A Fortunate Life (18 page)

But our task as clandestine divers was to hide our presence, not advertise it. And for this we had to learn how to use a different type of diving set, the Swimmer Canoeist Breathing Apparatus, or SCBA. The SCBA ran on pure oxygen, carried in two small bottles on the back. These fed a ‘counter-lung’ made of rubber, which was carried on the front. The ‘counter-lung’ formed a kind of bellows which went in and out with each breath, providing you with a supply of pure oxygen. The exhaled breath then passed down a rubber tube to a refillable can containing a chemical (‘protosorb’) that extracted the CO
₂
from the exhaled breath and recycled the left-over oxygen back into the counter-lung for the next breathing cycle to begin.

The SCBA set was very light, self-contained and gave off no bubbles. But it had two big disadvantages. The first was that oxygen can become lethally toxic at greater than two atmospheres of pressure, which meant that we were limited to a depth of 30 feet, and going deeper could be fatal. The second was that, being made of rubber, the counter-lung was very susceptible to being torn on sharp edges or underwater barbed wire. This, too, could be fatal, since water in the counter-lung not only altered the driver’s buoyancy, dragging him down, but also combined with the protosorb to produce a very unpleasant ‘cocktail’ of caustic soda, powerful enough to strip away the gums, which surged up the breathing tube and into the diver’s mouth, causing him to spit out his mouth-piece and so lose his ability to breathe.

But the complexities of underwater work in the SBS were not confined to new equipment. We had to learn some completely new techniques as well. The first was diving at night, and the second was underwater ship attack. The water around Portsmouth could often be pretty murky, and at a hundred feet the available light was often very limited. But nothing prepared us for the inky blackness of diving at night, when the only visible thing is the dim, luminous glow of your compass and depth gauge. We always swam in pairs, connected by a ‘buddy line’ or short length of cord attached to both swimmers at the wrist. A ‘buddy’s’ duty was to check his partner’s kit and help him out if
he got into trouble underwater. After much practice on many freezing nights in an old disused clay pit close to our base, we became quite proficient at swimming on a compass bearing and estimating distance underwater in the dark. By the end we could all swim a three-leg course in total darkness at a depth of twenty feet and find our target, the hull of an old barge, with some accuracy. Finally, we were let loose on a real ship, doing a three-hundred-yard underwater approach at night, to end up beneath one of Her Majesty’s frigates in Portsmouth harbour. One of the things I discovered in the SBS was that my colleagues divided pretty neatly into two: those who (like me) hated the parachuting but never minded the diving, and those who hated the claustrophobia and disorientation of diving but loved parachuting. But, even for someone who is not claustrophobic, diving in inky blackness under a major ship is a bizarre and unsettling experience. You can hear a ship, and feel the vibrations of its engines and machinery, from some distance away underwater. Underneath it, however, apart from this general sound which thrums loudly in your ear, you can also hear all the other shipboard sounds, including people hammering, someone dropping a spanner and even the metal-tipped boots of the engine room staff walking around. It is very difficult not to let your mind dwell on the twenty thousand tons of ship above you and the crew going about their routine business – only the thickness of a metal plate or two away from where you are, cocooned in coldness, darkness and blindness amongst the barnacles, the seaweed and the dead man’s fingers,
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just beneath them. It was also difficult not to think what it would be like for them if the charges you were planting were real.

Our biggest fear on these exercises lay in the wire-mesh-covered inlets under the ship’s hull, through which cooling water is sucked for the ship’s engines, and which, when the engines are running, are quite powerful enough to pull off a diver’s face mask. Normally, all this machinery is carefully turned off before a diving exercise begins. But this did not always happen. Much later, on a ship attack exercise in Singapore, someone restarted an engine while we were beneath the ship, and I had a very nasty moment when I got caught in the suction and was only saved by an alert ‘buddy’ who pulled me clear.

It was now the turn of the year, and our course was in full swing. The day always started with Physical Training (PT) at 0600, followed by a
near-naked swim in the icy waters of our local clay pit. Then we had a full day’s instruction, ending usually with some kind of night exercise.

Apart from diving, we learned how to paddle canoes at night over long distances; how to read charts and tide tables; how to do basic coastal navigation; how to work the clandestine radio sets used by SBS at the time; and how to carry out rudimentary first aid. We also learned how to use not only the standard British Army weapons of the time but also the weapons commonly used by our enemies – including the fabled Kalashnikov AK-47, which (because of its robustness, simplicity and resistance to jamming) all of us agreed was the best battlefield weapon in the world. I found myself proficient enough with most short-barrelled weapons,
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with the single exception of the pistol, with which I proved absolutely useless. It soon became clear to me that if I was armed with one of these, then by far the safest place to be was the target, for this I seemed incapable of hitting even at the closest range. This applied most especially to the World War II ‘Wellrod’ silenced pistol then issued to SBS combat swimmers, a single-shot affair that took about fifteen seconds to reload. If ever I had to depend on one of these, I concluded it would be easier to damage a potential enemy by throwing it at him than by trying to shoot him with it. We also learned how to shoot accurately in built-up areas and confined spaces (on a specially constructed range), unarmed combat, fieldcraft and the techniques of escape, evasion and survival.

Indeed, survival was the subject of the shortest and most effective lesson I have ever attended. The instructor, one of our Sergeants and a mountain of a man, came into the lecture room in which we were all seated, walked up to the front and put both his arms on the lectern. ‘Right! Today you will learn survival. It’s not complicated,’ he said, pulling two very ancient pieces of bread, curled up at the edges, out of one pocket of his parachute smock. He then pulled a live frog out of the other, put it between the pieces of bread and ate it. ‘If you can do that,’ he said, ‘you will survive. If you can’t you won’t!’ Then, lecture over, he left the room, leaving us with our eyes out on stalks and a lesson we would never forget.

At the end of a bitterly cold December we went up to the Royal Naval base at Greenock for a week practising our submarine drills, after which we did a three-day exercise that involved being dropped
from a submarine and paddling at night up Loch Long and Loch Goil to Lochgoilhead. Here we packed up our canoes and carried them, with full kit, over a vicious hill to Loch Fyne, near Ardno, where we reassembled them for a twenty-mile paddle, followed by a reconnaissance of a target, which we raided, before making our way south over the mountains and along Loch Eck (where I used my old poaching skills to supplement our depleted food stock by tickling trout), to a pick-up point in Glen Kin, close to the Holy Loch. It was bitterly cold, and we were permitted to carry only one sleeping bag, together with its white Arctic camouflage cover, between the two of us. My ‘buddy’ at this time was an outstanding Marine who came from Wincanton, called Peter Meacham, with whom I became close friends. On our first day, lying up in a pine wood on the shores of Loch Long, I discussed with him how we should divide the use of our one sleeping bag. His answer was very clear: ‘I am in charge today, so I will have the sleeping bag – that’s the way you officers work isn’t it?’ It was a joke, of course, though not an entirely unfounded one. We actually ended up sharing the sleeping bag, turn and turn about, in three-hour stretches, with the warm one sleeping and the shivering one keeping sentry and trying to get as much warmth out of the flimsy cover as he could manage. Sleep was not something we got much of at any time during those three months, but it was especially lacking on this exercise.

Towards the end of our course we were taught how to resist interrogation. The heart of this skill is to recognise that all intelligence has a life. For instance, if an operator is captured during a raid, the intelligence he possesses that the enemy desperately needs to obtain quickly is the target, the number of operatives and the escape and evasion plan. If he can keep these details secret until his comrades have completed their task and had time to get away, the intelligence he has is useless to the enemy. So the first thing to have is a good cover plan with a whole series of deeper cover plans beneath it which, like the layers of an onion, get closer and closer to the truth without actually revealing it, and to delay the peeling of each successive skin for as long as possible. Each layer of the cover plan has to be a variation of the first story and convincing in its own right, so it forces the interrogator to waste time checking whether it is true or not. In this way, the prisoner can, when he feels the need to get a break from the pressure, unpeel one layer of the onion while continuing to conceal the real truth at the centre until, hopefully, the intelligence he holds becomes redundant.

This all sounds very easy in theory. But in practice it means putting up with a very great deal of discomfort. Basically, interrogation is a battle of wills between the interrogator and the prisoner. The interrogator’s job is to induce in the prisoner a kind of conditional and temporary mental breakdown, so that the prisoner abandons his values and adopts those of the interrogator in their place. The job of the prisoner is to hang onto his values and keep himself anchored in reality. Disorientation is a key part of this process, and discomfort, pain and, especially, sleep deprivation, are the most powerful tools in the hands of the interrogator. At the time when I was going through interrogation training, the techniques used by NATO interrogators included ‘white noise’ (playing, at very constant, loud volume, the kind of noise you get on your mobile phone when there is a bad connection), severe discomfort (especially through cold and through the use of painful restraints), hooding and total sleep deprivation. These interrogation techniques were subsequently banned as a result of public outrage when it came to light that they were being used against IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland.

On our final exercise in December 1964 we had to conduct a series of exhausting night operations testing the range of skills we had learned; and then, after three days of sleeplessness, when we were on the escape phase of the exercise, one of the chain of ‘agents’ through whose hands we were being passed on our way to safe territory, betrayed us. I was ambushed in a sunken lane leading to a bridge over the Stour near Wimborne Minster in Dorset. I was fully laden with a 50-lb pack and a submachine-gun. Nevertheless, I managed to clear a high wall on my left and get into the Stour to escape. But it was to no avail – I was captured the following morning lying up in a wood. After the exercise was over they took me back to the point where I was ambushed and showed me the wall I had jumped over. It was vertical, without any hand holds and about six feet high. Even unencumbered with a heavy pack and a weapon it was completely impossible for me to scale it, let alone jump over it. This showed me the extraordinary things the body is capable of when fear, adrenaline and the instinct for flight take over.

Even after we were fully trained, a period of interrogation became a feature of many of our exercises. Often these involved an escape-and-evasion exercise across Dartmoor, during which, as usual, we got no sleep and at the end of which we were taken prisoner and transferred to Bovisand Fort, an old Napoleonic fortification situated on the
bluffs above Plymouth, for interrogation. Apart from special-forces operatives, RAF V-bomber pilots were also subjected to these sessions. One interrogator, who I got to know quite well, told me after one exercise that one of the RAF pilots had broken down and unloaded on a startled interrogator a full list of his targets in Russia. He was swiftly removed from the course and shortly afterwards from the V-bomber force. This same interrogator, who I always seemed to get, also told me that, if the situation had been real and he had enough time, he knew exactly how he could break me – make me sit for days and days in solitary confinement with absolutely nothing to do. He told me I was the kind of person who always had to be active and pushing against something, and that idleness, rather than pain, was my Achilles heel. It is not an inaccurate judgement.

The Poole elements of our training were now over. But there were two more stages to go before I could qualify as a fully trained SBS officer.

On 3 January 1965, I joined RAF Abingdon for my parachute course. Our first task was to learn how to land properly, using the parachute roll, which we practised interminably on the floor of an aircraft hangar. Then they taught us how to exit properly from the aircraft door, projecting yourself through it with sufficient force to break through the 120-mph slipstream. We did our live parachuting onto Weston-on-the-Green, a little World War Two grass airstrip, complete with hangars and all the usual airfield paraphernalia, alongside which runs the busy, twin-carriageway A34 road.