by Peter Taylor
The IRA had been planning the operation for months and the ‘Brits’ had been watching them in Belfast and Spain where the Spanish authorities were alerted and asked for their co-operation. They duly obliged. British intelligence code-named its counter measures ‘Operation Flavius’ after the Roman Emperor, who put down a rebellion and established peace.8 The ‘Brits’ hoped to do the same. The Belfast end of the operation was based on Special Branch information.9 From the early stages, the intelligence services kept tabs on the operation, as at Loughgall, without necessarily knowing the fine detail of the IRA’s plans. One or more members of the ASU was spotted at Spain’s Malaga airport, roughly seventy kilometres from Gibraltar, on 5 November 1987, four months before the planned attack.10
On 19 February 1988 the various intelligence agencies and their surveillance teams set up their operational headquarters in Gibraltar’s Rock Hotel,11 where they waited, watched and planned, keeping in touch via London with their counterparts in Spain. The SAS are thought to have moved onto the Rock a week later as the IRA made its final preparations for the attack. The intelligence indications were that it would be carried out during the Changing of the Guard ceremony on Tuesday 8 March and that the huge car bomb driven in from the Spanish mainland would be triggered by remote control. The tactical leader of the SAS team now in place briefed his men that ‘at least one of the three terrorists, if not more, would in all probability be armed … and there was a strong likelihood that at least one, if not more, of the three terrorists would be carrying a “button job” device [to detonate the bomb from a distance]’.12
The commander of the SAS team was also given ‘Top Secret Rules of Engagement’ for ‘Operation Flavius’. He was told that his objective was ‘to assist the civil power [the police] to arrest members of the IRA, but subject to the overriding requirement to do all in your power to protect the lives and safety of members of the public and of the security forces [author’s emphasis in both cases]’. The SAS claimed that the order to arrest was nothing new as the ratio between arrests and kills over the preceding decade in Northern Ireland had been three to one.13 Crucially the directive contained a specific paragraph on ‘Firing without a Warning’. It said: ‘You and your men may fire without a warning if the giving of a warning or any delay in firing could lead to death or injury to you or them [the SAS team] or any other person, or if the giving of a warning is clearly impracticable.’14 The Rules of Engagement, which were based on the Yellow Card, appeared to give the SAS carte blanche.
The ASU flew into Malaga airport on Friday, 4 March, four days before the scheduled attack. Savage and McCann arrived via Paris and Farrell via Brussels. The two men booked into the Hotel Escandinavia in Torremolinos that night under false names. Farrell joined them and apparently shared their room.15 By this time, MI5 is believed to have provided the Spanish authorities with full details of their unwelcome guests. On Saturday, the ASU hired two Ford Fiestas, one red and one white. The red Fiesta left Marbella to pick up the explosives, while the white Fiesta was left in the basement of the Sun car park in Marbella. When the explosives (140 lbs) arrived, they were transferred to the white Fiesta and left in the car park.16 There they remained until they were finally discovered by the Spanish authorities the day after the SAS shot three members of the ASU dead.
The IRA also hired a third car that Saturday, a white Renault 5 that was to be driven to Gibraltar and left in a parking space close to where the Changing of the Guard ceremony was due to take place. It was thought the intention was to leave it there until the white Fiesta with the explosives inside arrived some time before the ceremony was due to begin. The Renault and the white Fiesta would then change places.
Sometime after the explosives had been safely delivered and transferred to the white Fiesta, Savage, McCann and Farrell left for Gibraltar, with Savage in the Renault and McCann and Farrell in the red Fiesta. None of them knew that they were under Spanish surveillance as they drove along the Spanish coast to Gibraltar, and under British surveillance once they entered the British dependency. McCann and Farrell left the red Fiesta at La Linea on the Spanish side of the border and walked into Gibraltar on foot. Savage, driving the Renault, was allowed into the colony without being searched.
One of the key questions is why was Savage not stopped and arrested if he was under surveillance and the British suspected the car might be full of explosives? Arguably, the IRA ASU at Loughgall was not stopped on its way to the police station because it was fully armed and would no doubt have put up a deadly fight. Sean Savage was a lone man in a car who could have been surrounded by plain-clothes SAS men and taken by surprise, increasing still further the Regiment’s ratio of arrests to kills. According to the British, Savage parked the white Renault 5 at 12.50 p.m. that Sunday afternoon.17 Savage and the parked Renault were subsequently ‘clocked’ by MI5 ‘watchers’. A specialist soldier was ordered to carry out a visual inspection of the vehicle, obviously without attracting too much attention. He reported back that, in his view, ‘the car was a suspect car bomb. The most distinctive thing about it was that there was an old aerial placed centrally on the roof of a relatively new car.’18 One would have thought that if it was a car bomb, there would have been a noticeable weight on the rear axle. Photographs taken of the car at the time give no such indication.
By this time, Savage had been joined by Farrell and McCann and the three were walking back towards the border along Winston Churchill Avenue. At 3.40 p.m. the Gibraltar Police Commissioner, Joseph Luis Canapa, passed control of ‘Operation Flavius’ to the SAS. Minutes later, Farrell, Savage and McCann were dead. The three had been chatting in the sunshine near a Shell petrol station and then had split up, with McCann and Farrell walking off in the direction of the border whilst Savage went the other way. McCann suddenly looked round and made eye-contact with one of the SAS soldiers. At the subsequent inquest the soldier said, ‘He had a smile on his face … We looked directly at each other. The smile went off McCann’s face … almost as if McCann had a realization actually who I was, or I was a threat to him.’19 The soldier said he intended to shout a warning but was not sure whether it ever came out as things moved so swiftly. ‘The events took over the warning,’ he said. ‘The look on McCann’s face, the alertness, the awareness … then all of a sudden his right arm, right elbow, actually moved across the front of his body. At that stage, I thought McCann was definitely going to go for the “button” [to detonate the bomb by radio-control].’ He fired one round at McCann, then a second round at Farrell as, he said, she was grabbing at her shoulder bag. He then fired a third round at McCann. The second SAS soldier also opened fire, hitting both with seven rounds. ‘I perceived McCann as a threat to me and Gibraltar and my comrades,’ he said.
As soon as Savage, walking off in the other direction, heard the first shot, he swung round to be confronted by two other members of the SAS team. One of them told the inquest that as he shouted a warning, ‘Stop, police! Get down. Hands above head. Stay still!’ Savage ‘went down with his right arm to the area of his pocket, adopting CQB or Close Quarter Battle stance.’ The soldier opened fire and carried on firing ‘until I was sure he had gone down and was no longer a threat [capable] of initiating that device’. His partner did the same, firing nine rounds in quick succession into his body, two of which were aimed at his head. In two brief and bloody minutes, the SAS gave the IRA three more celebrated martyrs to join Bobby Sands.
But the killing was not over. Ten days later, as Farrell, Savage and McCann were being buried in Belfast’s Milltown Cemetery with full IRA honours, a lone loyalist gunman, Michael Stone of the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), attacked the mourners with a handgun and grenades. Those gathered around the graveside could hardly believe their eyes. Gerry Adams called out for calm as the crowd dived for cover behind the headstones. Stone tried to make his escape on foot along the M1 motorway that ran along the bottom of Milltown Cemetery but was overpowered by pursuing republicans. Only the swift intervention of the RUC prevent
ed Stone from being beaten to death amidst screams of ‘Get the Orange bastard!’20 He had killed two civilians, Thomas McErlean (20) and John Murray (26), and one IRA man, Caoimhin MacBrádaigh (30), who was pursuing Stone when he was killed. Stone was subsequently given life sentences for six murders and became a loyalist folk hero.
When I later met Stone in the Maze prison, he told me his attack was retaliation for the IRA’s Enniskillen bomb four months earlier. He said it was symbolic: the IRA had attacked a British cenotaph and he was taking revenge by attacking the IRA equivalent, the hallowed republican plot in Milltown Cemetery where the IRA’s martyrs are buried. His targets, Stone said, were Adams and McGuinness. Stone was released from the Maze prison in July 2000 under the Good Friday Agreement, having served just over twelve years of his sentence.
But not even Stone’s murderous rampage was the end of the spiral of death triggered by Gibraltar. Three days later, one of his victims, Caoimhin MacBrádaigh, was being given an IRA funeral when two army Corporals in a VW Passat ran into the cortège as it made its way along Andersonstown Road to Milltown Cemetery. The soldiers were definitely not ‘Det’ operators carrying out surveillance but army signallers who, bizarre and unwise though it may seem, had apparently stopped to watch the funeral out of curiosity. The Passat was immediately surrounded, and one of the signallers pulled out his Browning and fired a warning shot in the air. One ‘Det’ operator told me that if any member of the ‘Group’ had been involved, under those circumstances they would have shot to kill not to warn. He also stressed that no member of Special Forces would ever have put themselves in that position.
The mourners and IRA stewards, thinking it was a replay of Michael Stone’s attack, dragged the corporals out of the car, bundled them into a black taxi and drove them off to be ‘executed’ by the IRA. It was one of the most dramatic and harrowing images of the conflict as television cameras captured the frenetic crowd surrounding their vehicle and the army’s ‘heli-tele’ in the sky recorded the moment of ‘execution’. Corporal Derek Wood (24) and Corporal David Howes (23) were stripped and savagely beaten before meeting terrifying and lonely deaths. Wood was shot twice in the head and four times in the chest and stabbed four times in the back of the neck. Howes was shot five times, once in the head and four times in the body.21 One of the most poignant images of the conflict is the photograph of the Redemptorist priest, Father Alec Reid, administering the last rites over the corporals’ bleeding and battered bodies.
The horrific pictures confirmed the majority of the British public in its view that republicans were savages. Little account was taken of the circumstances in which it had happened and the trail of death from Gibraltar to Milltown Cemetery that had preceded it, intimately involving members of the West Belfast community. In a statement that evening, the IRA claimed responsibility for the ‘execution’ of ‘two SAS members who launched an attack on the funeral cortège of our comrade’.22 The IRA got it wrong. Mrs Thatcher was waiting on the tarmac with the families as the Royal Air Force brought the two coffins back home to England, each draped in a Union Jack. The IRA gunmen who pulled the triggers were never charged. There was no evidence against them and no one was prepared to identify who they were.
There was one more element to be added to this maelstrom of controversy. Thames Television’s This Week programme under its Editor, Roger Bolton, investigated Gibraltar in an edition called ‘Death on the Rock’ produced by Chris Oxley and reported by Julian Manyon. Mrs Thatcher and her Government were furious and demanded that the programme be stopped on the grounds that it was being transmitted before the inquest and would prejudice the outcome. Thames and the IBA both stood firm in the face of an attack by Government on broadcasters of unprecedented ferocity even by Northern Ireland standards. The intensity of the onslaught was fuelled above all by Manyon’s interview with an eyewitness, Carmen Proetta, who said that McCann and Farrell had been shot ‘with their hands up’.23 ‘Death on the Rock’ did not affect the inquest. On 30 September 1988, the jury concluded by a majority verdict of nine to two that the three members of the ASU had been ‘lawfully killed’, thus apparently vindicating the Government’s position. But it was not until seven years later, on 22 September 1995, that the European Court of Human Rights, to which the families had taken their case, had the final word on whether the killings were a breach of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights that safeguards the right to life. The Court ruled by ten votes to nine that the killings were unnecessary and that Farrell, Savage and McCann could have been arrested. That was the bad news for the ‘Brits’. The good news was that it ruled that those involved had not been operating a ‘shoot to kill’ policy.24 By the time the European Court delivered its verdict, the SAS had shot dead a further twelve IRA men. This time, all of them were armed.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Collusion: Brian Nelson
1983–January 1992
‘Collusion’ is one of the emotive slogans in the Provisionals’ propaganda armoury deployed to discredit and undermine the ‘Brits” campaign against them. But to republicans, ‘collusion’ – like ‘shoot to kill’ – is more than propaganda, it is a cardinal article of belief. They are convinced that collusion is institutionalized and that the ‘Brits’ not only set up the loyalist paramilitaries in the early 1970s but continually used them as surrogates to carry out the state’s murderous work. They believe the loyalist ‘death squads’ are simply the ‘Brits’ in another guise, orchestrated from on high.
Undoubtedly during the thirty-year ‘war’ collusion did exist – to suggest otherwise would be naïve – and it was not surprising given that there were some members of the RUC and, above all of the UDR who believed the loyalist paramilitaries were fighting on the same side against the same enemy. There were even cases where police officers and UDR soldiers were also members of loyalist paramilitary organizations. Constable William McCaughey, for example, was not only a member of an RUC special unit but a member of the UVF. In 1980 he was convicted of the murder of a Catholic shopkeeper in the village of Ahoghill in 1977 and sentenced to life imprisonment along with another RUC officer, Sergeant John Weir, who was also convicted of involvement in the murder. Neither was the trigger puller. McCaughey told me that he carried out this and other terrorist crimes in the belief that he was defending Ulster. Four other police officers, who were colleagues of McCaughey, were also convicted of serious offences committed in 1978. One was found guilty of kidnapping a Catholic priest and three others of the bombing of a Catholic bar in South Armagh where they erroneously believed a notorious terrorist was drinking. McCaughey was also involved with them on both occasions. The four policemen were given suspended sentences. In delivering his verdict, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lowry, said that all the accused had acted under the same powerful motives that something more than ordinary police work was needed to rid the country of the pestilence that was destroying it. He described the disgraced police officers as ‘misguided, wrong-headed, but above all, unfortunate men’. It is significant that all six policemen were brought to justice: an unlikely outcome if collusion was state-approved.
Most examples of collusion were not as blatant as that but took the form of some police officers and UDR soldiers passing on intelligence material to the loyalist paramilitaries or their associates (who might be neighbours in the staunchly loyalist estates where many members of the almost exclusively Protestant local security forces lived). One loyalist gunman told me that at one stage his unit had so many intelligence documents, they didn’t know where to put them.
Although in my view collusion was not institutionalized or approved at the highest level of Government, the case of Brian Nelson does raise disturbing questions about how far up the intelligence chain collusion went.
Nelson was a former loyalist paramilitary who was recruited as an agent by the army’s most secret intelligence wing (believed to have been established in 1979), euphemistically known as the ‘Force Research Unit’ or the FRU for short. Th
e ‘research’ involved was the identification and recruitment of potential republican and loyalist agents prepared to defect and work for army intelligence. Its motto was ‘Fishers of Men’ and its crest depicted a man in a loin-cloth with a trident and net. The existence of the FRU, for years a closely guarded secret, only became publicly known due to an astonishing court appearance in 1992, in which Brian Nelson pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder. He had risen to become the head of intelligence for the loyalist Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), the ‘killer’ wing of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). The allegation against Nelson was that he was used by the FRU to target IRA suspects and get the loyalist ‘death squads’ to eliminate them, thus doing the dirty work of the ‘Brits’ for them.
The FRU favoured the direct approach, as one of its handlers I met clearly indicated. At one stage ‘Geoff’ said that he was running seven sources at the same time, both republicans and loyalists. He pointed out that the FRU had a great advantage over Special Branch in that they had more money to offer informants. ‘Whatever I needed to recruit a source, I could get, in cash,’ he told me. ‘If I had wanted £250,000, I could have had it.’ When I expressed incredulity, he explained this would not have been a lump sum. ‘Maybe the quarter of a million wouldn’t have been in a suitcase,’ he said, ‘but I could have been okayed that amount of money over a period of three or five years or whatever. What price is a life? The army flies helicopters every day in Northern Ireland and that costs thousands of pounds. A quarter of a million isn’t a lot of money in those terms.’ As every Special Branch and FRU agent-handler knew, a top-grade source was a priceless long-term investment.