by Peter Taylor
The Boyles, whom I first met in the late 1970s, are a God-fearing Catholic family with no republican connections. When they got home around 8 O’clock that evening, Con rang an RUC police constable whom he knew from the constable’s time in Dunloy and who was now a detective in Ballymoney RUC station a few miles away. Con told him it was something that ought to be looked into and said that if he would care to come to Dunloy, Con would take him to the exact spot. The detective thanked him, declined the offer and said he would be in touch. For a Catholic in a republican area to inform the police about a possible IRA ‘hide’ required considerable courage. ‘There was no trouble around here at the time and I didn’t want any,’ Con said. ‘I didn’t want to see any policeman hurt so I thought this was the best thing to do.’
Con heard no further word from the policeman that night. He left home the following morning about 9 a.m. to visit a neighbour in a farm about half a mile from the graveyard. John had left home earlier that morning to help his brother, Hugh, with the hay in the field close by the graveyard. When Con arrived, the neighbour asked him if he had heard the shots. Whilst the two men were talking, the neighbour’s mother came out of the house and told Con that his wife had just telephoned to tell him not to go near the graveyard.
Con realized the message came from the police. But it was too late. John was dead, shot three times by two members of a four-man SAS team who were lying in wait in the graveyard, obviously waiting for the IRA to come to retrieve the contents of the hide. Con went straight to the spot to find Hugh lying face-down on the ground being guarded by a soldier with a gun. Two other soldiers promptly stopped him. ‘They said that the other bastard was lying in there, dead. It had to be John. I wasn’t allowed to speak. I told them that I had warned the police about it but they told me to “shut up”, poked me with a gun and told me to keep quiet.’
It is impossible to know what made John return to the graveyard. Perhaps it was out of curiosity to see if the ‘hide’ was still there. In an unprecedented move, two of the four SAS men, Sergeant Alan Bohan and Corporal Ron Temperley, were charged with the murder of John Boyle. The court heard that they thought he was a terrorist returning to the ‘hide’ which in fact contained a rifle. They said that Boyle removed the weapon from under the headstone and turned towards them as if to shoot. Bohan and Temperley said they thought their lives were in danger and fired three shots, killing John instantly. They were less than twenty feet away. The judge, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lowry, returned a verdict of not guilty but described one of the soldiers as ‘an untrustworthy witness, eager to make unmeritorious points’8 and described the operation as ‘a badly planned and bungled exercise’.9 Despite the fact that Con Boyle had done his civic duty at considerable risk to himself and his son, the family never received any apology from the SAS, the army, or the RUC. Although bitterness is an emotion foreign to the family, time has not eased the loss. ‘John’s killing was a waste,’ says Con. ‘I could see no reason why they couldn’t have arrested him. It would have been easy. As time went on and you watched what was happening around, the SAS didn’t arrest very many.’
The SAS were to kill one more person in 1978. This time it was in Derry at an IRA weapons ‘hide’ at 2 Maureen Avenue, an unoccupied house that was being renovated in the Brandywell area of the Bogside. The premises had been under surveillance by the ‘Det’ for some weeks, during which time it was established that some IRA equipment was being stored in one of the bedrooms in a wardrobe-type cupboard with a single latch lock. At this stage, it was not thought that weapons were inside. The house was then kept under close observation. When there were suspicions that the IRA was planning a ‘hit’ and the ‘hide’ would be involved, three SAS men secretly broke in well after midnight and took up position in the loft above the bedroom containing the ‘wardrobe’. At 1 a.m. on 23 November they began ‘eyes-on’ surveillance on the ‘hide’ below them. Their orders were monitor all movement in and out of the house and to challenge and apprehend anyone seen handling weapons or explosives. Their instructions were to open fire only if necessary and then only in accordance with the Yellow Card.10 With innocent workmen there during the day, the risk of compromise was great.
Just before 10 p.m. the following evening, two men entered the house and went into the bedroom. From their O.P. in the loft, the SAS heard ‘dragging noises’. When the nocturnal visitors had left, the SAS team examined the wardrobe and found that it now contained ‘illegal weapons and ammunition’.11 The SAS did not challenge the two men as it was decided, again presumably on Special Branch information, that they were of lesser importance and not worth challenging as this would have ‘blown’ the carefully planned operation to catch one of the main ‘players’ who would be associated with the team chosen to carry out the ‘hit’.
Around 9.30 p.m. on 24 November, by which time the SAS had been in place for about 44 hours, Patrick Duffy (50), a member of the IRA’s Derry Brigade, entered the house. He was unarmed at the time.12 He went into the bedroom and was shot dead by the SAS. At the inquest, the soldiers said that he had ‘opened the wardrobe, leant inside and relocked it’. They then said they challenged Duffy with the warning, ‘Don’t move! Security Forces!’ They then opened fire with their Sterling and Ingram sub-machine guns, hitting Duffy a dozen times. They said he reacted as if he was about to use a weapon and they feared their lives were in danger.
When the shooting happened, ‘Jim’ recollects being outside the house although he says he did not hear any shots and only became aware of them through the radio traffic. But whatever happened, he was convinced that the SAS ‘would have worked within the rules of the Yellow Card’. In describing the complementary roles of 14 Intelligence Company and the SAS, one ‘Det’ operator said, ‘We lick ’em. They stick ’em.’ That may have been the case in the bedroom of 2 Maureen Avenue.
The Bishop of Derry, Dr Edward Daly, who had been a crucial eye-witness on ‘Bloody Sunday’, was uncompromising in his criticism of the SAS and the policy he believed it was pursuing at the time. ‘Members of the British Army here seem to be able to act outside the law, with immunity from the law,’ he said. ‘The shooting dead of a person merely because he enters a house or a place where illegally held guns or explosives are stored is quite unjustifiable. This policy gives soldiers the power to act as judge, jury and executioner.’13 Bishop Daly also believed that ‘shoot to kill’ only encouraged more young people to join the IRA.
It was to be five more years before the SAS made another ‘kill’ in Northern Ireland. Clearly, lessons had been learned.
Chapter Nineteen
Double Disaster
27 August 1979
Towards the end of 1978, as ‘Jim’ and the ‘Det’ were monitoring the arms cache in the wardrobe in the unoccupied house in Derry, Brigadier James Glover of the army’s Defence Intelligence Staff was preparing one of the most insightful and prescient papers on the IRA ever to emerge from the MOD. On completion it was entitled Future Terrorist Trends, marked ‘Secret’ and dated 2 November 1978. How it was leaked or lost and came into the public domain has never been convincingly established.1 In it he wrote, ‘The terrorists are already aware of their own vulnerability to Security Force intelligence operators [the ‘Det’] and will increasingly seek to eliminate those involved.’ In the previous eighteen months, the IRA had ‘eliminated’ two operators, Corporals Paul Harman and Alan Swift, and shot dead Corporal David ‘Jay’ Jones. It had also ‘executed’ 14 Intelligence Company’s most publicly famous member, Captain Robert Nairac, the Grenadier Guard who was working in South Armagh as an SAS Liaison Officer (SASLO). Nairac, a Roman Catholic educated at Ampleforth College and Oxford, was a maverick (his hero was T. E. Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’) and used to pose as a republican, singing rebel songs in the bars of ‘Bandit Country’. Such bravado would have been contrary to all his ‘Det’ training. He sang his last song on Saturday evening, 14 May 1977, at the Three Steps Inn at Drumintee, a few miles from the border, and was
never seen by his colleagues again. Astonishingly and against all ‘Det’ custom and practice, he had no back-up partner with him. Nairac had aroused suspicion, was abducted by the IRA after a struggle, taken across the border, interrogated and shot. It is said he didn’t give his interrogators a scrap of information. His body was never found and is believed to have been disposed of in an animal feed processing plant. Captain Nairac was awarded a posthumous George Cross. In the same eighteen month period, the ‘Det’ had played its part both directly and probably indirectly in ‘eliminating’ one member of the INLA, Colm McNutt, and five IRA men, Paul Duffy, Denis Heaney, Denis Brown, William Mailey and James Mulvenna. The score card for that year and a half’s deadly undercover war was ‘Brits’ 6 – IRA 4. Three weeks after Glover’s report was finished, Patrick Duffy was shot dead by the SAS near the wardrobe, bringing the ‘score’ of the ‘Brits’ to seven.
But Glover’s observation was not the reason for the significance of his report. Its purpose was to review the state of the IRA as the end of the first decade of hostilities approached. Glover knew that the widely held perception of the enemy did not match the reality. (One civil servant of the time confessed to me that he used to think the IRA were simply ‘petty criminals running black taxis’ and said he felt guilty for not taking them more seriously.) Glover thought it was time that his superiors and presumably their political masters woke up to the fact and recognized that if the IRA’s strategy was to fight ‘the long war’, the ‘Brits’ had to dig in for it too. Glover predicated his report on looking at least five years ahead. He recognized that the IRA had changed and the tactical and strategic response of the ‘Brits’ would have to be modified accordingly.
The main change in the IRA was structural. As its leadership had admitted a year earlier in the GHQ report seized after Seamus Twomey’s arrest, Castlereagh was ‘breaking Volunteers’ and ‘contributing to our defeat’: therefore there was an urgent need for ‘reorganisation and remotivation and the building of a new Irish Republican Army’. The basis of the reorganization to equip the ‘new’ IRA for ‘long-term armed struggle’ was to be ‘cells’ of four Volunteers.2 This cellular structure would replace the old ORBAT (Order of Battle) of Brigades, Battalions and Companies which had been so deeply penetrated by British intelligence. In theory, members of each cell would know the identity of each other but not of those outside it. Glover (later General Sir James) told me he had no doubt where the impetus for change came from in preparation for a campaign of attrition that the IRA called the ‘long war’.
It was really Gerry Adams, and his cohort Ivor Bell, languishing in the Maze Prison who set out to do a really deep study of the classic terrorist movement and it was they between them who drew up a new blueprint for the IRA. The new cellular structure demanded far less people, was more professional, required a lower level of popular support and was more difficult to penetrate. Rather like the Chinese, the IRA had a totally different sense of timing to that which we had had. We had tended not unnaturally to look one or two years ahead and the IRA at this stage were preparing to look five to ten years ahead.
Controversially, in his report Glover challenged the prevalent perception of the enemy.
Our evidence of the calibre of rank-and-file terrorists does not support the view that they are merely mindless hooligans drawn from the unemployed and unemployable. PIRA [the Provisional IRA] now trains and uses its members with some care. The Active Service Units (ASUs) are for the most part manned by terrorists tempered by up to ten years of operational experience … the expertise of the ASUs will grow and they will continue to be PIRA’s prime offensive arm … PIRA … will still be able to attract enough people with leadership talent, good education and manual skills to enhance their all-round professionalism.3
Glover believed that the IRA was no longer an almost exclusively working-class organization based on the depressed housing estates of Belfast and Derry but one that had now drawn well-educated recruits from the middle classes attracted by the ideology of republicanism. He described it as a ‘sea change in the IRA’. As a result the Republican Movement now had a ‘far stronger intellectual and professional base’ which posed an even greater long-term threat for the ‘Brits’. He left the army’s top brass in no doubt that the IRA had not only a sufficient number of high-calibre and well-motivated recruits available to prosecute its ‘long war’ but the necessary weaponry and technical expertise to do so. ‘PIRA strategy’, he wrote, ‘is based on the premise that a campaign of attrition, with its attendant costs in both lives and money, will eventually persuade HMG to withdraw from Northern Ireland.’ Hitherto, as Glover recognized, the IRA had not mounted sustained attacks on prominent figures, but he warned that this was now likely to change, with PIRA staging ‘a few spectacular attacks to indicate that their normal lower posture stems from restraint rather than weakness’.
Future Terrorist Trends was greeted with less than universal enthusiasm within the MOD. ‘It didn’t find all that much favour,’ he told me. ‘Perhaps underneath it all, everyone realized that this was the likely way in which things were going to go but at the time it hadn’t really been paraded in front of them in such an overt, and, I hope, persuasive way.’
Glover’s warning about IRA ‘spectaculars’ was grimly prophetic although not even he could have anticipated how cataclysmic they were to be. On one day the following summer, 27 August 1979, the IRA struck two devastating blows against the ‘Brits’ in the space of a few hours. I remember the day vividly, just as millions will never forget where they were when they heard that John F. Kennedy had been shot. I was at home writing Beating the Terrorists? when I turned on the radio and heard that Earl Mountbatten, the Queen’s cousin and the last Viceroy who oversaw the ending of British rule in India, had been blown up by the IRA at his holiday home at Mullaghmore, County Sligo, in the Irish Republic. The IRA had planted a 50-lb bomb under the deck of his fishing boat, Shadow V, which was detonated from the shore by radio control just after the boat had put to sea. Three others died with him: his fourteen-year-old grandson, Nicholas Knatchbull; his daughter’s mother-in-law, 82-year-old Lady Brabourne, and fifteen-year-old Paul Maxwell from Enniskillen, who was working with the boat as a summer job. The 79-year-old Earl Mountbatten, who had spent holidays in the pretty coastal village every summer for the past thirty years, had sought advice from the Cabinet Office in the early seventies about his safety. The Foreign Office (presumably MI6), the Home Office (presumably MI5) and the MOD (presumably Defence Intelligence) were all consulted and Mountbatten was told in a memo that, although no visit to Ireland could be regarded as risk-free, nevertheless ‘all feel that the risk is one that can reasonably be taken’.4
Brigadier Glover was in a helicopter flying from Derry through the mists to Army Headquarters at Lisburn when the Mullaghmore bomb went off. When he heard the news he was shocked. He had warned of high-profile targets and of the IRA’s growing sophistication with remote-control bombs but even that had not prepared him for this. He then heard news that doubled his astonishment. Hours after Mullaghmore there had been two massive explosions near Warrenpoint, close to the border with the Republic. Although Glover would not have known the details at the time, the explosions left eighteen soldiers dead, sixteen of them members of the 2nd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment. It was the Parachute Regiment’s biggest loss since Arnhem in World War Two.
The ambush was carefully planned and there was no intelligence to alert the army or Special Branch to it. A convoy of paratroopers were driving from their base at Ballykinler in County Down to relieve the Queen’s Own Highlanders in Newry who were about to return home after their tour of duty. The convoy consisted of two four-ton trucks, preceded by a Land-rover. One of the passengers in the Land-rover was Stuart, a signaller. He had initially intended to travel in one of the trucks but because the radio signals came and went along the route to Newry, he was told he was needed in the lead vehicle. Stuart remembers it being a stunningly beautiful day as they drove alon
g the dual carriageway alongside Carlingford Lough, the stretch of water that marks the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. ‘It was just lovely,’ he told me, ‘and it made me think, you know, isn’t it a shame that there’s so much hatred and so many nasty things going on in this country when it’s got so much to offer.’ Stuart’s Land-rover passed a hay lorry parked in a lay-by and ‘didn’t give it a second thought’. The first truck drove past it and, just as the second truck was doing the same, there was a huge explosion and the hay lorry went up in the air. Stuart watched in horror as the second truck was thrown 100 feet in the air and then landed on the central reservation of the dual carriageway. Eight hundred pounds of explosives had been concealed amongst the bales of straw.
The hay lorry and the second truck just disappeared together. There was smoke, debris and straw all over the place. We immediately turned round our Land-rover and went back to the seat of the explosion to render what assistance we could. There were bodies and bits of bodies everywhere and there was ammunition exploding in some people’s pouches. We were putting some people out who were on fire and we were just checking to see if anybody was alive. By some miracle, two of the soldiers were just still alive but the other six were killed. I never felt an anger like it. It just didn’t seem fair that a bunch of really good mates, each one a thoroughly professional soldier, should die in such a way in such a cowardly attack. They were just helpless. They were just sat in a truck.
The rest of the convoy ran for cover as their training had taught them to do and took shelter by the Gate Lodge of the nearby Narrow Water Castle. As they did so, they came under fire from the IRA unit on the other side of Carlingford Lough from where the bomb had been detonated. The Paras returned fire and in the process killed an English tourist, Michael Hudson (29), who was bird-watching on an island opposite the castle.5