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periods, taking the battle to the Communists on their own ground. It was a novel idea at the time. Calvert was expected to create the new force almost overnight. He raised the Malayan Scouts, which he then renamed the Malayan Scouts (SAS). They were a very mixed bunch. There were some excellent veterans from SOE, SAS, Ferret Force, and Force 136. A squadron of 21 SAS reservists, on its way to the Korean War, was diverted to join the Scouts. Calvert also recruited 1,000 volunteers from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), a group that would re-emerge later as “C” Squadron, SAS. It still exists as a phantom squadron. Calvert also acquired some cowboys whose units were glad to be rid of them. A handful of National Service conscripts was added to the mix. At that time, the prolonged selection process for which the SAS would become a world leader did not exist. Calvert once told the author that the Scouts had similarities, in his mind, with the Black And Tans as an ad hoc formation that could be readily disbanded if it provoked a political row. No surprises there: most Special Forces units are ad hoc, temporary entities, dispersed when their work is done.
    The Scouts were withdrawn in 1951 to be reorganized as 22 SAS Regiment under a new commander and retrained at the Jungle Warfare School, Kota Tingi, Malaya. This was an interesting establishment that subequently trained Australian SAS soldiers to fight in Vietnam. Run by a veteran jungle fighter named John Cross, it replicated some very evil jungle booby traps used by the Vietminh. Colonel Cross could imitate most of the bird calls to be heard in the jungle. During the Second World War, serving with the Gurkha Rifles, he heard a call that belonged to a nocturnal bird. It was mid-morning. He set up an ambush and waited for the Japanese patrol to walk into it. Did it work? “We killed every last one of them,” he once told the author.
    The reformed SAS returned to the jungle, fighting an often clandestine campaign until around 1960. Further changes from 1955 resulted from the appointment of Lieutenant Colonel George Lea, an Arnhem veteran, as commanding officer. Lea sacked the most ineffective officers and recruited some new talent including Lieutenant Peter de la Billiere. As a Lieutenant General, he led British forces in the first Gulf War in 1990–91. By 1956 five SAS squadrons totaling 560 men were operating in the Malayan jungle. But as yet, it was still an ad hoc force of the sort envisioned by Calvert.
    There was always a darker side to the evolution of these forces. The same individuals who led by heroic example in the Second World War were thrust into counter-insurgency campaigns later perceived as “dirty wars” in which they matched evil with evil. Some of the Long Range Desert Group, having taken prisoners who were an embarrassment—since there was no provision for POWs in the Libyan desert—considered murdering their captives. They did not do so, releasing them to their fate in the wilderness instead. In the 1930s Wingate’s Special Night Squads, hunting Arab saboteurs in Palestine, were disbanded because of the treatment of captives and because the SNS, like the Black And Tans in Ireland in the twenties, provoked rebellion rather than suppressing it. During the Vietnam War, the “Green Beret” affair arose from the unauthorized killing of a double agent in 1969.
    The most dramatic moral breakdown, however, occurred not within the ranks of the SAS or SBS or their American counterparts in OSS, but within the U.S. Navy’s equivalent, the Office of Naval Intelligence, which lubricated the Allied advance across Sicily in 1943 by cutting deals with the Sicilian Mafia, first in New York and later in Sicily itself. This morally ambiguous strategy was followed, as noted above, by OSS arrangements in Italy with Italian Fascists in the organization of shadowy anti-Soviet “stay-behind” units known loosely as “Gladio,” The Sword. In Italy, Germany, and Belgium,