by Peter Taylor
The listening devices, the undercover operations, the tailing, the cameras, were everywhere. The ‘Brits’ would leave a car sitting on the street with a small camera looking at a particular house. They just parked the car and put a small camera on the house. It was fitted inside the car aerial and the aerial could be directed by remote control. And they were live pictures. There was no need to leave an undercover operations officer sitting there.
According to Hughes, the ‘Brits’ left a trail of high-tech equipment littered across the province.
There were loads of cases where they’ve been caught, where they’ve actually left cameras looking into the gardens of prominent republicans’ houses. All over the country, they were finding them all the time. The houses of prominent active republicans [IRA men] are known to have been bugged with sophisticated devices bolted into the beam of the ceiling which covered the bedrooms, the sitting room and kitchen. I know of two cases where this happened. They go in the middle of the night and install these listening devices or do it during renovation work or even when a house has been searched. You have no control over what is planted so a massive amount of listening equipment has been dropped in Belfast.
What did the technology enable British Intelligence to do?
Effectively to bring the IRA to a standstill where it could move very, very little. I think that’s what that technology did and what the intelligence services were able to do. I think they were able to effectively stop the IRA and contain it.
But although the intelligence services may, on ‘Ken’s’ calculation, have been successful 80 per cent of the time, that still left the IRA with a 20 per cent window of opportunity of which they took full advantage. England remained the prime target not only because of the impact of bombs on the mainland but because England was not covered by the surveillance net that now ensnared Northern Ireland. Getting under the wire in an English city in the late 1980s and 1990s was easier than doing so in Belfast or Derry. Military bases across England were particularly vulnerable and their security could not be guaranteed: in Northern Ireland, an army barracks was a fortification, at home it was part of the scenery.
To the regimental bandsmen at the Royal Marines School of Music at Deal in Kent, eating their breakfast and relaxing before the morning rehearsal on 22 September 1989, the ‘war’ in Northern Ireland seemed a million miles away. Suddenly, at 8.22 a.m., a 50-lb bomb on a timer exploded, killing ten members of the regiment. It was the biggest bomb the IRA had set off in England since Brighton in 1984. Their Commandant General referred to the IRA as ‘thugs, extortionists, torturers, murderers and cowards, in fact the scum of the earth’. The mother of the band’s alto-sax player said, ‘I can never forgive the IRA. All we have to look forward to is the funeral and an empty life. Instead of putting them in prison, which does no good, they should be put up against a wall and shot.’9 Security at Deal had been the responsibility of a private security firm. As a result, security around all military establishments was tightened.
The IRA also struck again in Europe, where it enjoyed an even greater freedom of movement. On 26 October 1989 two IRA gunmen with automatic weapons opened fire on a car at Wildenrath, in Germany, as it stopped at a petrol station snack bar. The driver, Corporal Maheshkumar Mania, was not a soldier but a member of the Royal Air Force who was a supervisor at the RAF communications centre at Wildenrath. Corporal Mania tried to drive away but was pursued by the gunmen, firing repeatedly. He was not alone in the car. With him was his wife and six-month-old baby daughter, Nivruti Mahesh. She was shot once through the head and became one of the youngest victims to die in the conflict. Her father was hit many times. Her mother, Mrs Smita Islania, survived although in deep shock. She refused to leave her daughter and sat there, wrapped in a blanket, clutching her tiny, lifeless frame.10
The German police subsequently issued a warrant for the arrest of Desmond ‘Dessie’ Grew (37). His brother, Seamus Grew, had been killed with Roddie Carroll by the HMSU in 1982 in one of the shootings that John Stalker investigated. Dessie Grew, like his brother, was originally a member of the INLA but left to join the Provisionals. Like Seamus, Dessie was kept under close surveillance by the ‘Det’. ‘Mary’ was one of the operators on his tail. ‘He’d been a terrorist for twenty-odd years,’ she told me. ‘We all knew his chequered past, how many people he’d killed and how many acts of terrorism he’d been involved in.’
In the autumn of 1990, there was intelligence that Grew was going to collect weapons and kill someone, presumably a member of the security forces, although the intelligence did not specify whom. The weapons, AK 47s, were concealed in an IRA ‘hide’ in a mushroom shed on a farm just outside Loughgall. The shed had been under surveillance for some time and one of the assault rifles may have been ‘jarked’ at some stage. There may also have been a listening device. ‘Mary’ was tasked to be the ‘dropoff driver for the ‘troop’, the members of the SAS team who were to set up an OP near the shed. The operation had already been going on, round the clock, for about a week. ‘Mary’ planned to drop the ‘troop’ off near the location and then lie up in a quiet and secluded position where the van would not be seen from the road. That particular night, 9 October 1990, there was no specific intelligence that Grew was coming and ‘Mary’ just expected it to be a routine ‘drop-off’ and to do what she usually did.
As a drop-off driver, your tasks are very simple: to drive them in, pick them up and take them home. I would make a couple of flasks of coffee and I would have some moist baby-wipes because obviously the guys are all ‘cammed’ up with cream all over their faces. When they came off in the morning, they’d be freezing cold, gagging for a cuppa and wanting to get all this dirt off their face. Maybe I’d have some biscuits or crisps stashed in the vehicle with me, ready to give the guys in the morning.
‘Mary’ sat in the van in her ‘lay-up’ position for about three or four hours listening to the radio ‘net’. She was about 350 to 400 metres away from the mushroom shed. It was a quiet, dark autumnal night and the air was very still. Suddenly she heard ‘Standby, Standby’, which meant that something was going to happen. Grew and another man had turned up to collect the weapons. The ‘other man’ was Martin McCaughey from Cappagh, a former Sinn Fein councillor. She then listened to the commentary from the ‘troop’ hiding in the bushes, watching Grew and McCaughey’s every move.
I was sitting in the van with the doors locked and the windows slightly wound down and just listening. Suddenly there was this thunderous roar of 7.62 fire going down. It’s very loud and you feel the jolt. It’s not like watching it on TV when you just hear like a crack or a bang. This is ‘kerboom’, several times, shattering the quietness of the night.
McCaughey and Grew wouldn’t have stood much of a chance, would they?
They walked out of that barn carrying AK 47s, walking in the direction of the ‘troop’ guys. At the end of the day, they were terrorists on a mission and they met their Maker. I didn’t feel sad or elated. I didn’t feel anything at the terrorists’ deaths. They chose to do that. I was just glad that our guys were all right. The terrorists had a clean ‘getaway’ car as well as the ‘operational’ car there. And in the clean car was a bottle of whisky. Now why would you have that? Only to celebrate the death of some innocent person they’re just going out to murder in cold blood.
Was a warning given?
Yes. A warning is always given. Special Forces, like regular forces, operate under the rules of the Yellow Card. We are governed by the same body of rules as anybody else when it comes to opening fire.
Grew and McCaughey died where they fell, with two AK 47s close by. ‘Mary’ handed out the coffee and the baby-wipes on the way back to base.
The following year, ‘Mary’ was involved in an operation in which the intelligence was spot-on. The targets were three members of the IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade, Lawrence McNally (38), Pete Ryan (37) and Tony Doris (21). ‘They’d been part of a Provisional IRA terror group for years,’ ‘Mary’ said.
‘Again, we knew all their history, all the incidents that they’d played a part in and all the deaths they’d been a party to. On this particular occasion they’d planned to go and assassinate a civilian on his way to work. We had information and it was very good.’ I understand there was also technical surveillance involved. The intelligence indicated that the IRA’s target was to be killed in the heart of the Protestant village of Coagh on the morning of 3 June 1991. A car had been hijacked the previous evening in nearby Moneymore. At least half a dozen agencies were tasked by TCG South to carry out the operation. The planning was meticulous. ‘Every job has a very detailed plan which is gone over and over and over again,’ ‘Mary’ said. ‘That’s one of the reasons why the Special Forces are seen to be as good as they are because it’s prior planning and preparation, over and over.’
Early the following morning, the stolen car was tracked both on the ground and from the air on its journey to Coagh. The three IRA men had no idea they were being followed and that an SAS ambush had been prepared in Coagh’s main street. Nor did they know that their ‘target’ was an SAS decoy who, like the driver of the broken-down lorry at Drumnakilly in 1988, bore a passing resemblance to the person the IRA were intending to kill. The SAS soldier was sitting in the car, as the target usually did, as if waiting for his friend to go to work. ‘He was a sitting duck, waiting for the terrorists to turn up and take him out.’
At 7.30 a.m., the IRA drove into Coagh high street and, according to ‘Mary’, were pointing their weapons and about to open fire on the man in the car when the SAS issued a warning and then opened up. The decoy, within inches of his life, leapt out of the vehicle and made for cover. ‘He was literally seconds away from being “malleted” by PIRA and he managed to escape at the last minute. Who else is going to do it apart from an SAS man?’ The car, riddled with 200 rounds, crashed and burst into flames. ‘Mary’ had never seen anything like it before. ‘There was a massive fireball and smoke, hundreds of feet in the air. It was like watching a James Bond movie.’ McNally, Ryan and Doris died in the car. The weapons recovered were forensically examined and shown to have been used in four previous killings. ‘Mary’ had no sympathy or regrets. Nor had the local Westminster MP for the area, the Reverend William McCrea, a member of Ian Paisley’s DUP. ‘They have fallen into the pit they planned for others,’ he said. ‘Justice has now been done.’11
Despite ‘Mary’s’ view, shared by her ‘Det’ colleague ‘Anna’, that the ‘Group’ had decimated the IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade, killing eight of its members at Loughgall, three at Drumnakilly, two at the mushroom shed, and now three at Coagh, there was no shortage of recruits to take their places. Four more were to die a year later, the SAS’s last victims in Northern Ireland. On 16 February 1992, an ASU attacked Coalisland RUC station with a 12.7 mm Russian-made Degtyarev heavy machine gun mounted on the back of a hijacked lorry. It was believed to have been part of one of the Libyan arms shipments. They then drove through the town, an IRA stronghold in East Tyrone, waving an Irish Tricolour. It was suspected they might have been making an IRA propaganda video since there would normally have been no operational reason for them to make such a rash display. Again, there was pin-point intelligence on the IRA’s bravado. The lorry drove to the car park of St Patrick’s Church at nearby Clonoe where a getaway car was waiting. So too were the SAS.
Four members of the ASU were cut down: Kevin Barry O’Donnell (21), Sean O’Farrell (23), Peter Clancy (19) and Daniel Vincent (20). The previous year, O’Donnell had been acquitted at the Old Bailey in London following a car chase after which two AK 47s were found in the back of his car. In his defence, O’Donnell said he was horrified to find that the IRA had been using his vehicle and claimed he was on his way to dump the weapons at the time.12 Had the Old Bailey verdict been different, O’Donnell would have still been alive and later eligible for release under the Good Friday Agreement. When he returned to Tyrone, he would immediately have become a target for surveillance, as he returned to his old haunts and picked up again with his old comrades. Kevin Barry O’Donnell had joined the IRA the year after Loughgall. At his funeral, the priest, Father MacLarnon, echoed the feelings of all sides who had suffered so much when he said that it was time for ‘the politics of co-operation’ to replace ‘the politics of confrontation’. His words were prophetic. On the wider political front, outside the killing fields of East Tyrone, things were already moving in that direction.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Road to Peace
1988–1992
The long road to peace began with the election of the hunger striker Bobby Sands to Westminster in 1981. The journey was tortuous and bloody. After Sands was buried, over 1,200 more funerals were to follow before the Republican Movement and its former enemies finally signed up to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.1 The ‘long war’ took a long time.
The Provisionals’ political thinkers always knew that at some stage the Armalite would have to give way to the Ballot Box. That was the way of ‘liberation’ movements like Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the Middle East and Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa. The question was when. There were still those in the IRA, however, who believed that the British presence would only end at the point of a gun and that being sucked into a political compromise was walking into a trap designed by the ‘Brits’ to split and defeat the IRA. They were convinced that although the Ballot Box might be indulged, the Armalite should be grasped firmly in both hands as that was the only language British governments understood. They were not prepared to honour the sacrifice of their comrades with anything less than a British withdrawal and the realization of the united Ireland they had fought and died for. The achievement of Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and the leadership of the Republican Movement was to travel the road to peace without losing too many of its followers along the way. Peace inevitably involved compromise, and compromise was not a word in every republican lexicon. There were inevitably defections but none that led to the disastrous split that the leadership feared and laboured mightily to avoid.
For their part, the strategy of the ‘Brits’ was to convince the IRA that they would not be allowed to win. Although in Northern Ireland nothing is straightforward, there is no doubt that the relentless pressure from the intelligence services and their covert arms finally helped bring it home to the IRA that the military victory it believed was attainable in the early 1970s was now no longer possible. The ‘Brits’ simply knew too much. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to believe that the British forced the IRA to the negotiating table. They did not. The IRA was going that way anyway, as its electoral success through the 1980s indicated. What the ‘Brits’ did, primarily through their covert agencies, was to limit the IRA’s options, as the IRA’s former Belfast Brigade commander and first hunger strike leader, Brendan Hughes, recognized. When he returned to West Belfast, following his release in 1986, he came to the view that the ‘Brits’ were causing the IRA major problems because of the number of informers they ran and the sophisticated technology now at their command.
I think prominent IRA people came to the conclusion that the British military regime could not be defeated, and there had to be negotiations and that was the only way through it. Otherwise, the only alternative was [to carry on] a futile war which I didn’t think the leadership were prepared to do.
Hughes was saying publicly and controversially what republicans only whispered, confirming what the ‘Brits’ themselves believed. Not surprisingly, ‘Paul’, who had arrested Hughes at Myrtlefield Park in 1974 and whose experience in Special Branch spanned two decades, agreed with his old adversary.
The IRA didn’t change its policy because they had won. They changed their policy because they realized they couldn’t win. They recognized that the ‘long war’ strategy could equally be countered by the security forces and Special Branch, which by now had become a highly sophisticated, efficient and effective organization. They realized tha
t there was no point in their so-called ‘war’ going on, that their campaign was a waste of time. It had reached an end.
Sir Ronnie Flanagan, who became RUC Chief Constable in 1996 and was knighted in 1998, took a similar view. He had been intimately involved in countering the IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries throughout the 1980s and 1990s in a variety of departments including Special Branch, as a Detective Inspector in 1981 and its Head (HSB) in 1994.2 He believed the IRA entered negotiations for a whole range of reasons.
I think, in terms of those who headed the Republican Movement, there was the realization that if they cannot be defeated by military means alone, then neither can they win by military means alone. I think they came to sense that, ‘Yes, we could go on for another twenty-five years engaging in terrorist attacks, but would that actually mean progress towards our ultimate objective?’ I think one might wonder that if part of that objective was the reunification of Ireland, did all that violence bring that any closer or did it actually put that day off? I think it was a pragmatic decision that ‘yes, we can go on doing this, but will it actually bring closer the achievement of the objective that we are pursuing?’ I think they came to the conclusion that the answer to that was ‘no’.
In effect, what became known as the ‘peace process’ developed because of a convergence of interest between the two sides. The ‘Brits’ too had long reached the conclusion that they could not ‘win’ in terms of achieving a military victory over the IRA. To do so would have meant using methods that were alien to a liberal democracy. Whatever republicans might think of the modus operandi of the ‘Brits’ (and they would point to collusion and Brian Nelson as examples), the security forces were not in the business of going into republican or loyalist areas and just taking ‘terrorists’ out, as Mossad and the Israeli Defence Forces were prone to do both at home and abroad.3