Show Notes
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.
In the first episode of SAS: The Shadow War, The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley meets ‘George’, the former SAS ground commander who led the operation at Drumnakilly. He reveals how the mission unfolded – and the decisions made when it mattered most.
But decades on, the battle over what happened in Northern Ireland is far from over. As former soldiers face renewed legal scrutiny, the episode asks: where does the duty to protect lives end, and the demand for accountability begin?
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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.
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.