by Simon Cursey
By the time they saw us, I had already forced my 9 millie across the front of Tug, my driver, making sure the gun was just out of his window. This was to stop the ejecting empty cases hitting him in the face while he started to accelerate. I fired two or three rounds with one hand at approximately three to four metres range. Kev, at the same time, was aiming and poised to fire his SMG at the group. As I fired, he too fired a short burst of three to four rounds out through his side window and then quickly spun and turned on his knee to fire another burst of four to five rounds out through the car’s back window as we passed by the group and carried on accelerating away.
We carried on and sent a full report over the radio as we drove off directly back to our base. Our ops HQ informed the uniformed forces of the shooting and as far as we knew, they went over to St James’s to take a look around. After we arrived back at our location, we parked the vehicles and un-loaded our weapons before handing all our gear into the stores … but not before checking our car for bullet holes. We couldn’t see very much that night but in the morning we noticed that Delta, a Hillman Hunter, had some holes in its driver’s side, the one nearest the gunmen.
We took three hits on the car (front wing, rear door and rear wheel arch). We saw both men fall as we drove away and heard later from the Army that only one had survived. We had no casualties except for the rear window which Kev fired out through as we passed the men. But unfortunately, the press had a field day with this incident, with ridiculous claims like Army murder gangs are out on the streets murdering innocent people. We always fired controlled aimed shots when we had to.
A couple of days later, Kev went back to the estate posing as a member of the press. He went to the house of the dead gunman to have a look and interview the parents of the dead man, while the body was there lying in a coffin in the front room of the house. No one knew about this except a couple of us in the section. We took him down there in a car and dropped him off near the estate so he could walk in. Then we waited around for him for about an hour or so, until he returned to the car after the interview.
Kev always seemed to have a strange, even morbid sense of curiosity, especially when he was involved in the shooting. However, he got round to paying his respects to the parents and managed to get the interview to help keep his cover intact.
I can only imagine what would have happened if all the players in the house had realised that Kev wasn’t really from the press and that in fact it was him that actually shot the deceased. It took nerves of steel and the courage of a lion for Kev to go in that house, but that was Kev.
It was about this time that we all began to feel some distinct changes in the atmosphere. It was not an unhappy feeling, but it just seemed that a little more tension and urgency was in the air. The streets of some of the most desperate areas of Belfast had become like a war zone. Every night and most days were filled with explosions and gunfire. Many people in the city were not living; in fact they were barely surviving, what with the constant gun battles running in some of the toughest and direst streets in Britain. All over the city people were far too afraid to even leave their homes after dark.
Another good friend of mine had recently been gunned down and killed while on one very successful long-term operation.
He was part of the Four Square Laundry operation, which was run by another small independent section of the MRF. They operated with a small team of three or four members and had been extremely successful for a very long time; much longer than most people think.
They operated from a vehicle made up to look like a genuine laundry van and they used to regularly visit the fringe areas around Suffolk and Dunmurry, on the outskirts of Belfast. They collected laundry from various houses in the estates to be taken away for cleaning. But first they sent it to forensic testing for explosive residue, gun oil, lead and powder-burn traces.
After the testing, they’d record and register any positive clothing and have the laundry washed and returned. Later, the uniformed forces would make follow-up spot searches of the whole area including the suspect addresses and would usually find weapons, ammunition or explosives in the houses.
It was a wonderful well organised little operation, worked very well for a very long period and was fully instrumental in the finding of hoards and hoards of weapons and explosives. Unfortunately, the Four Square Laundry needed a lot of business to be successful, and as a result had to pitch its prices quite low. It could have been this that attracted attention to them but I very much doubt it, due to its longevity in its activities. It was also strongly rumoured at the time, and was more than likely, that one or two of our own IRA informers who had ‘turned back’ to their masters and given the IRA details of the operation, probably in some vain attempt to save their own skins. It didn’t work: the two informers were found slaughtered soon after my friend’s murder and the end of the Four Square Laundry.
When the Four Square Laundry op was eventually blown, my friend Telford (Ted) Stuart was making notes in the driver’s seat of his van. He was murdered without warning, sitting right there. It has been rumoured that other MRF members were hidden, observing, in the van roof. But this is not true and Ted was alone when he was machine-gunned to death at point blank range. His female colleague was across the street collecting laundry from a house at the time, and although she was deeply shocked she was fortunately unhurt. Needless to say, this particular operation ceased to exist then and there, but we had many strings to our bow and other operations forged on relentlessly.
This small section was part of our MRF unit but operated totally independently of us. They had the laundry business, together with an office, and also a very popular ‘information gathering’ massage parlour which was wired for sound, just off the city centre. This was also raided soon after the shooting but without any casualties. The whole section (or troop) consisted of only a handful of members. I knew many of them and we often met up for a coffee and chat, in between operations. The murder of Ted Stuart was a great shock to us all, not that it made us afraid for our own lives. We were shocked because of the loss of a very good close friend: a generous, cheerful and genuine person. I can still see him to this day, laughing as we walked together down the path in our compound, with his big thick hair and bushy beard.
The main responsibilities and duties of this section were being regularly and deeply involved in observation/surveillance and information gathering, working closely with our MRF Intelligence section and that of other uniformed units throughout the city. Other methods they used included working with informers, whom some people outside the loop called ‘MRFs,’ ‘Smurfs’ or ‘Freds’. It’s well known, they were taken around in covert blacked-out vehicles, pointing out known and suspected terrorists. Other responsibilities included a great deal of OP (observation post) work, much more than carried out by us in 81, 82 and 83 sections. Our main duty was to be out and about day and night in the city, gathering information, trying to spoil and interfere with IRA plans and operations, and when possible; confront active terrorists.
If the MRF was known as a top secret operational unit, as it was, then this other small section was a double top secret sub-unit of the MRF that even fewer people knew anything of.
Chapter Nine – Firing on Automatic
An old friend of mine, from my original parent unit but working in a different, unrelated plain-clothes outfit, was caught late one rainy night in the Falls Road area. He was in a dangerous part of the city, driving back to his base from being out on public-relations duties.
After turning off the Falls Road to take a short cut through the streets, he was forced to stop the vehicle by a group of armed men waiting in the shadows. A man travelling with him prior to his capture managed to jump out of the car and disappear into the back streets before he came to a halt. The armed vigilante group dragged my friend out and forced him against a wall while they searched him.
While he was held at gunpoint, his 9 millie pistol, which he carried for his own protection, was found.
They beat and kicked him to the floor then dragged him into a derelict house in one of the dark and bleak streets off Falls Road.
He was relentlessly tortured and savagely beaten for a couple of hours before the group decided to throw him head first down the cellar steps of the burnt-out house. Fortunately, despite having landed heavily on the hard cellar floor, he had the peace of mind to crawl away to one side as fast as he was able. Above him, he heard the gunmen laughing and preparing their weapons to fire down at him in the darkness. As he struggled and crawled into a corner he was hit in the legs by three or four bullets from two or three automatic weapons, which fired between 10 to 15 rounds down at him. After the shooting, he again heard the gunmen laughing and chatting so he lay still and quiet, in the dark, cold room, playing dead for several hours until he was sure the gunmen had gone.
Four or five hours later, in the early dawn, he managed to drag himself back up the cellar steps in what must have been horrendous pain – one of his kneecaps had been blown off. From the top of the cellar he clambered and crawled, picking his way through the back door and into the alley. Out there he slowly edged along, close to the walls, quietly passing the backyard gates of the other buildings, stopping himself from crying out in pain, not wanting any local ‘Catholics’ to see or hear him while he inched along through the deserted streets for about half a mile.
If any locals had seen him crawling along injured, the likelihood was that they would have finished the job themselves. Dragging his legs behind him, no doubt losing plenty of blood, my friend made his way to the near-by Royal Victoria Hospital; he just managed to reach the hospital gate-man before passing out. That man, realising what the situation was, immediately called some assistance to get him into the emergency department.
I went to visit him a few days later, after he had been transferred to the Musgrave Park Hospital (military wing.) Initially he looked in a terrible state, with his bruised face and both legs bandaged and held up by a kind of trapeze system. I spent a few hours with him, cracking jokes about his situation and telling him that he was lucky to be alive.
From his descriptions of the terrorists, I was quite sure of who the main character was that tried to murder him. He was a local psycho we thought was hiding away in the South at the time, as he was wanted for a variety of killings. A few more days later, I had an evening meeting down in the city with one of our more reliable informers. I asked him to have a quiet check around to see if this particular character has been around the area recently.
Not very long after that I was contacted by the informer. ‘Yes,’ he told me. ‘He’s back in the city, he’s been back a few weeks.’ He also confirmed that the fugitive had been directly involved in the incident concerning my friend, along with three or four other men.
Over the next few days we managed to forge a plan within the section to draw this particular crazy out of the shadows. We knew that he knew of our existence, that he had a deep hatred of us, and that he would also take much pride in getting the opportunity to slot a couple of us if he could.
We made it known through various channels, that a military plain-clothes section would be operating an observation post in a house roof in the Ballymurphy area on a particular day and time. When we received confirmation that this psycho – James Bryson – was preparing an attack on our bogus OP, we informed the local Army unit of a possible attack.
Our target, together with two or three armed friends, arrived in the area cruising around, up and down the streets in one car. The Army made their plans and was lying in wait in various positions and we were observing the scene from an area where we could follow up if things didn’t go to plan. However, exactly as they planned, the Army opened fire on the ASU, claiming the terrorist kills and leaving the streets of Belfast a little safer. All we in fact did was to pass on some vital intelligence of a possible terrorist attack and the Army formed their own plans. We were effectively just doing our job. We weren’t interested in claiming the kills ourselves, we never were. We simply wanted all hard core terrorists stopped. It was irrelevant who actually stopped them, along with this particular psycho and a couple of his sidekicks taken off the streets … permanently. As it was, Bryson lingered a few weeks and finally died on 22 September, 1973.
Most of the terrorists gunmen we were directly confronted with, were not of much Intelligence value anyway, especially with the developing ‘Cell’ structure they were operating with… It was the boys further up the line who had some Intelligence value, not so much the average inexperienced gunman. Our office was in the gutter and our job was to gather information while interfering and spoiling IRA operations. The IRA physical structure was our target and main focus. We had no contact or association with any of the Loyalist organisations.
It all sounds simple and straight forward but in fact it took quite some time to plan, organise and co-ordinate. We never went out to directly target any specific individuals or focus on any one particular player. There were so many armed terrorists running around the streets at this time. It was very much a ‘target rich environment’.
My friend managed to make a full recovery and carry on with his military career, after losing a kneecap and having to undergo more than 12 months of recuperation. But this didn’t stop him from taking part in the many sporting activities he was regularly involved with. Many years later we both enjoyed a weekend water skiing together at Lake Windermere, north of Manchester, and you couldn’t really see that he’d had his legs so badly shot up.
Things didn’t always go our way all the time. Together with a colleague, I was on a static OP observing a house off the Falls Road near the Royal Victoria Hospital. It was quite a clear sunny day with a few billowing white clouds in the distance. We had been there, with our car parked at the roadside, for quite some time and we were expecting our relief to arrive very soon in the area to take over the surveillance. The streets were quite busy with lots of people shopping and passing cars scurrying about. We occasionally got out of the car and mingled with the pedestrians wandering up and down the street and looking in the shop windows. We didn’t feel or look out of place and nobody was taking any notice of us because there was plenty going on around us.
Back in the car a little while later, I was sitting in the driver’s seat and Bob, my colleague on the operation, was in the front passenger seat next to me. We occasionally glanced through a newspaper and fiddled with the radio while continuing to observe the area. Our car was parked, like many others, with the driver’s door on the kerbside.
I’ll always remember very clearly; it was as if in slow motion. I saw what in a split second was going to happen – an old blue Audi 100, mingled among the traffic, was coming towards us along the street at approximately 30 mph. As it drew closer it slowed down and I saw a gun barrel showing through the rear passenger window. There were three men in the car and it slowed even more as it closed up to us.
Before I could say anything or even reach for my 9 millie under my lap, the air was filled with blinding flashes and deafening cracking. Our windows were blown out and there were bullets flying everywhere. The smell of cordite was very strong in the air: they must have opened fire on us from a range of only a few metres as they slowly slipped passed. Within only two or three seconds, it was all over. I was, amazingly, OK. Then I looked at Bob who was slumped on me, slowly falling onto my lap. I knew he was hit but I wasn’t sure how badly, and all I could do was put my arm around him, bash a clear hole in the windscreen and drive like a man possessed to the hospital, just a couple of hundred metres along the road.
As I set off, I swung out into the road and noticed people running and cowering behind other cars along the street. They looked bewildered and not too sure what was going on or who had done the shooting. I quickly made my way the short distance along the Falls Road, weaving through the cars and people until I reached the RVH.
I flew screeching through the main gate and carried on weaving my way up the driveway in and out of parked cars. At the casualty
department entrance, I pulled in and stopped. Two men in white quickly took control and put Bob onto a stretcher. I felt helpless and a bit frantic and could see he was in a very bad way if not already dead. He had taken two or three rounds through the lower part of the car door and sill into his hips and lower abdomen. His passenger seat looked like a grenade had gone off under it. Bob died a couple of weeks later.
While he was being wheeled through the florescent corridor into the emergency ward I contacted our base on the car radio and informed them what had happened. They said for me to wait there and they would send someone down to pick me up as soon as they could. Bob was taken into a cubicle and the doctors and nurses worked on him for about ten minutes while I watched over them. They put a drip in his arm and an oxygen mask over his mouth, while trying to shock him into life. I was a real mess, covered in blood, so the nurses took me to another cubicle to check me out and were relieved to see that none of it was mine. When they finished, I asked if I could wash my hands and arms and one of them smiled and indicated, pointing to the sink in the corner. I had to use the nail brush to clean Bob’s blood off my hands and wristwatch before it dried too much.
One nurse gave me a cup of coffee to settle me down and a doctor approached me to give me Bob’s 9 millie pistol which had still been tucked in his belt. Even though he said nothing, I’m sure the doctor and nurses had a good idea of whom or what we were. He handed me the Browning together with Bob’s magazines and spare ammo, wrapped up in a pillow case which he took from a cupboard.
