We were betrayed, says Kiwi SAS man

Members of the ill-fated Bravo Two Zero mission behind Iraqi lines during the 1991 Gulf War were betrayed by a military high command which considered them expendable, says New Zealand commando Mike Coburn.

Instead of being rescued, the men were later told they were lucky not to be court-martialled, Coburn told Justice Peter Salmon in the High Court at Auckland yesterday.

In dramatic evidence, Coburn laid blame for the deaths of three comrades-in-arms squarely at the door of the SAS regimental hierarchy.

Coburn, aged 36, who served with the New Zealand SAS before joining its elite British counterpart, is fighting attempts by the British Ministry of Defence to stop publication of his account of the disastrous mission in his book, Soldier 5.

Coburn told the judge that the patrol was compromised early in its mission. Three men died and three were captured and tortured by the Iraqis.

He was later handed over to the International Red Cross and repatriated back to the SAS headquarters in Hereford, England.

There, he said, in a short debriefing the commanding officer admitted that aspects of the regimental support system had not functioned well and in some cases not at all.

"Shocking among his revelations to us was the statement that he had decided not to court-martial the surviving members of the patrol.

"The reference to court martial was a shock. It seemed incredible after all we had been through. There was no justification for even mentioning it and it came completely out of the blue ...

"We had been compromised primarily due to the fact that we had been placed in an area right next to a significant number of enemy forces when there should not have been any."

Coburn told the judge it was part of the SAS ethos that no matter how much difficulty a patrol got into, the regiment would always take urgent steps to get it out, regardless of where it was.

Sadly, he said, that ethos was shattered with the Bravo Two Zero debacle.

He said the CO told them they had few aircraft available, and Scud missiles were more important than the patrol.

"Being told we were expendable after the fact only served to compound the betrayal of trust."

While the risks involved in special forces work was something soldiers prepared for, "incompetence, including equipment failure and the regimental command structure, including the failure to acknowledge its own faults," was something he did not expect.

"They had been reluctant to rescue us when they knew the patrol had been compromised and were in need of help."

Coburn told the judge that an ineffective search was mounted some days later, when it was already too late.

He said that in early 1998 he learned their SOS messages had been received but the request for help was considered premature.

Coburn told the judge: "The vast majority of the reasons for the failure lay not with the patrol, but with the regimental hierarchy and those failures have resulted in the lives of three men."

Coburn said that General Sir Peter de la Billiere, the CO of British Forces during the Gulf War and a former CO of 22SAS, had written a book with a chapter on the Bravo Two Zero patrol.

Two other members of the patrol, writing under the names Andy McNab and Chris Ryan, also gave their accounts of the doomed mission.

Coburn said he had always believed that recent engagements should not receive publicity for security reasons. He said he had expressed disbelief that the ministry took no steps to stop McNab's "fictitious" account in Bravo Two Zero, but did not push the issue for fear of jeopardising selection chances in the covert unit for which he was then training.

Ryan's book, The One that Got Away, created much bad feeling in the regiment, particularly for its "character assassination" of patrol member Sergeant Vince Phillips.

Coburn said he asked the regiment to publish its own version "in order to nip in the bud any future distortion."

But he was angered that a statement put out by the ministry after a film adaptation of Ryan's story merely "damned the patrol with faint praise."

Coburn said that in October 1996 he signed a confidentiality contract which the regiment introduced to stop any more disclosures.

But he said he understood the purpose was to protect current and future sensitive operations and would not cover material already in the public domain. He said that failure to sign would have resulted in the ultimate humiliation of being returned to his normal unit, banned from further contact with the SAS.

Coburn said he was not able to see the contract before signing, that he was not able to take it all in as he read it, and was left uncertain about what he had signed.

He said he was not allowed to retain a copy to consider the matter properly, and with the benefit of hindsight would have wanted to take legal advice.

Coburn told the judge his reasons for writing his own account included restoring the reputation of a dead colleague.

He said there was a need for a true account of the mission, for accountability to be apportioned to the SAS hierarchy at the time and to do right by Sergeant Phillips.

At least 14 books on the SAS had been written by insiders. The ministry did not object to publication of books - only to books it did not like.