by Mark Urban
One senior officer who served at Lisburn at the time denies that it was the number of errors which caused a rethink. Another notes, ‘One is not in the business of embarrassing ministers.’ In some of its public statements about gunfights involving special forces, the Army tries to project an impression that these are chance encounters. An SAS party may be referred to, misleadingly, as a ‘patrol’. The intention is to create the impression that there was no foreknowledge on the part of military commanders of the whereabouts of specific terrorists. However, it is clear that information can be exploited to allow ambushes by the SAS, as it had been in the period from 1976 to 1978.
In December 1978 the ambushes stopped and for five years, until December 1983, the SAS did not kill anybody in Northern Ireland. Of course during this period IRA members were killed by normal Army patrols, the RUC and, in one incident, by 14 Intelligence Company. However, an analysis of all published sources on deaths in Ulster, including Sinn Fein’s own ‘Roll of Honour’ of fallen volunteers, shows that during 1979 to 1980, for example, only one IRA member was killed by the entire Army in Northern Ireland.
But if the SAS had been reined in, who was responsible? The answer appeared to lie at the top of the security forces command structure. During the days when SAS operations had been confined to south Armagh control of operations was wielded at a relatively junior level. The commanding officer of the Army’s battalion in the area was often in charge, sometimes seeking higher authority – from 3 Brigade in Portadown for certain operations.
With the extension of operations throughout Northern Ireland in 1977 arrangements had changed. An SAS sabre squadron, about seventy-five soldiers, has a headquarters and four smaller units called troops. A troop is commanded by a captain, usually in his late twenties, and should consist of sixteen soldiers, although there are often less.
One troop remained at Bessbrook in south Armagh in the area controlled by 3 Brigade, but the other three were placed elsewhere. One went to 39 Brigade, the Belfast area, another to 8 Brigade in Londonderry. The fourth troop remained at a central location under the personal control of the CLF. Although the other troops were notionally attached to the three brigade headquarters, this was largely an administrative convenience. One officer describes the arrangement: ‘It made sense to dot them around, from the point of view of getting places faster. If CLF had nothing for them to do, they went to the brigade commander.’ However, in most cases the SAS were under the control of the CLF. This system of command and deployment was conceived late in 1977 and probably remained in effect until late 1980 or early 1981. The advantage of the system was that it gave the regions their ‘own’ SAS men, ready to respond rapidly in an emergency. The problem was that it dispersed SAS efforts, when they might better have been concentrated at the place where the best intelligence was available.
After 1978, the CLF still had opportunities to use them for ambushes, had he wanted to. One officer holding a pivotal position at Lisburn says, ‘There were a lot of occasions when we knew what the terrorists were going to do.’ But the key personalities, and with them attitudes to the use of lethal force, had changed.
In February 1979 James Glover, the General Staff brigadier who had written several influential intelligence reports when in Whitehall, arrived at Lisburn as CLF, after promotion to major general. Major General Glover argued against ambushing the IRA. He was acutely aware of the importance of funerals in sustaining the republican movement and he wanted to get killing out of the headlines.
The tradition of martyrdom is a long one and it plays an important role in confirming the status of model republicans on families who have lost a member fighting for the IRA. The funerals of volunteers become set-piece demonstrations of solidarity in which the precise circumstances of the person’s death are often forgotten as the mourners succumb to emotion. The funeral of a Provo volunteer, maybe still a teenager, in which thousands marched behind the coffin, was important in confirming the status of people who might otherwise have never earned any kind of respect in their community.
The idea that martyrdom increased the IRA’s support and should therefore be avoided at all costs had been expressed by several officers at Lisburn between 1977 and 1978. But others had argued more forcibly that ambushes were worthwhile, principally because they deterred others from carrying out terrorist crime. Now the balance of power in the argument shifted.
James Glover had already written a highly classified paper spelling out his belief in the need for significant changes in the organization of military intelligence while he was still a brigadier in London. He knew that intelligence was the key to preventing terrorist outrages and that it was going to be harder to get it following the IRA’s evolution towards a cellular structure. Major General Glover summed up his preference for agents rather than ambushes years later in an interview with the BBC TV programme Panorama: ‘I always used to say, “Bring me a terrorist who can work for me and don’t give me a dead terrorist”.’
Although Major General Glover worked in 1979 for the same GOC who had advocated the aggressive use of special forces before, Lieutenant General Creasey, there were other changes at senior levels. Roy Mason, the Secretary of State who believed in putting military pressure on the IRA had been replaced, following the Conservatives’ general election victory in May 1979, by Humphrey Atkins. And while Chief Constable Kenneth Newman had initially agreed with the deployment of the SAS he had become increasingly sceptical about what they could achieve in the complex circumstances of Northern Ireland. Many RUC officers considered the Boyle episode at Dunloy to have been an extraordinary display of ineptitude by the Army. And while Lisburn considered Ballysillan a ‘success’, RUC officers saw the episode as a propaganda disaster for the security forces.
A consensus emerged between the new CLF and the RUC that the SAS should not be deployed in ambushes. Instead, their skills of concealment would be exploited to allow them to take a greater role in the burgeoning surveillance effort.
There was an element of self-interest in the RUC’s position. Newman, with his emphatic belief in Police Primacy, wanted RUC undercover squads to assume the responsibilities of the Army. But many Army officers felt that most of the police were unsuited to such work: sitting in a ditch for several days, soaking wet, was too much like hard work for a member of the police force, they would say. They regarded the RUC as having more of a ‘nine-to-five’ mentality. Some, remembering the strongly Protestant flavour of the Special Patrol Group police squads, wondered whether the force would behave impartially in situations where its members confronted terrorists. One senior officer says of the RUC’s acquisition of special units, ‘What they didn’t appreciate initially was the degree of professionalism which was required to be successful.’
The police felt that they could train men in undercover work, even if this required them to recruit many ex-soldiers. A senior RUC officer says he thinks it is right that a member of the police should be involved in such work because ‘he has more sense of the legal consequences of his actions, a different training’.
All of this debate about special forces and the integration of intelligence took place in the context of a broad and unresolved tension between the RUC and the Army, which had simmered away since the outset of Police Primacy early in 1976. While still agreeing to the principle, Lisburn felt that control of operations had been handed over to the RUC too quickly. The danger of expressing such views openly at weekly meetings of the Security Policy Committee must have been obvious to Lieutenant General Creasey, the GOC – doing so could precipitate a row which would damage the whole anti-terrorist effort. But, in any case, the rivalry between the Army and the RUC was about to be forced into the open by a devastating series of events in a single day.
9
Warrenpoint
The events of 27 August 1979 caused the tension which had been deepening between the RUC and the Army over the past few years to erupt. It was a day which saw the Army’s worst ever loss in Northern Ireland and the as
sassination of a member of the Royal Family – a day which, in the words of a senior security forces official, ‘brought to a head the crisis which had been brewing between the police and the Army’.
Soldiers from 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, were travelling from the Army depot at Ballykinlar in County Down towards Newry. The men were riding in two four-ton lorries and a Land Rover. They had no more protection than was offered by the canvas sides of their vehicles.
The IRA had chosen to ambush them at a place called Narrow Water, near Warrenpoint. Here, the road comes close to the sliver of water which marks the international boundary between the Republic and the North and connects Newry, via a canal, to the Irish Sea.
In its conception and planning, the attack showed how far the Provisionals had come from their early, chaotic, bomb-making days. About 1500lb of explosive were used in the attack. Attacks in rural areas often involve huge amounts of explosive because the IRA knows the chances of catching innocent bystanders are much less than in the city and because it is much easier for them to conceal large quantities in the open country.
Some 500lb) of explosive had been packed in milk churns, placed on a lorry trailer and covered with hay bails. The trailer was left in a lay-by beside the road. The people who planned the attack exploited local knowledge and experience to the full. In 1976 the Provisionals had attempted to ambush the Royal Marines in exactly the same place. But the troops whom they wanted to catch had noticed the wires through which the command detonating the bomb was to be sent. The Royal Marines, realizing the danger, had sought cover 400m away, behind the granite masonry of the gateway to Narrow Waters castle.
Three years later the Provisionals decided to do things differently. There would be no tell-tale command wires. Instead, the bomb on the trailer was to be triggered by remote control, using a small transmitter unit of a type manufactured for model aircraft enthusiasts. A second bomb, twice as powerful as the first, would be placed at the castle gateway. Just to make sure the soldiers took cover there, snipers on the other side of the water, in the Republic, would open fire after the detonation of the first bomb.
At about 4.30 p.m. the trailer bomb went off, catching the second lorry. It was ripped apart by the blast and six of the paratroopers inside were killed. The IRA members opened fire as dazed paratroopers tried to disentangle mutilated comrades from the twisted metal. A passer-by was also killed on the road. As the IRA had reckoned, the paras sought cover behind the castle gates. Everything went according to the IRA’s plan.
The battalion based nearby at Bessbrook, the Queen’s Own Highlanders, was alerted. A Wessex helicopter took off. Lieutenant Colonel David Blair, the Highlanders’ CO, took off in a Gazelle light helicopter to investigate.
At 4.59 p.m., with Lieutenant Colonel Blair conferring with the paratroopers behind the gates and a Wessex lifting off with injured men, another radio signal was sent. The 1000lb device at the gates went off. Another twelve soldiers, including the Lieutenant Colonel, died.
In Mullaghmore in the Republic, the IRA struck on the same day. Lord Mountbatten, the Duke of Edinburgh’s uncle, and three other people were killed by a bomb concealed on their pleasure boat. Once again, it was a highly sophisticated attack. Careful intelligence had been used to pinpont the target. About 50lb of explosive had been hidden beneath the boat’s deck and, as at Warrenpoint, a radio control transmitter had been used to detonate it.
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At Lisburn and Knock there was consternation. If this was the revamped IRA, officers wondered, how would they cope? The Provos had staged two ‘spectaculars’ in one day. Either of them – killing a large number of paratroopers or striking a member of the Royal Family – would have been a major coup in itself. Together they were sufficient to bring the differences over security policy to a point where the Prime Minister had to become involved.
Margaret Thatcher had been elected Prime Minister only three months before. She found herself facing her first real crisis. As before and since, the mounting of a ‘spectacular’ by the IRA produced many calls for tough action. Mrs Thatcher went to Northern Ireland to meet the GOC, CLF and Chief Constable. The events of 27 August, coupled with the killing by INLA terrorists of her old friend and political helper Airey Neave earlier in the year, meant that Mrs Thatcher went to Northern Ireland with the desire to bring in measures which would really hurt the IRA. But she soon found herself caught up in Army/RUC rivalry.
Lieutenant General Creasey, the GOC, decided the time was right to check what he believed had been the RUC’s premature assumption of responsibility for security. During a working lunch attended by the Prime Minister and senior Army officers at the headquarters of 3 Brigade in Portadown, Lieutenant General Creasey inserted what was, in bureaucratic terms, the dagger. He suggested that there should be a single security supremo for Ulster, and implied that it should be a military man. The GOC said the Army should regain operational control, at least for a limited period. At first he asked for twelve months, later reducing this to six. He also advocated a closer integration of intelligence – something which was, in fact, already underway.
The Prime Minister went to Crossmaglen to talk to troops and then by helicopter to Gough Barracks in Armagh, where Kenneth Newman and the RUC team were waiting. There the Chief Constable asked her to authorize the expansion of the force by 1000. The Prime Minister agreed to this on the spot. In the days following her return to London, Newman defended the RUC’s assumption of control of all security operations, resisting the Army’s call for a temporary reversal of Police Primacy.
In London Frank Cooper, a senior Ministry of Defence civil servant with some experience of Ulster, was given the task of evaluating the Army and RUC proposals. Cooper soon realized the difficulties involved in abandoning Police Primacy, even temporarily. But the Army’s attempt to regain the direction of operations could not be wished away. Cooper came up with the idea of appointing someone to soothe the tension between police and Army and to chart the way ahead in security policy. It was decided that Maurice Oldfield, chief of SIS (MI6) between 1973 and 1978, should be appointed as Security Co-ordinator. Oldfield – sometimes described as the model for John Le Carré’s fictional character George Smiley – had retired to All Souls College in Oxford, where he had intended to pursue his interest in mediaeval history. Such was his sense of duty that Oldfield felt he could not refuse the Prime Minister’s personal appeal to go to Northern Ireland.
His appointment as Security Co-ordinator was announced on 2 October 1979 and, less than one week later, he had arrived. Oldfield, a bachelor, lived in a flat above his offices in Stormont House, which adjoins the castle which was once home to the devolved Northern Ireland government. The Security Co-ordinator was not given the authority to run actual operations; neither was he given any power to compel the RUC or the Army to accept his judgement. Instead he and his staff were briefed to draw up reports which analysed what was going wrong in the government’s handling of the situation. Some of these studies dealt with particular matters of security policy, for example the organization of intelligence. Others set out political, economic and security strategy for each of Ulster’s six counties. The aim was to present these reports to ministers and officials who might then implement further improvements in security based on Oldfield’s recommendations.
Oldfield was assisted in his task by a group known as the Planning Staff. It contained two Army, two RUC officers and two civil servants. Its members were rising figures within their respective organizations. Brigadier Robert Pascoe, the Army’s senior member, was a Royal Green Jacket officer who had commanded a battalion in Ulster and would go on to become the GOC there. Assistant-Chief Constable John Whiteside was considered one of the rising stars of the RUC. Before joining the Planning Staff he had spent several years as a chief superintendent in charge of Belfast CID. When the Planning Staff’s eighteen-month assignment was complete he went on to be Head of CID.
The Security Co-ordinator earned the respect of most of the pe
ople he came into contact with. As a senior figure at Lisburn recalls, ‘He had no executive powers, but with his great presence and experience he was able to persuade and cajole people down the right path. He was really a sort of Solomon-like figure: everyone thought they could trust him and go to him. People were prepared to accept his adjudication. He really took the steam out of it.’ Small, with thick spectacles, Oldfield had the bearing of an academic. Someone who worked at Stormont remembers, ‘He was almost a teddy bear of a man. Very unimposing – a delight – most of us became very fond of him.’
At the same time as Oldfield and the Planning Staff were preparing their reports, Whitehall was preparing to put the reins of security into new hands. Kenneth Newman was coming towards the end of his time as Chief Constable and was to go on to become Commandant of the police staff college and later Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Newman had seen through the advent of Police Primacy. In the process he had earned the respect of many ordinary RUC men, a breed not noted for their easy acceptance of the ideas of ‘outsiders’, which as an Englishman Newman had been. One veteran RUC man says of Newman, ‘He was highly esteemed here, very well liked. We can only speak in the highest terms of him.’
His successor in 1979 was Jack Hermon, who for some years had been groomed for a senior position having sat on the Bourn Committee which had produced the idea of Police Primacy. Hermon had grown up in Larne in North Antrim, a strongly Protestant area. After considering a career as an accountant, he had joined the police, serving initially in the religiously mixed areas of counties Londonderry and Tyrone.