John Thomas “Mac” McAleese was a Scot from Stirling who joined the Royal Engineers in 1969, passed the All Arms Commando Course in 1973 and transferred into 22 SAS two years later. In the spring of 1980 he was a lance corporal in Pagoda Troop, B Squadron — the counter-terrorist team the regiment kept on permanent standby, waiting for a day that had never yet come.
It came on 30 April 1980, when six gunmen seized the Iranian Embassy at Princes Gate in London and took twenty-six hostages. For five days the police talked. On the sixth the gunmen shot a hostage and pushed his body out of the front door, and the job passed to the Army.
At 19:23 on 5 May the assault went in. McAleese led Blue Team onto the first-floor balcony, laid the frame charge against the window and blew it — and because the BBC and ITV cameras were pointed at that exact window, the explosion, the black figures and the smoke went out live to the nation in the middle of a bank-holiday snooker final. Seventeen minutes later it was over: five of the six gunmen dead, one taken alive, every remaining hostage but one brought out. The SAS had existed since 1941; that evening the public met it for the first time.
He did not stop there. He fought in the Falklands in 1982, served through the Troubles, and was awarded the Military Medal for gallantry at the Loughgall ambush in County Armagh in May 1987; he was at Drumnakilly the following year. He guarded three British prime ministers and left the Army in 1992 as a staff sergeant. Afterwards came a pub in Hereford, security work in Iraq and Afghanistan, television — and, in the end, the sale of his medals to the Lord Ashcroft Collection.
On 20 August 2009 his elder son, Serjeant Paul McAleese of 2nd Battalion The Rifles, was killed by a roadside bomb in Helmand while going to the aid of a wounded comrade. John McAleese died two years later, on 26 August 2011, in Greece — a heart attack, at sixty-two. Father and son are buried in the same country they both served.
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