Who dares, earns

IF PERSIL dominates washing powders and Levis are the top jeans, the SAS is the brand leader in the market for violence. Their national debut at the Iranian Embassy in 1980 established the SAS's reputation for ruthless effectiveness. It was reinforced in 1988 by the shooting of three unarmed IRA bombers on Gibraltar. But, as with every other successful product, the secret of success lies less in the facts of performance than in the advertising.

The number of books extolling the SAS's capacity to "routinely achieve the apparently impossible" is now well into double figures. These works - either by ex-SAS men or SAS groupies - both trade off and act to re-inforce the SAS's aura of invincibility. Most marketing campaigns are designed around an image: if you buy the product, you will become sexier, happier, richer. The implicit message of the SAS books is that if you read them, you will become tougher, more aggressive and more violent.

Take, for instance, The SAS Security Handbook, by ex-SAS man Andrew Kain, recently published by Heinemann at £20, which promises to "protect you and your family using the unique skills of the SAS". In a section devoted to self-defence, it suggests that if you get into a situation in which you conclude that "you have to hit this person", you must "drag up your most primeval instincts from deep within you, focus your hatred on the person trying to harm you, then unleash one violent attack, the most violence you can produce. If there is enough hatred behind it, it will succeed . . . In the Iran Embassy seige, SAS men reacted instantly, killing the terrorists. Hesitation could be as fatal for you in confrontation with a criminal as it would be for an SAS man facing an armed terrorist."

Then there is the SAS Encyclopaedia, written by SAS groupie Steve Crawford. This gives useful details on "the SAS art of war", along with a special section devoted to the weaponry the terminators themselves carry. There are plenty of pictures, including one of a white phosphorous grenade exploding - helpfully captioned as "a device that can cause horrific injuries".

Bravo Two Zero, Andy McNab's account of combat, capture and torture behind Iraqi lines during Gulf War, and the biggest-selling SAS book of them all, also has a picture of a white phosphorous grenade exploding. McNab's book has a detailed description of how to slit someone's throat while ensuring that they do not make any noise. SAS men are exports in this technique, known as "slotting".

Whether intended or not, McNab's graphic elaboration constitutes an instruction manual on how to kill. In 1994 Jamie Petrolini and Richard Elsey decided to test the technique. They murdered Mohammed el-Sayed, whose offence was to be the first victim who conveniently crossed their path.

Petrolini and Elsey, self-confessed addicts of SAS books and SAS equipment, were caught and sentenced to life imprisonment. The prosecution had produced evidence that they had been inspired by McNab's account. This did not dampen McNab's enthusiasm for publishing detailed accounts of SAS procedures. Last year he produced Immediate Action, described by its publishers as "horrifying, chilling . . . violent".

But the Petrolini and Elsey case does seem to have had one effect on Mr McNab: the book does not contain any new details on "slotting".

Time for a kinder, gentler SAS? The murders in Dunblane, and the killing of headmaster Philip Lawrence, seem to have turned the public against instruments of violence - although not, if the sales of SAS books are anything to go by, against accounts of how to kill.

There is a curious paradox here. The Government, as quick off the mark as any marketing company sensitive to minute changes in its niche, has embarked on a frenzy of legislation to make it more difficult for people to purchase the instruments of murder: principally, it claims, guns and knives (although actually more people are murdered by strangulation than are either shot or stabbed). Yet there seems to be no concern at all about the celebration of violence which is the essence of most of the books about the SAS.

Petrolini and Elsey did, indeed, use a combat knife to kill el-Sayed. It was the Fairburn Sykes Commando Knife, one of those used by the SAS. But it was not their purchase of that knife which motivated the boys to murder. According to Petrolini's account, it was their reading of SAS books that convinced them SAS soldiers were, in his words, "demi-gods, above the law".

Of course, the fact that two murderers claim to have been inspired to kill by accounts of the SAS does not prove that, in the absence of such material, they would not have killed anyway. Still less does it show that SAS books "cause" murders. The link between accounts of violence, whether literary or filmic, and the commission of actual violence, is notoriously hard to establish.

Knives do not magically turn their owners into killers, either - not even those marketed for "combat". Yet our legislators seem to think there is an overwhelming need to ban them. The logic is bizarre. Instruments of death, whether guns or knives, cannot kill anyone on their own. What makes a murderer is the motive to kill. Where there is the will, there will be a way. The point is so obvious as to seem hardly worth stating. Yet it seems to have escaped the members of Parliament.

If the proposal to ban combat knives comes into effect, it will certainly pose a new set of problems for SAS fans. The SAS Survival Handbook, by John Wiseman, stresses that "you are only as sharp as your knife". Wiseman's book recommends - as the knife of SAS choice - the Malayan parang, "which has a curved blade like a machete". This will almost certainly fall into the category of forbidden knives.

The Government has stressed that whatever form the law takes, it will not ban freezer knives, which are just as vicious - and in the wrong hands, just as deadly - as the Malayan parang or any other combat knife. The next edition of The SAS Survival Handbook should take this into account, although the author seems curiously reluctant to update: the book contains a long chapter on how to protect yourself in the event of nuclear holocaust. But the new law will create a gap in the market: how to kill people efficiently without knives or guns. No doubt some enterprising ex-SAS soldier will soon fill it. Men who have been through the regiment are not the market leaders in the branding of violence for nothing.

© Copyright Telegraph Group Limited 1996.