Win delivers another loss to SAS

STEVE BOGGAN reports on an elite fighting unit attacked from within

LONDON - It is the latest chapter in a war of words that is threatening to tear apart the most feared fighting unit in the world: the SAS.

On Wednesday, while Britain was sleeping, a former member of the regiment was celebrating a court victory in New Zealand that will allow him to publish his account of one of the murkiest episodes in the history of the Special Air Service.

Already, four books have described the doomed mission of Bravo Two Zero, the call-sign of a unit dropped behind Iraqi lines during the Gulf War. Of the eight men who helicoptered into Iraq in January 1991, three died, four were captured and tortured and one made an eight-day march to freedom in Syria.

Now, because of the ruling in an Auckland court, a fifth will be published. So, what's wrong with that? Plenty, says the Ministry of Defence. Because Soldier 5 by Mike Coburn will accuse officers of leaving their men to die and label the authors of at least two of the other books as liars.

It will be the latest in a long line of so-called kill-and-tell books to divulge the hitherto secret operations of the SAS. There are now more than 100 about the regiment, 57 of them published in two years following the success of Bravo Two Zero. That has sold more than 1.5 million copies and has made McNab - also, like Ryan, a pseudonym - a millionaire.

They continue to be published at an astonishing rate, in an attempt to feed an apparently insatiable appetite for tales of SAS exploits. Ever since the regiment sprang to prominence, ending the Iranian Embassy siege in April 1980, it has taken on an almost mythical status.

As a result, its profile is undoubtedly too high for its military masters' liking. The MoD spent hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to persuade New Zealand's High Court to ban Soldier 5 because it would put future military operations at risk. Its principal tactic, however, was much simpler; the MoD lawyers argued that Coburn - another pseudonym - was the first of these authors to have signed a confidentiality clause while serving in the regiment. That, they said, removed his right to divulge details of the mission.

Coburn's lawyers scoffed at both arguments. Books by former SAS members that have given details of the mission already include General Sir Peter de la Billiere's Storm Command, Andy McNab's Bravo Two Zero, Chris Ryan's The One That Got Away and Peter Ratcliffe's Eye of the Storm.

The events at the heart of the row took place just days before the allied bombardment of Baghdad and Iraqi forces in Kuwait began. The Bravo Two Zero patrol was dropped by helicopter deep inside Iraq. Its mission was to blow up Scud missiles and communication lines in west Iraq.

But it all went horribly wrong. According to McNab and Ryan's accounts, they were dropped in the wrong place with Iraqi forces all around, and they had been given the wrong frequency codes when they tried to call for help. They also accused potential rescuers of looking for them in the wrong place.

Two men, Steven Lane and Bob Consiglio, were killed in firefights with Iraqis who, according to flawed reconnaissance, should not have been there. A third, Sergeant Vince Phillips, died of exposure in the desert. Ryan walked 320km and escaped into Syria.

McNab, Coburn, a Zimbabwean named in court as Mal, and a fourth member of the patrol, Dinger Bell, were captured. (They were handed over to the Red Cross at the end of the war.) Many of the facts are agreed among the authors. But, crucially, there are also claims, counter-claims, accusations of lying and attempts to shift blame that have torn the protaganists apart and brought shame to the regiment.

In his account of the patrol in Eye of the Storm, Sergeant-Major Peter Ratcliffe, the regiment's senior warrant officer, casts doubt on McNab's claims and blames him for the failure of the mission.

McNab's orders in the event of problems, he said, were to head south to the safety of Saudi Arabia. Yet McNab took his team northwest towards Syria, with the River Euphrates in the way.

"It does not take an Einstein to work out that more people, settlements, industry, farms roads and military installations will be found along a major river," he writes. Ratcliffe was present at the debriefings of both Ryan and McNab. He said McNab mentioned firefights, but nothing on the scale of the epic battles in his book. Accepted military theory, he said, has it that it would take 1250 men to take out 250 enemy. "I consider it unlikely that 250 of the enemy were killed and wounded by Bravo Two Zero," he says.

In The One That Got Away, Ryan tells of killing two Iraqis on his way to safety, but Ratcliffe says: "In his debriefing Ryan made no mention of encountering any enemy troops during his epic trek to freedom.

"If these incidents happened, then I personally find it difficult to believe that they could have slipped his mind during the debriefing."

No-one knows exactly what Coburn's book will say, but in court he claimed that he was told after the war that officers had considered the men "expendable." That is sure to embarrass the MoD.

- HERALD CORRESPONDENT