by Ken Wharton
He was then forced face down on the settee, where his hands and legs were tied together; a blanket was then forced over his head, leaving him in the dark, both figuratively and literally. One of the two PIRA men left the flat, presumably to bring Scappaticci along with other members of the nutting squad. This psychological torture continued for just under seven hours before McGartland pleaded to be allowed to go to the toilet. He managed to hobble into the bathroom where, to his horror, he saw that the bath was full to the brim; this was a favourite torture tactic: drowning, reviving, drowning. McGartland takes up the story here:
I poked my head out of the bathroom door and looked down the hallway at the sitting room window, wondering exactly how far I was from the ground. I tried to remember how many floors we had walked up that morning. I had no idea what was below that window – concrete, parked cars, trees, shrub or grass.
Knowing that he was at least 40ft in the air, but also knowing that his own mortality confronted him, he hobbled as fast as the restraints would allow, hurling himself head-first into the window. He crashed through the glass, falling three storeys, hitting the hard ground and narrowly missing spiked railings, which left him unconscious and badly injured. Had he not done so, the nutting squad would have taken as much pleasure as possible, as well as taken their time, in violently extracting a confession from him. Marty told the author that he knew that they would then bind masking tape tightly around his head, completely covering his eyes, make him kneel and then fire two shots into the back of his neck.
He was discovered by a passing Army patrol – believed to be the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers – with his SB minder close behind; he was unconscious, covered in blood and broken glass, suffering from a deep wound in his side. In addition, he had several cuts to the head, a fractured jaw, several missing teeth as well as severe concussion. He was initially treated under armed guard at the RVH, before being transferred to the Musgrave Park Hospital and then to protective custody at Palace Barracks.
Escapes such as this were extremely rare and this may have been the only instance in the bloody period of the Troubles. The Provisionals’ attitude has long been that if a Volunteer has been ‘green-booked’* he or she is aware of the punishment: that punishment is a kangaroo court, a severe beating and torture, before the inevitable two rounds into the back of the head. It is said that certain members of the ‘execution party’ would place the hood over the victim’s head, drawing out the agonising moment, as the terrified man desperately gulped in his last few breaths of air, then came that moment of eternal blackness.
As the reader will see, the Provisionals were riddled with informers – a fact that is borne out in Chapter 13, which covers ambushes in which undercover soldiers, armed with first-class information, were able to ‘take out’ top PIRA players as well as destroy several arms dumps. This information could have only come from highly ranked Provisionals, such was the accuracy, detailing times, places and often identities of those involved. It is not proven, but theories abound that as the ‘long war’ neared its end, the Army Council wanted to change the focus of the campaign, deliberately sacrificing the elements who did not agree with the long-term goals of the peace process. The failed PIRA attack at Loughgall (see Chapter 13), which resulted in the deaths of eight Provisionals, is often cited as a case in point. The deaths of James Lynagh and Patrick Kelly in the ambush were very convenient for the so-called ‘doves’ on the Army Council, who saw the pair as too independent and too much of a threat to a future peace process. One unsubstantiated rumour that has persisted for years is that Lynagh allegedly threatened to ‘execute’ Gerry Adams, so much was his hatred and distrust of the man.
The subsequent paranoia saw several ‘executions’ and numerous violent interrogations that produced a toxic atmosphere within the IRA’s ranks with a consequent lowering of morale. In effect, these misguided actions of those who commanded the movement unintentionally took the pressure off the security forces as paramilitary operations were reduced and lives were saved. Essentially, the upper echelons of the IRA in tandem with their burgeoning nutting squad reduced the effectiveness of one of the most ruthless killing machines the UK has witnessed.
There have been many allegations against Gerry Adams, the former President of Sinn Féin, and these will be looked at further in this book in connection to which orders – if any – that he gave either directly or indirectly to the ‘executioners’. There is further evidence that Adams was involved as an IRA commander in the deaths of at least three people: Jean McConville, Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee. The deaths of informers Wright and McKee are dealt with elsewhere in this book, but Mrs McConville became one of the previously mentioned group of people who will be forever known as ‘the disappeared’.
The ‘disappeared’ were people who had incurred the wrath of Irish Republican paramilitaries such as the Provisional IRA. They were taken from their homes either in the dead of night or in daytime under various ruses to ensure their compliance. Jean McConville was abducted from her home in the Divis Street area of Belfast on the night of 7 December 1972. Former Provisional Dolours Price admitted in an interview with Ed Moloney that she was the one who drove her to her death.* McConville was a widowed mother-of-ten, whose children screamed and clung to her legs as PIRA thugs barged into her home and dragged her away. She had been variously accused of spying for the British Army and that she gave comfort and solace to a dying soldier who had been shot in the Divis Street area. It is alleged that to calm the children down, in the company of an older and unnamed PIRA female, Price told them: ‘Mammy will be back shortly,’ thus condemning them to a life of severe emotional problems, of being shunted from care home to care home and of never knowing where their mother’s body was buried. Price drove her across the border, handing her over to the nutting squad in Dundalk on the Irish side. As Patrick Radden Keefe writes: ‘Price also asserted that Gerry Adams, the Irish Republican politician who had helped engineer the peace agreement, was the person who gave the orders.’** It is unclear if Price continued to play a further role in the disinformation process that followed, as the local Provisional commanders began several rumours to the effect that a British Army radio transmitter had been found in her flat, and that she had abandoned her children to run off to England with her ‘soldier boyfriend’. Leading PIRA member Brendan ‘the Dark’ Hughes has always claimed – according to respected journalist and author Ed Moloney – that Adams was a senior commander in the Provisional IRA – something that the former President of Sinn Féin has always denied. Hughes, also known as ‘Darkie’, allegedly told Moloney in a series of interviews that Adams gave the order for the disappearance of several people, including Mrs McConville and the two previously mentioned Freds, McKee and Wright.
As recently as April 2018, the Guardian newspaper claimed to have unearthed a document in The National Archives at Kew that purported to show that the Army was aware of a cell within the Provisionals referred to as ‘the unknowns’. This group was responsible for the abduction, murder and secret burial of ‘enemies’ of the organisation. The newspaper claims that British military intelligence was aware of the existence of this secret inner group. The report states that soldiers arrested three PIRA Volunteers following an armed robbery in Belfast’s Oldpark area. It further alleges that one of the men may have informed his interrogators of the existence of this group. If this was the case, the Army may have chosen to suppress this information as they had discovered a very good source of intelligence from a senior level of the Provisional IRA. In fact, this information was so secret, it is felt that many members of PIRA would have been unaware of its existence. If this is the case, the Army had struck a seam of gold with high-grade information being available to it over the course of most of the Troubles.
In addition to PIRA’s Internal Security Unit, better known as the nutting squad, there were sub-units that were used for punishment shootings; these involved kneecapping and ‘hurley beatings’, which were carried out by ad hoc punishment sq
uads using heavy wooden hurley sticks to cause severe physical damage. The beatings and kneecappings were used against ‘antisocial elements’, who might include house-breakers, routine thugs and bullies – unless they were already Volunteers – drug dealers and, of course, paedophiles.
On 8 September 1974, a local Catholic, Arthur Rafferty (56), died some twenty-one days after he had been shot by a local punishment squad from the New Lodge unit. He had been seized on or around 18 August from his home in Hillman Street in Belfast. He was a docker who had been suspected of sexually interfering with a child at Belfast Waterworks. He was taken to waste ground in Newington Street, where he was shot five times in his stomach and legs. A placard left around his neck stated: ‘This is the penalty for a sexual assault on a child of seven years old at the Waterworks.’ He died in the RVH despite the staff’s best efforts to save him. There was a certain amount of hypocrisy and double standards in the actions of the Provisionals, but their uncompromising attitudes were much in evidence in this punishment shooting. Quite what proof they had is unclear, but it further demonstrated their utter ruthlessness and the iron grip with which they controlled the Nationalist areas.
TOUTS
Jock 2413, Royal Artillery:
When the IRA executed one of their own members for touting, they usually used two weapons and both shots were fired through the back of the head so that the exit wounds meant that the victims’ family could not have an open coffin wake. Plus, there were quite a few occasions when the family of the so-called tout were prominent Republicans and the bodies just disappeared without the usual execution announcement. This enabled the families to claim compensation from the government. Another indignity which the dead informers suffered was the fact that when the body was discovered, a rope was tied around their legs and it was dragged by an armoured PIG several yards in case it was booby trapped. I witnessed that happen in the Bogside. The lad was 19 years old and was a paid informer. He must have been so scared because his hair was literally standing on end.
IRA punishment squads that kept ‘order’ on the Nationalist housing estates ruled with a rod of iron, employing a cold-hearted ruthlessness against anyone who transgressed their ‘laws’. Unlike the nutting squads with their capital crimes, these PIRA personnel’s task was to stop before the victim died; favoured methods of punishment included tarring and feathering, beating with any manner of blunt instruments and kneecapping. Kneecapping is a form of malicious wounding, in which the victim is injured in the knee, using either a firearm or power drill to damage the knee joint. Contrary to popular belief, the patella (kneecap) is usually not injured in these incidents; rather damage to soft tissues that include nerves and arteries is the primary objective. Some victims can walk with a limp afterwards, while others are crippled for life, and there have been instances of a bungled job that has severed the femoral artery and caused the victim to bleed to death. This indeed was the case in the 1980s when a punishment squad badly bungled an attempted kneecapping in Leeson Street, Belfast.
UDA members on the Shankill Road.
In 2013, the author was given the honour and privilege of helping to write the final two chapters of the late Raymond Gilmour’s book about his life as an agent inside both the INLA and the provisional IRA: What Price Truth.* Part of this process was listening to an interview with Raymond that told in detail the undoubted sacrifices that he was forced to make in his attempts to destroy terrorism from within. In the book, he mentions a punishment shooting outside the Bogside Inn in Londonderry by a PIRA gunman. The leader of the punishment squad was either inexperienced, nervous or just plain cruel, as he used an Armalite, firing a high-velocity round, instead of the standard handgun. The effects at such close range of using a highly powered weapon were naturally catastrophic, taking the victim’s leg off above the knee. He bled to death long before an ambulance could arrive.
The Loyalist paramilitaries, while equally as vicious as their Republican counterparts, were not as well organised, however, when it came to punishment beatings, often working on an ad hoc basis, often indiscriminately random. Unlike PIRA’s Internal Security Unit, both the UVF and the UFF carried out their internal killings and violent assaults almost on an as-you-go footing. It was the Loyalists who coined the term ‘romper room’ to describe a torture chamber-cum-interrogation centre, with the Lawnbrook Social Club being the favourite of Shankill Loyalists such as Lenny Murphy and his Shankill Butchers gang. It was also used, but not exclusively, for the torture and murder of Catholics who had either inadvertently crossed sectarian boundaries or been abducted by murder gangs. One former RUC officer told the author of a particularly gruesome murder scene that he had attended:
There was a dozen or more teeth, clearly yanked out by the roots, several bloodied fingernails and bloody spatters in every single direction. There were urine stains around the chair in which he had been tied and tortured and his underpants were caked in faeces. One thing which will stay with me was the look of agony on his face.
The Loyalists ran their areas with a mailed fist inside a mailed glove, as a chronicler of the Troubles once said, punishing people for crimes both real and imaginedry. One UDA member had long been suspected of siphoning off funds from the club at which he worked, resulting in an arbitrary sentence of death by the area commanders. The man was asked to meet up with a fellow member who just happened to have been his friend since childhood. He was invited to the friend’s house and instructed to bring a loaded gun with him. On arrival, he handed over the loaded weapon, before being plied with drink as they discussed tactics to deal with the offender. After an hour or so, it is alleged that he asked who the man was; at this stage his friend was standing behind him; he simply said, ‘You,’ before twice shooting his best friend in the back of the head.
UDA members attempt to match an Army patrol at Clonduff Drive in the Castlereagh Road area of Belfast, 1972.
The practice of kneecapping was not the sole domain of the Republican punishment squads; however, the Loyalists took it a degree further in some instances, using an electric power drill to inflict the same tissue and bone damage, but doing so over an excruciatingly long and painful period to inflict maximum agony on the offender.
As we will discuss in this book’s final chapter, this ‘shadow justice’ is still prevalent today – not with the savage frequency of the past, but Republican paramilitaries, like their Loyalist counterparts, are the real ‘law and order’ in their ‘tribal’ areas. It is often written that the Republican paramilitaries, ‘morally obliged’ to apply the Green Book quite literally, felt that they could terrify their members into remaining loyal. As evidence of a high level of informing clearly exists, then this ruthlessness did not work in every instance. There were those informers who wanted power and money, which motivated them to betray the IRA, but there were also many dedicated men and women who wanted to destroy what they saw as a cancer from within. This author eagerly awaits future revelations that might well reveal just how senior some informants really were.
A UDA checkpoint barrier at Moat Road, 8 June 1972.
UDA members ‘on patrol’.
A man is frisked by masked members of the UDA at a barricade on the Lisburn Road end of Sandy Row, 1972.
UDA barricades off Ainsworth Avenue, 4 July 1972.
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* Colin Breen, op. cit., p.81.
* I have been asked not to name this man for legal reasons.
** God and the Gun, Martin Dillon (Routledge, 1999), pp.99–100..
*** Home Run, John Nichol (Penguin Books, 2008).
* www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-24794617.
** The two men were taken into the Republic, where they were executed by the IRA’s nutting squad. Their bodies were buried in unmarked graves in isolated, boggy countryside.
* A former head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Sir Nigel Hamilton, referred to McGuinness as such in March 2017.
** The masking tape was designed not to let the victim’s
head smash open from the bullet’s exit wound. The purpose was to allow an open casket funeral.
* The Green Book is the IRA’s manual of its standing rules and regulations; once a man or woman has been green-booked, he or she belongs to the IRA and is bound by their punitive procedures and punishments.
* www.newyorker.com/news/newsdesk/the-last-testament-of-a-former-ira-terrorist.
** Ibid.
* What Price Truth, Raymond Gilmour (Createspace, 2015)..
CHAPTER 10
MAINLAND ATTACKS
It was once said, by persons unknown, that a bomb in England was worth ten in Northern Ireland. This was proven time and time again when outrages in Warrington, on the M62 motorway between Leeds and Bradford and in the Royal Parks in London attracted more media attention than some of the atrocities in Ulster. It was further evidenced by the ‘billion pound bombs’ which left Manchester’s commercial heart devastated and tore huge gaping holes in the City of London’s financial heart with major explosions at the Stock Exchange and at the Baltic Exchange. Bomb attacks in Northern Ireland were often relegated to the inside pages of the newspapers, also being moved down the order of newsworthy incidents on both BBC and ITV news programmes. The killing of soldiers and horses in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park and the killings of two young boys in Warrington meant much more to the English, Scottish and Welsh populations than did the napalm-like attack on the La Mon House Restaurant or the slaughter of Protestant workmen at Teebane. For this reason alone, the Provisional IRA set up a dedicated group of Volunteers known as the ‘England team’ whose job it was to bomb frequently and occasionally spectacularly, disrupting the English lifestyle and daily routine.