2RHPZ
06-10-2004, 06:02 AM
Liberia
When the Ayatollah's mobs overran the US Embassy in Tehran
on 4 November 1979, making prisoners of fifty-two of the staff
for 444 days, they dealt a deadly blow to President Jimmy
Carter's hopes of re-election and demonstrated the continuing
potency of a form of blackmail which belonged to the Middle
Ages. Other Middle East groups revived the custom. In Beirut,
Islamic Jihad seized Western hostages such as Terry Waite and
held them for years as bait in a political trap. Saddam Hussein
constructed a human shield of innocent Westerners in Iraq in
1990 to deter an Allied air assault.
This trade in expatriates did not go unnoticed by Western
security agencies. They discreetly made contingency plans,
reflecting each emerging crisis around the world, to answer
the question: 'What if some of our people were caught up
in this?'
The first British prime minister to raise the issue was James
Callaghan in May 1978, when 1000 Katangan irregulars stormed
into Zaire from their exile in Angola to seize the border mining
town of Kolwezi. Some 2500 Europeans, most of them French
and Belgian, were at risk; many were already hostages and
some dead. The French government promptly dropped the 2nd
Foreign Legion Paras into the rebel area to restore order.
Callaghan's question, from Downing Street to the Ministry
of Defence, was: 'What could we have done if the European
hostages had been British?' The answer: 'Very little, Prime
Minister. We have only one parachute battalion currently fit
to parachute and that is on counter-terrorist duty in South
Armagh.'
The solution, short of having a very large rapid deployment
force with a worldwide airlift capability, was to anticipate the
trouble before it got out of hand. Hundreds of contingency
plans, involving various agencies, were developed (and are
regularly updated still) to secure the evacuation of British and
friendly nationals out of harm's way. Incidents in which the
extraction is a calmly ordered one, in good time, are classified
as 'Service-Assisted Evacuation' operations. The departure of
British citizens from Cyprus, courtesy of the Army and RAF,
after the Turkish invasion of 1974, would be in that category.
A 'Service-Protected' evacuation, by contrast, is one in which
the crisis has taken a dangerous turn. Such operations, because
of the risks involved, are yet another job handled often, though
not invariably, by the SAS. In some instances, rescues have been
carried out jointly with US special forces, or by one nation on
behalf of the other.
In June, 1990, as order started to crumble in the African
state of Liberia, more than 2000 US Marines took up positions
aboard four warships offshore. There they remained, as a civil
war developed and Liberian soldiers drove stolen cars round
the capital, Monrovia, firing weapons in the air and extorting
money from civilians. On 5 August (as it happened, three
days after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait) 225 Marines went
ashore to evacuate US Embassy and technical staff. The UK,
meanwhile, sent a single Royal Marine officer, who led a highly
successful road convoy of British citizens across the border to
Sierra Leone, as well as an SAS team to guard British envoys.
When the Ayatollah's mobs overran the US Embassy in Tehran
on 4 November 1979, making prisoners of fifty-two of the staff
for 444 days, they dealt a deadly blow to President Jimmy
Carter's hopes of re-election and demonstrated the continuing
potency of a form of blackmail which belonged to the Middle
Ages. Other Middle East groups revived the custom. In Beirut,
Islamic Jihad seized Western hostages such as Terry Waite and
held them for years as bait in a political trap. Saddam Hussein
constructed a human shield of innocent Westerners in Iraq in
1990 to deter an Allied air assault.
This trade in expatriates did not go unnoticed by Western
security agencies. They discreetly made contingency plans,
reflecting each emerging crisis around the world, to answer
the question: 'What if some of our people were caught up
in this?'
The first British prime minister to raise the issue was James
Callaghan in May 1978, when 1000 Katangan irregulars stormed
into Zaire from their exile in Angola to seize the border mining
town of Kolwezi. Some 2500 Europeans, most of them French
and Belgian, were at risk; many were already hostages and
some dead. The French government promptly dropped the 2nd
Foreign Legion Paras into the rebel area to restore order.
Callaghan's question, from Downing Street to the Ministry
of Defence, was: 'What could we have done if the European
hostages had been British?' The answer: 'Very little, Prime
Minister. We have only one parachute battalion currently fit
to parachute and that is on counter-terrorist duty in South
Armagh.'
The solution, short of having a very large rapid deployment
force with a worldwide airlift capability, was to anticipate the
trouble before it got out of hand. Hundreds of contingency
plans, involving various agencies, were developed (and are
regularly updated still) to secure the evacuation of British and
friendly nationals out of harm's way. Incidents in which the
extraction is a calmly ordered one, in good time, are classified
as 'Service-Assisted Evacuation' operations. The departure of
British citizens from Cyprus, courtesy of the Army and RAF,
after the Turkish invasion of 1974, would be in that category.
A 'Service-Protected' evacuation, by contrast, is one in which
the crisis has taken a dangerous turn. Such operations, because
of the risks involved, are yet another job handled often, though
not invariably, by the SAS. In some instances, rescues have been
carried out jointly with US special forces, or by one nation on
behalf of the other.
In June, 1990, as order started to crumble in the African
state of Liberia, more than 2000 US Marines took up positions
aboard four warships offshore. There they remained, as a civil
war developed and Liberian soldiers drove stolen cars round
the capital, Monrovia, firing weapons in the air and extorting
money from civilians. On 5 August (as it happened, three
days after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait) 225 Marines went
ashore to evacuate US Embassy and technical staff. The UK,
meanwhile, sent a single Royal Marine officer, who led a highly
successful road convoy of British citizens across the border to
Sierra Leone, as well as an SAS team to guard British envoys.