by Peter Taylor
What the soldiers did not know was that the IRA had planted a second 800-lb bomb by the Gate Lodge, anticipating that the soldiers would make the practised moves that they did. But in order to create the maximum carnage, the IRA were waiting until reinforcements arrived. Immediately the first bomb had gone off, the Paras had radioed the Queen’s Own Highlanders in Newry for help and were now expecting the arrival of a QRF with medical assistance. Roughly twenty minutes later, a Gazelle helicopter landed in a field behind the Gate Lodge. The rest of the QRF arrived in army vehicles. Casualties from the first bomb were loaded on board the Gazelle and, as it was taking off, a second explosion shattered the afternoon sunshine, killing twelve more soldiers, including the commanding officer of the Queen’s Own Highlanders, Lieutenant-Colonel David Blair (40), and his wireless operator, Lance-Corporal Victor McCleod (24).
In the space of barely half an hour, the IRA had killed eighteen soldiers, sixteen of them members of the Parachute Regiment. It was the army’s biggest loss of life in a single day in the whole of the conflict. Stuart and Glover both agreed on the significance of what became known as ‘Warrenpoint’. ‘From the IRA’s point of view it was the most successful operation they’ve ever carried out,’ said Stuart, ‘and what better target from their point of view than the Parachute Regiment. The IRA would see this as revenge for Bloody Sunday.’ To Glover, his prophecy about an IRA ‘spectacular’ had come doubly true. ‘It was arguably, I think, the most successful and certainly one of the best planned IRA attacks of the whole campaign,’ he told me. ‘It was almost inevitable that at some stage they were going to succeed because we’d failed to interdict them. So the event itself was not a surprise but the nature of it was. It was ghastly.’
No one was ever convicted for Warrenpoint. From intelligence reports, the army had a good idea who the bombers were but convictions need evidence or witnesses and both were in short supply. I asked Stuart if he and his colleagues who survived knew who the bombers were. He said they had absolutely no doubt. One of the main suspects was Brendan Burns, who remained a highly active member of the South Armagh IRA for most of the next decade. He had originally been stopped by the Gardai when he was driving away from the scene with another man on a motor bike but was released when there was no evidence against him. ‘He was a very capable bomber and probably responsible for the death of quite a large number of soldiers in South Armagh,’ said Stuart. But the activities of one of the IRA’s top bombers came to a swift end on 29 February 1988, when Brendan Burns (30) was finally blown up by his own bomb which detonated prematurely when he was moving it just outside Crossmaglen. The Paras were ecstatic when they heard the news.
The army believed that, had it been allowed to fly its helicopters across the border in hot pursuit of the bombers (given that they remained in place for some time after the first explosion), it would probably have caught them. But ‘hot pursuit’ was not permitted by an Irish Government that in 1977 had put eight SAS men on trial for merely ‘straying’ across it. Downing Street was furious that it appeared to have had such scant co-operation from its counterparts in Dublin and, not least, from the Irish police.
By this time Number Ten had a new occupant, Margaret Thatcher, who was to become the IRA’s most implacable enemy. Her triumph in the General Election of 3 May 1979 had been overshadowed by the death of the Conservatives’ Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, Airey Neave, at the opening of the election campaign. He was one of Mrs Thatcher’s closest personal friends and had organized her successful campaign for the Conservative Party leadership. He had been driving out of the House of Commons underground car park on 30 March when an INLA bomb, triggered by a mercury tilt switch, exploded under his car as it drove over a ramp. He died almost instantly. In opposition, he had argued for giving the army a freer hand, increasing the use of the SAS and giving terrorists longer prison sentences.
Mrs Thatcher was at Chequers when she heard about Mountbatten and Warrenpoint. She was shattered by the news. ‘Words are always inadequate to condemn this kind of outrage,’ she wrote. ‘I decided immediately I must go to Northern Ireland to show the army, police and civilians that I understood the scale of the tragedy and to demonstrate our determination to resist terrorism.’ Mrs Thatcher flew to Northern Ireland, visited the casualties in hospital and was helicoptered to the army’s fortress in Crossmaglen to show solidarity with those she regarded as her ‘boys’. Her presence had an electrifying effect on the army whose morale had every reason to be rock-bottom after the disaster. The officer who took over from Lieutenant-Colonel David Blair, who was killed at Warrenpoint, was one of those who met her in Crossmaglen.
She came in out of the sky in her helicopter with blue dresses and coats and scarves flapping in every direction. She really was like a blue tornado and it was good to see her. It was just marvellous the way she arrived and greeted everybody and took a real interest in what was going on. She gave us some very strong words of encouragement and explained in no uncertain terms how determined she was to defeat terrorism as best she possibly could.
The NIO’s Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Brian Cubbon, was also present at one of the briefings given to the Prime Minister and remembers a dramatic gesture made by one of the senior officers.
It was the first time that I had met Mrs Thatcher and I was very impressed with the patient way in which she received the briefing about what had happened. I think it was a Brigadier who made quite a dramatic presentation about Warrenpoint. The culmination of it was to throw down on the floor of the conference room the epaulets of the officer who had been killed at Warrenpoint, saying that was all that was left of him. Again I was impressed with her. She took that in her stride.
Mrs Thatcher visited both the police and the army and their respective commanders in the province, Sir Kenneth Newman and the GOC, Lieutenant-General Sir Timothy Creasey. Creasey and Newman did not see eye to eye and the tangible friction between them filtered down to the middle and lower ranks in each organization with the result that – perhaps with the notable exception of Special Branch and the ‘Det’ – no love was lost between them. Although Creasey had little choice other than to go along with police primacy, he embraced it less than whole-heartedly. ‘He had a simple view of the problem,’ one of those who dealt with him told me. ‘He divided the problem into the “good guys” and “bad guys”. He believed the “good guys” should be given medals and the “bad guys” put up against a wall and shot.’ Creasey, who had commanded the Sultan of Oman’s forces, was a man of action who, as GOC, did not subscribe to the view that the IRA could not be beaten. He was enthusiastic about the use of the SAS and it was no coincidence that the Regiment became so active whilst he was GOC. He is said to have ‘erupted’ when the eight SAS troopers were arrested for crossing the border. Creasey’s strong views were shared by some of his senior officers. A civil servant told me how he had stood next to one of Creasey’s commanders, who was looking at the ‘Rogues’ Gallery’ (a photomontage of IRA ‘players’). ‘Give me the word and I’ll take them out,’ the official told me he said.
In contrast, Newman was a cerebral Chief Constable, dedicated to systems and structures and the modernization of the RUC, convinced that the police, not the army, would finally turn the conflict around. The clashes between Creasey and Newman were bound to happen. Sir John Hermon, who succeded Sir Kenneth as Chief Constable in 1980, described relations between the two as ‘strained’.6 That was probably putting it euphemistically. According to one of the civil servants at Stormont, Creasey was ‘unbearable’, so much so that he, although a lower-ranking official, had to deal with the GOC as his more senior colleague could not. When Mrs Thatcher visited the two camps, who were supposed to be fighting the same enemy rather than each other, each told the Prime Minister its side of the story. Sir Kenneth Stowe, who succeeded Sir Brian Cubbon as Permanent Under Secretary shortly after Warrenpoint, was amazed at the bad blood he found between the two arms of the security forces when he first went over to Northern Ir
eland. But he understood what caused it.
I think the basis of their mutual difficulty was the criminalization policy which meant that every crime, every murder, every shooting had to be addressed as a crime with the police in the lead. It could not be addressed as a terrorist operation which required a counter terrorist response [by the army]. Another element was that the intelligence-gathering of the RUC and of the army was not, I suspect, effectively shared. That is my suspicion but I think it’s probably well-founded.
In what sense?
They weren’t talking to each other when they should have been talking to each other. That was the problem.
Mrs Thatcher and her advisers decided that something had to be done. The army wanted the Government to appoint a military supremo, as General Templer had been in Malaya, to co-ordinate the drive against the IRA but this was rejected out of hand as it would have meant turning back the clock, stabbing police primacy in the back and giving the army the upper hand once again. A compromise was reached and probably brokered by Sir Frank Cooper who was now Permanent Under Secretary (the senior civil servant) at the Ministry of Defence. It was decided that there should be a supremo but he should not be a military man. Cooper said he probably had a dozen potential names in his pocket and, in the end, Sir Maurice Oldfield, the head of MI6 from 1965 to 1977, came out on top. At the time, Sir Maurice, who is thought to have been the model for John Le Carre’s George Smiley, was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was consequently plucked from the dreaming spires and thrust into the strifetorn world of Northern Ireland as its Chief Intelligence Co-ordinator. His office was a few yards away from Sir Kenneth Stowe’s and the two men had regular discussions. ‘He was supposed to ensure that the combined resources of intelligence-gathering of the police and of the army and their subsequent operations were effectively integrated,’ Sir Kenneth said. ‘He was totally committed to engaging with the senior people on both sides and actively engaged in trying to get them to work together and working out systems that would ensure greater, more effective collaboration than had always been achieved in the past.’
When I asked Sir Kenneth what Sir Maurice had achieved, he said it was ‘difficult to say’ beyond getting the police and the army to work together better, which was his primary task. To Sir James Glover, Oldfield was ‘a referee, a catalyst, a Solomon who got us together to produce a solution based on logic rather than emotion’.7 But to Sir John Hermon, who became the RUC Chief Constable on 1 January 1980, he was superfluous. ‘I must say, I paid scant attention to him,’ Sir John told me. ‘Quite frankly, I didn’t consider his role was necessary or that it contributed very much. He very quickly became superficial. Not because of his inabilities or anything else, but because he wasn’t needed.’8 Hermon felt this way not least because he got on very well with Creasey’s successor as GOC, Lieutenant-General Sir Richard Lawson. The two were as close together as their predecessors had been far apart.
But the shadow of Warrenpoint that Oldfield had been recruited to dispel was soon eclipsed by a crisis that was to have even more lasting repercussions for the ‘Brits’: the Hunger Strike.
Chapter Twenty
The Iron Lady and the Iron Men
March 1976—October 1981
There were two great watersheds for the ‘Brits’ during the thirty-year ‘war’. One was ‘Bloody Sunday’ in 1972, the other was the IRA hunger strike of 1981. Both had profound repercussions for British policy and the course of the conflict. In Future Terrorist Trends Brigadier Glover had warned that ‘an isolated incident such as “Bloody Sunday” can radically alter support for violence’. Like so much of his report, that too was prophetic.
The origins of the hunger strike lay in Merlyn Rees’s decision to abolish special category status for all prisoners convicted of terrorist offences committed after 1 March 1976 and send them to the newly constructed H Blocks of the Maze prison where they would be locked up in cells like common criminals. The first IRA prisoner to be convicted under the new regime was a nineteen-year-old IRA man from West Belfast called Kieran Nugent who had been arrested in May 1976 and found guilty of possessing weapons and hijacking a car. When he entered the Maze, he was ordered to put on a prison uniform and refused on the grounds that he was not a criminal but a political prisoner. Nugent stayed unclothed for his first day in the H Blocks but on the second day prison officers gave him a blanket so he would not have to walk round the exercise yard naked. ‘If they want me to wear a uniform,’ he said, ‘they’ll have to nail it to my back.’ He spent the rest of his three-year sentence wearing the blanket.1 In the ensuing weeks and months, other IRA prisoners followed his example, forming the nucleus of what became known as the ‘blanket’ protest. One of those who came close on Nugent’s heels was Gerard Hodgkins who was gaoled in December 1976 for a firearm and bombing offence as well as IRA membership. He told me what happened when he entered the prison.
The prison officer said, ‘Right, you’re here to do your time. You can do it the hard way or the easy way. If you take my advice, you’ll get them uniforms on you now. If not, strip.’ So you stripped there and then whilst you were being ridiculed and jeered at by the screws [prison officers].2
In those early days, the ‘blanket’ protest attracted no great attention outside republican ranks, as Hodgkins was the first to admit. The handful of ‘blanket men’, as they became known, felt a profound sense of isolation. Nevertheless, Hodgkins was convinced that the prisoners would win and do so very quickly. ‘Believe it or not, you were hoping against hope that we’d get political status,’ he said. ‘Being honest about it, within a few months, we really believed we’d get it.’3 For years it was a vain hope. The prisoners had little else to keep them going until, over the months and years, the handful became hundreds. Solidarity, shared hardship and deprivation forged a bond that became ever stronger in the face of the ‘Brit’ enemy. By 1978 there were nearly 300 ‘blanket men’ – or ‘nonconforming prisoners’ as the authorities called them – in the H Blocks of the Maze. Nevertheless, despite the numbers and the attempts of their supporters outside to generate sympathy for the prisoners, the issue failed to take off. The La Mon inferno in February 1978 had reinforced Roy Mason’s determination not to make any concessions. He made it clear that there would be ‘no change in our policy of treating jailed terrorists as anything but common criminals. No amnesty. No concessions to prisoners.’ To grant special category status once more would, he said, ‘undermine our effort to defeat the IRA and the loyalist gangs’.4
But the situation was about to change, due to the arrival in the H Blocks of the former commander of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, Brendan Hughes. Originally Hughes had been serving his sentence in the compounds following his arrest at Myrtlefield Park in 1974, but three years later he was involved in a fracas with a prison officer that led to a five-year sentence for assault. As the offence was committed after 1 March 1976, Hughes was despatched to the H Blocks where he was given a hero’s welcome by his comrades. Naturally, he refused to wear prison uniform. ‘It didn’t matter whether it had arrows on it or Mickey Mouse,’ he told me, ‘it was still the prison uniform.’5 Hughes promptly became the IRA prisoners’ Officer Commanding (OC) and set about trying to turn the tables on the ‘Brits’ and the ‘screws’, who were seen as their representatives on the wings. Initially, Hughes thought that the prisoners should abandon the blanket protest and should set about sabotaging the prison system from within. His suggestion was howled down by the ‘blanket men’ who saw it as capitulation. The prisoners’ new OC then had to think again, and in March 1978 the so-called ‘dirty’ protest was born (republicans insisted on calling it the ‘no-wash’ protest on the grounds that it sounded more dignified). Again, as with the ‘blanket’ protest, it is difficult to say to what extent it was planned or was simply a reaction to circumstances and events. The tension between the prisoners and their guards had almost reached breaking point because the IRA had started to kill prison officers to show solidarity with their co
mrades inside and to retaliate for the brutality the prisoners said they repeatedly suffered at the hands of the ‘screws’. By the start of the ‘dirty’ protest, four prison officers had been shot dead. Prisoners complained that, whenever they left their cells to wash, they were beaten and humiliated, and so they refused to leave their cells to wash and slop out their chamber pots. Hughes then ordered them to daub their excreta on the walls to get rid of it. ‘Other people were suggesting that we smear excreta on ourselves,’ he told me, ‘but it was a step I wasn’t prepared to take.’ Even smearing it on the walls was bad enough, as Gerard Hodgkins told me.
I just smeared it on the wall. I ripped off a lump of the mattress to do it with. You were going against your whole socialization of how you had been brought up. You were going against everything you’d ever learned about basic hygiene and manners and stuff like that. I lived like this from 1978 to 1981 … You were literally waking up in the morning and there were maggots in the bed with you. It just gets to the stage where you just brush them off… I think the human spirit can become accustomed to any environment.6
Mason, who was fully aware of the Provisionals’ propaganda expertise after the experience of Castlereagh, realized that they now had a potent weapon. ‘From their point of view, it was a brilliant stroke,’ he admitted. ‘Now in their desperation to be noticed, they’d hit the jackpot and at last started to believe that they might actually win.’7 Suddenly, the issue caught fire. The media had never been particularly interested in men wrapped in blankets but cells covered in shit was a different matter. As Mason admitted, the images of Christ-like figures with long hair and even longer beards were undeniably powerful. ‘But despite the adverse publicity, I couldn’t give way,’ he said. ‘To do so would give the IRA its biggest victory in years. It would appal the law-abiding majority in Northern Ireland. It would dismay the security forces. It would mean the abandonment of the policy of police primacy and the rule of law. It would in the end lead to more death and misery.’8 The Secretary of State’s counter-offensive was statistical: he pointed out that of the 300 prisoners fouling their cells, 74 had been convicted of murder or attempted murder, 80 of firearms offences and 82 of crimes involving explosives.9 But four months into the protest, he realized that what he had thought containable (though embarrassing) was now almost beyond control, following a visit to the H Blocks on 31 July 1978 by the Roman Catholic Primate of All Ireland, Cardinal Tomas O’Fiaich. O’Fiaich met the prisoners, saw their conditions and was horrified. When he left the Maze, he issued a statement that made Government Ministers hold their heads in a mixture of anger and despair.