Show Notes
On St Patrick’s Day 1978, a covert surveillance mission in rural Londonderry went catastrophically wrong.
In episode five of SAS: The Shadow War, The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley meets ‘Blue’, a former 14 Intelligence Company operative speaking publicly about the night he and a fellow soldier were ambushed while watching a farm linked to wanted IRA man Francis Hughes.
Shot three times, with one bullet tearing through his stomach, Blue was left bleeding heavily in the dark, his radio failing and help far away. What followed was a desperate fight to stay alive, improvise first aid and get a message out. It is a story of instinct, split-second decisions and survival, and of the brutal consequences when a covert operation collapses in seconds.
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More from SAS: The Shadow War
By the mid-1980s, intelligence had become one of the British state’s most important weapons in Northern Ireland, with covert surveillance teams working the streets of Belfast knowing discovery could prove fatal.
Two SAS operations, eight years apart, produced radically different legacies. The first made the regiment national heroes. The second sparked decades of controversy.
For days at a time, SAS operatives lay hidden in freezing hedgerows and fields, watching and waiting. Discovery could mean capture – or death.
Four miles south of Omagh, at the height of the Troubles, the SAS launched an ambush against an IRA unit suspected of carrying out a series of deadly attacks on soldiers.
For decades, the SAS has operated beyond public view, its missions shaped by secrecy and its reputation burnished by the rare moments when that secrecy has fallen away.