed incredible after all we had been through. There
was no justification for even mentioning it and it came completely out of the
blue..." (To this day, Coburn has no idea why a court martial should have been
mentioned.)
Coburn also told the court about equipment failures during the mission. The
risks involved in special forces work was something soldiers prepared for, he
said, but incompetence, including the regimental command's failure to
acknowledge its own faults, was something he did not expect. "Being told we were
expendable after the fact only served to compound the betrayal of trust."
The MoD's failure to prevent the programme going out might have put a lesser
organisation off. Not Whitehall. Although Coburn's story had been made public,
the British government now went after his book. Representatives of the English
publisher, Hodder and Stoughton, were called into Whitehall. They had to agree
not to publish and had to sign a confidentiality contract so that they couldn't
even tell the Coburns what had happened in the meeting. Reed, the New Zealand
publisher, was contacted by an English official, with the same result. Moreover,
the British government's New Zealand lawyers demanded that any money owed to
Coburn for his work on the book be paid to them. When the Coburns hired an
English lawyer, he too was called to an MoD meeting and put under a
confidentiality contract. He still cannot talk to his clients.
In April 1999, the Coburns packed up and left Britain, moving to New Zealand
with their three daughters. They hired a local lawyer, Warren Templeton, to
fight their case on legal aid. Last year, it was back in court, at the High
Court in Auckland, with two British lawyers (or possibly spooks, it was never
clear which) in attendance, sitting behind four local lawyers hired by the MoD.
The case proceeded amid extraordinary secrecy -- extraordinary for a New Zealand
court, anyway. The British flew in a string of witnesses -- known as Soldier A,
Soldier B, XY, ST, Staff Assistant and WO Projects--who sat behind large screens
to protect their identities. The witnesses could not be photographed, televised
(even using image pixellating) or recorded (even using voice scrambling
technology) for fear, the government said, that they might be identified and
they or their families become targets for "sophisticated terrorist attacks".
The government's case was that it was hardly surprising, given the sensitive
nature of SAS activities, that "the ethos within UKSF units was of complete and
lifelong confidentiality ... indeed, in the words of one person, who it is
anticipated will give evidence in this case, those serving were bound by 'a code
of silence'." Publications by SAS insiders were a much greater threat to the
operations of the special forces, and their capacity to undertake operations,
than those written by "outsiders", the government claimed, adding that "the
great majority of members of the UKSF adhere to and wish others to adhere to the
code of silence". It added: "The shadow of doubt that the person serving beside
one in an operational or covert context may one day aspire to join the list of
bestsellers does nothing to inspire trust and confidence."
But another theory for the attempted ban was put forward by one of the
government's own witnesses, who said the contracts had been introduced partly to
help the SAS "retain market share" after the end of the cold war. Soldier ST, a
former warrant officer, told Justice Salmon that the regiment was concerned
about competition from the Paratroops and the Royal Marines. The soldier agreed
with Coburn's lawyer, Warren Templeton, that enforcing the contract was intended
to "safeguard employability", see off competition from other units within
Britain and "protect your market base". Justice Salmon asked: "You are really
saying that secrecy protects your position in the market?" Soldier ST replied:
"That is a good way of summing it up." He also agreed with Templeton that the
SAS was "trying to develop its future role now that the cold war has dispersed".
Soldier ST, who was responsible for assessing damage to the regiment from
various publications, agreed that much of what was in Coburn's manuscript was
already in the public domain.
The trial verdict was another major defeat for the MoD and the regiment. Justice
Salmon agreed that a few minor passages in the book, which contained
confidential information apparently about MoD equipment, would have to be
amended. But he said it was unlawful for the ministry to order Coburn, in
effect, to give up his civil rights. "The Ministry of Defence has used its power
to issue orders for the improper purpose of restricting the defendant's right to
freedom of speech and expression." When he signed the contract, the judge said,
Coburn had been under economic pressure which was "illegitimate and so
constituted duress". It was not at all the same thing as ordering a soldier to
"take that hill". It damaged a man's private law rights. Costs were awarded to
Coburn's side.
This was the British government's third defeat in the New Zealand courts. But
the MoD promptly appealed. A further three day hearing has been held in the
Court of Appeal in Wellington and a decision is expected soon. But even if it
loses again, and legal scholars are betting it will, the government has said it
will appeal again -- presumably to the law lords in the Privy Council in London.
By that stage, the MoD's bill is likely to top [pounds sterling]10m.
One of the ironies of the battle is that, while everything Coburn wants to
publish has already been made public one way or another, he knows secrets that
the British government has reason to dread ever being revealed.
He worked on a tour of what is known as "special duties" in Northern Ireland on
operations against the IRA. SAS men were sometimes transferred into the still-secret
14 Intelligence Company, whose operations are shrouded in mystery. A former IRA
man once told me that 14 Company was feared by the Provisional IRA. Coburn will
say only: "My time in Northern Ireland was really very, very enjoyable, very,
very good work, all under operational conditions and it's something I'm quite
proud of."
Stephen Davis is editor of the New Zealand Herald