by Peter Taylor
26. Ireland. The Propaganda War, op. cit., p. 67.
27. Paying the Price, op. cit., p. 215.
28. Beating the Terrorists?, op. cit., p. 329–32. This is a more detailed account of the impact of the Bennett report on the critical parliamentary arithmetic.
Chapter Eighteen: Shootings and Stakeouts
1. Provos, op. cit., p. 201.
2. Ten Men Dead. The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike, David Beresford, Grafton Books, 1987, p. 153.
3. Lost Lives, op. cit., p. 716.
4. Ten Men Dead, op. cit., p. 158.
5. The SAS in Ireland, op. cit., p. 215.
6. Ibid., p. 221.
7. Big Boys’ Rules. The Secret Struggle against the IRA Mark Urban, Faber & Faber, 1992, p. 62.
8. Lost Lives, op. cit., p. 763.
9. The SAS in Ireland, op. cit., p. 235.
10. Ibid., p. 244.
11. Ibid., p. 244.
12. Lost Lives, op. cit., p. 770.
13. The SAS in Ireland, op. cit., p. 241.
Chapter Nineteen: Double Disaster
1. Future Terrorist Trends ended up in the hands of the Republican Movement and was published in its weekly newspaper, Republican News. This particular copy of Brigadier Glover’s report is thought to have been ‘lost’ in transit to its destination in the Midlands. It is possible, although highly unlikely, that the loss was deliberate to alert the public and politicians to the threat that lay ahead. Although it is marked ‘Secret’, it is the analysis that is sensitive not the detail.
2. Beating the Terrorists?, op. cit., pp. 345–7.
3. Northern Ireland. Future Terrorist Trends, Brigadier J.M. Glover, BGS (Int) DIS, 2 November 1978. Leaked or lost document revealed in Republican News.
4. Lost Lives, op. cit., pp. 793–5.
5. Ibid., p. 799.
6. Holding the Line. An Autobiography, Sir John Hermon, Gill & Macmillan, 1997, p. 102.
7. Provos, op. cit., p. 255.
8. Ibid.
Chapter Twenty: The Iron Lady and the Iron Men
1. The Provisional IRA, Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie, Corgi Books, 1993, p. 350.
2. Provos, op. cit., p. 204.
3. Ibid.
4. Paying the Price, op. cit., p. 209.
5. Provos, op. cit., p. 219.
6. Ibid., p. 221.
7. Paying the Price, op. cit., p. 209.
8. Ibid., p. 210.
9. Ibid.
10. Provos, op. cit., p. 222.
11. Paying the Price, op. cit., p. 211.
12. The Downing Street Years, Margaret Thatcher, HarperCollins, 1993, pp. 389–90.
13. Provos, op. cit., p. 229.
14. Ibid.
15. INLA. Deadly Divisions. The Story of One of Ireland’s Most Ruthless Terrorist Organisations, Jack Holland and Henry McDonald, Tore, A Division of Poolbeg Enterprises Ltd, 1994, p. 173.
16. Provos, op. cit., p. 229.
17. The Downing Street Years, op. cit., pp. 389–90.
18. Ibid., p. 233.
19. The Downing Street Years, op. cit., p. 392.
20. For fuller details of the IRA hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981, see Chapters 16 and 17 of Provos, op. cit.
21. Ibid., p. 235.
22. The Downing Street Years, op. cit., pp. 390–1.
23. Provos, op. cit., p. 237.
24. Northern Ireland. A Chronology of the Troubles 1968–1999, op. cit., p. 148.
25. Ibid. The actual figures were Sands 30,492 and West 29,046.
26. The Downing Street Years, op. cit., p. 391.
27. Ibid.
28. The Diary of Bobby Sands. The First Seventeen Days of Bobby’s H-Block Hunger Strike to the Death, Republican Publications, Dublin, June 1981.
29. Provos, op. cit., p. 243.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., p. 251.
32. The Downing Street Years, op. cit., p. 393.
Chapter Twenty-One: ‘Firepower, Speed and Aggression’
1. Detailed accounts of John Stalker’s inquiry and his subsequent suspension from it are recorded in several books including the author’s Stalker. The Search for the Truth, Faber & Faber, 1987; John Stalker’s own account in Stalker, Harrap, 1988; Sir John Hermon’s account in Holding the Line. An Autobiography, Gill & Macmillan, 1997, and the account of John Stalker’s Manchester businessman friend, Kevin Taylor (with Keith Mumby), The Poisoned Tree. The untold truth about the police conspiracy to discredit John Stalker and destroy me, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990. Whilst John Stalker and I do not disagree on the facts, we differ in our interpretations of them. Mr Stalker believes he was the victim of a conspiracy to remove him from his inquiry because he was getting too close to highly sensitive material whereas I believe that he was stood down for other reasons.
2. Holding the Line. An Autobiography, op. cit., p. 149.
3. Lost Lives, op. cit., pp. 908–10.
4. Holding the Line. An Autobiography, op. cit., p. 150.
5. Lost Lives, op. cit., p. 927.
6. Ibid., p. 1,347.
7. Stalker. The Search for the Truth, Peter Taylor, Faber & Faber, 1987, p. 99.
8. Ibid., pp. 83–4.
9. Ibid., p. 81.
10. Ibid., p. 89.
11. Ibid., p. 41.
12. Ibid., p. 105.
13. Ibid., p. 33. In the wake of the furore Lord Justice Gibson’s remarks unleashed, he subsequently issued a qualifying statement in which he said, ‘I would wish most emphatically to repudiate any idea that I would approve or the law would countenance what has been described as a ‘shoot to kill’ policy on the part of the police.’
14. Ibid., p. 71.
15. Kevin Taylor had been under surveillance by the Greater Manchester Police because of his alleged association with a group of Manchester criminals known as the ‘Quality Street Gang’. Taylor protested his innocence of any wrongdoing and, after many years of contentious litigation, emerged with his reputation restored but a financially ruined man. To him, the compensation (reported to be £2.4 million, cf., Sunday Telegraph, 6 September 1998) he finally received from the Greater Manchester Police Authority’s insurers, who deemed it less expensive to settle than fight, was small compensation for the trauma and penury he and his family had endured. The story of Kevin Taylor and his relationship with John Stalker is incredibly complex and covered in detail in the books of the author, John Stalker and Kevin Taylor listed in note 1 above.
Chapter Twenty-Two: Group Activity
1. The SAS in Ireland, op. cit., p. 290.
2. Lost Lives, op. cit., p. 966.
3. The SAS in Ireland, op. cit., p. 290. This is from the account of the SAS soldier given at the inquest.
4. Ibid., p. 290.
5. Ibid., p. 312.
6. Ibid., p. 370.
7. Lost Lives, op. cit., p. 1,003.
8. The SAS in Ireland, op. cit., p. 329.
9. Ibid., p. 330.
10. Ibid., p. 331.
11. Lost Lives, op. cit., p. 1,003.
12. The SAS in Ireland, op. cit., p. 333.
13. Ibid., p. 338.
14. Ibid., p. 342.
15. The statistics include the two ‘Det’ killings referred to in the introduction, ‘Frank’s Story’: Declan Martin and Henry Hogan, killed on 21 February 1984. The other ‘Det’ killing was of Eugene McMonagle of the INLA, killed on 2 February 1983.
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Political Front
1. Lost Lives, op. cit., p. 1,473. The precise overall death toll from 1969 to the end of 1979 was 2,192. The precise security force total – British army, UDR, RUC and RUC Reserve – for the same period was 584.
2. For the complex details of the gun-running scandal in which Haughey and others were charged but acquitted, see States of Terror. The Politics of Political Violence, Peter Taylor, BBC Books, 1993, pp. 129–46.
3. Northern Ireland. A Chronology of the Troubles 1968–1999, op. cit., p. 141.
4. Northern Ireland. A Political Directory
1968–1999, Sydney Elliott and W. D. Flackes, Blackstaff Press, 1999, p. 273.
5. Ibid., p. 273.
6. Loyalists, op. cit., p. 174.
7. Provos, op. cit., p. 250.
8. Ibid., p. 282.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 283.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., pp. 283–4.
13. Lost Lives, p. 970.
14. The Provisional IRA, op. cit., p. 425.
15. Lost Lives, op. cit., p. 996.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 997.
18. Details of Patrick Magee and quotes from him are taken from an interview conducted by journalist Tom McGurk for the Dublin newspaper Sunday Business Post. The interview was published on 27 August 2000.
19. 25 Years of Terror. The IRA’s War against the British, Martin Dillon, Bantam Books, 1994, p. 222.
20. Magee’s Open University dissertation was on ‘Irish post-colonial representations in popular fiction’, i.e. a study of the way that Gerald Seymour, Tom Clancy and many other best-selling authors fictionalized the conflict.
21. Northern Ireland. A Chronology of the Troubles 1968–1999, op. cit., p. 186.
22. The Anglo-Irish Agreement. Commentary, Text and Official Review, Tom Hadden and Kevin Boyle, Sweet & Maxwell Ltd, 1989, p. 18. The other references to the Agreement are taken from the same source. The Commentary is an invaluable guide provided by Professors Hadden and Boyle.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Loughgall
1. For a more detailed account of Loughgall see Provos, op. cit., chapter 19. A photograph of Tony Gormley, Eugene Kelly, Seamus Donnelly and Declan Arthurs is included in the photographs. They are shown standing alongside the memorial to Martin Hurson in Cappagh in 1986, the year before the SAS ambush at Loughgall.
2. Ibid., p. 275.
3. Lost Lives, op. cit., p. 1,074.
4. Provos, op. cit., p. 272.
5. Ibid., p. 275.
6. Ibid., p. 274.
7. The SAS in Ireland, op. cit., p. 376.
8. Provos., op. cit., p. 276.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Death in the Afternoon
1. The attack took place on 23 March 1987.
2. Death on the Rock and Other Stories, Roger Bolton, W.H. Allen/Optomen, 1990; p. 189.
3. Ibid., p. 190.
4. Ibid., p. 191.
5. Mairead Farrell had been sentenced to fourteen years for a bomb attack on the Conway Hotel, Dunmurry. For a detailed account of her life, see the author’s Families at War, BBC Books, 1989.
6. Provos, op. cit., pp. 259–65. The ‘supergrasses’ (or ‘converted terrorists’ in official language) were former members of republican and loyalist paramilitary organizations prepared to give evidence against their former comrades. The phenomenon flourished in the early 1980s, beginning in 1981 when an IRA man from Ardoyne, Christopher Black, agreed to give evidence against thirty-eight people. Thirty-five were convicted and sentenced, many on Black’s word alone. In the months that followed, other republican and loyalist ‘terrorists’ agreed to do the same, invariably on the understanding that they would receive leniency in return. The supergrass system was finally discredited and collapsed in 1986 when the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of eighteen republicans who had been convicted on Black’s uncorroborated testimony. Savage was alleged by a supergrass to have been a member of the IRA and involved in causing an explosion.
7. Phoenix. Policing the Shadows. The Secret War Against Terrorism in Northern Ireland, Jack Holland and Susan Phoenix, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996, p. 134.
8. Cf., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1961, p. 943. The Roman Emperor was Titus Flavius Vespasianus (AD 69–79), who, before being formally appointed as ‘Emperor’ by the Senate, had stopped a rebellion amongst the Jews in Palestine and established peace in every corner of the Roman Empire.
9. Some of the key Special Branch officers involved were among the twenty-five army, police and MI5 senior intelligence officers killed on 2 June 1994 when the Chinook helicopter in which they were travelling to a security conference in Scotland crashed in fog on the Mull of Kintyre.
10. Who Dares Wins, op. cit., p. 287.
11. Lost Lives, op. cit., p. 1,112.
12. Who Dares Wins, op. cit., p. 293.
13. Ibid., p. 297.
14. Ibid., pp. 567–8.
15. The SAS in Ireland, op. cit., p. 402.
16. Ibid., p. 403.
17. There is an important discrepancy in the British and Spanish accounts as to when the white Renault was parked. The British say it was parked on the Sunday. A senior Spanish police officer involved in the surveillance operation told the Independent (23 May 1989) it was parked on Saturday, the day before. If this was the case, the British would have had plenty of time to establish whether it contained a bomb. The discrepancy is pointed out in The SAS in Ireland, op. cit., p. 403.
18. Who Dares Wins, op. cit., p. 304.
19. Ibid., p. 306. The following SAS soldiers’ accounts are all taken from this source based on their testimonies at the subsequent inquest.
20. Lost Lives, op. cit., p. 1,119.
21. Ibid., p. 1,122.
22. Ibid.
23. The Windlesham/Rampton Report on ‘Death on the Rock’, Lord Windlesham and Richard Rampton QC, Faber & Faber, 1989, p. 54. This is the report of the investigation instigated by Thames Television into the making of the programme. It cleared the programme makers of any impropriety. A full transcript of ‘Death on the Rock’ is included.
24. Lost Lives, op. cit., p. 1,114.
Chapter Twenty-Six: Brian Nelson
1. Regina v. Brian Nelson Before the Right Honourable Lord Justice Kelly on Wednesday 29 January 1992 at Belfast Crown Court. Evidence of Witness ‘Colonel “J”, transcript p. 1.
2. Ibid., p. 14.
3. ‘Time to Come Clean over the Army’s Role in the “Dirty War”’, John Ware, New Statesman, 24 April 1998, p. 16. John Ware did the seminal work on the Brian Nelson story and first revealed the MISR forms.
4. Loyalists, op. cit., p. 169.
5. Deadly Intelligence, State Involvement in Loyalist Murder in Northern Ireland, British Irish Rights Watch, February 1999, p. 5.
6. Northern Ireland. A Chronology of the Troubles 1968–99, op. cit., p. 231.
7. ‘Revealed. How the Army Set up Ulster Murders’, John Ware and Geoffrey Seed, Sunday Telegraph, 29 March 1998.
8. Regina v. Brian Nelson, op. cit., p. 53.
9. Sunday People, Greg Haskin, 17 September 2000.
10. For a detailed history of the Finucane brothers and family, see Rebel Hearts. Journeys Within the IRA’s Soul, Kevin Toolis, Picador, Second Edition, 2000, pp. 84 ff. Seamus was arrested and gaoled with Bobby Sands in 1976 for fire-bombing the Balmoral Furniture Company showroom near the nationalist Twinbrook estate on the outskirts of Belfast. Dermot was sentenced to eighteen years in 1982 for an attack on a security force patrol. He was one of the thirty-eight IRA prisoners who escaped from the Maze in 1983.
11. New Statesman, op. cit., p. 17.
12. Loyalists, op. cit., p. 207.
13. New Statesman, op. cit., p. 17.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Turning the Screw
1. Although most SAM 7 missiles were found when the Eksund was seized, some were included in the previous shipments on board the Kula and Villa. It is believed that the IRA only fired one, at a helicopter in South Armagh, but it was successfully deflected by its electronic counter-measures (ECM). It is thought that the other SAM 7s were not used either because of a lack of professional expertise or, more likely, technical problems with the firing mechanism.
2. Phoenix, op. cit., p. 163.
3. Lost Lives, op. cit., pp. 1,473–5. The death toll of British soldiers including the UDR was as follows: 1982 – 39; 1983 – 15; 1984 – 19; 1985 – 6; 1986 – 12; 1987 – 11; 1988 –34.
4. Northern Ireland. A Chronology of the Troubles 1968–1999, op. cit., p. 217.
&nb
sp; 5. Provos, p. 309.
6. The SAS in Ireland, op. cit., p. 440.
7. Ibid.
8. Provos, op. cit., p. 309.
9. Lost Lives, op. cit., p. 1,179.
10. Ibid., p. 1,183.
11. Ibid., op. cit., p. 1,239.
12. Provos, op. cit., p. 310.
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Road to Peace
1. Lost Lives, op. cit., pp. 1,473–4. The calculation 1982–1998 is inclusive.
2. Northern Ireland. A Political Directory 1968–1999, op. cit., p. 261.
3. The Israeli foreign intelligence service, Mossad, the equivalent of Britain’s MI6, tracked down and assassinated those Palestinians it believed were connected with the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. Mossad was assisted by the Israeli equivalent of the SAS, Sayeret Matkal (States of Terror, op. cit., p. 5).
4. Northern Ireland. A Political Directory 1968–1999, op. cit., p. 563.
5. Northern Ireland, A Chronology of the Troubles, 1968–1999, op. cit., p. 208.
6. Northern Ireland. A Political Directory 1968–1999, op. cit., p. 565.
7. Lost Lives, op. cit., p. 1,205.
8. The Politics of Irish Freedom, Gerry Adams, Brandon Books, 1994, p. 64.
9. Northern Ireland Office Press Notice, 26 September 1988.
10. Provos, op. cit., p. 316.
11. Ibid., p. 318.
12. Ibid., p. 321.
13. John Major. The Autobiography, John Major, HarperCollins, 1999, p. 238. Chapter 19, ‘Into the Mists: Bright Hopes, Black Deeds’, is a comprehensive account of Major’s critical role in the peace process.
14. Lost Lives, op. cit., p. 1,268.
15. Provos, op. cit., p. 324. This gives a detailed explanation of the unfortunate circumstances in which it happened.
16. John Major. The Autobiography, op. cit., p. 440.
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Secret Talks
1. John Major. The Autobiography, op. cit., p. 306.
2. Provos, op. cit., p. 328.
3. Ibid., p. 330.