David Stirling

We then followed in.

That was David, a former SAS soldier.

He's never spoken publicly before about his role in those dramatic few minutes when he and his SAS colleagues stormed the Iranian embassy in central London live on TV one evening in May, 1980.

I'm Sam Kiley, world affairs editor at The Independent, and you are listening to SAS: The Shadow War, the story of the conflict in Northern Ireland revealed for the first time by Britain's secret soldiers in their own words.

The order to storm the embassy was six days in coming, but its effects have been felt for years, up to today.

It was a very good day and a very bad day all at the same time.

David was an SAS soldier in his early 20s when he got the call to deploy in London in the counter-terror team.

[laughs] The way that all happened, uh, we, we'd only been on the team f- I was, I think it was my third time on the team, and I was a team sniper.

At Homs, a coastal town in Western Libya, he gathered information on a new British Special Forces formation known as the Special Air Service, or SAS, a small commando unit trained for sabotage missions in the desert.

In February 1943, Shurch met Colonel David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, who was then a prisoner in Rome.

Still using his false name, Shurch tried to learn who would replace Stirling as commander.

Later that spring, he interrogated captured naval officers seeking details about British ships and operations in the Mediterranean.

Now he's won in, in France, so he's making hay in the early part of the qualifying, uh, sort of period.

And if you imagine those two together, and Matt made the point, um, the other week that, that he would love to be playing with his brother in foursomes in, in, um, Adare Manor, uh, next year.

And given the way that they won, uh, together, um, that would be...

That would, that would bring something to the Ryder Cup, wouldn't it? You know, to have a pair of brothers-

Hmm.

I wonder

Oh, yeah, Ross Fisher definitely played with Harrington.

Yeah.

And I said, okay, and connected this extraordinary coincidence with, with the visit to Lesseps in France and.

so we agreed that it was a very interesting project i asked my friend a little bit more about brian and things dropped into place which i knew about already and i said okay on two conditions i will write it one is the family are completely happy and show me all private papers and secondly the sas hierarchy are also happy because they can be a little bit sensitive about who writes what about them, and particularly their history, and particularly of somebody who is so prominent in their history, but not necessarily as well known as the likes of Paddy Mayne and David Stirling.

Luckily both agreed, so I started.

Oh, fantastic.

And Brian, he's obviously, as I read through this, he was a tremendous impact on the progress of the war and of the SAS itself, but nobody else has written extensively about him in the past.

Why do you think that is? Why did it take until 2025, 2026 for a biography of his to be written by you?

Well, I find it astonishing considering the volume of literature written about the SAS in general and in particular, other more well-known characters like David Stirling and Paddy Mayne, even Jock Lewis and others of the originals, why nobody had honed in on Brian.

And I think it was partly in his nature.

He quickly grabbed Brian, liked him, he knew him from school, and said, I want you to be my signals officer.

David Stirling was sort of trying to set up the SAS with Laycock's blessing.

tried to recruit brian early on but brian had gone on one of the first commando raids bardia raid and he got these rather unpleasant desert sores and i think most people think oh you know rather like private hook in zulu are you you've got a boil or a sore you must be a malingerer when in fact they weren't they were very very nasty things quite often infected by all the flies in the desert, aggravated by the sand, and could quickly lead to diphtheria.

And Brian got very ill, was invalided home, missed the Battle of Crete, probably luckily for him.

A few.

But mostly, there were people who'd either been in a territorial army or had done interesting things.

I mean, David Stirling couldn't make up his mind whether he wanted to be an artist or he had all sorts of things.

He served briefly in the Scots Guard, but they all came together in a unit called the 5th Scots Guard Ski Battalion, which was formed in 19… 39 or 40.

What it does not yet know is that its job is about to expand.

That same summer a young Scots Guards Lieutenant named David Stirling is recovering from a parachuting accident and pitching Middle East headquarters on an idea of his own.

A small unit of parachute-trained raiders dropped directly onto Axis airfields to destroy aircraft on the ground rather than shoot them down in the air.

The unit is authorised.