by Peter Taylor
After an epic six-day siege that hooked the nation, the quartet finally surrendered. The four men, who became known as the ‘Balcombe Street Gang’, were Harry Duggan, Martin O’Connell, Edward Butler and Hugh Doherty. Although luck on the part of the police and carelessness on the part of the IRA had led to their capture, it was a carefully directed Metropolitan Police operation that ensured their apprehension without any shots being fired or harm being done to the hostages – a crucial benefit in a propaganda war that made great use of ‘martyrs’.
The four were tried and sentenced at the Old Bailey on 10 February 1977 and received forty-seven terms of life-imprisonment. The judge, Mr Justice Cantley, described them as ‘criminals who called themselves soldiers’ and recommended that each serve not less than thirty years.12 During their interrogation, some of the ‘gang’ said that they were responsible for the Guildford and Woolwich bombs and that those convicted for them were innocent. Their evidence was discounted.
In a controversial postscript, the Balcombe Street Gang did not serve their thirty years. On 23 April 1998, a fortnight after the Good Friday Agreement, the four were transferred to Portlaoise prison in the Republic after serving twenty-two years in English gaols. The following month, to tumultuous applause, they made a dramatic appearance on the platform at a special Sinn Fein conference in Dublin called to ratify the change in the party’s constitution that would enable Sinn Fein candidates to take their seats in the new Northern Ireland Assembly. I was in the hall at the time and remember being deafened by the sound of stamping feet, wild applause and triumphant cheering as the four men stood there beaming, with clenched fists in the air. It was as if they had won a great victory. In the eyes of their ecstatic supporters, they had, and had come home as heroes. I wondered how the families of their victims felt. Shortly afterwards, the Irish Government announced that they would soon be released to honour the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement.
The bloody trial of death and destruction left by the ASU towards the end of 1975 dispelled any notion that the IRA’s indefinite cease-fire was still intact. The Provisionals felt they had been strung along by the ‘Brits’ for long enough and were no longer prepared to play politics to the enemy’s agenda. They had already dealt a blow to the Government’s hopes earlier in the year by boycotting the elections for Rees’s Constitutional Convention held on 1 May, declaring the Convention meaningless as it encompassed only six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties. Time and again in the ongoing secret talks they had pressed the British to deliver on ‘structures of disengagement’ but no concrete assurance had been forthcoming. Oatley never saw the process through because, in March 1975, he left Northern Ireland to take up an MI6 posting in Hong Kong. Others took over from him. As a farewell gesture, the two sides exchanged parting gifts. Oatley presented the Provisionals’ representatives with gold Cross pens and they gave him a Long Kesh harp. Even if Oatley had stayed on, it is unlikely that things would have been different. According to the Republican Movement’s minutes, which I have no reason to believe are other than reasonably accurate, the closest the British came to fulfilling the IRA’s expectations was at a formal meeting on 2 April 1975 between O’Bradaigh and McKee and James Allan and one of Oatley’s successors. The minutes begin with the British trying to soothe O’Bradaigh and McKee who were becoming increasingly concerned at the lack of progress on the key issues.
The acceptability of the Republican Movement as a respectable movement has greatly increased. It is now viewed as a serious political movement which should be listened to. This is an enormous gain. It would be lost if the Republican Movement goes back to war. There is no magic way forward. This is an extremely historic moment. It may never happen again for a long time. The alternative to going back to war is to accept a rate of progress which is slow but will increase as it goes along.
If on the other hand the Republican Movement helps the Government to create circumstances out of which the structures of disengagement [author’s emphasis] can naturally grow, the pace quickens immensely once the groundwork is laid. The only way to develop is to get the groundwork right. HMG cannot say they are leaving Ireland because the reaction would prevent that happening. They cannot make a stark, definitive statement… If one looks at events … The tendency is towards eventual British disengagement… but [it] will stop if the Republican Movement goes back to war.13 [Author’s emphasis]
The British were counselling patience and continued to do so as the meetings petered out against the increasingly violent backdrop of tit-for-tat sectarian killings and the Balcombe Street Gang’s killing spree in London. The reference in the minutes to the ‘historic moment’ that might not happen again for a long time proved prophetic. The ‘truce’ gradually fell apart to the sound of gunfire and bombs. It was to be more than a quarter of a century before the ‘Brits’ and the IRA tried to change the course of history again.
Chapter Sixteen
Enter the SAS
January 1976–May 1976
The horrific tit-for-tat sectarian killings that had stained the closing months of 1975 were but a prelude for the even greater horrors of the first few days of 1976. I was in South Armagh at the time and vividly remember the fear that gripped both communities as killers from both sides pulled the triggers of raw sectarian hatred. The loyalist UVF from mid-Ulster struck first in a co-ordinated attack that left six members of two Catholic families dead. None had any paramilitary connections.
The UVF’s first target was the Reavey family who lived in a small cottage in the village of Whitecross in South Armagh. It stood on its own away from the main village and surrounded by fields. On Sunday evening, 4 January, Mrs Reavey and her husband had gone to visit a relative, leaving three of her sons at home, Anthony (17), Brian (22) and John Martin (25). There were no undue concerns about security and the key was left in the door as was still customary in areas where there had been no trouble. Just after 6 o’clock, as the boys were watching television, at least four masked gunmen walked in and opened fire. John Martin was killed immediately and Brian seconds later as he tried to make for the bedroom. Anthony got to the bedroom and, terrified, crawled under the bed where the gunmen shot him and left him for dead. He recovered but died in hospital less than a month later when he suffered a relapse from the gunshot wounds. Forty-three spent cartridges were found amongst the pools of blood. Later that evening, a deeply shocked Mr Reavey went on television and made a plea. ‘He said he didn’t want any retaliation and didn’t want anybody to suffer the way we had suffered,’ Mrs Reavey told me. ‘He didn’t want anybody shot in retaliation for our sons. He said he would forgive them and made us kneel down that night and pray for the ones who killed them. He said it was worse for them than it was for us because they had to live with what they’d done, killing three innocent young men.’
I was making a film for Thames Television’s This Week programme at the time and went to the Reaveys’ cottage the night of the wake. I remember army helicopters raking the night sky and the fields below with powerful searchlights, probably more to show a security force presence that to deter the UVF. I had never been to an Irish wake before and found it difficult at first to come to terms with seeing John Martin and Brian immaculately laid out in their coffins, powdered and lifeless and bordered by dozens of mass cards. There were no tears as family friends filed past to pay their respects before being served with tea and sandwiches by Mr and Mrs Reavey. The order and calm seemed unreal after the unimaginable ordeal the family had been through. I met Mrs Reavey again twenty-four years later. Remarkably she seemed little changed although the pain and the memory of that night were still there. ‘The years have been hell,’ she said. ‘I think of the boys all the time but I’ll soon be coming to the end of my days. I hope that the ones that shot them will be found out before I die. Nobody was ever arrested for the killing of them and we never heard who did it.’ Robin Jackson, the UVF commander from Mid-Ulster who is believed to have planned and ordered these killings and many more, is now
dead. He was known as ‘The Jackal’ and died of cancer in 1998, a few weeks after the Good Friday Agreement was signed.
Ten minutes after the Reavey brothers were shot, another Catholic family, the O’Dowds, were having a post New Year sing-song around the piano at their home in a village near Gilford fifteen miles away.1 In an obviously co-ordinated attack, another group of UVF gunmen burst in and sprayed the room with automatic weapons, killing three members of the family.
The twin killings in one small corner of the province were to have an even bloodier climax twenty-four hours after the Reavey brothers and the O’Dowd family were gunned down by the UVF. Around tea-time on 5 January 1976, a dozen workers were being driven home in a minibus to the village of Bessbrook from the Glenanne textile factory in which they worked. It was a wet, dark, miserable evening. The driver and ten of the workmen were Protestants and one was a Catholic. The bus took the same route every day and on this occasion the passengers were not surprised to see a man in army uniform with a red light step out into the road and wave the bus down at a place called Kingsmills: given that they were only a couple of miles from Whitecross, where the Reaveys had been shot the night before, everyone on board fully expected army patrols to be thick on the ground that night. All were ordered out of the bus and made to stand spread-eagled against the side.
Alan Black was one of the passengers. ‘We thought the van was going to be searched, which is the most natural thing in the world,’ he told me. ‘We had nothing to hide so no one was worried.’ Nevertheless, Alan was a little surprised that the driver had not been asked for his licence. As he got out of the bus, Alan saw a dozen men in combat jackets lined up in the road. They were carrying automatic weapons and their faces were blackened with ‘cam’ (camouflage) cream. He was even more surprised at what he heard next. The man who had stopped the bus then barked, ‘Who is the Catholic?’ Alan thought this a bit strange, as it was not the kind of question British soldiers normally asked. Suddenly fearing that they had not been stopped by the army but by loyalist terrorists bent on killing their Catholic workmate, two of the Protestants standing next to him put their hands on top of his to stop him moving out.
However, the men were not loyalists but members of the South Armagh IRA, and it was clear that they already knew who the only Catholic on the bus was. The man who did all the talking grabbed him by the shoulder and ordered him to run off down the road. One of the gunmen made sure that he did. Then, with the eleven Protestants lined up against the side of the minibus, the man issued a single command. ‘Right!’ Automatic fire ripped the evening air for about ten seconds, although to Alan it seemed an awful lot longer. ‘The gunfire was deafening, like something you have in your worst nightmare,’ he recalled. ‘I could not believe it the first time I was hit. I could not believe it was happening. It was total unreality. But the pain was real enough.’ Then there was absolute silence, the only noise being the metallic sounds of guns being re-loaded. The IRA then opened fire again to make sure that all eleven Protestants were dead and no witness survived.
Miraculously Alan Black did although he was shot eighteen times. ‘When the shooting stopped, there was not a sound. There was just dead silence. There was not a word, not a noise, nothing. I watched them walk off down the road. They were wearing Doc Marten boots.’ Alan lay there, with the rain trickling down his face, in unbelievable pain, convinced that he was going to die and putting his fingers in the bullet holes to try to stop the blood coming out. Eventually a schoolteacher arrived on the scene and started to say a prayer for the dead. Ambulances and the police soon followed. Alan was rushed to hospital and made a remarkable recovery, although he is still haunted by the memory of that dreadful night. To this day, he cannot understand why it happened.
It was calculated. That’s what made it so hard to take. Ten lads that would not harm a fly and just wiped out. They didn’t mean to leave anyone alive. How do you reason with people that would go out and do that? They knew when they were putting on their uniforms, when they were blacking out their faces, when they were hijacking the van that was used to transport them out here, they knew what they were going to do. How can they live with themselves? I just don’t know.
I remember watching the funerals. The drizzle never stopped. It was as if the sky was weeping too. The massacre was claimed by the South Armagh Republican Action Force, the group responsible for the slaughter at the Tullyvallen Orange Hall. In fact it was the South Armagh IRA, allegedly acting without the authority of the IRA leadership. After Kingsmills, the tit-for-tat killings in South Armagh stopped.
Two days later, on 7 January 1976, Harold Wilson announced he was sending in the SAS for the purpose of ‘patrolling and surveillance’. Such a public announcement was unprecedented as the Regiment’s operations are normally shrouded in secrecy. In the wake of the sectarian bloodletting and the public outrage it caused, Wilson had to be seen to be doing something, and sending in the SAS in a blaze of publicity gave the impression of a firm Government, prepared to hit back at the IRA.
Initially, some members of 14 Intelligence Company were not impressed. ‘They were about as much use as tits on a goldfish,’ one of them told me. Only a handful were deployed to South Armagh, primarily to put the ‘frighteners’ on the IRA which, under the circumstances, seemed a not unreasonable thing to do. Few men were available as most of the Regiment were still involved in fighting rebel tribesmen, known as adoo, in strategically important Oman, although the operation was brought to a successful end in September that year, thus releasing more of its ‘troopers’ for service in the province. It was not as if the SAS had not set foot there before. Members of D Squadron, 22 SAS, were deployed with the regular army in 1969 and a handful had been present ever since attached to other regiments.2 Apparently the decision to deploy the SAS was not warmly greeted in every quarter of the Regiment, one of whose members at the time told me, ‘No bugger wanted to go. It wasn’t an attractive job and the vast majority didn’t want to get involved in Northern Ireland. We may be daft but we’re not stupid.’
Operating in ‘Bandit Country’, as South Armagh had become known, was very different from fighting in Oman and winning the hearts and minds of the tribesmen as the SAS had so successfully done, thus turning the tide of the campaign. In fiercely republican villages like Crossmaglen there were few hearts and minds to be won. Even more difficult was the fact that, unlike in faraway places, the enemy could not be followed to its safe havens over the border in what was known as ‘hot pursuit’. The Irish Republic was a sovereign state and jealously guarded its territorial integrity although it knew that the IRA was operating from the border counties of Monaghan and Louth adjacent to South Armagh. To the SAS the border was a line on a map that was as big a challenge as the IRA. Inevitably, shortly after its deployment, the Regiment was involved in a series of controversies.
The first occurred on 12 March 1976 and involved Sean McKenna (23), whose father had been one of the eleven detainees subjected to the Five Techniques immediately after internment in 1971. The young McKenna was living in a small, two-roomed cottage a couple of hundred yards over the border near Edentubber. The SAS had no doubt that he was a senior commander in the IRA and better out of circulation. He had already been acquitted of murder at two separate trials in the previous four years.3
McKenna thought he was safe but he was not. According to his own account, he was asleep in bed in the early hours of the morning when two men came in through the window, made their way through the kitchen and kicked down his bedroom door against which he had wedged a chair.4 Both were wearing civilian clothes. One of them put a 9 mm Browning pistol to his head and told him not to move. A flashlight was then shone in his face to make sure the intruders had the right man. McKenna was then told to get out of bed slowly and put on his clothes. One of the men gave him a choice: to come quietly or resist and be shot. He was then taken across several fields and across the border where he says three soldiers in uniform were waiting. One of them sent a message o
ver the radio, ‘We have our friend.’ The SAS men then handed him over with the instruction to shoot him if he made a wrong move. McKenna was then formally arrested and taken to the village of Bessbrook in South Armagh in whose disused mill the SAS, the regular army and the RUC were based. He was interviewed there by the RUC and made statements that resulted in his being sentenced to a total of 303 years for offences ranging from attempted murder to bombings, possession of firearms and explosives and membership of the IRA. According to one SAS source involved in the operation, ‘He was sure he was going to be shot when he was told to get dressed and go outside. He couldn’t stop talking and gave away everything he knew without having been asked a single question. When he was handed over to the RUC he was genuinely astonished and delighted to see them.’5
The army, of course, never admitted that McKenna had been lifted from across the border or that the SAS had been involved. Instead they issued a cover story saying that he had been found, drunk and incapable, staggering along the Northern side of the border. Whatever the exact truth, one of the IRA’s most wanted men in South Armagh was now safely locked up in the Maze prison. As far as the authorities were concerned, the end justified the means. After the Kingsmills minibus massacre, few would have argued. McKenna later came within hours of death on the IRA’s first hunger strike in 1980.