In March of 2018, a British soldier named Sergeant Matt Tonro was killed during a joint operation with American Special Forces in the Middle East. The Ministry of Defense released a statement calling him a member of the Third Battalion of the Parachute Regiment. Prime Minister Terresa May repeated that same designation in the House of Commons. There was just one problem.

The third battalion of the Parachute Regiment had never deployed to Syria. Matt Tonroe was not a paratrooper. He was a member of the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, SAS, operating out of their base at Creden Hill near Heraford. But the British government could not say that.

For the past four decades, when SAS soldiers die on classified operations, they are officially recorded under whatever regiment they served in before joining special forces. Their real unit is erased. Their real mission is denied. And in Tonro’s case, even the country where he died was hidden behind the vague label, other locations.

This is the story of how the world’s most elite soldiers became invisible in death. To understand how we got here, you have to go back to 1941. A young Scottish guards officer named David Sterling was recovering from a parachute injury in a Cairo hospital. Instead of resting, he spent his time writing a proposal that would change military history. His idea was simple.

Take a small team of highly trained soldiers, drop them behind enemy lines in North Africa, and have them destroyed German aircraft on the ground. The British High Command gave Sterling 66 men and a fake name, L Detachment, Special Special Air Service Brigade, designed to trick German intelligence into thinking a massive paratrooper force existed in the region.

The first mission was a disaster. Only 22 men survived, but Sterling adapted, switched from parachutes to vehicles, and by the end of the war, the Special Air Service had killed or wounded over 7,700 enemy soldiers while suffering 330 casualties. And here is what makes the modern secrecy so strange. During World War II, the government openly discussed SAS casualties in Parliament.

In April 1945, the Secretary of State for War told MPS that seven SAS soldiers had been captured and executed by the Nazis in France. He described one officer beaten to death with a rifle, but four others were taken to a wood by the Gustapo and shot. That level of transparency continued for four decades.

Ministers routinely answered parliamentary questions about SAS deployments in Omen, Borneo, and Malaysia throughout the 1950s. the 1960s and the 1970s. So, what changed? Northern Ireland. When the SAS was formally deployed to the province in 1976, operations got messy fast. In 1978, a teenage boy was shot dead by an SAS team in County Antrum after stumbling across an IRA weapons cache.

Then came operation Flavius in Jialter in 1988 where members of the SAS shot three unarmed IRA members on a sunlit street. No bomb was found. The European Court of Human Rights later ruled the operations planning was so flawed that lethal force was almost inevitable. After Gibralar, something shifted inside Whiteall.

The government had been embarrassed one too many times. And so in the late 1980s, a new policy was born. The Ministry of Defense would no longer comment on special forces, not to confirm operations, not to acknowledge deployments, not even to admit that specific soldiers belong to the SAS when they died.

Research by Action on Armed Violence proved this so-called long-standing policy was barely 40 years old. It was a choice, not a tradition. The system built to enforce it was thorough. The Director of Special Forces reports only to the Defense Secretary and Prime Minister. No parliamentary committee can scrutinize the SAS.

The regiment is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and through the D-notice system, the Ministry of Defense pressures editors into voluntary self-censorship about special forces operations. The hypocrisy is remarkable. The former Secretary of the Dnotice Committee admitted that almost all SAS publicity came from leaks within special forces.

The Ministry of Defense feeds heroic stories to friendly journalists, then threatens prosecution when uncomfortable ones surface. If you are finding this useful, hit subscribe. I cover military history and special forces operations every week. This double standard becomes painfully visible when SAS soldiers die. On May 19th, 1982, a Sea King helicopter packed with SAS soldiers crashed into the freezing South Atlantic during a transfer between HMS Hermes and HMS Intrepid.

20 SAS soldiers and two crew were killed. The worst single day loss for the regiment since World War II. Only nine men survived, pulled from the water after fighting hypothermia in pitch darkness. One survivor, Corporal Mark Aston, later described how men who had served together for years fought each other underwater, desperately reaching for a tiny pocket of air.

Of his five closest friends in G Troop, he was the only one who came home. The fallen are remembered quietly at St. Martin’s Church in Herafford, away from public view. After September 11th, the secrecy deepened. The SAS deployed to at least 19 countries over the next two decades. In Iraq, Task Force Black ran 175 combat missions in a single six-month tour alongside Delta Force.

Six SAS soldiers were killed and 30 wounded. The government confirmed none of it. When Matt Tonroe died in Syria, his death notice listed him under the Parachute Regiment. The Pentagon initially blamed an ISIS bomb, but a later investigation revealed the explosion came from munitions carried by a coalition soldier.

[music] It was an accidental detonation. The real facts only emerged more than a year later, but the Tonro case barely scratches the surface. The biggest scandal in SS history is still unfolding inside a London courtroom. In 2023, the government was forced to launch a judge-led inquiry into roughly 80 suspicious deaths during SAS night raids in Afghanistan’s Helman province from 2010 to 2013.

The allegations are devastating. A BBC Panorama investigation found one SAS squadron killed 54 people in suspicious circumstances during just 6 months. Witnesses described an unofficial policy to kill all fighting age males on target regardless of whether they posed any threat. A senior officer who blew the whistle told the inquiry a cancer had infected an SAS squadron.

He described flat packing where pillows were placed over detainees heads before they were shot with a pistol. Weapons were reportedly planted next to unarmed victims. The soldiers who cleaned up after these incidents were called Mr. Wolf after the character from Pope Fiction, General Gwen Jenkins, then a colonel commanding special forces in Afghanistan, received direct warnings about these executions.

He was legally obligated to report the evidence to military police. Instead, he locked it in his safe. He was not punished. [music] He was promoted, eventually becoming national security adviser to Prime Minister Rishi Sunnak. Computer servers at special forces headquarters containing key evidence were deliberately wiped before investigators could examine them.

The inquiry managed to recover a backup copy. [music] Terabytes of data that someone had tried to make disappear. The contrast with Britain’s allies is striking. United States special forces answered to congressional oversight committees. [music] Australia’s Breerin report publicly documented 39 unlawful killings by Australian special forces [music] and led to formal apologies.

In Britain, the government initially insisted the inquiry could not even use the word SAS, forcing it to be called UKSF1 instead. The SAS remains one of the most capable special forces units ever created. From North Africa to the Iranian embassy’s siege in 1980, from Borneo to Afghanistan, [music] these soldiers have accomplished missions that seemed impossible.

The question is not whether the SAS produces [music] extraordinary soldiers. The question is whether a democracy can afford to let any military unit operate completely beyond the reach of accountability. David Sterling built the SAS on boldness. The model who dares wins is carved into everything the regiment touches.

But there is another principle that matters in a democracy. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.