March 2011, a team of eight men lands by helicopter south of Benghazi in the pre-dawn dark. Six are from 22 SAS. Two are MI6 officers. None are in British uniform. None carry British identification. They are there, according to the cover story assembled afterward, on a diplomatic mission, escorting a junior foreign office contact to meet rebel leaders opposed to Muhammad Gaddafi’s regime.
They are detained by farm guards before that meeting happens. The Guardians account published March 6th describes what followed. Libya’s rebel commanders have freed two MI6 officers and six SAS soldiers captured by farm guards on Thursday morning after the British government vouched for their identities. The Sunday Telegraph reported the team was escorting that junior diplomat to establish contact with opposition leaders, groundwork for formal diplomatic engagement.
The Daily Star Sunday cited a further detail. The team was carrying a4 million pound communication system described as hackerproof intended for the rebel council. On March 7th, foreign secretary William Hey stood at the commons dispatch box. He told MPs he took full responsibility for the mission. The timing and details, he said, had been decided by the professionals.
He confirmed the prime minister had been aware of the operation in advance. A spokesman for the rebel council told the Times the team’s covert insertion was needless theatrics. If this is an official delegation, why did they come with a helicopter? The HEG statement confirmed something without explaining it.
The foreign secretary, not the defense secretary, had personally authorized the mission. Eight men operating without British documentation civil war were the foreign secretary’s responsibility. The inserted by air into a foreign country in the middle of a unit that produced those eight men is known to its members as the increment formerly designated Equadron and had never been publicly acknowledged before Libya forced Hey’s hand.
The question raised by that statement is the same question the unit was built to answer. When SIS needs men with rifles for an operation that can’t be acknowledged, where do those men come from? And what legal instrument makes it possible? The relationship between British intelligence and British special forces runs deeper than the 1990s.
When the special operations executive was formally dissolved in January 1946, many of its officers moved directly to MI6. Keith Jeffrey’s official history of SIS, published in 2010 and commissioned by the Foreign Office to mark MI6’s centinery, describes the wartime relationship between the two agencies as strained.
They had competed often bitterly for control of covert operations overseas. After S SOE’s dissolution, its paramilitary knowledge was partially absorbed back into SIS. Academic Philip Davis has documented what he calls a rump SOE capacity, the ability to run special political actions persisting within SIS into the post-war period.
Through the Cold War, the formal SISSAS operational relationship developed quietly. The SAS 1983 to 2014, one of the few sources to state this directly, notes that C and D squadrons conducted support operations for SIS, placing the connection in the Cold War decades and naming the squadrons involved. D Squadron’s mobility troop specializing in vehicle operations and long range insertion was the element best suited to that work.
The Northern Ireland period added a different strand. When the military reaction force was compromised in 1972, British intelligence built a more professional architecture for covert ground operations. By late 1972 and early 1973, 14 intelligence company known as the debt was operational. Trained by SAS, SPS and the intelligence corps, the debt ran plain surveillance against paramilitary targets.
Mark Urban’s Big Boys Rules, the primary secondary source on this period, documents the intelligence landscape of the Troubles. By the late 1970s, SIS had lost most of its agent network in Ireland, and the command relationships between military intelligence and the wider intelligence community were under strain.
Inside 22 SAS, by the 1980s, two distinct internal wings are relevant. The counterrevolutionary warfare wing formed after the 1972 Munich massacre focused on hostage rescue and anti-terrorism. The revolutionary warfare wing was something different. the SISf facing element based at Creden Hill in Heraford providing personnel for operations that cross the line between military and intelligence work.
Richard Tomlinson’s account of SIS written from his experience as an intelligence officer confirms the connection. The army provides a detachment from the SAS regiment called revolutionary warfare wing in Cedenhill and the navy provides a small detachment from their special boat service in pool. Both have similar roles as far as MI6 is concerned and are known collectively within the service as the increment.
The increment began as an informal arrangement, a loosely organized group of SAS personnel supporting MI6 operations when the need arose. Formalization came gradually. By approximately 2007, according to a BBC report published in January 2012, it had taken on a more structured form described as E squadron, existing alongside A, B, D, and G squadrons of 22 SAS.
The designation appears on no official order of battle. The first written documentary proof of its formal existence surfaced in 2021 when Army personnel accidentally circulated a spreadsheet of over 1,200 soldiers names that contained buried in the data a single line 22 SAS squadron. That wasn’t a disclosure.
It was a clerical mistake. But it was the first written proof in any official document that the fifth squadron of 22S had a formal designation. One of the more persistent errors in coverage of this unit is the claim that it draws primarily on civilians on MI6 paramilitary officers rather than serving military personnel.
Tomlinson’s account is precise on this point. To qualify for the increment, SAS and SBS personnel must have served for at least 5 years and have reached the rank of sergeant. They are security vetted by MI6 and given a short induction course into the function and objectives of the service. Tomlinson is a defector whose account is contested by HMG on other grounds.
on the specific composition point. His description is consistent with every other sourced account. The drawing pool spans all three UK tier 1 services. 22 SAS provides personnel from the Revolutionary Warfare Wing at Cedenhill. The Special Boat Service provides an equivalent detachment from Pool. The special reconnaissance regiment formed in 2005 as the successor to 14 intelligence company and designed for plain surveillance operations worldwide is also confirmed as part of the pool.
Lee Neville’s special forces in the war on terror published by Osprey describes E squadron as the UK equivalent of the CIA’s special activities division ground branch. a description that maps the composition and function simultaneously. MI6 conducts its own vetting assessment before personnel join.
The unit then operates under two command authorities simultaneously. The director special forces and the chief of SIS. Which authority governs a specific operation isn’t documented anywhere in the open record. Gray Dynamics, drawing on open-source intelligence analysis, confirms that ES squadron accepts tasks directly from UK intelligence agencies such as MI6 and consequently functions semiautonomously from the rest of the UK special forces.
That ambiguity is the point. Bosnia, July 10th, 1997. A NATO sanctioned operation launched by the SAS targeted suspected Serbian war criminals. A Bosnian Serb wanted for war crimes charges was killed. A second man was arrested by a 10-man team. The operation is confirmed across multiple sources, including Richard Aldrich’s academic treatment of SAS operations in the Balkans.
Whether this was a regular SAS tasking or increment specific work isn’t established in the open record. What is documented is that E squadron’s history identifies arresting war criminals in the Balkans as a confirmed operational domain of the unit and that enforcing ICTY warrants with intelligence preparation and a deniability requirement maps onto an SIS directed mandate rather than a military one.
A regular SAS operation answers to the DSF chain. An operation to enforce international legal warrants in a third country. Answers to a different authority. Sierra Leone. September 10th, 2000. Operation Barass rescued 11 Royal Irish Regiment soldiers from the Westside boys in a joint SASSBS assault. Whether increment personnel operated in an advisory or supporting capacity in the months before Barass isn’t confirmed in the available record.
British special forces were present in Sierra Leone for an extended period before the rescue and reporting from the time describes SF elements directing anti-RUF operations. Increment adjacency is consistent with the unit’s documented pattern. It can’t be stated as established fact. Iraq 2003. The comprehensive report of the special adviser to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD, the Jula report, states that intelligence services of three nations supported the Iraq survey group and specifically credits the United Kingdom, describing
SIS’s contribution as a long and demanding task. A UK officer served as deputy commander of the ISG. Whether increment personnel conducted site exploitation of former regime locations isn’t independently confirmed in the available record. SIS was present on the record in Baghdad in 2003 conducting operations that required physical access to sensitive sites.
Libya 2011. the mission already described. Syria from late 2011 onward. UK covert operations appear to have begun within months of the Syrian civil wars start reportedly guided by the National Security Council. Declassified UK has reported a budget of 9.6 million pounds for the program. Among the confirmed elements of UK involvement were training and support operations directed at factions of the Free Syrian Army, armed opposition groups fighting the Assad regime.
Which specific FSA factions receive training, and whether UK’s special forces were directly embedded rather than operating in a purely advisory role remains officially unconfirmed. What the record does establish is that section 7 authorizations for SIS directed operations in Syria existed and were in use regardless of what Parliament voted on in August 2013.
That vote is worth noting. Parliament rejected UK military action in Syria, the first time a British government lost a war powers vote. The legal constraint applied specifically to military action through the DSF chain. Section 7 authorizations for SISD directed covert operations require no parliamentary vote before or after.
The Commons can block an intervention. It has no mechanism to block an intelligence operation running under the same foreign secretary’s signature. Section seven of the intelligence services act 1994 chapter 13 royal ascent granted on 26th May 1994. The first operative subsection reads, “If, apart from this section, a person would be liable in the United Kingdom for any act done outside the British Islands, he shall not be so liable if the act is one which is authorized to be done by virtue of an authorization given by the Secretary of State under this
section. Subsection two defines scope. In subsection one above, liable in the United Kingdom means liable under the criminal or civil law of any part of the United Kingdom. The statute does not enumerate what acts are covered. It does not carve out exceptions for specific categories of harm. It says any act.
Legal commentary on the provision, including a 2006 Slate analysis applying it directly to SIS operations, confirms that the section extends to all criminal liability under British law, which by implication includes lethal force. The Intelligence Services Commissioner’s 2004 annual report states the section’s purpose plainly to ensure that certain of SIS’s activities overseas which might otherwise expose its officers or agents to liability in the United Kingdom are expressly authorized by the Secretary of State. The authorization is timelmited.
6 months if signed by the Secretary of State, five working days if signed by a senior official under express ministerial authority for urgent cases. That delegation clause is operationally significant. In a fast-moving situation, a senior official can sign on a 48-hour window with the minister’s advanced permission.
The foreign secretary signs, not the defense secretary, not the prime minister. The foreign secretary, whose ministerial accountability runs through SIS, not through the ministry of defense. The commissioner, a senior judge appointed by the prime minister, reviews a sample of section 7 authorizations annually.
The 2011 annual report published July 2012 and covering the period of the Libya operation confirms this oversight continued. Operational detail goes into a confidential annex agreed between the commissioner and Downing Street before publication, never publicly released. The Intelligence and Security Committee scrutinizes SIS expenditure and policy, but ISC reports also go to the Prime Minister first with classified material excluded by agreement before Parliament sees them.
During the 1994 parliamentary debates on the intelligence services bill, the statutory breadth became explicit. In the Commons on April 27th, 1994, an opposition MP stated that under the authorization provisions, any task that one can think of, murder in an extreme situation, clubbing, imprisonment, torture, or blackmail, could be put into action under a warrant.
The minister, Douglas Hog, pointed to section 7’s proportionality requirement as the constraint. The Secretary of State must be satisfied that the nature and likely consequences of any acts authorized are reasonable, having regard to the purposes for which they are carried out. The debate wasn’t long. The bill passed. The Defense Council instructions that govern UKSF operations under the DSF chain are military governance instruments, formal documents defining rules of engagement, reporting requirements, and accountability for
SAS, SBS, and SRR personnel when acting in their military capacity. When those same personnel join E squadron and operate under a section 7 authorization, those instruments don’t apply. The jurisdiction switches, the accountability switches. The minister answerable to parliament switches from the defense secretary to the foreign secretary whose accountability is mediated through a committee whose findings are partially redacted before any parliamentarian outside that committee reads them.
There is no joint document governing increment operations. There is no single minister simultaneously accountable for both the DSF and SIS dimensions of what E squadron does. Two statutes deliberately govern two separate chains of authority, leaving the space between them ungoverned by either. In November 2022, Defense Secretary Ben Wallace refused a request from the Commons Defense Committee to visit Heraford.
The 2023 AGG report on accountability and oversight of UK special forces concluded that parliamentary oversight of UKSF is thwarted for operations running through the SIS chain rather than the DSF chain. The accountability gap is wider still by design. Every man who has served in the increment has signed a secrecy undertaking.
No increment member has been the subject of a published memoir cleared by the dnotice advisory committee. Deaths on special forces memorials without unit attribution exist across the relevant period. which were increment related can’t be established from the open record. The increment isn’t extraordinary. It’s logical.
Britain has conducted foreign policy through covert action for as long as it has had an intelligence service. from S SOE’s wartime operations through cold war paramilitary work through the Northern Ireland period into the post 1994 framework that gave the whole arrangement statutory cover. The unit answers a procurement question. When SIS needs trained soldiers for an operation that can’t be attributed to the Ministry of Defense, where does it get them? The revolutionary warfare wing provides the personnel.
Section 7 provides the legal immunity. The foreign secretary provides the signature. The intelligence services commissioner reviews a sample. Parliament sees a redacted summary. Hey’s full responsibility in March 2011 covered what happened in a Libyan field. Responsibility isn’t accountability. Accountability would require Parliament to know what section 7 authorizes, when it authorizes it, and in whose name.
The statute, the commissioner’s redacted reports, and the ISC’s classification agreements ensure that it doesn’t. The provision was debated briefly in 1994 and has never been substantively revisited. The unit it helped sustain operated across four decades, three continents, and multiple conflicts. Acknowledged publicly for the first time only when Libya made denial impossible.
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