Operation Trojan Horse, Black Opps insertion into Kuwait.

I am surprised that this story has not been discussed on ATS, it involves the taking of hostages a covert black ops insertion into a war zone and then a Prime Minister lying about the whole sordid operation.

It starts late on August 1st 1990 in Heathrow airport just before the boarding of British Airways Flight 149 (BA 149). BA 149 a Bowing 747 with 367 passengers on board and was destined to head travel overnight from Heathrow to Kuala Lumpur via Kuwait. Prior to take off it became apparent that the tension between Iraq and Kuwait was reaching braking point and requested a security briefing. The pilot believed based on media reports that the invasion of Kuwait was imminent he was assured however that the situation on the ground was normal based on information provided to him by the head of BA Security for the region who had received his information form the Foreign office. It has since transpired that the man who was head of Security at BA at the time was also once the Station Chief for MI6 in Kuwait, the first of a few interesting coincidences.

As the passengers boarded their plane the pilot remained concerned about his refuelling stop at Kuwait. Not all of the passengers on this flight where normal flyers, among them included the Security Chief of Kuwait who was rushing back to his country and about 6 young men who sat at the rear of the plane (much more on them to come). Just before take off the pilot decided to delay the flight citing a minor technical fault in the hope that by the time it was fixed they would be ordered to stay away from Kuwait however this never happened rather he only secured the fate of his colleagues and passengers and the flight took off without any change to its flight plan.

Meanwhile as BA 149 was in the air satellite reconnaissance from the Pentagon showed Iraqi ground forces moving into Kuwait and confirmed the invasion by 02:00 on August 2nd. This information reached the British Prime Minister, Margret Thatcher at 03:00 hours. Iraq had invaded Kuwait.

Meanwhile BA 149 remained on course, the pilot continued to request security update’s for Kuwait. While in the air a interesting conversation took place between one of the air stewards and the 6 young men who had sat at the back of the plane. The steward noted that they along with a few other passengers where to disembark at Kuwait and in accordance with local law offered them a “landing card” to get them into the country. One of the six men reportedly said “ahh, we don’t need that mate, don’t think so”. To many this would seem meaningless however the cover for these men was that they were an oil worker. Regular oil workers would know that this was a requirement and not be so dismissive. This began to raise some eyebrows amongst the crew.

By the early hours of the morning all other flights destined for Kuwait where diverted with one notable exception, BA 149. At approximately 04:10 local time, as tanks were entering not Kuwait city the flight touched down. The passengers that were to disembark included the Kuwaiti security Chief and the 6 mysterious young men and a couple few other passengers. Witnesses noted some tension amongst these men as they waited for their bags, which according to witnesses looked like “equipment” rather than clothing.

What would happen next was catastrophic, the Iraqi’s began bombing the airport the all the passengers disembarked form the aircraft and where then taken hostage by the Iraqi Army. All this is with a few notable exceptions, the 6 young men.

It has since been discovered that these young men where part of what was called Operation Trojan Horse. Who exactly they where is a mystery Stephen Davis who wrote a book on this flight has claimed they were members of the super-secretive “Increment”, a deniable branch of MI6 made up of ex special forces guys. The remit of this operation was to observe Iraqi troop movements specifically in relation to any move towards Saudi-Arabia in two man teams.

One of these two man teams became compromised when after a week one of the men on the team developed food poisoning. His partner realised that he had no choice but to extract as the other man was becoming seriously ill. As such an American War ship in the Gulf was called on to send in a Black Hawk to extract the men. The special forces solider carried his friend for 15 miles through hostile desert to get him to the helicopter. The former captain of that ship has confirmed that this extraction did take place he says that he was ordered to arrange for a medical evacuation of two British Special Forces men from Kuwait. Apparently the other team also had to be extracted after 3 weeks however the final team remained inside Kuwait city until allied forces liberated Kuwait.

To be clear this is not a conspiracy, this actually happened. The British Government knowingly sent British and American nationals into Kuwait as a cover for a Special Forces insertion which resulted him them being held as human shields for months. A member of that team has spoken out about what happened, the Captain of a American warship who extracted members of the team has spoken out and even the American Ambassador to Kuwait at the time has said that he was told about a British Intelligence team operating inside Kuwait.

When Margret Thatcher was asked about this in parliament as to why the plane was allowed to land she said it landed after the invasion to parliament. This was a blatant lie, she know of the invasion at 0300 and the plane landed at 0400.


Anyway I though you guys might appreciate this one.

Sources
Last Flight to Kuwait
British hostages demand inquary into BA 149
The Strange Flight of BA 149
Flight 149

really no takers?

I remember when this first broke. It wasn't spread around a lot, but it was talked about quietly. Their timing sucked beyond belief but it's about what I would expect from a Spec Ops insertion that was supposed to be kept quiet.

reply to post by Zaphod58


It wasn’t just kept quiet, it was covered up. Thatcher lied in parliament about it and BA have refused to disclose the passenger manifest.

It’s interesting however that there is very little information that seemed to come out at the time.

reply to post by OtherSideOfTheCoin


S & F

To be totally honest I'm not surprised about the lack of info. It was a covert Op that went south. This isn't something Governments usually like to discuss even less so if it fell apart. It's a very interesting read though. I had heard something about this a few years ago but not too many details.

Thanks filing in the blanks

This sort of thing happens all the time.

While you get a lot of insertions by sea or night jumps, it's also pretty common to infiltrate as flight crew, replacement workers, tourists, or diplomatic personnel.

We used to insert SF into Russia as workers for embassies - waiters, cooks, electricians and the like. They knew it, too, and would follow everyone around, so you would contrive to give them a lot to follow by everyone leaving the embassy about the same time and scattering like quail, riding the subway, going to government buildings and the like, timed for their shift changes to add confusion.

Generally you'd get caught and PNGd eventually.

But the tourist thing goes on a lot, too, where you can get in as a Canadian or whatnot. Not that many years ago an entire A-team was infiltrated as a religious tour group into a middle eastern country for the purpose of locating someone, they did it, too, but got caught exfiltrating when a local contact ratted them out. The US let it die down in the news and traded for them.

edit to add:

About the same time as the operation you describe, there was a pretty large op out of Alabama that moved a bunch of SF into the region as part of an aircraft delivery. The regular delivery guys stayed home and were mostly replaced by three A teams. They had to stage it out of a commercial airport in Montgomery, AL. It was sort of entertaining watching them try to look civilian and non-chalant. It doesn't help you if all the guys are dressed in exactly the same t-shirts, shoes, and blue jeans, and all the jeans, sunglasses and Nikes are new and the same type. And everyone has on "the watch".

reply to post by OtherSideOfTheCoin


It was covered up at the time. About a year or two later I heard about it the first time.

reply to post by Bedlam


Thanks for that interesting response.

I have heard about operations like this taking part before but only as training opp’s this is the only one that was real life so to speak that I know about.

So thanks for your input.

reply to post by Zaphod58


The insertion of spec-ops was covered up but the hostage talking was not, just to be clarify I am guessing that’s what you meant though anyway

I was just posting a link to this thread for another post

but i really can't believe it never got any more attention.

I"m just seeing this for the first time. It's really interesting.
I don't know how I missed it the first time around.

reply to post by FlyersFan


Thanks for that dude, thought i would give it a bump see if anyone else found it interesting

figured it might be fun to give one of my old threads a bump, see if anyone else is interested in this.

Just in case anyone is interested, there is a 10 part documentary on this on YT...in fact, it was the youtube doc which prompted me to search for the subject here on ATS.

Last Flight to kuwait

Very interesting and very scary to think civilians in relatively recent times would be sacrificed just to put eyes on the ground, just goes to show how expendable government believe people to be.