There are a growing number of SAS memoirs, including most recently even one by an ‘SAS wife’! These are testimony to the incredible interest that the unit attracts, an interest that has, at last, come to be seen as counter-productive by the military authorities. Amidst all of this interest, one memoir by a former SAS member has been completely ignored. It has never been published or distributed in this country and is not mentioned or discussed in any of the many histories of the unit. The volume in question is Peter Stiff’s See You in November, published by Galago in Alberton, South Africa in 1985. This is really rather surprising. Stiff served in Borneo and Aden; indeed in Aden he was a member of the disastrous patrol that was nearly overrun by rebels and had the corpses of two of its number beheaded. This is exciting stuff. Why the uncharacteristic neglect then? The reason seems likely to be Stiff’s later career in the SAS, as an employee of David Stirling’s Watchguard International, and as a member of the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation (CI0). Stiff reveals, among other things, his involvement in a campaign of bombing and assassination in Zambia and in an abortive conspiracy to assassinate Robert Mugabe during the Lancaster House talks in London.
After Aden, Stiff went on to help train the police in Kenya. (‘In spite of the trainees being their top men, none, as is common with most Africans, could shoot straight, or seemed able to learn.’) More interesting, he was a member of an SAS team dispatched to Thailand by Harold Wilson’s Labour government to train Thai special forces. This, it was hoped by the regiment, was the beginning of a more substantial commitment that would end with British troops committed to the Vietnam war. He worked closely with the US Green Berets stationed in Thailand: ‘Their task and thus mine was to hit the Ho Chi Minn trail from the west through Laos.’ He goes on:
We were given sectors across the border in Laos to work in, and patrols of three or four of us would cross the border, seek out the locals and gather intelligence. A number of the Americans could speak Thai as well. We would not be identifiably British or American, and we would wear nondescript military clothing, without insignia….. and neither would we wear dog tags for identification. If we were killed, then the enemy would have a hard time making propaganda capital from our corpses. Our major task was reconnaissance, but we were conscious that our prime purpose was to set the pattern for more troops, both American and British to be committed later on….. I was in Thailand for eleven months altogether, but politically so far as Britain was concerned, it is certain that few knew I was there and those who did, turned a blind eye. The British effort in that theatre never got off the ground because of the opposition of the British government. When the United States started to tail off their efforts in Vietnam, the efforts disappeared altogether. (p. 54).
There was no other official SAS presence in the region, but, we are assured, there were ‘quite a few unofficial ones’.
Watchguard International
After leaving the SAS, he was placed on the books of Watchguard International, a private company working for the security services. As ‘a private company’, the firm, as Watchguard International was euphemistically known, ‘could engage in things unofficially approved of by the British government…. but officially very much disapproved of.’ This could cause problems. Stiff tells how the firm’s activities in North Yemen were compromised.
‘In 1969 two members of the firm, Knocker Parsons and Falcon Wilson, were killed in that area of operation while leading a band of guerillas and their bodies captured. There was an enormous fuss made at the United Nations as to what two white soldiers, both positively identified as British, were doing in North Yemen. The British lied their way out of it, as is the way of things in international politics. They insisted the men were soldiers who had been killed in action within a normal operational area in the Aden Protectorate. The North Yemen people, they said, had flown their bodies to a sensitive area just to stir up a row.’ (p. 57)
His own involvement with Watchguard International was with David Stirling’s celebrated conspiracy to overthrow Muammar al-Gadaffi in Libya. He blames the operation’s failure on American interference, and comments that ‘I cannot remember being so thoroughly fed up before in my life.’
Terrorism in Zambia
Stiff eventually ended up in Rhodesia, ‘following the wars’, and in 1973 was recruited into the Central Intelligence Organisation by another former SAS man, Desmond Simpson. He began a career as a terrorist, carrying out a campaign of bombings and assassinations in neighbouring Zambia. With another former SAS man, Hugh Hind, he bombed the Central Post Office, the High Court and The Times of Zambia in Lusaka, attacked the ZANU and ZAPU headquarters in the city and assassinated various nationalist activists and leaders. The intention was to stir up conflict between the two rival nationalist organisations and hopefully turn the Zambian authorities against them.
He describes an attack in 1974 on three unarmed ZANU members in Lusaka:
‘One of them must have heard me, for he half turned and gaped in astonishment. Before he could speak, I opened fire and emptied a magazine into them without anyone realising what I was doing. I changed magazines and gave each the coup de grace. I wanted no survivors to talk of white assassins.’ (p. 122)
The following year, with Hind, he assassinated the ZANU leader, Herbert Chitepo and one of his bodyguards with a car bomb in Lusaka. A child playing in the next door garden was also killed. ‘Such is war’, he sagely observes, ‘where the innocents always suffer alongside the guilty.’ This was all routine stuff as far as Stiff was concerned. As he points out:
‘The art of assassination, like anything else, can be taught from a text book as it is in the SAS and other special force units. There are even various set terms used for the exercise, which are built around four words: positive, non-positive, direct and indirect.
The most certain way of killing someone is by a direct positive method. An example would be to walk up to a person, press a gun against his body and pull the trigger.
Direct non-positive is the next most likely method to be successful. This would include hiding on a roof with a rifle and shooting the target as he entered the house opposite. This would be direct because the assassin was actively involved and present when it happened and non-positive because the target was moving and the range didn’t exclude the possibility of a miss.
Next in order comes indirect positive. This method is where the would-be killer waits until his victim is asleep in his bed and then climbs the garden wall and plants a bomb under his car. It is indirect because the man who plants the bomb leaves once he has done so, but it is positive because when the victim detonates the charge with his car, it is a strictly no nonsense goodbye. There remains a possible element of failure though, because someone else might come out the next morning to wash the car and reap the consequences.
The least certain method is the indirect non-positive method. This is when someone poisons the milk on the doorstep in the early morning. It is indirect because the poisoner will not be there to oversee the result…. and non-positive because the target might only decide to have black tea and not drink the milk at all. (pp. 129-130)
They had considered shooting Chitepo with a poisoned cross-bow bolt or a poisoned airgun pellet, or ‘blasting’ him with an AK47, but in the end decided on ‘the indirect positive method’ of planting a bomb in his car. This would avoid the ultimate failure of the assassin, ‘which is to be caught’.
On another occasion, Stiff admits that he seriously considered a ‘private enterprise’ killing. He was tempted to assassinate the former Rhodesian Prime Minister, Garfield Todd, who was opposed to the Smith regime and to UDI, whom he regarded as a traitor. Nothing could have been easier:
‘I thought of using an old trick popular with the various government security services throughout the world. I would knock on his door. When he answered I would club him, sweep him bodily to the window and throw him out head first.’
The inquest verdicts in such cases were invariably ‘accidental death’ or ‘suicide while of unsound mind’. (p. 187). He decided against on this occasion, but hints very strongly that Todd’s fatal fall from a window during the Lancaster House talks in London in 1979 might well have been just such an operation.
Stiff was particularly eager to kill Joshua Nkomo and was continually perplexed by the refusal of the CI0 to authorise such an operation. The go-ahead was eventually given in early 1979. He took part in a full-scale Rhodesian SAS assault on Nkomo’s house in Lusaka, killing some twenty bodyguards and altogether destroying the building…..but Nkomo was not there. Soon after the Lancaster House peace talks began.
The attempt on Mugabe
It is well-known that elements within the Rhodesian military were determined to prevent a settlement and planned a military coup, to be spearheaded by the Rhodesian SAS. What is less well-known is the operation that the CI0 mounted to assassinate Robert Mugabe in London. Stiff and another former British SAS member, Angus Monro, were sent to London, equipped with a variety of poisons, explosives and firearms to carry out the assassination. On this occasion, they were to be paid $25,000 for the operation, something that had never happened before. They considered shooting Mugabe with a ricin impregnated bullet so that even a wound would be fatal, but in the end decided on a bomb, a claymore mine inside a briefcase. The briefcase would be left in the foyer of the Royal Gardens Hotel and the bomb detonated by remote control when Mugabe was going in.
‘I was fully aware that not only Robert Mugabe would die. The members of his entourage close to him would be killed, as doubtless would the policeman on duty at the door. The kiosk close by would be blown to shreds and there was a sixty per cent chance that the occupants would be fatal casualties. The policemen who opened the car door stood a fifty-fifty chance of coming out of it alive. Depending on their proximity to the seat of the explosion, the chances of everyone else in the foyer varied. The deadly claymore effects would be reinforced by the shattering of the whole glass fronted area, which would double its effect.’ (pp. 333-334).
This admission by a former British SAS member that he planned to bring devastation to central London is more than enough to explain why Stiff’s memoirs have been ignored.
As it was, the operation was blown and he and Monro returned to Rhodesia. Plans to assassinate Mugabe did not end here though and Stiff was involved in various attempts back in Rhodesia during preparations for the elections and the hand-over of power. After a number of bungled efforts, the British warned of serious reprisals against those responsible and Mugabe was thereafter beyond the reach of his enemies.
With any memoir it is necessary to beware of faulty memory, exaggeration, straightforward lies and simple omission of anything too embarrassing or too compromising. There is no reason to believe that Stiff’s memoir is exempt from these difficulties. Nevertheless, he does provide a generally convincing account of a former British SAS soldier’s involvement in a campaign of bombing and assassination in Zambia, a campaign to which he brought his SAS training and skills. The revelation that he and Angus Monro, another former British SAS member, were prepared to bomb the Royal Gardens Hotel in London, killing policemen and bystanders as well as Mugabe and his entourage, certainly deserves to be more widely known.
One last point with regard to the involvement of former British SAS personnel in the Rhodesian war: there is no way at present of determining the exact numbers involved, but the likelihood is that it was significant. The Rhodesian commander-in-chief, Peter Walls, had served in the SAS in Malaya, as had the commander of the notorious Selous Scouts, Ron Reid-Daly. A number of other individual former SAS members can be identified, but understandably neither the British government nor the SAS itself are particularly keen to establish the exact numbers. What we do know is that when the Rhodesian SAS finally disbanded at the end of 1980 they received a telegram of commiseration from 22 SAS in Hereford to whom they handed over their mess silver for safekeeping.