Flight 149: A Hostage Crisis, a Secret Special Forces Unit, and the Origins of the Gulf War by Stephen Davis

Author:Stephen Davis [Davis, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781541700055
Google: MY0lzgEACAAJ
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2021-09-07T23:45:25.380915+00:00

BACK IN THE UK, plans for a hostage rescue were finalized. The SAS commanders were not confident about the intelligence they were getting on the hostages, despite having pinpointed some of the locations where they were being held. There were just too many of them. Intelligence officers began watching CNN for any references or footage of the hostages, analyzing it frame by frame.

The plan called for a joint operation, with the Americans mounting a diversion and the SAS parachuting into the areas where the hostages were held using a HALO descent—high altitude, low opening. They would then force their way into the camps and free the hostages; helicopters would fly in for the extractions.

There was a plan B, too, with members of the SBS infiltrating into Kuwait and Iraq to map out potential escape routes if the hostages had to flee on foot. The prospect of hundreds of civilians moving on foot across the desert, pursued by vengeful Iraqis, was not a happy one. Hundreds are going to die, one SAS officer told his colleagues.

Thatcher had been urging President Bush to act tough ever since their first phone call after the Iraqi invasion. But concerns over the fate of the hostages weighed heavily on the allied war planners. Saddam’s decision to release the women and children was seen in some quarters as a step toward a settlement. Thatcher saw things differently. In an interview on the Sunday morning Breakfast with Frost show on September 1, she made it clear to David Frost that the hostage issue would not stand in the way of military action to free Kuwait. “If you allow the taking of hostages,” the prime minister said, “terrible as it is, to determine your own action against a dictator, he has won, and all he will ever do or anyone else with similar ambitions will do, is to take hostages, knowing that other people will never take the requisite action to stop such a dictator. So I am afraid we would have to take the necessary action we feel vital to stop a dictator, even though he still held hostages.”

Many of the hostages watched on television as CNN and Kuwait stations broadcast quotes from her interview. Her comments about the hostages made them feel “sick to the stomach,” one remembered. What followed made them even more fearful. And angry. Thatcher threatened Saddam and the Iraqi military with prosecution over war crimes:

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