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Operation MIKADO

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by JBsidetheseaside (U13725236) on Friday, 2nd January 2009

  ...The Sea King helicopter that got 'lost' in Tierra Del Fuego: This mystery may (or may not) have finally been resolved by the memoirs of its pilot, Capt. Richard Hutchings RM.
  
  The background to the controversy was the delivery of the first sets of night vision goggles to the Royal Navy for use in the Falklands conflict. Both the Army and Air Force thought they should have had them. So when MIKADO was approved, it led to a Fleet Air Arm aircraft and crew with NVG taking an SAS force into hostile territory which had never happened before. (SBS worked with the Navy/Marines, SAS always flew with the RAF or Army Air Corps.)
  
  According to Hutchings, they were given no proper maps and so flew close to a flaring Argentine gas rig, leading to a diversion. Then fog made further progress to the planned LZ impossible, and so he landed the SAS some seven miles further away from the Rio Grande airbase.
  
  The un-named SAS CO then expressed no confidence in Hutchings and his crew's navigation and refused to proceed. He demanded to be taken to Chile where he proposed to follow his still classified extraction routine. (His navigational doubts seemed not to apply to that leg of the mission.)
  
  Years later, the SAS gave a breifing to Nigel West (Tory MP Rupert Allison) in which they blamed the Naval crew, stating falsely that they had been spotted on radar and illuminated by a flare, which West took to mean what it sounds like and not the gas rig which they missed by several miles.
  
  In classic inter-service tit-for-tat fashion, Hutchings implies but does not directly accuse the SAS of bottling out in order to make the eventual Entebbe-style C-130 assault on Rio Grande impossible. (This mission was dubbed 'Operation Certain Death' in SAS circles, and is widely viewed as bad judgement by Gen. De La Billiere who was rather too close to Thatcher after the Iranian Embassy Siege of 1980.)
  
  Having duly bitched about others, Hutchings must himself be doubted about some of his more eye-raising claims, especially his suggstion that the Chilean Air Force were flying RAF C-130s with 'Fueza Area de Chile" (sic) mis-splet on the side, particularly when he can't get the right name of Defence Secretary "John Knott" (sic.) Hutchings also claims to have served on HMS Illustrious before the Falklands war, which was clever when since she was half-built in the Swan Hunters yard at the time.
  
  The mystery of what happened to the SAS troops after they left the helicopter, and the question of whether they went on to establish an OP with their sat-phones, remains. Hutchings was sent back to Chile shortly after the war to recover his buried survival kit, only to discover it had been taken almost immediately he had left it.
  
  The Chileans meanwhile, seemed to be operating very hand-in-glove with the British, and the possibility of the SAS working in liason with them remains as an alternative to Hutching's retaliatory claims about their uncharacteristic timidity.
  
  
  ('Special Forces Pilot' by Richard Hutchings, ISBN 184415804.)
  

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• Message 2

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by stalteriisok (U3212540) on Saturday, 3rd January 2009

  my take on this is the original one - that sas troops were landed to report when super etendardes were taking off - and give advance warning to the task force - no heroics - just standard ops for the sas
  
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