Qualla: Operation Mikado

Operation Mikado: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Some of the soldiers assigned to it gave it a different name than the planners did. Officially it was Operation Mikado. Among the men of the SAS who would have carried it out, it became Operation Certain Death. The plan, hatched in the desperate weeks of the 1982 Falklands War, was to fly two Hercules transports across the South Atlantic and slam them down onto a working enemy airbase in the dark, disgorge dozens of commandos to blow up Argentina's deadliest aircraft, and then somehow get home. The airbase was at Río Grande, on the windswept Atlantic coast of Tierra del Fuego.

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Operation Mikado: The Missiles That Changed the War

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The fear driving the plan had a name: Exocet. Argentina's five French-built Super Étendard fighters, flying from Río Grande, carried air-launched Exocet missiles that had already proven they could sink British warships. The loss of those ships sent a shock through the task force ...

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Operation Mikado: A Plan Modeled on Entebbe

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Brigadier Peter de la Billière, the SAS director, looked to a famous precedent: Israel's 1976 raid on Entebbe, a long-range strike landed boldly on a hostile runway. His version called for around 55 troopers of B Squadron, flown in two Lockheed C-130 Hercules that would touch dow...

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Operation Mikado: Plum Duff and the Fog

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

First, someone had to scout the ground. On the night of 17 May, a reconnaissance mission codenamed Operation Plum Duff sent an eight-man SAS team toward Tierra del Fuego aboard a stripped-down Royal Navy Sea King helicopter, launched from HMS Invincible. The flight went wrong alm...

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Operation Mikado: The Raid That Never Came

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Operation Mikado was never launched. The reconnaissance failure, the obvious strength of the defenses, and the near-certainty that the lumbering Hercules would be detected long before they touched down all weighed against it. The British government later acknowledged outright tha...

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