Philip Anthony Sessarego (31 December 1952 – November 2008), also known by the pen-name Tom Carew, was a British soldier, adventurer and author, who published the best-selling book Jihad!
After the army he worked on the family farm, but grew restless, and subsequently found employment using his military training as a mercenary soldier, with ex-members of the SAS, seeing service as an advisor to the Sri Lankan Army in counter-insurgency warfare in 1979, and in Afghanistan/Pakistan in the early 1980s with the United States Government's Defense Intelligence Agency, training the Afghan Mujahideen to fight the Soviet Union.
[3] In 1999, with the assistance of ghost writer Adrian Weale, Sessarego (using the pen name "Tom Carew") wrote an account of his military experiences in the Afghan-Soviet War entitled Jihad!
Sessarego was subsequently lured to the BBC on the pretence of an interview about Afghanistan, where on arrival he was aggressively evidentially confronted mid-interview by Eykyn accusing him of being an imposter, who had invented a non-existent career with the Special Air Service.
[6][7] After the film of the confrontation was broadcast by the BBC's evening Newsnight show, Sessarego was generally ridiculed in the British media for being a "fantasist", calling into doubt not just his claims to have been a trooper in the SAS but the whole content of Jihad!.
His publisher attempted to defend the book's validity by offering to remove a small part of its text that contained the erroneous claims regarding the Regiment.
Weale, the book's ghostwriter, defending its content by ripping out one page of its text during an interview with the BBC, as an illustration of how little space had been taken up with the claims regarding the Special Air Service.
[8] Sessarego subsequently was reported as living in Belgium in impoverished circumstances selling ex-Army surplus military materials and running "survival" training courses.