The Sixteen: The Covert Assassination Squad That Went Beyond the SAS - Hardcover

Urwin, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1904132146 ISBN 13: 9781904132141

Publisher: Vision, 2003

Synopsis

"A member of the Sixteen—an elite, ultra-secret group of handpicked men who were charged with carrying out assassinations in the Middle East and Eastern Europe during the Cold War—John Urwin has decided to break the code of silence and speak for the first time about his covert unit. This true story reveals how Urwin was trained extensively in the use of extraordinary weapons and military techniques that were not made available to other parts of the armed services. He describes weapons such as the sash, which looks like a normal trouser belt but has serrated edges and when released lashes out and upward at astonishing speed, taking the face off anyone standing within a four-foot radius. Urwin recounts his training in unarmed combat, survival skills, and fear-elimination techniques. He also discloses the Sixteen's mission to assassinate Communist sympathizers in the military and their dispatch to Egypt on orders to assassinate President Nasser, a mission that was aborted with only hours to spare. This book is not just about military intrigue and covert ops—it is also about a band of young men whose secrecy, skills, and professionalism earned them a place in the Sixteen."

About this title

About the Author:

John Urwin served with the Sixteen for two years. He currently trains undercover British security agents and public figures in survival and combat skills.

From Publishers Weekly:

According to this improbable memoir, The Sixteen were an "untraceable" British military assassination team operating in the 1950s, so secretive that even the author, a member, knew little about them. The hallmarks of The Sixteen were a supposedly invincible martial arts system known as "the machine," an eccentric weapons kit, including "the sash," a belt-cum-weapon capable of "ripping three or four men to pieces in a few seconds," and "One Step Beyond," a "fear elimination process" consisting of a protracted, disorienting existentialist lecture on the meaning of life. Urwin, now the proprietor of a "survival and unarmed combat club," says he went on several missions to the Middle East to murder various political, military and terrorist figures, whom he doesn't to name. He treats it all as a thrilling rite of passage out of a working-class youth and into the company of "real men," who recruit him by means of mysterious assignations and periodically spring him from the of his regular-army unit to go on glamorous overseas escapades. The book's tone of jaunty, school-holiday adventurism and its very British preoccupation with secret societies, tea drinking and sudden elevation from humble origins to elite status all bring to mind a possible Harry Potter and the Special Ops Commandos. Unfortunately, Urwin is no J. K. Rowling, and the narrative bogs down in slack pacing and interminable stretches of expository dialogue. Readers who accept Urwin's verbatim recall of lengthy conversations from 45 years ago may buy the rest of his wild tale.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vision
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1904132146
• ISBN 13: 9781904132141
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288