Big Boys' Rules

by Mark Urban

  Fred Holroyd alleges 4 Field Survey Troop was an SAS unit operating in Ulster before the government admitted the Regiment had been sent there. He also alleges that the unit was involved in ‘dirty tricks’, something which will be discussed in the next chapter. My research indicates that Captain Ball and Lieutenant Nairac were not in the SAS during their 1974 tour with the surveillance unit, the time when Holroyd met them.

  Captain Ball went on to join the SAS in mid 1975, when he was listed as ‘22 SAS’ in his regimental journal. Lieutenant Nairac was never in the SAS; although he died later in Northern Ireland, his name was not inscribed on the clock tower at the Regiment’s camp in Hereford where all SAS men who fall in action are listed. During the 1970s there was no great sensitivity about listing a soldier’s assignment in a regimental journal as being to the SAS. It may strike the reader as odd that while the Army would lie to the press and even to the courts about its undercover activities in Northern Ireland, it would not do so in a regimental journal. The reasons lie partly in the fact that such journals are not intended to be seen by people outside the regimental community and partly in the carelessness of those who put such journals together. They often transposed a regiment’s classified list of where its officers and NCOs were serving into their journal without realizing the sensitivity of some of the information. Lastly, many of the officers who put such magazines together consider that inserting false information about someone’s posting in their regimental journal would be tantamount to deception of regimental brothers. While people assigned to the surveillance unit are sometimes not listed in their journals – or more often one of the unit’s cover names given here is used – I have never discovered, in many hours of research, one instance where the soldier’s posting was listed falsely.

  One soldier from the unit who served with Captain Ball, who had won the Military Cross during his time with the KOSBs, remembers him as a highly unusual, instinctive soldier. He was a hard man physically – the soldier says, ‘Our joke about him was that his idea of a good time was to wrap himself in barbed wire and run about a minefield in the pouring rain.’ After two tours as an officer in the SAS he went to run the Sultan of Oman’s special forces. He was killed in a car accident in Oman in 1981.

  Another example of a soldier who served in the special unit at the time was William Hatton. As a young NCO he was posted from the Parachute Regiment to the surveillance unit, where he became involved in many observation operations. Hatton subsequently went on to join G Squadron 22 SAS, reaching the rank of corporal. He was one of sixteen members of the Regiment killed in the Falklands War in 1982 when their helicopter crashed into the sea. Corporal Hatton’s official obituary reads: ‘He was present with his squadron on four operational tours in Northern Ireland when his vast depth of experience in the theatre was of quite inestimable value.’

  Most missions carried out by 14 Intelligence Company involved either setting up static observations posts (OPs), or watching people from unmarked cars (Q cars). An OP in an urban area might be a derelict house or, in the countryside, a roadside ditch – neither offered much protection. Q cars were fitted with ‘covert radios’, invisible to the casual observer. But the presence of a strange car was in many areas noticed quickly – particularly as there was a tendency to use relatively new British-made saloons. Outsiders could become prey to the gun law of the republican estates where youths, often armed, hijacked cars for use by the IRA or INLA, or simply for the thrill of joy riding. Soldiers assigned to the unit usually carried a standard 9mm Browning automatic pistol for self-defence. Sometimes they also used small sub-machine guns – in the early days the American-designed Ingram and later the German Heckler and Koch MP-5K. They were not normally equipped with assault rifles, as the SAS often are in Northern Ireland, for unlike them 14 Company’s mission was not to confront paramilitaries but to watch them. Their weapons therefore had to be small enough to be easily concealed.

  The IRA soon became aware of the stepping-up of surveillance. Overt OPs on the top of blocks of flats, like the Divis tower on Belfast’s Falls Road, announced their presence to everybody. Covert OPs allowed members of regular units and 14 Intelligence Company to observe suspects, seeing who their associates were. This in turn allowed the collators of intelligence at Lisburn and brigade headquarters to investigate links between meetings of particular individuals and patterns of terrorist activity.

  Operators in the surveillance unit usually abandoned Army regulation appearance. One of its men remembers, ‘The long hair and beards were the result of typical soldier’s thinking. If there is something you are not allowed to do and then the rule is waived, then everybody does it.’ As a result they were in danger of creating another uniformity, albeit different to and hairier than that of the uniformed soldier on the street.

  The difficulty of unobtrusive penetration of the tightly knit nationalist community meant that the presence of OP teams and Q cars in republican areas carried risks. Brigadier Glover, in his 1978 report on terrorist trends, had warned, ‘The terrorists are already aware of their own vulnerability to Security Force intelligence operators and will increasingly seek to eliminate those involved.’ His warning followed an IRA ambush on an OP in south Armagh in which three soldiers had been killed in 1975. According to a member of the élite surveillance unit, three of its members were killed in incidents between 1974 and 1978. The first member of 14 Intelligence Company to die was Captain Anthony Pollen, a member of the Coldstream Guards attached to its Londonderry Detachment. On 14 April 1974 he and another member of the unit were in plain clothes when they were cornered by republicans at a demonstration in the Bogside, where they were attempting to take photographs. The other soldier escaped but Captain Pollen was shot dead.

  Following the south Armagh ambush procedures were tightened. An OP consisting of two to four soldiers would be sited nearby in such a way that its members could be supported by arms fire from at least one more OP of a similar size. They would be backed up by a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) of soldiers and/or police at the nearest convenient security forces base. The QRF would be only a few minutes away from the OP team, able to respond to a call for help over the radio. Despite these new precautions, the scene was set for a sequence of lethal confrontations between 14 Intelligence Company and the republican paramilitaries. At midday on 12 December 1977 the Officer Commanding (OC) Londonderry Detachment of 14 Intelligence Company briefed his soldiers on a forthcoming surveillance operation in the republican Bogside and Brandywell areas of the city. The team was to use five unmarked cars. Each of them, the OC later said in a statement to the RUC, ‘was equipped with covert radio and in addition each member of my staff was in possession of various items of very sensitive military equipment. Such equipment is kept in each car and is concealed from view.’ The OC was referring to advanced photographic and eavesdropping equipment carried on operations.

  At 1.30 p.m. the Q cars moved into position. One of them, a red Hillman Hunter saloon driven by a young lance-corporal, was noticed by two young members of the INLA. Colm McNutt, a low-level INLA commander known by the nickname ‘Rooster’, who was carrying an unloaded Webley revolver, and Patrick Phelan noticed the car parked with one person sitting in it. In a later interview with the police, Phelan said: ‘We went over to the car and we told the boy to put down his window. He screwed down the window a bit. Rooster told him he wanted the car. The driver said he wasn’t giving it. Rooster then pulled the gun out of the waistband of his trousers.’

  The Lance-Corporal, who witnesses said had long hair and was wearing jeans, got out of the car and Phelan climbed into the driver’s seat. As McNutt walked around to the passenger seat, the Lance-Corporal drew his 9mm Browning and fired at him. McNutt stumbled with the impact of the shots and then tried to run away. The soldier fired again, killing him. Phelan threw himself out of the car and escaped. He was later arrested and charged. Republican activists used what was to become a familiar ploy, saying the SAS were responsible for the incident. They were
not and the Army denied it. Although, as we will see, the IRA had discovered a great deal about the activities of 14 Company, it would appear that its propagandists preferred to play on the potent emotional response in republican bars and housing estates which attaching the three letters ‘SAS’ to an incident would trigger.

  To the layperson, the use of lethal force by the Lance-Corporal to protect himself and the equipment in the car might seem excessive. Just two days later, however, there was to be another confrontation with quite different results.

  Corporal Paul Harman, of Belfast Detachment 14 Intelligence Company, was on duty in the city’s Turf Lodge estate. The soldier had served in the 16/5th The Queen’s Royal Lancers before transferring to the Intelligence Corps and being selected for ‘special duty’ in Northern Ireland. As he stopped his red Morris Marina at the junction of Monagh Road and Monagh Avenue, he was approached by an unknown number of assailants.

  It may be that Corporal Harman tried to talk his way out of the situation rather than using force; certainly no republican terrorists were killed during the incident. Later the Corporal was found shot dead with bullets in the head and back. The car had been set on fire and police found no trace of his Browning pistol. The IRA announced that it had captured intelligence files from the car. According to an Army intelligence officer, radio code books and surveillance equipment were also missing from the car.

  The officer says Corporal Harman’s death was a major setback for 14 Intelligence Company which then found itself under IRA counter-surveillance. Operations were halted, with the Detachment’s Q cars taken off the streets for several weeks while officers tried to assess what the Provisionals had learned from the incident. Procedures were tightened afterwards, with more efforts made to find different types of car and restrictions imposed on soldiers operating alone.

  Six months later there was another incident in Londonderry. Two IRA members approached a Q car with two members of the surveillance unit in it. The soldier in the passenger seat opened fire, hitting Denis Heaney in the chest with three rounds. He was killed instantly. The RUC said they recovered a weapon from the scene. Sinn Fein said Heaney had been shot by the SAS and that night there was rioting in the republican estates.

  Heaney’s death was probably a failed element of a deliberate IRA operation to target members of 14 Company. A few weeks later the Derry Brigade were to mount a successful attack against one of Londonderry Detachment’s Q cars. It appears that they had spotted Lance-Corporal Alan Swift driving alone in an unmarked car in a republican district of the city.

  At 1.30 p.m. on 11 August 1978 IRA terrorists hijacked a Toyota van. Several automatic weapons were recovered from a cache and an operation set in train. Lance-Corporal Swift had been spotted in his parked car on a layby off the Letterkenny Road in the Brandywell area of Londonderry. At about 3.30 p.m. the Toyota pulled up in front of his car and at least two terrorists opened fire from the rear of the van. The Lance-Corporal was killed. The Army Press Office said he had been ‘in plain clothes and on duty’ when he died.

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  Whatever the dangers of such work, there was a consensus among security chiefs that plain-clothes surveillance could yield still better results. So, from 1976 to 1978 there was a proliferation of special units besides 14 Intelligence Company’s detachments which were intended to do similar work, albeit in less demanding situations. The Army and the RUC did not agree a master plan, rather there was general agreement that many more soldiers and policemen could be used for such duties without crowding the existing Army surveillance unit. An entire detachment of 14 Company could be tied down on mobile and static observation of a single suspect and there were, after all, a great many more suspects whom the intelligence experts wanted watching. The need for these teams was such that the RUC would have found it hard to oppose the Army’s commitment of many more men for observation duties because, despite the advent of Police Primacy, people at Knock understood that the Army had a great many more operatives to call upon than the RUC could muster.

  Major General Dick Trant, appointed Commander Land Forces at Lisburn in 1977, was the driving force behind a large expansion of Army surveillance resources. Trant, a tall man with the genial manner of a country vicar, wanted to restore to each unit the capability for intelligence-gathering which had been lost when infantry battalions were relieved of their reconnaissance platoons during an Army reorganization. Complementing 14 Company, the CLF had at his disposal a force, formed little more than a year before, of a few dozen soldiers from various units serving in Ulster called the Northern Ireland Patrol Group. He decided that this arrangement was not satisfactory, partly because the soldiers stayed for a few months only and partly because they were not properly trained.

  Major General Trant decided to introduce Close Observation Platoons, units of thirty in each of the battalions serving longer ‘residential’ tours of up to two years and in one of the four-month tour battalions, the one based in south Armagh. The COPs, as they became known, would take the best soldiers from the battalion and give them expert training in observation techniques. The CLF and brigade commanders would be able to use the new platoons anywhere in Ulster, not just inside the area of responsibility of the particular battalion to which they belonged. COPs were to become important in establishing the regular patterns of activity among ASUs and movements of key republicans. Although 14 Intelligence Company or SAS operators were usually brought in when there was good intelligence of a forthcoming operation, the COPs often provided the basic data about an area and IRA activities in it.

  Lisburn leaked details of the new groups, which in press briefings were described as ‘SAS-type units’, in the hope that proliferation of such groups would intimidate the IRA. In June 1977 The Times announced ‘First of 300 Arrive for Army’s New Undercover Drive’. The number was something of an exaggeration, there being about 200. The journalist noted that they were going to gather information designed to bring suspects to trial but added, ‘The Government is also expecting publicity about secret Army activities to increase their deterrent value.’

  The Parachute Regiment, battalions of which had retained their own reconnaissance unit, known as Patrol Company, was to take an important role in training the COPs and the new surveillance units of the RUC. Chief Constable Kenneth Newman was naturally interested in expanding the surveillance activities of his force. Under Police Primacy the RUC were meant to be taking over the direction of security matters and he did not want them to be left out of what he felt was an important area of operations.

  The Special Patrol Group (SPG), the RUC’s mobile anti-terrorist unit, had in 1976 set up a firearms and observation unit called Bronze Section. Its members were selected for special training in undercover activities and initially operated mainly in the Belfast area. Michael Asher, a former soldier in the Parachute Regiment who joined the SPG as an ordinary police constable, describes various Bronze Section activities in his book Shoot to Kill. Asher’s account suggests that most Bronze operations, many of which were based on informer intelligence, were failures. The RUC surveillance operators, like their Army counterparts, adopted beards and long hair en masse. They appeared, he wrote, ‘exactly like policemen trying to look like ordinary citizens’. In some respects, the RUC’s occasionally farcical early experiments with Bronze Section were reminiscent of the Army’s experience with the Mobile Reconnaissance Force.

  Asher says that on one occasion the SPG was deployed by Bronze Section following intelligence that a loyalist assassination squad was going to kill a Catholic lawyer. The police lay in wait all day outside the lawyer’s flat, until ‘it occurred to one of the Bronze Section’s bearded men to check if he was in’. It was only then that they discovered the target of the loyalist death squad had emigrated to Canada.

  Partly as a result of such episodes, partly in recognition that Bronze Section performed too broad a function, in that it dealt with firearms as well as observation, senior RUC officers decided to establish a new surveillance uni
t. They were impressed by the results obtained by 14 Intelligence Company and wanted to create a similar unit within the police force. In 1977 Special Branch formed a surveillance squad which was part of E4, its Operations Division. The unit, E4A, was later to become the subject of many allegations of wrong-doing by republican activists. But pre-meditated confrontations with terrorists were not part of E4A’s brief, just as they were not part of the Army surveillance unit’s duties. The RUC later set up special firearms units which were meant to give the force its own ‘SAS’ capability. E4A concentrated on mobile and static covert OPs while other sections of E4 were to specialize in technical surveillance, being equipped with advanced monitoring apparatus – for example video cameras with fibre optic lens attachments, which could be used to observe a room through a tiny hole, and state-of-the-art listening devices. The SB surveillance unit evolved close contacts with MI5 which has its own research laboratories developing bugging devices and other equipment.

  E4A set higher standards than Bronze Section. It allowed the SB to conduct many more surveillance operations than before. A senior security forces officer says, ‘E4A were much more professional than Bronze, who got something of a cowboy reputation.’ In its early years E4A tended to be used more in inner-city areas and 14 Intelligence Company in the countryside, although by the 1980s the units were apparently regarded as largely interchangeable.

  Chief Constable Newman used the creation of another undercover squad to try and bypass a long-running source of tension with the Army. The Chief Constable was keen for the police to have a presence in border areas, particularly in south Armagh. He proposed that the Special Patrol Group should send uniformed units into the area. The Army, however, still maintained that it was too dangerous, and urged that soldiers deployed by helicopter should undertake the patrols instead. But they had other reasons for sticking to this position – as one Army officer puts it, ‘They were well-meaning but amateur. They were to a man Protestants, and the place they wanted to go and sort out was [Catholic] south Armagh.’