Show Notes
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.
In SAS: The Shadow War, The Independent’s international affairs editor Sam Kiley traces the regiment’s covert campaign against the IRA in Northern Ireland, from the surveillance operations and ambushes of the Troubles to the hard questions that still endure today. Along the way, the Iranian Embassy siege and a deadly operation in Gibraltar reveal how the SAS became both a celebrated and a contested force.
Drawing on rare and previously unheard first-hand accounts from former operatives and those who witnessed the conflict up close, this eight-part documentary series explores a war fought largely out of sight – and the legal battle now being waged over how its actions should be judged. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from SAS: The Shadow War
On St Patrick’s Day 1978, a covert surveillance mission in rural Londonderry went catastrophically wrong.
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.