The Nemesis File - The True Story of an SAS Execution Squad

by Paul Bruce

  The report said internees suffered severe beatings, were often stripped naked, were made to run barefoot over broken glass and were subjected to one particularly gruesome torture which had become commonplace in Long Kesh.

  Prisoners’ heads were covered with an opaque cloth bag with no ventilation and they were dressed in a one-piece boiler suit and forced into a search position with their legs apart. They were then left in a room filled with constant, high-pitched whining for up to six hours at a time. Some prisoners, they claimed, were driven to the point of insanity, others openly prayed for death to release them from their agony.

  The report had been accompanied by a statement signed by 387 Catholic priests in Northern Ireland – 80 per cent of the Catholic clergy – alleging the torture and brutality of men arrested under the Special Powers Act.

  We believed the British Government could never agree to such an inquiry for fear that the commission members might stumble across our activities. We knew what uproar would follow round the world if news ever leaked out that the British Government had employed their own crack SAS forces to act as execution squads in Northern Ireland.

  Then the IRA revealed the depths to which they were prepared to stoop, even towards their own, by singling out totally innocent teenage Catholic girls for harassment and punishment.

  On Tuesday, 9 November 1971, Martha Docherty, a nineteen-year-old Catholic girl from the Creggan in Londonderry, was picked up by women from the area. In three days’ time, she was due to marry Private John Larter, aged eighteen, from Suffolk in England, a young British soldier in the Royal Anglian Regiment who had planned to become a Catholic the day before his wedding. A month earlier, he had been kidnapped by youths in the Creggan, shot through the hand and told to keep away from Martha.

  The women tied Martha Docherty to a lamppost with lengths of wire, cropped off all her hair and then tarred and feathered her. Around her neck they placed a placard with the words ‘Soldier’s Doll’ on it. For fifteen minutes, fifty or more women stood around swearing and jeering at the petrified girl.

  Despite the punishment, however, Private Larter did become a Catholic two days later and the couple were married the following day in Ebrington Barracks, Londonderry.

  Martha would not be the only girl to suffer. The following night, Deirdre Duffy, only seventeen, was stopped by seven women while walking in Londonderry. Pushed into the back of a car and driven to the Bogside, she was then hauled out, tied with wire to a lamppost and tarred and feathered. Her offence was dating a British soldier.

  At that time, a total of 27 British soldiers serving in Londonderry were engaged to be married to local girls. The IRA did not approve and issued strict orders forbidding any girls to attend discos or dances at which British soldiers would be present. Any girl who did attend would be punished.

  I felt deeply sorry for the girls and the IRA’s treatment of them only increased my feeling of disgust for them. It appeared that they would happily bomb innocent people, hide behind the Catholic minority and use terrorist methods against the troops, including sniper fire and remote-control booby-traps. They were only brazen when dealing with their own teenage girls or youths who had allegedly broken some IRA rule. Those poor little bastards would be taken away and beaten by three or four IRA thugs using sticks and batons. The more serious lawbreakers would have their knees shot away in what the IRA liked to call ‘knee-capping’.

  With those thoughts in my mind, I had few qualms at that time about the job I was being ordered to carry out. The more Northern Ireland seemed to be sinking into a morass of violence, bombings and shootings, the more I believed I was helping to try to sort out the killers who had taken it upon themselves to undermine the social fabric of the Province. If IRA members were prepared to kill and maim innocent civilians, then they had to bear the consequences.

  CHAPTER NINE

  During the next nine weeks, we would be called upon to execute only another two IRA prisoners, both caught by an SAS unit on the border as they tried to cross into the north. They would be handed over to us at different map references. Each killing followed the same pattern. There would be no alteration in the orders given to Don whenever he was called to headquarters in Lisburn and told that another shipment was to be picked up and disposed of in the usual way.

  As a result, we felt that for the great majority of the time at Long Kesh we led an idle life and the killings became a tiresome bore that we had little enthusiasm to continue with. We kept fit, we worked out, we drank tea and went to pubs and discos but, at heart, we were bored with our life. We also felt the work we were being ordered to do, usually once every fortnight or so, should not have been a job for the SAS.

  We would have much preferred to be involved in proper soldiering, as the other SAS units were, living in the field, maintaining surveillance, passing on intelligence information and, whenever necessary, ambushing infiltrators. Then we would have really enjoyed our two-week breaks after a month in the field.

  Most of the executions went as planned. A couple went awry.

  On one occasion, we arrived at the SAS rendezvous on the border. Benny had been given the ‘border special’ to carry out this particular execution. After seeing the red flashing light, he walked towards the SAS man and his prisoner. At the moment of handover, the prisoner sprinted away from Benny and the SAS bloke.

  I heard a shout and looked up. I had been standing guard behind the car on that occasion and saw the man running towards me. I heard the thump of the ‘border special’ but the man kept running. Seconds later, I heard another thump and the man collapsed just as he was running past the car. I ran towards him as he writhed and moaned on the ground. Benny raced up and put another round into him, silencing him instantly.

  ‘Shit,’ said Benny. ‘I shouldn’t have let that happen. I had no idea he was going to do a runner.’

  ‘Quick,’ said Don, ‘open the boot, put him in and let’s get the fuck out of here.’

  Minutes later, we were driving north towards Blackskull Lane, fearful that we might be stopped by a patrolling army squad or the RUC.

  Don said, ‘If we get stopped by an army unit, leave me to do the talking. I will give them the codename,“Nemesis”, and tell them to contact their commanding officer. If they demand to open the boot, I will then explain who we are and what we are doing. If they demand we go along with them, then that’s what we will do. As long as we stick with the army, everything will be fine.’

  He went on, ‘If we get stopped by a couple of cops, I will talk first and see if I can persuade them to let us go on our way. If they insist on opening the boot, then we will have to take them out. We cannot afford to be caught. We could end up doing a long time inside. Just keep your fingers crossed.’

  Thank God, nothing happened. I would have found it difficult to shoot two cops in cold blood for no reason.

  On our return to Long Kesh, we had our first major discussion about the extraordinary tasks we were being ordered to carry out. None of us had thought for one moment when joining the SAS that we would be ordered to act as an execution squad, and yet that was all we had done since arriving in Northern Ireland.

  Over coffee that night, I asked Don what would have happened if we had come across a unit of eight RUC cops at a road block. ‘We surely wouldn’t have tried to take on all of them, would we?’ I asked in disbelief.

  Don replied, ‘If that had happened, we would have been in deep shit.’

  We all looked at each other, waiting for him to continue and wondering what he meant. We had all believed that the codeword ‘Nemesis’ had been given to us as protection, a password that would ensure there would be no problems with either the army or the police. Now it seemed as though the codeword would have proved useless with the police.

  Don went on, ‘No way could you expect that number of cops to keep their mouths shut about our operations. No matter how we tried to explain our way out of the predicament, I don’t think the authorities could have come to our aid. In f
act, I’m sure they would never do so.

  ‘Those cops would have passed our codeword to their superior officers and they would have contacted Lisburn headquarters. But I believe that Lisburn would have denied everything, denied knowing anything about the codeword, denied our very existence.’

  We all looked at Don in astonishment.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he went on. ‘Let me explain. Eight or ten cops could never keep their mouths shut and, within days or weeks, it would be common knowledge that SAS units were being used to kidnap and execute IRA blokes at random. That would cause the most almighty row. The authorities, or rather the politicians, would turn their backs on us, tell the police that we were a rogue unit that had gone AWOL [absent without leave] and that they had been trying to capture us themselves. We would have been turned over to the police, taken to court, charged with murder and banged up.’

  ‘Shit,’ I thought.

  However, Don hadn’t finished yet. ‘Worse than that,’ he went on, ‘we would have been told by some army smart-arse that, if we opened our mouths in open court, and let the cat out of the bag, then we would never see daylight again.’

  I suddenly felt cold. I had believed, perhaps naively, that we were obeying orders; that whatever happened the army would stand by us. We were carrying out the dirtiest part of a bloody awful campaign against the IRA and yet, if the shit hit the fan, we would be sacrificed, left to spend fifteen or twenty years inside for doing nothing except obeying orders from the Lisburn headquarters.

  I looked at the other three and imagined they were thinking the same. We had all joined the SAS because this was Britain’s élite force, the toughest fucking troops in the British Army. We had all been put through hell to make the grade and earn the winged dagger. We had been so proud when we had been issued with the SAS badge, with those famous words written underneath: ‘Who dares wins’.

  Now the full horror hit us. We were expected to go out on a limb, carry out the shittiest work of any army unit in Northern Ireland and risk being charged with murder, found guilty and banged up for twenty years. Was that the privilege of being a member of the SAS?

  The only crumb of comfort Don could offer us that night was the belief that he didn’t think we would be employed for much longer doing this particular job. ‘It’s obviously not working. It’s obvious from everything we read in the papers that, far from being on the edge of defeat, the IRA have hundreds of active service blokes happy and willing to fight and die for the cause.’

  We knew he was right and hoped the authorities in Lisburn would realise the part we were playing was all but useless in stopping the IRA recruits from rallying to the tricolour.

  In November, Prime Minister Edward Heath had all but accepted that the IRA had moved on from being a tiny band of dedicated activists to become a major force when he stated that ‘a war situation’ existed in the United Kingdom.

  Throughout November and December 1971, the IRA stepped up their campaign of bombings and shootings. Since we had arrived in the Province the security situation had deteriorated alarmingly and now it appeared that the Protestant paramilitary organisations were becoming actively involved.

  At first, the Ulster Protestants had been prepared to let the authorities, i.e. the police, backed by the British Army, contain the situation. But then they had seen the situation go from bad to worse and the IRA become stronger every week.

  On Saturday, 4 December, the loyalists hit back. An organisation calling themselves the League of Empire Loyalists exploded the biggest ever bomb planted in Belfast since the troubles began. They were determined to show the IRA that they could hit them when and where they wanted. The bomb ripped apart one of Belfast’s most famous Catholic pubs – McGurk’s Bar – at the junction of Queen Street and Great George Street in the Catholic New Lodge area. Sixteen people were killed and thirteen seriously injured when the 50lb bomb exploded.

  We noted everything that was going on in Ulster but would always be dragged back to our little world of dirty deeds. Most executions went according to plan, but once again JR was to screw up. On this occasion, everything went as clockwork until it came to the point when JR, who had been delegated to carry out the execution that night, once again could not control his nerves. As he went to shoot the man in the back of the head, he missed, hitting him in the neck, the round exiting from the man’s mouth.

  In those circumstances, JR should, of course, have immediately put another round into the man’s head or heart to finish him off as quickly as possible. The man was screaming with pain and fear but JR froze, unable to pull the trigger again. At the time I was standing next to JR, so, to put the poor bastard out of his agony and to shut him up, I pulled out my pistol and shot him through the head, killing him instantly.

  ‘What the fuck are you playing at?’ I said to JR when the poor bloke had been finished off.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t do anything … I just froze.’

  Back at Long Kesh, Don turned to JR and said, ‘Right. It seems we can’t trust you to handle a situation, so from now on you’ll just be the fucking driver. OK?’

  JR mumbled a reply but, from that day on, he would become the gofor of the unit, relegated to driving, making the tea and coffee and running any errands we wanted. He never complained. In some ways, he seemed relieved that he would never again have to face the stress and tension that he obviously found difficult to cope with.

  There were odd occasions which later made us laugh at our predicament, although it seemed a little sick. Driving back to Blackskull Lane in the dead of night, with a prisoner in the car, we had a puncture in the front nearside tyre. Everyone had to get out and lend a hand while Benny guarded the prisoner. It seemed extraordinary that we needed to stop for ten minutes to change a wheel and that the poor, wretched IRA man had no idea that he had just been given an extra ten minutes of life. We wondered what on earth we would have done if someone had come along and asked if we needed any help while we tried to pretend that the IRA man was one of us.

  On another occasion, the Corona slid on an icy patch and the car buffeted along the nearside grassy bank, ripping off the bumper and damaging the front end and the doors on the nearside. The timing could not have been better, as the very next day it had been arranged that we would change our Q-car from a dark-blue to a dark-green Corona. Jokingly, we blamed JR for the driving error but it wasn’t his fault.

  By Christmas 1971, all four of us had steady girlfriends who we had been dating since mid-November. The IRA had announced a 48-hour Christmas ceasefire and Don had been informed that we would not be required over the holiday period. We determined to enjoy ourselves and let our hair down.

  Early in December, Lizzie’s parents had invited me to spend Christmas with them, which really gave me a buzz. It would be wonderful to enjoy a happy, relaxed Christmas atmosphere with roast turkey, plenty of booze and, more important for me, a few days of uninterrupted Lizzie. We had become lovers in November and were becoming more and more involved with each other.

  Lizzie knew her parents would sleep soundly every night because they really enjoyed a good drink with friends at the club and at home. Each night, at about 3.30 in the morning, Lizzie would come to my room and we would spend the rest of the night making love. At 7.30, Lizzie would tiptoe back to her room, hoping her parents would let her sleep in until 10 in the morning. With little sleep, too much booze and tons of good, homely food, I arrived back at Long Kesh feeling unfit and shattered but remarkably happy.

  Over the next few days, we were determined to get fit again with long, hard runs and plenty of weight training in the gym. I think we all needed it.

  In December, we had read a long newspaper article, illustrated with pictures, which had obviously had the full backing of the Ministry of Defence public relations outfit, showing how the 42nd Commando, Royal Marines were guarding the border, allegedly preventing IRA activists from crossing into the north.

  The pictures showed Wessex and Sioux helicopters
in action, along with Panhard armoured cars and armoured Land Rovers, as well as Marines in full combat gear. Allegedly, the troops patrolled for 118 hours a week and had been successful in stemming the numbers infiltrating the Province. It seemed certain, so the article claimed, that the presence of the Marines had proved a deterrent to those IRA sympathisers, usually teenage boys, who wanted to travel to the north to fight and die for a ‘free Ireland’.

  We knew differently. Despite the presence of 42nd Commando, we were still required to drive down to the border every so often to pick up a prisoner, take him back to Blackskull and shoot him. It seemed to us that one section of the border had been deliberately kept clear of Marines so that the IRA, believing they had found a gap in our defences, would send through men who were known to the authorities in the north and who could not, therefore, simply drive across as some raw IRA recruits did. The senior IRA men had to risk the dangers of a night crossing of the border in order to return to the north. It would be at that exact spot that the SAS would be waiting. The Marines were making the SAS task easier because we did not have to keep watch on so large a section of the border.

  Sunday, 30 January 1972 was a day I will never forget. We were sitting in our Portakabin in Long Kesh, idly watching TV, when a news flash announced that shooting had taken place in the Bogside in Londonderry and there were unconfirmed reports that a number of people had been hit.

  That day, 10,000 people, mainly Catholic supporters, accompanied by some Protestants and clergymen from both faiths, had been taking part in a peaceful march organised by the Civil Rights Association. The marchers were approaching Free Derry Corner when troops on duty barred their route and made them turn back.