The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Peter McAleese
Veteran of the SAS and the Paras who as a mercenary was hired to assassinate Pablo Escobar
PETER McALEESE, who has died aged 81, was a Scottish mercenary with a reputation for reckless courage that was formidable even by the standards of most “soldiers of fortune”; in 1989 he was lured out of retirement for a daredevil – and ultimately doomed – mission to assassinate the Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar.
During the 1960s McAleese served with the Parachute Regiment and then transferred to the SAS, but he was twice bounced back to the Paras after fighting with other soldiers: “One [SAS] officer told me he wanted to put me in a cage and only take me out for operations,” he recalled. He turned mercenary in the 1970s, fighting in the Angolan Civil War, the Rhodesian Bush War and other conflicts.
By the late 1980s he had become a publican in Birmingham, but like most mercenaries he regarded surviving into retirement as something of a badge of failure. When, in 1989, the urbane adventurer and fixer David Tomkins asked the 46-year-old McAleese if he would absent himself from the Gunmakers Arms to take on a job for him, he agreed on the spot before inquiring what the job was.
It turned out to be “Operation Phoenix”, a mission – against almost suicidal odds – to kill Escobar at his palatial residence, the Hacienda Napoles, on the edge of the jungle near the city of Medellín. Tomkins and McAleese were ostensibly commissioned by the rival Cali drug cartel, but in McAleese’s telling the assassination had been “outsourced” to the cartel by the Colombian government: Escobar had so many government officials on his payroll that he would have been rapidly made aware of any state-sponsored plot against him.
The cocaine tycoon had become increasingly mercurial and was committing horrific acts of violence against ordinary citizens; a bounty of $1 million was placed on his head.
McAleese and Tomkins devised a scheme to approach the Hacienda in helicopters disguised in the livery of the Colombian police, and although the mission seemed to offer limited hope of success – as the world’s richest criminal, Escobar could afford ample well-trained security – McAleese was nevertheless able to recruit a 12-strong team, mostly ex-Special Forces.
McAleese started by training his men on a football pitch, before moving to a jungle training camp as the day of the mission approached. There, they were given automatic weapons and explosives smuggled from the United States.
One of McAleese’s men “lost his bottle” and departed, telling the Australian media that a group of British mercenaries were at large in Colombia, without specifying their mission. The British Foreign Secretary, John Major, denied any knowledge, but made a general condemnation of the activities of mercenaries, although McAleese later insisted that both the US and British governments knew about Operation Phoenix and supported it.
Whether McAleese’s men could have escaped with their lives even if they had succeeded in killing Escobar seems doubtful, but the question was not put to the test. On the day the mission launched, the helicopter pilots were told to fly low to avoid detection by the army or the police, many of whose employees were in the pay of Escobar.
As a result the helicopter carrying McAleese and Tomkins crashed, and the pilot was killed. McAleese, in severe pain from broken ribs, was forced into hiding in the mountains for three days while Escobar’s men, tipped off about the operation, searched for him and his colleagues. “If Pablo had caught me I would have had a long, drawn out, painful death,” he later observed.
McAleese was eventually rescued and advised by the British security services on his return home to confine himself to running his pub. By this stage his mercenary career had left him with 42 inches of scars and a body he described as “200lb of chewed bubblegum”. Escobar would be killed in a stand-off with Colombian police in 1993, and his Hacienda turned into a macabre theme park.
McAleese and his men had taken film footage of their exploits during training, and this was featured in a documentary film,
Killing Escobar, in 2021. Interviewed for the film, McAleese dwelt more on his inadequacies as a husband and father than on the failure of Operation Phoenix: “I have an awful lot of regrets and none of them are in the soldiering side of my life.”
“At 79, he’s still a scary individual,” noted the Guardian’s reviewer.
Peter McAleese was born into a Catholic family in the Shettleston district of Glasgow on September 7 1942. His home was in the shadow of the massive Barlinnie Prison – conveniently so, as his violent father, who once broke Peter’s nose, was often incarcerated there and could signal to the family from his cell.
“Like my father and uncle Billy, fighting rivals with sticks, iron bars and knives became second nature,” McAleese recalled in his memoirs. “I went round ‘tooled up’ with an axe or knife hidden under my jacket without thinking. I preferred a long bayonet, not for stabbing but whipping the ‘enemy’ about the head with the thick steel.” At the age of 13 he was expelled from St Roche’s Junior Secondary School for fighting.
What saved McAleese from the life of drudgery interspersed with recreational fighting that became the lot of many of his friends was a fascination with paratroopers, fostered by Alan Ladd’s heroics in the adventure film The Red Beret, which he saw 17 times when it was released in 1953. McAleese could recall the occasion when a paratrooper visited his hometown and he followed the man around for hours until he was exasperatedly told to “f--- off ”.
After a spell as a plasterer, McAleese went to live in Aberdeen, biding his time until he turned 17 and could sign up with the Parachute Regiment there. Although he was on the short side his toughness was never in question, and he was also quick-witted; he made rapid progress, and in 1962 was accepted into 16 Troop D Squadron of the SAS, which specialised in parachuting.
He saw service in Borneo and Aden, where he first killed a man, when his patrol was ambushed: “Nothing can equal the thrill of battle. I loved it.” But he came a cropper while stationed at Fort Bragg, when a US Special Forces soldier blew cigar smoke in his face in a bar. “The custom in the regiment at that time was to turn the other cheek, but I was not far enough along in my development to do that, so I hit him.”
He was returned to the Paras, but rejoined the SAS in 1964, its youngest full corporal. Another fight, with a French paratrooper, meant that it was back again to the Paras, where he became a small-arms instructor and was promoted to staff sergeant.
As he admitted in later life, however, he was a wife-beater, and he knew that he risked dismissal. “I seemed to be on a course of self-destruction so I decided to leave the Army. It was a bad decision, as I gave up something I loved, that I was good at, and that suited me.” Nevertheless, he insisted: “I don’t think I made a bad depot soldier when necessary, and maybe my turn-out has been smarter than most. I wonder how many soldiers nowadays bother to iron creases into their combat uniforms?”
For a while McAleese earned good money working on oil rigs. But, having divorced, he continued to beat his girlfriends, and served three prison sentences for violence in the early 1970s.
After his release his “blood was up for soldiering again” and he embarked on his career as a mercenary, serving alongside the notorious “Colonel Callan” while fighting for the National Liberation Front of Angola in 1976. At one stage he had to clear up after Callan had massacred an estimated 17 of his own men: “I couldn’t believe that anyone could have done what he did. I inherited all those bodies. It was just unbelievable.” McAleese himself took care not to execute even the most troublesome of prisoners, regarding such an action as murder.
The following year saw him involved in the Rhodesian Bush War, fighting with the SAS. Asked on one occasion whether his thirst for violence was unusual, he recalled at this period giving a talk to a group of “sweet old ladies” in Salisbury who pressed him for the most gruesome details of battle over tea and cake. As he left, one of them called after him: “Remember now, Peter, you’ll get one for me, won’t you?”
In 1980 he enlisted with the South African Defence Force’s 44 Parachute Brigade and helped to found the Pathfinder counterinsurgency unit, which fought in Namibia. After one action he was recommended for the Honoris Crux. The black soldiers in his unit called him Kavundashira, meaning “aggressive”.
From the mid-1980s he worked in security in South Africa and Uganda, and he returned to Britain after nearly losing a leg in an accident during a parachute display. After the Colombian debacle he trained bodyguards in Moscow in the 1990s and undertook security work in Iraq and Algeria.
In 1993 McAleese published a bestselling memoir, No Mean Soldier, in which he sought to correct the media portrayal of him as a mindless thug. “People shake just talking to me. But it’s nonsense. I’ve been portrayed as a complete maniac by people who don’t even know me.” In later years he drew comfort from his Catholic faith.
Peter McAleese was twice divorced; he had three children.