by Mark Urban
Stalker realized that the bugs in the hayshed which had failed had been replaced by new ones and that these might offer a vital clue as to whether the police officers who opened fire on Tighe and McCauley really had shouted a warning, as they claimed. So began an eighteen-month battle of wills between the Stalker team, the RUC and MI5 to establish whether the shooting was on tape and, if it was, whether the inquiry could have access to it.
Stalker’s investigations also linked the killings of Grew and Carroll to their earlier meeting in the Republic with the INLA terrorist Dominic McGlinchey. He had been responsible for an upsurge of INLA activity in the border area, particularly in Armagh. McGlinchey, who had bragged in an interview about his preference for killing people at close range, had driven the INLA into active and reasonably effective terrorism, thus making him one of the most wanted men in Ireland. It is possible that the police thought Grew and Carroll’s car contained McGlinchey and that, having been briefed to the effect that he was a dangerous killer who had evaded capture many times before, considered it their duty to open fire on the car without hesitation. Stalker discovered that SB surveillance men had followed Grew and Carroll to their meeting in the Republic.
The Manchester police officer came to the conclusion that the SB had become far too powerful within the RUC. He believed middle-ranking SB officers had organized the cover-up of the shootings and were engaged in trying to obstruct his inquiry. In his book Stalker wrote:
The Special Branch targeted the suspected terrorist, they briefed the officers, and after the shootings they removed the men, cars and guns for a private de-briefing before the CID officers were allowed access to these crucial matters. They provided the cover stories, and they decided at what point the CID were to be allowed to commence the official investigation of what occurred. The Special Branch interpreted the information and decided what was, or was not, evidence; they attached labels – whether a man was ‘wanted’ for an offence, for instance or whether he was an ‘on-the-run terrorist’. I have never experienced, nor had any of my team, such an influence over an entire police force by one small section.
According to Stalker, Assistant Chief Constable Trevor Forbes, Head of the Special Branch at the time of his inquiry, told him he would never be able to hear the tape of events in the hayshed. The existence of a tape of events in the hayshed emerged in November 1984, five months after Stalker’s inquiry began. Assistant Chief Constable Forbes was to become an important figure in Stalker’s inquiries. Not only was he head of the principal department under investigation, but he had also been the RUC’s Operational Commander Southern Region in Armagh – and therefore in authority over the area in and around Armagh – until shortly before the shootings.
Forbes was regarded by many at Knock as utterly loyal to the Chief Constable. Shortly after Jack Hermon took over, Assistant Chief Constable Mick Slevin, the man who had rebuilt the SB during the late 1970s, clashed with his new boss, say RUC officers. Slevin apparently refused to brief Hermon fully on an intelligence matter, telling him, ‘The need-to-know principle goes up as well as down, sir.’ Chief Constable Hermon resolved to displace his independent-minded HSB, and the lifelong plain-clothes man was moved to a job which Chief Constable Hermon considered better suited to his abilities – in charge of complaints and discipline. Slevin had by that stage contracted cancer and died after a short period in his new job.
Forbes was not a career detective, but had previously run the force’s traffic branch. He was promoted from the backwater of traffic to the difficult regional commander’s post in Armagh. He enjoyed a close relationship with Chief Constable Hermon out of hours as well – for some years the two men had run the RUC’s pipe and drum band.
As Stalker probed more deeply into the affair, Kevin Taylor, a Manchester businessman, came under police investigation. Taylor, who knew Stalker from various social functions, came under examination as a possible associate of a group of criminals in Manchester.
In May 1986 Stalker was removed from the Northern Ireland inquiry pending investigations of his relationship with Taylor. He had already delivered an interim report to Chief Constable Hermon which was strongly critical of his force. Stalker wrote that he was reserving judgement on the Tighe case until he heard the hayshed tape but that he considered that the five men who had died in the other two incidents ‘were unlawfully killed by members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary’.
Stalker had decided that he needed to interview a number of senior RUC officers, including Chief Constable Hermon and his deputy, under caution. He wanted to know why the original internal inquiry had found out so little. His removal came just before he expected finally to get access to the hayshed tapes and to carry out these interviews.
In 1990 attempts by the police to prosecute Kevin Taylor collapsed. Taylor had been ruined by the prolonged inquiries into his activities and regarded his suffering as having been the price of removing Stalker. The Greater Manchester Deputy Chief Constable resigned in March 1987, convinced the investigation into his dealings with Taylor had been linked to the Northern Ireland inquiry.
Stalker later wrote philosophically about his battle of wills with Hermon: ‘I respect, if not admire, the way in which Sir John Hermon took the fight to me. He protected the force and himself from intrusion by me into its anti-terrorist efforts and practices, and he succeeded.’ Stalker concluded, ‘I was expendable, he was not.’
After Stalker’s dismissal, the shoot-to-kill inquiry was taken over by Colin Sampson, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire. Among those at Lisburn and Knock who observed the affair at first hand there is general hostility to Stalker. Senior officers, both police and Army, usually use the word ‘naive’ when describing him. For the most part, however, they do not deny the substance of his findings. It would seem, rather, that the Army too enjoyed the considerable operational independence which Chief Constable Hermon had won for the security forces and resented Stalker’s investigation because it involved outside scrutiny of sensitive operations.
When Chief Constable Sampson delivered his report in 1988, he said that several officers had been guilty of conspiring to cover up what had happened during the three incidents. However, the government decided that no action would be taken against the men for reasons of ‘national security’. Chief Constable Hermon, in his 1988 annual report wrote: ‘What can now be said is that Mr John Stalker and Mr Colin Sampson both stated what the RUC had always insisted: that there was no ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy … at last the allegation so harmfully and sensationally publicised for so long has been proved false.’
The Chief Constable’s confident summary of Stalker’s views needs qualification. In February 1988 Stalker told The Times: ‘I never did find evidence of a shoot-to-kill policy as such. There was no written instruction, nothing pinned up on the notice-board. But there was a clear understanding on the part of the men whose job it was to pull the trigger that that was what was expected of them.’
The idea that the police officers involved in the shootings had not been given explicit orders to kill, but had been led to think that was what was required of them, is endorsed by a veteran RUC man. He claims that senior officers, when visiting the RUC’s special units, had made it clear that they were men chosen to act as the force’s cutting edge in the anti-terrorist effort. The RUC man says, ‘I believe that Sir John would demand the ultimate without thinking it through.’
In June 1988 the Northern Ireland Police Authority, a watchdog designed to oversee the force, discussed whether to investigate observations made by Mr Sampson about the behaviour of Chief Constable Hermon, Deputy Chief Constable McAtamney and Assistant Chief Constable Forbes. This was blocked by just one vote of the sixteen-strong authority.
In 1991 Peter Taylor reported on BBC television that Colin Sampson’s recommendations had actually been tougher than Stalker’s. Sampson had suggested that the RUC officers involved in the hayshed shootings should be charged with conspiracy to murder and that MI5 as well as police officers shou
ld be charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice. In the latter case, the proposed charges resulted from the fact that Security Service officers were believed to have destroyed a tape of the hayshed shooting after they knew that Stalker had asked to hear it. My own inquiries confirm Taylor’s summary of Sampson’s findings. Peter Taylor used these revelations to support his thesis that Stalker’s removal from the Northern Ireland inquiry was unconnected with his criticisms of the RUC. The new information shows that even if the reporter is wrong and people did conspire to remove Stalker because they feared his findings, that Colin Sampson proved an even tougher proposition.
Those who directed security policy at Stormont had undoubtedly drawn their own conclusions from the shootings. The price of admitting to serious misdemeanours on the part of the security forces is, to the mandarins of the Northern Ireland Office and the ministers they serve, usually too high. Instead, changes designed to ensure that there would be no repetitions of such killings were made, some of them put into effect even before Stalker had arrived in Ulster.
Without doubt the affair showed how powerful the SB had become by the early 1980s. A senior Army officer who served at Lisburn during the mid 1980s notes, ‘Special Branch runs the intelligence operation. It is Army policy that the RUC SB has all the intelligence which we gain. The reverse is not true.’ But the affair had shown the need for greater supervision of the Branch and in 1984 John Whiteside, the Head of CID, was made Senior Assistant Chief Constable in charge of both CID and SB. Understandably, some SB officers were none too happy at being placed under the control of the one-time head of this rival department.
During this period, several SB officers, of the rank of chief inspector, superintendent and chief superintendent were pushed out of the force. But the fate of at least two of them adds weight to suggestions made by some RUC officers that they had to take the blame for mistakes by the Security Service, for instance. Their untimely departure from the RUC did not appear to diminish their eligibility for other intelligence organizations: one was believed to have been recruited by the Security Service; another joined the British Services Security Organization in Germany, which works closely with the Army and MI5.
The shootings in Armagh also produced grave doubts in the minds of those at Stormont and Lisburn that the RUC could be trusted to execute specialist operations of the type performed by the SAS. The future of the HMSUs and SSU, the most highly trained of the firearms squads, therefore came under review. An officer serving in a key position at Lisburn at the time of the ‘shoot-to-kill’ incidents reflects: ‘Police Primacy is 100 per cent correct, but when it comes to mounting specialist operations against terrorists, you’ve got to ask: is that a job for policemen? Police Primacy had inevitably led towards a police desire to run the whole thing, so there was a build-up of police special units. But the whole Stalker affair caused them to think twice.’
Some soldiers in the Army’s special forces took pleasure from the failure of the RUC’s efforts. ‘Your British soldier is far more tolerant. You imagine an RUC man who gets a chance of slotting a Catholic. Will he be more tolerant than an SAS man?’ says one member of the Regiment.
Senior officers at Lisburn expressed their views more tactfully. You couldn’t expect the RUC to match the SAS, says one, because the SAS is recruited from a pool of people which is so much larger. This is true – the HMSU and SSU members represented about one in eighty of the strength of the RUC whereas the SAS numbers about 400 out of the British Army’s total strength of 155,000 – one in almost 400. Furthermore, the SAS troops sent to Northern Ireland form a much smaller number, recruited from experienced men within the squadrons. In this sense the SAS were more ‘élite’, having been chosen with greater selectivity.
RUC officers looked on the whole affair with bitterness. As on previous occasions an investigation by outsiders was bringing about a fundamental realignment within the force. Many RUC officers agreed with Stalker about one thing: that the constables who belonged to the special squads felt badly let down by their senior officers. The shootings had exposed the fact that the police, unlike the Army, lacked the skills to protect their officers from difficult questions. One RUC officer involved in the affair says: ‘Soldiers will be taken away to some other part of the world. You can’t do that with us, we live here. You have to make sure that we uphold the law and live with it. Sometimes you wonder if the senior officers really realize what the men are going through. It seemed to us that the Army had things much better sewn up.’
Within a few months of the Armagh incidents, the will within the RUC to deploy its special units on missions to confront terrorists had collapsed. One senior officer says, ‘As a result of the tremendous pressure Hermon was under he used the military more than he did before.’ Training of the SSU by SAS men and paratroopers appears to have been stopped. The RUC’s special units were given different tasks, often acting as back-up to the SAS, sealing off an area rather than facing terrorists themselves. The idea expressed by some Army officers at the time of the reduction of SAS strength in Ulster that they might be pulled out altogether was quietly forgotten. The TCGs were once more giving the critical role to the Army.
During an interview with a senior Army officer who had witnessed Stalker’s investigation first hand, I said that what surprised me about the whole affair was not that the RUC had been caught feeding false versions of the shooting incidents to the media and the CID, but that Army special forces had done it so many more times and got away with it. He smiled and explained that cover stories were vital to protect the sources and methods of sensitive operations. Such operations, he said, must be allowed to continue ‘without being held ransom to that mythical commodity you call truth’.
17
‘Ambush’: A Matter of Interpretation
Towards the end of 1983 the SAS did something they had not done in Northern Ireland for five years: they killed members of the IRA. Shoot-outs of a kind which had happened between 1976 and 1978 began to occur once more. The tone of spokespersons at Lisburn or Knock was often to imply that these incidents were the result of chance encounters between Army ‘patrols’ – the term SAS was never used on the record – and terrorists. In fact, in many cases these incidents were the result of deliberate choices by people armed with foreknowledge of terrorist crime.
Some were to assume that the government had simply ordered the SAS to eliminate terrorists. But according to people who have served at the heart of covert operations in Ulster, stark, explicit orders to kill would have been both unpalatable and unnecessary. Understanding the practical consequences of the change in mood which took place in the second half of 1983 requires a knowledge of Army tactics – in particular that of the ambush.
To many civilians the word ‘ambush’ carries no lethal connotation. One dictionary defines it as ‘to lie in wait’. This might imply a mission to arrest as well as to shoot somebody. To anybody trained by the British Army, however, the word has quite a different meaning. The manual in use by the Army during the early 1980s to train soldiers in Northern Ireland-type operations, Land Operations Volume III – Counter-Revolutionary Operations, says, ‘An ambush is a surprise attack by a force lying in wait upon a moving or temporarily halted enemy.’ An attack of this kind could be against the law in the United Kingdom, in that soldiers may only use the minimum force necessary to protect life and property.
The Army manual sets out how an ambush should be mounted. The troops taking part are positioned to be able to fire into the ‘killing area’. The main body of soldiers form ‘assault’ or ‘killer’ groups charged with destroying the enemy party. On either side of these groups will be ‘cut-offs’ – smaller groups who can prevent stray enemy soldiers escaping. Other soldiers may be positioned to stop the enemy trying to outflank the main ambush party.
These tactics are not peculiar to the SAS, but are taught to the majority of soldiers entering the Army. However, the SAS has made a speciality of the ambush. Following selection, all SAS
soldiers are taken to Brunei to be trained in jungle warfare. They spend much of their time learning how to carry out ‘Type A’ ambushes, those limited to a particular area where it is known the enemy can be intercepted. Those who have taken part in such training say that the SAS soldiers train to rake the ‘killing area’ with gunfire and shrapnel from claymore mines and necklaces of grenades. An SAS NCO maintains that these jungle patrols are ‘where all soldiering begins and ends’.
During the inquest in 1988 into the deaths of three IRA members in Gibraltar, the SAS officer ‘Soldier F’ denied suggestions that the decision to mount an ambush contained an assumption that the enemy party would be killed. He said that the aim of an ambush might also be to take prisoners. This may have been his interpretation of Army doctrine, but Land Operations makes clear that an ambush is an attack and implies that any prisoners, if it is part of the mission to take them, are survivors of such an assault. The manual deals with the arrest of terrorists under a different section. It goes on: ‘The aim of an ambush is thus usually achieved by concentrating heavy accurate fire from concealed positions into carefully selected killing areas which the enemy have been allowed to enter, but from which their escape is prevented by fire and possibly obstacles.’ It adds that such an attack would only normally be used in ‘Setting 4’, a counter-insurgency campaign verging on limited war in which the security forces had lost control of certain areas.
The increase in the amount of intelligence reaching security chiefs in Ulster by the early 1980s meant that they sometimes had foreknowledge of terrorist attacks. This information gives them a choice. In the words of someone who has run operations by the SAS in Northern Ireland: ‘There are two options – either to arrest with irrefutable evidence on which to base a prosecution or the other, which is to go in and shoot. The chances of being able to make an arrest under those circumstances are minimal because the terrorists will be armed.’