by Simon Cursey
The best thing to do in a predicament such as John found himself in is to simply put the weapon on the floor and step away from it. He was so fixated on the idea that he had to clear the weapon that he just kept making the same mistake. There was no danger to anyone because he was firing directly into the gravel area we used by the path. I just stopped him, took the weapon, cleared it and gave it him back. Luckily no one in the operations room heard anything, so we just put it down to experience after we picked up the empty cases. All of us in the section understood how and what happened and it made us all that little bit more careful with our weapons in future.
A couple of months later, the ‘Colonel’ had another lucky escape. He was out on general surveillance with one of the other sections, patrolling the fringes of Andersonstown, west Belfast. Many of the streets around the city had ‘sleeping policemen’ built on them, especially near Army or police locations, to help control passing traffic. These ramps were quite large and if we were not careful while passing over, we could catch the exhaust pipes or damage the underside of our cars. Therefore, when we drove over them we turned diagonally, just like everyone else.
The Colonel was in the front passenger’s (commander’s) seat as his vehicle made its short turn to the right, preparing to pass over one of these security ramps. As the car rose up and rolled diagonally over the top of it, a shot rang out and the windscreen fractured with a small bullet hole right in the centre. Immediately, they sped off away from the area and reported the shooting as they made their way back to base.
Once there, a close inspection of the damage to the car revealed that there was a short crease or groove just off centre on the car’s bonnet, perfectly in line with the hole in the middle of the windscreen. We all felt that the round was probably a .22 calibre, based on the shape and size of the mark on the bonnet. And the hole in the screen was right in between the driver and the commander.
If whoever fired the weapon had done so a moment or two earlier, we were sure that someone in the car would have probably been injured or perhaps killed. But fortunately the vehicle was making its turn as the shot was taken and it missed everyone. As they say, sleeping policemen save lives.
People taking pot-shots at passing cars did occasionally happen, not very often but it happened. We figured it was probably some youths having a bit of fun, rather than an ASU launching a specific attack. Nevertheless, the Colonel was pretty well shaken up when they arrived back at base after the shooting and I don’t think I ever saw him out on patrol again after that incident.
Periodically we had to keep a low profile or even to stay off the streets for days on end, spending our time just keeping ourselves busy with training. Often this was during major operations, such as ‘Operation Motorman’ at the end of July 1972, when the Army was out in force clearing away barricades from the no-go areas of Ulster’s cities. Or it occurred when large operations were in progress, gathering up suspects for internment. It was a very busy time during the early 1970s, when the province was moving ever closer to civil war, seemingly on a daily basis.
Operation Motorman started at 4:00 am on 31 July and carried on all through that day in Belfast and Londonderry. The Army deployed around four per cent of the whole of the British Army’s total strength during this operation and unfortunately a 15-year-old youngster and an unarmed 19-year-old IRA member were shot dead while Motorman was underway. A few hours after the end of the operation, a massive coordinated car-bomb attack was launched in the village centre of Claudy, County Londonderry. Nine people died in this attack, five Catholics and four Protestants.
During these restrictive periods, however, we did occasionally go out on the streets. Usually this would only be in a general surveillance mode, staying away from sensitive areas where the Army was out in large numbers. We often cruised around the city, looking out for wanted players and hoping to bump into an armed group milling about. We occasionally called into out-of-the-way Army locations for a chat and a pot of tea with the local Intelligence boys, to see if we could help with anything they were planning. Usually we would spend an hour or so doing this, and then move off to another Army location for another chat and a brew.
It was during one of these periods that one of our patrols was heading back to our base after their day shift in the city had finished. It was early in the evening and they were making their way home, passing through the area of Dee Street-Newtownards Road, on the east side of Belfast. It was a lone vehicle with just two of our lads in the car.
Driving out of the city along Newtonards Road, they suddenly came across a large group of UDA men in the street. Their vehicle slowed to negotiate its way through the group like we had done dozens of times in the past. But as it drew closer to the crowd, the UDA attacked with stones and bottles. During this attack something large smashed through the windscreen and hit the driver, Len Durber, in the face, forcing the car to swing out of control and crash.
The UDA afterwards claimed that the car attempted to run them over – which I found ludicrous. We never generally felt any great threat from the UDA; they were an accepted Protestant organisation at that time and the area of the incident, Newtownards Road, was a relatively safe area. If we ever came across one of their groups in the street, we always slowed down and they never bothered us and normally just let us pass.
A couple of us checked and inspected Len’s car the next day. Given the amount of blood and what looked like pieces of brain on the dashboard, he had been hit by something quite heavy, and it wasn’t the steering wheel or the door frame. The vehicle commander, Rick, who just suffered bumps and bruises, later told me that something the size of a Crown Green bowling ball had been thrown at the windscreen as they slowly approached to pass through the UDA group. Len was reported to be very ill for quite a long time and I heard months later through friends that he had died in a mainland hospital, leaving behind a wife and young family.
Another of our patrols, from section 82, again alone but with three occupants in the car, were caught out one night, again during a period of general surveillance. They were taking a look around an estate off Shore Road, north Belfast, and came across a crowd near Dandy Street. The crowd started to get agitated and blocked the road with a barricade, forcing the patrol to stop. They then launched an attack on the car with stones and sticks which grew in ferocity until the group tried to force the occupants out and roll it over. The rear door was eventually wrenched open and one of the patrol was grabbed and pulled from the back seat and hurled to the ground by the crazed mob. Fortunately, as he was being pulled out, he dropped his SMG and kicked it under the driver’s seat so it was left on the floor of the car in the darkness. Two men then climbed into the back of the car and tried to drag the driver and the commander backwards over their seats into the rear, to get them out. The commander, Tim, while being hauled backwards in the struggle, managed to fire an un-aimed shot back over his shoulder, into the rear of the car in the darkness. At the same moment the driver, Mal, noticed an armed man moving towards them through the crowd. As the two attackers in the back seats jumped out to escape being shot, the vehicle managed to ram the barricade and race away. They then contacted the local Army unit and asked them to send in a uniformed patrol to rescue their SMG man. The Army patrol managed to arrive within minutes and after speaking with the group, they succeeded in taking our guy away from the crowd. This must have made the crowd feel they had helped in the capture and arrest of a wanted man and it eventually calmed the situation. The man concerned was unhurt, but was subsequently taken off the streets for a few weeks and instead spent most of his time helping the Int. boys in the ops room until the dust settled.
That night our people were very lucky to have escaped alive. They were trapped and the situation was turning very nasty. It was only due to the calm courage and experience of the driver and commander that all three of them were saved from almost certain death.
This was very similar to another situation which occurred many years later and was televised
live around the world. Everyone looked on in stunned amazement while two soldiers caught up in an IRA funeral. They were trapped, dragged out of their car, mobbed and stripped, and within minutes they were driven away for execution on some lonely piece of waste land. When I saw the incident on TV, I could hardly believe what was happening, although I quickly realised that the two men were not part of 14 Intelligence Company.
If it had been Kev or John and me in that situation, our ‘procedure’ – which we had all discussed, planned and agreed many times in the past – was to quickly send a ‘contact’ over the radio. Our plan then was; we’d open fire directly at some of the nearest rioters, shocking them and forcing them back momentarily, creating some space to allow us to get out of the car. Being sprayed with the brains of the person in front of you is a powerful incentive to back off from a man with a gun. We then would have tried to make our way over to the nearby wall and put our backs against it, holding off the rioters by shooting them if necessary until the Army could extract us.
We would have had an SMG and over 100 rounds of 9mm ammunition with us for our two Browning pistols; and for sure, we would have used them all up if we had to, to get out alive. Sadly, as we all saw, simply firing a warning shot in the air is just not enough in that type of mad mob situation. In the middle of a frenzied riot when everyone around just wants to get at you and kill you, you really must do whatever it takes to gain some form of control over the situation – even if that means shooting directly in the face anyone that approaches you. Simply sitting there, reciting the Yellow Card - Rules of Engagement will get you nowhere in a crazed situation like that. Thankfully, I’ve never been in that kind of situation; but believe me, we all knew exactly what we would do if it ever happened. Most of us had spent almost every day for years thinking about it. I fully appreciate and totally agree with the Yellow Card - RoE, but when stuck in such a desperate situation or working under cover, usually alone, constantly surrounded by terrorists, their supporters and sympathisers.’ At any moment, you may just have a split second to make a choice.
I know that this may appear to be a very aggressive and perhaps an over-the-top approach. But in a situation like that, when you’re totally alone with nowhere to go, I’m afraid that all you have is the choice of life or death. There is no middle ground or the opportunity to issue warnings or try and negotiate your way out. I’m sure that Kev, John and the rest of our guys, wherever they are today, would agree with me. We were often told never to be caught alive with any ammunition on us if we were cornered. If we were ever trapped with no way out, we knew we would almost certainly not survive and the only chance was to shoot our way out. We constantly discussed all the scenarios we might find ourselves in and agreed amongst ourselves our best actions in such a situation.
I soon realised watching the whole episode unfold on TV, that those two poor soldiers trapped at the funeral were probably not part of 14 Intelligence Company the moment they fired that warning shot into the air out of the window. We never fired warning shots. Even though the crowd flinched momentarily, unfortunately it just didn’t allow them enough time to get out of the car, and staying in it was simply a death trap.
A couple of weeks after Operation Motorman finished we were on normal patrol duties again and back to some of our regular operations. One of our earliest was a CP (close protection) job. But this time it was an RUC detective meeting with some people from the UDA which was an accepted Protestant paramilitary organisation at that time, although prohibited much later, in 1992.
They apparently wanted to talk about some peace plans they had for the area and needed to discuss them with the RUC. The meeting was scheduled to take place about lunch time in a coffee bar off the Shankill Road, by Tennent Street, not far from the RUC station. It was between the RUC and the UDA in a Protestant area of the city and we felt that the threat level was quite low.
However, we didn’t want to take any chances because it was possible that an IRA ASU could slip through from a Catholic area – basically just along the road – and try to launch an attack on this group meeting. In addition, we discovered it was to be a meeting between two high level members of the UDA and two RUC detectives. During this period of great unrest, we never took any chances. We never gave the IRA an inch to play with and we covered all our CP operations the same way and with the same possible high threat level, wherever the meeting took place.
After an early breakfast at 6:30 am we gathered and checked our weapons and equipment and then made our way at about 8:30 am to the Tennent Street police station to meet the RUC people involved. It was a crisp clear morning with a light patchy mist in the air as we set off from our base HQ a few miles outside Belfast. By the time we arrived at Tennant Street, the mist had generally cleared but the sky was still a little grey and the streets were beginning to get busy with people wandering around the area. We radioed ahead as we arrived and the gate people let us straight in without delay. After parking our vehicles out of sight, we unloaded and cleared our weapons and made our way to the meeting after concealing and locking the SMGs in the boot of one car.
During our briefing, which began at 9:30 am, we decided to have four of our men in the coffee bar and three cars close by with five men on backup a couple of minutes away. Mike, with the radio, was to be in the coffee bar and three others, Dave, Ben and Colin, all armed with 9 millies. I was together with Kev in car ‘Echo.’ Kev liked to drive when we were in Echo because it was a tuned-up, super-fast Ford Cortina 1600E and he used to say that it suited him.
John, Bob and Tug were in the other cars, ‘Delta’ and ‘Foxtrot,’ all of us ready to move in to back them up if required. Our briefing was finished by 11:00 am and the meeting was set for 1:00 pm. Mike and his team made their way there on foot. They were in the coffee bar by 12:30 pm. I didn’t know exactly where they were inside the bar but I had a good idea. We were spread out in our three cars and parked up along the road a little, near the RUC station. In fact we were out of the cars, a couple of metres away, mingling with the shoppers and passers-by but ready to move at the nod of a head. Whenever we were waiting around in the street, I always preferred to get out of the car and move around a bit. I always felt safer out of the cars when parked as I could observe the area much better than I could just sitting inside. If things began to look a bit dodgy for us, we could always see it much earlier from outside the car.
At approximately 1:30 pm we received the message from Mike that all wasn’t so good in the coffee bar, so we all loaded up in the cars and moved in closer to the target area. On our approach we noticed a suspicious vehicle parked near the coffee bar, about fifty metres along the road with two men inside, so we pulled up and watched these guys for a few moments. Kev and Tug got out and ambled up the street on the opposite side to observe from a little closer while Bob stayed with John in their car. I quietly told Mike on the radio of the situation outside. A couple of minutes later Mike and Colin emerged from the coffee bar with the two RUC chaps, followed a few moments later by Dave and Ben, making their way across the busy road and covering each other as they walked towards Bob’s and John’s cars.
The two men in the car we were watching, together with another armed man further up the street, whom we hadn’t seen earlier, started to move in on Mike’s group as they made for our waiting cars. We now saw that all three of the unknown men were armed with handguns at the ‘ready’ and aiming, making their way towards our guys. Kev and Tug were closest and opened fire almost immediately from behind a couple of parked cars while John and I got out of our cars and joined in with them, with a few rounds. The four of us managed to fire about four to five rounds each at the gunmen while they only managed to fire approximately three or four rounds between them in return. Mike and Colin were busy bundling the RUC chaps into John’s car while Dave and Ben, on leaving the bar, effectively switched their roles and became our backup, opening flanking fire on the attackers with a couple of rounds each. Everything happened very quickly, and we had been surprise
d when the other gunman from further up the road joined in the attack with the two from the car. They obviously knew who their target was because they started to move in very quickly when the two RUC chaps appeared in the street.
However, we were always prepared for eventualities such as this and we had practiced such procedures many times while training. Just fine tuning a procedure which is well known and widely used even in security CP training today.
In this manner we totally wrong footed the gunmen; they didn’t expect to be taken on from the side and the front as they approached the coffee bar. As a result they were caught in the open with no cover, right in the middle of the road, and had little chance of escape. Again we used overwhelming accurate fire power, as always for two main reasons: one, to quickly overcome the gunmen and take control of the situation, and two, to reduce the amount of wild inaccurate fire at us from the gunmen and so to stop innocent passers-by from being hit.
We cordoned off the area and removed their weapons. Moments later as we were loading up and moving off, the Army patrol we had earlier radioed for, appeared. They took over control from us moments before we left the area.
Later over a coffee Tug and I asked Mike, ‘Why did you feel so uneasy in the coffee bar?’
‘I felt suspicious of the whole situation,’ he explained, ‘but I couldn’t put my finger on anything or any person in particular, just lots of whispering going on in the bar. I sensed something wasn’t right and decided to close the meeting down and pull out, especially after you told me the situation outside.’
Chapter Eight – Lying in Wait