Herifiture, England. Home of the headquarters for Britain's special air services.

SAS fighters were performing routine drills when the orders came through from Lord Guthrie,

head of the British Army. Pack their jungle fighting equipment and prepare for battle.

A British regiment was being held hostage by a dangerous rebel army deep in Sierra Leonean jungle.

The SAS, the British special air services, they're the special operations force that we modeled all of our special operations after.

They set the model for the rest of us to follow.

Assuming they even make it to their target without being shot out of the sky, the rescue force will be outnumbered more than five to one.

They face hardened fighters with an unparalleled knowledge of the terrain. It will be the toughest fight of their lives.

When they realized they could only go in via air, that was when the men of the SAS, the men who were tasked to go in and do this,

hostage rescue, coined the phrase the nickname for the mission Operation Certain Death.

Welcome to Covert, a show about the shadowy world of international espionage and top secret military operations.

I'm Jamie Rennell, and I'm going to take you inside history's greatest special forces missions

to learn about the brave soldiers who risked their lives to terminate the world's most wanted men, eliminate terrorist threats, and protect countless innocent lives.

The odds are against us totally. I mean, we flew into their village, into their backyard, with two of the biggest helicopters in the world, as told by the people who were there.

If that wasn't bad enough, they also had a belief that we find hard to understand, but they had this belief that voodoo would protect them to such an extent it would make them bulletproof.

Last time we talked about how this British regiment got themselves into this situation, and how negotiators tried to reason with their captors.

In this episode, we go behind the battle lines to learn about the planning and high stakes execution of one of the most dangerous special forces missions in history.

Operation Certain Death Part 2.

September 8th, 2000.

It had been over two weeks since 17 soldiers from Britain's Royal Irish Regiment on routine patrol in Sierra Leone were taken hostage by a local rebel army, the West Side Boys.

Former SAS fighter Phil Campion.

It wasn't until that we moved forward into Sierra Leone itself that the focus starts coming down, then you start thinking, right, this is going to happen.

...