by Ken Wharton
In the very early hours of 9 October 1990, Army/RUC intel, having learned of an arms cache at Lisasly, Co. Armagh, set up an ambush in the remote rural area. A team belonging to the British Army’s 14 Intelligence Company – there are several highly informed sources who claim that it involved the SAS – dug in close to a mushroom shed, as they had been informed that Grew (37) and a fellow INLA member, Martin McCaughey (23), planned to retrieve three AK-47 automatic weapons for an attack against an off-duty SF member later that day.
The two men arrived in a stolen car and scouted around for signs of a potential ambush before entering the shed, emerging a few seconds later with the weapons. The undercover soldiers, believing that their lives were at severe risk, opened fire. Grew was hit and fell backwards into the mushroom shed; McCaughey was mortally wounded, falling against the shed door, which then fell on top of him. One of the soldiers thought that the wounded man (McCaughey) made a noise, and so fired again, this time killing him. Grew was hit several more times; there were no further movements or sounds. It is estimated that more than seventy shots were fired at the two INLA men; Grew was hit twenty-two times, with wounds to his heart, lungs, liver, kidney, ribcage and diaphragm; McCaughey was hit ten times.
The Irish Supreme Court later ruled that that as the men were victims of a ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy, the British State must pass on details of disclosure to their families. However, an inquest jury in Northern Ireland stated: ‘Mr Grew and Mr McCaughey put their own lives in danger by being in the area of the sheds in the vicinity of a stolen car, which was expected to be used in terrorist activity. They were both armed with guns, wearing gloves and balaclavas and were approaching soldiers who believed that their lives were in immediate danger.’
Predictably, Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams was outraged, claiming that there was ‘clear evidence’ of a deliberate shoot-to-kill on the part of what some Republicans claimed were ‘... execution squads’. Adams described Grew during his eulogy as ‘... a freedom fighter, a patriot and a decent upstanding Irish citizen’. Whether such actions by the British Army were by this stage of the Troubles standard procedure is a moot point. The Thatcher – later Major – Government had demonstrated that they were prepared to fight fire with fire, returning the IRA’s famed ruthlessness with an equal amount of the same. The consequences of all of these ambushes were that the Provisionals’ Army Council were forced to concede that their organisation was riddled with informers – apparently at the very highest levels – and that no cache of weapons anywhere in the North was safe from betrayal and subsequent discovery. In order to combat the growing menace of informants, the Army Council was quite prepared to turn a blind eye to any and every excessive behaviour on the part of Scappaticci’s ‘nutting squad’. If the number of PIRA/INLA men killed was only small, the high-profile deaths – Lynagh, Kelly, Grew, et al. – made each ambush by undercover soldiers even more impactful.
INLA AMBUSHED AT VICTORIA BRIDGE
In late 1990, an agent inside the INLA warned his handlers that an off-duty UDR soldier, Leslie Finlay, was to be murdered at his home at Victoria Bridge, Co. Tyrone. On 12 November 1990, Mr Finlay and his family were secretly removed from their home as SAS and RUC HMSU units dug in in the fields surrounding the house. In the winter darkness, a stolen car arrived, containing three INLA men, including Strabane man Alex Patterson (31). He walked towards the house, but on seeing no sign of life, fired his weapon through the front door, apparently in frustration. However, it then jammed. At that moment, the undercover personnel opened fire on him, giving him no option other than to run back towards the getaway car. However, the panicked driver, clearly fearing for his own life, began to drive away. Patterson attempted to throw himself into the moving vehicle but was cut down in a hail of bullets, falling backwards into the road. The car was hit several times, but the driver managed to drive away; shortly afterwards, it crashed, forcing them to abandon the vehicle and run across fields. It is known that they managed to put some distance between themselves and their pursuers before they eventually found an empty caravan several miles away in which to hide. However, Sammy Joe McNulty and Eddie McGarrigal were arrested four days later by an RUC patrol and taken into custody.
Leslie Finlay, the intended victim, told the author in a private conversation: ‘When I was informed that an INLA gang was coming to my house, well, I knew that they weren’t coming to wish me happy birthday!’
THE COAGH AMBUSH
Coagh – pronounced Coke – is a village in Co. Tyrone; it was used frequently as a base by the IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade, which included Tony Doris, Lawrence McNally and Michael Peter Ryan. On 3 June 1991, acting upon information from an informant, an eight-man SAS team set up an ambush in Coagh’s Main Street. They were aware that the three aforementioned PIRA members had planned to kill an off-duty UDR soldier on that day; they were aware also that the ASU had hijacked a car in nearby Moneymore the previous day. One of the three – McNally – was heavily suspected of the murder of Derek Ferguson (30) on 9 April of the same year at his caravan between Lough Neagh and Cookstown. PIRA intel had failed yet again as they killed a man suspected of UVF membership in front of his two sons. The victim had no connections with Loyalist paramilitaries and was simply killed because he was a Protestant and a relative of a Unionist MP William McCrea.
Just three days before the ambush took place, the Provisionals had rolled a lorry packed with explosives into Glenanne Barracks that killed three soldiers and injured forty more. The three men of the ASU all had chequered pasts, with Ryan believed to have led the attack on the Derryard PVCP on 13 December 1989.*
In addition to the murder of Derek Ferguson, three off-duty UDR soldiers had been killed by the Provisionals in the area over the course of the previous three years; the soldiers were: Edward Gibson (23) in 1988, Leslie Dallas (39) in 1988 and Thomas Jameson (40) in 1990, all killed at home or on their way to work. It is widely thought that Ryan and one of the other three men of the ASU were involved in their murders.
At approximately 07.30 hours, as eight undercover soldiers waited behind a lorry in the centre of the village, a stolen red Vauxhall Cavalier drove into Main Street. Their target was an off-duty UDR soldier who waited every morning in his car in Coagh to pick up a workmate. The SAS had removed the man from harm and even had one of their own soldiers in the driver’s seat of his car as bait for the terrorist gang. The car approached, with Doris driving; the ambush team opened fire, hitting him in the initial burst of fire; he lost control, crashing into parked cars in Hannover Square just by the bridge.
At least one of the other two PIRA men returned fire as the gun battle raged for around ten minutes, with the car bursting into flames. Doris was already dead, slumped in the front seat; McNally and Ryan’s bodies were half in, half out of the blazing car. Two AKM assault rifles were found in the burned-out car; the dead men could only be identified through dental records. Peter Ryan was thought to have been involved in more than a dozen murders of security force personnel; additionally, he had escaped with Joe Doherty and Paul Patrick Magee from the Crumlin Road Gaol in June 1981.
As in previous situations involving SAS ambushes, a local unit of ‘green soldiers’ quickly took over the scene, providing a protective cordon for the RUC forensics’ team as the undercover unit was whisked away. Laura Friel, writing in An Phoblacht (Republican News) on the seventeenth anniversary of the shooting made the following claim:
Scene of the ambush of an armed IRA gang by the SAS at Coagh in which three gunmen were killed.
It has always been known that the three Volunteers, who were on active service at the time of their deaths, died as a result of an SAS ambush. In classic shoot-to-kill style, presumably acting on information, the SAS established a killing zone and waited for the IRA ASU to enter the area. We accept that it was a war situation and that injury or death was a likely outcome for all participants in that morning’s action. There are nevertheless rules of war which govern how combatants treat each o
ther after the action has ended and a particular soldier no longer poses a threat to the other side. We believe these rules were broken in a deliberate and pre-meditated way by British forces.
This was countered on the Loyalist side by Unionist MP William McCrea, who said, ‘They have fallen into the pit they had planned for others and justice has been done.’
Sinn Féin councillor Francie Molloy stated, ‘This shows there were enough troops on the ground to have secured the arrest of the occupants of the car without anyone being shot. Instead it was a case of judge, jury and executioner all in one operation.’ Without wishing to over-labour the point about the significant impact this type of ambush would have on PIRA thinking and tactics, Mr Molloy’s statement demonstrates that the SAS had severely rattled the Republican paramilitaries and disrupted many proposed operations, some of which would be shelved permanently, saving future lives of both the security forces as well as innocent civilians.
With evidence emerging later – presumably from the same source as the leak that resulted in the deaths of Doris, Ryan and McNally – that the East Tyrone Brigade had planned to replicate their earlier attack at Kingsmills in January 1976, some men are probably still alive today as a consequence of their deaths in that blazing car. The rationale was that, as several workmen’s buses passed through Coagh every day, they would set up a fake VCP, before summarily executing the workmen, as they had done ‘successfully’ at Kingsmills. The proposed Coagh attack never came to fruition, but the tragedy of Teebane crossroads that resulted in the deaths of eight Protestant workmen would occur only six months after the deaths of Doris, Ryan and McNally.
CAR PARK AMBUSH: DERNAGH
In February 1992, SF intel learned of a pending attack by the Provisionals on the RUC base at Coalisland in Co. Fermanagh. The information is again alleged to have come from a ‘very, very senior Provisional’. The agent supplied them with a very detailed account of the planned operation. Details included the names of some of the six-man team, the location as well as the intended use of a Soviet-supplied Degtyaryova-Shpagina Krupnokaliberny (DShK). This formidable weapon is capable of firing ten rounds a second at a muzzle velocity of 2,788ft (850m) per second. It was a deadly weapon designed to annihilate the enemy – a heavy machine gun that was quite capable of bringing down an aeroplane.
St Patrick’s church, Dernagh, near Clonnoe, where four IRA gunmen were killed by the SAS in 1992.
In the small hours of 16 February, an SAS unit dug in in fields surrounding St Patrick’s church, Dernagh, near Clonnoe, as their informant stated that this was where the ASU planned to meet after the attack. The RUC base was also quietly evacuated, but with lights left blazing to give the impression that it was still manned. Just after 22.00 hours on a cold winter’s evening, at least six PIRA arrived at the car park in stolen vehicles, including a flatbed lorry on which the DShK was mounted. After parking up, the bulk of the team climbed on board the lorry, which then set off in the company of a saloon vehicle for the short journey to Coalisland. At exactly 22.30 hours, Kevin Barry O’Donnell opened fire from less than 50m away; several hundred armour-piercing rounds were blasted into the station walls.
We have looked previously of the death of PIRA man Tony Doris at Coagh; his home had been on Annagher Hill in Coalisland. The two-vehicle convoy, one of which was flying an Irish tricolour, deliberately drove past the house, shouting slogans and firing off the final DShK rounds into the air. Convinced that they had left several dead RUC men and women back at the riddled station, they drove into the car park at Dernagh, blissfully unaware that their death warrants were already signed. As the heavily armed paramilitaries arrived at the church, preparing to drive towards safe houses in the Cookstown area, a single flare burst in the night sky, illuminating them. The soldiers immediately opened fire, hitting at least six of the IRA team, including the two men in the lorry, both of whom were killed instantly.
The gun battle was only brief, but four men – O’Donnell (21), Daniel Vincent (20), Peter Clancy (19) and Sean O’Farrell (23) – were killed, with a fifth man being wounded. One of the soldiers was hit and badly wounded as one of the PIRA team managed to return fire. Another member of the gang drove off, but he was wounded in a burst of fire, crashing shortly afterwards; he managed to escape on foot, as did two others. All three were later arrested before being convicted of the attack several years later.
A former RUC E4A officer told the author in private correspondence:
One of the dead men at the church was known to me; an arrogant wee shite with a gob the size of a bucket. Sly, nasty, always wishing you well, but with that glint of evil in his eyes and you knew that he was plotting your demise. The mothers would look shocked and strained and they could not imagine that the man lying in a coffin in her living room, with an Irish flag covering it was the same wee baby she delivered after carrying it for 9 months, feeding it with her own milk, changing its shitty nappies and holding his hand for his first day of school. After her grief, wound up by her Sinn Féin friends, stirred with more hatred by the family Priest, she would moan about injustice, murder, state execution and the like. But she didn’t see the carnage her wee boy and the boyos had caused as they summarily executed innocents for the most spurious of reasons.
Naturally there was an operational post-mortem at Army Council level as the leading Republicans, still shell-shocked by the latest breach of information and the resulting carnage, attempted to work out what had gone wrong at Coalisland. In addition to the loss of four dead and one captured, they had lost several AK-47s as well as the virtually irreplaceable DShK. Further, they had to understand why O’Donnell – a leading member – had chosen to fire the heavy machine gun at such close range when it had an effective killing range of 1,500 yards or more. There was much internal criticism of their post-attack conduct as they drove with hazard warning lights flashing, firing rounds into the air, as well as the understandable but risky detour to pay homage to Tony Doris. They reasoned that had the team planned several separate escape routes, fewer of them would have been killed.
O’Donnell’s sister, Róisín Ui Mhuiri, angrily said, ‘We demand the truth about the circumstances of the deaths of Peter, Patrick, Sean and Barry. We know the truth – our sons, brothers, were killed in a well-planned ambush.’ However, the facts speak much louder than the emotional anguish of the dead men’s families. When that flare burst into the sky, the undercover soldiers saw six men, most of whom were heavily armed, their weapons pointing in the direction of the SAS troops. How likely would it have been that they would have immediately dropped their weapons and then surrendered? The chances of that were indeed slim; moreover, for the soldiers it was a choice that they had to make in a millisecond; they didn’t have the luxury of even a few moments in which to make their life or death decision. It was more of a ‘shoot-to-survive’ than the popular Republican claim of ‘shoot-to-kill’. There was no doubt that the Provisionals had received a bloody nose almost on the same scale as Loughgall in 1987. Again, in the recriminations that followed, the IRA found itself being torn apart, as it clearly had no idea of how to handle the very serious leaks that were costing them personnel, as well as denuding their reputation as successful urban guerrillas. This was the last large-scale SAS ambush to happen, as the Provisionals were reluctantly shepherded towards an eventual ceasefire, and internal support of the ‘Armalite and ballot box’ strategy grew with an increasing inevitability.
There were other examples of ‘biting back’, and while it is true that these ambushes were not carried out on a frequent basis, they occurred with a frequency that caused sufficient alarm and consternation inside the Provisional Republican movement. Each one was a body blow to their planning, strategy and, more importantly, to their ranks. A lot of the men – and the woman Mairéad Farrell killed by the SAS in Gibraltar – who were removed were senior personnel, experienced killers whose presence was difficult for the Provisionals to replace. It began to eat away at their confidence, causing suspicion – not
always justified – within their ranks as no one could trust anyone else. These undercover tactics spread panic and disorganisation within the IRA, leading to the reduction of arms stores readily accessible inside Northern Ireland and several internal executions. With highly placed informants – such as Scappaticci – spreading misinformation, the IRA used resources to root out, interrogate, torture and murder suspected informants. They used resources designed to kill members of the security forces on themselves instead.
For further and more detailed reading on this subject, the author thoroughly recommends Bandit Country, by Toby Harnden, Big Boys’ Rules, by Mark Urban and Ambush: The War Between the SAS and the IRA, by Adams, Morgan & Bambridge.
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* Heckler & Koch G3 battle rifle, which fired 7.62mm high-velocity rounds with a rate of fire up to 600 rounds a minute and a muzzle velocity of 2,625ft (800m) per second.
** Big Boys’ Rules, Mark Urban (Faber & Faber, 1991).
*** Guardian newspaper, Peter Cole, 8 January 1976.
* There was a contradictory statement made during the inquest into the shootings; the coroner stated that Doherty had three head wounds and twenty-one in his torso.
* Commander of the IRA’s Mid-Tyrone Brigade.
* Fear is the Foe, Stanley Whitehouse & George B. Bennett (Robert Hale Books, 1995).
** www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-33384714.