The Nemesis File - The True Story of an SAS Execution Squad

by Paul Bruce

  After insisting that I stayed for tea, Lizzie offered to drive me back to Long Kesh. As we sat in the car saying goodbye, she leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. I began to kiss her but she pulled away. I liked that.

  As I walked into camp with a smile on my face, I believed we would see more of each other. Inside, I knew I needed her.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  After making his morning telephone call to Lisburn headquarters, Don told us he would be away for a couple of hours and would see us all at lunch. He never made any phone calls from inside Long Kesh for fear that the call could be intercepted or bugged. Despite the fact that we were all allegedly fighting on the same side, Don did not want there to be any possibility of people listening to his conversations with the intelligence services working at Lisburn.

  He would make the calls from different telephone boxes and at different times so that there was no pattern to them. He would always walk to make his calls, not only taking different routes but in a way that made him seem unobtrusive, going about his daily duty almost unobserved.

  If he was called into Lisburn, he would take the car, leaving the camp by the back gate.

  On his return on this particular Wednesday, 3 November, he told us, ‘Look lively, we’ve got another job tonight,’ and he added, ‘We had better make sure we are all on the ball again’.

  We were ready. That weekend, two British soldiers had been killed in Belfast, one shot at point-blank range as he sat in a car; the other killed when a bomb exploded in his billet in Cupar Street off the Springfield Road.

  As well as those assassinations, something else had made us angry. We had seen on the TV news that weekend that 15,000 people had marched through the West End of London to Whitehall, protesting against internment without trial in Northern Ireland. We had heard the never-ending chant of the marchers, ‘Victory to the IRA’, repeated over and over again by the protestors, many of whom carried nationalist flags.

  Only days before the march, the government had announced that during the month of October the IRA had detonated 225 bombs, using a total of 2,381lb of explosives. Many of those bombs had been intended to kill and maim British troops. The IRA didn’t seem to care that some of the bombs also killed innocent women and children.

  We also realised that not only were the IRA winning the propaganda war in mainland Britain but they had also succeeded in gaining an increasing amount of support for their cause throughout the entire Catholic population of Northern Ireland. One woman in the Ardoyne, who had never supported the IRA, commented at that time, ‘We never wanted the IRA but they seem now to be our only protection.’

  It looked as if the briefing we had been given on arrival, only five weeks before, by the combined intelligence-gathering sources of the British Army, British intelligence, Special Branch and the RUC, had been either completely wide of the mark or perhaps deliberately slanted to give us the impression that the war against the IRA was all but over.

  In those five weeks, the number of bombings and shootings across the Province, but principally in Belfast and Londonderry, had escalated alarmingly. Every single night, without exception, the BBC Northern Ireland news was filled with reports of deaths, injuries, bombs, shootings and burnings. By the targets selected, we knew the IRA had been responsible for all but a few of them. Far from being nearly extinct in the north, the IRA seemed to be gathering strength daily.

  We felt we could have been far more usefully employed on the border with the other SAS units, catching the IRA men infiltrating into the north, rather than just being used as an execution squad. All four of us would have much preferred to be dressed in combat gear and going out to capture these bastards in the way we had been trained, rather than donning jeans, sweaters and leather jackets as though we were going for a drink down the local. We did realise, however, that every man we took out meant that there would be one less killer on the streets of Northern Ireland. That gave us some justification.

  As usual, when we were waiting to go out on a job, we were all pacing up and down in the billet waiting to get on with it. I walked up to Don who was cleaning the silencer and the 9mm Browning, ‘I’ll take the border special tonight,’ I said, taking the shooter from him.

  ‘What did you call it?’ he asked.

  ‘The border special,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to call it something. And that’s all it’s good for.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said JR, ‘I like that; the border special,’ and he laughed. His laugh, however, sounded more like relief because, in reality, it should have been JR’s turn to pull the trigger that night.

  After taking the gun, I stripped it down once more and made sure I had cleaned and buffed the rounds, before placing them carefully back in the magazine and sliding it gently into the butt. I waited to hear the click, showing it was properly in place. I wanted no foul-up.

  We drove down to the border once again, with JR at the wheel and Don and Benny in the back navigating us to the map reference Don had been given earlier that day. We drove neither too fast nor too slowly, always keeping to the speed limits, trying not to draw attention to ourselves.

  Shortly after eight o’clock, we pulled up on a narrow lonely road near the border and waited in the darkness for the rendezvous, wondering what our man would be like this time. Don climbed out and walked back, as arranged, about ten yards. We knew the area would have been secured because at least one other SAS unit would have made sure of that before we arrived. We posted a guard simply as an extra precaution.

  I waited until I saw the red light from the torch. JR flashed our headlamps once and I got out and walked up the lane. I saw an SAS trooper, in full camouflage, carrying a pistol in his right hand with his SLR slung over his shoulder. He held his victim far more securely than the last time, gripping the man’s neck as he pushed him towards me. ‘Watch this one,’ he warned. ‘He’s a lively little runt.’

  The man, about five feet six inches tall, slim and with what I can only describe as a ferret-like face, looked confident, even cocky. Looking at me, he said in a southern Irish accent, with a sneer, ‘Who’s this then, the Special Branch?’

  I said, ‘I’ll take care of the little rat,’ grabbed hold of him by the back of the neck, frog-marched him the ten yards to the car and put him in the back seat. Don climbed in after him and we drove off.

  After driving in silence for a while, our man asked sarcastically, ‘And where do you boyos think you’re taking me?’

  ‘We’re taking you to someone who wants to talk to you,’ Don said.

  He replied, ‘I suppose you’re the fucking SAS like those other fuckers who picked me up.’

  ‘If we were the SAS,’ Don said, ‘you would already be fucking dead, sunshine.’ He added, ‘Now shut up, sit back and relax.’

  When we arrived at the forest, Don grabbed him by the jacket and half-dragged him out of the car. ‘Out,’ is all he said, ‘Out.’

  JR parked off the road and we walked across the grass towards the trees, the moon shining brightly in a near cloudless sky. We shivered in the cold; winter wasn’t far away.

  We walked a hundred yards or more towards the old trench but noticed it had all been filled in. Beyond it we saw that a new trench had been dug. Our man also saw it.

  He said, ‘What the fuck’s this?’ and turned towards me. I was about to pull the trigger as he turned and I just continued to squeeze it, hitting the man full in the face. I immediately re-aimed at his chest and pulled the trigger twice to make sure he would be well and truly dead.

  As he fell to the ground, I could see the small red mark on his face where the round had entered. I could see nothing on his chest but I knew I had hit the mark.

  Don bent down and checked his pulse. ‘He’s a goner,’ he said.

  Don grabbed hold of his shoulders and I took his legs and we picked him up and threw him into the trench. I picked up the three empty shell cases and the Browning and we walked back to the car without saying another word.

  I felt good as we drove b
ack. I hadn’t liked the little runt from the moment I saw him. I hadn’t liked his sarcasm or his attempt to put down the SAS. I wondered how many soldiers he had tried to kill and how many he had killed. I felt I had done my bit to rid the country of one more troublemaker who was prepared to go the whole hog to achieve his political aims.

  Back at Long Kesh, Benny made the coffee and I sat on my bed cleaning and oiling the pistol. Two hours later, we were all sound asleep and looking forward to the following night – Thursday, disco night at Sydenham. Lizzie would be there.

  As we walked into the disco, a number of girls began whistling and cheering at Benny; clearly word had spread fast.

  ‘Who’s a big boy then?’ a number of them shouted at him as we walked to the bar for a pint.

  Benny turned scarlet, put his head down, his hands in his pockets and walked with us trying to hide his embarrassment.

  ‘You’re supposed to keep a low profile in our mob,’ JR joked, ‘and here you are after one bloody night you’ve become a celebrity.’

  ‘Not my fucking fault,’ said Benny. ‘I didn’t think she would go shouting her mouth off.’

  ‘If you’re going to cause all this fuss,’ I said, ‘you’ll either have to go to the doctor and have a few inches taken off or make sure you keep it inside your trousers for the rest of the time we’re here.’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ Benny mumbled as he downed his first pint in one.

  It would be only a matter of minutes, however, before a girl came up to Benny and, despite his embarrassment, she succeeded in dragging him on to the floor for a slow dance. Don and JR teamed up with the girls they had met the week before, and Lizzie came in looking good, smiling and happy. ‘Nice to see you again,’ she said as she walked up to me and gave me a peck on the cheek. It was as if we had been married for a couple of years, but she did seem happy to see me again. I tried to play it cool, of course, but I was genuinely really happy to see her.

  Lizzie looked great and I felt proud to be with her as well as lucky. It felt good to have someone with whom, I hoped, I would have a proper relationship. I knew in my heart that I much preferred to have a steady girl than a one-night stand.

  The evening went well and we danced, had a few drinks and chatted most of the time. We kissed and snogged through all the slow dances and it seemed good. Lizzie invited me to dinner again on the Sunday and said she would collect me from Long Kesh and take me to the club for a drink before going back to her home.

  The lads enjoyed their night out and we all went back together in the car shortly after midnight. We made sure the route we took from Long Kesh to Sydenham passed through only safe areas, as that same day the army had carried out the biggest house-to-house search ever mounted, starting at 7am in the Catholic Andersonstown area, covering most of the Lower Falls and ending at lunchtime. They were looking for known IRA suspects, weapons and bomb-making material.

  As we drove back, we noticed the numbers of RUC police on the streets and felt sorry for them. We felt safe because we carried our pistols whenever we went out, except on disco nights. The police, however, were becoming increasingly targeted by the IRA and were getting very angry. In October 1971 alone, there had been 155 separate attacks on police stations and police personnel and yet they only carried the old-fashioned .38 mm revolvers.

  That week, two police divisions had written en bloc to the Chief Constable, Graham Skillington, threatening mass resignations if they were not re-armed. Some demanded automatic weapons, like Sterling machine guns, others demanded armoured cars.

  Two days before, Belfast had been rocked by a massive bomb that had ripped through the Red Lion, a Protestant pub in Ormeau Road at Ballynafeigh, two miles from the city centre. Two civilians had been killed and 36 people seriously injured in the blast which had been timed to go off in the middle of the day when the area was crowded. Minutes later, another bomb exploded in a fashion shop, destroying it. The shops had been on either side of the RUC station but that wasn’t touched by either blast. No prior warning had been given. It proved to us that the IRA couldn’t care a damn for the people they purported to be supporting and protecting.

  To make sure we kept fit we would, from time to time, go for hard runs around the disused aerodrome as well as lifting weights which one of the army cooks kept in a makeshift gym not far from our Portakabin. His weights proved really useful, providing us with something to do rather than hang around all day waiting for the next mission.

  Meanwhile, Sunday came and went and I spent most of the time with Lizzie, taking her dog for a walk, having drinks in the club and then enjoying a good Sunday roast as well as tea. At ten that night, Lizzie dropped me back at Long Kesh with a kiss and a promise of a date at the disco that Thursday.

  We knew another job was imminent after Don had been told to report to Lisburn for another briefing. ‘We’ve got another bloody Belfast job,’ he said on his return. He explained what had gone wrong and why we had been ordered to sort things out.

  Two of the former IRA supporters who had agreed to work for Special Branch had apparently managed to kidnap a known IRA gunman, a former colleague, and they had him chained to a bed in a house in Ballysillan Road, north-west Belfast. The two former IRA men, Mick and John, had begun to panic that their victim would be discovered and their cover blown. They had contacted Special Branch who decided we would be the ones to dispose of him. They wanted the job done immediately; they didn’t want to risk losing their informers.

  Despite the urgency, we preferred to carry out the operation under cover of darkness and arrived at the scene shortly after dusk. Two minutes after we pulled up outside the house, Mick and John came out with their man, his hands tied behind his back. They had obviously given him a real hiding, as his face was a bloody mess, with cut lips, black eyes and a badly bruised face.

  Don got out of the car and the two Irish informers pushed their prisoner in beside me. ‘Listen, you two,’ Don said to Mick and John. ‘We don’t want any more fucking jobs like this, do you understand?’

  ‘Well, it had to be done,’ one of them said. ‘We saw him, so we grabbed him; we had no option.’

  ‘Bloody morons,’Don mumbled as he got back into the car next to the prisoner.

  As we drove away, Don untied the man’s hands and, to reassure him, said, ‘If you’re co-operative and answer the questions, you’ll probably be handed over to the medics to take care of you.’

  His soothing words had the desired effect. The man kept quiet and sat back rubbing his wrists. Throughout the journey, I would occasionally look at his face and could see the mass of congealed blood around his eyes and nose and the heavy bruising. He looked a right mess, yet he hardly seemed to notice the beating he had taken.

  No one spoke during the journey as Benny drove back to the forest where the execution would take place. On this occasion, I felt annoyed that we were having to carry out someone else’s dirty work. I didn’t mind so much when we were taking out known IRA gunmen who the SAS had picked up on the border, but I felt that this had nothing to do with us.

  This would be JR’s first execution and I wondered how he would deal with it. I knew, from bitter experience, that when I actually pulled the trigger the effect on me was far greater than when someone else carried out the execution.

  I should have guessed, however, that JR would screw up and he did. As before, we thought he wouldn’t shoot the bastard until we had all walked to the trench. Suddenly, I heard the ‘thump’ of the silencer after we had taken only a few paces from the car. Shot in the back of the head, the man fell to the ground.

  We just looked at each other, annoyed with JR for making us carry the body nearly a hundred yards to the grave. The man, in his thirties, must have been more than six feet tall and weighed over fifteen stone. The four of us struggled to carry him.

  Benny commented, ‘Thanks, JR. For fuck’s sake, why didn’t you let him walk?’

  ‘I thought you’d like the exercise,’ replied JR, ‘It’s good for you.
’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Don.

  As Benny began to drive away, JR suddenly said, ‘Christ. I’ve forgotten to pick up the bloody case.’

  ‘Come on, JR,’ said Don, ‘you’re acting like a fucking amateur. Get out there and find it. And make it quick.’

  I got out and helped JR as we scrabbled around on the ground in the darkness, trying to find the single case. It seemed like an age but after about five minutes JR found it. ‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘I’ve found it. Let’s go.’

  ‘About bloody time,’ Don remarked as we got back in the car, deliberately embarrassing JR further, hoping his criticism would make him pull himself together.

  I could see that Don had been annoyed by the whole affair, not only that we had been ordered to carry out a job which had nothing to do with us, but also by the lack of professionalism shown by JR. Don knew JR had fired the Browning earlier than he should have done because his nerve was near breaking point. Don knew he had forgotten to pick up the single case because he had not been thinking straight. To Don, these matters, small in themselves, showed that JR was not sufficiently self-disciplined, could not cope with stress and hadn’t yet proved he was a good enough soldier to be part of an SAS unit. Don was proud of being a ruthless professional and he believed that everyone who wore the winged dagger should be of the same calibre.

  A couple of minutes after leaving the forest, the headlights of the car picked up an old, small wooden sign, with black lettering that was only just visible to the naked eye. It read ‘Blackskull Lane’. I looked at Don, unable to believe that this had been a mere coincidence. Then we checked our reference map and, a few miles away, we saw the village of Blackskull marked on the Ordnance Survey map.

  ‘Someone’s got a sick sense of humour,’ said Benny quietly.

  That week Amnesty International published a report alleging serious and apparently substantiated allegations of ill-treatment of internees held at Long Kesh. Amnesty urged that an independent international commission should be set up to investigate the allegations which detailed a number of cases which, they claimed, amounted to a prima facie case of the brutality and torture of internees.