by Simon Cursey
When Colin saw us closing on him, he radioed for John to go back to the car and join in the follow-up while he took the lead himself. The target then went into a large shop, so we all moved in closer again, taking up positions all around the shop. Dave was on the target and I moved up much closer than normal, following Dave into the large shop.
In a busy department store it’s best to have various members of the team up closer, moving closer to the target and observing from various distances while mingled in with the crowd. If we just had a one-on-one in the store, it would be quite easy to lose the target in the crowd.
The target stopped again. This time he went for a drink in the coffee lounge and was joined there by another man. I sauntered in to buy a coffee and then sat down near the entrance where I had a clear view of the target. Dave entered and bought an orange juice and sat at another table on the other side of the room. In the 20 minutes we were in there, the target was joined by two other people and an envelope was handed to him, after which he soon got up and left. We only managed a couple of photographs of the group from the cameras we had with us in our bags as it was risky with so many people close around us, but we managed to radio back to the lads in the cars a full, detailed description of the others at the meeting.
Mike was outside, ready to take over the lead, and I followed on behind Colin while Dave followed behind me. The man quickly made his way back to his car and set off back in the direction of Andersonstown. I was quickly back in my car with Kev so we took the lead while the others organised themselves.
‘So, did you enjoy your coffee?’ Kev asked sarcastically as I settled back into the car.
I turned to him and replied enthusiastically, ‘Yes, thank you very much.’
And with a horrendous scowl on his twisted face, he sneered, ‘You little twat.’ But then I handed over a couple of biscuits I saved for him, which made us both smile as we followed on after our target.
Back at his home, the target parked his car and let himself into his house, which ended our little surveillance operation for the day. An hour later back at base, we all cleared and checked our weapons, handing them in to the armoury, and settled into the briefing room where we collated our notes and arranged for the Intelligence boys to develop our films.
Car surveillance was a type of operation that was demanding but relatively straightforward; but when it turned into foot surveillance our co-ordination had to be spot on and everybody had to move very quickly to stay on top of things and keep control of the situation.
Compared with any surveillance operation undertaken on foot or in vehicles, or both, the counter-surveillance operation is generally far more complicated – but just as important as following the target. If we felt at any time that our lead man has been compromised or was himself being followed, we immediately called off the operation and all broke off in different directions to meet up later at a pre-arranged RV.
Our lead man would be watching the target and people close to him. Meanwhile, the other members of the team are involved in counter-surveillance, watching everyone else. Believe me, for that you really need eyes in the back of your head. You’re looking for signs that someone is watching or following your lead man. Also, if the target gets a little suspicious, he might try to pull a trick, like ‘boxing’ around a block of buildings, to see if he’s being followed. If this starts to happen, the lead man position must change, perhaps more than once, and another team member has to be waiting for the target to finish his circuit around the building. Other methods the target can use to shake a tail, mentioned earlier, is to walk into a shop and then immediately turn and walk back out again, or simply speed up, slow down, stop suddenly or turn around and go the other way. The target will do this to observe the reactions of anyone else that’s following on behind him. In this type of close-up situation, you as the follower must carry on as normal, without blinking or getting flustered.
The weather was changing and winter was just about on us but we had work to do. The whole section was out and about in the city on general surveillance, just taking a look around areas like Oldpark by the Ardoyne, together with the Springmartin, Turf Lodge and Suffolk estates around Andersonstown. We had been cruising around independently looking for vigilante groups and opportunist house and car break-ins. We would drive into these estates, have a look around for a few minutes and then leave and go to some other area. A while later, another of our cars would do the same and then move off. It wasn’t a problem going into these areas at night as there were always some other cars milling around. Belfast is a large city and there is always someone around, on foot or in a car.
I was with Kev in car Alpha with him driving. We had spent about four or five hours cruising around but everywhere seemed quiet, perhaps because of the rain.
On occasions, if the city was uneventful, we’d cruise around looking at the estates for a few hours and then zoom off back to base for a break and some tea and snap. We’d stay in base for a couple of hours discussing where we had been and what we had seen, then go out again until 4:00 or 5:00 am. In the very early hours, at about 6:00 am, we’d make our way back to base again, have a debriefing over coffee and then hand over to the next duty section at 8:00 am before going off to have some breakfast and a few hours’ sleep.
We would eat dinner and by 8:00 pm in the evening we’d be back on as standby section, drawing our weapons and loading up the cars that were available and sitting around in the briefing and ops rooms until midnight. We just waited around to be called out to assist the duty section if we were needed or required to assist them on some operation. By midnight or 1:00 am we’d go off to bed but just sleep on top of the blankets fully dressed before starting our own duty section at 8:00 am, after a shower, change and breakfast.
It was approximately 4:00 am one morning and Kev and I had been patrolling around the area of Ladybrook. There wasn’t much going on so we decided to call it a night, and go down Kennedy Way to Musgrave Park Hospital Army location for a pot of tea and a chat with the uniformed lads before heading off back to base.
After some tea and a chat with the guard commander, we informed the rest of our section and set off back to our own location at about 5:00 am. We turned along Stockmans Lane and onto the M1 motorway towards the city centre. There, we made our way right, along Divis Street, then Castle Street to Queen’s Square and the Queen Elizabeth Bridge, onto the Sydenham Bypass.
The weather had been quite miserable, foggy and drizzling with rain showers for most of the night. Perhaps, as mentioned, that’s why it had been so quiet. The IRA was normally a fair weather terrorist group and didn’t like to play out in the wet with us.
As we made our way along the Sydenham bypass, about three or four miles out of the city where the building line dropped away to grassy fields and a few houses to both sides, I saw a man at the roadside. He was wearing a long dark coat with a baseball cap and seemed to be just sitting there at the side of the dual-carriageway. He had his arms draped over his knees and his head bowed down between them, looking down at the ground between his feet.
I said to Kev, ‘What do you think about that guy sitting by the road up ahead, shall we check him out in case he’s sick or hurt?’
“Yeah OK, sure, let’s take a look at him’ Kev replied in a sleepy grunt. ‘But keep a look out in case he has some friends around.’
We were always very careful if we checked out someone in this kind of situation and we very rarely did it. It could be a genuine situation but it was always possible that it could be a setup and there might be some others lurking in the shadows waiting for someone to pull in, so they could hijack the car – a very common occurrence back then. However, we were pretty well armed with two 9 millies, an SMG and big Kev next to me with his huge flick-knife.
Kev slowed down as we drew near the chap to give us both a little time to have a look around the area. He then pulled over and stopped next to the guy, who was about two metres from my door. He didn’t move until I wound my window dow
n and shouted at him.
‘Hey you, you over there, are you OK?’
The guy slowly looked up and in a drunken stupor replied: ‘Who the fuck wants to know?’
Charming. ‘We’re the police and we’re just checking to see if you’re OK,’ I replied.
The guy slowly staggered onto his feet and looked at us as he swayed from side to side. Slowly, he stepped towards our car, put his hands on my open window door frame and poked his head in towards me. I didn’t want him to get too close and see inside the car, so I quickly said, ‘OK, stop there and show me some ID.’
The guy said nothing but started to push his head further in through my open window, half forcing his way in and half falling in. It was very dark so I think he couldn’t see anything and was just curious to have a look at me.
Within moments he was so far in my window, with his head and shoulders and his hands on the frame, that I was being forced over onto Kev’s side of the car. I pulled my 9 millie up and stuck the barrel under his chin, but again I’m not sure he even realised the gun was there. By now the guy was pushing himself so far into the car that I was being forced up both against Kev and the steering wheel. Kev quickly climbed out through his door and moved around to my side of the car, taking hold of the drunk by his shoulders and dragging him out of my window and away from the car. As I jumped out, keeping my 9 millie hidden behind my leg, Kev was holding the guy up and forcing him against the car.
‘Come on you, just show us some ID, then you can go home,’ said Kev to the drunk.
The guy’s head rolled from side-to-side and as he looked at us both with his intoxicated gaze he replied, ‘Piss off, who are you? You show me your ID.’
You almost had to admire his attitude, but he was being abusive and it upset Kev, then as quick as a flash Kev grabbed the guy tight around his throat. ‘Here’s my fucking ID,’ said Kev.
The guy froze, threw his hands in the air and started to apologise. ‘OK guys, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean any harm. I’m just on my way home, no problem, I’m going, no problem.’
Kev let him go and the guy quickly staggered and stumbled away in the darkness towards some houses about two hundred metres away. We both shrugged our shoulders and jumped back into our car and set off as if nothing had happened. A few moments later, I said to Kev, ‘I don’t think we’ll check-out any more drunks in future, what do you think?’
He answered with a smile: ‘Yeah, I think that’s a very good idea, Sy.’ We both burst out laughing at what had just happened.
I must admit that this was the first time I had ever seen Kev move so fast in an aggressive way. And he was damn fast with his throat grab, fast enough to frighten the life out of anyone.
Back at base we told the other lads in the section what had happened. We all had a good laugh over it before packing our gear away and wandering off to our beds, where we flopped down as Tug put on his tape recorder, playing some new Bob Marley releases his brother had sent him, ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ and ‘Get Up, Stand Up’. They seemed somehow relevant.
Chapter Twelve – Cut It Off and Kill It
Christmas had come around again. It was the winter of 1973 and the situation in Northern Ireland had over the past two years grown more and more intense and desperate. The IRA bombing campaign of the UK mainland had been in full swing since soon after Bloody Sunday, early in 1972.
The latest atrocities had been several months earlier, in September, and Scotland Yard was still hunting the culprits after two bombs at mainline stations had injured 13 people and brought chaos to central London. The first explosion at King’s Cross injured five people after a youth had thrown a bag-bomb into the booking hall. Fifty minutes later, a second explosion tore through a snack bar at Euston station, injuring eight.
No group at the time of the bombing admitted to setting the devices, which weighed two to three pounds each, but the police were confident that the mechanisms were of typical IRA design. The King’s Cross blast occurred at around 12:25 PM, shattering glass throughout the old booking hall. One witness said, ‘I saw a flash and suddenly people were being thrown through the air – it was a terrible mess, they were bleeding and screaming.’
The second occurred just minutes after the Press Association received a phone warning from a man with an Irish accent, leaving very little time for the police to act to clear the station. As an employee in the Euston station bar put it, ‘Police officers were running up and down the platform shouting for people to get out of the station,’ he told a reporter. ‘A few moments later, the bomb went off.’
The police said they received over 100 bomb hoaxes that day and were also forced to evacuate three other London railway stations. They issued a photo-fit picture of a five-foot two-inch-tall youth they wanted to question regarding the King’s Cross bombing. The IRA later admitted to the bombings, which came during one of their more sustained periods of activity on the UK mainland.
A couple of days earlier, on 8 September, bombs had been detonated in Manchester city centre and at London Victoria station. And two days after the King’s Cross bomb, more blasts rocked the area of Oxford Street and Sloane Square in London. These random bombing sprees seemed to come to an end after the Balcombe Street siege in December 1975.
Within a couple of months, in November 1973, six men and two women had been convicted of being involved in two London car bombings they had carried out earlier, in March. One person died and almost 200 were injured in the two explosions, one of which was at the Old Bailey court and the other outside Scotland Yard, the Metropolitan Police headquarters. They were all active Provisional IRA members at that time. But a ninth defendant, Roisin McNearney was acquitted.
If it was starting to feel unsafe on the UK mainland, the province of Ulster was by now a mess and on the verge of civil war, if not already in one. The Government at the time knew it, but appeared to be running out of ideas to try and quell it. Talks failed, negotiations collapsed and thousands of people on both sides took to the streets in Londonderry and Belfast in demonstrations, as the shooting, bombing and killings increased daily.
In Belfast, driving through and around those ‘hard areas’ of the Falls Road, Divis Flats, Unity flats, Andersonstown and the Ardoyne, was just like driving through the streets of Beirut; burned out, derelict houses passed by me row on row. Most that still stood were boarded up. Rubble and glass covered the roads while clouds of smoke billowed over the city from houses and burning vehicles destroyed in rioting the previous night. It was a desperate place to be and to work in. I often wondered if I was ever going to get out of the place in one piece, to see the sunshine and flowers in some peaceful park back in North Yorkshire, on the blessed mainland.
Back at our little 70 by 15 metre compound life went on, although we were told that a few of our regular operations were being shelved due to new commitments. The word from ‘high up’ seemed that instead they wanted us to adopt a much more active and robust role when we were out on the streets. Then hopefully, they’d all get fed up and call their own mutual ceasefires, leaving the way open for the Government to step in and try to negotiate with all sides a long-term, peaceful solution – which all sounded very good, in theory.
Our whole unit together began to have daily briefing sessions and updates of the general situation. It didn’t matter if we were on duty, off duty, on standby or even taking a shower, we all had to attend these regular briefing sessions. In the past we just had section briefings amongst ourselves and the Intelligence boys, at the start of our duty shift. It was during these new briefings that we noticed the format started to change a little and phrases such as ‘deal with’ and ‘eliminate the threat or enemy’, were being used far more often. We were given comprehensive dossiers of the most dangerous people in Ulster and told to study each of them and memorise as much information and detail as possible. We now had to commit to memory names, addresses, photographs and past histories of the most vicious terrorist killers in far more detail than before. Anyone tha
t’s ever worn an Army uniform knows exactly what is meant by ‘eliminating the threat or enemy’. We didn’t need it spelling out to us.
We were indirectly being tasked to go out on the streets, find the enemy and deal with it. In normal Army terms, the words would have been ‘seek out and destroy’.
But we all felt that the word ‘destroy’ was a little too aggressive and strong for the politicians to stomach, so we went along with ‘eliminate’ as an acceptable alternative. We didn’t really care which words they used, the end product would still be the same as far as we were concerned, at the sharp end.
But we were in Northern Ireland, very close to home, and the world’s Press was paying very close attention, some of it revelling in the perils of the fading British empire. The British government and Army do, at times, tend to be a little fussy with the words they use. Unlike in the US, with those famous words of Colin Powel during Desert Storm: ‘Cut it off and kill it’, he said, referring to Saddam’s tank army.
I couldn’t imagine Willie Whitlaw or Ted Heath saying something like that, not in public anyway. But on the other hand, I can see Maggie saying it. Her husband Denis said with a smile to the SAS team after the Iranian Embassy siege in London 1980, ‘You let one of the bastards live.’ One of the terrorists had managed to hide himself amongst the hostages, pretending to be one of them, during the SAS rescue mission. It’s hard to imagine Cherie Blair saying anything similar; she’d probably end up defending him in court.
As it was, we were left to work out the details and our methods of the ‘eliminating the threat’ ourselves, which we discussed regularly as a section. One thing we made very clear amongst the eight of us, was that we had to be very careful in our planning and preparation, much more so than normal for this type of project.