by Mark Urban
The funerals of the Loughgall eight became the platform for threats of revenge. Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams said, ‘Loughgall will become a tombstone for British policy in Ireland and a bloody milestone in the struggle for freedom, justice and peace.’ Ten months after the Loughgall incident an IRA team was sent to attack a British military band in Gibraltar, but this unit too was intercepted and killed by SAS soldiers.
In allowing the heavily armed IRA unit to enter the village and set the bomb off, the covert operators had achieved, in their terms, the ultimate ‘clean kill’. One of Gerry Adams’ first reactions was, ‘I believe that the IRA volunteers would understand the risk they were taking,’ which implied that the operation would be regarded as ‘fair’, even by many in the republican community.
The IRA later said that some members of its team had survived. It claimed furthermore that they had witnessed the SAS men summarily executing the eight men. It is quite possible that there were others in the general area who survived – both the numbers involved in The Birches attack and the fact that the SAS group opened fire on the Hughes’ car suggest that the soldiers’ briefing indicated there were others around – but any surviving member of the IRA team would presumably have got away as fast as they could rather than wait to see what had happened to their comrades. None of the civilian bystanders involved in the incident have made any claim to substantiate the IRA allegation, which is vigorously denied by those who took part in the operation.
Did the intelligence officers and SAS have another option or was the Loughgall operation inevitable? The intelligence expert who regards the ambush as ‘an act of revenge’ says there were several choices open to them. First, if E4A did have the explosives under observation for days or weeks, then Weapons Intelligence Unit specialists might have been able to make the bomb components inert. This would have meant the people inside the RUC station would not have been at risk, even if the operation had been allowed to proceed. That they did not render the explosives safe may be seen in terms of their desire for a ‘clean kill’ – had the men been shot at the site without the digger blowing up, it would have been harder to justify the need for an ambush.
Second, the covert operators had the chance to step up UDR patrols, as they had done, according to the intelligence expert, with the same IRA group on several previous occasions. Third, they could have arrested the men as they came to fit the explosives in the digger. They could also have arrested Lynagh or Kelly, if they knew where they were, shortly before the attack. Finally it is also possible that the security forces could have allowed the attack to go ahead, keeping the group under surveillance, and then attempted to arrest them as they returned to their homes. However this last option involved unacceptable risks for the people of Loughgall, as there was no guarantee that nobody would be killed by the bomb.
In November 1989 a court in Armagh awarded £2652 damages to the Buckleys, the couple who had taken cover in a ditch during the firing, for the nervous distress they had suffered. In April 1991 the Ministry of Defence paid Anthony Hughes’ widow ‘substantial’ compensation in an out of court settlement. The Crown lawyers insisted that the payment did not constitute an admission of liability.
The lawyers’ stance may have reflected the belief of the three SAS soldiers who shot the Hughes that the brothers were in fact part of the IRA operation. They told colleagues that they had seen Oliver Hughes climb into the Citroën after soldiers opened fire on the Toyota van. Although SAS men administered first aid to Oliver Hughes, some believe he would have died but for an RUC HMSU officer insisting that an ambulance be brought for him immediately.
The SAS soldiers’ belief notwithstanding, all other evidence points to the Hughes brothers being law-abiding citizens who inadvertently wandered into the ambush. Although they wore boiler suits, neither had gloves, balaclavas or weapons. Since this shooting was the only blemish on the security forces ‘clean kill’, security chiefs would clearly have preferred to have announced publicly, if it were true, that the brothers were IRA men and one had been arrested. Local nationalists, people deeply critical of the IRA, deny that the brothers were members of that organization.
The Sunday Times journalists, in their book Ambush, say that after the incident speculation was rife, ‘newspaper reports quoting the usually unnamed intelligence sources “revealed” that a high ranking “sleeper”, a mole in the IRA’s ranks, had been activated to divulge forthcoming IRA plans that would allow the security forces to set up an ambush and score a quick victory to counter the swell of republican pride that had greeted the news of Judge Gibson’s assassination.’ The journalists despatched such speculation saying, ‘In fact the ambush was handed to the SAS on a plate. The east Tyrone Brigade had devised a plan so ambitious, yet so cumbersome, that routine surveillance and good detective work had given the RUC plenty of warning.’
IRA statements also discounted the possibility of an informer. It was not the right time for them to sling allegations that the men had been betrayed from within their own community. Later suggestions emerged from within the republican community that the police had known about the forthcoming raid because two Provisionals on a reconnaissance mission had been recognized after their car broke down in Loughgall. As in other incidents, both the security forces and the IRA wanted to deflect attention from treachery within the nationalist community.
The intelligence expert who was familiar with the operation says there was indeed an informer. The confidence of the Sunday Times journalists in ruling out the likelihood of a mole must be questioned in the light of events which took place in 1989, a year after their book appeared.
On 21 May RUC officers stopped a car outside Ardboe in Tyrone. In the back, hidden under a coat and nearly hysterical, was a woman in her late thirties, Collette O’Neill. Also in the car was John Corr, later claimed by Crown lawyers to be the commander of the IRA in Coalisland, and Brian Arthurs, brother of one of the men killed at Loughgall. The odds of a police patrol making such a discovery by chance were slim.
There was speculation that Mrs O’Neill was the Loughgall informer and that she had activated her ‘panic button’ transmitter shortly before her abduction. The Irish News suggested that the IRA had discovered her identity by taking documents from the car of two senior RUC officers killed in south Armagh in March 1989.
Following the incident O’Neill and her two children were taken into protective custody and housed at HQNI, Lisburn. Three weeks later she was taken to Nottingham to a safe house where she was protected by RUC officers. Meanwhile the Crown prepared a case of kidnapping against Corr and Arthurs.
Such is the power of community ties that O’Neill soon became unhappy in her exile. It appears that her husband and others in her village disowned her. She left the safe house and telephoned her mother from a phonebox. In October she made contact again telling her mother that she would make a deal with the IRA if they would allow her to come home. A bargain was reached whereby the Provisionals would guarantee her safety in return for her withdrawing evidence against Corr and Arthurs.
O’Neill went back and in December the Crown case against her alleged abductors collapsed. In an interview with the Sunday Tribune newspaper she denied that she had been the Loughgall informer. But there can be no doubt that O’Neill was closely involved with the group of people who planned the bombing. She admitted in the interview that the phonecall on the morning of Friday 8 May 1987, giving the go ahead for the Loughgall attack, had been made from her home. The Crown lawyer had noted during a hearing of the kidnapping charges against Corr and Arthurs that O’Neill was the ‘alleged’ Loughgall informer.
A senior security forces officer who played a key role in the operation told me, ‘Loughgall was a plum – it was an exceptionally heavy team of good operators. The temptation was there to remove them in one go. The terrorists played into our hands and everything went our way. Was it a decision to kill those people? I don’t think it would have been phrased like that. Somebody would have said, “How far
do we go to remove this group of terrorists?” and the answer would have been, “As far as necessary.”’
Loughgall was the apotheosis of the ‘clean kill’, a cleverly planned exploitation of intelligence resulting in the humiliation of the IRA. Whether supplying the republican movement with eight new martyrs furthered or hindered the cause of peace is another matter.
Conclusion
The advent of Police Primacy in 1976 – which granted the RUC the authority to direct all security operations, including those of the Army – coincided with a pronounced shift towards the improvement of intelligence-gathering and the establishment of more effective methods for its exploitation. Throughout the ten years which followed, the importance of the ‘Green Army’ – groups of uniformed regular soldiers – in confronting terrorism fell as the role of the undercover forces grew. This is illustrated most graphically by the statistics of IRA men killed. During the period from the commitment in 1976 of an SAS squadron to south Armagh to late 1987, conventional units of the Army killed nine IRA men and two members of the INLA. During the same period, the SAS and 14 Intelligence Company killed thirty IRA members and two INLA. This is despite the numerical superiority of the regular Army: whereas the combined strength of the SAS and 14 Company in Ulster has never normally exceeded 150 soldiers, the regular Army fluctuated between about 9000 and 14,000 during this period.
It is harder to be specific about the figures for arrests and convictions. I believe that covert work has increased in importance in the building of cases against suspects, but that the bulk of such work is still carried out by uniformed police and soldiers. From December 1978 to December 1983 the Army’s special forces themselves carried out many arrests. The ‘supergrass’ convictions, which, despite the success of many later appeals, had a pronounced impact on the terrorist infrastructure, also developed as a result of the most important covert activity – agent-running.
It is important to note that from 1976 to 1987 the RUC and Army only ever killed republican terrorists with their undercover units. Loyalists, although responsible for many scores of killings during the same period, have never been subjected to an ambush at one of their arms dumps, for example. On the other hand, many loyalist terrorists have been convicted of serious crimes. In 1990, for example, there were about 260 republican and 130 loyalist prisoners in the Maze. This shows some correlation between convictions and the respective levels of violence perpetrated by the two wings of terrorism in Ulster. Unlike in the mid-1970s, when the two sides produced similar levels of violence, throughout the 1980s, the republicans killed considerably more people than the loyalists.
The special forces did not carry out action based on intelligence which was likely to result in the death of loyalist terrorists. Security forces officers tend to argue that this is because the loyalists are not a threat to the security forces themselves. But the fact that loyalist paramilitaries were not killed by Army and police undercover squads raises two key points: first, it further discredits the idea – so frequently voiced in the authorities’ dealings with the courts and media – of chance meetings between undercover forces and armed republican terrorists, since the odds of stumbling on and shooting a loyalist would appear to be almost as high. Second, it heightens the sense of injustice felt by many nationalists.
The ambushing of republican terrorists by the security forces has generally been followed by public expressions of approval from loyalist politicians. Clearly, such SAS operations are popular in the Orange ghettos where intense frustration is felt at the frequent inability of the security forces to prevent the killing of off-duty police officers and UDR soldiers. Even if the Westminster politicians in charge of security are not guilty of deliberately applying the ambush weapon in a sectarian way, they are at the very least culpable of acquiesing in this state of affairs. It would be surprising if they did not appreciate the value of such operations in soothing militant loyalists and bolstering the morale of the security forces – particularly those recruited locally.
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Several phases are discernible in the development of the forces designed to act on intelligence. Although the SAS arrived in south Armagh in early 1976, it only really began to operate as the cutting edge of the intelligence effort in late 1977 and early 1978. During this period the SAS squadron began operating throughout Northern Ireland, and the first centre for fusing intelligence and covert operations, the Tasking and Co-ordination Group at Castlereagh, was opened. Between 1976 and 1978 the SAS carried out large numbers of operations, killing seven IRA men. Ironically, south Armagh – the area where the SAS was first committed – was to prove the least suitable for operations by the Regiment because the republican community there has always been more successful than other communities in preventing informing.
As the tactics and procedures for handling human source intelligence developed, so the operations of the SAS changed, and became more ambitious. Several of the early incidents involved encounters at arms dumps: these were places where the soldiers had reasonable confidence that somebody might turn up if they waited long enough. During the 1980s such operations became rarer; instead the SAS aimed to catch republican terrorists in the act of attacking security forces members or installations.
Ambushes were discontinued after December 1978. There followed five years in which the SAS did not kill anybody. This period is interesting, not least because it disproves the idea that lethal confrontations between IRA members and special forces are inevitable. It resulted to some extent from the RUC’s desire to take on the more adventurous side of covert operations itself.
There are several reasons for supposing that the killing of six people in late 1982 by members of one of the RUC’s Headquarters Mobile Support Units may have been an aberration rather than a return, sanctioned at the highest level, to an ambush policy using RUC rather than Army special forces. Most importantly, the RUC’s special units had conducted a good many operations in the two years prior to those incidents, and these had brought them face to face with terrorists without resulting in shootings. The arrest of the team which planned to bomb the RUC band in Belfast in July 1982 is one example.
The conduct of the HMSU incidents gave rise to direct political pressure for the RUC to abandon any aggressive special forces operations. But they also resulted in a series of conspiracies at various levels of the force, designed to protect its members from prosecution and from criticism by the Stalker inquiry. The legacy of distrust which these events left between Stormont and Knock meant that the declining role of the SAS in Ulster was checked. The Armagh shootings were a disaster for those senior figures in Stormont and the security forces who believed that the police could supplant the SAS.
From December 1983 there were more SAS ambushes and a pattern of occasional ‘executive action’ based on informer intelligence emerged. These operations were considerably more sophisticated than those carried out by the SAS during its earlier period. The art of the ‘clean kill’, according to people interviewed, was to eliminate members of the opposition so cleverly – ideally catching them armed and on the way to carry out an attack – that even committed republicans would feel there was little they could complain about.
I do not believe that special forces operations were resumed as a result of an explicit order from politicians. Rather, my research suggests that the key role in advocating ambushes is played by middle-ranking police and Army officers, such as a Regional Head of Special Branch or the commanding officer of the Intelligence and Security Group. The attitude of those at the top of the RUC and Army in Northern Ireland is obviously important, but in the cases described to me that attitude has been more one of acceptance than of initiating a wave of ambushes. Officers like Lieutenant General Richard Lawson, GOC from 1979 to 1982, or Major General James Glover, CLF from 1979 to 1980, were explicitly opposed to the aggressive use of Army special forces. Some of their successors have simply chosen not to veto the proposals for such operations made by more junior officers.
Some
of the incidents involving special forces during the years 1983 to 1987 were not initiated by the Army. The Dunloy shooting in 1984 was started by the IRA. The killing of three IRA men in Strabane in 1985, an incident which aroused considerable media interest, probably started as an observation mission rather than an ambush, even though that is what it turned into.
In other cases – Coalisland in 1983, Tamnamore and the Gransha hospital in 1984, the shooting of Seamus McElwaine in 1986 and, most famously, the 1987 Loughgall incident – the evidence indicates that it was the soldiers’ intention to ambush from the outset. Interviewees have told me explicitly that this was the case.
When I began this study, I was open to the idea that ambushing the IRA might help to lower the level of terrorist violence. All of my research, however, convinces me that it does not and that, on the contrary, such operations carry significant human and moral costs.
What then did these killings achieve? At the simplest level they made a good many members of the security forces feel better. Most soldiers who have served in Northern Ireland or police officers who live there are prepared to admit to satisfaction at seeing terrorists get their ‘comeuppance’.
Advocates of ambushes argue that they are one of the few ways of deterring terrorists. The IRA itself admits that the level of covert surveillance deters them from carrying out many more attacks. They are less comfortable about admitting that the presence of so many informers in their ranks has a similar effect. However, it is entirely different to suppose that the fear of death, rather than the fear of imprisonment, has reduced the level of terrorism.