With so many underwater scenes in Bond films, 007 has earned his fins over the years. Here, 007GB agent Stuart Douglas reveals how he earned his – and then some! – as a Royal Naval frogman.
I wrote a previous article for the club and mentioned how Thunderball was a driving factor in my career choice when I joined the Royal Navy. Here, I’d like to expand a bit on the job I did for 15 years and some of the ‘Bond-esque’ aspects of it.
According to the backstory, Bond was an ex Special Forces operator, 030 SFU… a fictional unit. However, in Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond wears the parachute wings of the SBS on his Naval Commander uniform. Several films have featured underwater aspects of Bond’s skillset: his sabotage of the drug facility in the pre-credit sequence in Goldfinger, complete with fake gull on his hood; the iconic underwater set piece of Thunderball, the frankly laughable (to someone who has ever been diving!) deep-diving sequence in For Your Eyes Only, which, incidentally, featured an ex-Navy frogman in as the villain in the JIM suit; and the even more risible HALO-to-diving sequence in Tomorrow Never Dies… Bond has earned his fins and here’s how I earned mine…
Royal Navy Clearance Divers are the Navy’s specialist frogmen, at full strength, there are less than 250 in the Service and, from inception in 1952 to date, only about 3,000 have passed the course and earned a place amongst the Navy’s elite.
The primary role of the branch is to carry out bomb and mine disposal in UK waters and overseas in support of UK operations. They also carry out Maritime Counter-Terrorism roles alongside SBS and SAS operators.
Candidates attend a week long aptitude course where they are subjected to high levels of physical exertion, long distance (2km in less than 1 hour) underwater swims and lack of sleep. Successful candidates are then placed on a six month long qualifying course where they spend many hours conducting long endurance swims on closed circuit oxygen rebreathers, including complex navigational swims where candidates are heavily penalised for missing objectives or being spotted when surfacing to take bearings.
Penalties always take the form of physical tasks, known as ‘beastings’ where candidates are subjected to periods of hard physical exercise as ‘punishment’ for mistakes. These included jumps from a 6m board, a 100m swim and run back to the start, repeated as often as the staff dictated, or ‘mud runs’…a distance run across the mud flats at low tide. Often these will last as long as staff decide or in some cases, to weed out the weak, until one or more of the course members gives up and withdraws from the course.
The course progresses onto techniques for searching undersides of ships and also conducting mock ‘attacks’ on ships to place dummy limpet mines and escape unseen, all the while being scrutinised by staff who will cut a candidate from the course if he fails to maintain the demanding standards or fails to keep up with the pressures of longer days, less sleep and increasing physical demands.
The course then decamps to Scotland to conduct deep dive training, enabling candidates to dive to 50m on air and 54m on mixed gas rebreather sets.
Upon completion of the diving phase, quite often up to 70% of the original course members have either voluntarily withdrawn or been rejected by staff. The remaining members then move onto bomb disposal training at the Joint Services Explosive Ordnance Disposal School in Kent. This is a ‘pass or fail’ module where candidates are expected to assimilate vast amounts of technical information and put this into practice in a number of practical exercises where failure means removal from course, even at this late stage.
Any candidates remaining are then ‘badged’ into the Clearance Diving branch and sent to join either a ship in one of the minehunting squadrons or one of the diving teams based around the country.
My first posting was to a bomb and mine disposal unit based in Portsmouth, where, as the ‘newbie’ I was given all the jobs that nobody else wanted. Spending six hours in the water working on the propeller of an aircraft carrier in January and then being told that I wasn’t good enough because I was expected to have been able to do eight hours. It was obvious that even after passing an extremely arduous course, I was at the bottom of the ladder and was required to prove my worth on the team. I spent about a year on that unit, and we were extremely busy. Most of our work came from dealing with World War 2 mines, found by trawlers in the Thames Estuary. It’s estimated that the Germans dropped and laid around 200,000 mines around the UK, a huge quantity around the Thames Estuary.
The usual means of dealing with these was to dive on the mine, carry out a visual or ‘blind’ ID… during the last phase of course, candidates have to dive in blacked out facemasks and, using known measurements of parts of their own bodies be able to measure and accurately draw and ID the ordnance when on the surface. Disposal was by placing a 4lb explosive charge against the mine, returning to the surface, lighting the fuse and retreating to a safe distance.
All things being equal, the detonation of the explosive pack would cause a sympathetic detonation of the device. 1700lb of explosive being set off underwater is an impressive sight.
In reality, these jobs often took place at night and with less than favourable conditions. More than once I’ve got to the mine to find it wrapped in the trawl net, occasionally meaning I had to get inside the net to place the charge, a task fraught with danger as it was very easy to get snagged and required a cool head to extricate oneself whilst in the proximity of nearly a ton of high explosive.
Following this, I volunteered for training in saturation diving, a six week course, after which, successful divers would be qualified as saturation divers, extending our dive range down to 300m depth. This involved living in dry chambers pressurised to 30 times atmospheric pressure and being transported to the dive site in a diving bell. Following completion of a dive, often lasting several days, it can take many days to gradually decompress the divers back to surface pressure… after our 300m dive in Norway, it took 11 days, 3 hours, 5minutes to return us to the surface… longer than it took astronauts to get back from the moon!
I spent 3 years on the Worldwide Operations team. We spent period on 24 hour notice to be transported anywhere in the World in support of UK Operations. Several times pagers went off and soon after we would be heading towards an RAF base, blue lights and sirens going, where an RAF C130 would be waiting for us.
In the three years I was on this team, I spent very little time at home, other than scheduled leave, which was cut short at Christmas of 1991 when we were sent out to Kuwait as part of ‘Operation Granby’, ‘Desert Storm’ as out American cousins called it.
Here, we were responsible for clearing shipping lanes of mines, often dangerously close to the Iraq coastline. Our ‘modus operandi’ was to spot the mines from a Sea King Helicopter, and then jump out of the helo’ from about 10m up, in full kit, with 4lb of plastic explosive taped to our leg and the detonator and fuse coiled up and shoved behind the counterlung of our rebreather set. We’d descend to the mine, affix the explosives, insert the detonator and once on the surface and the helo was overhead, light the five minute fuse, get winched up and get away at high speed.
After the ceasefire, we moved inland in Kuwait to commence clearing harbours and beaches of explosives, including hundreds of landmines. These were cleared manually , by a slow crawl along a section of beach probing the sand in front. Once a resistance was felt, we’d carefully clear the sand from around whatever it was and attach a hook with a line, we’d then reverse our course, paying out the line, at a safe distance the line would be given a sharp pull, this was to check if the mine had any anti-handling devices fitted. If it didn’t go off, we’d then retrieve it, and it would be set aside for disposal….this procedure took several hours to clear a section and could not be rushed.
Prior to the ceasefire, we had attended a briefing for the allied assault to liberate Kuwait. It was planned that there would be an amphibious assault on the main beaches and in the 48 hours prior to this, we along with the US Navy SEALs, US Marine Force Recon’, US EOD divers and French Foreign Legion frogmen, would conduct shallow water reconnaissance of the approaches to the main beaches, marking obstacles and explosives, we would then return in the hours immediately prior to the assault and place explosives to clear the obstacles.
We were briefed that we would be unsupported by gunfire from the sea and would be approaching occupied positions which may have been mined. The predicted losses would be in the 50-75% range…there were 24 of us. We were instructed to write a will and a final letter to our loved ones, and they would be lodged with the Command back in the UK should the worst happen.
Fortunately, it was decide that the amphibious landing would be the ‘plan B’ in case the cavalry assault from the desert failed and the movements close to the coast were designed to get the Iraqis to commit more defences to the coast, leaving them vulnerable from the land.
When we set about clearing the beaches, the barbed wire and anti-personnel mines we encountered made us realise that our losses would have been closer to 100%..hence our nickname for the operation..’Op certain death’.
The highlight of my career was joining the Maritime Counter Terrorism Unit. Only since about 2000 has this unit actually been confirmed to exist. We worked alongside maritime units from the SBS and SAS in protection of UK maritime assets, such as cruise liners, ferries, cargo ships and oil rigs. We were trained in various insertion methods including parachute, fast boat, helicopter insertion, submarine delivery and underwater swims. The job was very hard work, we spent many, many hours training, carrying out long underwater swims, sometimes up to 3km, at the end of which would be a climb of varying heights up a caving ladder to the target.
We spent many, many hours cold and wet in cold places. Several times we thought it was ‘our time’ when a boat would be caught by a bad wave, and we got capsized in the middle of the North Sea at night. Out of all my jobs, this was probably the most ‘Bond’.. dressed in black, climbing up the side of an oil rig, or a cruise liner underway, fast roping out of a helicopter at night onto the deck of a cargo ship, or donning a closed circuit oxygen rebreather and slipping into the water to silently approach a ship at anchor.
Nostalgia makes me forget that it was often freezing, and the times I fell off the caving ladder, or misjudged the landing when fast roping and hit the deck of a ship harder than I would have liked, or the sheer physical effort of a 3km underwater swim, wearing body armour and carrying weapons and other assorted kit, followed by the even harder task of climbing a caving ladder (notoriously difficult to climb) whilst still wearing body armour and carrying kit, usually in the region of 30lb and that’s before we even started ‘work’.
We were proficient in the use of a number of weapons, our sidearm was the Browning ‘hipower’ 9mm semiautomatic, later replaced by the Sig 226, the H&K MP5 9mm sub machine gun and the Colt AR-15 5.56mm semi-automatic rifle. We spent many hours on the range at varying distances and also in simulated close quarters battle simulations. For these, we used ‘simunition’, an advanced version of paintball that could be fired from normal weapons fitted with conversion kits. This allowed us to see and feel when we’d ‘gotten it wrong’ in training and we certainly did feel it, these rounds were pretty painful.
Prior to being deployed to Operation Granby in 1991, I had volunteered for Special Forces selection. At that time, the SBS and SAS ran their own individual selection processes. The SAS at Hereford and the SBS at Poole. My choice was the SBS, a natural choice given their work was primarily on and under the water. The initial selection process was two weeks, after which, successful candidates would progress to the Swimmer Canoeist course, lasting almost nine months. The first week of the course was devoted to assessing a candidate’s fitness and endurance over land, long days of physical activity, lots of ‘sickeners’ and three test marches; a 10 mile to be completed in less than 3 ½ hours, a 20 mile to be completed in less than 6 ½ hours and a 30 mile, to be completed in less than 12 hours. All these marches were self-navigated and carrying a load of 70lb plus food and water and over what the staff euphemistically called ‘undulating terrain’. The 20 and 30 mile marches were carried out ‘back to back’ with candidates being left out overnight with no shelter, and the 30 mile finishing with a swim out to a landing craft in Studland Bay.
The second week was water based, with instruction in the 2 man canoe, with increasing distances including night paddles as well as portaging the canoe between points. This involved dismantling the canoe and carrying half each in addition to our 70lb rucksack. This pushed out load weight to almost 130lb! It’s no wonder my knees complain in the mornings now!. Candidates who found themselves at the back of the pack on a paddle would be capsized by the staff and have to right their canoe and get back in and then try and catch up again…increasing the pressure on that pair.
We also carried out assessment of our abilities underwater using oxygen rebreather sets and conducting dives of up to 3 hours duration.
I was successful on the two week selection, but unfortunately, my tactical skills were seen to be lacking in our preparation for the Jungle phase and I was cut from the course prior to deployment to Brunei.
I left the Service in 1997, taking a voluntary redundancy. Following this I took some commercial diving contracts, including recovery of bodies from a sunken vessel in Iceland before settling on more mundane employment with the Civil Service and now, Cambridge University.
I still keep myself fit, although not as fit as I used to be. I’ve run half marathons, Last year we climbed Kilimanjaro and next year my wife and I will be running the length of Iceland from North to South. 210 miles in 9 days
So, there it is. I have been fortunate enough to have had what I consider to be the best job in the World. I have travelled lots, done things that I’d only ever seen in movies and gotten paid for it. On the flip side, I’ve spent many, many hours cold and wet, deprived of sleep, physically uncomfortable and on more than one occasion thought that my number was up, but I wouldn’t have swapped it for the world.
Last modified: 13 January 2026
