Counter Terrorist Wing
In 1975 the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Edward Heath asked the Ministry of Defence to prepare for any possible terrorist attack similar to the 1972 Munich massacre at the Munich Olympic Games and ordered that the SAS Counter Revolutionary Warfare (CRW) wing be established. Once the wing had been established each squadron would in turn rotate through counter terrorist training. The training included live firing exercises, hostage rescue and siege breaking. It was reported that during CWR training each soldier would expend 100,000 pistol rounds and would return to the CWR role on average every 16 months. Their first deployment was during the Balcombe Street Siege, where the Metropolitan Police had trapped a PIRA unit. Hearing on the BBC that the SAS were being deployed the PIRA men surrendered. The first documented action by the CRW Wing was assisting the West German counter-terrorism group GSG 9 at Mogadishu.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Special Air Service
Famous quotes containing the words counter, terrorist and/or wing:
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality—counter-moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical.”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
“Ignorance is the curse of God,
Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)