LONDON, 24 May 2003 — Col. Tim Collins, in his rousing speech to the men of the Royal Irish Regiment on the eve of the Iraq war, warned them to “tread lightly”. Harm the innocent or besmirch the reputation of the regiment, he said in the biblical cadences that this stern Presbyterian favors, and “the mark of Cain” will be upon you. Now, Collins himself is a marked man — accused, amid a swirl of vaguely sourced reports, of the very crimes that he feared would deface Britain’s assault on Saddam.
The reports surfaced on Wednesday in the London-based Sun newspaper. The “paper that supports Our Boys” is suddenly willing to question the reputation of the man who came to symbolize Britain’s war effort.
“It stinks,” says Dan Plesch, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. “Ask yourself where these allegations are from. Is it to divert attention from something else? Is it to stop Collins saying something?”
Britain’s Ministry of Defense isn’t telling. All it will say is that Col. Collins’s conduct during the war is being investigated by the army’s Special Investigations Branch and military police. The investigations have only just begun, says a spokesman, and are complicated by the fact that a lot of personnel are on leave, having only just returned from the Gulf. Collins himself, who was recently promoted from lieutenant-colonel to full colonel, is on holiday with his wife Caroline and five children.
The principal allegations are that he assaulted Iraqi soldiers in an effort to extract information from them, pistol-whipped a civilian, intimidated other civilians by shooting into the ground close to their feet, shot out the tires of an unarmed civilian vehicle, coerced civilians into obeying him, and let Iraqi conscripts go hungry while he took tea with their officers. All sufficiently serious for the Sun to blast “Col. Tim probed on war crimes” across its front page.
Collins, 43, and a soldier for 22 years, came to prominence because of one speech — delivered on March 19 just before the men he commanded, the first battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment, moved into southern Iraq. “We go to liberate, not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people, and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Show respect for them.”
The “embedded” journalist taking down his words was Sarah Oliver of British newspaper the Mail on Sunday, who says that Collins’s extempore address was a moving occasion.
Oliver wasn’t alone in being moved. The words that she reported in her pooled dispatch had an electrifying effect. George Bush had a copy of the speech printed out and pinned to the wall of the Oval Office. Prince Charles wrote effusively to Collins to express his admiration. Commentators (with the exception of William Deedes, who thought the speech overwrought) lined up to proclaim Collins a glorious mixture of Henry V and Winston Churchill.
Collins was held up as a shining example of British soldiery. “People were looking round for heroes,” says Plesch. “His speech sounded Shakespearean and dignified. It drew on history and appealed to people who wanted to contrast British soldiers with the US hubba-hubba-hubba — the same people who ignored the fact that Gen. Tommy Franks was an Arabist who spoke Arabic. We like to think of the US Army as being full of Bible-thumping, hamburger-chomping generals, but there are plenty of sophisticated officers too. There’s no limit to the amount of useless stereotypes.”
Plesch sees the Collins persona as largely a media creation, but the colonel did give the press a great deal to chew on. He was rarely photographed without his Ray-Bans (though he did briefly lose them in action); he favored Pattonesque cigars; he wore the Gurkha knife known as the kukri; his men knew him as “Nails”; and he had the blood-spattered rifle of a Sierra Leonean militia leader screwed to his office wall. Meanwhile, back home in Belfast, his devoted 72-year-old mother said his late father, Thomas, whose partial deafness had stopped him from being a soldier, would have been proud of their boy.
This is the icon whose reputation now hangs in the balance. If the allegations were to be substantiated, the great speech would look like cant. “If you are ferocious in battle, remember to be magnanimous in victory... You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest, for your deeds will follow you down through history. We will bring shame on neither our uniform or our nation.” The Shakespearean hero’s fall would be tragic indeed.
Oliver, who was with Collins’s regiment throughout the war, is vociferous in her support. She argues that the incident in which Collins shot out the tires of a looter was justified because he had on several occasions been asked to stop and had refused.
She says she saw no pistol-whipping or assaults on Iraqis. She also dismisses claims that Collins was a braggart who loved to brandish his stage props.
But someone, somewhere thinks Collins is a show-off who needs to be taken down a peg or two, and is leaking information to the Sun in a bid to tarnish the hero. Britain’s Ministry of Defense refuses to be drawn on whether this is fueled by postwar inter-regiment feuding, but there is no doubt that some think Collins’s Irish Regiment was getting above itself. “How come they were the only regiment which had to ask for extra ammunition for their pistols?” wonders an officer in another regiment. There was little hand-to-hand combat and the implication is that the Rangers were getting carried away.
Collins left the Royal Irish Regiment when the war ended: His promotion to full colonel means that a staff job now beckons. He has even been linked to a possible position at the Pentagon, though the Ministry of Defense refuses to say where he is heading or when his new job will be confirmed. The leaks raise suspicions that his enemies in the army want to deny Collins the glittering prizes predicted for him.
Military sources (this is a world of shadowy, unnamed figures) say that the allegations originated with American reservists who felt the lash of his tongue when they were attached to his regiment. But government-watchers are intrigued that the Ministry of Defense hasn’t rushed to the defense of our Boy’s Own hero. “He hasn’t exactly been hung out to dry, but the support hasn’t been very vocal either,” says one.
Some have suggested that, despite his Sandhurst (military academy) training, the fact that he is a Belfast boy and not a product of an English public school makes him an outsider. His showmanship (or, as his supporters would prefer, high-octane leadership) and high public profile were also a source of friction. “He is the sort of soldier who makes enemies,” says one associate. “He is charismatic, strong and self-assured. He is a man who will get noticed.”
The military analyst Sir Timothy Garden cautions against concocting instant conspiracy theories and says there is great pride within the army at the way in which officers coped with media attention. But he admits that Collins’s star status may now become a problem. “An investigation of this sort is best conducted out of the spotlight,” he says. “A high media profile will make it more difficult to get at the truth.” Collins will hope that the Ray-Bans, the cigars, the kukri and the blood-spattered rifle on the wall do not become part of the case for the prosecution.
