Cold War British Army "stay behinds" - Live at the Imperial War Museum London (440)

0:00Welcome to Cold War Conversations, the home of real stories of the Cold War. Did you know with the Sam's Club app, you're technically in the club, no matter where you are? Like, this is a club. This is also a club. And this is a club. My bad. Come join us. Sam's Club. And we're live on match day as Doug reaches for a buffalo wing. He's got it. Oh, and he's gone for a can of Pepsi too. What a finish! There's no doubt about it, it just tastes better. Match days deserve Pepsi. Steve was a totally professional soldier with a brilliant sense of humour. So one May day, when the Soviet Union was still there, he had a few beers and decided it would be a good idea to break into regimental headquarters, go up onto the roof where the flag that flew, the Union flag normally was, sorry, the flagpole, and he hoisted the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union.

0:59This is Cold War Conversations. If you're new here, you've come to the right place to listen to Cold War history. Please make sure you follow us in your podcast app so you don't miss future episodes. This special episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the Imperial War Museum London in October 2025. I speak with Colin Ferguson, a veteran from the British Army's covert Special Observation Post troop. They would allow the main Soviet forces to pass over them before deploying into observation posts where they would engage the enemy with the long-range guns and rockets of the Royal Artillery.

1:37We speak in detail about selection, training and deployment. Do check out Colin's podcast, The Unconventional Soldier, which offers first-hand accounts of past conflicts, military history, book and film reviews. I'm delighted to welcome Colin Ferguson to our Cold War conversation. Thank you very much, Chloe.

2:03Thank you for turning up, everybody. Really appreciate having you here. As Chloe said, Cold War conversations is primarily an oral history of the Cold War experience. It doesn't cover just military, but civilian, espionage, even astronauts. and in my view there's nothing like hearing history from someone who was there and we have in Colin here someone who was there served 22 years in the British Army and was part of the Royal Artillery's Special OP Troop so as time is of the essence I'm going to go straight into the question so what was the Special OP group Colin? Before I answer that question thanks for having The first thing is I'd just like to do a quick story about what I think was the sacrifices made by my friends and also the sense of humour.

2:53This chap here, obviously not me, far too handsome. It's a guy called Steve Cummins who, along with another guy in my troop, Miles Amos, was killed in Northern Ireland in 1989. Steve was a totally professional soldier with a brilliant sense of humour. So one May day, when the Soviet Union was still there, he had a few beers and decided it would be a good idea to break into regimental headquarters, go up onto the roof where the flag that flew, the Union flag normally was, sorry, the flagpole, and he hoisted the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. The RSM was driving into camp the next day, and needless to say, that was the first thing he saw, because you could see his flagpole for miles, and Steve spent the next five days in the regimental neck contemplating the error of his ways.

3:38So, but to answer your question, Ian, so in 1982, the Royal Artillery had two depth fire regiments, and they were equipped with the M107 gun, which could fire out to about 30 kilometres. And their job was to deploy along the inter-German border, as close to the border as possible, and fire on the advancing Warsaw Pact forces. The problem they had was they had no method of observing the fall of shot from the guns It was all predicted fire So they look at likely routes of advance Based on the order of battle of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces Also at this time the British Army was looking to do a re-equipment programme And they were bringing to service Warrior, Challenger Tank And more importantly for the gunners The Multiple Launched Rocket System, MLRS which would offer a greater weight of fire and a greater range as well.

4:32In tandem with that, you had General Bagnell who was rewriting the doctrine of how the British Army was going to fight the Warsaw Pact. So instead of forward defence, he was introducing the thought of firing in depth, usually using air at this time, on the second echelon follow-on forces and using manoeuvre to take on the contact battle with the advanced forces. So our commanding officer at the time, Lieutenant Colonel Stone, later Major General Stone, realised there was a capability gap here. So he wrote a paper and he said to Bagnell, this is what I want to do. I want to raise a troop of guys who will dig in, let the advanced forces come over them, emerge from their hides and take on the follow on forces.

5:16And Bagnell, if anybody knows about General Bagnell, was not a man to muck about. And he just said, crack on. And that's how the troop came into existence in 1982.

5:24Colin Ferguson:to. And how did you get recruited into this select band? Well in Germany in the 1980s it was a good life for a soldier. It was cheap beer, cheap fags, cheap cars, cheap fuel but it was boring. Going and exercise was boring. I worked in the regimental command post of an air defence regiment where they had the RSM, the CO and everybody else hanging about. I spent a lot of time in NBC, full kit on NBC Sentry and I had enough of this so I walked down to the battery office which is a place you didn't go into lightly because that had the BSM and the battery commander and I wanted to go and do P Company and go back to UK and join the Airborne Regiment of Royal Artillery and like all BSMs he had like bionic ears and he heard me talking to the clerk and he said Ferguson get in here so I marched in and he goes why are you leaving my battery and I said because I'm bored which is probably not the best thing to say you BSN and he says what do you want to do and I said I want to go and join 7RHA go in the OPs do more soldiering and he said well if you go at P Company and you pass it the chances are you'll end up in the guns or back in a command post but I know the place for you and he told me about there's a unit up the road called the Special O P Troop they work behind enemy lines and six man patrols and more importantly they're led by sergeants there's no officers and that was the final selling point for me So I put in and applied for the special opiate trip at that point.

6:54Colin Ferguson:Right. What was the selection course like for this? Well, the whole thing was very, very secretive, and you never got to know about it. But I got some join instructions. This is all I could find out about at the time. So my friend has got these, like 40 years old, and he came in before me. So the selection course, you've got your papers to turn up, and the opening paragraph says, Selection lasts for six days, and it's designed to put you in a number of different situations, to enable selectors to see a reaction. You don't have to be super fit, just BFT standard, and that was just like a run in boots, and boot fit.

7:25We don't expect trained skilled map readers, but someone that shows us that he has the ability to learn. Okay, so it was pretty vague. So you turned up on a Sunday night with all your equipment, and there was about 15 or 16 guys, and I turned up. You met the instructors, you stood up, you gave a little story about why you wanted to join the unit, And then they showed you a little video, which is like one of those pathy ones about the sniper. And it showed you them constructing a basic hide. And then the next day we got up and you did a BFT, a running boots, just to show that you had a very basic fitness.

8:01And it was a basic fitness, the BFT. And then you spent two hours in the back of a four-tonner and you're taken up to Hill Design, which is quite a hilly area in northern Germany. And then it started. and as soon as you got off the fourth tunner what became distinguishable for me was unlike basic training where you have been shouted at and heard around and harassed all the time there was none of that it was all very calm it was all very collected but you're being watched all the time and the first thing they did was they paired you up with somebody an oppo and you were told he is not to be more than two metres from you at any one time so if you had to go to one of the DS summoned you you had to go along with your guy if you had to go to the toilet the guy had to accompany you and that was deemed very important and a lot of that was just making sure that you could do basically what you were told without supervision and there's a number of exercises you did for example there was an 18 kilometer navigation exercise but it wasn't just about getting from a to b you come up to a checkpoint and the instructor would be there and he'd have a poncho and he'd uncover the poncho and be a basic form of Kim's game that most people should be familiar with, Rudyard Kipling, and he'd go cover it up, come back five minutes later list the objects then you go on to the next checkpoint and the DS would say, what were the objects at the last one?

9:20and what was the number of the Land Rover that was parked there? okay so then you try to remember all this stuff as you go on different checkpoints, you get to another checkpoint you'd be on a bit of high ground and the guy would say within these boundaries there's 10 objects hidden. I need you to locate them and tell me where they are. You get up to another checkpoint towards the end of the 18 kilometres and it was more than 18 kilometres because you're a young soldier and your map reading is not brilliant so a lot of people end up doing like 25k, 30k because they're getting lost. So towards the end of the day you turn up and you do a weapon handling test to make sure you can still function with your weapon.

9:57And the very last checkpoint would be something like a military knowledge test. So you'd have all these things going on throughout the day and each morning you'd get up, there'd be battle PT, there'd be a night, they'd teach you how to do a recce and you'd have to go and do a recce patrol and write the patrol report the next day. And again, they're not expecting you to be expert at this point, they're just seeing how trainable you were. So you get less sleep as you go on and sort of near the end, you've been with this guy, like me and Ian have been paired up, we've been beasted together, we're sharing food together and then they're introduced to the noble art of milling where they get me and Ian for one savage minute to punch the hell out of each other on milling.

10:38That's to show controlled aggression. And then the final thing was you had to occupy an OP. And at that stage in the game, we don't know anything. It was just crawl inside a bush and suffer for 24 hours and write down what you saw in front of you as the DS went past in Land Rovers, dressed in like Warsaw Pact uniforms, that type of stuff. And then after about 24 hours, you were bugged out. he went to a checkpoint, the emergency rendezvous and he said get your warm kit off and they did a 10 mile march where you have webbing in your rifle but at this point there was only about 6 people left at this point we did the 10 miler, got to the end and you're thinking that's it, there's a truck there and you're thinking oh fantastic and then he said right get some water down your neck you're going round again and so we drunk a load of water four guys decided that was enough So it was just me and a guy now called Vinny, who's still a good friend of mine, left.

11:34And we went two miles down the road, and there was a Land Rover waiting for us. And it was just a second, just a test, a resolve. And then you jumped in the truck, and then we went back to Dortmund, and then you walked in and told you if you passed the field, that initial selection period. Wow. Wow. And then you've got a training course to get you right up to speed. Can you describe what that was? Yeah, so that was divided. I'll have to look at it here because I'm getting old now. My memory is rubbish. So it was divided into first couple of phases, but eight or nine weeks and seven and eight weeks, depending when the course was being run.

12:15So in the first phase, you did things like high-frequency signals because that was the main means of communication. They built up your basic infantry skills because most of the guys were from the Royal Artillery at this point. navigation, patrol tactics with six man patrols NBC and first aid in an environment where you've got no help going back to your own lines foreign weapons training because they said that if you ran out of ammunition or your own weapon didn't work there's bound to be maybe an AK-47 or likewise on the battlefield that you could pick up ranges how to construct hasty option OPs and dug in OPs.

12:57Now, Hasty Optional OP is basically where you find the biggest, thickest bush. You crawl inside it, you had chicken wire covered in waterproof material and dark hessian, and you crawl in this bush, you cut your way in with secateurs, and you push it up, and you construct a rudimentary shelter in there. That wasn't your first option, because even back then, you weren't protected from fire from the Soviets, or more importantly, in our job, your own side. so you always had to try and get underground so we always went for the option of getting underground that would reduce your heat signature everything else so we're taught how to do dug in OPs and hasty optional OPs and then there's a 10 day 7 to 10 day I can't remember off the top of my head now final exercise where you put all those skills together in one big package and then you're taken back to camp and there's only 4 guys on my course at this point and you're told if you pass the field that one so the 4 hours were lucky We then had a long weekend and we went back on to the next phase.

13:57One thing I didn't point out was all during this training. The days were broadly similar during those packages. You'd start off in the morning with PT. Then they also started off with vehicle recognition and order of battle of Warsaw Pact forces. So even at night, you'd finish at half six at night. You'd be in your room doing AFV recognition. So the days were long. They went on to about nine o 'clock at night just by doing all your revision and stuff. Then you moved on to phase two, where they taught you more in-depth things about HF signals. We were using the one-times pad to encrypt stuff that was there from World War II.

14:35So you'd be sat with torts in your mouth, trying to keep the light down, doing all these difficult calculations, the rain thundering over your head. Yeah, it was extremely difficult. Then you moved on to things like contact drills. You'd be doing patrol contact drills, contact drills bugging out the OP from under the ground. All really good stuff. Demolitions. They did put a hospital week in because when General Stone and his staff designed the course, they went to Hereford, they went to the Airborne Brigade, they went to Commando Brigade. We ended up with sort of a mixture of all those training regimes.

15:09You can see that when you look into the training in depth. We're also very fortunate that for the first 10 years of the unit, we had instructors from the Parachute Regiment. and then from about 1991 we're extremely fortunate we had a warrant officer from 22SES who was our chief instructor so a lot of the drills and skills we were taught were coming from the Special Air Service that relationship only ended at the start of the wars on terror at Afghanistan and Iraq where they couldn't spare those guys to come and train us you also did things like a week learning how to control artillery fire there was a hospital week in there but they binned that because the guys were going up to Isolone Hospital which was a military hospital, they didn't really know what to do with this one of the guys asked them, what did you do?

15:59and he said, I watched an RSM's wife's piles being removed so hardly the battlefield experience that you want so they binned that and we later went down to the International Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol School who ran an excellent two weeks look medic course and then the final exercise at that point was you did a full mexi exercise for three weeks the digging in of a mexi shelter and it was usually they usually tried to conduct that during one of the major big divisional exercises so you're really getting a feel for how it would work and then if you passed phase two you still had another four weeks to go you had to go down to the wassop the international long range reconnaissance patrol school and do the two weeks advanced specialist recognition course and the two weeks survival with resistance to

16:50Colin Ferguson:interrogation course and after that you're qualified to go on the patrols wow well how many made it through in your cadre uh i had a initial week i was 16 or so turned up me and vinnie got through for the main course there was about eight people turned up and four of us got through wow I often take the mickey out of some people in the military when I say you can get a fit soldier and you can get a thinking soldier but the challenge of a fit thinking soldier is a difficult one Now you mentioned mexes there can you just explain how you were going to be deployed and the set up of the patrol So that's a mexi shelter everything the troop got was we never it's called a special OTP troop That's a bit of a misnomer in some respects because we were specialists.

17:41We weren't special. The term special was used to differentiate us between conventional OPs. So this Mexi shelter was a standard shelter. It was used for command posts. It was used for a variety of things. It was also used by 2-1 and 2-3 SAS and the Honourable Artillery Company. And that was one of the reasons they wanted a regular component because 2-1 and 2-3, even though they were operating behind enemy lines, they were more strategic. The Honourable Artillery Company were going to be more or less doing our role and they became our reserve counterparts. But the time that they took to get mobilised and get in, the Warsaw Pact had been probably at the ports of Cali.

18:19So that's one of the other reasons they needed a regular component. So this is how we deployed, six-man patrol. You'd normally also have to dig in two further OPs from there as well, two fully dug NOPs. So the idea was you dug this in. it normally take two to three days okay so you go from that that was a template for marking it out and you'd scrape back all the camouflage carefully put it away so you could use it again you'd wrap sandbags around the trees to stop sign like sand and dirt sticking in the bark and giving it the sign away to anybody looking for you and that was a calming up process at the end and that's all you could see the little hatch there.

19:08I'm six foot plus and that's probably about two metres below me at least in there as well. So you dig that up, you camouflage it, you'd wait in the hide and then you wait to be activated by the command post

19:22Colin Ferguson:and then two guys each would go forward to two OPs and sit in those OPs. How long would it take to dig one of those out? Oh God, that was worse than digging it in. Honestly, it would take probably like four or five days to get it out because you've got the covers in there. You have to be careful how you remove them. And I look back on it now. I mean, health and safety-wise, they'd have a field day now. There's no showing up of the size. And size would collapse on you as you're digging. And that was entrenching tools, manual. We had a little digger that they found was used for digging out posh basements in places like Knightsbridge.

19:58So they gave us that. but that couldn't get down to the last couple of metres and the last couple of metres were always dug by hand. So it was back-breaking work. Choice Hotels gets you more of what you value. Comfort Inn It's calling your name Save on the stay Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim Book direct at choicehotels.com Have no fear, Chosen Foods is here to defend your favourite foods from the forces of seedy oils and sketchy ingredients. with cooking oils, salad dressings and mayo, all powered by the good fats from 100 % pure avocado oil and simple, delicious ingredients. Chosen foods.

20:36And how close were you building these to the inner German border? We got a... What happened is you'd get named area of interests and target areas of interest from a higher formation based on intelligence summaries, that type of thing. So like a named area interest would be like looking down a valley, for example. a target area of interest would be like a crossroads prominent crossroads or a likely choke point so you'd base your reckeys on that where you sighted the MEXI and the OPs was entirely up to the sergeant patrol commander on the ground which you think about it's quite a lot of responsibility so some of the OPs could be right on the IGB some of them could be a couple of k's away maybe looking down into a valley all depended on what the NAIs as they're known the TAIs were and the the selection of the locations how how was was was that done because the soviets must have been expecting something like this so how did you try and outfox them um you used to do things like pretend you're on like a signals exercise because one thing you have to do is you have to test comms so you could try and do it covertly which was three or four guys wandering around and a British registered car or whatever wouldn't go down too well so a lot of times we'd carry out the recce's pretending we're on another exercise so we'd go to a location for the Mexicans so the main signals were done from and you'd test that you could get signals as well then you'd go out and recce the OPs now bear in mind whether you're a Soviet soldier or a British soldier a map recce's a map recce so you've got to think about what the enemy they always have a say in what you're doing so a lot of times you look at I'm doing map wrecking, go, that is an ideal position.

22:22But they're going to know that, so we're going to go to less than ideal position just over there and try to outfox them that way. So you had to think, what would the Soviets do? Because Soviets did have specialist units that were used for, there are some unpronounceable Soviet acronyms, I can't remember off the top of my head, but they were trained to hunt down, stay behind soldiers and those people conducting those operations. Right, right. I can imagine living in one of those for how many days were you expected? Well, we were always told three weeks and the exercises we did were normally two to three weeks.

22:56But I mean, we'd probably be partying down there and the Soviets would be in London. But I mean, what was it like? Because if you're in there, you have to stay in there, which means things like bodily functions. so the idea was that when you had two guys in each of the OPs and two guys in the NEXE you'd change over regularly but in real life that didn't happen because you're worried about leaving sign back and forward there might be a lot of enemy movement going back and forward so a lot of times you spend six or seven days in a very small OP with barely enough room for two guys and again you're carrying out your bodily functions and then I can't make this any less crude than it is, you're basically crapping into cling film wrapping it up and put it in a sandbag and you're peeing into a bottle which gets particularly nasty the good thing is there's army rations sort of bung you up after a while and by lying still you do lose your appetite as well so you're eating very little actually when you're in that but then you might have to do a changeover and that's usually done at night so imagine you're coming out that OP you haven't moved for 6 or 7 days you're getting up you're going on a compass bearing and paces to where the Mexie is and it's bloody hard to find We had first-generation passive night goggles who work off ambient light.

24:12But a lot of these forests are pitch black. If there's no moon, it really is just stumbling around like a blind man. So for a lot of the last 10, 15 metres, the guy that's changing over from you, would crack the hatch in the Mexie a little bit and he'd be talking you on to him. So he would talk you on, he would come out, you would go down and he'd come up the hatch and he'd go off and try and find the OP, which is often a lot harder because it's smaller and all the rest of it. So you can imagine you're going down two, three metres into this Mexie. First thing that hits you is the smell. A wonderful concoction of food, curried stews, farts.

24:51I can't be any more. This is the detail you get on Cold War Conversations.

24:56Colin Ferguson:You don't get this anywhere else. Somebody might have been for a crap, and basically a crap was like a little bucket that you, again, Then you did your business into a plastic bag, wrapped it up. Of course, at the same time, you have to do the other ones. We had a little bit of plastic piping leading to a jerry can, which is painted yellow and covered in sand, so you knew you weren't peeing into a normal jerry can of water, drinking water. So conducting your business was a convoluted process. And then you get down into the mix itself and it's crammed. When you first constructed them and before you did the backfilling, you go in there and it looks very very spacious but once you filled it with three weeks of rations all the bergens, all the equipment, all the batteries everything, it became very very cramped you've also got the fact that as I hinted back to health and safety all the sides are bulging in with a sheer weight it's very humid, we used to work in t-shirts down there and members of the audience think well that's not very tactical the reason we weren't worried about working in t-shirts was that if you were found in a Mexie, you were going to die.

26:03They were just going to stick a couple of grenades down the hatch. There was no chance of you fighting your way out. You were just going to die. They'd probably call and he'd just surrender, whatever. And that was the fatal flaw. If an OP got discovered, everything got discovered. Because what we did was we ran a telephone line, dug in, hidden, between the OP and the Mexie shelter. So if an OP got compromised, they'd find out that in the OP was a field telephone and all they had to do was rip up the phone line and follow it all the way back to the Mexie. So if an OP got compromised, it was bug out, everybody got away to the ERV.

26:36So you'd go in there, and actually, compared to life in an OP, life in a Mexico was fantastic. You could stand up, you could eat what you wanted, guys had books down there. Because what you'd find would be a flurry of activity. You'd get a convoy or a load of vehicle movement, so the two of you'd be working away, and the two guys in the OP would be working away. But then you'd get lulls. So you'd sit on a radio watch reading a book. you might be playing cards because there's only so much sleep you can have in a place like that as well so it was a lot more preferable to

27:09Colin Ferguson:being in an OP and were you ever detected or compromised on exercises? Yes we were on a big exercise I was in an OP and I could hear there's a German army unit Bundeswehr unit was doing a clearance patrol along the wood line and I jumped the gun a little bit I thought we'd been compromised and we hadn't And I realised this, when I came bursting out of the OP, firing my weapon, and this young Bundeswehr conscript, just absolutely terrified, dropped his weapon and ran. And I knew at that point that, damn it, I'd compromised. We hadn't been compromised by then, and then we activated it then. But compromise is interesting because I've got some facts.

27:52So I was doing some digging. There was an exercise called Badger's Lair, which was run in Saltown, Germany in 1973. And this was run around 23SAS, TA and the HAC who were digging in Mexie shelters. Now, they used to operate slightly different from ours. They used to dig in these massive shelters on the front edge of wood lines, which how they ever thought they'd get away with that, I don't know. Later on, they evolved and changed the same way that we operated, where they'd hide the Mexie deep in a wood and put the OPs on the wood line. But during Badger's Lair, in 1973, they very quickly discovered 37 out of 39 hides within a matter of days and that was the direction finding with signals and the use of dogs okay they ran another exercise called Temple Priest in 1981 and they discovered 72 to 80 % of the SS patrols and 50 % of the HAC patrols and I think at that time the HAC were doing the Mexies further back in they then did another rerun called Exercise Temple Priest 2 in 1982 and the results of that are classified but they were your biggest Achilles heel was the fact that you're using HF communications which has to communicate back hundreds of kilometres so you'd have the entrance to the hatchway that you saw there, you'd normally have the radio positioned there and you'd have antennas coming out from that radio so you'd always have an antenna array up we rigged it so that if you could sense that there was something in the area you could drop the antennas to the ground from the hatch but a lot of times they would get snagged and you'd have this big antenna saying hello we're over here basically we later got a radio called the 319 and the beauty of that was you could remote the antenna 50 metres away from the Mexie which would buy you a bit of time now people used to say to me did you have things like claymore mines and all the rest of it?

29:56We didn't because we looked upon it that the more stuff you have up on top, there's the most chance of being discovered. So actually camouflage and concealment was your best weapon. We did have some rudimentary technology. We had a thing that was called EARS, and I can't remember the exact name of the acronym, but it's something like external acoustic remote sensor, I think it was. And it was called EARS because the actual sensors were like two pairs of ears, like a pair of ears. and you could put them up a tree, but I could never distinguish between a German wood pig and somebody walking around with a rifle.

30:33So they weren't very good.