Tucked away in a Hereford hamlet on England's border with Wales is the supersecret headquarters of the 22nd regiment of the Special Air Service (S.A.S.)—demonstrably the world's toughest antiterrorist commando unit.
The S.A.S.'s training grounds were the site of a party last week as the 900-man regiment celebrated the successful assault on the Iranian embassy in London.
Guests of honor were the members of the task force, who in S.A.S. parlance had "beaten the clock" while carrying out the mission. Translation: the men had missed having their names inscribed on the clock-tower memorial at headquarters, the S.A.S.'s tribute to its fallen heroes. Alive or dead, commandos of this elite unit of the British army remain unknown to the world at large. Even when the heroes of the Princes Gate rescue raid are decorated for their feat, the ceremony will be kept secret.
Shadowy, mysterious, masked when they attack to hide any possibility of identification, trained both to rescue and to kill, S.A.S. members have thrived on the unit's mystique ever since it was founded in the Libyan desert in 1942. The goal then was to penetrate and operate behind enemy lines in North Africa. Moving swiftly and with seemingly phantom-like invisibility, the S.A.S. destroyed hundreds of Nazi planes on their own airstrips, freed countless Allied prisoners and blew up scores of Axis ammunition dumps. The commandos were also sent on missions to assassinate leading Axis generals. One of the unit's few known failures involved an attempt to kidnap Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the top German commander in Africa. The Germans soon came to fear the S.A.S. men sporting berets decorated with a winged dagger and the motto WHO DARES WINS.
Disbanded after World War II, the S.A.S. was revived in 1952 to fight Communist insurgents in Malaya. In Oman, the unit helped the Sultan repulse Saudi-backed rebels and Marxist insurgents. Gradually, the S.A.S. has focused on combatting terrorism. In Northern Ireland, where S.A.S. men have been posted since 1976, the unit is credited with halving the rate at which British servicemen were murdered by I.R.A. gunmen. One reason for the S.A.S.'s success has been its fearsome psychological impact on terrorists in South Armagh. So great is the S.A.S. reputation that European governments have often called upon its antiterrorist squads for help. During the 1977 hijacking of a Lufthansa 707 to Mogadishu, for example, the S.A.S. sent two men to advise West German commandos in their successful storming of the aircraft.