by Ken Wharton
Scene of the IRA bomb and shooting attack at Loughgall Police Station that resulted in eight IRA and one civilian being killed.
Several issues were raised by the ambush at Loughgall; very obviously it gave the Provisionals a very bloody nose, with the SAS/RUC privately regretting that all twelve members of the ASU had not come into their sights. It also showed the Republican paramilitaries that they could not attack SF bases with impunity. But more importantly, it demonstrated to the Army Council – which almost certainly included Martin McGuinness – that the problem of informants (touts) was not only endemic, but seemingly insurmountable. It was almost certainly true that an informant had been killed in the ambush, but it was also very likely that there was another informant, even more highly placed than the man who was unable to identify himself to the undercover ambushers at Loughgall. This author raises speculation in another chapter that the premature explosion at Frizzell’s fish shop in 1993 (see Chapter 14) could have been a deliberate attempt to kill one of the bombers – Thomas Begley – or to discredit those on the Army Council who wished to step up the offensive. Equally so, in the case of Lynagh, it is possible that the highly placed source (or one of the sources) of the Loughgall information wanted to eradicate the man known as ‘the Executioner’. He was viewed as a loose cannon who would often plan attacks of his own volition, running an almost independent campaign of attacks. He was almost certainly one of the architects of the border genocide campaign that was designed to kill off many of the Protestant farmers who lived in the vulnerable border area. It is known also that Lynagh was restricted by the Army Council to the Co. Tyrone border area as he was deemed too dangerous to roam unsupervised in the Belfast or Londonderry areas.
Although the ‘final’ ceasefire was still a number of years away, there was already a growing body of opinion within the Provisionals’ ranks that eventually the violence would have to stop and a dialogue with the British would need to take place. Men such as Lynagh, Patrick Kelly and later Thomas Begley represented the extreme violence of the 1970s and early ’80s that was considered necessary in the early days of the ‘struggle’. However, they were clearly surplus to requirements once the ‘Armalite and the ballot box’ strategy became central to Sinn Féin/PIRA thinking. Eight key players were killed but the next fifteen months witnessed the Poppy Day massacre in Enniskillen some six months later, followed by the Ballygawley coach massacre in 1988, both of which were carried out by the same units, albeit by their replacements. The SAS/RUC ambush had been a major setback for the IRA, but the aforementioned incidents demonstrated their strength in depth.
Ed Moloney, in his A Secret History of the IRA, claims that Lynagh and McKearney, as well as other members of the East Tyrone Brigade, had planned to use the attack on Loughgall as the springboard to launching a breakaway group of Republican paramilitaries that would be even more ruthless than the mainstream Provisional IRA. The killings very conveniently eradicated Lynagh and his cohorts, thus strangling the emergence of a group that could wreck PIRA strategy and prove extremely embarrassing to the entire Republican movement.
On 2 December 2011 some details of a Historical Enquires Team (HET) report into the incident were released by the Belfast Telegraph. The newspaper article reported that the HET findings concluded that members of the IRA opened fire first and thus the SAS soldiers were within their rights to return fire.
INSTANT REVENGE AT DRUMNAKILLY
On 20 August 1988, in what was a spectacular and irresponsible lapse of security on the part of the British Army, a coach carrying thirty-five young soldiers from the Light Infantry (LI) was attacked by the Provisionals. Eight soldiers were killed and twenty-eight were injured, including the driver; some of the injuries were appalling. In 2007, the author interviewed one of the survivors – David Hardy – who was still in some agony almost two decades later. The coach was unguarded as it made its way from Belfast docks to the LI barracks in Omagh. At this stage of the conflict, the Troubles had raged for almost twenty years, and no one could have been unaware of the dangers that faced unarmed military personnel moving around Ulster.
Shortly after midnight, in the early hours of the Saturday morning, near Ballygawley roundabout, the bus passed a parked vehicle, in which was hidden a device containing 200lb (91kg) of Semtex. The watching team saw the vehicle pass the bomb and detonated it from about 300 yards away; one of the bombers was said to be Gerard Harte, whose demise, along with the other suspected bombers, his brother, Martin Harte,* and Brian Mullin, we will read of shortly. The blast completely wrecked the bus, hurling it almost 100ft down the road, throwing the unbelted passengers into hedges and fields, and trapping many of the dead and injured inside the twisted metal. The explosion left a 6ft-deep crater, with mangled bodies and metal strewn over a wide area.
Army/RUC intel were made very quickly aware of the identities of at least three of the bombing team: the aforementioned Harte brothers and Brian Mullin. In what has been described as an ‘incredible coincidence’, it was also learned that the same three men planned to carry out the assassination of an off-duty UDR soldier at Drumnakilly, Co. Tyrone. Both pieces of information, although nominally passed on to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by Kevin Maginnis MP, came from a high-ranking informant inside the Provisionals.
It was revealed to the SF that a three-man PIRA unit intended to kill a part-time UDR soldier either at his home or during his normal working day as a lorry driver for a coal delivery company. During the very early hours of 30 August, an undercover soldier was inserted into the UDR man’s house, while the intended victim was spirited away to a place of safety. The man’s lorry was driven to a lonely and isolated spot on Long Bog Road at Cloughfin, where the disguised SAS man began to change a supposedly flat tyre. Twelve of his colleagues hid in a nearby hedgerow while another soldier set himself up inside an abandoned and derelict van.
The scene of the Ballygawley bus bombing on 20 August 1988.
The disguised lorry driver had to change the tyre several times during a six-hour stint, sitting and kneeling alongside a perfectly good piece of rubber. Eventually, a stolen white Ford Sierra car containing Gerard Harte (29), his brother Martin (23) and Brian Mullin (26), clad in the same boiler suits as used by the ‘Loughgall martyrs’ and armed with two AK-47s and another weapon, arrived on the scene. It is unknown which side opened fire, but under ROE, the SAS team was entitled to fire and did so. Just under 200 rounds were expended at the terrorist gang; when the smoke cleared, with the stench of cordite heavy in the air, the Harte brothers and Mullin were all dead. Could they have been arrested; might they have been offered the option of surrender? It is a moot point, as all three men were known or suspected killers who were at the location for a specific reason: to kill again. Moreover, the three were aware of the consequences of their actions. They were armed with deadly weapons, and it was, as both sides acknowledged, a war situation. In arriving in such a manner with the clear intention of killing an unarmed soldier, they forfeited the right to any sort of consideration under Geneva Convention guidelines.
The late Stanley Whitehouse* told the author in a private conversation of a situation that he faced in Holland in the winter of 1944/45:
We were dug in behind a hedge overlooking the road, when a group of about 8 German soldiers came marching along. They were all armed, but their rifles were shouldered; they were sitting ducks. All at once the order came to fire and we just blasted away. A few seconds later, they were all dead or dying. I felt bad about it, but they would have done the same to us.
Helicopters quickly took the undercover soldiers away, while a platoon of UDR personnel replaced them at the scene. If indeed the three dead men were responsible for the Ballygawley bomb, instant justice had been meted out. The three men were later given paramilitary funerals and even as the echoes of the volleys of shots fired over their coffins died away in the summer air, Gerry Adams was saying of the dead PIRA men that they were ‘... good, decent, patriotic freedom fighters driven to fight
for justice ...’ On the other hand, Harte was described by an RUC spokesman as a ‘... ruthless, dedicated terrorist ... the organiser of many attacks on the Security Forces ...’
The Provisionals, Mid-Tyrone Brigade had a number of hard-core bombers and gunmen, any one of whom might have been involved in the coach bombing, but it is interesting to note that it was Ken Maginnis MP, now Lord Maginnis of Drumglass, who very shortly after the attack on the LI informed Prime Minister Thatcher of the identities of the ASU. Was he tipped off by an informer from inside the Provisionals or was he simply score-settling and setting up three ruthless terrorists on the basis that their deaths would be a hard blow to the Republican paramilitaries? As a member of the Ulster Unionist Party, he once infamously compared homosexuality to bestiality, and although perceived as a liberal by some, despised the IRA. He has always maintained that he gave Mrs Thatcher the names of people he thought would have been involved in carrying out the attack. Indeed, some twenty-seven years after the Lone Bog Road he told RTÉ: ‘Of course I felt, thank God, that’s the end of those fellows, they will not be killing any more of my soldiers. And that’s war.’**
The real issue here though is did the highly placed source inform only Mr Maginnis, or was he an agent of either the RUC or Gardaí Special Branch? As Lord Maginnis was still alive at the time this book was written, one can only speculate as to how he acquired this information. However, as one former soldier told the author: ‘I don’t really care how he came by the information; all I know is that three leading Provvie gunmen were killed. I believe that the three were heavily involved in the Ballygawley attack but in any case, they had been involved in Security Force murders, so I say: well done Lord Maginnis.’
Rumours have persisted for years that the ambush of the three PIRA men was planned well in advance of the coach bomb, but that it was merely a ‘happy coincidence’ that the alleged perpetrators of the outrage had already been earmarked for ambush. One sad note in relation to the timing of this attack is that, had the ambush been timed for eleven days earlier, the soldiers of the Light Infantry might not have been killed by the roadside bomb. This, however, is an easy criticism to make, given that the benefit of hindsight ensures that the military historian is always blessed with 20:20 vision.
SENIOR LOYALIST AMBUSHED ON CRUMLIN ROAD
On 2 October 1989, in what was one of the very few ambushes carried out against Loyalist paramilitaries, an undercover British Army unit – alleged to have been SAS – killed UVF member Peter Robinson (27) after it had observed him shooting a Catholic dead in a random sectarian attack.
In the early autumn of 1989, British intel had been alerted that the UVF were planning to use a stolen motorbike to kill a Catholic civilian in the Crumlin Road area. It is thought that the source of information was an RUC Special Branch informer in the UVF: Colin ‘Crazy’ Craig. Although the Crumlin Road area is Protestant/Loyalist, Catholic residents of the nearby Ardoyne were forced to use it as a thoroughfare and for shopping trips. Robinson and Davy McCullough were observed on their motorbike along the Crumlin Road by an undercover team in two unmarked vehicles: a Vauxhall Astra and a Fiat car; in the unit was at least one female member. McCullough was driving the motorbike, when Robinson on pillion spotted a Catholic civilian, Paddy McKenna (43), walking past a mini-parade of shops. It is unknown if he was their intended target or whether he was simply chosen at random, but the bike slowed, allowing Robinson to fire a burst of more than a dozen rounds at him, hitting him eleven times and killing him instantly. A photograph of the time shows the man’s body lying in a massive pool of blood outside a shop front. There has never been any suggestion that the victim had paramilitary links.
As the motorbike began to speed away, it was rammed by one of the undercover cars, throwing the pair to the ground. One of the female operatives fired two shots at Robinson, mortally wounding him, before a male soldier shot him twice in the head. The attack, or rather the timing of the ambush, has sparked some controversy over the years, as Republicans in particular claimed that the motorbike could have been stopped before the killing of Mr McKenna. Indeed, Laura Friel, writing in An Phoblacht, claimed that the innocent Catholic was ‘sacrificed’ in order to legitimise the undercover shooting. In her article* she claimed that the undercover unit had delayed their ambush in order to make themselves look good and ‘prove’ that they were targeting Loyalists as well as Republicans. Her article also suggests that the name of the agent inside the UVF was ‘leaked’ to gunmen in the INLA, who shot Colin Craig dead along with two other UVF men – Trevor King and David Hamilton – on 16 June 1994.
What makes this one incident even more interesting, apart from its rarity, is the level of suggested collusion between the SF and the Loyalists. It was indeed rare that Loyalists were targeted for ambush and this particular example opened the door to many allegations from Sinn Féin/PIRA. Ms Friel’s main supplier of information for this accusation is simply referred to as a ‘source’. Of course, when such a person is adamant that they require anonymity, then it is the writer’s duty to protect that source, as I have done on many occasions. However, as Sinn Féin publications have never been backward in coming forward, it seems strange that they rely on a vague description. The salient point of the article is as follows:
‘The [British] army was shooting IRA men dead all over the place, so they had to be seen to target loyalists as well. The decision was made to take out Brian Robinson and Davy McCullough,’ said the source. According to the source, just hours before the McKenna murder, Robinson and McCullough were told they would be carrying out the attack on a motorcycle instead of using a car. ‘The lads were surprised by this but went along with it. I am in no doubt now that the vehicle was changed to make it easier for the [British] army to kill Brian and Davy,’ said the source.
I think that the allegations contained in the aforementioned article are wild and inaccurate; it is a part of the Republican mythology of the Troubles. If collusion between the security forces and the Loyalist paramilitaries did exist – and there is more hearsay than tangible evidence to support this – then it was simply a representation of collusion from all sides of the conflict. There are claims that both the Irish Defence Force as well as the Irish Police, An Gardaí Siochana, conspired with both the Provisionals as well as with the INLA. The destruction of forensic evidence on the Irish side of the border following the Warrenpoint massacre in 1979; the betrayal and ambush of senior RUC detectives, Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Bob Buchanan by Sean ‘the Surgeon’ Hughes and the South Armagh Brigade of PIRA* at Jonesborough in 1989; the murder of Lord Justice of Appeal in Northern Ireland, Sir Maurice Gibson, and his wife Cecily, Lady Gibson, in 1987 are fine examples of this ‘collusion in reverse’.
Former Provisional Kieran Conway,** in his interesting book Southside Provisional: From Freedom Fighter to the Four Courts, alleges that members of the Dublin establishment including a top banker, a stockbroker, a leading journalist and several mainstream politicians aided the Provisionals in their armed campaign.
The following incident does not relate to any of the undercover ambushes of which we are discussing, but it nonetheless lends a little additional weight to the claims by the anti-Republicans of Gardaí collusion. On 28 October 1986, a PIRA unit fired seven missiles containing Libyan-supplied Semtex at an Army watchtower in Drummuckavall, Co. Armagh. Soldiers from the Scots Guards pursued a stolen car containing the mortar team onto land owned by Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy, a notorious Republican who is suspected of involvement in several terrorist incidents, including the Omagh bombing in 1998. In 2015, he was convicted of tax evasion and gaoled for eighteen months. The Murphy farm straddles the border with the Irish Republic, partly in Co. Armagh and partly in Co. Louth. One of the soldiers accidentally ‘crossed’ the border into the Republic, where he found two Provisionals hiding in a shed. He attempted to arrest them, whereupon a violent scuffle broke out; he was clearly in dire straits, but a Gardaí patrol arrived and arrested
him for illegal entry into Ireland and for being in possession of an illegal weapon! He was taken to a police station at Dundalk but was released six hours later after negotiations between senior RUC and Gardaí officers. The two PIRA suspects were told to ‘run along’, as they had apparently not committed any crimes in the Republic. The neutral reader should be aware that if collusion existed at all, it was clearly not confined to just one side.
IPLO AMBUSHED AT KINNEGO
On 18 April 1990, the Irish People’s Liberation Organisation (IPLO) lost a member when one of their gunmen was killed in an ambush by the Army in Kinnego, Co. Armagh. There were again complaints about ‘state executions’, but the reality was the inevitable result of terrorists playing big boys’ games but forgetting that these inevitably result in big boys’ rules, to echo the words of author Mark Urban. In the late evening of that day, undercover soldiers, believed to have been SAS, were dug in around the house of an off-duty RUCR officer on the Armagh–Charlemont Road at Kinnego, Co. Armagh. They observed two men approach the house, both of whom were armed with sawn-off shotguns. IPLO gunman Martin Corrigan (25) and another man were challenged by the soldiers; Corrigan acted aggressively and was immediately shot dead; his comrade wisely surrendered.
The ambush demonstrated the reach of Army/RUC intel, as the source was an agent inside the Republican paramilitary organisation. Counter-intelligence was again showing that they could penetrate not only the Provisionals, but also the INLA and the IPLO, on the Nationalist side. It was also a fact that they had many agents inside the UFF and UVF on the Loyalist side.
DEATH IN A MUSHROOM SHED: LISASLY
Desmond ‘Dessie’ Grew was what might be termed ‘a professional terrorist’, being a member of the OIRA before joining the INLA, serving four separate terms of imprisonment for this activity. He is thought to have been involved in the killings in West Germany of Heidi Hazell in September 1989 as well as RAF Corporal Maheshkumar Islania and his baby daughter, Nivruti Maheskkumar, in November of the same year.