by Peter Taylor
The day after Farrar-Hockley’s television bombshell, the real shooting war began. On 6 February 1971, during a riot in Ardoyne following disturbances elsewhere, the army shot dead a local republican, Bernard ‘Barney’ Watt (28). They said he’d been a petrol bomber but there was no forensic evidence to support the claim. The IRA brought out its guns as the rioting spread and lost one of its Staff Officers, James Saunders (21), to a bullet from an army sniper. In the course of these exchanges and as rioting engulfed the nearby New Lodge area, the IRA shot dead twenty-year-old Gunner Robert Curtis from Newcastle. He had been married for a year and his wife was expecting their first child. His unit had just finished a six-week tour along the border and had returned to Belfast for a rest. The men were just taking their kit off the troop ship where they were billeted in Belfast harbour when they were suddenly rushed to the riot. Norman was standing next to Gunner Curtis when he was hit.
The crowd was in front of us, throwing bricks, bottles, and petrol bombs. Then all of a sudden the crowd parted and this chap just popped out with a machine gun and just opened up. There were sparks everywhere. Bullets were just ricocheting all over the place and that’s when ‘Geordie’ Curtis got hit. He was standing right next door to me. He just gave a slight scream and then he was on the floor. The bullet must have come up the street, bounced off it and hit him. It was deflected onto his chest and killed him instantly.
Six of our soldiers were shot that night. One dead. Our first night in Belfast. We were told they would give us a welcome party, or a going away party. So we sort of expected it. But we didn’t expect to be shot at. Nobody told us they were using weapons. Nobody trained us for that.5
At first, Norman and his colleagues did not know that Gunner Curtis was dead since there was little blood. It was only when a cigarette was placed in his mouth and it refused to glow that they realized that life had gone.6
Gunner Curtis was the first soldier to die on duty in Ireland since 1921. ‘It was the turning point,’ Joe Cahill told me, ‘defence was out of the window.’7 (Cahill was now a senior figure in the Provisional IRA’s Belfast Brigade.) The following day, Chichester-Clark went on television to declare that ‘Northern Ireland is at war with the Irish Republican Army Provisionals.’8
The IRA’s next killing was cold, calculated and precise in a way that the random shooting of Gunner Curtis was not. Three young Scottish soldiers from the Royal Highland Fusiliers, Dougald McCaughey (23) and two brothers, John and Joseph McCaig, aged 17 and 18 years respectively, were having an off-duty drink at Mooney’s Bar in the centre of Belfast. They were wearing civilian clothes. In those days, despite the rioting, off-duty soldiers could still come and go as they wished in the bars, clubs and discos of Belfast. Out of uniform and off-duty, they were not thought to be targets. A former soldier approached them, chatted them up and asked if they’d like to come to a party. Two other men were with him. What the three young Scottish ‘squaddies’ did not know was that the friendly former soldier was the leader of an IRA group from Ardoyne.
Well plied with drink, McCaughey and the McCaig brothers were driven to a lonely mountain road just outside Belfast where they stopped to relieve themselves. As they did so, they were shot through the back of the head and their bodies left by the roadside. One of them is said to have been propped up with a half-empty beer glass still in his hand.9 The horrific killings, the cowardly manner in which they were carried out, and the fact that two of the victims were only 17 and 18 years old, sent shock waves through the province and the rest of the United Kingdom. People knew that Northern Ireland was brutal but never imagined it was as brutal as this. Both the Provisional and the Official IRA issued statements maintaining that none of their units was involved.10 The Provisionals’ statement was carefully worded since, although the killings were carried out by members of the IRA, it seems that those responsible were not authorized to do so. It is certainly highly unlikely that Billy McKee, by then the commander of the Provisional IRA’s Belfast Brigade, would have given the go-ahead for such an operation. He would have regarded it as unsoldierly and contrary to the principles of republicanism. ‘Paul’, then a young Special Branch officer, was familiar with the names and history of the suspected killers. The former British soldier who had enticed the three young men to their deaths came from Ardoyne and had applied to join the SAS but was deemed to be temperamentally unsuitable. According to ‘Paul’, the man was a psychopath who had killed a civilian in controversial circumstances during the army’s anti-terrorist campaign against EOKA in Cyprus. He believes that the Ardoyne IRA did know that he had been in the British army but were not aware of his controversial history. Special Branch was not surprised he was prepared to kill as a way of getting his own back on the army. ‘Paul’ has no doubt that, had the government introduced internment without trial immediately after the killings, it would have been widely supported, not least by the nationalist community, ashamed to think that such barbarity had been conducted in its name.
The revulsion was unbelievable. People within the republican community weren’t ready for that. You must bear in mind that the vast majority of nationalists and the vast majority of those who down the years would have supported the republican cause, weren’t all ready for a campaign against the ‘Brits’, against the RUC and against the system. In fact, that was a real turning point, the point at which the IRA themselves thought that internment would have been introduced. Indeed the thinkers in the movement at that time felt that the government would have got away with it then and there wouldn’t have been the difficulties there were when it eventually came in.
The pressure on Chichester-Clark now became intolerable. To unionists, the man who succeeded Terence O’Neill with a mission to restore order to the streets had presided over a catastrophe, culminating in horrific murder. There were demands for tougher security, for the army to stop pussyfooting around and, above all, for the introduction of internment without trial which had dealt the IRA a blow in its 1956–62 border campaign from which it had never recovered. It had worked at that time because the Irish Government had introduced it simultaneously, which meant that IRA men on both sides of the border had nowhere to hide. The beauty of internment to its implementers was that there was no need for evidence. But the chances of the Irish Government obliging the ‘Brits’ a second time round were zero given how the actions of the British army were perceived in the South. Dublin was not about to do what it saw as Stormont’s dirty work for it.
On 16 March 1971, Chichester-Clark flew to London for discussions on the security situation with Prime Minister Heath, Home Secretary Maudling, Defence Secretary Carrington and the new GOC Northern Ireland, Lieutenant-General Harry Tuzo. He asked for 3,000 more troops and returned to face an increasingly disgruntled Stormont Cabinet with an offer of less than half that figure, which would have brought the army’s total strength in the province to just under 10,000 men. It was not enough. Nor were there the promises of any new military initiatives to curb the IRA and restore some semblance of law and order to the province. Two days after Chichester-Clark’s return to Northern Ireland, when it became clear that Downing Street had given him very little, 3,000 loyalists marched on Stormont demanding action from their Government including internment, the return of the ‘B’ Specials, the re-arming of the RUC and, presumably, Chichester-Clark’s head. Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister knew he had little option other than to resign. Heath tried to discourage him, knowing that the political upheaval was more likely to stir things up than calm them down, but on 20 March 1971, Chichester-Clark resigned because he saw ‘no other way of bringing home to all concerned the realities of the present constitutional, political and security situation’.11
He was succeeded by Brian Faulkner, a tough, no-nonsense unionist hardliner with an astute and determined political brain. Faulkner was not a ‘toff and member of the landed gentry like his predecessors, Captain O’Neill and Major Chichester-Clark, but a self-made man who had made his money in the family shirt-maki
ng business. Faulkner, who had played his political cards deftly over the years since he first became a Stormont MP in 1949, finally achieved his ambition and became Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, defeating his rival, William Craig, an even harder hardliner, by twenty-six votes to four. Minutes after the result was announced, Faulkner made a statement from notes he had jotted down on the back of an envelope the night before in anticipation of victory.
‘Obviously the kernel of our immediate problem is the law and order situation,’ he said. ‘Let me say right away that what we need on this front are not new principles, but practical results on the ground in the elimination not only of terrorism, but of riots and disorder.’12
You could almost hear the cheers from the Ulster Unionist Party’s rank and file. To them, Faulkner’s credentials were impeccable, which is why he had been elected. As Minister for Home Affairs in 1959, he had been successful in countering the IRA’s border campaign and knew that internment worked. He soon began to lobby for it, convinced that what had broken the IRA before would do so again. Faulkner had no idea how wrong he could be.
Chapter Five
Crackdown
August 1971–November 1971
Gavin had his first taste of Northern Ireland in 1966 as a young Captain with the Queen’s Regiment in the days when the garrison was known to the army as ‘Sleepy Hollow’ because nothing ever happened there. If you wanted real action, you hoped for a posting to Aden. If you wanted a fun time with minimum stress and lots of country pursuits, Northern Ireland was the place to be. At that time, the IRA was ‘a joke’. The battalion’s tour was so quiet that it was sent off to British Guyana for nine months for the independence celebrations. When Gavin returned on 6 February 1971, the place was unrecognizable. It was the day Gunner Robert Curtis was shot dead by the IRA. ‘I realized in ten seconds it was a totally different situation,’ he told me. ‘There were soldiers on the docks with weapons which would never have been seen before. They were all over Belfast and there was protective security everywhere. The situation was getting serious. It wasn’t “Sleepy Hollow” any more.’
By now a Major, Gavin arrived to take up a desk job for a two-year posting at Headquarters Northern Ireland as the General Service Officer responsible for plans. He had bribed his wife with a dishwasher and brought his family with him. Scarcely were his feet under the desk when the Chief of Staff, Brigadier Marston Tickell, told him ‘we’re thinking about internment’ and asked for his views. The legislation already existed under Section 11 of the Northern Ireland Special Powers Act that stipulated that any person could be arrested and detained if suspected of acting ‘in a manner prejudicial to the preservation of the peace or maintenance of law and order’.1 The net could be cast as widely as the authorities wished since all that was required was suspicion not evidence.
Gavin started to ‘brush up’ on the practicalities. To his surprise all he found in the archive was a page and half of notes, the bare bones of a plan. Following the killing of the three Scottish soldiers, the need to do something became even more pressing and bare bones were clearly not enough. The notes suggested that a good place to lock people up was the Isle of Man, an obvious choice as it was near to Northern Ireland and it would be a location from which the internees would find it difficult to escape, unless they were exceedingly good swimmers. Gavin was a little concerned about this, realizing that the Special Powers Act only applied to Northern Ireland and therefore the moment the internees set foot on Manx soil, they would be free. He discussed the proposal with the MOD’s Civil Adviser who sat in the next door office and they concluded that the Isle of Man did not seem such a bright idea.
Gavin realized that his superiors would be unlikely to thank him for this novel suggestion and started to look round for something else. He chatted to some of the army’s logistical experts and discovered that there might be a location at an old army depot used to store army Land-rovers, trailers and trucks, known in the jargon as ‘B’ vehicles. (‘A’ vehicles were tanks, etc.) It was situated just outside Belfast at a place known as ‘Long Kesh’ and was so old that some of the Second World War-type Nissen huts were still there. Gavin thought he had hit the jackpot and reckoned that with three days’ notice of internment, army sappers could put up wires and whatever was required to keep Long Kesh’s new inmates in.
The plan was secretly approved and now all that it needed was a name. No army plan was complete without one. Gavin got in touch with the MOD in London and was sent a list of approved code names. ‘Most of them were awful, dreadful names. I do recall one was called “Sludge” but that wouldn’t lend any sense of occasion to either soldiers or citizens or history. But one stood out as being a little clearer and more understandable, Demetrius. Being a Greek word, I thought this might actually help to cover the plan a little, so we called it “Operation Demetrius”. It was better than “Sludge”.’
Intelligence was critical to the success of internment and most of that was in the hands of RUC Special Branch. ‘Paul’, one of its officers involved in the operation, admitted it was less than perfect. The problem was that many of the files were based on individuals from the ‘old’ IRA who had been involved in the failed border campaign which ‘Paul’ himself had helped counter. As the IRA ceased to be involved in violence after it had given the order to dump arms on 5 February 1962,2 the requirement for Special Branch to keep on its toes was less pressing. When the IRA split in the wake of the upheavals of August 1969, a whole new generation rushed to join the Provisionals, and Special Branch was caught on the hop. Identifying and cultivating a whole new range of informants could not be done overnight, and in the climate of the time, new recruits to the IRA were not rushing to betray their new comrades or the nationalist community to the ‘Brits’. Special Branch faced an uphill task. ‘Paul’ admits the shortcomings. ‘We knew what their structure was and who the leaders were in most areas, people like Billy McKee and Joe Cahill. We knew their ORBAT, their Order of Battle, and what their “battalions” were, as they were very much geographically organized. But we wouldn’t have known exactly the layout of the “company” units within each “battalion” and we wouldn’t have known the individual members of the units. At ground level, the information was patchy.’
Ground level was the vital area in which intelligence was urgently needed since it was the ‘Provos’ who were planting the bombs and pulling the triggers.
When Farrar-Hockley examined the contents of the Special Branch files in preparation for ‘Operation Demetrius’, he was not overly impressed. ‘It became apparent to us that though the records had been excellent up to the 1950s, after the “triumph” of that period which brought the IRA’s campaign effectively to an end, there had been very little updating of information. There were some excellent people in Special Branch and there were some not so excellent people. The excellent people were working hard on getting an up-to-date record of everything and the others were doing it when it suited them.’ He also knew that the chances of enlisting the support of the Dublin Government for ‘Operation Demetrius’ were remote if the attitude of its police force, the Garda Siochana, was anything to go by. ‘Our relations with the Irish police were poor. They wanted us to tell them everything but when we asked for things, they sucked their teeth.’
Dublin’s co-operation was the prerequisite of success and it was a non-starter. As ‘Paul’ recognized, ‘They didn’t really have any reason to intern at that time from their point of view. One couldn’t envisage how they could do it. It would have been very, very difficult for them.’ He acknowledged that the operation was always going to be ‘risky’, but in the scales of judgment, the political pressures to go ahead outweighed the advice of those who counselled caution. In the end it came down to a stark choice: the British Government had to give Faulkner what he wanted and his party and constituents demanded, or risk losing another Northern Ireland Prime Minister only a few months after losing the last. Three resignations in two years were hardly likely to increase confi
dence in Stormont. Politically, the ‘Brits’ were still pushing their fingers in the dyke and trying to keep Northern Ireland at arm’s length.
In April 1971, the month after Faulkner became Prime Minister, the army and the RUC held a secret security meeting in Belfast to discuss how intelligence should be obtained from those arrested under the Special Powers Act if internment were introduced.3 The methods traditionally used by the army to extract information from enemy suspects when countering insurgents in the colonies were known as the ‘Five Techniques’. They consisted of making the suspect stand against a wall with arms spread-eagled for hours at a time; placing hoods over their heads to produce sensory deprivation; subjecting them to a continuous high-pitched noise known as ‘white noise’ to disorientate them, and depriving them of sleep and food. They had been used as a counter-insurgency weapon in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, the British Cameroons, Brunei, British Guiana, Aden, Borneo and, most recently in 1970–1, in the Persian Gulf.4 Their origin lay in the accounts that British soldiers gave of how they had been interrogated by the North Koreans during the Korean War. British military intelligence used the techniques not only to interrogate suspects but to train its own soldiers in how to resist interrogation. Remarkably, these practices had never been written down in any army directive, order, training manual or syllabus and there were no guidelines in existence to govern their use.5 They became part of an oral tradition taught at purpose-built interrogation centres in England.