by Peter Taylor
By December 1982, with five ‘terrorists’ and one innocent teenager dead, the ‘shoot to kill’ furore had not only refused to die down but intensified. Throughout the following year, nationalist demands for a Government inquiry grew. In the end the pressure became politically irresistible. In May 1984, John Stalker, the Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, was appointed to head what became unofficially known as the ‘shoot to kill’ inquiry to get at the truth of what had happened and to unravel the circumstances in which six men had been killed and cover stories invented. But of all the incidents, it was the shooting at the hayshed that came to absorb the attention of Stalker and his team. It was only six months into the investigation that they discovered – to Stalker’s astonishment – that the hayshed had been bugged by MI5. For months the team pushed to find out more, in the face of objections and obstructions from Special Branch, until finally they established that not one but forty-two tapes had been made while the hayshed was under surveillance. Tape 42, Stalker concluded, must therefore contain the answer to the vital question: Was a warning given?
Stalker now felt he was searching for possible evidence of murder. He spent the next eighteen months trying to get access to Tape 42 and was thwarted at every turn. He was finally told that it had been destroyed, although a transcript existed. The transcript, it transpired, was vague and inconclusive and concluded with a phrase along the lines of ‘nothing more of security interest’.
What Stalker and his team did not know was that a cassette copy of the tape did exist as a result of an extraordinary sequence of events. One of the 2 SCT soldiers monitoring the device at the time of the shooting had made his own personal copy of the master tape, presumably as a macabre souvenir of the shooting. (Soldiers had a habit of collecting such memorabilia, usually in the form of souvenir photographs of IRA dead bodies. But a killing on tape was unique.) A few days later MI5 found out about the cassette and ordered it to be handed over. The order was obeyed and the cassette copy of Tape 42 was given to the Security Service in Northern Ireland. It was then stored in a secure place in the province, a time bomb ticking away. When Stalker appeared on the scene, there were fears in MI5 circles that the bomb was going to explode. One of the senior MI5 officers stationed in the province ordered one of his MI5 colleagues to destroy it. He did so. The vital evidence was gone. By this time, several other members of the Security Service had heard the tape, in addition to members of 2 SCT. The vast majority heard no warning.
In a dramatic turn of events, John Stalker was removed from his inquiry in controversial circumstances in May 1986 just as he believed he was about to find out exactly what was on the tape, which would establish whether a warning was given. The reason given for his sudden removal was his association with a Manchester businessman, Kevin Taylor.15 But most of the public, and Stalker himself, thought he had been removed from his inquiry because he was getting too close to the truth. In his report, Stalker had already concluded that there had been no ‘shoot to kill’ policy but the fact was generally lost in the welter of speculation and conspiracy theories generated by his removal.
The dramatic dénouement of the mystery of the missing tape finally came when Sir Colin Sampson, the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, took over Stalker’s inquiry and his team on 6 June 1986 and began to piece the rest of the picture together. Sir Colin brought with him his colleague from the West Yorkshire Police, Assistant Chief Constable Donald Shaw, who was in charge of the Force’s Complaints and Discipline branch. Almost a year later, Sampson delivered his report, built on the groundwork of Stalker’s team, to the Director of Public Prosecutions in Northern Ireland, Sir Barry Shaw. Neither the Sampson Report nor the Stalker Report was ever made public since both contained highly sensitive intelligence material that went to the heart of national security. Sampson, however, did recommend that police officers should be prosecuted for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice for fabricating the series of cover stories. It is not generally known that he also recommended that MI5 officers should face the same charge for destroying the copy of the tape. Far from covering up what happened, Sampson and his team were prepared to have it exposed in open court. If there had been a ‘Brit’ conspiracy to get rid of Stalker (which I do not believe), then appointing Colin Sampson as his successor, in the expectation that he would collude in a cover-up, was a major mistake. This is one of the main reasons why the conspiracy theory does not hold water.
Sir Barry Shaw concluded that there was sufficient evidence to warrant the prosecutions of both the police officers and the MI5 officers. It was now for the courts to decide. The Thatcher Government was in a quandary. Because Stalker and Sampson and their teams had done their jobs thoroughly and got to the bottom of what had happened, not to proceed with prosecutions would confirm the widely held suspicion that there had been a conspiracy and cover-up. To go ahead and have MI5 officers in the dock – albeit incognito – being cross-examined about the destruction of the copy of Tape 42 would have been political dynamite. The Security Service had not yet taken its first tentative steps out of the shadows and the prospect of its officers facing cross-examination on any issue, let alone this one, would have been unthinkable in Whitehall.
Under the circumstances, the Attorney-General, Sir Patrick Mayhew (later Lord Mayhew), told the House of Commons in January 1988 that there would be no prosecutions ‘in the public interest’ since national security was involved. Members of Parliament were under the impression that the issue revolved solely around RUC officers since the fact that they told cover stories had already been revealed. They had no idea it involved MI5 and the destruction of vital evidence of what happened when Michael Tighe was shot dead by the HMSU.
When I asked Lord Mayhew about the prosecution of Security Service officers, he was reluctant to be drawn. All he would say was, ‘A lot of intelligence matters would have been brought out that would have been very deleterious to the intelligence operation that was essential in the circumstances of the time.’ Sir Robert Andrew, who was by then Permanent Under Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office and had to deal with this explosive issue, was more forthright. He told me that he had only found out that a cassette copy of the tape had been made and then destroyed when he read the Sampson Report.
This, if true, was most unfortunate. It was a very difficult one. There was an argument for saying that prosecutions should have been brought to clear the air and to demonstrate that the Government was not covering up illegal activities. On the other hand, there was a fear that if police officers and, even more so, officers from the Security Service were put in the dock and had to answer questions on oath, intelligence-gathering methods and the identity of individuals would have become known and prejudiced the effectiveness of intelligence-gathering operations. This is why the Secretary of State, Tom King, judged on balance that a prosecution was undesirable.
Sir Robert, who was present at some of these discussions between King and Mayhew, confirms that the decision not to prosecute was made on political grounds. He was clearly uneasy at the decision. I tried to draw him on his personal view. ‘It was very difficult,’ he said. ‘I saw it as a finely balanced case. I don’t think I would want to go further than that.’
After the HMSU’s display of ‘firepower, speed and aggression’ in the three controversial confrontations in the autumn of 1982, it was decided that the SAS were, after all, the best exponents of these attributes. Whatever the consequences, SAS men were expected to display them. Policemen were not.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Group Activity
December 1983–April 1986
By the mid-1980s, the SAS and the ‘Det’ had become known as the ‘Group’. Its undercover soldiers not only worked together but lived together when an operation was under way. Between 1983 and 1992, the ‘Group’ shot dead one member of the INLA and thirty-five members of the IRA, including many of the Provisionals’ most seasoned operatives. The SAS killed twenty-eight of them and the ‘Det’ killed eight. By
this time, except where operational circumstances required, the SAS was no longer permanently co-located in the three ‘Det’ areas but based at Aldergrove as a resource that the TCGs could draw on when necessary. The SAS was now not only centralized but its soldiers were stationed in the province for twelve-month tours of duty instead of six.
After the intense controversy that engulfed the HMSU in the wake of the six killings in the autumn of 1982, the SAS came into its own once again: not that it had been idle during the preceding four years, it just had not been killing ‘terrorists’. All that was to change. Significantly, the vast majority were killed in rural areas. There were to be no more shoot-outs in built-up city streets. But although the SAS got most of the ‘kills’, for often that could be the culmination of its operational role, the groundwork of the ‘Det’ and other agencies with which it worked lay behind every one. 14 Intelligence Company was now a highly experienced, highly trained and highly effective counter-terrorist force. The introduction of women had transformed it, giving its operators greater flexibility and cover.
Through the mid-eighties and early nineties, ‘Anna’ and ‘Mary’ were closely involved in several of the operations of the ‘Group’ although not necessarily together, and they sat alongside the SAS at TCG briefings prior to a likely ‘contact’ with the IRA. They assert categorically that, although it has almost become enshrined as fact in nationalist and republican folk memory, there was no ‘shoot to kill’ policy. They say the SAS were never instructed to bring the IRA back dead not alive. The Yellow Card rules applied.
Although there may not have been a ‘shoot to kill’ policy in the sense that the SAS were instructed to bring back dead bodies, none the less, when soldiers did open fire, they were instructed to shoot to kill not to wound. Lord Mayhew, who as Sir Patrick Mayhew was Northern Ireland Secretary between 1992 and 1997, put it graphically. ‘If you do shoot, then you don’t shoot to tickle, you don’t shoot to miss, you do shoot to kill,’ he told me. ‘This thing about “shoot to kill”, as though it’s sort of self-evidently wicked, is absolutely wrong. It’s nonsense. You don’t shoot to do other than kill in the circumstances where the law permits you to shoot.’
‘Anna’ and ‘Mary’ were involved in operations that drew on a variety of intelligence data: ‘jarking’; information from agents; MI5 listening devices planted in the homes of key IRA ‘players’, sometimes as they were under construction, as a long-term intelligence investment; ‘Mk 1 Eyeball’ surveillance on the ground and, later, from hidden video cameras transmitting live, colour pictures that would even indicate the colour of the household rubber gloves an IRA member might be wearing.
When some or all of these ingredients came together, ensuring minimum risk to the SAS and maximum surprise to the IRA, an operation would be triggered. Such were the circumstances in place on Sunday 4 December 1983 when three men from the Coalisland unit of the IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade, Brian Campbell (19) and Colm McGirr (22) and a third person, went to retrieve two weapons from a cache hidden in a patch of brambles in a heavily overgrown field.1 One was an Armalite with a magazine fitted and the other a shotgun. Two black hoods and gloves were also part of the cache. One of the weapons, perhaps the Armalite, had been ‘jarked’ by the ‘Det’ and tracked for some time. It had already been used in four killings and eighteen other shootings.2 McGirr and Campbell were ‘bad boys’, one ‘Det’ operator told me. TCG South had a choice, either to ‘lift’ the weapons or ‘do something’. It chose the latter and the SAS staked out the field. According to the account of the soldiers involved, a car drove up and McGirr and Campbell got out and went to the cache, leaving the third man, the driver, in the car. McGirr retrieved the weapons and handed the Armalite to Campbell whilst he held onto the shotgun. One of the SAS men said that as he shouted ‘Halt! Security Forces!’ the two IRA men turned with their guns. ‘I then thought that my life was in immediate danger, and fearing for my life and that of my comrades, I opened fire.’3 McGirr and Campbell were both shot dead by the SAS soldier and other members of the team. McGirr was hit thirteen times and Campbell twice. The driver managed to escape, although he was badly wounded by shots the SAS fired at the vehicle. He is believed to have been taken across the border where he survived, although he has never fully recovered from his injuries. The car was later found, covered in blood. The survivor subsequently said that when McGirr and Campbell were shot, ‘neither was armed nor were they at any time challenged to stop. Those who carried out these killings … had every opportunity to stop and detain us all… but they chose to open fire without any warning.’4 One of the ‘Group’ involved in the operation assured me that a warning was given. He also said that the third man survived as a ‘cabbage’.
Just over six months later, the SAS struck another blow at the IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade. There was intelligence that an ASU was to carry out an incendiary bomb attack on a kitchen fittings factory in the Ardboe area along the shores of Lough Neagh on 13 July 1984 to mark the third anniversary of the death of the hunger striker Martin Hurson, who came from the East Tyrone village of Cappagh. Eight SAS soldiers took part in the ambush. According to their account, they had the area around the factory under surveillance when, through the night sights of their rifles, they saw men coming towards them, one of whom seemed to be wearing a hood. When the nearest IRA man was about thirty metres away, one of the soldiers said he issued a challenge, ‘Halt! Hands up!’ In his statement the soldier said, ‘This man raised his hands up very fast. I believed he was going to shoot me so I fired one aimed shot at the centre of his body. I heard him scream.’
The man who fell was William Price (28) from Ardboe. He was subsequently hit with three other bullets, including one to the head which killed him. His sister, who later examined the body, said his head was blown apart like the shell of an egg.5 Two pistols were found by and near the body. Two other members of the ASU, Raymond Francis O’Neill and Thomas McQuillan, were arrested by the SAS. It was evidence that the SAS could and did make arrests in appropriate circumstances. They were subsequently convicted and sentenced to nine years.
There was a macabre postscript to the killing. When members of the SAS and the ‘Det’ operators returned to base, having put three IRA men out of circulation, one of them for ever, there were celebrations in the bar as invariably happened when the ‘Group’ celebrated an IRA ‘kill’. (They argued that if the IRA celebrated the death of a soldier or policeman, why should the ‘Brits’ not do the same?)
For the killing of William Price, a cake was baked, iced and decorated in the shape of a cross. It bore the inscription ‘R.I.P. PRICE. ARDBOE’. I understand it was not the first or the last of its kind. It brought to mind the ancient custom of a tribe eating its enemy. When I visited William Price’s parents – simple country folk who apparently had no idea that their son had joined the IRA – and told them about the cake, they expressed no surprise.
The final operation by the ‘Group’ before the ‘spectaculars’ that were to mark the rest of the decade was almost the settling of an old score. The victim was Seamus McElwaine, an IRA commander who had been arrested by the SAS in 1981 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He had been part of a mass break-out from the Maze in 1983 and had become active along the Fermanagh border once again, going backwards and forwards from his ‘billet’ in County Monaghan. The SAS, however, finally brought his second run to an end on 26 April 1986. McElwaine and another IRA commander, Sean Lynch, were attending to a culvert bomb, unaware that the firing point was under surveillance. Both IRA men were armed and wearing combat gear. The SAS opened fire, killing McElwaine and wounding Lynch who, like Francis Hughes after his fire-fight with the ‘Det’ in 1978, crawled away to hide. Again like Hughes, Lynch was discovered by the ‘green’ army and the RUC, given medical attention and survived. He was duly tried, sentenced to twenty-five years and sent to the Maze where he subsequently became the prisoners’ OC. The judge said Lynch was not a soldier but a criminal. Republicans accused the SAS of finis
hing off the wounded McElwaine whilst he lay harmless on the ground. At the funeral, Martin McGuinness, who gave the graveside oration, described him as ‘an Irish freedom fighter murdered by British terrorists’.6
All the shooting incidents in which the ‘Det’ were involved happened in the first half of the decade. All the operators came from North ‘Det’. Given the circumstances of some of the shootings, it was not surprising that they were put down to the SAS. At one point it appeared that the ‘Det’ was assuming its offensive role. In two confrontations, two and a half months apart, the operators of North ‘Det’ shot dead five armed IRA men on ‘active service’. Several operators told me that at this period TCG North preferred to use the ‘Det’ in circumstances where the SAS would normally have been deployed. The first incident took place on 6 December 1984 and involved William Fleming (19) and Daniel Doherty (23) from the Creggan who had recently served a four-year sentence in the Republic for possession of explosives and IRA membership.7 Two of Fleming’s brothers were in prison and a cousin had drowned in the River Bannagh only four days earlier whilst trying to escape after a gun-battle between the IRA and the SAS. When there was intelligence that the IRA were planning to kill a part-time member of the security forces who worked at Derry’s Gransha psychiatric hospital, the ‘Det’ placed Fleming and Doherty under surveillance and, on the day of the planned operation, tracked the motorcycle on which they were to carry out the attack.
Just before 8 a.m., the time of a shift change, the two IRA men entered the hospital grounds with Doherty driving and Fleming on the pillion. Both were armed.8 The ‘Det’ was ready. One of the operators in an unmarked car said he saw a motor bike coming towards him and the pillion rider was armed with a gun. He said he shouted an order to stop at which point the pillion passenger ‘raised the handgun and pointed it towards me’. The operator rammed the bike, knocking Fleming to the ground. The operator said Fleming then pointed a gun at him and he shot him twice with two bursts of three rounds.9 Although the bike had been rammed, Doherty managed to ride on to be faced with another operator from the ‘Det’ team. The soldier opened fire at Doherty ‘because I feared for my life’. The bike finally crashed, throwing off the dying or dead Doherty who had also been hit by a burst of fire from another operator. In all, the ‘Det’ team fired fifty-nine rounds at the two men. A forensic examination showed that six shots had been fired at Doherty whilst he was on the ground.10 Both men had wounds to the head. Unionists were jubilant at the operation. Gregory Campbell, a local politician from Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, put their thoughts into words. ‘I am delighted that the two IRA men were intercepted and executed by the undercover army squad. The only way the IRA will be dealt with is when they are executed. They deal in death and must be dealt with by death.’11 Nationalists were horrified and asked why, if there had been intelligence on the operation, Fleming and Doherty could not have been arrested instead of being killed. At their funeral, Martin McGuinness said that only the freedom fighters of the IRA could bring Britain to the negotiating table. Elsewhere, Gerry Adams said the British ‘do not want to take prisoners. They only want dead bodies.’12