[PDF file]: How Dare You David Stirling The Phoney Major: The Life, Times and Truth about the Founder of the SAS Gavin Mortimer London: Constable, 2022, £25, h/b John Newsinger On Sunday 30 October, the BBC broadcast the first episode of its much trumpeted drama series, SAS Rogue Heroes, with a screenplay by Steven Knight of […]
David Stirling: the authorised biography of the creator of the SAS Alan Hoe Little, Brown and Co, London 1992, £17.50 As the subtitle suggests, most of this book is taken up with the story of the foundation of the SAS. I didn’t read that section. I read the last third which contains lengthy accounts […]
[…] beyond the pale.(24) British governments supported repression and killing in Uganda, Chile and South Africa. In Vietnam in the 1960s, unknown to Parliament and the public, British SAS troops fought alongside American “special forces”.’ Pilger’s footnote refers the reader to a section of William Blum’s The CIA: a Forgotten History, on the Iran coup. […]
[…] the British in the late 1940s. (4) In these Palestine operations an “anti-terrorist” squad was set up under the leadership of one ex SOE and one ex SAS man. “The squads consisted largely of ex-soldiers rather than experienced police or intelligence personnel”, and their overall commander used them “to exploit existing intelligence to capture […]
The SAS, MI6 and the War Whitehall Nearly Lost Nigel West Little Brown and Company, 1996, £16.99 There are two substantial essays in here, one about the SAS raid on the Argentine mainland which didn’t take place, and the other about the SIS operation to prevent the French delivering any more Exocets to the […]
[…] beginning, he wanted to put the organisation on a more military footing and was always concerned to work as closely as possible with the Army, particularly the SAS. Phoenix, we are told, favoured ‘a more aggressive counter-terror policy’. By then the security forces’ surveillance methods were so effective that they had accurate profiles of […]
[…] the Army organised other intelligence operations along the lines used by Kitson against the Mau-Mau in Kenya. The Military Reconnaissance Force (MRF) was created for this task. SAS trained, and including SAS personnel, the MRF numbered about 40 and specialised in covert action. They set up Loyalist and Republican ‘pseudo-gangs’ to infiltrate and subvert […]
Books The Secret War: an account of the sinister activities along the border involving Gardai, RUC, British Army and SAS Patsy McArdle (Mercier Press, Dublin 1984) McArdle is a journalist with Downtown Radio in Northern Ireland. Journalists sometimes write really good books, but McArdle’s is a stinker, little more than a jumbled collection of […]
[…] way) that Capt. Robert Nairac was involved in the killing of IRA members in the Republic during the mid-seventies. (Sunday News 27th November 1983) Capt. Nairac, the SAS officer who was abducted and killed by the Provisional IRA, has been linked with three murders by a former British Military Intelligence Officer (‘X’). Nairac’s ex-colleague […]
[…] words of the author, ‘ ….the oil company was delighted….’; and ‘….the most important effect of the campaign was that it ensured the continued existence of the SAS….’ To put it another way Britain saved some oil rich desert using a regiment the SAS that the accountants back home were looking to […]
