I first started in close protection as a bouncer in a nightclub in London. I had just left the army, where I’d served in the Parachute Regiment, and I really didn’t know where I was going or what I was going to do. I thought about truck driving – lots of ex-Paras obtained their HGV licence as part of the resettlement programme and drove trucks for the rest of their lives. Driving is good because it gives a sense of freedom that many ex-soldiers crave, plus if you are an international driver it takes you to the Continent for days, sometimes weeks at a time, which is another thing ex-soldiers tend to like and are used to.
A good friend of mine and fellow Para gained his HGV licence and ended up transporting goods for a charity – aid, medicines, etc. – in and out of Bosnia during the first couple of years of the conflict, which he thoroughly enjoyed. It would take him three or four days to get to his destination, followed by a couple of days turnaround and, strangely, a seemingly quicker journey back home. He would then rest in the UK for a couple of days before going back out to Bosnia. Although he didn’t go directly into the war zone, he loved the job, as he felt he was doing some good whilst getting a little bit of adventure at the same time. He would take his truck almost anywhere that the aid was needed, from a warehouse on the Italian–Croatian border, where it was then unloaded and distributed into the war zone by the Red Cross, to towns and villages recently bombed and desperate for aid.
I was lucky enough to join him on one trip. He called me and asked if I wanted to sit with him for a week or so while he took his truck to a place called Lipik in northern Croatia. He said it would be good to have some company, and I agreed. The bombardment of Lipik, along with the nearby village of Pakrac, was started by the Serbian forces at 5.30 a.m. on 19 August 1991. The first building to be destroyed was the orphanage, which was home to around eighty children between the ages of three and sixteen. For seven days, the children cowered in the cellars while the building above them, as well as most of the rest of the town, was shelled. In a lull in the fighting, the children were quickly evacuated to the coast.
My friend and I were one of the first convoys of private humanitarian aid into the town. The charity my colleague was working for had arranged for us to be met in Lipik by their local representative. We had a map and were able to find the town, although finding the warehouse that we were supposed to deliver to was a bit of a problem. However, an English truck in the middle of war-torn Lipik caused a great deal of interest, and we were soon found by the charity worker and directed to a shelled-out warehouse, where the aid would be fairly divided between the town’s inhabitants. Half the truck was filled with baby food donated by Cow & Gate, and the other half was clothing, toiletries, bedding, blankets and other much-needed sundries. Many people who survived the shelling remained in their burned-out homes, and the aid was a godsend to the majority of people who had found themselves with nothing.
As a Para, I had been to some very interesting places and had met some wonderful people, but nothing had quite prepared me for the destruction a continuous mortar bombardment can bring to a town and its inhabitants. Every single building, without exception, was in ruins, and it amazed me how people could have survived it.
After we had unloaded the supplies, we found a small bar in the centre of Lipik that had been hastily set up once the Serbs had moved on to destroy another village. It was an improvised establishment, using the living room and garden of a partly bombed house next to the original bar, which had been completely destroyed. Although makeshift, it was nevertheless somewhere for the locals to meet and relax.
As foreigners, we attracted a lot of attention, and the evening was spent listening to the countless stories of atrocities and carnage perpetrated by the Serbian Army. We were also introduced to Colonel Mark Cook. He was the commander of the British contingent of the United Nations Protection Force. He vowed to the mayor of Lipik that he would help rebuild the orphanage. Mark went on to raise over £1 million and a few years later rebuilt the orphanage as he’d promised. He asked us if we could bring in our next container some children’s clothing for the orphans who were now living safely on the coast. The children got their clothing a few weeks later, and Mark Cook went on to form the charity Hopes and Homes for Children, which has helped thousands of children worldwide.
Having experienced the conflict, albeit in a very small way, I felt I had been part of it and wanted to do something more to help. But, sadly, I knew that unless I could quickly find a job with a charity based out there, I wouldn’t be coming back. It was just a one-trip deal for me.
Although the experience was wonderful in many ways, I knew I couldn’t drive trucks for a living. I needed to be more active. Sitting down all day, every day would have sent me crazy. It was also very unhealthy. I have kept fit for most of my life and have trained every day more or less without fail, but truck driving, whether in the UK or abroad, affords you little chance of keeping in shape.
Spending over a week in the same cab as someone gives you the opportunity to talk about anything and everything. My friend and I spoke mostly about trivial things but with the occasional gem thrown in. At one point, he mentioned that he knew another ex-Para who had gone into personal protection. I didn’t know much about the industry, except that it was a business populated mainly by ex-SAS and RMPs (Royal Military Police). However, the idea was a good one, and once I got home I made some enquiries about training.
At that time, there was no standardised training and no SIA licence. You had to shop around, make lots of enquiries and find the best privately run course you could find. There were a few training companies run by ex-SAS, but not many, and they were quite hard to find. Of course, the Internet was up and running, but many companies still did not have websites, so my research was mainly via word of mouth and advertising.
I looked at a few companies but eventually chose to train with the WFB. Back then, the organisation was based just outside Manchester, near to where I lived, so it was a simple task to visit them and get all the relevant details. The WFB had not been going long but were accredited as a training provider by Manchester College of Arts and Technology, an accreditation most other training companies didn’t have.
A month or so later, I paid a deposit, and a month after that I was on my way to Wales for my first-ever close protection training course. Luckily, my resettlement grant covered most of the training fees, so I really had nothing much to lose, apart from a hundred or so pounds of my own money and my time, and I had loads of that.
We met in a car park in the village of Llandrindod Wells, mid Wales, which I thought was a bit bizarre. According to the organisers, the reason for this was that the training camp was almost impossible to find, and it was far easier for everyone to meet at a specific location at a specific time, rather than us all arriving in dribs and drabs or getting lost. There were supposed to be ten of us on the course altogether, although only eight arrived at the car park. Maybe two pulled out, or perhaps they couldn’t even find their way to the town centre! We nervously waited in more or less silence for thirty minutes after the arranged time, then the eight of us made our way in convoy behind the instructors to the training camp – a huge farmhouse down a tiny, muddy lane in the middle of nowhere.
On arrival, we were given 30 minutes to find a bed, unpack and pour ourselves a cuppa. Then we all met downstairs in the living area, where we were introduced to our instructors and talked through the days ahead.
In the army, we did some crazy things and went to some crazy places. The training was tough, and I thought I was fairly hard, but, fuck me, the training these guys put us through over the following ten days was definitely some of the best I have ever had. Initially, I think we all questioned what was going on, as sharing a room and training in a farmhouse was not what any of us had really expected, but realism was the name of the game, and everything we did during those ten days was based upon us being out in the field – literally – and on real operations.
One of the instructors was a Russian ex-Special Forces officer, the other was an instructor with the Lebanese forces, and our fitness and martial arts instructor was an ex-Scottish boxing champion. I have never seen a pair of fists move so quickly.
Every day started at 6 a.m. with a three-mile run and an hour of unarmed combat. We then showered and had breakfast, and the rest of the day was meticulously planned: 9 a.m. to 10.30 a.m. – theory of convoy driving; 10.30 a.m. to 11.30 a.m. – planning a convoy; 11.30 a.m. to 1 p.m. – first convoy practice; 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. – lunch; 2 p.m. to 3.30 p.m. – building search theory; and so on throughout the course. After the first six days, we used what we had learned and put it into practice with a ‘real’ operation. The WFB team had arranged for someone to fly into Cardiff International Airport, and we were to look after him as if he was a real client for two days and two nights. Those two days were probably even more difficult than the training we had all just gone through, as everything was thrown at us. But I believe we learned more during those two days than we had done during the previous six.
Going to meet the principal (the person who we would be looking after) was easy, but coming back was one of the most fraught and difficult situations I have ever found myself in. We were all nervous but didn’t expect what followed. First, the principal was with his girlfriend, which was not part of the plan, so we had to adapt to looking after two clients instead of just one. And then he fell ill, so we had to divert to the hospital. On the way, we had a call from the operations room to tell us that the route to the hospital had become compromised, so we had to frantically work out a secondary route. Then his girlfriend wanted to buy a new pair of tights, so we had to stop and find her some. Finally, after the principal miraculously recovered a few hundred yards from the hospital entrance, our communications were compromised, and we were told we could no longer use our radios.
Of course, all of this had been planned by the instructors, but what hadn’t been planned was that once our communications were out of action we lost the rear vehicle and had to embarrassingly drive back to the base individually and not as a convoy. Luckily, the instructors were fairly patient with us, as it was our first client pickup, and we were bound to make some mistakes. However, as the course continued, we were allowed less and less leeway, and we were bollocked more and more if we made fuck-ups. We had been told at the beginning of the course that if we made the same fuck-up twice, we would be on our way home, which only increased our stress levels.
While the client was in our care, none of us slept, which made battling our way through the plethora of planned emergency situations and events even more demanding. The principal went for a walk and got shot; he and his girlfriend had a major bust-up and darted off in different directions; he became ill; a fire started in the house; he wanted to go out for an unplanned evening drink at a minute’s notice; and in the middle of the night we had to arrange residential patrols while infiltrators tried to breach the building and attack the principal. Packages were delivered, improvised explosive devices were found on the premises and a team member crashed one of the vehicles.
Those two days looking after the principal were definitely among the longest and hardest two days of my entire life – not because of the lack of sleep or intense physical and mental stress we were under, but mainly because of the knowledge that if we got it wrong out in the field as a protection officer, we would not have a second chance and could be coming home in a body bag. It was a great way to learn.
The last two days of the course consisted of a complete debrief with long conversations and discussions about the mistakes we’d made, specific operations, protocol and operational procedures. But we still started each morning with a run and unarmed combat training.
It was a shame that the WFB was later sold and disbanded, as the systems they used and the standards of training were certainly pioneering and original within the close protection industry at that time. Now I believe it is all namby-pamby theory. I have seen overweight, unfit muppets pass close protection courses. Back in my day, the industry was for the elite.
After the course, we all went our separate ways, although many long-term friendships were made. Two of the students went on to work for the United Nations, and many years later I actually saw one of them on television standing behind Slobodan Milo
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in The Hague, where the former president of Serbia was on trial for crimes against humanity. Apparently, after a time spent taking judges to Kosovo to investigate war crimes and looking after them while they were there, he was tasked to keep an eye on Milo
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during his court appearances – a boring but steady job! Another of the students went to Australia, where I heard he was arrested for supplying drugs. At the time of writing, he is still in prison! I didn’t hear from a few of the students again, but a couple of the others are still working in the protection industry and currently serving in Iraq.
After the course, I went back to working the doors in London and found myself a cushy little number at a club with nice clientele. For six months, it was great, but it became a bit boring, and after having been in the army and doing the close protection course I knew that I liked excitement and not comfy stability. I also thought that it would be a waste of time and money if I didn’t do anything with my protection training. One night as I stood pondering these things, Errol Brown, the lead singer of the band Hot Chocolate, came into the club. Surprisingly, he stood making idle conversation with me for a few minutes, although I was not sure why, as he had a small entourage with him. It was then that I made a decision: I would use my new-found skills to look after celebrities.