MRF Shadow Troop

by Simon Cursey

  In the shocked aftermath of the devastating blitz, Kev and I managed to get the car moving again and we drove around the areas of the blasts to see if we could help in any way. But there was little we could do so we made our way back to base through the rubble of the destruction. We made out a report of the events that afternoon before going ‘off duty’ and grabbing a few hours’ sleep.

  Some days later I was casually listening to some tapes in our cabin with Tug. He had received them from his brother on the mainland a day or so earlier. Tug was dead keen on the Eagles and I was sat on my bed reading a motor magazine whilst he was freaking out, playing an imaginary ‘air’ guitar to ‘Take it Easy’ and ‘Witchy Woman’. Colin and Kev were on the other beds reading, while they ignored him leaping around the room, twanging at strings that didn’t exist.

  Suddenly Mike appeared in the doorway and made an announcement. ‘Everyone listen in a minute, we have a job. We all need to be in Lisburn HQ tomorrow by 10:00 am, so I want you all ready to go by 8.30,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you more details before we set off in the morning.”

  The next morning, after a chat in the briefing room and having drawn our weapons and radios, we set off for a meeting with the GOCNI (General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland), apparently to discuss some problems a particular Belfast Hotel was having. The 240-room establishment off the city centre had only opened the year or so before; it was luxurious and modern, and consequently some of the Press covering the Troubles stayed in it. However, there had been various attempts to blow the place up over the past few months, and on one occasion a female terrorist posing as a mother-to-be had entered the hotel, gone to the ladies’ toilets and placed in position the bomb she had under her maternity dress. She quickly disappeared and the toilet’s outer wall was blown away, scattering debris over the adjacent car park, luckily with no injuries.

  On arrival at Lisburn HQ we checked in with the gate guard like we had many times before, parked our cars out of sight from prying eyes and cleared our weapons. We kept our 9 millies on us but left our SMGs hidden in the boot of one of the cars. We all then made our way to the canteen for a coffee, as we were a little early for our meeting with the GOC. Over our coffees, Tug and John were cracking jokes as usual while Mike read some papers he had with him. Kev was playing around with his flick knife while chatting to Colin and the rest of us.

  Relaxing and minding our own business, we encountered as usual some strange looks and whispers from many of the uniformed military around us. We had no right to be surprised at this, because we all looked like shit, as if we were a bunch of scruffy builders straight off a building site. The troops in the canteens generally never really bothered us much and we often sat and chatted with them if we had the time while waiting around for something or other. It was the officers that normally tried to make problems for us.

  A few moments later, a chap in uniform came over to us and said, ‘OK, the GOC is free now and he will see you when you’re ready.’

  ‘Thanks, we’ll be over in a moment,’ Mike replied, and then set off first while we all straggled along a few moments later when we had finished our coffees and popped our cups onto the tray racks.

  We left the canteen and made our way over to the main building and into a long, highly polished corridor, passing office doors to our left and right as we made our way to the far end.

  We were ambling along as a loose group, chatting like we had just gone on our lunch break from some building site. Then suddenly we heard a loud frantic voice: ‘Hey! Stop there! Stop, who are you people?’ We all halted in our tracks and turned around to see who was making such a racket.

  Kev answered first, just as loud and demanding. ‘Who are you?’ he shouted. Kev knew exactly who the guy was but just enjoyed stirring people up, especially people like this. I could clearly see that the person was a staff officer, a Guards captain wearing very shiny shoes and Army barracks dress trousers with an immaculately-ironed shirt – a right stickler for the proprieties for whom we were a walking insult to HM Forces and the Crown.

  ‘What are you people doing here? Do you have any identification?’ said the Guards officer.

  ‘Sure, but you’re making us late for an important meeting, and you don’t need to know why we are here,’ said Kev while he took out one of his fake ID cards and I flashed my sports centre ID card. A couple of other guys were fumbling and searching for whatever they had on them, which included a variety of different faked identification cards.

  The officer stood there for a few moments deeply scrutinising our documents front and back, not realising for a minute that they were all counterfeit. ‘OK,’ he said at last, ‘Now what about the rest of you? Come on, show me.’ Suddenly another voice rang out from up along the corridor.

  ‘It’s OK, Richard, I can vouch for them all,’ the GOC himself called, leaning out of his office door.

  ‘In future, when you arrive here, I want you all to check in with me first before you go anywhere,’ the captain said as he gave us back our bogus ID documents.

  ‘I’m afraid we’ll not … Richard,’ was Kev’s parting shot to the officer.

  Thankfully, Mike was busy in the GOC’s office during this little incident. He never liked people interfering or being nosey about us or our unit – especially uninvolved staff officers who had no right to know anything about us. If Mike had heard the goings on, he would have surely given the chap a right mouthful, far worse than Kev had.

  Mike, our section commander, really was a great guy, always cheerful and friendly. As far as he was concerned, we in our section were all one family. We didn’t need his physical protection as he knew we could all very well look after ourselves. But he always supported any decisions we made and really didn’t like people from outside the unit interfering. He’d been around and seen plenty in the Army and done a lot of stuff during his time when he was in the SAS years before and he really wasn’t the type to mess with.

  We had many interesting fellows like Mike with us, such as a couple of guys in section 81 that had recently joined the unit. They had been part of the team that ‘jumped’ into the Atlantic earlier that year, 1000 miles out to sea, and boarded the QE2 together with some bomb disposal experts. There had been a bomb scare on board the vessel and they went out to join the ship to check it out. Luckily it all turned out to be a hoax and the FBI later caught the culprit (the movie Juggernaut with Richard Harris, Anthony Hopkins and Omar Sharif was based on the incident).

  It was only occasionally that we had little problems with some of the uniformed military people, especially officers who felt they had a God-given right always to know who we were and what we were doing. In fact they had no right to know anything about us: they knew it and we knew it. But they were always there, trying to gather information on us, wanting to know our business. It caused quite a bit of friction at times with derogatory and condescending comments directed at us and our unit, the MRF. As far as they were concerned, if they didn’t know anything about us or couldn’t find out anything, then we must be crap and deserved only ridicule. We felt this attitude was born of jealousy and frustration but we couldn’t really care less and found these moments of friction quite entertaining.

  Anyway, at the end of our meeting with the GOC our task was clear. We were required to act as a civilian security firm brought in from London, to live in and protect this Hotel during a very sensitive period and until they reorganised their own security measures. After our briefing and further lengthy discussions, we decided that we required eight men on this operation to offer a worthwhile security network in and around the hotel. The weapons we decided to take were Walther PPKs because they were smaller than our Browning 9mm pistols and easier to conceal in a hotel environment where we would be dressed in close-fitting suits and other clothes less bulky than those we normally wore. We decided to take two submachine guns fitted with suppressors which we initially planned to use at night in our observation positions inside the hotel. We also drew six Pye handheld radi
os.

  The next day, three of us went out early to meet the MD of the Hotel to discuss the layout and carry out a security survey of the premises. We noted and took photos of all the vulnerable points, lighting, fences, entrances and exits, together with car parking areas within 25 metres of the perimeter. Part of the survey included possible sniper positions on other buildings where an RPG 7 (Soviet handheld rocket launcher) could be fired from effectively.

  The front entrance included a security barrier along the main road and a security hut with a couple of men checking people approaching the hotel at the end of the short drive. The hotel was just off from the city centre with the a car park to one side and an open area to the rear, surrounded with tall buildings and not at all easy to secure. Our operation was planned to last for almost three weeks and it was going to be a lot of work.

  After we had completed our security survey at the Hotel we all gathered back at base and filed into the briefing room for a discussion on how we could carry out this operation. We laid out the plans and photos of the hotel, which showed lots of detail including the thickness of walls and floors, across the briefing-room table. Everyone gathered around and involved themselves in the discussions about how we could successfully secure the hotel from attack.

  Eventually we decided to operate a two-shift system. Four men would be on duty and four off, but ready on standby in the event of a full-scale attack, and each shift would last for eight hours. We planned to move into the hotel at 6:00 am the following morning, so as not to draw attention to ourselves. We had reserved two rooms on the first floor overlooking the entrance at the front. The only person that knew we had been tasked through military channels was the managing director of the Hotel.

  After we had set our plans, the rest of the afternoon was spent checking weapons and radios and packing essential clothing and suits we felt we’d need, together with Tug’s ghetto-blaster and selection of his Eagles, Neil Diamond and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tapes. Ghetto-blasters then were very different to those of today. We didn’t have cassettes or CDs. We had those large old-style bulky twin-spool tape players into which we had to hand feed the quarter-inch tape, through the tape heads, before we could play it. Tug’s brother often sent tapes over to him which he had recently recorded from his new LPs.

  After a very early night we got up, had coffee, drew our weapons and equipment and were ready to go by 4:30 am the next morning. The duty section took us into the city at 5:00 am in four vehicles and dropped us off at different points a few hundred metres from the Hotel. The gatemen at the end of the driveway were expecting some new security people at about 6:00 am, but they didn’t know who. They were ordered not to search us but to simply let us straight in after we gave the pass word, ‘Exeter’. We arranged things this way as we didn’t want anyone to know who was coming and what we were carrying into the hotel.

  I was dropped off with Tug near Bedford Street, by the City Hall square, and we both made our way through the side streets a few hundred metres to the Hotel. I’m not sure where the others were dropped off but it wasn’t far from the hotel. We all arrived within minutes of each other in groups of two at a time and the reception lady gave us our room numbers as we walked in. The rooms we were allocated were really very nice. They had large springy beds, spacious sitting/lounge areas, TV and radios – altogether different from the Army-style metal cots in cold portacabins we were used to. I said, ‘This is nice, Mike. You can leave me here when it’s all over.’

  He smiled. ‘You should be so damn lucky, if anyone gets to stay on it’ll be me.’ Then he stretched out on the bed and rang room service: ‘Breakfast for eight, please.’

  We had two adjoining rooms with long curtains draped all the way to the floor and four single beds in each. Over breakfast in our room at 7:00 am we decided that during daylight hours two men would be sufficient patrolling in or around the reception area together with a periodic check around the outside, front and rear, for any suspicious vehicles and packages. The other two could relax for an hour or so and then change over, but be ready to move and join the others at a moment’s notice.

  During the night all four would be active, two around or covering the reception area and the other two patrolling the hotel, while again periodically checking the rear and north side of the hotel which was our most vulnerable side. We agreed that each subsection had to keep in regular contact with each other, either by sight or by radio checks at least every half an hour during their active period. We also decided to start operating at 10:00 am, which initially gave a reasonable mix of day and night duty between the eight of us. Mike split us up into two teams of four: Colin, John, Dave and me in one team and Mike, Bob, Tug and Ben in the other. Kev was involved in something else for a couple of weeks and not among us on this operation.

  After breakfast we arranged to meet the gate security men to introduce ourselves and brief them on the procedures we wanted them to follow in the event of an approach or trouble in their direction. Their orders were to inform us by radio, or through reception if not able to speak directly to any of us, if any suspicious characters appeared to them. They were to give us a full description and state how many suspects there were, and we would handle it from there.

  Our aim was to stop any threat before it arrived in the reception area – in other words outside the front entrance. If by chance any gunmen arrived in reception through the entrance we were to challenge them first but if necessary, to neutralise them in the reception area if possible without injury to anyone else, which we felt was quite feasible given the open-plan layout. We planned that if a bomber got inside the entrance, we would wait until the bomb was placed before taking on the bomber. Afterwards we’d evacuate the hotel and call ATO (bomb disposal) to disarm the device.

  In the 1970s, This hotel entrance had tall revolving glass doors, with the main restaurant to the right as you stepped through them. The reception desk itself was straight ahead and a little to the right and was usually staffed by two or three reception girls in hotel uniform. In the open-plan central area there were some large lounge chairs and glass-topped tables arranged in a circle. To the left was a door leading to the bar, which ran along the building from front to rear and could seat approximately 60 people. Half left, leading up to and through the high ceiling and the first floor, stood a very large and wide marble spiral staircase with thick dark Perspex banisters. I felt this was an excellent vantage point to observe the entire reception area, and at night the top of these stairs near the ceiling was quite dark and so was the area behind it. I was able to scan the reception area from this position for quite some time day and night, without drawing too much attention to myself, and I spent many nights observing from this position with a silenced submachine gun. With its butt folded down it slipped nicely into a large black padded tennis case I had with me. The hotel was normally quite busy during the day, mostly with people gathered in the bar or loitering and chatting in the foyer. Nevertheless I casually wandered around the hotel all day long with my SMG tucked under my arm, neatly hidden inside its sporty case, and nobody suspected a thing.

  During our ‘off duty’ time we normally stayed in our rooms, resting, watching TV or reading. Colin had some good books with him, including Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer, plus a couple of new ones from Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File, just the type of books to suit the occasion – and not forgetting Tug with his ghetto-blaster. But Tug was good: he never played it too loud. I found it quite relaxing, lying in bed in the dark and drifting off to sleep listening to the Bee Gees singing ‘Massachusetts’, ‘Words’ and ‘Saved by the Bell’, all very popular songs at the time.

  We generally took our meals in the downstairs restaurant, relieving other members of our section periodically so they could grab a bite to eat. In our rooms, we had coffee-making facilities and the chamber girls used to supply us with plenty of sandwiches and biscuits to get us through the long nights. Sometimes the girls called in to see if we nee
ded more sandwiches and occasionally one or two would stay a while, just chatting. They knew we were English but had no idea we were Army. We’d ask them where they lived, pretending we didn’t know Belfast and that we had only been in Ulster a week or so. Most of the staff in the hotel were Protestants and lived in relatively quiet areas of the city but there were one or two girls from some of the fringe Catholic parts of Belfast. They generally seemed very friendly but we were always extremely careful about what we said to them and kept our weapons and equipment out of sight when they were around.