by Paul Bruce
As he spoke, more than 200 Protestant families in the Ardoyne removed all their belongings from their homes and then set fire to their houses, thus making them uninhabitable by Catholic families.
That day the first major sectarian shoot-out between Catholics and Protestants took place in Coalisland, when a hundred Catholic gunmen staged a gun battle against sixty Protestants.
Since internment, the officer told us, the level of violence, especially against British troops, had escalated alarmingly and different tactics were now necessary to destabilise the IRA and wreck its morale. ‘That is why you lot are being sent to Northern Ireland.’
Forty-eight hours after the wholesale arrest of IRA suspects, the Stormont Government announced the result of its internment policy, claiming that 70 per cent of suspects sought had been arrested and interned, including a high proportion of the IRA leadership.
There would, however, be a high price to pay for introducing internment, a policy which the IRA had predicted but which took out of action the great majority of their leadership. Within the first 48 hours of suspects and sympathisers being detained, bombings and shootings across the Province cost 22 people their lives.
Then we were given certain information which began to make sense to us. The major told us of a recent briefing by Brigadier Marston Tickell, Chief of Staff Northern Ireland Command HQ, when he had stated that, following internment, the intelligence services expected flying columns of IRA gunmen and activists from the south to infiltrate the north, to keep up the political pressure and further increase the degree of violence and terror.
Brigadier Tickell said, ‘To put a stop to these flying columns we intend to switch much of the British Army’s activities to the border area where troops will be moved into the unmarked border zone to keep watch.’ He also issued a warning, which he had received from Special Branch, that the IRA intended to make a dramatic political gesture by capturing a small border town and declaring a great victory.
Our briefing officer added, ‘You and all British troops will find yourselves in a war of attrition against these terrorists who are now armed with automatic weapons as well as revolvers. They also have the capacity to make and distribute gelignite bombs across the entire Province. I can tell you that your mission will be no picnic.’
To bring us up to date, the major explained what had occurred in the four weeks since internment. Two thousand families, about 10,000 men, women and children, had been forced to leave their homes; most parts of Belfast had become religious ghettos; many more sectarian gun battles had taken place; and widespread bombings were causing daily harassment of the general public. As a result, he said, a mounting tempo of fear and insecurity had gripped the entire Province.
Our briefing officer also told us of the political problems that had arisen over the border issue in the area where we would be operating.
He told us of meetings which had taken place between Prime Minister Edward Heath and the Irish Premier Jack Lynch, in which Heath had demanded that the southern Ireland police and army should do much more to stop the smuggling of arms and men across the border into the north. Lynch had suggested that United Nations troops should be invited to patrol the border but this idea had not found favour with Heath.
The major gave us no clue of what our duties might be in Ulster. It is probable that he himself had not the slightest idea of the secret undercover operations we would become involved in. That information, he explained, would be given to us after we arrived in Ireland and had reported to 39th Brigade Headquarters at Thiepval Barracks in Lisburn.
He had given us much to think about. Now we were ready for some action.
In the pubs and bars of Belfast in October 1971, the talk was still of the bombing of the Four Steps Inn on the Shankill Road, when two people were killed and 25 seriously injured after a bomb ripped the pub apart. Targeting pubs was a new phase of the IRA’s terror tactics. On that night, hundreds of Linfield Football Club supporters had stopped at the pub for a drink after their team’s European cup tie against Standard Liege at Windsor Park. As a police spokesman said at the time: ‘There were hundreds of people milling around the pub at the time; it was a miracle that more people weren’t killed.’
At Belfast Dock, a Royal Transport corps driver in a Land Rover met us and drove us and our baggage to Sydenham Docks where the prison ship HMS Maidstone was anchored. The sentries waved us through the gates and the Land Rover pulled up outside a sandy-coloured Portakabin which would be our home for the next few weeks.
Inside, we were pleased to see that a television set took pride of place in one corner of the room. There were two sets of bunk beds on either side, a desk, four chairs, a gas-bottle cooker, a large wooden wardrobe and, at one end, a tiny room with just a wash basin, shower and loo. In the middle of the desk a modern, grey telephone had been placed, through which we would receive instructions from the Lisburn headquarters. Over the windows were thin, green, cotton curtains, which looked more like sacking.
We hadn’t been in the Portakabin more than a few minutes when Don told us, ‘Don’t make yourselves too comfortable, we won’t be staying in this place long.’
‘What do you mean?’ someone asked.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘That’s the main gate over there, about fifty yards away, any bastard could drive up to those gates and hit us with an RPG or something.’
We were learning.
We decided to eat at the REME cookhouse, situated at the end of a large hangar about sixty yards away. The grub was good and far better than we would have put together in our Portakabin.
The wry comment from the REME lads was that the food was so good because the cooks tried to spend hours producing really tasty meals so that they wouldn’t have time to go out on street patrols with everyone else. It worked; the food was good and they didn’t go on street patrols.
A couple of hours after we had unpacked a Q-car – an ordinary-looking blue Morris Marina with Northern Irish plates, driven by an Ulster Defence Regiment soldier in civvies – arrived to take the four of us to the Lisburn headquarters.
We went in civvies, wearing jackets over our jeans to conceal the 9mm Brownings we had tucked into the waistbands. These were the only weapons we had brought over from the mainland. We would never be without them throughout the following twelve months.
‘I feel just like James Bond,’ quipped JR as we drove into the 39th Brigade HQ. No one else said a word.
We were whisked through the main gates and stopped outside the headquarters building which was guarded by armed UDR soldiers. ‘You will be meeting Brigadier Kitson, Commander of the 39th Infantry Brigade,’ we were told. ‘He may want to have a few words with you.’
We had heard much of the legendary Brigadier Frank Kitson, an army officer who had served in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus. During two years in Kenya in the 1950s, Brigadier Kitson’s fame spread through the army because of his radical policy of ‘turning’ around captured terrorists and leading them out as ‘counter gangs’ against the feared Mau Mau.
It had been assumed that Brigadier Kitson, who had won the MC (Military Cross) twice over, had been brought in to command the 39th Infantry Regiment because of his acknowledged expertise in counterinsurgency. Kitson’s professional hallmark was the practice of treating field operations and intelligence gathering as inseparable functions. He found himself trying to apply some of his Kenya expertise to Northern Ireland.
Someone once said that, under a peaked cap, Kitson looked like a gauleiter with his cold, staring eyes, pale, wintry expression and strangled voice. In the two years he served in Ulster, Kitson, an ambitious, efficient, searching, spiky man with a chilling stare, became the IRA’s most hated and feared military target.
Before being sent to Ulster, Kitson had published a controversial book, Low Intensity Operations, which had made him a figure of cult-hatred on the far Left. Kitson’s theories addressed the proposition, once endorsed by Prime Minister Edward Heath, that internal subversion and civil anar
chy represented the dangers of the future, rather than conventional war. As a result, considerable effort, particularly in Irish Republican political circles, centred on caricaturing Kitson as a systematic and callous anti-democrat. That argument could not be sustained, however, for Kitson, an honourable and sensitive officer, was a man whose respect for democracy probably ran deeper than it did in most of his critics.
Kitson, who always believed passionately in the British Army, quickly won a reputation among his senior officers in Ulster for ruthless, even brutal, action, if he believed it could be morally justified. The IRA would come to fear and hate Brigadier Kitson for his successful methods in combating them, often taking them out before they could strike.
As a field officer in Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya and Germany, Kitson had won the respect and affection of his men; some officers found him forbidding but others well-nigh worshipped him and his military virtues.
The son of an admiral, Kitson would serve for two years in Ulster before being appointed to the elite position of Commandant of the School of Infantry at Warminster in Wiltshire in June 1972. He would go on to become GOC 2nd Armoured Division in 1976, and Commander in Chief of United Kingdom Land Forces in 1982. He would be promoted to general and be rewarded with a knighthood. Because of his ruthless approach towards the IRA gunmen, he would remain at the top of the IRA’s hit list even when he left Ulster.
The most senior army commander in Ulster when we arrived was General Sir Harry Tuzo who had been appointed GOC and Director of Operations Northern Ireland in 1971. He would still command that position when we left Ulster in October 1972. However, we were not destined to meet him.
Having been escorted to the headquarters building, we were personally greeted by Brigadier Kitson who shook us all by the hand and then invited us upstairs to a large briefing room with maps covering the walls.
‘Your lads have arrived,’ Kitson said as he handed us over to a Royal Signals officer who came into the room to greet us. ‘He’ll look after you,’ Kitson said and left the room.
We would not see the controversial brigadier again during our tour of duty but we believed that he was the man responsible for the war of attrition that had recently started against the IRA. Kitson knew that the men best able to carry on that war were members of the SAS.
Also in the room that morning were a couple of men in civilian clothes, both around forty years of age. They listened with interest to everything the signals officer said. We believed they were senior intelligence officers.
We were given a cup of tea and a cigarette while the officer addressed us, although most of the time he seemed to be directing his briefing towards Don.
‘At this point in time,’ he told us, ‘there are three SAS units in the field on active service; one in southern Ireland and two patrolling the border. They are engaged in passing information back to Lisburn, informing intelligence of IRA movements of arms, ammunition and men from the south, across the border and into the north.’
After ten minutes, the signals officer handed over to a warrant officer who had come into the room while the officer was speaking. I never knew what mob he was in because he wore no beret, but he wore a leather strap with a warrant officer’s crown on his right wrist.
The signals officer left the room and the two men in civvies appeared to relax more, moving to join us around the table. The WO also sat down and more tea was brought in.
During the next hour, the three of them took turns to brief us on the way we would fit into the SAS operation on the border. They informed us that, according to the latest intelligence reports, most of the IRA’s senior ranks had been rounded up and were interned in Long Kesh, leaving perhaps as few as sixty senior IRA professionals in Belfast and Londonderry. They believed the rest of the IRA’s forces consisted of unprofessional sympathisers and kids who hardly knew how to handle a gun.
We had been brought in to try to contain the situation and make sure the IRA could not organise or train more professional gunmen and bomb makers. The information being gathered by the SAS units and other agencies was now being used to create a state of uncertainty and unease among the two wings of the IRA, the Officials and the Provisionals.
Intelligence believed that, if the pressure was kept up in the field, there would be every chance that the IRA would not have sufficient trained men to sustain a bombing or shooting campaign in the north. With violence and bombings contained, an opportunity would then arise for the politicians to thrash out a solution.
He told us that the SAS had been brought in to Ulster at the start of the troubles in 1969 but had, unbelievably, been permitted to operate in uniform which was now perceived as a serious mistake. It also meant that none of those SAS units who had served in Northern Ireland could return to work in covert operations. As he put it, ‘That was a major cock-up.’
He went on, ‘That is why you will be operating throughout your time in Northern Ireland in civilian clothes. You must let your hair grow down to the collar and spend most of your days in jeans and sweaters. At no time during your tour of duty in Northern Ireland will you ever wear uniform. And on no condition must you wear anything at all that could suggest you are members of the armed forces. Not even underwear.’
He went on to detail our unit’s particular job. He said, ‘You will be part of an abduction and assassination operation.’
I didn’t even blink. It came as no surprise to me. My heart flipped but somehow I had thought this was coming, although I still wondered exactly what we would be required to do.
He went on, ‘Hopefully, you will only be involved in border work. You will receive instructions to go to a map reference to collect IRA gunmen trying to infiltrate from the south. We know the IRA are at this moment training as many young gunmen and bombers as possible and it will be part of your duty to prevent these killers from entering Ulster.’
Don asked, ‘And when we have them in our possession, what do we do with them?’
The warrant officer replied, ‘Later on, I will give you another map reference. This will be the place where you will dispose of them. The area will be prepared before you get there. Everything will have been taken care of. You will just have to deliver them.’
‘What exactly do you mean?’ asked Don, wanting to make sure that he understood precisely what the officer was saying.
Without trying to hide our role, the warrant officer said starkly, ‘It will be your duty to kill them. You will hand them over dead.’
My mouth went dry and the palms of my hands began to sweat. I hadn’t imagined that we would actually have to kill someone in cold blood and deliver them to someone else to be got rid of. I had no idea that this would be part of an SAS mission. It seemed unreal, like a bad dream. I couldn’t imagine that the SAS would be called on to kill people like that. To shoot them in war I could understand, but this …
I knew these IRA bastards had to be dealt with; that the bloody IRA campaigns of bombing and shooting had to be stopped, and at all costs. But this? ‘Shit,’ I thought.
The warrant officer must have understood what we were thinking because he added forcefully, ‘If you have any qualms about this mission, forget them. If those bastards ever got hold of any of you, they wouldn’t just kill you; your deaths would be far fucking worse than anything you could imagine.’
He went on, ‘Unfortunately, we are not operating on our own. We come under the joint services intelligence wing and therefore we will also have to become involved with the grasses, the MRFs – Military Reconnaissance Force – the IRA members who have agreed to work for us rather than spend the next twenty years in jail. On occasions, you will have to act on their information and you must never forget that some of these bastards will, in fact, be double agents. And that can spell danger for you all.’
The warrant officer also gave us our password, ‘Nemesis’. He told us, ‘If ever you get arrested, stopped at a police road block or picked up by any army patrol, you must go along with whatever the officers say and then de
mand to speak to their commanding officer. When you get to him, you must give him the one word “Nemesis” and ask him to contact 39th Brigade headquarters and ask for the intelligence duty officer. We’ll sort out the rest. Don’t forget it, the word is Nemesis,’ and he spelled it out: N-E-M-E-S-I-S.
At the time we had no idea what the word ‘nemesis’ meant. Later, when I looked in the dictionary, I smiled. Nemesis was the mythological Greek goddess of retribution and vengeance, often interpreted as any agent of retribution or vengeance. I thought to myself how clever those bastards were to think up such names. It was perfect.
He told us the Marina we had arrived in would be our vehicle but that we would need to change it from time to time.
‘Any questions,’ asked the warrant officer.
‘Yes,’ Don said.
‘What?’
‘We are not staying at that Portakabin at Sydenham. It’s just not safe.’
Don didn’t ask the question; he just told them straight. The warrant officer and the two civvies looked at each other.
‘Something will be sorted out,’ replied the warrant officer.
At the end of the briefing, however, the warrant officer did have some good news for us. We were told we would all be promoted to sergeant for the duration of the mission so that we would have a decent wage. That brought a smile to our lips.
JR asked with a grin, ‘Could I have three stripes to sew on my leather jacket?’
The warrant officer replied, ‘I’ll pretend I never heard that request.’ But he was only joking.
The briefing was at an end.
‘Fancy a bite to eat?’ Don said as we walked to our car. We all nodded.
During lunch at a cafe in Lisburn, we picked up a newspaper which reported on the front page that the Official IRA’s publicity bureau had issued a statement concerning alleged SAS operations in Belfast and other parts of Northern Ireland. The statement alleged that members of the SAS were planting ammunition and weapons on innocent civilians to whitewash the brutality of the British Army.
