Authors: Peter Ratcliffe
They requested military help, and by ‘military’ they obviously had in mind the SAS, especially given the Prime Minister’s well-known regard for the Regiment. Both Hurd and the Director of Special Forces were dead set against sending us in, however, claiming that to do so would set a precedent for future gaol sieges. For twenty-four hours after Mrs Thatcher’s call to Rifkind it had been an off-and-on situation as to whether the SAS became involved or not.
By October 1987 I was squadron sergeant-major, and now lived in my own flat in Hereford. I was there one evening when the telephone rang. It was Major Mike, the D Squadron commander, a tall, tough, no-nonsense kind of man with the distant blue eyes of a deep-water sailor. He was both liked and respected by the men – something that’s tough to achieve in our business. On this occasion he was also a man of few words. ‘I’m going north’, he told me over the phone. ‘By helicopter. Turn on your television set.’ Then he hung up. For once the Boss didn’t have much time for idle chit-chat.
Switching on the television, I read the latest headlines from the Peterhead Gaol siege on Ceefax. The situation there didn’t look good. By early next morning the CO had become involved, and had talked over the telephone with both Malcolm Rifkind and the Ministry of Defence.
The SAS Counter-Terrorist team, known as the SP (Special Projects) team, was on permanent standby, as it always is. At the time D Squadron was doing its tour as the SP team, which is why the OC and I were involved. But, apart from Major Mike, now in Peterhead giving the local prison authorities on-the-spot advice – and in my opinion there was no one better able to tell them what was what – it still wasn’t certain whether our services would be needed. Margaret Thatcher, however, apparently had no such doubts.
Formed in the 1970s, by 1977 the SP team had expanded to full squadron strength, all four of the Regiment’s squadrons forming the team in rotation. Each team did six months’ standby duty based in Hereford, but with periods of SP training, deployments to Northern Ireland, and training abroad, to cope with any hostage or terrorist situation within the United Kingdom, or anywhere else in the world where Britain had an interest.
I spent the day hoping that we wouldn’t be called in to Peterhead, for the truth was that I would much rather have been playing squash, since I was due to play for the army in a tournament on the Friday and Saturday. In addition, a good friend of mine and his wife had arrived from Germany, and were staying with me in Hereford. Throughout the day, we were constantly told the operation was on, then off, then on again. This became quite tedious after a bit, leaving us wondering why the authorities couldn’t make a simple decision, one way or the other.
At around eight o’clock that evening I drove the CO home from the camp in my car. He invited me into his house for a drink, and as I was leaving I joked, ‘I’ll see you in half an hour.’ Smiling as he closed the door, he said, ‘I hope not.’ I drove home and walked into my flat to find the phone ringing. This time it was the operations officer. ‘It’s on,’ he said.
I raced back to the camp. Earlier that morning I’d had a telephone conversation with the squadron OC, and together we had selected which team would deploy to Peterhead, if required. The SP team consists of two twenty-man teams, known as Red and Blue, although otherwise there is no difference between them. We had selected Red Team, in readiness against our being called in to rescue the warder and quell the Peterhead riots, which by now had been running for four days.
The guys came in to the camp fast. Taking some of them, including the CO and the ops officer, in two Range Rovers while the rest of the men boarded a motor coach with all their equipment, we set off for RAF Lyneham. Blue lights flashing in the darkness, a police car escorted us all the way, clearing the roads ahead of us of slow-moving traffic. At Lyneham, Royal Air Force Police with more flashing blue lights, escorted us directly to the runway, where the C-130 Hercules was already warming its engines. The two Range Rovers drove straight up the tailramp of the aircraft and were chained to the deck. Then the rest of the guys from the coach, hauling their equipment and their weapons, piled aboard. Everyone was in the C-130 in less than a minute, and the vehicles were still being lashed down as the aircraft began taxiing down the runway. We were airborne within five minutes of driving through the gates.
Flying time to Aberdeen was an hour and fifteen minutes, and when we landed in the very early hours of the morning another police escort was waiting at the airport to guide us to Peterhead and the maximum-security gaol. The CO, the ops officer and I rode in the police car, while the rest of the team followed in a big police van and our two Range Rovers.
Camped at the front gates of the gaol were television crews, press photographers and journalists. The cameramen had their long-focus lenses trained on the roof of D Wing. To avoid being spotted by them, we left the vehicles out of sight and went the back way into the gaol, picking our way along the fence flanking the houses where the warders lived.
Each man carried his green canvas holdall, containing a gas mask, black leather gloves, fireproof black coveralls, black, rubber-soled Adidas boots, a 9mm Browning High Power automatic pistol and a Heckler & Koch 9mm submachine-gun, body armour, belt kit, ammunition, riot baton and personal radio. Additional equipment, including explosive charges, stun grenades, more ammunition and ladders, was rapidly and stealthily ferried into the gaol by our guys using the same route.
We slipped through a gate, crossed a yard to a building and entered a room measuring about twenty feet by thirty, which some prison-authority wit had chosen to call the gymnasium. There was scarcely room to swing a cat and the place filled up rapidly as we piled in with our gear, to find the squadron OC waiting for us.
When the civil authorities call in the army and formally hand over control of a situation, that situation or emergency, regardless of what it may be, becomes entirely a military matter. All decisions are taken by the military involved, although this does not mean that there will not have been discussions with other authorities, and notably government ministers. Now the gaol seige, and its resolution, was in our hands.
The OC had a mind like a steel trap. No detail escaped him as he rapidly briefed everyone. He had a map of the prison laid out and, on a blackboard, detailed drawings of the roof and the landings at each level of D Wing. The plan Major Mike had devised called for a four-entry approach involving a total of sixteen SAS men. The prisoners had taken over three floors of D Wing and the warder was being held hostage in a cell beneath the roof, which they had barricaded off.
Four of our men were to climb out of a skylight in another part of the prison and then creep along a narrow brick parapet flanking the roof, with a drop of 70 feet to the ground – in the dark, which took some nerve. The parapet was very narrow, which meant that the men would have to walk along it in single file, while at the same time trying to avoid being spotted by prisoners locked up in another wing of the gaol across the yard. To make matters worse, it had rained, and the parapet was slippery as a result.
When the OC gave the word over the radio, the guys on the roof were to ease themselves down through the hole the prisoners had made in the slates and then crash through the ceiling into the room where it was believed the hostage was being held. Simultaneously, shaped explosive charges would be electronically detonated to blow three metal doors on the D Wing landings clean off their hinges, and the other three SAS teams would charge in.
In the gymnasium, we put on our fireproof black coveralls, Adidas boots for stealth, body armour and gas masks. We were to carry batons, stun grenades and canisters of CS gas. The OC told us that we were going in for hard arrest, meaning no firearms were to be drawn unless absolutely necessary – the CS and stun grenades would do most of our work for us.
Silently, the four teams got into position and made their preparations. But, as the guys edged their way along the slippery wet parapet, they were spotted from across the yard by prisoners in B Wing, which held several hundred men. They shouted warnings and banged pisspots on the bars of their cell windows to alert the hostage takers. By now, however, everything was in place for the rescue and the OC didn’t wait a moment longer.
‘Standby, standby … go!’ he shouted over the radio. It was exactly 5 am.
And in we went. The prisoners didn’t know what had hit them. The moment the stun grenades exploded and the CS-gas pellets released their fumes, the fabled hard men of Peterhead were no longer in the game. Indeed, they had never had a prayer from the moment we were called in.
It was all over within three minutes. Reeling around, stunned by the bangs and choking on the gas, they were grabbed from the room they’d barricaded in D Wing and dragged down the iron stairs from one landing to the next. Other SAS guys in black overalls and gas masks gently led the prison officer to safety.
I had been tasked along with a guy called Johnny, an Ulsterman, to go through the door on the first-floor landing. When the simultaneous explosive charges blew the hinges off the door, I charged in. It was extremely difficult to see anything, owing to the gas and the amount of smoke from the flash-bang grenades. The rioters had wrecked or ransacked everything in sight, hurling the debris on to the walkways outside the cells, which further impeded our progress. Johnny and I cleared each cell, but there were no rioters on this floor. Then, over the radio, the OC reported that the hostage had been rescued and the rioters seized.
I was still on the first floor with Johnny when our guys brought Mr Stuart down the stairs to our landing. He was wearing a donkey jacket with orange flashes on the sleeves, and was utterly bewildered. He had been sitting at a table in the cell beneath the roof when our guys burst in, and it was obvious that he didn’t know what was happening to him.
Other teams cleared any remaining resistance from the landings. Apart from a thundering great racket from the rest of the prisoners in the other wings, who were locked in their cells and rioting, it was all over bar the shouting. The prison warders, the same warders who had been unable to cope with the rioting convicts, suddenly became very brave. They had entered the wing after we’d freed the hostage, and I watched as they dragged the ringleaders down the metal stairs.
Peterhead was a typically forbidding, Victorian-built prison, with galleries – metal walkways with iron railings – round the landings, which in turn ran round a hollow lightwell in the centre. Strung across the lightwell between each landing were wire nets, put there to break the fall of any prisoner who tried to kill himself by jumping off one of the walkways. It was one of the most horrible places I’d ever seen in my life. If I had spent any time banged up there as a prisoner, I’m certain I’d have been up on the roof myself.
D Wing was a shambles. The prisoners who had rioted earlier had made a good job of wrecking it, and anything they had not managed to destroy or use for barricades had been finished off by the hostage takers.
In the aftermath of our assault, wraiths of CS gas began creeping into the cells in which the other prisoners were locked. They banged their pisspots and set their bedding on fire, or clung to the bars on their windows and yelled out, demanding to be released. From the prison yard, the newly brave warders hosed down the open cell windows with water jets. Meanwhile, Mr Stuart was examined by the prison doctor and then taken to hospital and reunited with his wife. His captors were locked up in top-security cells. And we returned to the gymnasium, in the darkness still managing to keep away from the prying cameras of the media.
Under Scottish law, after a crime has been committed full statements have to be taken by the police from every person concerned before anyone may leave the country. As we slipped out of our kit in the prison gymnasium, the police arrived, looking for statements from each of us. They were swiftly told to forget it.
After a quick chat with the OC, who had so brilliantly planned and executed the whole rescue operation, I told the lads to finish changing out of their kit, pack up and start moving out. There was a very simple reason: we didn’t want to be still hanging around when dawn broke, which would not be long now. There was no point in advertising our presence, especially not with the press and TV there. We slipped quietly out through the back gate, the same way we had arrived. The entire operation had taken less than an hour from our arrival to our departure. No wonder, as we learned later, Margaret Thatcher was said to be pleased.
The lads were driven immediately to Aberdeen airport, where they had to wait for the pilots and crew of the C-130, who were on enforced rest. The earliest time they could depart was midday. Meanwhile the Colonel, the OC, the Operations Officer and I climbed into a police car and were also driven to the airport, where a helicopter was waiting to take us back to Hereford. Six hours later, having refuelled at Glasgow and Liverpool, we were back in the camp. The flight back was slow, but I passed the time thinking about the events of the predawn hours, and reflecting on my luck that, once again, I had been involved in the action and another piece of the Regiment’s history.
It was a Saturday, and having been up all night and taken part in the operation at Peterhead, I was looking forward to getting my head down. Only a quarter of an hour after walking into my flat, however, the telephone rang.
The caller was Chris Wilson, captain of the British Army squash team, of which I was a member. Every year there is a squash tournament between teams from the police, army, navy and fire service. It is called the Quadrangular, and I had been selected to play for the army on Friday and Saturday. When the Peterhead job blew up, however, I had called Chris and told him that I was working and wouldn’t be able to make the team. He had no idea what was happening, but he had the good sense not to ask. The fact that I was a squadron sergeant-major in the SAS was enough to tell him all he needed to know.