by Mark Urban
Shortly after the arrests a bomb in the Datsun exploded, causing extensive damage to property. There was no loss of life because the area had been cleared. It is not clear from accounts of the trial whether the terrorists intended to detonate the device with a remote control unit, and the blast was caused by a fail-safe timer, or whether it was only fitted with a timer, as was the case in Gibraltar.
There were further arrests during the following days and Brown came under police pressure to testify against his accomplices. Brown’s wife was abducted from their home on the Twinbrook estate, apparently by the IRA as a means of pressurizing him not to give evidence. She subsequently returned home and Brown did not turn Queen’s Evidence.
One of the occupants of the Cortina, Siobhan O’Hanlon, was released on bail, only to be arrested a few days later with three other women, in possession of explosives and other bomb-making materials. When the trial of those accused of plotting to kill the RUC band came to court, O’Hanlon was acquitted. Police officers claimed to have seen her throw the pair of gloves recovered from the Malone Road out of the Cortina’s window, but the judge said he did not believe them. Although O’Hanlon was sentenced to seven years in prison for her part in the other incident, she was released after serving only part of the sentence. The Sunday Times later claimed that O’Hanlon was one of the IRA members to have survived the Gibraltar operation in 1988 – an allegation which she has denied.
Brown and McKiernan pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder the police band when they were tried in 1985. Daniel Quinn, one of those arrested shortly after the abortive attack, also pleaded guilty to attempted murder. Four others pleaded guilty to lesser charges of involvement with the Active Service Unit. During the trial it emerged that the ASU had carried out several other operations during the summer of 1982: an attack on an Army patrol on the Twinbrooks estate in May; a mortar attack on Woodbourne police station in June; and, in the same month, a shooting at an Army patrol on the Springfield Road.
Although the operation succeeded in its basic aim – saving the lives of the police band – it could be criticized for several reasons. In presenting their evidence to the court, the police claimed that the bombers had been intercepted by a routine police patrol which became suspicious of the two cars. This, on the evidence of the officer involved with the operation, was clearly untrue since the operation was mounted on the basis of informer intelligence. The surveillance operators failed to tie O’Hanlon to the bomb plot through photography or forensic evidence, and were reduced, in the opinion of the judge, to lying about having seen her drop the gloves.
In the end the RUC were forced to rely on Brown, the bomber himself, to try to implicate the others. Since the whole RUC/Army operation was mounted on the basis of informer intelligence, it is open to speculation that their original informer may have been one of those arrested, since knowledge of the precise details of the plot would clearly be confined to a small number of people. It could further be speculated that the security forces knew in advance of the ASU’s operations throughout that summer, but had allowed them to proceed to keep suspicion from falling on their informer.
What the whole episode showed was the difficulty of carrying out an intricate covert operation without resorting to an ambush. To the outsider it would seem that the security forces tactics were still worthwhile – after all, the operation produced several convictions and prevented the police band from being blown up. But if the police knew about the IRA operation in advance, they might have had the option of preventing it entirely, so ensuring that the lives of fellow officers were not put in jeopardy. Some of those in undercover units were left wondering whether it had really been worth risking the lives of so many people for the convictions gained, especially given the failure of the case against O’Hanlon. ‘It wasn’t a very glorious incident’, the man involved with the operation comments; and alluding to the O’Hanlon episode, he says, ‘It was that sort of thing which did lead to frustrations.’
The Belfast case was similar to the Gibraltar case in that intelligence indicated a car bomb attack on a band. But in July 1982, there was a strong reluctance on the part of security chiefs to authorize anything resembling an ambush. The Belfast incident shows the difficult dilemmas facing those mounting undercover operations, not the least of which was their decision to let the band continue with its concert engagement despite the fact that they were confident that it was under a considerable threat. But it was also an example of a successful joint police/Int and Sy Group operation: Brown and his accomplices were successfully apprehended by a force made up of both soldiers and specially trained police officers.
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The existence of élite police firearms units like that used at Governor’s Bridge resulted from the advance of Police Primacy. These units were intended to carry out operations based on sensitive intelligence much in the same way as the SAS. The Special Branch E4A unit and Bronze Section of the Special Patrol Group had been largely restricted to surveillance duties, although they were occasionally involved in operations, as in the Ballysillan Post Office depot incident. In early 1980, soon after Jack Hermon became Chief Constable, the SPG had been disbanded, to be replaced by a hierarchy of mobile support units. This was largely a presentational change carried out to overcome the negative public perception of the SPG.
Each police division had a Divisional Mobile Support Unit (DMSU) of at least one squad of twenty-five to thirty. In inner city areas the DMSU controlled more squads. The DMSUs were trained in riot control, basic observation post techniques and firearms. They could be used to cordon off areas, mount checkpoints and disperse rioters. Several hundred police were drawn into the DMSUs.
In addition it was decided that there should be special units in rural areas. The two RUC operational regions outside Belfast were given their own special units, known as Headquarters Mobile Support Units (HMSUs). The function of the two HMSUs was to give back-up in the RUC’s two rural regions where there were fewer DMSUs than in Belfast, and where the need for highly trained firearms squads was perceived at Knock to be greater. Each of the squads consisted of twenty-five to thirty police who received more advanced firearms training than those in the DMSUs and operated more often in plain clothes in response to SB information.
At the apex of the new structure was the Special Support Unit (SSU). Although it is believed many HMSU members were given firearms training by the Army, only the SSU sent men in any numbers to be trained by the SAS. The SSU is, says a veteran RUC man, ‘the back-up, they were trained up by the SAS to be the Special Branch’s own Reserve’. Many of those who had been in Bronze Section were apparently drafted into the SSU. When they were set up, the HMSU’s and SSU’s members received advanced training at Army camps such as Ballykinlar and at Aldershot where they were instructed by paratroopers and the SAS.
At a later trial the RUC’s Deputy Chief Constable Michael McAtamney described the training undergone by HMSU members. He said they were given four weeks of special training during which they were shown how to respond to various threats if they were seated, standing or walking. ‘Their training is on the basis that once they have decided they are entitled to open fire, that they should fire, in order to put their assailant out of action as quickly as possible,’ he added.
The soldiers who trained them formed the impression that the quality of SSU recruits varied widely. One says that while they regarded many as being reasonably professional, some were ‘Orange nutters’ about whom they harboured serious doubts. These reservations were not confined to soldiers’ bars in Aldershot or Hereford. One senior Army officer says that, in forming the SSU, the RUC failed to understand the complexities of such operations.
But the early 1980s saw the high summer of official optimism about what could be achieved under Police Primacy. The RUC’s special units were being formed at a time when the Army thought of itself, to some extent, as disengaging from Ulster. The number of regular battalions had decreased from fourteen at the beginning of 1978 to ten by
the end of 1980. One of the brigade headquarters, 3 Brigade, was also disbanded as the Army’s strength fell below 10,000.
Despite its reservations, the Army leadership at Lisburn accepted that the RUC should develop its own covert units and that the SAS should help them do it. According to one observer at Stormont, ‘The SAS were reined back a bit to give the police a bigger role.’ Among ministers and generals confidence in the RUC was high; there was a feeling that it should have the ability to confront terrorists on the basis of its own intelligence, without Army help. This confidence was to be shattered in November 1982.
PART THREE: 1982–1984
16
Stalker
Just after midday on 27 October 1982 three police officers were blown apart at the Kinnego embankment near Lurgan in County Armagh. They had been travelling in an unmarked car which was wrecked by a large bomb placed underneath the road.
A fortnight later three IRA members: Eugene Toman, Sean Burns and Gervaise McKerr, were intercepted by members of an RUC firearms squad, near Lurgan. Even years after the event the precise identity of the unit is still uncertain. Some sources speak of it as being part of the Special Support Unit, others say that it was the Southern Region Headquarters Mobile Support Unit (HMSU). The confusion may be due to the fact that the squad, one of two based at Lisnasharragh near Belfast, was under the administration of the SSU but was controlled from day-to-day under different command arrangements.
The police, riding in unmarked vehicles, were expecting Toman, Burns and McKerr, who had been under E4A surveillance. The overall operation was being run by Special Branch officers of the regional TCG at Gough Barracks, Armagh.
The police chased after the car, opening fire on it. Later examination was to indicate that 109 shots were fired at the three men, who were unarmed. As their riddled car came to a halt Eugene Toman stumbled from the vehicle, but was shot through the heart by a policeman. All three IRA men died.
On 24 November another group from the HMSU saw two young men approaching a hayshed near Lurgan. The police were keeping the building, which they believed was an arms dump, under surveillance on orders from the TCG. Shortly after Michael Tighe, aged seventeen, and Martin McCauley, nineteen, had entered the shed the police opened fire. Tighe was killed and McCauley seriously injured.
The incidents in Armagh continued on 12 December, when Seamus Grew and Roddy Carroll, members of the INLA, were waved down by police after crossing the border from the Republic. This was also an operation directed by the TCG, in which members of the security forces had mounted surveillance operations against INLA members inside the Republic. A car pulled up behind the two men as they returned to the North.
In the unmarked police car was a Special Branch inspector and Constable John Robinson, a member of the HMSU. Constable Robinson got out of the car and walked towards the passenger side of the suspect vehicle, where Carroll was sitting. He fired his pistol through the window, killing the INLA man. Constable Robinson then walked around the front of the car, reloading his pistol as he went, and fired four times at Grew, slaying him as well. Neither of the INLA men was armed.
These three shootings, in which the police had killed six people in a small area of Ulster in just over one month, were to prompt a series of inquiries. They caused great alarm at the Northern Ireland Office and in Westminster. Someone serving in a key position at HQNI, Lisburn at the time remembers, ‘It came as a big shock to me as it did to any other citizen.’ However, his statement needs to be treated with some caution, as Army surveillance operatives of 14 Intelligence Company were believed to have been involved in the events leading up to the Grew/Carroll shootings.
The killings became known as the ‘shoot-to-kill’ cases, because of the belief in the nationalist community that there had been a police conspiracy to murder the suspects. Many nationalists could not see how it was possible to justify the shootings. McKerr’s widow, Eleanor, said at a press conference, ‘If they thought they were suspected terrorists, why didn’t they come to my home that night and lift Gervaise?’
The ‘shoot-to-kill’ affair was to become the greatest crisis of Jack Hermon’s nine-year tenure as Chief Constable, a running sore which over a space of years allowed republican propagandists to exploit the Catholic community’s darkest fears about the police. Matters were compounded when it emerged that the police had concocted cover stories to explain what had happened in each incident.
Journalists were told that the three IRA men had gone through a roadblock, injuring a member of the police and that the RUC had been there as part of a routine patrol. In the Grew and Carroll case it was also said that their car had run through a roadblock, again injuring a member of the police. None of this was true. While many soldiers and police do not regard the use of cover stories to the press as wrong, some would have objected to the fact that the officers had also been instructed to give the same versions to CID officers who were investigating the killings, as is routine after fatal incidents of this kind.
Following an internal RUC inquiry by Deputy Chief Constable Michael McAtamney, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) decided to bring murder charges against three policemen involved in the first shooting and against Constable Robinson for his role in the Grew/Carroll incident.
Chief Constable Hermon responded by attempting to block the murder charges. He said in a later television interview, ‘To prosecute these officers would be quite disastrous: a) because they would never be convicted of any crime and certainly not of murder, and b) that the resultant outcry from certain elements of the community could have damaged our sources of intelligence.’ Apparently he threatened to resign if the charges went ahead, something he did not in fact do.
When Constable Robinson was tried, early in 1984, he revealed that SB officers at Gough Barracks had told him to give a false version of events. He and other officers had also been asked to sign forms indicating they would comply with the Official Secrets Act, something they were already bound to do as police. The SB wanted to disguise the facts that they had been waiting for the car on the basis of informer intelligence, and that Constable Robinson had been accompanied by an SB inspector, as well as the actual circumstances of the shooting. These revelations prompted the DPP to suggest that there should be another inquiry into whether there had been a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
The murder trial of the three officers involved in the first incident also brought to light false evidence. Lord Justice Gibson, the trial judge, found the men innocent. He criticized the DPP for even bringing the case, asking whether it had been considered what effect such a case would have on the morale and reputation of the police and armed forces generally. He commended the police for behaving with bravery and for ‘bringing the three deceased men to justice, in this case, the final court of justice’.
These remarks caused consternation in Northern Ireland. What did he mean by the phrase ‘final court of justice’? Was the judiciary endorsing the shooting of unarmed men in questionable circumstances? Lord Justice Gibson issued a statement a few days later saying that he had not meant to suggest any backing for a ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy and that he believed the police had only the same right as other citizens to use reasonable force. But with his statements the judge had lit a slow-burning fuse, one that was to consume him and others in a conflagration of violence.
Following the acquittal of Constable Robinson an outside inquiry was announced into these events. On 24 May 1984 John Stalker, the Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, was named as its head. Some RUC officers regarded the bringing-in of an outsider as a deliberate slap in the face from Whitehall. If it was the government’s intention to punish the force by ordering an inquiry but to limit the damage to RUC morale by ensuring Stalker’s findings were predictable and anodyne, then this was a grave miscalculation.
From the outset there was tension between Hermon and Stalker. The Chief Constable was uncomfortable at the damage which might be caused to morale within the force, whil
e Stalker suspected a widespread cover-up. Relations between them were prickly, and soon focused on what the scope of Stalker’s investigation was meant to be – his terms of reference.
According to the journalist Peter Taylor in his book, Stalker: The Search for the Truth, the Deputy Chief Constable’s primary task was, ‘to investigate the circumstances in which the three cover stories had been given to the CID’. He also had to investigate why surveillance teams following Grew and Carroll had been in the Republic, and to look in general terms at the practice of SB officers seeking to protect informers.
Stalker saw his primary field of inquiry differently. In his autobiography, he said he was ‘to investigate the conduct of members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in connection with the investigation of all three incidents’. Stalker regarded this as allowing him to look in general terms at whether the officers had tried to cover up murder.
The investigations established a link between the hayshed in which Tighe was killed, the killing of the three IRA men in the car and the earlier explosion at the Kinnego embankment. An informer had pinpointed the hayshed as an arms store and had also identified Toman, Burns and McCauley as having been involved in the killing of the three police officers in the Kinnego explosion. Stalker believed that the two incidents which followed the bombing might have been the result of an RUC plot to avenge the deaths of their three comrades.
It also emerged that the hayshed had been under technical surveillance. A Security Service technical officer had put special devices into the barn which would indicate if explosives stored there were moved and transmit any sounds from within the building. It was to the RUC’s and MI5’s great embarrassment that the explosives used to kill the three officers at Kinnego had been taken from the hayshed after the bugs had been installed, but that the devices had failed. The Chief Constable’s attempts to restrict the inquiry’s terms must have resulted at least in part from a desire to prevent his own officers finding out that such a terrible mistake had been made.