2RHPZ
06-09-2004, 02:39 PM
The Drugwars
The collapse of the Soviet Union first as a super-power,
then as a coherent political entity after 1985 marooned a
generation of military strategists whose futures had seemed
assured (and whose minds were dominated by) the threat
from Eastern Europe known as Priority One. Unique among
Britain's regular armed forces, the SAS had preserved wider
horizons, through military training teams in the Third World,
through the extraction of British and friendly nationals from
hotspots in Africa and elsewhere and even occasional forays into
a shooting war on the side of a useful ally.
It was natural, when the British government loyally followed
the United States in perceiving drug addiction as the new strategic
threat requiring a military response as part of the New World
Order that the SAS should be first in line to take on this latest,
mainly jungle war.
In practice, this was an old fashioned commodities war tricked
out in a glitzy new uniform. Between 1840 and 1842, Britain
prosecuted a highly successful strategic campaign against China
to restore Britain's lucrative trade in opium, exported from India
under UK protection. Perhaps it was some folk memory in the
corridors of the City of London that prompted articles in the
Economist and Financial Times proposing the 'decriminalisation'
of some drug misuse. However, as contemporary opium and
its derivatives, heroin, cocaine and crack, combined with inner
city deprivation to make many American cities no-go areas,
President Reagan and then President Bush took up the challenge
to abolish this particular sin.
The global scale of drugs production, from Colombia to the
Golden Triangle of South-east Asia by way of Pakistan and the
Caribbean, meant that the warlords and drug barons controlling
it needed permanent private armies. In some territories, notably
Peru, elected governments lost control of vast areas of their
country to revolutionaries arm-in-arm with drug barons. An
American observer, Rensselaer W. Lee III, notes that in the
border area of north-west Burma, Laos and Thailand, such
armies include remnants and descendants of the Second World
War 3rd and 5th Divisions of the National Siamese Army and
the Burma Self-Defence Force. The opium warlord Chang
Chi Fu had 'an army of 10,000 fully equipped with the latest
weaponry' to protect the growing areas and escort the product
to market.
The British commentator Frank Gregory writes:
The anarchy caused by the drugs cartels in Colombia is well
known and during 1985-1990 the drugs dealers killed 2011 mem-
bers of the police and armed forces and caused them to suffer
3384 wounded... Britain and America have supported vigor-
ous action in the Caribbean because, as a US official said, 'the
Caribbean is a strategic area for us, and the threat is not pol-
itical subversion, but its subversion by narcotics trafficking'.
In 1989, in response to a worldwide appeal for help from
a beleagured Colombian government, the Prime Minister
Mrs Thatcher personally directed the SAS to make a con-
tribution. The insertion of the regiment's training teams into
Colombia from the autumn of 1989, served three purposes. It
provided realistic jungle experience for Britain's special forces.
It added a symbolic touch to the UK's moral support of Bush's
moral crusade. (In that sense, it was similar to the attachment
of Alastair Morrison and Barry Davies to the German GSG-9
team in October 1977. Prime Minister James Callaghan had
just reached an understanding with his European partners for
a common front against international terrorism. In Colombia,
the SAS was again the vehicle for giving practical clothing
to the political abstraction.) Finally, the regiment contributed
indirectly to a critically important victory in the war against the
powerful Medellin cartel.
The British soldiers primarily trained a force exclusively
dedicated to the drugs battlefield, the Anti-Narcotics Police.
In December 1989, having just completed his SAS training, a
captain now attached to another internal security force, received
a tip-off that a notorious cocaine baron, Gonzalo Rodriguez
Gacha ('El Mexicano') with his son and a team of bodyguards
could be found at home. Gacha had been held responsible by
Colombia's President Virgilio Barco for the assassination of
the Liberal Party's main presidential candidate, Luis Galan, in
August 1989. Gacha lived in style, as befits someone who has
declared war on his own government. Home was a large ranch
a few miles from Pacho, north of Bogota. As a former judge
in that area, Antonio Suarez, acidly noted shortly before the
tip-off: 'We always knew when he was home; his big ranch
was suddenly surrounded by armed troops -- on guard duty.'
This time, security forces raided the big ranch but the bird
had flown. Then the Captain (let us call him Hero) had a lucky
break. His helicopter, scouting the area, spotted a speedboat on
the shore of a lake and a group of men beating someone up.
The helicopter landed and seized the party at gunpoint. They
were Gacha's people, to be sure, but Gacha himself was not
present. He was hiding up in a villa further along the lakeside.
Captain Hero promptly organised a combined operation to take
the villa, involving the helicopter, ground troops and a team in
the speedboat, which he led in person. There was a hectic gun
battle before the villa was seized but again, Gacha had vanished
into adjoining woodland. It was at this point that Hero applied
the basic jungle training he had just received from the SAS. He
carefully examined a map of the area and used the helicopter to
put a stop party, including himself, into a classic ambush on
the most likely escape route. He got it right. This time there
was no escape. Gacha, with his son Freddy and five remaining
bodyguards, were killed in a storm of machine-gun fire.
It was the biggest boost for months to the credibility of
President Barco and a blow to the cartels' myth of invincibility.
Half a ton of documents seized in the follow-up operation made
'embarrassing reading for authorities in the Isle of Man and
Hong Kong', according to one source. In Panama City, US
military sources claimed that US Drug Enforcement Agency
officers co-ordinated the hunt for Gacha and that 'a team of
Special Forces led Colombian drug forces on the raid'.
The same sources asserted that 'American troops were directly
involved in the fire-fight that resulted in Mr Rodriguez Gacha's
death... The operation is regarded by US planners as a model
for future attacks against the drug cartels.'
The SAS said nothing, as usual, though it approved privately
of Hero's operation as 'a textbook job'. But from some of their
pupils in Colombia, a clear picture emerged of the style of
training the British soldiers offered. Like Woodhouse's teams
in Malaya and every operation since then, the British removed
the slings from their own rifles and from those of their allies.
They were then carried ready for immediate use rather than as
potential souvenirs for an enemy to retrieve after he had killed
the soldiers to whom they were issued.
The journalist Timothy Ross went on patrol with one of
the teams hunting for another notorious drugs baron, Pablo
Escobar, in Antioquia province. He discovered a characteristic
SAS environment: a rain forest, complete with temperatures in
the 90s, painfully high humidity, scorpions, fevers, dysentery,
poisonous snakes 'and a very hostile local peasantry'. He
reported:
The SAS have given a series of intensive courses in jungle
warfare and such specialist areas as combat intelligence. They
are much admired by the Colombians for their physical
resilience... The corporal said, 'The sun burned the skin
off their faces but they led us off on patrol exercises at such
speed that we were begging for water. 'No,' they said, 'keep
on, only five minutes rest every hour... Don't stop, shoot
as you move' they drilled into us...
Some of the men believe the SAS style of tactics should
be applied more radically and daringly and complain that
dropping in troops from helicopters gives Escobar warning
with their rotor noise.
During the year before SAS training contributed to Gacha's
death, British mercenaries had been in Colombia, some to train
members of Gacha's private army. An ex-SAS veteran, Peter
McAleese, told a television reporter that he had trained 'a
number of Colombians' in military tactics and skill-at-arms. He
confirmed that another British mercenary (with no SAS links),
David Tomkins, 'handled the explosives side'. The British team
was paid off in 1988 and an Israeli squad moved in, prior to the
assassination of the presidential candidate Galan in August 1989.
An Israeli supplied weapon was used to murder Galan.
In a revealing aside, the television reporter David Leigh
asserted that McAleese believed that he was in Colombia to
train people to 'assault Communist guerrillas in the hills'. If so,
it was a neat illustration of the degree to which the mercenaries'
'political correctness' had failed to keep up with a fast-changing
world. In Angola, Rhodesia and southern Africa, McAleese
and others could claim that they were part of the hot Cold
War. Their plausibly-deniable operations, through appropriate
cut-outs, were sometimes funded (as in Angola in 1976) by the
CIA. In Colombia, however, the drug barons were the bad guys
and the special forces of the Western world were on the other
side of this new war. The regular SAS was about to start training
regular Colombian government forces with that in mind.
It was a complex little conflict which spilled across unmarked
jungle frontiers into Brazil and attracted regular and mercenary
soldiers from all over the world. Not only were SAS person-
alities thrust into this exotic campaign; two-man RAF dog
handling team was sent from Nottinghamshire to Ecuador
with six RAF dogs for use in sniffing out hidden cocaine
stocks. Royal Navy ships and RAF Nimrods played a part in
monitoring drug cargoes as they approached the US coastline.
No one doubts that international drug gangs pose a threat to Western democracy,
and so units such as the SAS have been tasked to fight them. But is it a case of
too little too late?
The collapse of the Soviet Union first as a super-power,
then as a coherent political entity after 1985 marooned a
generation of military strategists whose futures had seemed
assured (and whose minds were dominated by) the threat
from Eastern Europe known as Priority One. Unique among
Britain's regular armed forces, the SAS had preserved wider
horizons, through military training teams in the Third World,
through the extraction of British and friendly nationals from
hotspots in Africa and elsewhere and even occasional forays into
a shooting war on the side of a useful ally.
It was natural, when the British government loyally followed
the United States in perceiving drug addiction as the new strategic
threat requiring a military response as part of the New World
Order that the SAS should be first in line to take on this latest,
mainly jungle war.
In practice, this was an old fashioned commodities war tricked
out in a glitzy new uniform. Between 1840 and 1842, Britain
prosecuted a highly successful strategic campaign against China
to restore Britain's lucrative trade in opium, exported from India
under UK protection. Perhaps it was some folk memory in the
corridors of the City of London that prompted articles in the
Economist and Financial Times proposing the 'decriminalisation'
of some drug misuse. However, as contemporary opium and
its derivatives, heroin, cocaine and crack, combined with inner
city deprivation to make many American cities no-go areas,
President Reagan and then President Bush took up the challenge
to abolish this particular sin.
The global scale of drugs production, from Colombia to the
Golden Triangle of South-east Asia by way of Pakistan and the
Caribbean, meant that the warlords and drug barons controlling
it needed permanent private armies. In some territories, notably
Peru, elected governments lost control of vast areas of their
country to revolutionaries arm-in-arm with drug barons. An
American observer, Rensselaer W. Lee III, notes that in the
border area of north-west Burma, Laos and Thailand, such
armies include remnants and descendants of the Second World
War 3rd and 5th Divisions of the National Siamese Army and
the Burma Self-Defence Force. The opium warlord Chang
Chi Fu had 'an army of 10,000 fully equipped with the latest
weaponry' to protect the growing areas and escort the product
to market.
The British commentator Frank Gregory writes:
The anarchy caused by the drugs cartels in Colombia is well
known and during 1985-1990 the drugs dealers killed 2011 mem-
bers of the police and armed forces and caused them to suffer
3384 wounded... Britain and America have supported vigor-
ous action in the Caribbean because, as a US official said, 'the
Caribbean is a strategic area for us, and the threat is not pol-
itical subversion, but its subversion by narcotics trafficking'.
In 1989, in response to a worldwide appeal for help from
a beleagured Colombian government, the Prime Minister
Mrs Thatcher personally directed the SAS to make a con-
tribution. The insertion of the regiment's training teams into
Colombia from the autumn of 1989, served three purposes. It
provided realistic jungle experience for Britain's special forces.
It added a symbolic touch to the UK's moral support of Bush's
moral crusade. (In that sense, it was similar to the attachment
of Alastair Morrison and Barry Davies to the German GSG-9
team in October 1977. Prime Minister James Callaghan had
just reached an understanding with his European partners for
a common front against international terrorism. In Colombia,
the SAS was again the vehicle for giving practical clothing
to the political abstraction.) Finally, the regiment contributed
indirectly to a critically important victory in the war against the
powerful Medellin cartel.
The British soldiers primarily trained a force exclusively
dedicated to the drugs battlefield, the Anti-Narcotics Police.
In December 1989, having just completed his SAS training, a
captain now attached to another internal security force, received
a tip-off that a notorious cocaine baron, Gonzalo Rodriguez
Gacha ('El Mexicano') with his son and a team of bodyguards
could be found at home. Gacha had been held responsible by
Colombia's President Virgilio Barco for the assassination of
the Liberal Party's main presidential candidate, Luis Galan, in
August 1989. Gacha lived in style, as befits someone who has
declared war on his own government. Home was a large ranch
a few miles from Pacho, north of Bogota. As a former judge
in that area, Antonio Suarez, acidly noted shortly before the
tip-off: 'We always knew when he was home; his big ranch
was suddenly surrounded by armed troops -- on guard duty.'
This time, security forces raided the big ranch but the bird
had flown. Then the Captain (let us call him Hero) had a lucky
break. His helicopter, scouting the area, spotted a speedboat on
the shore of a lake and a group of men beating someone up.
The helicopter landed and seized the party at gunpoint. They
were Gacha's people, to be sure, but Gacha himself was not
present. He was hiding up in a villa further along the lakeside.
Captain Hero promptly organised a combined operation to take
the villa, involving the helicopter, ground troops and a team in
the speedboat, which he led in person. There was a hectic gun
battle before the villa was seized but again, Gacha had vanished
into adjoining woodland. It was at this point that Hero applied
the basic jungle training he had just received from the SAS. He
carefully examined a map of the area and used the helicopter to
put a stop party, including himself, into a classic ambush on
the most likely escape route. He got it right. This time there
was no escape. Gacha, with his son Freddy and five remaining
bodyguards, were killed in a storm of machine-gun fire.
It was the biggest boost for months to the credibility of
President Barco and a blow to the cartels' myth of invincibility.
Half a ton of documents seized in the follow-up operation made
'embarrassing reading for authorities in the Isle of Man and
Hong Kong', according to one source. In Panama City, US
military sources claimed that US Drug Enforcement Agency
officers co-ordinated the hunt for Gacha and that 'a team of
Special Forces led Colombian drug forces on the raid'.
The same sources asserted that 'American troops were directly
involved in the fire-fight that resulted in Mr Rodriguez Gacha's
death... The operation is regarded by US planners as a model
for future attacks against the drug cartels.'
The SAS said nothing, as usual, though it approved privately
of Hero's operation as 'a textbook job'. But from some of their
pupils in Colombia, a clear picture emerged of the style of
training the British soldiers offered. Like Woodhouse's teams
in Malaya and every operation since then, the British removed
the slings from their own rifles and from those of their allies.
They were then carried ready for immediate use rather than as
potential souvenirs for an enemy to retrieve after he had killed
the soldiers to whom they were issued.
The journalist Timothy Ross went on patrol with one of
the teams hunting for another notorious drugs baron, Pablo
Escobar, in Antioquia province. He discovered a characteristic
SAS environment: a rain forest, complete with temperatures in
the 90s, painfully high humidity, scorpions, fevers, dysentery,
poisonous snakes 'and a very hostile local peasantry'. He
reported:
The SAS have given a series of intensive courses in jungle
warfare and such specialist areas as combat intelligence. They
are much admired by the Colombians for their physical
resilience... The corporal said, 'The sun burned the skin
off their faces but they led us off on patrol exercises at such
speed that we were begging for water. 'No,' they said, 'keep
on, only five minutes rest every hour... Don't stop, shoot
as you move' they drilled into us...
Some of the men believe the SAS style of tactics should
be applied more radically and daringly and complain that
dropping in troops from helicopters gives Escobar warning
with their rotor noise.
During the year before SAS training contributed to Gacha's
death, British mercenaries had been in Colombia, some to train
members of Gacha's private army. An ex-SAS veteran, Peter
McAleese, told a television reporter that he had trained 'a
number of Colombians' in military tactics and skill-at-arms. He
confirmed that another British mercenary (with no SAS links),
David Tomkins, 'handled the explosives side'. The British team
was paid off in 1988 and an Israeli squad moved in, prior to the
assassination of the presidential candidate Galan in August 1989.
An Israeli supplied weapon was used to murder Galan.
In a revealing aside, the television reporter David Leigh
asserted that McAleese believed that he was in Colombia to
train people to 'assault Communist guerrillas in the hills'. If so,
it was a neat illustration of the degree to which the mercenaries'
'political correctness' had failed to keep up with a fast-changing
world. In Angola, Rhodesia and southern Africa, McAleese
and others could claim that they were part of the hot Cold
War. Their plausibly-deniable operations, through appropriate
cut-outs, were sometimes funded (as in Angola in 1976) by the
CIA. In Colombia, however, the drug barons were the bad guys
and the special forces of the Western world were on the other
side of this new war. The regular SAS was about to start training
regular Colombian government forces with that in mind.
It was a complex little conflict which spilled across unmarked
jungle frontiers into Brazil and attracted regular and mercenary
soldiers from all over the world. Not only were SAS person-
alities thrust into this exotic campaign; two-man RAF dog
handling team was sent from Nottinghamshire to Ecuador
with six RAF dogs for use in sniffing out hidden cocaine
stocks. Royal Navy ships and RAF Nimrods played a part in
monitoring drug cargoes as they approached the US coastline.
No one doubts that international drug gangs pose a threat to Western democracy,
and so units such as the SAS have been tasked to fight them. But is it a case of
too little too late?