No terrorist could kill the hardest SAS man of them all... It took a broken heart



At the height of his high-octane, adrenaline-fuelled days in the SAS, John McAleese was said to know no fear and feel no pain.



Never was this more evident than on May 5, 1980, when his black-clad, masked figure was seen by millions of television viewers clambering across the elegant cream stucco-fronted balcony of the Iranian Embassy in Kensington, blowing out the windows with explosives before storming the building with three colleagues and freeing the terrorist-held hostages inside.



But nearly 30 years later, the SAS hero - who Margaret Thatcher once said made her ‘proud to be British’ - was a shadow of his former self when he walked behind his son’s coffin at Hereford Cathedral.



Grief: SAS legend John McAleese died of a broken heart at the age of 62 following the death of his soldier son Paul who was killed serving in Afghanistan Grey-haired, red-eyed, pain etched across his weathered face, Mac, as he was known to his family and friends, was reeling from the body blow dealt by the loss of his son, Paul McAleese, who had devotedly followed him into the Army, and paid with his life in 2009 when he was killed by a Taliban road-side bomb in Helmand, Afghanistan.

In the two years that followed, McAleese came undone.

Having hardened his heart to fight undercover in places such as Northern Ireland and the Falklands, the loss of Paul, says his family, devastated his life.

And when the 62-year-old died of a suspected heart attack in Thessalonika in Greece last weekend, he was a broken man — the triumphs of his early career overwhelmed by the tragedy of his later life.

‘I only ever saw my father cry once,’ says his 28-year-old daughter Hayley, speaking for the first time about the double tragedy.

‘And that was at my brother’s funeral.

'He was so strong. We never, ever saw him upset. Seeing him break down like that was heartbreaking. I thought he was invincible.’ RELATED ARTICLES Previous

1

Next Gurkhas to bear brunt of Forces cutbacks as Government makes... SAS troops dressed in Arab clothes join hunt for Gaddafi as... Share this article Share The day before he died, Hayley spoke to her father by phone. Family and friends had just commemorated the second anniversary of her brother’s death on August 20, 2009.

McAleese, living with his second wife, Jo, and working as a security consultant in Greece, hadn’t been able to get there.

‘Dad was upset that he couldn’t come,’ she says. ‘I knew he was hurting, but he was a very private man. I said I was worried about him because he was bottling it all up.

After Paul died, he changed so much. He aged overnight. He looked older and somehow smaller.

In the end, it was a friend in Greece who called Hayley to tell her that her father had suffered a heart attack. ‘At first I thought he meant he was in hospital, but then he said: “There’s no easy way to tell you this.” And then I knew.’

Hayley was born two years after the Iranian Embassy siege, and the story of her father’s heroism came to her mainly via her brother Paul, three years her senior.

‘I’d hear Paul and his friends talking about things Dad had done and I’d ask my Mum: “Did Dad really do that?” And she’d say: “Yes.”

'I felt so proud of him, even though he didn’t talk about it much himself.’

Flashpoint: John McAleese leads the SAS team as they storm the Iranian Embassy in 1980

At the time of the siege, John’s first wife Kim was at the family home in Hereford, watching Coronation Street, feeding seven-month-old Paul. The programme was interrupted to show live the climax to the hostage drama.



‘Mum used to joke that she knew straight away that it was Dad, even in the balaclava, because of his bow legs,’ says Hayley. ‘It was years later when I saw the video. When I told Dad, he just shrugged his shoulders and said: “Oh, cringe!” But I was so proud of him.’ #

Modesty was a character trait that McAleese never lost, not even in later years when he found fame on television as presenter of the BBC series SAS: Are You Tough Enough? in 2003, in which members of the public were put through SAS selection.



Yet those who were with him on that day in May know all too well that without his fearlessness and ability to think at lightning speed, the outcome might have been very different.



The five-storey embassy at 16 Princes Gate had been taken over on April 30 by six armed Iranian dissidents who had taken 26 hostages — mostly embassy staff but a few visitors, too — while demanding freedom for a small oil-rich area of West Iran.



With Margaret Thatcher adamant that she would not make deals with terrorists, a tense stand-off began, while troops of 22 Special Air Service Regiment set off for London from their base in Herefordshire.



McAleese, one of twin boys born in Laurieston, Stirlingshire, was among them.

After leaving school, he’d followed his father down the coal mines before joining the Royal Engineers at 16.



From there, he volunteered for commando training and then the SAS, driven by a sense of adventure and a determination to learn as much as he could about soldiering.



And so he found himself in London 15 years later, caught between a group of terrorists and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was determined to show the world — live on TV — how the British dealt with such people.



It was the killing of a hostage that finally prompted Home Secretary William Whitelaw to order the storming of the building.



‘The whole operation should have been shrouded in smoke bombs,’ says McAleese’s best friend and former SAS operative Rusty Firmin, who was also there. ‘But Thatcher wanted everyone to see it. Mac had no idea he was being watched by millions.’



In the minutes that followed, McAleese, dressed in black overalls and a balaclava and carrying a Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine gun, was seen live on TV with his colleagues abseiling down ropes on to the balcony, where he set charges to blow out the front window.



The explosion caused half the balcony to collapse but McAleese dodged falling masonry, fired CS canisters into the gap where the window had been and then jumped through in a hail of gunfire.



With news cameras poised outside, it was the first time that an SAS operation had ever been filmed.



The raid lasted only 17 minutes, and by the end, five of the gunmen were dead, one was arrested and the hostages saved.



Tragic: Paul McAleese, 29, was killed by a Taliban bomb in Afghanistan

McAleese, meanwhile, was already being talked about as The Man On The Balcony.



Long before the likes of SAS soldier-turned-writer Andy McNab had opened up the secretive world of the SAS for public consumption, McAleese had unwittingly become the SAS poster boy.



The six-day siege was officially declared over by Scotland Yard at 8.15pm on May 5, 1980, with five of the six terrorists — all Arab extremists — dead and the other in custody.

Willie (later Lord) Whitelaw, was quickly on the scene and had tears of relief and joy streaming down his face. ‘I always knew you would do a good job, but I didn’t know it would be this good,’ he told the SAS men.



On the night of the raid, the SAS men were enjoying a few beers in their barracks when Mrs Thatcher arrived to congratulate them.



At 10pm, a TV was pushed into the room so the group could watch the coverage of the day’s violent events. But some of the soldiers, including McAleese, found their view blocked by the PM.



Without thinking, he yelled: ‘F***ing sit down, Maggie, I can’t see.'



Aware that she was among some of the toughest men in the world, she simply did as she was bid.



The years that followed offered experiences which were no less colourful, although mostly still secret.



Rusty Firmin recalls how, two years after the embassy siege, the pair were sent to the Falklands where they trained for a mission from which neither expected to return — flying two C-130 Hercules aircraft into the heart of Argentina, landing at a military airbase and ‘taking out’ the enemy pilots who were bombing British forces.



‘It was a death mission,’ he says. ‘Even if we’d survived, it would have been a question of escape and evading capture and getting out of Argentina across the mountains.’



In the end, Margaret Thatcher crossed their paths once again when she stopped the mission going ahead.



Next on their list of trouble spots was Northern Ireland, where, Firmin recalls, they permed their long hair to fit in with the enemy.



At home, McAleese said nothing of such antics for fear of worrying his loved ones.



‘Work and family were always separate,’ says Hayley. ‘At home, he was just Dad.'



John McAleese's grandson Charley at his father Paul's funeral in 2009

He remained close to both Hayley and Paul even after he separated amicably from their mother and married his second wife Jo, the mother of his third and fourth children Jessica, 22, and 14-year-old Kieran.



McAleese finally left the SAS in 1991 after 26 years’ service, turning his attention to media work and security consultancy. Behind the scenes, 17-year-old Paul McAleese was preparing to step into his father’s Army boots.



‘Paul followed in Dad’s footsteps from the moment he was born,’ says Hayley. ‘They were closer than anything. We always knew he would go into the Army, and Dad was so proud of him when he did.



‘At first, it was Paul looking up to Dad, but then Dad was looking up to Paul as well.’



Indeed, it was in emulating the kind of courage he had so often seen in his father that the 29-year-old serjeant, who served with 2nd Battalion The Rifles, was killed in Afghanistan while trying to reach an 18-year-old soldier who had been injured.



He stepped on an improvised explosive device and was killed instantly.



Now, having lost her brother and her father, Hayley is trying to make sense of her grief by raising money for other soldiers.



In March next year, she will walk the length of the Great Wall of China for the armed forces charity Help For Heroes. She had signed up to do the charity walk in memory of Paul. ‘Now I’m walking for both of them,’ she says quietly.



Certainly McAleese’s death last week is a timely reminder of the heavy price that so many still pay for serving their country. Risking his own life should have been enough, but losing his son was simply too much to bear.

