by Peter Taylor
Chapter Eighteen
Shootings and Stakeouts
1978
Whilst Castlereagh was squeezing the IRA on the inside, the ‘Det’ and the SAS were doing the same on the outside.
If ‘Jim’ had nine lives in the ‘Det’, he had used most of them up by the end of his second tour in 1978. He was a crack shot who had taken out IRA gunmen with a record-breaking anti-sniper unit before joining 14 Intelligence Company. He was clinical and professional in everything that he did and was matter-of-fact about the IRA. ‘I don’t love and I don’t hate them,’ he told me. ‘As individuals, some of them were very good; some of them were very bad as terrorists. We often used to talk and say that if we had been brought up in those areas at those times, then maybe we would have joined the IRA in the same way as they did. So there’s a certain amount of sympathy but I personally don’t have any sympathy for extremists. People that come over here and plant bombs in crowded shopping centres on a Saturday afternoon are the scum of the earth.’ ‘Jim’ believed that ‘terrorists’ should be given no quarter. He also loved life in the ‘Det’. ‘There was a sense of adventure and it was a highly professional operation, a high level of modern-day soldiering,’ he told me. ‘It was what was required and I felt I was doing something towards ending the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland.’
As IRA leaders attended meetings in the ‘safe’ university area of Belfast, ‘Jim’ kept watch from adjacent premises purchased by the army for surveillance purposes. Were the meetings bugged? ‘Well, it would be foolish not to bug the meetings of the Belfast Brigade Staff,’ he said. (At some stage ‘Det’ operators were apparently living in one of the houses where the Brigade Staff were meeting and regularly changed the audio tapes.) As part of his training, ‘Jim’ had been trained in ‘Methods of Entry’ (MOE) and had become expert at it, paving the way for MI5 officers to plant the listening devices, or simply going through whatever documents and material he could find. ‘We would break in, log what was there and then Special Branch would decide what to do with it. It was quite a desperate situation and desperate measures were needed. But everything was within the law and authorized by the Government.’
Just as ‘Jim’s’ fellow operator ‘Alan’ was tasked to keep tabs on Brendan Hughes, so ‘Jim’ was later directed to keep under observation another senior member of the Belfast Brigade Staff who went on to become one of the Republican Movement’s well-known public figures. (I will refer to him as ‘Liam’.) Special Branch had pointed ‘Liam’ out and detailed his activities within the Belfast IRA. ‘Jim’ then started to follow him round, knowing that if he got too close or was seen too often, he would be ‘pinged’ and possibly ‘finished’. ‘Jim’ suspected he had been ‘pinged’ when ‘Liam’ and another member of the Belfast Brigade Staff followed him into a shop where he had gone to buy a paper. ‘Some leading terrorists, who we were monitoring, started monitoring me.’ ‘Jim’ returned to his car, locked the door, took the safety catch off the Browning concealed under his leg, and eased his finger round the trigger. It was a Friday afternoon and rush hour on the Falls Road meant traffic was crawling along at a snail’s pace. The two senior IRA men came over and ‘Liam’ started banging on the roof calling ‘Jim’ ‘a British bastard’ and other things. ‘Jim’ made a gesture indicating that he did not know what the man was talking about and wondered whether he should shoot him before it was too late, but drew back because he says it would not have been within the directives of the Yellow Card (the military Rules of Engagement in Northern Ireland): ‘Liam’ was not armed and at that moment was not a direct threat to ‘Jim’s’ life.
What concerned ‘Jim’ however, was the sight of the other IRA man beckoning to a known gunman across the road. He knew his chances of escape were remote once shooting started and, seeing his chance, hit the accelerator and roared off into a gap in the traffic.
Fortunately, he escaped. ‘I knew I had to play it right to get out of it,’ he said. ‘I was a very lucky man.’ Special Branch finally caught up with ‘Liam’ and he went to gaol. I saw him a few years after his release and asked him if he remembered ‘pinging’ the ‘Brit’ and banging on the roof of his car. He smiled as the memory came back but did not want to be named and quoted as by then he had endeavoured to put his past behind him. He asked what had happened to the soldier. I said that, like ‘Liam’, he was still alive and retired.
With his cover blown, ‘Jim’ was no use as an operator in Belfast. He returned to England and became an instructor alongside the SAS, training future ‘Det’ operators. By 1978, he was back in Northern Ireland but this time attached to North ‘Det’ which monitored the extensive area covered by the army’s 8 Brigade, most of it in the north-west of the province, including, most important of all, Derry City itself. Here ‘Jim’ would not be recognized. His second tour took place at a time of considerable tension after an IRA incendiary bomb planted on 17 February 1978 incinerated twelve Protestants dining at the La Mon country house hotel outside Belfast. The nine-minute warning was inadequate and the bomb appears to have gone off prematurely, igniting a huge fire-ball that consumed those in the restaurant. It was a ‘mistake’ and the IRA apologized for it.1 Nine days later, unionist demands for action were satisfied when the SAS ambushed and killed a member of the IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade, Paul Duffy (23), as he was moving explosives from a derelict house near Lough Neagh.
‘Jim’ arrived in North ‘Det’ to take the place of another operator, Lance-Corporal David Jones (23) of the Parachute Regiment, who had been killed by the IRA on 17 March 1978 in confused and dramatic circumstances. Corporal Jones, known as ‘Jay’, and another operator whom I will refer to as ‘John’ had been staking out a farmhouse near the Glenshane Pass in South Derry which was being used by the unit commanded by South Derry’s most notorious IRA commander, Francis Hughes. The ‘Det’ and Special Branch believed they were on the point of putting an end to his violent career. As one IRA commander later said, ‘He was the sort of man who would shoot up a few policemen on his way to a meeting to plan our next attack on the police.’2 On 8 April 1977, Hughes and his colleagues, one of whom was suspected to have been the equally notorious Dominic McGlinchey, were believed to have shot dead two members of an RUC Special Patrol Group when they tried to stop their Volkswagen car.3 Shortly afterwards, police posters went up all over the province featuring Francis Hughes, the most wanted man in the North.
The area around the derelict building that ‘Jay’ and ‘John’ were watching had been placed out of bounds by the army because of the special operation in progress. The two operators were therefore surprised to see men looming out of the shadows dressed like soldiers. Thinking they were probably UDR men who had wandered into the area by mistake, ‘John’ issued a challenge.
The ‘soldiers’ were Francis Hughes and members of his unit returning from a patrol. Hughes opened fire and a fierce but brief gun-battle ensued. ‘John’ opened up with his Sterling sub-machine gun, hitting Hughes who carried on firing. Both soldiers were wounded. ‘Jay’ did not survive but ‘John’ did. One ‘Det’ operator later told me that in the light of what happened to ‘Jay’, in future shouting warnings in an out of bounds area was out. ‘We all knew there was no room to f*** around and issue a challenge,’ he said. He also pointed out that all shootings involving the ‘Det’ had always been ‘clean’.
Hughes managed to crawl away and hide before the ‘Det’s’ back-up team and the Quick Reaction Force (QRF) arrived. Shortly afterwards, Geoffrey, a corporal from the Gloucesters who was part of the QRF, found Hughes after following a trail of blood across a field. As was clear on meeting him, it was an encounter Geoffrey never forgot.
I saw this guy with peroxide blond hair. At first I thought he was SAS. There he was sitting down by a big clump of bushes. He was wearing a plain green combat jacket. I asked him who he was and he said nothing. We then cocked our rifles and he said, ‘Don’t shoot, you’ve got me.’ He said his name was Seamus Laverty. Then an RUC guy
came up and said, ‘Do you know who you’ve got there? They’ve done a bad job with the peroxide hair!’ I said to my mate, ‘Christ, we’ve got the bastard!’ We knew what he’d done. Hughes said, ‘I’ve no problem with you lot, it’s those black bastards [RUC] that we hate.’ It was a bit like being soldier to soldier, although I don’t consider them soldiers. We were heroes. The Sergeant-Major said, ‘For the rest of your lives you’ll never buy a drink in the Company bar!’
Hughes is said to have shouted, ‘Up the Provos!’ as he was carried away.4 When he was fully recovered and deemed fit for interrogation, he was taken to Castlereagh and interviewed by the RUC’s top detectives. He said nothing apart from a string of expletives. Statements were not necessary as there was enough other evidence to convict him. He was finally sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to join the other IRA prisoners in the H Blocks, where, on 12 May 1981, he died after fifty-nine days on hunger strike.
‘Jim’ took ‘Jay’s’ place in North ‘Det’ and was glad to be back on the ground. It was not long before he came face to face with the IRA again. One Saturday afternoon on 10 June 1978, his unit got a phone call from Special Branch saying they had intelligence that there was going to be a bombing in the town and the ‘Det’ was tasked to go into Derry to see if there were any ‘players’ on the ground. ‘Jim’ set out with his partner, ‘Mai’, to have a look round the Bogside. They were in separate cars but always close together. Meanwhile, two other operators were checking out the Creggan. Given that it was a Saturday afternoon and the Bogside was busy with shoppers going back and forth to the city centre, no one was likely to give ‘Jim’ and ‘Mal’ a second look. As ‘Jim’ was driving by Rossville Flats, he was suddenly stopped. ‘The IRA had a system then of hijacking cars to use in bombings and they assumed I was a prime target for a hijack, as a relatively young, single bloke in a car on my own. Two gunmen emerged from the corner of a street and flagged me down, drew their guns and tried to get me out of the car. Unfortunately the gunmen that day took on the wrong people.’
‘Jim’ pretended he did not know what the hijackers were on about and played for time until he saw ‘Mai’ about fifteen yards behind him in the driver’s mirror. He knew he had a split-second advantage as the hijacker’s gun, a ‘Star’ 9 mm pistol, had the hammer forward in the half-cock position. ‘Jim’s’ Browning was in his waistband. It was a situation that both men had spent weeks training for with the SAS back in England. ‘Mai’ leapt out of his car and fired two shots at each of the gunmen. He missed one, who ran away, and hit the other in the leg. With the wounded IRA man sitting on the ground, ‘Jim’ got out of the car and finished him off with four bullets through the chest. But why kill him, I asked, if he was wounded already? ‘He had to go down. He had a gun in his hand and was still a threat. That was the only way. It was an instant, split-second decision.’ ‘Jim’ said he could have fired at the other gunman who was running away, confident that he would have hit him, but decided it was too risky with so many people around. ‘One doesn’t know what bullets may do after they’ve passed right through a body.’ He picked up the ‘Star’ pistol and showed it to the astonished and terrified crowd of busy shoppers, to prove that his victim was armed.
The whole encounter was over in seconds. There was a stunned silence and then pandemonium. ‘We were out of it within five or ten seconds of the shooting. Another ten seconds and we wouldn’t have made it. They’d have ripped us to pieces.’ Shortly after the shooting, the rioting started. ‘The IRA didn’t like it so they went into Derry and trashed it.’ The dead man was Denis Heaney (21). The previous month he had been arrested along with his accomplice for an attempted hijacking and detained at Strand Road RUC station for three days, during which time he alleged that he had been beaten up by the police and presented with a statement that he refused to sign. At that time his family did not know that he had joined the IRA.5 When neither ‘Jim’ nor ‘Mai’ was prosecuted for murder, Heaney’s family brought a civil action for damages against the MOD but without success. The judge ruled that Heaney had been armed and the force used had been ‘reasonable’ under the circumstances. At the trial the family were convinced they were denied justice, claiming that he was shot in the back and pointing out that there were no witnesses to testify that he had a gun in his hand. Although a crowd of people watched the shooting, no one was prepared to testify against the IRA. It was ‘Jim’s’ second lucky escape.
By this time, a new batch of operators had arrived in North ‘Det’ fresh from training. ‘Some didn’t just look the part,’ ‘Jim’ remembers. ‘Some had had their hair cut and looked like “squaddies”.’ On 11 August 1978, four operators were tracking IRA weapons round the Creggan acting on intelligence that some were to be used to kill a member of the security forces. The ‘Det’ may have already taken the precaution of secretly lifting them from their hide and doctoring some of the ammunition by removing most of the powder so the bullets would not go very far or do much damage if they hit their target. (Operators had no hesitation in de-activating guns should the opportunity arise. At one stage there seems to have been talk of rigging ammunition so it exploded in the gunman’s face but this was ruled out as a step too far.) At the same time one or more of the weapons may have been ‘jarked’.
One of ‘Jim’s’ partners on the operation was a new arrival, a Scots Guardsman called Alan Swift. ‘Jim’ knew the Creggan intimately whereas Alan, having just been assigned to North ‘Det’, did not know it as well. They were both in separate cars and ‘Jim’ kept checking on the radio ‘net’ that Alan was all right. Another operator in a helicopter was tracking the operation from above. On several occasions Alan told ‘Jim’ he was not sure where he was and, to ‘Jim’s’ consternation, he was not giving the correct call signs. At 3.30 p.m. ‘Jim’ heard forty to fifty shots being fired in two to three bursts from several automatic weapons, almost certainly those that had been concealed in the ‘hide’. He was around 400 yards away from Alan at the time. He immediately checked with the other two operators on the radio and they had not been attacked. There was no reply from Alan.
‘Jim’ drove to Alan’s location and saw the sight he had feared the worst. ‘Alan was half in and half out of the car and a load of kids were dragging stuff out. Instead of doing the murder that they were going to do, they “sussed” out Alan and shot him instead. They were just after killing any “Brits” and we were fair game.’ I pointed out that it was equally hazardous for the IRA. ‘It’s not as dangerous,’ he said. ‘They could make lots and lots of errors and they’re not necessarily dead. If they get “sussed” out by their opposition, they get a nice cup of tea and a warm friendly bed for the next fifteen years. But if we got captured by them, we knew exactly what they were going to do to us. Make one error and you’re dead.’
In 1978, after Roy Mason had extended the role of the SAS from South Armagh to the whole of the province, the Regiment became very busy. On 21 June, it ambushed an IRA ASU from its 3rd Battalion as it was about to fire-bomb a post office depot on the Ballysillan Road in North Belfast. Five SAS troopers had staked out the premises and around midnight opened fire, killing three members of the unit, Denis Brown (28), William Mailey (31) and James Mulvenna (28). No guns were found. The SAS said they had issued a challenge. The bombs were not unlike that used in the La Mon inferno four months earlier.
There was Special Branch intelligence that four IRA men were to be involved in the operation, as a result of which the SAS shot dead a fourth person, William Hanna (27). This was a mistake. Hanna was a Protestant, not an IRA man, and was simply passing by. The fourth member of the unit escaped. For the first time, as part of ‘Ulsterization’, undercover RUC officers were also directly involved in an SAS ambush. It was a taste of things to come.6 In all, 111 shots were fired at the IRA unit, 22 of them by one RUC officer. The SDLP demanded an inquiry into the shootings, claiming it was part of a ‘shooting without question’ policy by the army.7 The phrase was soon honed to ‘shoot to kill’. Ro
y Mason said there was no need for any investigative inquiry. But the controversy over the SAS’s ‘mistake’ was nothing compared with the furore caused by the Regiment’s next killing only three weeks later.
Dunloy is a staunchly republican village in North Antrim on the side of a hill overlooking the vast rolling amphitheatre bordered by the Corkey Mountains and the Glens of Antrim beyond. On the evening of 10 July 1978, a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, John Boyle, was in the ancient village graveyard looking at a faded Boyle family headstone, one of many that lurch out of the overgrown grass, making it the sort of place one would not like to be alone in at night. Some youngsters were in the graveyard too and John noticed that they appeared to have found something under one of the many fallen headstones. When he went over, they ran away. Curious to see what they had found, John looked under the stone and saw a bundle and other material pushed underneath. It was clear that it had not been there for long. He did not attempt to examine the find further but went home to tell his father, Cornelius (‘Con’) Boyle, about his discovery. Con then went back to the graveyard with his son to have a look for himself. ‘I think it was a jacket wrapped up and probably tied in a bundle and a plastic parcel the size of a half-stone bag of groceries,’ he told me. ‘There was something behind that too. When I saw the bulky thing, I thought it was a bomb.’ Con, like John, never touched anything.