by Mark Urban
A series of SAS operations in 1976 and 1977 led to the killing of two IRA men, Peter Cleary and Seamus Harvey, and to the arrest of several more. Army chiefs regarded these operations as successes and officers were keen to point to the alarming rate of sectarian murders before 22 SAS’s D Squadron arrived and the absence of such crimes in south Armagh during the remainder of 1976.
Although Army commanders were under strict orders not to cross the Irish border, some apparently chose to do so. In March 1976 Sean McKenna, identified by the Army as a key local IRA commander, was taken from his home in the Republic of Ireland and deposited in Northern Ireland, where an Army patrol promptly arrested him. The IRA said he had been abducted by the SAS, a charge denied at the time by Army headquarters at Lisburn. However, a British officer involved in undercover operations in south Armagh at the time confirms that McKenna was indeed ‘lifted’ by the SAS.
In April Peter Cleary was killed by soldiers in D Squadron. Army intelligence said he was an important Provisional who had been living in the Republic, crossing the border for operations as well as social engagements. On the night in question he had been visiting his fiancée near Forkill, 50 metres north of the border. A four-man SAS team had been observing the house for some days, in two observation posts. The four soldiers had had little sleep and were exposed to the elements. When Cleary arrived they arrested him and radioed for a helicopter to pick them up. According to the Army, three of the soldiers went to light a landing zone for the helicopter while one stood guard over the prisoner. It was then, the soldiers said, that Cleary tried to overpower his guard and was shot during the struggle.
The IRA alleged that the man had been murdered. As is normal after a shooting, an investigation was started and the SAS men subjected to prolonged questioning from the RUC. The Special Investigations Branch of the Royal Military Police, in effect the Army’s in-house CID, also questioned the soldiers.
Another incident occurred one month later. At 10.50 p.m. on 5 May 1976 four SAS men in an unmarked car were apprehended by a member of the Gardai, the Republic of Ireland police force, at Cornamucklagh. The Army later claimed they were on a reconnaissance mission and had made a map-reading error. Two more cars were sent out when the soldiers were missed. They too followed the road down to the border and misread their position, only to be detained by the same zealous Garda. By the end of the night the Irish police had arrested eight SAS men and held three cars, four sub-machine guns, three pistols and a pump-action shotgun.
One year later the men were tried in Dublin on charges of possessing arms with intent to endanger life. They were acquitted because, the judge said, the prosecution had not proved that the soldiers had crossed the border intentionally. The same officer who maintains the SAS abducted Sean McKenna insists that the later border incident did indeed arise out of map-reading errors. But given that courts in the Republic are unlikely to have sympathy for the SAS, the significance of the acquittal lies in the fact that prosecutors failed to provide solid enough evidence to obtain convictions.
All the same, despite the pleas of innocence and the verdict of an Irish court, the incident provided the IRA with an opportunity to propagandize what they saw as incontrovertible proof of the Army’s operations in the Republic. In the bars along the border speculation about the SAS’s cross-border abduction and assassination activities could be fleshed out with details of the soldiers’ parent unit, of unmarked cars and of sub-machine guns and pistols.
It is important to see the SAS men’s error in the light of the other accidental border violations which were taking place at the time – because it is unmarked in many places, the frontier could easily fool soldiers. One incident, which could have been even more serious than that involving the SAS, is related by a member of the Parachute Regiment. A patrol commanded by a colourful NCO nicknamed ‘Banzai’ was landed in a field by an RAF helicopter. The pilot had made a map-reading error, putting the soldiers down too far south, well inside the Irish Republic. When Banzai and his patrol sighted Irish Army armoured cars and troops moving to the north of them, they concluded that they were witnessing an invasion of Northern Ireland. Alarmed, British Army officers were readying their own armoured cars to fight the Irish Army before it was realized that Banzai’s patrol was inside the Republic.
There was further controversy in July 1976 when two men were arrested by British soldiers as they worked in a field inside the Republic. It was subsequently established that they were unconnected with terrorism and they were released. But, again, the incident was used by Sinn Fein to cast doubt on the legality of SAS operations and so rally support for republican terrorism.
In April 1977 the Bessbrook Squadron was involved in a second fatal shooting. Seamus Harvey, an IRA man, was killed as he approached a parked car in the village of Culderry. SAS soldiers had been lying in wait following a tip-off that the car was to be used by terrorists. It had already been used in an incident in which a soldier had been killed. Harvey, carrying a shot-gun, was killed in a gun battle after other IRA members, in concealed positions, apparently opened fire on the soldiers. The Army said that at least two other IRA members were just behind Harvey, claiming that one had been injured though neither was captured.
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Events like these in south Armagh and over the border in the Republic represented the first signs that a new policy of stepping up undercover operations had been adopted by the security chiefs in Army and police headquarters (at Lisburn and Knock respectively). The commitment of a whole SAS squadron in early 1976 gave them an essential new tool in their covert war against the IRA which was then rapidly evolving into a more professional fighting organization than it had been in the early 1970s.
Two years after the deployment of D Squadron, this aggressive new strategy for combatting terrorism, which involved an extension of SAS activity outside its initial area of responsibility in south Armagh, bore its first fruit. The shooting of Paul Duffy in February 1978 in county Tyrone was just one incident in a pronounced shift in policy on the part of the police and Army. Beginning in 1977, intelligence resources in Northern Ireland were switched away from the publicly visible ‘Green Army’ to small, highly trained units of specialists, whose operations were cloaked in secrecy.
There had been many undercover operations before then, certainly, but the number and scale of them increased significantly. Whereas in 1975 the Army had fewer than 100 soldiers in Ulster whose main task was clandestine surveillance, by 1980 this number had trebled. Similarly, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), which began to assume overall responsibility for the campaign against terrorism in 1976, also developed a variety of specialist surveillance and firearms units of its own.
One important factor in the move towards a new consensus on security policy was the effect of new personalities in positions of political and military leadership. In 1976 Roy Mason took over as secretary of state for Northern Ireland: the one-time coalminer took a less cerebral approach than his predecessor Merlyn Rees. A key security adviser recalls that Mason seemed uninterested in political initiatives, believing simply that Ulster needed substantial economic help and that the pressure on the IRA should be stepped up. He had no hesitation about escalating operations against them, and said publicly that he intended to squeeze the IRA ‘like a tube of toothpaste’.
Then, in 1977, two new senior military officers who shared Mason’s convictions were appointed to Northern Ireland. Both Lieutenant General Timothy Creasey, the General Officer Commanding (GOC), and Major General Dick Trant, Commander Land Forces (CLF), believed that increasing undercover operations offered the chance to cut Army casualties. Further, they would – they believed – intimidate the IRA, increase the success rate of court prosecutions by obtaining more detailed intelligence about suspects, and restore the morale of the uniformed soldiers and police officers who were relatively vulnerable as targets for bombers and snipers. The two senior officers signalled their intention to intensify undercover operations in a series of press leaks d
uring 1977.
Enthusiasm for the new strategy seemed a little more muted on the police side. Kenneth Newman, appointed Chief Constable of the RUC in 1976, had a critical attitude towards some SAS operations. Steeped in the principles of minimum force during his long and varied police career, Newman let it be known that, while he admired the professionalism of the SAS, he believed it was best reserved for operations that allowed ample preparation and rehearsal, preferably also in rural areas. Operations which involved the deployment of SAS soldiers, often at night, in strongly republican areas following vague tip-offs from informers, precluded the opportunity for either.
Nevertheless, Newman was prepared to agree to the new policy – despite his misgivings – because he understood the critical importance of improving surveillance and intelligence-gathering if his force was to combat the paramilitaries effectively. Besides, the overt presence of the Army on the streets and in the estates was a source of resentment among the nationalist community; the reduction in visible Army activity which covert operations would bring also served his purposes.
John (Jack) Hermon, Newman’s senior deputy and later successor as chief constable, was also perturbed about extending SAS operations, according to a senior officer who worked with him at the time. Particularly in Hermon’s case, however, these reservations may have had more to do with jealously preserving the principle of Police Primacy established in 1976 – which gave the RUC ultimate control of security forces activity in Northern Ireland – than with a squeamishness about undercover operations as such. Under Hermon’s leadership the RUC was to develop an expanded array of specialist units with covert surveillance and firearms capabilities.
These, then, were the key figures around the table at weekly meetings of the Northern Ireland Security Policy Committee. Mason, Creasey, Trant, Newman and Hermon all favoured a more aggressive role for undercover forces in the administration of security policy in Ulster. But while there was a consensus about the benefits of countering the IRA in a more effective but less visible way, there were deep differences over other areas of policy. The most significant disagreements involved the questions of who should take overall control of the security effort, and how an integrated structure for the sharing of intelligence could be created. The failure of the security establishment to resolve these issues, stemming from distrust and rivalry between the Army and the RUC, was to plague the whole anti-terrorist campaign.
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The Security Establishment
By the late 1970s the social and political landscape of Northern Ireland had been transformed by a decade of sectarian violence. A large standing military and police establishment had developed, charged with keeping order in a region with a population of 1.5 million people.
The Army had been deployed in Ulster in August 1969 after the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, had proved unable to control local rioting. As a medium-size provincial police force the Royal Ulster Constabulary had lacked the means to deal with an increasingly violent nationalist insurrection and loyalist counter-violence. The RUC lost responsibility for maintaining public order to the Army; and the need to contain the unrest led politicians to violate many of the principles on which the rule of law is based in Britain.
In August 1971, the policy of internment without trial was implemented, which led to large-scale round-ups of people suspected of terrorist connections. Internment proved highly controversial because the intelligence on which it was based was so poor – a great many people with no connection with terrorism were held, whereas many senior members of the IRA escaped – and because it constituted an admission that the security forces were short of any evidence which could be presented in court against the suspects. Holding people in this manner further alienated the nationalist community. The introduction of Special Category status in June 1972 for convicted terrorists was meant to soothe local feelings by allowing paramilitary groups extra privileges in jail. In fact, by allowing the terrorists to claim they were prisoners of war, Special Category status marked yet another violation of normal law in the rest of Britain.
Northern Ireland’s devolved Parliament at Stormont, which had considerable autonomy before the Troubles, was dissolved early in 1972 to be replaced by direct rule from London with all executive powers invested in the newly appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The politicians believed the embattled people in Ulster would consider this system fairer.
The RUC had emerged deeply shaken from the early years of the Troubles. The Hunt Report, an official government inquiry, published in October 1970, had blamed the force for mishandling the republican disturbances in August 1969 in Londonderry (Deny to nationalists). Decision-makers in Whitehall believed nationalist passions would be soothed if the RUC was reduced virtually to a force of unarmed warrant-servers.
Army numbers peaked at around 22,000 in 1972, at the height of the Troubles, when soldiers went into the republican heartlands of Londonderry and Belfast to break up the paramilitaries’ ‘No Go Areas’. The virtual collapse of the police and the desire of Army commanders not to inflame matters had allowed sectarian extremists on both sides to claim control of large areas of Belfast and Londonderry. But 1972 also saw a growing awareness in Whitehall that the Army’s role would have to be reduced in the long term. The shooting by soldiers from the Parachute Regiment of thirteen demonstrators in Londonderry on ‘Bloody Sunday’ in January of that year led to an inquiry into the Army’s behaviour. Army casualties peaked during that year too, causing some senior officers to agree with politicians who were looking for ways to reduce the military commitment to Ulster.
By 1977 the Army had fourteen battalions, units of about 650 soldiers each, and various supporting elements in Northern Ireland. They were deployed in fixed areas, known to the troops as their ‘patch’ and in Army jargon as Tactical Areas of Responsibility or TAORs. In some areas locally raised troops of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), a reserve unit formed in 1970 and manned largely by part-timers, had taken over responsibility for order from the RUC’s B Special reserve. The idea was that, as part of an Army controlled by disinterested British generals, the UDR would be perceived as fairer than the B Specials who were regarded by many Catholics as the strongest bastion of hardline loyalism. The RUC, successor to the Royal Irish Constabulary – the police force of Ireland prior to partition – was left without the B Specials and with most of its officers disarmed. The force endured several demoralising years when it could carry out few tasks independently of the Army.
Despite these intentions, the UDR too soon became deeply unpopular among Catholics. In the early days of the Troubles many politicians had great hopes for the UDR. It had been set up with a reasonably large Catholic contingent: one in five of the people in its ranks. Most had left by the late 1970s. Many regular Army commanders had little respect for the military capabilities of the UDR, believing it was dangerous to let part-timers into hard republican areas. In 1978 the force was reorganized in an attempt to make it more professional. Several companies were disbanded so that their members could be concentrated more effectively in certain areas. Measures were also taken to boost the number of full-time UDR soldiers. It was apparent that the strains of holding down a job and carrying out dangerous patrols in their spare time were too much for many people. There were only 844 full-timers in 1972 but more than 2500 by the mid 1980s. Some distrust remained between the regular Army and the UDR, however, because of connections between some of the local soldiers and loyalist paramilitary groups.
From 1969 Ulster was divided by Army commanders into battalion patches, the more dangerous of which were occupied by regulars and the remainder by UDR units. Regular and UDR battalions were divided between three brigade headquarters: 39 Brigade in the Belfast area, 8 Brigade in Londonderry and 3 Brigade in Portadown covering the border. The brigade commanders stood between the units conducting operations at a local level and the two senior commanders – both generals – with wider responsibilities.
Each of the bri
gade commanders reports to the Commander Land Forces (CLF) at Lisburn, who is a major general and the top Army commander in Ulster. Above him is the General Officer Commanding (GOC), who, although an Army officer, is also in charge of the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy detachments in Ulster and for high-level co-ordination with the police and ministers. The barracks at Lisburn, a largely Protestant town near Belfast, extend over a large area and include Victorian buildings occupied by the headquarters of 39 Brigade and a new set of buildings – featureless 1960s municipal architecture at the base of a concrete communications tower, which is home to Headquarters Northern Ireland (HQNI).
The Army complex is named Thiepval barracks, after a First World War battlefield. Thiepval has a deeper meaning to many in Ulster not immediately obvious to an outsider. It was the area where the 36th Ulster Division was decimated by German artillery and machine guns. It is remembered as a place where a blood sacrifice was made by those loyal to the British crown, after republicans took advantage of the war to plot their Easter Rising in Ireland against Westminster’s rule. The loyalist members of the 36th Division are reported to have shouted ‘Fuck the Pope’ as they went over the top of their trenches.
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The Northern Ireland Office (NIO) was Whitehall’s instrument for the direct rule of Ulster. From early 1974 it studied various ways of restoring the status and credibility of the RUC. In 1975 a committee of senior Army, RUC and intelligence officers chaired by John Bourn, an NIO civil servant, produced a document called ‘The Way Ahead’. It was to become the most important security initiative of the late 1970s, leading to a policy known as Police Primacy. Under this plan, the role of the regular Army was to be reduced and overall direction of the security effort given to the RUC in 1976, thus requiring an expansion of locally recruited forces.