The fantasy life and lonely death of the SAS veteran who never was

[JJ_BPK]

The UK has it's share of walt's & posers..

May you rot in Hell, as the devil burns your A$$ for ever...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/ja...essarego-jihad

The fantasy life and lonely death of the SAS veteran who never was

Ex-soldier who wrote of derring-do in Afghanistan is found dead in a garage, Audrey Gillan, The Guardian, Saturday 24 January 2009

He professed to have been a member of Britain's secretive and elite Special Air Service, writing an account of his time in the Hindu Kush and other places in Afghanistan, training the mujahideen to fight the Soviets during the invasion in the late 1970s. But after selling 50,000 copies of his book Jihad!, Tom Carew was exposed as a fantasist fixated with the SAS whose real name was Philip Sessarego.

This week, the tale of the man whose Walter Mitty-style fictions caused him to be despised by real members of the SAS - who rarely speak of their time in "the Regiment" - took a strange, and final, twist when it emerged that a decomposed body discovered in a rented garage in Antwerp is believed to have been his.

The corpse had lain in the wooden lock-up in the Ekeren area of the Belgian town since last summer, and was not discovered until Sessarego's landlord came banging at the door last November to ask why his rent had not been paid. In the garage, he found Sessarego, 55, lying with his few belongings, a small cooker and a bed. It appeared that the reclusive man had taken to living in the garage and had succumbed to accidental carbon monoxide poisoning.

A local said: "He was hiding from someone, I think. But he also seemed to be living in a kind of parallel world, so maybe he thought he had to hide. They found documents in the garage to show it was Sessarego. They sent for DNA from England and I have been told they are 99% sure it is him."

Belgian police confirmed that the body had been identified as Sessarego from papers but said they had yet to have DNA verification. While his death had initially been investigated by the murder squad, it was believed to have been an accident.

Under the assumed name of Philip Stephenson, Sessarego had been flitting around Belgium since he was exposed as fake by the BBC Newsnight programme in November 2001. Instead of serving with the regiment, motto Who Dares Wins, he spent two years with the Royal Artillery, having twice failed the SAS's stringent entrance test. It is understood that Sessarego did spend some time in Afghanistan, but his account of what he did there was not based on reality.

Sessarego would tell anyone who would listen that he had 20 years experience with the Hereford-based SAS, but as his account unravelled, more of his fakeries emerged. A number of mercenaries claimed they had been duped by him into travelling to Croatia to take part in a "black op" for which they would be paid a large amount of money. They were in the country for six weeks but there was no operation.

Perhaps he thought his pen name would protect him from his enemies, but under Carew he gave endless media interviews in the wake of the September 11 attacks, offering his expertise on how the Taliban would fight. He also said he was going to write a follow-up book on how Britain secretly armed Croats and Muslims as the former Yugoslavia was about to break up through an arms dealer whom the CIA had suspected of involvement in the hijacking of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro in 1985.

Perhaps aggrieved at his fakery, that he chose to "mess with the SAS", or put out at the £100,000 advance paid by the small Scottish publisher Mainstream for Jihad!, someone chose to expose Sessagero as a charlatan.

Yesterday, neither his ex-wife Diane nor his children could be contacted. But in an interview with the Mirror in 2001, his daughter Claire, who Sessarego had abandoned as a child, said: "Basically, if I'm going to be blunt about it, I think he is a twat. He never served in the SAS . He's just a fantasist who's trying to make money on the back of other people's reputations ... There are a lot of former SAS men who have scores to settle with him - but they thought he was dead. Now they know different and I wouldn't care if somebody killed him because he's brought it all on himself."

She added: "Dad was obsessed with wanting to be in the regiment. He took the SAS selection test a couple of times but failed, and that really crushed him. I think he decided if he couldn't be the real thing, he would pretend ... He always wore a half-moon moustache because that was the fashion among all real SAS soldiers at the time and walked with a swagger, with his chest puffed out. He used to wear desert boots and jeans or combat trousers and a check shirt and would hang out in the pubs where SAS men drank."

In Jihad!, he claimed he was the first British soldier to be sent into Afghanistan to assess the mujahideen's capabilities and train them. He wrote of how he killed Soviet soldiers: "The butt of my deadly Kalashnikov pressed into my shoulder as I let go a long, vicious burst of fire. A Russian special forces soldier and two Afghan regular troops clambering over the wall only noticed me as they were poised in mid-air. By then it was too late. My weapon bucked and climbed as it spewed out bullets. They had no chance ... All three were dying as they flopped awkwardly into the dust."

In Hereford, one local who had followed Sessagero's antics but did not wish to be named, said: "I wouldn't believe it. It's not the first time he has been dead. He was supposed to have been found decomposed in Bosnia in the early 90s. And there were rumours of his demise in South Africa. Anything to do with this guy I would take with a pinch of salt. He is an out and out fantasist and for some people he has almost become a bogeyman."