Since the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London on 5 May 1980, the Special Air Service (SAS) has become a cultural phenomenon as much as a military one; has become, in the words of its former Director, Peter de la Billiere, ‘a living embodiment of the individualism of the British’. Their heroic exploits have been relentlessly celebrated over the last fifteen years in a still growing body of popular literature: fiction, memoir, history, journalism and survival handbook. These works constitute what Graham Dawson has characterised as the myth of ‘the soldier hero’, one of the myths of nationhood that provide ‘a cultural focus around which the national community could cohere’. This celebration of the ‘soldier hero’ as the ‘quintessential figure of masculinity’ has a considerable pedigree, but it does seem as if the SAS have successfully established themselves as the ‘soldier heroes’ of the Thatcher years and beyond.(1) What I shall attempt here is an examination of this myth of the SAS as it is elaborated in Peter de la Billiere’s autobiography and his personal account of the Gulf War.(2)
Born Rebel
De la Billiere was born in April 1934, the son of a Surgeon Lieutenant Commodore in the Royal Navy, who was killed during the German invasion of Crete in 1941. He never really knew his father and confesses that it was only much later that he felt any real sense of loss. He was brought up by his mother and a succession of nannies. His account of his childhood in Looking For Trouble, entitled ‘Born Rebel’, is a story of rebellion against female authority at home. He was ‘born a rebel’ and his ‘rebellious tendencies were fostered by the lack of a father’ (p. 2). This rebellion consisted of making his mother’s life a misery, (on one occasion he faked a telephone call to her reporting that he had been hurt in an accident), and driving a succession of nannies into resignation. He describes one ‘typically callous incident’ (p. 24) when he tried to injure and nearly killed his tiresome younger brother by convincing him that he could walk in safety on the plaster floor between the joists in their loft. While he insists that he was ‘fairly normal and exuberant’ (p. 13), in fact the picture he paints is of a disturbed child, completely out of control.
His rebellion at preparatory school and later at Harrow public school. In 1950 he painted the slogan VOTE LABOUR on a number of college walls (this did not indicate any youthful leftism, just that he thought this would cause more offense than anything else he could think of at the time). More disturbingly, he stole a .303 rifle and ammunition from the college armoury and, under cover of darkness, took pot shots at other boys’ windows. The only reading he admits to were various Second World War adventure stories (The Dambusters, The Great Escape and The Wooden Horse). He became obsessed with the well-publicised exploits of a notorious Dutch solder, Raymond ‘Turk’ Westerling, who was fighting against Indonesian nationalists in the Celebes. This obsession grew into a determination to join the Special Air Service, the celebrated British wartime unit that had been re-formed in Malaya in 1951 to fight the Communists.
De la Billiere’s concern in this account of his early years is to establish his credentials as someone who did not toe the line or obey the rules. This is the stuff of which the adventurer, the hero, is made. It is the upper class misfits who are the best defenders of Empire, the real bulwarks of the Establishment. They can be relied on in an emergency, they are not worried about getting their hands dirty. His early years of rebellion were an ideal preparation for his years as an officer in the SAS. Another way of looking at it is that it was in the army that he found the stability and security that he had never found at home or at school.(3)
Learning to Lead
He joined the army as a private but was quickly identified as officer material. This he puts down to his organizing a ball game when the PT instructor turned up late, but a sceptic might well think it was when his background was discovered. At last in April 1953, eager for combat, he arrived in Korea as a junior officer in the Durham Light Infantry. The war had reached a condition of stalemate with the two opposing sides dug in facing each other. He ‘began an extraordinary troglodytic existence … we lived in holes deep underground, and slept by day, emerging into the open under cover of darkness’. He was an enthusiastic participant in ‘a static battle of attrition’ enlivened by the heady danger of the night patrol into no-man’s-land (pp. 64 and 5).
It was in Korea that de la Billiere began to learn the art of ‘man-management’, of how to get young working class soldiers to willingly obey orders that might well involve them having to kill or be killed. ‘Commanding men – I began to see – is actually a question of getting them on your side … and working to bring them together as a loyal and coordinated team’. He set about becoming a paternal authority figure, a father to his men, mainly Durham miners: ‘I had grown to love them. The men were my life, and they meant a tremendous lot to me … the more I did for them, the greater my own reward.’ His theory, which he asserts was to be constantly proved in practice, was that ‘if you really look after people – which does not mean being soft with them, but taking more trouble about them than you take about yourself – they quickly appreciate your efforts on their behalf. You win their respect and a special relationship develops’. Of course, not all responded to such generous paternalistic treatment. Sometimes ruthlessness was required and he describes how on one occasion when a windy corporal refused to take part in a night patrol, he forced him to at pistol point, threatening to shoot him on the spot. He found night patrols extremely frightening and very exciting and was always keen to lead them (pp. 78-84).
Colonial Wars: Malaya
Not until October 1956 did he achieve his ambition of selection for the SAS. This had one drawback: it meant he missed the Suez invasion ‘in which [he] should have much liked to fight’ (p. 103). Instead, he was sent to Malaya to take part in the closing stages of the counter-insurgency campaign against the Communists. According to de la Billiere the ‘decisive factor’ in this conflict ‘had been the introduction of the SAS’ with their ability to patrol the deep jungle for long periods of time (p. 107). This is the first example of the ‘special forces egoism’ that runs right through the rest of his autobiography and is an essential component of the SAS myth. It was the supermen of the SAS who turned the tide. This is nonsense.
Given that the majority Malay population was firmly enlisted on the British side in the conflict, a Communist victory was never likely in Malaya. The decisive part in the defeat of the insurgency was actually played by the Briggs Plan and the commitment of the resources to implement it. Drawn up by Lieutenant General Sir Harold Briggs, the Director of Operations in Malaya in 1950-51, this had established the administrative machinery that was to wrest control of the Chinese population from the guerrillas, and introduced the programme of forced resettlement that was to eventually see nearly half a million Chinese squatters confined in heavily guarded camps. The guerrillas were effectively cut off from their supporters: the fish were left stranded as the sea was drained away. A massive repressive machine was put in place: eventually there were 22 battalions of regular soldiers, 40,000 police, 40,000 special constables, 100,000 auxiliary police and 250,000 home guards enlisted in the struggle against some 5,000 guerrillas. In the course of the Emergency some 34,000 people were interned without trial, many others sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, over 10,000 people deported and 226 hanged. The Communists were remorselessly ground down.(4)
How important a role did the SAS play in this British victory? At most they played a significant part in mopping up operations in the closing stages of the Emergency, helping to hunt down the isolated guerrilla units that had retreated into deep jungle once the tide had turned against them. Even here it is important not to exaggerate SAS prowess: the troops who were recognised as performing most effectively in jungle operations were the Fijians and East Africans, followed by the Gurkhas. In no way was the SAS contribution ‘decisive’.(5)
De la Billiere himself played a part in the last major action in which the SAS participated in Malaya, Operation Sweep, which began in February 1958. This involved driving the small group of guerrillas led by Ah Hoi out of the Telok Anson swamp north west of Kuala Lumpur so that they could be either killed or forced to surrender. He writes:
The swamp proved a hellish environment in which to live and move. Because it was so low-lying, the heat was relentless. In most places no ground was visible: the mangrove trees were standing in water into which their roots plunged. To make progress, we either had to slosh through waist-deep, dark-brown liquid, making a dangerous amount of noise, or hop from one root to the next – a laborious and exhausting process which wore the arches of the feet raw. The leeches were unspeakable. At night there was no ground to sleep on: we had to sling hammocks between trees, and we cooked, crouching on the flattest root we could find (p. 125).
After three weeks, in which his troops came across a number of abandoned guerrilla camp sites but never actually sighted a guerrilla, he received a radio message that the operation had been a success and that Ah Hoi was coming in to surrender. While there is no doubting the courage, fitness or endurance of the SAS, soldiering in these appalling conditions, they played only a minor role in the eventual British victory. What de la Billiere does in his account is to effectively substitute tales of SAS prowess for any serious consideration of their military effectiveness. The defeat of the Communist guerrillas, hunted down in their jungle hideaways, is portrayed as a triumph of British masculinity rather than for the over-whelmingly superior military-political apparatus that the British were able to bring to bear. Moreover, the Communist guerrillas demonstrated even greater courage and endurance, sustaining their revolutionary war for more than a decade against overwhelming odds.
Colonial wars: Oman
As the Malayan Emergency came to an end, the SAS faced disbandment. It was saved by rebellion in a British client state, the Sultanate of Oman. Here Saudi-backed rebels, at most seven hundred strong, led by the Imam Ghalib and his brother Talib, were securely established on the Jebel Akhdar, an inaccessible plateau from which they harassed the Sultan Said bin Taimur’s British-officered armed forces. The situation in the Middle East was too sensitive for the deployment of a large British force and so the SAS were sent in to see if they could dislodge the rebels without attracting too much notice. Their deployment in November 1958 in support of a reactionary absolute monarch who still kept slaves, would not permit schools or hospitals, and ruled by medieval methods of repression, does not cause any serious embarrassment. Instead de la Billiere provides a graphic account of the taking of the Jebel, a feat accomplished once again in the most testing physical conditions over incredibly difficult terrain. He writes:
The exhilaration of operating successfully in this tough environment had sent our own morale soaring. Even by our own high standards we were incredibly fit: people’s skins were peeling and splitting with sunburn, but most of us had faces and arms tanned the colour of horse-chestnuts, and we rejoiced at the challenge of the hard climbing with which the Jebel presented us. In every way this was an ideal operation for the SAS. Unlike in Malaya, where we hardly ever set eyes on the enemy, here we saw adoo every day: once we were up in the mountain, pretty well any Arab was fair game (p. 144).
This is the stuff of boys’ adventure stories. It does leave out, however, one important dimension of the conflict: the Jebel had been under heavy and sustained air bombardment for weeks. Air Chief Marshal Sir David Lee gives some idea of the scale of this offensive:
during the week ending 12 September, Shackletons dropped 148 x 1,000 lb. bombs; 40 rockets were fired by Venoms and a large quantity of 20 millimetre ammunition was expended. During the latter part of this month HMS Bulwark arrived in the Gulf of Oman and her full complement of Sea Venoms and Seahawks joined in the air attack. In one week, forty-three offensive sorties against the plateau targets were flown from the ships as well as ten reconnaissance sorties. Within the confines of a relatively small target area, air attacks on this scale continuing for week after week against simple agricultural tribes was a terrifying experience … There were increasing number of reports that villagers were pleading with their Imam Ghalib to go down the mountain and surrender …(6)
This is not to say that air bombardment on its own would have dislodged the rebels or that the SAS did not accomplish the taking of the Jebel more efficiently and more economically than other troops could have done, but it does at the very least detract from the pose of underdog that de la Billiere’s narrative adopts. In fact, once the SAS were established on the Jebel, Ghalib and his men very wisely recognised that defeat was now inevitable and slipped away.
It was this operation that secured the regiment’s future. They had shown, in de la Billiere’s words, that they ‘could be flown into a trouble spot rapidly and discreetly, and operate in a remote area without publicity – a capability much valued by the Conservative Government of the day’ (pp. 150-151). There was considerable demand for their services throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. De la Billiere himself served in the disastrous Aden conflict in 1964. He took part in the Radfan campaign which saw a patrol from his squadron nearly overrun by rebels and the heads of two of his men on display across the border in Yemen. He served more successfully in Borneo during the confrontation with Indonesia in 1964-65. The cross-border raids and ambushes that the SAS mounted ‘were backed by Denis Healey, who had become the Labour Minister of Defence’. Healey, ‘rather surprisingly for a Socialist politician – had a realistic grasp of military matters, understood the cost-effectiveness of the SAS, and gave us his full support’ (p. 242). No other Labour politician earns such praise.(7)
Promotion
In 1969 he was promoted second-in-command of 22 SAS, eventually taking over full-command in 1972. This involved world-wide responsibilities. In 1972-73 there were SAS officers and men deployed in twenty-three different countries from the Far East to South America, ‘many’, according to de la Billiere, ‘engaged on highly sensitive projects’ (p. 274). The most important commitment by far, however, was the war in Dhofar, a war that is still virtually unknown. Once again the SAS were sent to the rescue of the Sultan of Oman, on this occasion Said bin Taimur’s modernising son, Qaboos.
The Unknown War
According to de la Billiere, in Dhofar the SAS ‘rolled back and finally dissipated the tide of Communism which threatened to overwhelm southern Arabia’ (p. 263). This is another example of ‘special forces egoism’ although with more justification than in the case of Malaya. Nevertheless the importance of the conflict is exaggerated and the contribution to victory made by the Sultan’s Armed Forces (SAF) and allied troops is ignored. This is not to deny the crucial part played by the SAS, but that they alone turned the tide and secured victory over the revolutionaries of the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG). Their contribution has to be placed in the context of a coordinated military effort that eventually involved some 10,000 regular troops of the SAF together with a Jordanian battalion and an Iranian battle group with strong air support. The SAS were involved in ‘a hearts and minds’ operation that was intended to mobilise the Dhofari population against the guerrilla army that had successfully overrun most of the province. They were involved in the raising of a Dhofari militia, the firqats, that incorporated defectors from the PFLOAG. This was an essential part of the counter-insurgency effort, but was certainly not decisive on its own.
The turning point in de la Billiere’s version of the war occurred in July 1972 when perhaps as many as 300 guerrillas attacked the coastal town of Mirbat and were held at bay for five hours by a handful of SAS until reinforcements came to the rescue. It has been portrayed as another Rorke’s Drift, a heroic stand against overwhelming odds. Thirty-eight dead guerrillas were subsequently put on display in Salalah, but de la Billiere estimates that they probably suffered double that number of fatalities. The SAS lost two men killed. What this account leaves out is that the brunt of the guerrilla attack fell upon some fifty of the Sultan’s gendarmes and askars. They too played a part in the defence of Mirbat and suffered fatalities. De la Billiere goes on to argue that for the PFLOAG, Mirbat was ‘a shattering reverse and it marked the turning point in the war’ (p. 277). How valid is this judgement? Certainly the PFLOAG had suffered a serious set-back, but it was one from which they could have recovered if it had not been for the relentless pressure maintained by the SAF. Final victory was not claimed until the end of 1975 and even then mopping up operations continued until the middle of the following year.(8)
Why then the emphasis on the Mirbat engagement? Part of the reason is clearly the way this particular incident helps sustain the SAS myth. The heroic stand by a young 23 year old officer, Mike Kealy(9) and eight SAS troopers, holding off a much stronger force in an exotic Arabian setting is just the sort of incident calculated to set the blood racing and sustain national pride. It summons up all the romance of Empire and demonstrates once again that the British are still the same people who in earlier times had ruled over much of the globe. Much more important in military terms was the patient building up of firqat forces, but this does not carry the same emotional charge as a brave stand against a fanatical Arab foe. The Mirbat fight serves to invert the reality of the war, portraying the stronger side as the weaker, battling heroically against the odds. Goliath, in this history, succeeds in passing himself off as David. The wonder is that the battle has not been made into a feature film. In fact, the war in Dhofar saw a revolutionary movement fighting a guerrilla war against a considerably stronger, largely mercenary army, that possessed complete air superiority. This is a very different tale from that told by de la Billiere. Later revelations with regard to members of the SAS embezzling funds while in Dhofar were to be a serious embarrassment. According to de la Billiere, for a while 22 SAS had ‘the smell of corruption hanging over it’ (p. 289).
The War against the IRA
When de la Billiere finally became Director of the SAS at the end of 1978, its main commitment was to combat terrorism both in Britain and in Northern Ireland. The expertise developed in this particular field has been widely celebrated, the ruthlessness displayed generally applauded: these are the men the IRA fear.(10) In fact, a very strong case can be made that even from the British point of view the SAS were part of the problem in Northern Ireland rather than part of the solution. The ruthlessness with which the terrorists were eliminated during the storming of the Iranian Embassy in May 1980 had no unfortunate side effects because the terrorists had no popular support. Similar ruthlessness in the secret war against the IRA, however, did have serious drawbacks precisely because they did have a popular constituency in Northern Ireland. One of the main concerns of British security strategy in the province was to weaken and undermine that popular constituency, whereas incidents involving the SAS tended to strengthen it.(11)
Another characteristic of the secret war waged by the SAS was the extent to which it fed on itself, generating a cycle of violence. A good example of this is provided by the Gibraltar shootings of 6 March 1988. Three unarmed IRA members were shot dead by the SAS in what appeared to be a deliberate execution rather than an attempt to arrest them that went wrong. All three are supposed to have made ‘threatening movements’ when challenged, a phrase that has replaced ‘shot while trying to escape’ in the lexicon of counter-insurgency operations. This incident initiated a cycle of violence that was to leave another five people dead. When the IRA funerals took place on 16 March, the mourners were attacked by a loyalist gunman who killed three people and wounded another fifty. Three days later, when one of the victims of this attack was buried, two undercover soldiers (one of whom had earlier been de la Billiere’s driver) were seized by the mourners and then killed by the IRA. This series of incidents dramatically raised the level of tension throughout Northern Ireland. If the three IRA members shot dead in Gibraltar had been arrested then this cycle of violence would never have got started.(12)
De la Billiere himself has remarkably little to say about Northern Ireland. Presumably the subject is still too sensitive for a recently retired senior officer to write about even in the most guarded terms. But what he does have to say is quite revealing. He discusses the Dunloy incident of 11 July 1978 in some detail and it is worth quoting him at some length:
Our soldiers had found a weapons cache in a grave, and had staked the site out, lying up for several days and nights hidden in a wet ditch at the edge of the churchyard. One night a man appeared, lifted the top of the grave and took out a semi-automatic weapon, which he pointed in the direction of the watchers. They, thinking that he had seen them and was about to shoot, opened fire and killed him.
Clearly the dead man had been a member of the IRA; but he was only sixteen, and probably a low-grade operator. The IRA opened up a vociferous propaganda barrage, producing pictures taken seven or eight years earlier, when the youth was singing in a choir, and presenting us as having killed a choirboy (p. 315).
This is a complete travesty. De la Billiere’s account is thoroughly pernicious, especially in view of the fact that it is quite likely that many of the readers of his autobiography will not have access to a more reliable account of this tragic incident. In fact, the arms cache was discovered by sixteen year-old John Boyle on 10 July. He told his father, who informed the police, whereupon the graveyard was staked out by the SAS. The very next day he returned to the graveyard for another look at the weapons and was shot dead in broad daylight. He quite categorically had no connection with the IRA. The two soldiers responsible were later acquitted of murder.(13)
Gulf War
After his stint as SAS Director had ended, de la Billiere went on to command the British garrison in the recently recaptured Falklands. He was later appointed General Officer Commanding Wales and then the South East District. He was preparing for retirement when Iraqi forces occupied Kuwait. In Storm Command, his account of the Gulf War, he recalls how the news ‘set my adrenalin racing….. this seemed to be a task for which my whole life had prepared me’. He had spent most of his life ‘looking for trouble-spots’ and fortunately ‘had always managed to find unrest somewhere in the world’. Now he had the opportunity to end his career with a full-scale war and ‘grasped it eagerly’ (p. 11). A key factor in his appointment to command British forces was the great admiration that Margaret Thatcher had for him. In her memoirs, Thatcher recalls that she ‘wanted a fighting general’ and insisted on de la Billiere who she had known since ‘his command of the SAS operation at the time of the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege’. It was objected that he was within a week of retirement, but predictably she got her way. This was an instance of what I have described elsewhere as her ‘Boudicca syndrome’.(14) (Her admiration for him was whole-heartedly reciprocated. Her subsequent downfall was to come as a great shock and he sent her a personal letter of commiseration.)
He makes clear at the start of his account that his intention is to ‘demonstrate the importance of individual human beings in modern warfare’. Despite all the technology, it was still individual performance that counted: ‘pilots, tank drivers, mechanics, engineers, cooks, radio operators, infantrymen, nurses … It was these ordinary people who at the end of the day were going to put their lives on the line’ (pp. 3 and 4). In practice, however, what we get is another instance of ‘special forces egoism’ with the exploits of the SAS taking up as much space as the rest of the air, land and naval forces under his command put together. This derives not just from his obsession with the SAS, but also from the very nature of the Gulf War itself. The conflict was so one-sided, the coalition’s technological advantage was so great, that when the land battle actually came it was little more than a massacre, more reminiscent of Omdurman than Alamein. De la Billiere describes how his 4th Brigade in the hundred hours of the land offensive knocked out more than 60 Iraqi tanks, 90 armoured personnel carriers, 37 artillery pieces, and captured over 5000 prisoners. All this without suffering a single fatality from Iraqi fire (nine men were killed, but by US planes). It is very difficult to turn such a battle into a celebration of heroism, endurance and self-sacrifice. De la Billiere does not even try. Instead, he focuses on the exploits of the SAS patrols operating behind Iraqi lines.
Here the British were still the underdog, overcoming vastly superior odds by sheer guts. This was where British manhood could show what it was made of, where cause for national pride could be found in abundance. Whereas the entire land offensive is covered in twenty-three pages of text, the heroic exploits of one lone SAS corporal take up fifteen pages. Separated from the rest of his ‘lost patrol’ this soldier walked through the Iraqi lines to safety. As de la Billiere proudly remarks, this soldier hero’s ‘superhuman courage and endurance … make an amazing story and one which perfectly exemplifies the spirit and traditions of the SAS’ (p. 265). Once again there is no disputing the courage and endurance of this particular soldier, but it is the ideological purpose that his feat is made to serve that is of interest here. After one of the most one-sided wars in modern history in which Iraqi soldiers endured weeks of bombardment followed by a devastating attack that left perhaps as many as one hundred thousand of them dead, the image we are left with is of the lone British soldier, hungry and cold, being hunted across the most difficult terrain by hundreds of Iraqis and yet still making good his escape. In this way the Gulf War is redeemed, transformed from a technological massacre into a tale of individual heroism, a celebration of British masculinity. It is no coincidence in this respect that the three other best-selling accounts of the war published so far have been ‘Andy McNab’s’ gripping first-hand account of the fate of the rest of the lost SAS patrol, Bravo Two Zero, Chris Ryan’s The One That Got Away that tells of the ordeal of the SAS corporal who walked to freedom, and the account of their captivity by two RAF pilots shot down over Iraq, Tornado Down. These are tales of the underdog, of British masculinity triumphing, against all the odds, over the lesser masculinity of a brutal enemy.(15) In this way is the myth of the ‘soldier hero’, the myth of the SAS sustained.
Notes
John Newsinger lectures in History and Irish Studies at Bath College of Higher Education. His most recent book is The Fenians in Mid-Victorian Britain, published by Pluto.
- Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes, (Routledge, London 1994), pp. 1 and 4.
- Michael de la Billiere, Looking For Trouble, (Harper Collins, London, 1994), and Storm Command, (Harper Collins, London, 1992).
- For the memoirs of another upper class ‘rebel’ who served briefly with the SAS and later with the Sultan of Oman’s armed forces before a well-publicised career as an adventurer/explorer see Ranulph Fiennes, Living Dangerously, (Futura, London, 1987). He continued his ‘youthful pranks’ after leaving Eton and was thrown out of the SAS after a bombing incident at Castle Combe near Bath.
- For the Briggs Plan and the Malayan Emergency see Mohamed Amin and Malcolm Caldwell, Malaya: the making of a neo-colony, (Spokesman, Nottingham 1977), and, more recently, Richard Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare, (Oxford University Press, 1989).
- John Coates, Suppressing Insurgency, (Westview, Boulder, Colorado (USA) 1992), p. 167.
- Sir David Lees, Flight From The Middle East, (HMSO, London 1980), p. 133.
- For Denis Healey’s admiring remarks on the SAS see his The Time of My Life, (Michael Joseph, London 1989, p. 230). He writes of the commander of 22 SAS in Borneo, Colonel John Woodhouse that he ‘was the greatest guerrilla warrior yet produced by the West – a man to compare with Ho Chi Minh’. This seems at least a bit over the top (!) but is fairly typical of the awe the SAS inspire in their admirers.
- For other SAS accounts of the Dhofar War see Tony Jeapes, SAS: Operation Oman, (William Kimber, London, 1980) and Michael Paul Kennedy, Soldier’I’ SAS, (Bloomsbury, London, 1990)
- He later died of hypothermia while on a long distance march across the Brecon Beacons in February 1979.
- For a good example of such celebration see James Adams, Robin Morgan and Anthony Bambridge, Ambush: The War between the SAS and the IRA, (Pan, London, 1988).
- Ian Kearns, ‘Policies Towards Northern Ireland’ in Stuart Croft (ed.), British Security Policy: The Thatcher Years, (Macmillan, London, 1990), p. 122. See also my ‘From Counter-Insurgency to Internal Security: Northern Ireland’, in Small Wars and Insurgencies, Spring 1995.
- J. Bowyer Bell, The Irish Troubles, (Gill and Macmillan, Dublin 1993), pp. 753-755
- Raymond Murray, The SAS in Ireland, (The Mercier Press, Cork, 1990), pp. 225-235. See also Mark Urban, Big Boys’ Rules, (Faber and Faber, London 1992).
- Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, (Harper Collins, London 1993), pp. 825-826 and my ‘Thatcher, Northern Ireland and The Downing Street Years’, in Irish Studies Review 7 (Summer 1994).
- Andy McNab, Bravo Two Zero, (Bantam, London 1993); Chris Ryan, The One That Got Away, (Century, London, 1995); John Peters and John Nichol, Tornado Down, (Michael Joseph, London 1992).