Show Notes
Two SAS operations, eight years apart, produced radically different legacies. The first made the regiment national heroes. The second sparked decades of controversy.
In 1980, the world watched as the SAS stormed the Iranian Embassy in London to free its hostages. The daring assault brought the secretive regiment into the public eye – but what did that exposure cost?
Eight years later, an SAS operation against suspected IRA bombers in Gibraltar ended with three people dead and questions that would haunt the regiment for decades.
In this episode of SAS: The Shadow War, The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley revisits both missions and explores how the same regiment came to be celebrated for one operation and scrutinised for the other.
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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.
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.