by Mark Urban
Int and Sy Group carried out a covert investigation of the area and discovered that it was indeed a command wire: there was an 800lb bomb on the end of it. The explosive had been placed, in classic IRA fashion, under the road in the hope of blowing up a security forces vehicle. The SAS and SB detectives discussed what to do next. They agreed that the soldier’s discretion had been exemplary. Had he spoken up at the de-brief, everybody in the battalion would have known about the discovery within hours – with the danger that the news might leak out via a civilian employee or UDR member.
On 25 April, SAS men took up positions around the firing point end of the command wire. In the early hours of 26 April two men appeared in the field, one armed with a Ruger rifle, the other an FNC assault rifle. As they went to the firing point the SAS opened fire. One man, Sean Lynch from Lisnaskea a few miles away, was injured; the other was dead. Seamus McElwaine, Maze escaper and scourge of the security forces in Fermanagh for years, had been killed.
Lynch staggered into the darkness, hit several times. The SAS soldiers fired illuminating flares into the sky and Lynch rolled into a hedgerow for cover. He lay there first as a special forces QRF helped to search the area and then as other police and soldiers came to cordon and search the area. In evidence at Lynch’s trial, the Army said there had been four soldiers in two OPs overlooking the firing point when the shooting happened.
Police from the DMSU, who had been waiting in a nearby RUC station, continued their search into the following morning. Lynch said later he was found by a soldier who said, ‘Have you been shot, mate?’ Lynch replied, ‘I’m riddled.’ The IRA man said that DMSU officers then discussed killing him, but were stopped from mistreating him by an Army doctor.
Lynch attained the distinction, exceedingly rare among IRA members in the 1980s, of surviving SAS gunfire. He was later to claim that McElwaine had been injured in the first burst of shots and that the soldiers had questioned him for half an hour before finishing him off. Such allegations cannot be corroborated independently and, as of mid 1991, no inquest had taken place at which pathological evidence on the nature of McElwaine’s gunshot wounds could be presented.
The loss of McElwaine, only twenty-six but active in terrorism for ten years of his life, was a grave blow to the Provisionals in Fermanagh. There is little doubt that he had planned many killings and been personally responsible for several. His funeral across the border in Monaghan was attended by an estimated 3000 people, including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.
Some years later, when I visited an Army unit in the area, an officer expressed the opinion that the IRA in south Fermanagh had become largely inactive since McElwaine’s death. In his funeral oration, McGuinness said McElwaine ‘was a brave intelligent soldier, a young man who gave up his youth to fight for the freedom of his country’. The epitaph given him by an Army intelligence officer reveals both respect and loathing for the man: ‘He was an extraordinary bloke who would have been in the SAS if he was in the Army. It is just as well he is dead.’
23
Tyrone Brigade
During the mid 1980s Tyrone was one of the key arenas in the battle between the Provisionals and undercover forces. The IRA cells in the area did not match south Armagh in terms of the number of security forces members killed, but they were able to carry out more operations than those in Londonderry or Belfast. IRA enforcers, however, appeared unable to stop widespread informing among the Tyrone republican community – something which allowed the security forces to stage many more covert operations in this area than in south Armagh.
Tyrone, the largest of the six counties, is a heterogeneous area. It stretches from Strabane, on the Republic’s border in the west, across desolate moors to undulating farmland where the county touches the Republic again at Monaghan. Some villages are exclusively Protestant, others Catholic, and towns such as Cookstown and Dungannon contain roughly equal numbers.
The IRA infrastructure has clusters of ASUs grouped in particular parts of the county. Around Dungannon, in villages like Cappagh, Pomeroy and Coalisland there are several ASUs, with close connections with groups across the border in Monaghan and in north Armagh. There is also a cluster of them in the central part of the county in moorland villages such as Carrickmore, Gortin, Greencastle and Eakra. Around Strabane there are groups with close connections with the IRA in Londonderry and Donegal in the Republic. These groups of ASUs sometimes referred to themselves, respectively, as ‘East Tyrone’, ‘Mid Tyrone’ or ‘West Tyrone Brigade’. In reality there were individuals who held sway over groups of ASUs, each sometimes only three or four members strong. The total number of active Provisionals across the county was perhaps fifty or sixty, with another 100 or 200 Sinn Fein activists and other highly motivated supporters.
In his 1978 report, Future Terrorist Trends, James Glover had noted the weakness of the Provisionals’ middle level of command. Those who ran groups of ASUs were in a difficult position. The Northern Command leadership expected to exert control over the direction of policy and the types of targets attacked and ASU commanders expected to have considerable operational freedom. Matters were made more difficult by problems of co-ordination and communication. Telephones were assumed to be tapped and known activists frequently followed.
But in the mid 1980s the Tyrone leadership overcame many of these difficulties, bringing together groups of ASUs to mount complex attacks. Their primary targets were off-duty members of the security forces and remote police stations. The IRA had realized that the RUC’s network of small stations in rural areas was vulnerable. There were about twenty-four police stations in rural Tyrone, many of them run by four or five officers, during the day-time only. These buildings were often at risk since they could not all be protected by Army patrols. Mortar and bomb attacks on police stations were backed by intimidation against contractors called in to repair the damage.
The campaign against police stations in Tyrone peaked late in 1985. The most spectacular operation was an attack on Ballygawley police station. It was a complex operation, involving teams of dickers, a group of armed members and bomb-making experts. The IRA attacked the station with gunfire. Reserve Constable William Clements and Constable George Gilliland were shot dead at the entrance to the station. The IRA members then went into the wrecked building taking guns and documents and planting a bomb in the entrance to the building. It went off: three other police officers who had been inside escaped through the back door.
The Ballygawley attack delighted the terrorist leaders. An IRA man referring to it in a later magazine interview said, ‘That is the type of operation that we would like to have all of the time. Unfortunately most times it doesn’t present itself to be as easily worked as that.’ Episodes like Ballygawley appealed to the terrorists’ self-image as guerrilla fighters. They also offered the chance to humiliate the authorities. The IRA made much of the claim that three police officers had fled the station during the assault.
Provisional members used an RUC standard issue Ruger revolver, taken from the body of Reserve Constable Clements, in a way which must have caused a further blow to morale for members of the force. When it was recovered nearly two years later it was established that the dead policeman’s gun had been used to kill a UDR man in March 1986, as well as a building contractor in Greencastle who did work for the security forces, a Magherafelt businessman and in two other attempted killings.
The December assault on RUC outposts in Tyrone was continued ten days after Ballygawley by a mortar attack on Castlederg station. Two days later, on 22 December, there was a further mortar attack. Carrickmore station and several nearby buildings were damaged. Nobody was injured in the Castlederg or Carrickmore attacks, but they underlined the vulnerability of the outposts and the vitality of the IRA command in the county.
The IRA’s offensive against police stations in rural areas and the disturbances from loyalists opposed to the Anglo-Irish Agreement led in 1986 to the Army reversing the pattern of the previous decade, and increasing i
ts troop strength. Two more battalions were sent to Ulster, taking the number of regular soldiers from 9000 to about 10,200. These units were referred to as ‘incremental reinforcement battalions’, the idea being that their presence was only temporary. However, the Army’s later attempts to remove them were thwarted by IRA activity in the border area and cries of alarm from Protestants who objected to any diminution in the Army presence.
One of the architects of the IRA’s strategy in Tyrone was Patrick Kelly, a thirty-year-old Dungannon man believed by security chiefs to have effective control of the group of ASUs around the town. Late in 1986, Kelly is thought to have devised a plan to attack another RUC station. Although nobody was killed at The Birches, it was an operation which demonstrated a tactical approach still more sophisticated than at Ballygawley.
The Birches, like many other stations, had been surrounded by a high wire fence. This was intended to give protection against attack with anti-tank weapons, hand-thrown bombs and stones. The IRA decided to hijack a mechanical excavator and put a bomb in its front bucket. The digger would then be driven through the fence and the bomb detonated.
Early in 1987 I was given a briefing by a member of the security forces which contained a detailed account of how the attack on The Birches had been carried out. There had been several teams with different tasks. One group had staged a diversionary incident in Pomeroy, more than 20 kilometres north-west of Dungannon, which was designed to draw security forces away from the target. Another group had hijacked the digger and other vehicles needed for the job in Washing Bay, several kilometres to the east of Dungannon. A further team had mounted the attack itself. The attackers evaded security forces roadblocks after the raid by escaping by boat across Lough Neagh. When hijackers, ‘dickers’, gun-carrying members and bombers were included, the attack had involved thirty-five people, the person giving the briefing said. The Birches RUC station was destroyed by the bomb, creating problems for the authorities about how to re-build it.
The Tyrone IRA was able to combine practical skills such as bomb-making and the welding needed to make mortars with considerable resources and know-how. Its members went on operations carrying the latest assault rifles and often wore body-armour similar to that used by the security forces, giving them protection against pistol or sub-machine-gun fire. By 1987 they had also succeeded in obtaining night-sights, allowing them to aim weapons or observe their enemy in darkness.
In April 1986 Jim Lynagh, a veteran IRA member, had been released from the Republic’s Portlaoise prison. Lynagh had a lengthy record of involvement with the Provisionals and had been imprisoned several times as a result. He came from Tully, in Monaghan, one of fourteen children. In 1973, in Moy, county Tyrone, he had narrowly escaped death when a bomb he was carrying blew up prematurely. He spent the next five years in Long Kesh. He was then elected on to the Monaghan Council as a Sinn Fein member. In 1980 he appeared in a court in the Republic charged with IRA membership but was released a few months later. In 1982 the Gardai arrested Lynagh with twelve rounds of ammunition and he was sentenced to five years in Portlaoise.
The IRA later described Lynagh as ‘commander of a unit’. He held sway over a group of IRA members in Monaghan, north Armagh and east Tyrone. Some later reports were to describe him as overall commander of the IRA in the border region, although it seems more probable that he led groups of members on specific missions in the area he knew well. ‘Lynagh saw himself as the leader of a guerrilla band, not a member of a terrorist cell’, says an Army intelligence officer.
His modus operandi bore little resemblance to that of many other IRA leaders. Whereas other commanders might arm only one or two volunteers, Lynagh would lead ten or twelve with assault rifles to carry out a mission. This tactic had the advantage that it made them very difficult to arrest. In January 1981 Lynagh was believed to have led twelve members in an attack on the house of Sir Norman Stronge, the eighty-six-year-old former speaker of the Stormont assembly and long-serving MP for Mid Armagh. His son James, who had succeeded him as Official Unionist member for the constituency, was also home. Both men were killed. The local police sent several officers in an armour plated car in an attempt to head off the terrorists. As the IRA gang left the gates of Tynan Abbey, the Stronge residence, they riddled the car with automatic fire. The police survived but were pinned down and unable to prevent the gang’s escape.
The disadvantage of operating in such a large group is that it makes it more vulnerable to informers. But Lynagh was not greatly concerned by this possibility, as the men around him were tied by close bonds of loyalty. Many were part of the same committed republican community in Monaghan. Lynagh had been a close friend of Seamus McElwaine, the south Fermanagh commander killed in April 1986 who also lived in the border county.
After Lynagh’s release in 1986 he was kept under close surveillance by the Gardai, an Army intelligence officer says. The flow of information from the South had improved greatly following the Anglo–Irish Agreement.
Lynagh and Paddy Kelly were keen to join forces for a ‘spectacular’ along the lines of Ballygawley and The Birches, devising a plan to repeat their technique used at The Birches to attack a small police station in the north Armagh village of Loughgall. Throughout late 1986 and early 1987, however, intelligence officers in the North frustrated them from doing so, says someone serving in a key position at the time. What Lynagh and Kelly did not know was that they were under intense surveillance and that there was an informer in their midst. On several occasions the coming together of various ASU members presented an ‘indicator’ of a forthcoming attack, says the intelligence expert. These attacks were deterred by stepping up patrols by local UDR units and by other measures.
*
On 25 April, at about 8.30 a.m., the IRA blew up Lord Justice Maurice Gibson and his wife Cecily. Northern Ireland’s second most senior judge, and the man who had spoken of bringing terrorists to the ‘final court of justice’, had been driving back from holiday having taken the ferry to a Southern Irish port. The Gardai had accompanied them to the border but the RUC was not there to meet them. The RUC had stopped escorting VIPs on the border road because they had had several constables killed on such duties. In May 1985 four RUC officers had been blown up at Killeen in south Armagh while on escort duties. The incident produced a chill in relations between Jack Hermon and his opposite number in the Republic.
As Lord Justice Gibson’s car crossed into the North a 500 lb bomb was detonated at the side of the road. The affair caused profound embarrassment to the British government. There were claims that details of the Gibsons’ route might have leaked out of Gardai headquarters, and also the usual Unionist calls for more security on the border.
On the evening of the same day as the Gibsons died there was another terrorist attack. William Graham, a forty-four-year-old Ulster Defence Regiment full-timer from Pomeroy in east Tyrone, was working in the yard of his farm when two masked men carrying assault rifles walked up behind him. Graham’s wife, seeing what was about to happen, shouted to him to run. For some reason he did not hear her and the two IRA men opened fire. A post-mortem examination was to show that Graham was shot in the back and fell forward. The two IRA men stood almost over him and continued shooting him as he lay on the ground. At least nineteen rounds were fired. The east Tyrone IRA said that they had carried out the killing.
Superficially, there seemed little to distinguish Graham’s death from those of the scores of other reservists killed in their homes by the IRA. In fact, it was closely connected to the events which were about to unfold at Loughgall. Ballistic tests were to show that assault rifles recovered at Loughgall were the same ones used to kill Graham. But there are other connections between the incidents.
A member of the security forces in a position to know alleged to me during the preparation of this book that Graham’s killers had been under surveillance when they carried out the attack. The attack on Graham may have been allowed to proceed because the intelligence officers handling
the case did not want to jeopardize their plans to mount a major ambush, and Graham’s death may have been part of a plan to let the east Tyrone ASUs get so cocky that they would mount the Loughgall operation.
I have not found people prepared to corroborate the allegation that the IRA was allowed to kill Graham. I have included it because the person making it was, I believe, saying what he believed to be the truth. That some of the people who would carry out the Loughgall attack were involved in Graham’s killing seems highly probable. The person who made the allegation against the intelligence officers in charge of the operation says that a footprint from a training shoe found in the mud of Graham’s farmyard matched one of the shoes on one of the men who would carry out the Loughgall operation.
What several other interviewees have confirmed is that the ASUs who were preparing to attack Loughgall police station had indeed been under surveillance for weeks before the attack. Several sources have also told me that there was at least one informer in the east Tyrone IRA. Graham’s killing appears therefore, at the very least, to have represented a major error on the part of those conducting the intelligence operation against Lynagh and Kelly’s units. The Graham incident may be comparable to John Stalker’s discovery that the death of three police officers at the Kinnego embankment in 1982 was highly embarrassing to the RUC because the explosive used to kill them had been removed from a hayshed which was under surveillance at the time.
The evidence of the footprint, the guns, the east Tyrone IRA’s own claiming of the attack and the fact that nobody else was ever to be charged with Graham’s killing all suggest that his assailants were among those involved in the forthcoming Loughgall operation. It may be that the Provisionals simply gave their watchers the slip on the evening of 25 April 1987 or that not all of them were under surveillance at the time. If this was not the case, it may suggest that the desire to protect an informer or to allow an ambush to proceed on the best possible terms might lead the intelligence officers to sacrifice the lives of members of the security forces.