Ten-Thirty-Three

by Nicholas Davies

  Some nights later, E4A officers watched from a distance as six men took a total of seven hours to unload the hay lorry. When the men had finished their task and gone home, RUC explosives experts examined the barn and found 1,000lbs of explosives and some old-fashioned guns hidden behind the hay stacks. Officers from MI5, trained in counter-terrorist operations, were called to the scene and installed sophisticated listening devices in the roof of the barn. These were programmed to pick up not only conversations but also any noises suggesting the explosives or arms were being removed.

  A standing observation post manned day and night by the Det was set up to keep a close eye on the barn. The RUC hoped to track whoever moved the explosives, discover the Provos’ exact target and capture the bomb team red-handed. From sources inside the IRA, the TCG had learned that the explosives had been brought in to launch a specific, planned attack on the security forces, but they had no idea where or when this attack would take place. And they had no clue as to the identity of the bombers.

  On 27 October 1982, an anonymous phone call, supposedly from a member of the public, was received at Lurgan police station informing officers that a motorcycle had been found abandoned on a dirt track called the Kinnego Embankment. Three uniformed officers, Sergeant Sean Quinn and Constables Paul Hamilton and Alan McCloy, were sent to check the motorcycle. No one thought to inform either the HMSU or the TCG. Ten minutes later an explosion rocked the area and the three officers were blown to pieces. Explosives experts discovered that the bombers had planted a booby-trap bomb in a culvert beneath the embankment which had exploded when the officers walked over it. To the horror of the security forces, forensic experts found that the explosives used to kill the three officers were part of the shipment hidden in Kitty’s Barn.

  The tragedy had been able to occur because of two extraordinary errors. Firstly, the Det patrol detailed to watch the barn had been taken off duty for a twenty-four-hour break, during which a quantity of the explosives had been removed. Secondly, the listening device installed in the barn had been affected by wind and rain and no longer worked. After the tragic deaths of the three officers, a new listening device was fitted to the handle of the barn door where, experts insisted, it would not be affected by adverse weather conditions. And the Det unit was kept in position watching the barn with no breaks.

  In November, E4A learned from reliable informants inside the IRA that the two chief suspects believed to be responsible for planting the Kinnego bomb, Sean Burns and Eugene Toman, both aged twenty-one and from Lurgan, had returned secretly to the Province some weeks earlier. Both men had been on the run, taking refuge in the south, for the attempted murder of a police patrol some weeks earlier. Now, after killing three innocent police officers, they were considered to be among the most dangerous IRA activists, a prime target for the security forces. On 11 November E4A traced the two men to the home of a known Provo sympathiser, James Gervaise McKerr, who lived in Avondale Green, near Lurgan. An HMSU team was immediately dispatched to the area.

  The HMSU patrol had only just arrived at the scene – wearing traditional dark-green uniforms and driving an unmarked police car – when E4A radioed that Burns and Toman were leaving the house in a car driven by McKerr. The patrol immediately set up an impromptu vehicle check-point near a T-junction. As the car approached the junction, the HMSU vehicle parked on the left side was blocking half of the narrow road, with one armed officer standing on the right side waving a red light, warning the approaching car to stop. The IRA car, a green Ford Escort, slowed down almost to a halt and then accelerated hard, forcing the officer to leap out of the way. He did, however, manage to fire off five shots from his Ruger mini 14 rifle, shattering the car’s rear window and hitting the man sitting in the back. He also managed to puncture a rear tyre. As the terrorists’ car sped off, swerving wildly across the road, the HMSU officers gave chase. As they raced along the dark road in pursuit, they grabbed their Stirling machine-guns and opened fire, Chicago gangster-style, leaning out of the windows and firing into the getaway car. When the speeding Provos’ car came to a roundabout the driver tried to turn right, lost control, and careered off the road and down an embankment.

  The three officers leapt out and opened fire. They poured 117 rounds into the Provos’ car. When the firing stopped they gingerly approached the vehicle to find the bodies of the three men shot to pieces. They were virtually unrecognisable. But police called in to investigate and report on the deaths found no weapons in the car.

  The deaths of McKerr, Toman and Burns caused a furore. The RUC were accused of having cold-bloodedly murdered three innocent people. Sinn Fein claimed the shooting had been a ‘summary execution’. Their families denied that any of them was a member of the Provisional IRA and claimed that, had the police wanted to, all three could have been arrested at home at any time. The men were given paramilitary-style funerals, however, and the North Armagh Brigade of the IRA claimed that all three were members of their organisation. Black berets, gloves and Irish tricolours were placed on their coffins and, at the graveside, a single shot was fired over the coffins by a masked man.

  Following the shootings, the TCG decided to remove the rest of the Kitty’s Barn explosives but leave behind the rifles to see if any other IRA members knew of their existence. Once again, a twenty-four-hour watch was put on the barn. During the afternoon of 18 November 1982, the listening device in the barn indicated that someone was tampering with the rifles and armed HMSU officers raced to the scene. Wearing flak jackets and carrying sub-machine-guns, they approached the barn quietly and cautiously while others surrounded the immediate area. The officers had no idea of the identity of the men, nor how many were in the barn.

  Inside, two teenagers were holding the rifles and examining them closely. The rifles appeared to be antiques. In fact, both were bolt-action weapons from the First World War. Two were German Mausers and the third was of Italian or Spanish origin. Arms experts believed they were all manufactured before 1914. Forensic experts later maintained that all three weapons were in working order but said that ammunition for such weapons would be difficult to find. In fact, no ammunition was ever found at the barn.

  When the officers were within ten feet of the barn, one of them opened fire, spraying one side of the barn with bullets, the rounds making a dramatic staccato noise on the corrugated iron. In the barn were Michael Tighe, aged seventeen, and his nineteen-year-old friend Martin McCauley. They fled to the back of the barn to hide in the hay, taking the weapons with them. Then the door was pushed open and in strode three armed officers.

  ‘Right, come on out,’ one officer allegedly shouted.

  They saw something moving in the hay and opened fire with two bursts from their sub-machine-guns, killing Tighe instantly and seriously wounding McCauley. Both teenagers had been hit by three rounds. Another burst of machine-gunfire followed. Then the three officers walked to the back of the barn, grabbed McCauley and dragged him outside. He would later recover and appear at Belfast Crown Court charged with possession of the three old rifles. Lord Justice Kelly expressed doubts about the police evidence but, nevertheless, gave McCauley a two-year suspended sentence.

  But every word that had been spoken in the barn that afternoon had been picked up and recorded by the concealed listening device. That tape-recording would have been crucial to the entire independent investigation that followed the shootings, but no one would ever know what had been said because the tape mysteriously disappeared and could not be produced in the subsequent inquiry.

  The shootings caused a wave of anger in Republican circles. There was no evidence that either boy had ever been a member of the IRA. Their parents told the police that their sons had gone to the barn to feed Kitty Kearns’s dogs because she had gone away for the day and had asked them to help her.

  The third incident which aroused suspicion in the minds of Republicans and in some political circles in Dublin and Westminster that the RUC was indeed operating a shoot-to-kill policy occurred just thre
e weeks later. On 12 December 1982 two leading members of the INLA were shot dead by HMSU officers. The killings of Peter Seamus Grew, aged thirty-one, from Mullacreevie Park, Armagh, and twenty-two-year-old Roderick Martin Carroll from Callanbridge Park, Armagh, became known by Republicans as ‘the Mullacreevie Park Massacre’.

  Grew had been sentenced to fourteen years in prison in 1975 for attempting to murder a policeman and had only been released eight months before. He was, nevertheless, the chief suspect in a number of murders and attempted murders in the Armagh district. He and Carroll had been visiting friends in the Irish Republic and were driving north across the border in torrential rain when they met their deaths.

  Informants south of the border alerted the RUC Special Branch that the two men wanted for questioning would be travelling back home to Armagh. A time and a date were provided. A Det surveillance team as well as a squad of HMSU officers were dispatched south to locate and tail the two men as they travelled north. Three unmarked vehicles – an HMSU car, a Det surveillance team car and a police Ford Cortina – followed them.

  During the journey north, however, the HMSU car came to an unexpected halt and, unbelievably, the Det car, skidding on the wet road, crashed into the back of it. The driver of the third police vehicle pulled up, stopped to check his colleagues were not injured and had to watch helplessly as the two Provos in their bright orange Austin Allegro casually drove away, unaware that the three cars by the roadside contained members of the security services who were tailing them. Two of the police vehicles gave chase and caught up with the Allegro just as it was about to turn into the safety of the Republican area of Mullacreevie Park, forcing it to stop. As the armed police clambered out of their vehicles, Peter Grew and Roderick Carroll opened the doors of their car. The police opened fire instantly, killing both men in a hail of bullets.

  The following day the INLA vowed to avenge with ‘unmerciful ferocity’ the deaths of the two men, saying in an official statement, ‘These well-paid executioners have now left themselves open to any form of attack and can prepare to suffer the consequences of their actions.’ Troops and police were put on full alert as security chiefs prepared for a terrorist onslaught. Three days after the killing of Grew and Carroll, an INLA unit, dressed in the traditional black boilersuits of Republican gunmen at funeral ceremonies, and surrounded by two hundred mourners, fired shots over the coffins with police watching only a hundred yards away. Although such ‘military-style’ funerals were unlawful, the police made no attempt to intervene.

  But this was not the full story. The same day Carroll and Grew would die, a Det surveillance unit working secretly south of the border had seen the INLA activist Dominic ‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchey get into the car with them. He was carrying a hold-all which they knew contained weapons. This intelligence was supported separately by a reliable source, an FRU agent, who had reported earlier that day that McGlinchey was to be driven into Northern Ireland with a bag of weapons. Those members of the security forces following the orange Allegro that night had been informed that Grew and Carroll, along with McGlinchey and the weapons, were in the car. They would take no chances.

  In the autumn of 1982 ‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchey was the most wanted man in Ireland, on either side of the border. He was a fearless man who would take the most extraordinary risks to get close to those he intended to murder, usually shooting them with his favourite weapon, the powerful .44 Ruger revolver. During his reign of terror, which lasted for four years, McGlinchey was said to have killed a total of thirty people, mainly officers of the RUC, the army and the UDR. He also murdered civilians. He had risen through the ranks of the INLA to become ‘Double O’, the Operations Officer of the General Headquarters Staff, but he would still take part in active service attacks himself.

  These three tragic cases formed the basis of the famous Stalker Inquiry. The Deputy Chief Constable of the Greater Manchester Police Force, John Stalker, was asked to undertake an enquiry into the deaths of the six men who were killed within a five-week period in late 1982. He was to investigate allegations that the RUC had a secret but official shoot-to-kill policy against suspected members of the IRA and INLA. As he dug deeper, Stalker complained that he was meeting increasing resistance from members of the RUC at all levels from the Chief Constable, Sir John Hermon, down.

  Within days of the investigation starting in May 1984, the trial of the three police officers involved in the killing of Eugene Toman at the embankment outside Lurgan came to an end; the officers were acquitted. The judge, Lord Justice Gibson, said ‘seriously incorrect evidence’ was given to a court at a preliminary hearing of the charges and went on to praise the three officers for bringing Toman, Burns and McKerr to ‘the final court of justice’. This created an unprecedented uproar. His remarks seemed to remove all doubt that the shoot-to-kill policy existed and was officially endorsed in police and judicial circles of Northern Ireland. From that moment on, there was a generally held belief among Catholics and many others in the Province, as well as on the mainland and in the Republic of Ireland, that some members of the RUC were out of control and had a free rein to kill whoever they suspected of involvement in unlawful Republicanism. Lord Justice Gibson became a marked man, and he and his wife would later be killed by a car bomb at the border in April 1987.

  Stalker’s investigation should have been completed within nine months but in fact remained open for two years, with Stalker bitterly complaining of ‘downright obstructiveness’ by RUC officers. In the case of Grew and Carroll, however, he and his team were told by senior officers of the Source report and Det officers confirmed that McGlinchey had also been in the orange Allegro earlier that night but Stalker was refused permission to discuss the sighting with either the FRU source or the Det team. As Stalker investigated the killings he became more convinced that he was possibly looking at murder, or unlawful killing, in all three cases. If that were so, it could only lead to one conclusion: that senior police officers were involved in the formulation of a deliberate policy of shooting to kill.

  In May 1986, as he prepared to return to Northern Ireland and finally gain access to the vital missing tape (the one which had recorded the conversations and shootings inside Kitty’s Barn), John Stalker was suddenly and dramatically relieved of his duties. In his autobiography, he explained that he was phoned at home by a senior officer of the Greater Manchester Police Authority and told that allegations had been made against him which might indicate he had committed a disciplinary offence. As he wrote later, ‘I knew then, as powerfully as it is possible to know, that what was happening to me was rooted firmly in my enquiries in Northern Ireland. It was no secret that I was within a couple of days of obtaining the vital tape and of interviewing the highest policeman in the RUC. I knew that I had nothing to fear from any fair investigation into me, but I had learned enough during the previous years to know that devious and lying policemen do exist, and that they can function without hindrance given the right conditions. In those few seconds after that phone call I fleetingly wondered how much I had to fear from policemen such as those.’

  Stalker believed the tape would be highly embarrassing to the RUC and, more particularly, to the officers of the HMSU. The following day he went to Manchester police headquarters and was told that he was being investigated on ‘rumour, innuendo and gossip’ about his associations with certain people in the city. An official told him, ‘I have been authorised by your Police Committee to invite you to take extra leave. You will not be going to London for your conference tomorrow and you can consider yourself off the Northern Ireland investigation for ever.’

  Eight days later Stalker was visited by reporters from the Daily Mail after the paper carried a story claiming that he had been ‘suspended’ because of his ‘associations’ with a criminal (unnamed) and that he had accepted ‘lavish hospitality’ from a ‘criminal contact’. Stalker wrote later, ‘The story was a lie and I was devastated.’

  A few days later he was handed an official form under the provis
ions of the Police Discipline Regulations 1985 that stated: ‘Information has been received which indicates that during the past six years you have associated with persons in circumstances that are considered undesirable, and by such association you have placed yourself under an obligation as a police officer to those persons.’

  A team of sixteen officers was assigned to investigate the ‘rumours’ against Stalker, conducting enquiries day and night for five weeks. They failed to find anything of substance against him. No complaints were ever made against Stalker, and yet, after the five-week investigation, he was officially suspended from duty. Three months later, much to his relief, the Police Committee voted by an overwhelming majority – thirty-six to six – not to send the matter to a tribunal and to restore him to his position as Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police.

  Stalker may have been back at his desk but he was not permitted to continue investigating the shoot-to-kill allegations in Northern Ireland. He always believed – and discussions with certain senior police officers seemed to confirm the fact – that his removal from duty was wholly connected with his far-reaching investigations in Northern Ireland. The spurious questions about his ‘criminal links’ were contrivances intended to distract attention and to delay further the submission of the final report into what happened in the hay barn.

  Eventually, in March 1987, John Stalker chose to resign from the police force and the storm over the alleged shoot-to-kill policy quietly and slowly died down.

  It seemed to many FRU officers and senior NCOs that the fact that the Thatcher government had permitted a full-scale inquiry into the three separate killings indicated a worrying trend in the way in which terrorists were being hunted down and killed. The officers believed that the government would be able to hide behind an official inquiry into a possible shoot-to-kill policy, perhaps even pushing all the blame for such a policy onto those responsible for carrying out the operations. FRU officers wondered whether the Stalker Inquiry and all its inherent problems and political ramifications concerning the RUC was the reason why, more and more, the SAS were being brought into action, to take care of missions in which it was likely IRA and INLA gunmen and bombers would end up dead. Two particular high-profile SAS missions against the IRA were frequently discussed and put forward as prime examples of the government’s decision to use them rather than the RUC in dangerous situations. And the FRU were convinced that if the two SAS operations in questions had been handled by the RUC instead, there would have been far greater political ructions for the government to contend with. Using the SAS was a brilliant strategy: not only were they feared and respected by the terrorist organisations but they were also accepted by the British electorate as heroes, undertaking ‘dirty work’ on behalf of the nation who quietly rejoiced whenever they read of SAS missions which ended in the killing of IRA or INLA gunmen or bombers.