'My life as an undercover killer'

AS his grip tightens around my head and I hear the bones in my neck crack, I have a few moments to consider how I had got myself in this position. It had been entirely my own fault of course, for approaching John Urwin's claims with more than a little scepticism.

In my defence, although there wasn't much in the way of that going on at the time, it does sound a little on the far-fetched side. Here he is, a grandfather of 64, claiming he had been plucked from his National Service, trained to become part of an elite assassination squad, using combat techniques and equipment far in advance of anything practised today, sent on missions to kill in the Middle East, and then returned to obscurity with his regiment.

Naturally, the existence of this unit - named The Sixteen, for obvious reasons - was top secret, so there is no evidence it ever existed and no one to back up John's claims. It seems only reasonable to ask why I should believe his story.

It is then that he disappears into the hallway of his home, a neat semi in Benton, on the outskirts of Newcastle, and reappears bearing what looks like a shoebox. Opening the box, he pulls out a handgun.

He says it is a replica - although I keep my finger away from the trigger just in case - hands it to me, and tells me to point it at him. He is just a foot or so away, and as I point the gun, he grabs hold of my outstretched arm, pulls it past him, and brings the edge of his open hand down on my forearm.

"I would have broken that normally," he says. I don't disagree.

Then he asks me to stand opposite him as if we were in unarmed combat. He then takes hold of my arm, pulls me towards him, and grabs my head with both hands, pushing it down and twisting.

"Did you hear the bones crack?" he asks. "Yes," I whimper. "I would have broken your neck normally," he tells me. It's quite a relief that this is not normal.

Admittedly, I'm probably not the most difficult of opponents, possessing all the fighting skills of Dale Winton, but it does make me think there might be more to his story than I originally thought.

This story, briefly, is that in 1957, when he was 18, John, a lad from the backstreets of Byker, joined the Pioneer Corps for his National Service. He was a bit of a fitness fanatic, loved gymnastics, and didn't drink, the last of which meant he didn't really fit in with the rest of his unit.

He was in the gym on his own one day, towards the end of his basic training, when he was approached by an officer he'd never seen before and asked how his training was going. When John, who went by the nickname of Geordie, said he was looking for something more exciting than two years digging holes with the Pioneer Corps, the officer said he would be contacted again.

John didn't hear anything else until he was posted to Cyprus and he was driving a truck when he was flagged down by another officer, who seemed to know who Geordie was and took him to a mountain hut. There, he was initiated into The Sixteen.

The first step was what he calls the One Step Beyond programme, which involved being kept awake for 24 hours while being told how unimportant life was, with the aim of conquering his fear of death. Once he had passed this hurdle, he was taught to use equipment and fighting techniques far beyond anything known to anyone else, then or since.

Unarmed combat was based around 'the machine', a series of 150 basic moves, leading to 7,000 combinations, and apparently enabling him to take out just about any opponent.

Chief among the equipment seems to have been what was known as 'the Sash', basically a belt with the capacity to kill anyone within a reasonable distance before they have a chance to react. It has something to do with pressing a steel buckle to unleash a spring, but obviously he can't go into it in too much detail.

"Literally, I could take your head off with it in seconds, I could take your fingers off, your nose off, whatever," he says. My extremities begin to feel distinctly threatened.

After training, he was sent on a number of missions with the three other members of his section of The Sixteen, who were split into two groups of four assassins and eight support staff, assassinating people in the Middle East. He knew the others only by their nicknames - Spot, Dynamo and Chalky.

One plan was to kill Egyptian president General Nasser, but this was aborted when Nasser changed his plans so they killed a Russian nuclear scientist in Cairo instead.

In between operations, John went back to his unit, where nobody seemed to take too much interest in where he had been. When his two years of National Service were up, he wanted to sign on for another three so he could stay with The Sixteen, but his regiment was being posted back to Britain so he left and went back to a civilian life, including stock car racing and running bodyguard courses.

The existence of The Sixteen was known to only a handful of people, and John has kept the secret for more than 40 years, but has now written a book chronicling his experiences. He has broken his silence now, he says, because, with all the dangers we are facing, in the shape of Saddam Hussein and al Qaida, there is a need for another Sixteen. By revealing the existence of the original, he hopes to spur interest in creating another such squad. But he has been careful not to spill too many secrets.

"What is in the book is nothing to what I really know, it was not designed to be an instruction book. It is trying to show that there was a group called The Sixteen, that it did exist," he says.

There are, admittedly, a few obvious questions, the most obvious of them all being, why was he chosen? Why pick someone on National Service, still doing their basic training, instead of a trained soldier? Part of the reason, he says, was his very obscurity.

"Who would suspect somebody being taken out of the Pioneer Corps and being highly trained? Also, I didn't drink. That was one of the main factors," he says. "Most SAS operations are failures because the guys drink; they could be easily infiltrated or duped or whatever."

But what proof has he got to back up his story - apart from his ability to disarm a wimpish journalist? "How do I know what I know and how come I'm so bloody good at it, even now, at 64? How come I can do things that the SAS can't do?"

But if The Sixteen's skills and equipment were so far advanced in the 1950s, why aren't they used by our specialist forces now? "We didn't want the morons to know," - by morons, I assume he means regular soldiers - he says. "Because of the way they got drunk. It is only going to be five minutes before the enemy knows."

But if The Sixteen is such a secret, isn't he worried that somebody is going to try and shut him up for spilling the beans? "Because I'm stirring it, I'm expecting trouble. I'm pre-warned," he says, the implication being that as he is on his guard he will be more than a match for any agents sent to take him out.

There are lots more questions to be asked, of course, but I have to confess my neck is feeling pretty vulnerable so I don't push it. But then, to be fair, he knows his story sounds pretty far-fetched, although he says he doesn't care if people don't believe him.

My head is still spinning with the unlikeliness of some of this when I leave, although, and I'm not saying this out of self-preservation, I'm more convinced of his story than when I arrived. After all, the fact that it is all so improbable is the perfect cover. If nothing else, and I'm not saying it is nothing else, if you're reading this John, it makes a fascinating tale.

* The Sixteen: The Covert Assassination Squad that went B eyond the SAS, by John Urwin, is published by Vision (£16.99)