Down Among the Weeds

by Harry Beaves

  The Fred Basset informers were run by the Military Reaction Force (MRF), an intelligence-gathering unit made up of soldiers from all regiments and corps. It was a highly sensitive organisation based at Palace Barracks, Holywood and one of their tasks was recruiting and running a network of informers and agents.

  ‘Fred Bassets’ had proved very successful for N Battery, who most often took them on patrol in vehicles. The informer with an escort from the Intelligence Service and a Patrol Commander from the Battery would travel in a Saracen, looking out through the weapon slits. ‘Fred’ would point out wanted men to the Patrol Commander as the vehicle passed by. He would radio the description to a snatch squad in a second vehicle who would get out at top speed and apprehend the suspect who would be thrown in the second vehicle and taken away for questioning. It was a very effective technique and netted many on the ‘wanted’ list who would have passed by a normal patrol unidentified. The IRA became used to the method as two armoured vehicles cruising slowly through the housing estates raised their suspicion so, frequently, the wanted men would be running before the snatch squad had de-bussed. On occasions a suspect would loiter on the street as bait for the two vehicles and when the snatch squad pursued him, he would lead them into an ambush. By the time 28 Battery arrived vehicle patrols with Fred Basset were infrequent as they had outrun their effectiveness and were very risky.

  Despite this we made several Fred Basset mobile patrols, but with limited success, so we began taking informers on foot patrol, an even more dangerous tactic. All intelligence operations are highly sensitive and cloaked in secrecy. In this case security was particularly important, not just because an informer would be a high-value target for the IRA should they discover him, but also, because having betrayed one side, it was always possible an informer could do so again and set us up for ambush by the Provos. The cover of darkness was essential for us to be able to move safely on foot with Fred Basset. Fred and his ‘handler’ would arrive from Palace Barracks by military vehicle and disembark in Casement Park, close to the entrance to the stand, only after the main gate had been closed. They would be ushered into the Int Office and be seen by as few people as possible. Fred would wear a combat jacket and beret, usually above his jeans and Doc Martens. His handler would be in uniform with a sub-machine gun.

  The patrol was never less than eight men strong, usually staggered on both sides of the road. The Patrol Commander would be number one, number two would be on the opposite side of the road and Fred with his handler by his side would be at number three, behind the Patrol Commander. When the Patrol Commander met an approaching pedestrian he would greet him and, in a polite and friendly manner, ask him his name. He would then repeat the name in a clear voice as if to confirm it. Fred and his handler would by now be well hidden behind a wall or hedge. If the person was clear Fred would whistle twice and we would let the person continue on his way. If he was a suspect Fred would give one long whistle. The Patrol Commander would then tell the suspect we would like to take him back for further checks and call up on the radio. From then on it was vital that everything happened at top speed so that there was no risk of compromise to Fred Basset.

  When a Fred Basset patrol was out two vehicles were kept in Casement Park ready, engines running, with a section of soldiers on board. When the call was received they would crash out, the first vehicle picking up the suspect the second, Fred Basset and his handler. They would be taken to 19 Regiment’s Int Cell at MPH where Fred would tell exactly who the suspect was and what he knew about him and questioning would begin. The patrol would return to the stadium on foot. Patrols like this were incredibly risky; the biggest danger was attracting a crowd who might create a disturbance or riot that could put the informer at risk. Fortunately we always managed to avoid this and used Fred Basset to great effect.

  We had several different informers with different handlers during our time, but one was particularly successful. He was short and slim with very blue eyes, a typical sparky little Irish lad with a minder who was a tall, silent officer in the infantry. We were supposed to have no social contact in order to minimise any chance of compromise, but I always pulled Fred’s leg about his long dark hair. I got the impression he lived close by, but outside Andersonstown, and he seemed to know enough about military things to suggest he had been a soldier. I worked with him more than any other Fred Basset and he laid the finger on an enormous number of suspects for us, but as the weeks went on he became less good-humoured and more nervous and jumpy. His hair was cut short and he even began wearing camouflage cream on his face (another hint of military experience). I thought perhaps he was beginning to think that the IRA was getting close to him and as I said ‘Farewell’ after another successful patrol he replied, ‘You’ll soon be seeing less of me I hope.’ His silent minder added, ‘Yes, he’s not far off retirement.’ But there was another patrol, then just one more and another… Each time Fred arrived looking more pale and nervous. In any other circumstance I would have felt sorry for him, but I could only worry that if he reached the tipping point he might just set us up for an ambush by the IRA. Then one day I realised we hadn’t seen him for a while. Fred Basset patrols continued, but with different informers. I just hoped and assumed the highly successful old Fred was now enjoying his pension and not lying anonymously in a bog, a victim of IRA retribution.

  I was, however, wrong on both counts. Our ‘favourite Fred’ was involved in very much more and is part of another remarkable tale which I will tell in full in Chapter 19.

  One of the men arrested on 17th August provided us with a blinding glimpse of the obvious. We had got into the habit of always raiding houses at first light, hoping to surprise the sleeping occupants. The IRA had wised up to this and made sure that they were never in at that time, so Bertie Whitmore decided to put back the lift-and-search planned for dawn on 18th August to 1300. This meant rethinking our tactics, as at lunchtime the streets would be busy and, since dustbins and whistles would announce our arrival, speed would be of the essence.

  The target was numbers 1–11 Riverdale Park Drive and numbers 71–81 Riverdale Park North. The plan was for 4 Troop to enter the estate on a routine patrol which, we hoped, would not rouse too much suspicion, and at 1300 be near the targets, ready to form the cordon on the inside of the estate. 5 Troop, 6 Troop and 10 Troop would arrive at top speed by vehicle and de-bus, with 10 Troop providing the cordon on the outside of the estate, 5 Troop dealing with any aggro and 6 Troop going through the doors to make the arrests.

  The plan took the locals completely by surprise. Dozens of women screamed, banged dustbin lids, blew whistles and did everything possible to get in our way, while the kids threw stones, as usual. We had a fantastic haul of suspects including Seamus Loughran, the most important IRA man that we captured during our whole time in Ireland. Loughran was said to be a member of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade Staff and was described by Republicans as ‘one of the most astute political brains in Belfast’. He had been very much involved in the talks and collapse of the ceasefire at Lenadoon in July and, before that, was credited with involvement in writing some of the IRA’s most important policy documents like ‘Eire Nua’. Eire Nua was for a time the political strategy of the Provisional IRA. It envisaged Ireland as a federal state after the British had withdrawn from Northern Ireland and the existing Dublin government had been replaced. At the time of his arrest Loughran claimed to be Henry Hamill and had documents to support this. Hamill was, in fact, his next-door neighbour.

  Seamus Loughran Brigade Staff arrested 18th August 1972 in Riverdale Park Drive. Our most important capture. Picture 19 Regt.

  We arrested nine other wanted men, besides Loughran. They included Eddie Donnelly, believed to be the QM of E Company, Billy Roberts, his assistant, Jim McFall, the Explosives officer of E Company, and Brian Palmer, Adjutant of E Company. Several had aliases; two were particularly difficult to identify. Michael Magee claimed to be Michael McMullan. He was released and in the weeks that followed moved fr
eely around Riverdale with a respectable air. On 13th October L/Bdr Tranter of 4 Troop made a find which heavily implicated Magee and suggested he was by then Commander of E Company. He was re-arrested on 24th October and interned. A man calling himself Jackie Kelly was also released, but later discovered to be Seamus Storey, an escapee from Crumlin Road Jail. Two, Jim Hughes and Liam O’Kane, were boys in their mid-teens and were thought to be prominent in the Fianna. Certainly their presence that day in a house with the local IRA hierarchy made them worth watching in future. We heard later that several members of the Brigade staff had been in the house for the meeting, but by chance had left just before the lift.

  However one other important person had escaped the net. As the cordon had gone in three men ran from the back of the houses. Billy Roberts and Brian Palmer were challenged by the Troop Commander, halted with their hands up and were arrested by 10 Troop. The third ran on. The yellow card, which laid down the circumstances in which we could shoot, is clear that an unarmed man offering no threat must be challenged three times before opening fire. When a man runs out of a house forty feet away there is no time for three challenges so the man ran past 10 Troop and escaped across Finaghy Road North. The decision not to shoot was probably morally correct, but militarily unfortunate as it was believed that the fugitive was Tommy Gorman.

  Gorman was now the number one suspect for the murders of David Storrey and Bob Hope.

  Chapter 13

  The Arms Find

  At 2230 on 18th August Major Richard Craven assumed command of 28 Battery. He had been due to join 19 Regiment to command one of the other Gun Batteries in about nine months’ time, but, with David Storrey’s death, his posting was brought forward and he was rushed out to join us. Richard Craven was an Instructor in Gunnery, well known to most of the officers of 19 Regiment. He was a good man, but coming from a highly-technical gunnery job, without the benefit of the pre-Northern Ireland training package that we had been given, he was being thrown in at the deep end. To his great credit he quickly got to grips with the task – he had to!

  The two deaths had changed attitudes in the Battery significantly. Until then the task had been very physically demanding, but among some people there was still a slightly cavalier attitude, almost like a sports match where you throw a few punches and get a few back, but remain on top. The escalation of the incidents that led up to the bomb had made us all acutely aware of the seriousness and life-threatening nature of what we were doing. In the Ops Room, listening to events unfolding on the streets outside, I would struggle to hide my nerves, but when we were scrambled there was no time for fear; each of us depended on the others. Every sense had to be alert and the mind had to think and react quickly. On the streets I was hard and direct with those with whom I came into contact, trusting no one and showing little compassion as these were the people who had killed my friends. At night in my bed I would be gripped with anxiety and I secretly looked forward to the slot in the programme when it was my turn to take a patrol out during one of the quieter, ‘safer’ periods.

  We were nearing the end of a very frustrating Fred Basset patrol and had lifted no one. As we approached the entrance to Casement Park, I don’t know why, but I decided to cross the road to the chip shop where a small queue was waiting. A youth, who we knew to be a Fianna member, was sitting on the pavement, as teenagers do. The people in the queue looked up nervously.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I shouted to the youth on the ground.

  He mumbled a reply. I swung my leg back, kicked him hard in the thigh and screamed, ‘Stand up when I’m talking to you!’ A command that he clearly couldn’t obey with a dead leg!

  In the shadows on the other side of the road Fred Basset was wetting himself and his minder was hustling him quickly and quietly through the gate. I left the queue before any trouble could start and went back into the stadium. By the time I had completed my patrol report the telephone wires on the HQ Northern Ireland complaints hotline were buzzing about the brutality of a British soldier towards a youth queuing for chips in Andersonstown.

  On 19th August at the ‘quieter, safer’ time of 0450 I was in Riverdale with Bdr Tolson and four men, happily anticipating an uneventful patrol with little likelihood of any incidents at that time on a Sunday morning. On a number of previous nights I had noticed that the front door of number 26 Riverdale Park North had been left ajar in the small hours. Often sympathisers would leave a key on the outside of a door, or a door on the latch, so that fugitives looking for a safe house for the night could come in and use a bed. For this reason I had kept that house in the back of my mind.

  Riverdale Park North was on the edge of the council estate and number 26 was a very respectable privately-owned house. When we passed it I was amazed to see that it had been recently ravaged by fire and now seemed unoccupied, so I decided to take a closer look. The garage door had been pulled off and was now propped over the frame. Bdr Tolson and I eased it back and revealed a dark blue Morris 1100 inside. We cautiously peered into the car and noticed a number of bundles on the back seat, amongst them a Post Office mail bag. In situations like this you should leave well alone as the car might have contained a booby-trapped bomb, but curiosity got the better and I gently opened the right rear door, all the time dreading the small click of a detonator which might just have been the last thing that I heard! I lifted the edge of the mail bag and a quantity of live rounds fell out.

  Bdr Tolson and I breathed deeply, stepped outside and I reported ‘a significant arms find’ to Battery Ops. I suddenly felt we were very vulnerable. The person who had left the arms would not risk being caught in the building with them as it would imply ownership, but they would not have left them unguarded. Quite probably a sentry’s eyes were watching us from the houses nearby so we needed to be ready for a firefight if the IRA decided to defend the cache.

  Fortunately David Isaac and 5 Troop arrived very quickly and established a cordon. A ‘Finds Team’, ‘Scenes of Crime Team’ and Bdr Wylie’s search team arrived shortly after. The house was empty, but in the back of the car, among many other things we found: ten firearms, including two .303 rifles, a Thompson machine gun, two sawn-off shotguns and an Armalite, over 1400 rounds of ammunition, a British Army hand grenade and two-way radios. Also in the car were the proceeds of a Post Office raid including Postal Orders that would have been used to pay the IRA Volunteers who, because they were on the run, could not have normal jobs. It was the biggest single arms find that had been made in Northern Ireland at that time.

  We believed the house was owned by a local bookmaker. Amongst the charred remains searchers found a child’s scrapbook. In it, one of the adults (we assumed) had made entries deploring the activities of the local IRA who were described as ‘… no more than hoodlums, stealing from their own people…’ They compared them with Al Capone’s gangsters in Chicago. Local people were turning against them because ‘… this was not the sort of Ireland that Connolly, Pearse and the like had fought for or which decent people wanted…’ The door left ajar in the manner of a safe house already suggested that the family were Republican sympathisers. They had obviously become disillusioned, possibly because the IRA had been trying to extort protection money from the husband. When he refused to pay they had simply burnt the family out.

  Most of E Company’s weapons that I found in 26 Riverdale Park North on 19 August 1972. Picture 19 Regt.

  Sad though it was for the family, we saw this as encouraging. The IRA had initially gained support as the protectors of the Catholic communities against the Protestant extremists and the British Army. Some had been keen to do no more than just protect their communities and were politically motivated, but many were thieves and thugs who would have been on the wrong side of the law in any situation and frequently used the Republican cause to cover their own criminal activities. Counter-insurgency operations are all about winning the hearts and minds of the community and we were acutely aware of the difficulties that the British Army faced in projecting a posit
ive image in Andersonstown. It was reassuring, therefore, that the activities of the IRA, far from being approved, were alienating certain sectors of the Catholic community that they claimed to be protecting.

  Some nights previously I had been on patrol in the estate and heard a strange noise. It had carried a distance on the still night air, but it was unmistakably the sound of someone digging. Digging at two in the morning – that had to be suspicious! We followed the sound, but it stopped before we could discover anything and it was such a minor event that I don’t think I even included it in my report. On 5th October we made a routine search of 19 Riverdale Park Drive and discovered a hole about three feet square and three feet deep in the garden at the rear. The weapons had probably been removed from it the night I had heard digging. It is also likely that Seamus Loughran and the people we had lifted from the same area on 18th August had been discussing plans for E Company to become ‘active’ again after Motorman. My simple curiosity had captured the whole of E Company’s armoury and with one swift slice had severed the testicles from the IRA in our area.

  Casement Park was buzzing with excitement as the arms find was catalogued. By now it was mid-morning and, tired from the night’s activities, I sat in the cookhouse drinking tea with my lads warmed by the feeling of a job well done. Colonel Bill sat smiling and laughing with us and congratulated us on our find. When he stood up to go he called me outside with him. I knew what was coming.