Big Boys' Rules

by Mark Urban

  Clearly neither side in the argument can prove conclusively whether the level of terrorism would have been higher at certain times without the use of ambushes. What we can be certain of is that during the early 1980s – the period of no SAS killing – terrorist violence was at its lowest level since 1969. There were many reasons for this, notably the republican movement’s decision to divert resources from fighting to Sinn Fein’s grassroots political activity. Claims that times were more peaceful because such operations had stopped cannot be proved, but the experience of the years 1979 to 1980, when no IRA members were killed by the SAS and only two by the security forces in general, proves that ambushes can be stopped without any noticeable deterioration in the security situation.

  There is a feeling among some in the security forces that occasional ambushes are necessary because the many members of the IRA will not be deterred by prison sentences. They dispute Northern Ireland Office statistics which indicate that the rate of reconvictions for terrorist offences is much lower than that for common crime. The majority of those killed by the SAS during recent years were not men who had failed to be deterred by a spell in prison. Of the twenty IRA men killed by the SAS and 14 Company between 1983 and 1987, only six had previously been convicted for terrorist offences. In 1978 Brigadier Glover, in his report on terrorist trends, said that members of IRA units usually had ten years’ experience of terrorism. The success of the security forces in putting them away meant that by the 1980s the Provisionals were dependent on less experienced volunteers. The average age of those killed between 1983 and 1987 by the SAS was twenty-three years old, while five were in their teens.

  Some soldiers claim that ambushes have restored tranquillity to an area for a measurable period. Undoubtedly the level of sectarian killing in south Armagh did diminish in the months after the arrival of the SAS in 1976. But after a few months of wait-and-see the activities of the IRA against the security forces in the area returned to their previous high levels.

  Successive ambushes in Tyrone during the 1980s appear to have had no noticeable effect on the level of terrorist activity there. The IRA killed seven people in east Tyrone and north Armagh in the two years before the 1987 Loughgall ambush, and eleven in the two years following. Security did not improve: the IRA carried on killing and the SAS mounted further ambushes. Two IRA men were shot dead by the SAS near Loughgall in 1990 and three Provisionals belonging to an east Tyrone unit were killed in the village of Coagh in 1991. In 1990 the IRA succeeded in destroying the half of Loughgall police station that was still standing after the 1987 incident.

  If the impact of ambush operations on the level of terrorist violence is debatable, what of its cost? The SAS has killed six people by mistake since it was committed to Ulster. Is the death of six bystanders too high a price to pay for the deaths of twenty-five terrorists? Even some members of the SAS confess they believe it is. And does the death of terrorists create a desire for revenge and so contribute to the level of violence?

  A friend of the Loughgall IRA group returned to terrorism and was arrested in West Germany. A brother of one of those killed there was subsequently accused of kidnapping a woman alleged to have been the informer who made the ambush possible. I have also been told of the cousin of someone killed by accident by the SAS who became involved in terrorism out of a desire for revenge. It is, of course, impossible to prove that these people would not have become involved in terrorism anyway.

  If the security benefits of ambushing terrorists are questionable, and such operations may lead to the deception of courts and the killing of bystanders, why do ministers allow it? In part this can be explained by the politicians’ lack of real power over these forces. But it is also due to the fact that public opinion in Britain, desensitized by years of terrorism, tends to care little for the lives of its perpetrators.

  The activities of 14 Intelligence Company, the special Army surveillance unit, have shown that it is possible to conduct large numbers of covert operations without ambushing, but also that a small number of accidental confrontations are inevitable in this work. Four members of the unit were killed by the IRA between 1974 and 1984. In cases where IRA or INLA terrorists have been killed by 14 Company operators the threat has generally been very apparent. The most imporant exceptions to this have been the killing in January 1990 of three robbers carrying replica firearms at a bookmaker’s shop in west Belfast and the shooting of Brian Robinson, a UVF terrorist, in 1989.

  Although I have not been able to investigate these incidents fully, I believe the evidence points to both of them being the result of decisions taken by the surveillance operators on the spur of the moment rather than being pre-planned ambushes. The actions of the 14 Company operators in these two incidents appear all the more unusual given the fact that ambush work is very clearly reserved for the SAS, and during the period 1976 to 1987 the Company’s members appeared to act only in self-defence.

  The intelligence contest in Ulster has been pursued at a moral cost to many of those involved. Sources have been deceived and lost their lives due to the incompetence of their handlers. Detectives have had to allow attacks to go ahead to deflect suspicion from their sources. But there seems little doubt that the gradual improvement in the security of Ulster would have been impossible had the police and Army not immersed themselves so completely in the world of agent-running and treachery. Improved intelligence increases the amount of arms seized, reduces the level of inconvenience to the nationalist community at large and results in more convictions. Nobody who believes that terrorism should be checked can really argue that informer intelligence should not play a key part in such a campaign.

  About twenty-five people active in the IRA were named as informers between 1976 and 1987. This includes those killed by the organization itself and supergrasses. Many others have declared their treachery to the Provisionals and have been pardoned, have been taken into protective custody, or have ceased to provide intelligence but remained within their community. It is possible to estimate that around fifty active Provisionals had been informers during this period. This represents a very significant level of penetration – perhaps one in thirty or one in forty of the organization’s frontline membership during these years. Loyalist organizations also contain many informers, although the material they produce, as I have already noted, is often used differently.

  The widespread recruitment of informers has not prevented a great many acts of violence. Clearly many IRA ASUs remain free of informers. Nevertheless, the security forces have on occasion known so much about IRA operations that they have rendered them a farce. Those operations which have been allowed to proceed so as to keep suspicion from the informer have been rendered harmless – for example, by the substitution of dud bomb components or the emptying of police stations prior to their bombing. With few informers prepared to enter the witness box it is hard to see what alternative the security forces have but to let a great many of these penetrated IRA units carry on their compromised operations.

  Although the culture of the republican estates is generally merciless towards those who become ‘touts’, it is probable that the IRA’s attempts to flush out informers slowly erode its cadre of determined supporters. Young volunteers joining the IRA in the 1980s were almost as likely to die at the hands of their own comrades through accusations of informing as they were to be killed by SAS. Doubtless the IRA has committed ‘miscarriages of justice’. One intelligence officer told me that he had read a republican account of the killing of somebody described as a self-confessed informer, a person whom ‘we had never heard of’. Even the killing of real informers is likely to damage the organization’s standing in the eyes of the informer’s immediate relatives; in an organization where family involvement is so important, such consequences cannot be overlooked.

  The effects of the informer war are profound: the level of violence is reduced; the republican community is rendered increasingly paranoid and must eliminate a proportion of its own membership in an attempt to
retain its integrity. Those in the intelligence organizations who run agents are aware that their efforts are the key to the containment of terrorist violence. But there are also some risks inherent in this vital work.

  It is evident that many principles of informer handling considered standard by the British police forces are not accepted in Northern Ireland. Allowing attacks to go ahead to keep suspicion from a source, and dealing with people who are themselves continuously involved in terrorist crime, are two important areas of difference. Where the lives of sources are at stake, intelligence work will inevitably require tight security and this makes effective scrutiny of such operations problematic. But when intelligence officers abuse their position – most famously the Special Branch and MI5 officers found by the Stalker and Sampson inquiries to have conspired to pervert the course of justice over the 1982 Armagh shootings – security considerations have in practice made it impossible to convict them. Inevitably, this freedom from sanction also heightens the sense of injustice felt by nationalists.

  It is apparent, and none of those involved in covert operations whom I interviewed ever denied it, that attempts to protect intelligence sources and techniques have frequently resulted in the deception of the courts in Northern Ireland. It is also apparent that deception has been used to allow soldiers or police officers who have acted mistakenly to escape criminal charges. The powers of courts, in particular those dealing with inquests, have been modified in such a way as to make it extremely unlikely that they will ever uncover dishonesty on the part of the security forces.

  John Stalker suggested in his book that the best means of protecting intelligence sources was to say very little about them rather than to lie. This eminently sensible view is not shared by many of those at the heart of covert operations, who would argue that such niceties are an expensive luxury in a ‘war’. Yet so long as the government uses criminal law against terrorists, rather than calling them prisoners of war, this argument must be resisted.

  As undercover operations developed in Northern Ireland, so the government’s sense of what kind of force would be considered reasonable and necessary by the majority of the public altered. Statements by Army or police officers that the three IRA men killed at Ballysillan in 1978 were armed, or that the gun picked up by John Boyle in the Dunloy graveyard in the same year was loaded, were quickly proved to be false. In both cases I am confident that lies were knowingly disseminated by these agencies in an attempt to make shooting of unarmed men at Ballysillan and of a teenager uninvolved in terrorism at Dunloy appear more reasonable. As one incident has followed another, and the ability of lawyers to examine them in the courts has been drastically reduced, the authorities have felt progressively less need to justify their actions by deliberate disinformation.

  In the Loughgall ambush of 1987, the Strabane shootings of 1985, the Drumnakilly incident (in which three IRA men were killed by the SAS) in 1988, and the Coagh shootings in 1991, there has been no official suggestion that the SAS ever challenged the terrorists – inviting them to give themselves up – before opening fire. Whether or not challenges were in fact issued in previous incidents (for example, at Coalisland in 1983 or at Gransha hospital in 1984), as the authorities claimed, is a matter for speculation. The significant point is that either the Army no longer feels it necessary to issue a challenge as often as it used to, or it no longer feels it has to pretend that its soldiers have done so. It is easy to conclude that the reduction of scrutiny has changed the organization’s attitude to the use of lethal force by special forces units.

  As ordinary soldiers or police officers have been moved further and further away from covert operations, a gulf has opened up between the standards of behaviour acceptable in the ‘Green Army’ and police and in undercover work. Patience and discipline have been fostered as professional virtues among soldiers going to Northern Ireland for uniformed tours of duty. The statement that a small cadre of SAS and surveillance operators has been responsible for the great majority of IRA deaths in recent years does, after all, also show that the 10,000 or so soldiers walking the streets of Northern Ireland have generally behaved with restraint when they have met people known to them as IRA members. During my research, one of the strongest testimonials to the improvement in the behaviour of the British Army in Northern Ireland during the 1980s was given to me by a republican in the Bogside area of Londonderry. Republicans have also admitted to me in private that the treatment of suspects by the RUC has improved since the inquiries into security forces brutality of the 1970s which prompted the introduction of safeguards against the abuse of detainees.

  The cultures of the uniformed and covert security forces in Ulster have become so different that knowledge and supervision of the undercover units’ actions has lessened even within the Army and police. The SAS contingent in Ulster has become an élite within an élite. Reduced in strength during the early 1980s to little more than twenty men, SAS men wishing to join this troop must submit themselves to further scrutiny. The selection of these men is carried out by long-serving SAS NCOs who, increasingly during the 1980s, were drawn from the ranks of the Parachute Regiment – an organization with a reputation for action rather than for skills in tasks where tact or political sensitivity were required.

  The 1980s saw the emergence of a pattern of aggressive special forces operations with the acquiescence of politicians and senior officers, who knew little of the operational detail, and who in any case were more easily convinced than their predecessors had been of the political benefits. This did not involve the killing of any and every IRA volunteer who could be found, as republican propagandists try to imply. Rather, it meant that those in possession of unusually specific intelligence about a forthcoming terrorist attack provided that knowledge, via a special co-ordinated system, to the SAS. With the honing-down of the SAS contingent in Ulster to an even tougher élite, it was understood that these soldiers would then take the opportunity to play big boys’ games by big boys’ rules.

  Appendix I

  Republican Terrorists: Cause of Death,

  April 1976–November 1987

  PROVISIONAL IRA

  Date Name Place Organization Responsible

  1976

  April Peter Cleary S. Armagh SAS

  June Brian Coyle Londonderry IRA/accident

  July Peter McElcar Tyrone IRA/accident

  July Patrick Cannon Tyrone IRA/accident

  August Danny Lennon Belfast Army

  October Paul Marlowe Belfast IRA/accident

  October Frank Fitzsimmons Belfast IRA/accident

  October Joseph Surgenor Belfast IRA/accident

  1977

  January Seamus Harvey S. Armagh SAS

  April Trevor McKibbin Belfast Army

  April Brendan O’Callaghan Belfast Army

  July Thomas Tolan Belfast IRA

  August Paul McWilliams Belfast Army

  1978

  February Paul Duffy Tyrone SAS

  June Dan Jos McErlean Belfast IRA/informer1

  June Denis Heaney Londonderry 14 Company

  June Denis Brown Belfast SAS

  June William Mailey Belfast SAS

  June John Mulvenna Belfast SAS

  November Patrick Duffy Londonderry SAS

  1979

  January Frank Donnelly Belfast IRA/accident

  January Lawrence Montgomery Belfast IRA/accident

  April William Carson Belfast Loyalists

  June Peadar McElvenna S. Armagh Army

  July Michael Kearney Fermanagh IRA/informer

  1980

  January Kevin Delaney Belfast IRA/accident

  April Robert Carr Down IRA/accident

  June Terence O’Neill Belfast RUC

  1981

  February Patrick Trainor Belfast IRA/informer

  February James Burns Belfast Loyalists(?)

  May Charles Maguire Londonderry 14 Company

  May George McBrearty Londonderry 14 Company

  July John Dempsey Belfast Army<
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  1982

  January John Torbitt Belfast IRA/informer

  March Seamus Morgan S. Armagh IRA/informer

  April Patrick Scott Belfast IRA/informer

  August Eamonn Bradley Londonderry Army

  November Eugene Toman Armagh RUC/HMSU

  November Gervaise McKerr Armagh RUC/HMSU

  November Sean Burns Armagh RUC/HMSU

  1983

  December Brian Campbell Tyrone SAS

  December Colm McGirr Tyrone SAS

  1984

  February Jas Young S. Armagh IRA/informer

  February Henry Hogan Antrim 14 Company

  February Declan Martin Antrim 14 Company

  April Richard Quigley Londonderry IRA/accident

  July William Price Tyrone SAS

  August Brendan Watters Down IRA/accident

  December Tony McBride Fermanagh SAS

  December Daniel Doherty Londonderry SAS2

  December William Fleming Londonderry SAS

  December Sean McIlvenna Armagh RUC

  December Kieran Fleming Fermanagh IRA/accident

  1985

  February Michael Devine Tyrone SAS3

  February Charles Breslin Tyrone SAS

  February Danny Devine Tyrone SAS

  August Charles English Londonderry IRA/accident

  August James McCann Belfast IRA/accident

  October Damien McCrory Londonderry IRA/informer

  1986

  February Tony Gough Londonderry Army

  April Seamus McElwaine Fermanagh SAS

  August Patrick Murray Belfast IRA/informer

  September David McVeigh S. Armagh IRA/informer

  September James McKernan Belfast Army