by Peter Taylor
A month later, on 15 April 1976, the SAS lifted another IRA man they had been watching, Peter Cleary (26), a ‘Staff Officer’ with the 1st Battalion of the South Armagh PIRA who was ‘on the run’ across the border. Cleary was about to get married to his girlfriend and surveillance revealed that he made regular visits to see her at the house where she was staying a few hundred yards on the Northern side of the border. That evening, he was spotted making one of his visits, having left his car a few hundred yards away in the Republic. Around 10 o’clock, he was watching the television news about an IRA attack on a helicopter in Crossmaglen when the SAS arrested him in a situation of some confusion. Their presence had already been revealed when a neighbour, alerted by the barking of dogs, shone a torch into a ditch and illuminated two soldiers, one of whom then fired a warning shot.6 Helicopters were called up from Bessbrook, and Cleary was taken outside to await their arrival. According to the SAS soldier who was left to guard him, Cleary attacked him and tried to escape. The soldier shot him three times and said he had no chance to issue a warning.7 (Witnesses later said that Cleary had been beaten up by the SAS before he was shot.) Bessbrook was then radioed and told to have a body bag ready on the landing strip.
The following day, HQNI issued a statement that said that Cleary, who was wanted for questioning by the police in connection with several serious crimes in the area, had tried to escape and ‘assaulted the soldier guarding him and in the ensuing struggle was shot dead’.8 Word was put about, presumably by the authorities and duly reflected in the English press, that Cleary had been wanted for questioning in connection with the Tullyvallen and Kingsmills massacres as well as a 300-lb landmine attack a fortnight earlier that killed three soldiers of the Royal Scots Regiment near Cleary’s home in Beleek.9 At his wake, Peter Cleary lay in his coffin, dressed in his wedding suit. The IRA refuted the SAS account of what happened and claimed that Cleary had been picked out for selective, coldblooded assassination. Whatever the truth, there is no doubt that the kidnapping of McKenna and the killing of Cleary within months of the Regiment’s deployment sent a clear message to the IRA. The SAS meant business.
But D Squadron’s operations in the border area suffered a severe setback and embarrassing blow late at night on 5 May 1976. Two SAS soldiers in plain clothes, one in an overcoat and green shirt, the other in a brown jersey and white shirt, were arrested at a checkpoint manned by the Garda and the Irish army about half a mile on the Irish side of the border. They were driving a Triumph Toledo with an Armagh registration. One was an Englishman and the other one of several Fijians serving with the Regiment. In their car was a Sterling sub-machine gun, a Browning pistol and eighty-two rounds of ammunition. A large map marked with certain houses on the Irish side of the border was also apparently found in their possession. Around three and a half hours later, six other SAS men, four in plain clothes and two in army uniform, in a Hillman Avenger and Vauxhall Victor, were also arrested by the Irish police at the same checkpoint. Between them they were carrying three Sterling sub-machine guns, two Browning automatic pistols, a pump-action shotgun and 222 rounds of ammunition.10
The British presented the incident as a ‘map-reading error’. The whole incident had elements of farce about it and gave the Regiment’s reputation a severe knock. The troopers of D Squadron might be deadly marksmen but clearly left a lot to be desired when it came to orienteering.
Precisely what the first SAS car was doing across the border has never been convincingly explained by the authorities, but I understand that the first pair of SAS men were going to pick up or relieve two of their colleagues who were manning a Covert Observation Post (COP) on the Irish side of the border. When they did not return, the six others were sent out to find them. The eight SAS men were arrested and charged under Section 30 of the Republic’s Offences Against the State Act. One of those detained is alleged to have said, ‘Let us go back. If the roles were reversed, we would let you back. We are doing the one bloody job.’11
Although British officials can smile today when you mention the SAS’s map-reading shortcomings, there was little amusement at the time as it became a major diplomatic incident between the British and Irish Governments. There was great embarrassment at Stormont Castle where a new Permanent Under Secretary, Brian Cubbon, had just been installed at the Northern Ireland Office in succession to Frank Cooper. ‘I could never understand the “map-reading error”’, he told me. The eight SAS men were released on bail of £40,000, guaranteed by the British Embassy in Dublin, and returned to stand trial on 7 March the following year. Cubbon was phlegmatic. ‘My own view was that we’d just got to put our hands up for this one and if the Irish wanted to go through a trial with damage limitation, then we had to make the best of it. It was a bad episode and it was an affront to Irish sovereignty.’
At their trial, the SAS men were acquitted of the charge of taking weapons into the Republic with intent to endanger life, which could have carried a penalty of twenty years in gaol. They were admonished and fined £100 each for taking weapons into the Republic without firearms certificates. The Garda then handed the weapons back to the British army.12 It was hardly a glorious page in the Regiment’s history. The apparent reluctance of many of its troopers to become involved in the conflict seemed to be justified by events. SAS involvement in Northern Ireland did not have an auspicious beginning. To the IRA, the initials now meant ‘Special Assassination Squad’.
Chapter Seventeen
Piling on the Pressure
July 1976–March 1979
By the time Sean McKenna was arrested, convicted and gaoled, there was a new regime inside the Maze prison. Merlyn Rees had announced an end to internment on 5 December 1975 and the last internees were released. ‘If all I have is a footnote in history saying, “Merlyn Rees ended internment”, that will satisfy me,’ he told me.1 Since it was introduced in 1971, 1,981 suspects had been locked up without trial, only 107 of whom were loyalists.2 But the compounds in which they had lived out their existence (whose Nissen huts, barbed wire and watchtowers seemed to confirm the inmates’ insistence that they were prisoners of war) were not emptied. Those prisoners left behind were not internees but men who had been convicted and sentenced through the courts. They lived on in the compounds, enjoying the privileges of the special category status that Billy McKee and his colleagues on hunger strike had extracted from ‘Willie’ Whitelaw in 1972. They had weekly visits, letters and parcels, did not have to do prison work and, crucially, were allowed to wear their own clothes and mix freely with each other. Prisoners saw this as ‘political status’ and a recognition by the Government that they were ‘political’ prisoners. They had always believed that when the ‘war’ was over, they would all be released, despite the fact that successive British Governments swore this would never happen. They could not really do anything else. Ministers and senior officials who presided over this anomaly and saw the IRA turning the incarceration of its men to huge propaganda advantage, were determined to bring an end to special category status and treat prisoners as the criminals they believed they were. Frank Cooper had never believed the IRA was ever anything other than a bunch of criminals, whatever its protestations to the contrary.
There may have been some truth in the original IRA ethic, if you like to bestow that word upon it, but it increasingly got totally clouded, became corrupted, became criminal in every sense of the word. It was run for profit in many cases on both sides of the divide. Don’t you tell me it’s not criminal, it was criminal. Whenever you have murders on a large scale against innocent people going about their normal, daily, lawful business, those responsible have got to be made subject to the criminal law and dealt with as criminals.
To find a way of ending the contradiction between the way the Government viewed its prisoners and the way it treated them, Cooper and Rees pressed the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Gardiner, into Government service again. In his report he concluded that ‘terrorists who break the law are not heroes but criminals; not the pioneers
of political change but its direst enemies … the development of a “prisoner of war” mentality among prisoners with social approval and the hope of an amnesty, lends tacit support to violence and dishonesty … they are more likely to emerge with an increased commitment to terrorism than as reformed citizens.’3 He recommended that, as a matter of urgency, the Government should start work on building new cell blocks in which prisoners could be locked up and treated as criminals as they were throughout the rest of the United Kingdom. The building programme began and, before their releases, the last internees recalled seeing new structures rising beyond the wires of their compounds. They were the new ‘H Blocks’, so called because their wings made an H shape. Although neither the ‘Brits’ nor the IRA knew it at the time, the H Blocks were to herald a new phase in the ‘war’ of which the repercussions were to be immense.
In 1976, the Government embarked on a totally new policy as advocated in the Gardiner report. It became known as ‘criminalization’. Six years into the conflict, the ‘Brits’ realized that hostilities were likely to go on for a very long time since, despite its setbacks on the military front before the ‘truce’, and on the political front during it, the IRA showed no signs of giving in or, as the secret talks had indicated, making the compromises necessary for peace. The IRA remained absolutist in its aims and in its means of achieving them.
That did not mean that all the IRA leadership was confident of eventual victory, although it could never admit it since to do so would shatter morale and play into the hands of the enemy. Billy McKee remembers a conversation with Seamus Twomey in early 1976 when they discussed calling off the campaign. ‘Things weren’t going well and it was getting very rough,’ he told me. ‘We were short of money, short of arms and men were getting arrested. Things were getting a bit critical and we made plans about what way it would finish. I said to Seamus, “If we do ever have to call it off, no matter what happens, one thing we can always say is that we got rid of Stormont.”’4
But the IRA did not need to cover what might well have been its failure with the fig-leaf of the abolition of Stormont. ‘We got another kiss of life,’ McKee added. ‘Criminalization’ was the ‘kiss’. The policy that was designed to bring the IRA to its knees, however long the process might take, gave republicans their life-line, although few realized it at the time.
To the fury of the Provisionals, the Government abolished special category status, depriving all prisoners not only of the freedom to run their own lives with their own command structure, military training and parades, but of the visible manifestation that they were different from ‘ordinary’ prisoners. From 1976 onwards, all those sentenced for crimes committed after 1 March 1976 were to be locked up in the cells of the H Blocks and no longer accorded special category status. For the ‘Brits’ the new policy was designed not only to put the ‘terrorists’ behind bars but to change the perception of the conflict and undermine the IRA’s depiction of it as a war of liberation to complete the unfinished business of 1921 and get the British army and state out of Ireland for ever. To the mortification of many army officers who felt that their wings were being clipped, the RUC was to become the lead agency in the ‘war against terrorism’. Suspects on both sides were to be arrested and interrogated by the police, brought before the courts and sentenced by due process of law, just like ‘ordinary’ criminals. The army, the theory went, would gradually retire to the wings and let the RUC get on with the job, with policemen replacing soldiers on the streets. The policy became known as ‘Ulsterization’. This did not mean diminishing the role of 14 Intelligence Company whose importance was, if anything, increased. With the SAS now in place and the ‘Det’ becoming more sophisticated with the use of the latest surveillance technology, the ‘Brits’ were not going to let down their guard. Nor were the IRA. Despite the realistic private assessments of Twomey and McKee, the ‘Provos’ had no intention of winding down their campaign. By the end of 1976, the IRA had killed 12 soldiers, 16 members of the UDR and 24 policemen in the course of the year.5
By the early summer of 1976, there had been both diplomatic and political changes. On 16 March, Harold Wilson had stunned the country by announcing that he was standing down as Prime Minister, for reasons that have never been fully understood. The Press immediately sniffed some great scandal on the horizon but were disappointed when none materialized. The truth may well have been that, as Wilson suggested, he had had a long run and it was time for someone else to take over whilst he retired to his beloved Stilly Isles. As well as all the vicissitudes of domestic politics, Ireland too had taken its toll with its seemingly unending catalogue of killing and the stubborn refusal of its politicians to reach agreement. Wilson’s successor as Prime Minister on 5 April 1976 was Jim Callaghan, who, like Wilson, was no stranger to Ireland. But now glad-handing visits to the Bogside were out.
There were diplomatic changes in Dublin, too. The British Embassy had a new Ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, who gave the local press corps great copy. With his black eye-patch, designed to cover the loss of an eye during the battle of El Alamein in World War Two, double-barrelled name and aristocratic bearing and vowels, Ewart-Biggs was a colourful character anxious to dispel the view widely held by the Dublin media that he was straight out of P.G. Wodehouse. Within days of becoming Ambassador, he had had a meeting with the Gardai to discuss his security. He got the impression there was no great sense of urgency although they agreed he was a possible target for the IRA. ‘They are not very re-assuring,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘They do not seem to have given much thought to the scenario of attack. They thought for some reason that an attack on the car was unlikely – “It hasn’t happened yet”.’6 The Ambassador asked to be kept informed if there was any change in the Gardai’s assessment of risk. None apparently came.
Nine days later, on 21 July 1976, Ewart-Biggs was being driven to the British Embassy from his official residence in Sandyford, County Dublin, shortly before 10 o’clock in the morning. He was scheduled to meet the Irish Foreign Minister, Garrett FitzGerald. With him in the armour-plated Jaguar were Brian Cubbon, the NIO’s new Permanent Under Secretary, Judith Cook, his Private Secretary,7 and Brian O’Driscoll, the driver. Two hundred yards beyond the gates, the IRA triggered a command wire to detonate a 200-lb bomb hidden in a culvert. The Jaguar was hurled into the air, killing the Ambassador and Ms Cook.8 The driver and Brian Cubbon survived, although badly injured. It was a moment the new Permanent Under Secretary never forgot.
It was quite horrific. The explosion was enormous. The car turned over on its left-hand side. Christopher Ewart-Biggs and Judith Cook were killed instantly. I was very fortunate indeed. The next thing I knew was that I was on some table somewhere with arc lights peering down at me, with a surgeon cutting up my suit in order to get at me more easily. The Gardai claim that when they fished me out of the car I said, ‘Would you please tell the Irish Foreign Minister that we may be a little late for our appointment?’
The bombers were never caught. The Ambassador’s widow, Jane Ewart-Biggs, channelled her grief into working for peace and established a literary memorial prize in her husband’s name. She was made a Labour life peer in 1981 and died in 1992, before the peace that she had worked so tirelessly for had become a reality.
On 10 September 1976, unionist spirits were lifted when the new Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, announced his Cabinet re-shuffle. Roy Mason, the tough, straight-talking former Yorkshire miner and MP for Barnsley, was moved from being Secretary of State for Defence to being Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. At first Mason was less than enthusiastic because he regarded the MOD as his natural home.9 The NIO was unfamiliar territory, as it was for all Secretaries of State who entered Stormont Castle. To unionists, Roy Mason was an answer to their prayers, a man who, unlike his predecessors, would never contemplate having dealings with the IRA. Mason believed the IRA was to be beaten not talked to.
Unlike the slightly dishevelled but famously affable Rees, Mason was always formal, bus
iness-like and never off duty. ‘He didn’t like to meet anyone he hadn’t met before,’ one of his officials told me. ‘He would never sit around in braces and always wore a tie. And he always liked people on time.’ He was happiest when he was with the military, which reminded him of his golden days at the Ministry of Defence. He felt he spoke their language and they spoke his. He found the company of unionist politicians congenial, too, but was never really comfortable in that of nationalist politicians like the gregarious and expansive Gerry Fitt and Paddy Devlin. (His Labour successor many years later, ‘Mo’ Mowlam, was just the opposite. She could not stand many of the unionists and was most at home with the SDLP.) Mason loved the media’s attention. One of his officials described him as being ‘switched on by the cameras, like being jerked into action by electricity’. Appearing on television, invariably on his terms under the skilful direction of the NIO’s legendary media adviser, David Gilliland, not only appealed to his vanity but enabled him to get his uncompromising message across with sound-bites that made unionists jump for joy and nationalists tear their hair out. To Mason the IRA was the problem, not the symptom of it.
The new Secretary of State had no time for political initiatives and newfangled Constitutional Conventions and no time for secret talks with representatives of those he called ‘gangster mobs’. One of his first acts was to close down Laneside which had been home to Frank Steele and Michael Oatley. His priority was security and jobs, both of which, he recognized, were interdependent. Now, he decided, ‘it was time to take the war to the enemy’.10 Mason was a huge fan of the SAS and, having sent them to Northern Ireland in the first place when he was Defence Secretary, he was keen to use their capabilities to the full, not only by increasing their numbers but by extending their operational role to the rest of the province. His aim was to put enormous pressure on the IRA, applied by Special Branch, the ‘Det’ and the SAS. The IRA could no longer attack with impunity. One of Mason’s officials told me that one SAS officer wanted to squeeze even harder and attack the IRA’s havens over the border. ‘When are you buggers going to let us send Tornadoes into Dundalk?’ the official claimed the officer said.