by Paul Bruce
The noise of the firing panicked JR and, unbelievably, he slammed his foot on the accelerator and roared away from the scene.
‘Slow down,’ Don shouted. ‘For fuck’s sake, slow down. You’ll only draw attention to us.’
JR obeyed, slowing the car to about 30mph, but we could see his eyes searching the road ahead and behind for any possible trouble. There was none.
As we drove back, Don said, ‘Now you can see how easy it is. He didn’t even look at the car, let alone know what hit him. And if JR doesn’t fucking panic we should have no trouble whatsoever.’
I had anticipated that there might be some danger, yet there had been none. I felt uneasy that we were, once again, being ordered to carry out a mission which I felt was unfair; driving up to totally unsuspecting, probably innocent, victims and blasting them away. We had heard the politicians going on about the appalling, cowardly actions of the IRA in killing innocent people with bombs or bullets. Now we were doing precisely the same.
That night, as I lay in bed thinking of our new mission, I couldn’t help asking myself why we had to stoop to the IRA’s cowardly ways of operating. I know I would find killing what could be innocent victims in cold blood very, very difficult when my turn came.
The following day, we checked the newspaper to see whether our shooting in Ballymurphy had been recorded by the police and passed to the press. We were virtually certain the man must have died, but there were no reports of a man being shot from a passing car.
The next day, we again checked the papers and read a report saying that a young male, who lived in the Lower Falls Road district, had been shot in cold blood by four men in a passing car. We knew instinctively that he was the man we had shot.
Reading the report of our ‘hit’ in the paper made me realise how vulnerable to questioning we would be if the RUC stopped us at any time and discovered weapons on us. I also realised that we would have some real explaining to do if they stopped us when we were carrying three SMGs, the ‘border special’ and JR’s holster pistol. The police would know exactly what we had been doing without needing to ask a single question. Even simply reading about it in the paper made us realise that the RUC would now be touring around on duty just looking for four young men in a car, any car. That would be enough for them to become suspicious and to stop and question us.
We knew we had our codeword as a standby but we never put all our faith in that because we knew that, if we became politically embarrassing, we would be left to carry the can. That weekend at the Union Club, I listened with interest when a loyalist club member told us of an IRA hit squad which, a few days before, had shot seven workers from Mackie’s Engineering as they left work at the end of their shift. Understandably, the man was very angry that the IRA could carry out such attacks in broad daylight on innocent workers.
I stayed silent but wondered whether the attack had taken place in revenge for our killing of a Catholic man the night before.
Early the following week, we again went out on a ‘milk run’. Again we toured round trying to find a young man walking alone in a solid Catholic area and keeping an eye open for any RUC car patrols. A number of people gave us suspicious looks as we toured the area and we were convinced that our car had become known. We would need to change it.
We found that night’s target walking alone towards us in a street off the Falls Road. Benny, sitting directly behind Don, would be the hitman. Don told JR to drive at under 30mph, but not to go too slowly because that would arouse immediate suspicion.
As we drew level with the man, he looked up. He seemed about forty, casually dressed, in shirt, trousers and jacket. A split second later, Benny had fired half a dozen rounds into him, the empty cases bouncing back into the car and hitting JR on the head.
JR shouted, ‘Fuck me,’ as the empty cases hit his head, as, at first, he wasn’t sure what the hell was going on and the empty cases were hot. When we realised what had happened, the three of us couldn’t help roaring with laughter that JR believed that someone had taken a potshot at him.
Later, JR enjoyed the joke too. ‘Next time I’m going to wear a fucking crash helmet,’ he said. ‘It’s too dangerous in this car.’
Again, I had looked back as we drove away. I saw only a crumpled body lying in the gutter. I stopped laughing.
Later that week, we were again out on a ‘milk run’ and again we found a lone young man walking in a street off the Falls Road. It was my turn to carry out the assassination. As the man walked towards the car, dressed in jeans and a sweater, I knew I would have a window of opportunity of perhaps five seconds to make sure of a hit. This time he was on the opposite pavement but still only about ten yards away. He never looked up. With the SMG on rapid, I pulled the trigger, firing off only three shots. I never saw his face. By the time I had lowered the gun and looked back, he was slowly collapsing to the ground. I didn’t hear him utter a sound.
As we drove back to camp, I felt a sense of relief not only that had I carried out my first hit but also that I would not be called upon to carry out another one for perhaps a week or two. Back at camp, though, I needed three cups of strong coffee to bring me back to my senses. I fell silent, not wanting to talk about it, already trying to forget the part I had played in the poor bastard’s death.
On 1 June, we read in the paper of increases in sectarian violence and sectarian murders. The paper stated that, between 20 and 30 May, two middle-aged Catholic men had been murdered while walking alone in the Ballymurphy and Falls Road areas of the city. We felt sure that we had been responsible for their deaths.
The newspapers were also full of the troubles and the politics behind the ever-changing situation. We read that Protestant loyalist groups were adopting a much higher profile, setting up road blocks in the Mount Pottinger and Woodstock Road areas of Belfast, both hard-line Protestant estates.
They were openly challenging both the RUC and the army who tried, without success, to persuade them to dismantle them. Sometimes the loyalists would erect barricades for a weekend, perhaps for only a night or sometimes for a week at a time, testing the authorities.
In the newspapers, loyalist politicians argued, reasonably enough, that the Catholics of the Bogside and Creggan in Londonderry had been permitted to set up their own ‘no-go’ areas for months at a time without any interference whatsoever from police or army. Loyalists argued that this gave the IRA the opportunity to set up bomb-making factories with impunity and to train and arm young IRA recruits who could use their ‘no-go’ areas from which to go out and attack police, army and civilian targets.
We also noted that many reasonable Catholic families were unhappy with the near civil war conditions now prevailing in Belfast and Londonderry and some were determined to try to put an end to the conflict. The first major peace meeting held in the Creggan on Tuesday, 23 May drew 2,000 people and all the speakers had called for an end to violence.
However, in the audience, there were about a hundred known IRA hardmen. They deliberately disrupted the meeting, drowning out the speakers by chanting, shouting and demanding that the meeting be broken up. Finally, the organisers could not continue and the meeting ended. Later, the IRA issued a statement saying, ‘We are not in favour of ending the violence.’
Five days later, on Sunday, 28 May, 5,000 Catholics turned out in Londonderry to attend a peace gathering, in open defiance of the IRA leadership who had called for all Catholics to stay away. The meeting was a great success but the IRA weren’t happy with the turn of events.
Behind the scenes, the IRA had warned those organising the peace demonstration that they must never repeat such demands for fear of a backlash from hard-line IRA supporters. The peace organisers were left in no doubt what might happen if they continued to challenge the men of violence.
On the same Sunday, 10,000 Protestant loyalists took to the streets of Belfast, marching in their uniforms in the largest show of strength ever presented since the troubles had begun three years earlier. Organised by the Ul
ster Defence Association and the Loyalist Association of Workers, it seemed that the Protestants were more determined than ever to take the law into their own hands.
The following day, Don went off to Lisburn in the green Cortina and returned driving a dark-brown Marina. We were taking no chances.
Twice in June we would be ordered back to the forest, north-west of Belfast, to dispose of IRA men handed over to us by our SAS mates on the border. Twice I would pull the trigger as the drugged young men walked, without the least resistance, the twenty yards from where JR parked the car to the trench carefully prepared by the forester at the end of the clearing.
By now, it had become difficult for me to carry out these executions. Before each mission, I would feel physically sick, fighting to keep down the meal I had just eaten, worried that I would vomit in front of my three mates. I knew JR and Benny would think I had simply been ill but I knew Don would know the real reason behind it.
I needed to keep a tight hold on my nerves, especially when we were driving with the victim in the car, sitting right next to me, his leg pressed against mine in the tight confines of the back seat. I would listen to his breathing, knowing that, within a matter of a few minutes, he would have taken his last breath. I was secretly happy that they were now being drugged before being handed over to us, because now they didn’t move or speak. If they had spoken, I wondered whether I would still have the nerve to go through with the shooting. After each execution, I found it almost impossible to fall asleep, unable to sort out in my mind whether I was engaged in carrying out a job of which I should be justifiably proud, keeping killers off the streets of Northern Ireland, or whether I had really become nothing but a killer myself, a member of an assassination squad. That thought made my stomach turn. During those months, I would wake perhaps two or three times a week, having suffered yet another ghastly nightmare. I would be covered in sweat and shaking. Yet somehow I didn’t cry out and my mates never realised the hell I was going through. If they had thought my nerve had gone, Don would have shipped me back to Hereford. He would not have wanted another liability on his hands, for we were already carrying JR.
The more agitated I became, the more my thoughts turned to Maria back in England. I yearned to be back on the mainland, away from Ireland and the killings, and to be with her. From time to time, I still saw Lizzie but I had found that she could not give me the same support and understanding that I had found in the hours I spent with Maria.
I was worried. I felt that Lizzie’s father had decided I would be an acceptable son-in-law. He didn’t understand that I had no wish to stay in his beloved Northern Ireland. He had talked of putting our name down for a council house, suggesting that we would not have to wait very long, although we were not yet engaged, let alone planning to marry.
He couldn’t understand, as Lizzie couldn’t understand, that Ulster had become the last place on earth where I wanted to settle down. They had no idea of the life I had been living, no idea of the senseless, endless killings I had been ordered to carry out. I had come to hate the place and all the people who lived there – Protestants as well as Catholics. I came to see the sectarian hatred everywhere I looked, in every conversation I heard, even in Lizzie. And yet, in reality, Lizzie had never gone out of her way to blame the Catholics for pushing the Province to the edge of civil war; indeed, some of the discussions she became involved in suggested she felt an understanding, even sympathy, for the Catholic minority over the way the Protestants had treated them for generations.
I felt guilty about Lizzie every time I saw her because I now knew that I could never stay with her, even if we were to settle down together somewhere in England. I came to realise that, if I settled down with Lizzie, I would never be able to escape the horror of my life in Ulster. It would not be her fault at all but I knew that would be the reality of it and that would be unfair on her and her family.
The time had come for me to leave Lizzie but I found it difficult to find the strength to say so. Arguments began between us and the fun and the love we had shared for months evaporated. She knew it. Repeatedly she would ask me what was wrong and whether I still loved her and every time I lied because I didn’t want to hurt her.
I knew I could never tell her the truth of my life in Northern Ireland and so I began to tell white lies, telling her that I was on duty for nights at a time when, in reality, I wouldn’t be. It took perhaps a month or so before she realised that I was a changed man and that the relationship was heading for the rocks.
She didn’t want that. She seemed genuinely in love with me and I believe she wanted us to marry but I knew I couldn’t go through with it, for her sake as well as mine. She would cry and cry whenever we said goodnight and I would feel guilty whenever we made love. I felt guilty just sharing a meal with the family and prayed that the move back to Hereford would come quickly but there was no word of our future. It seemed, indeed, as though the authorities believed we were doing rather a good job causing fear and alarm among the Catholics of Belfast.
Whenever possible, I would telephone Maria at her post office in Tidworth, trying to find the best time when she could chat for more than a couple of minutes. I came to rely on those phone calls because they brought me closer to her. The calls formed a lifeline, together with my dream of escaping from Ireland. The more I talked to her, the more I felt there was an end, not far away, a time when I would leave the Province and return to a life of normality in England.
I had also discovered another escape from reality – alcohol. I had never been a big drinker, always secure in my mind that I didn’t need much alcohol to enjoy myself. My SAS training had also taught me that the more I drank, the less fit I would become. As someone had said to me at training camp, ‘When did you last see a really fit drunk?’
Now, whenever the pressures became too much for me, I would want to go out and have a real drink, perhaps four or five pints of beer, with Bacardi chasers. That always did the trick, enabling me to get some sleep at night rather than lying awake worrying and miserable.
However, we were about to be given a mission which would help to restore some pride in our professionalism. We were selected to trace, find and take out a violent IRA man who had beaten, tortured and killed an innocent British soldier.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Nineteen-year-old William Best, a young Catholic boy from the Creggan, who had been brought up in Londonderry, signed on with the Royal Irish Rangers, a British regiment drawn from both Catholic and Protestant sides of the Province.
Before joining the army in 1971, IRA activists had put pressure on him, seeking his active support in the Republican cause, appealing through his religion and nationalism for him to join them and fight the British Army.
He had wanted none of it and went off to Belfast to join the army, the only way he knew to escape the pressure from the strong IRA contingent in Londonderry who seemed to wield all the power in the Catholic areas of the city.
After serving for twelve months with the Rangers, he decided to go home to see his parents and family in Londonderry. That decision would cost him his life.
On 25 May 1972, while out visiting friends in another part of Londonderry, an IRA squad picked him off the street as he walked back home.
He disappeared. His parents, his extended family and friends of the Best family scoured the streets searching for him after he failed to make contact or return home. They became worried because he had promised to return by 10pm.
The police were notified but to no avail. He had disappeared without trace.
Two days later, Private William Best’s body was discovered lying in a pool of blood on waste ground in William Street, Londonderry, in full view of passersby. His head was covered by a hood; his hands tied with wire behind his back.
When his parents went to identify their son, he was unrecognisable. Private Best had been beaten and tortured for 48 hours by squads of IRA thugs who had been permitted to come and take out their anger and hatred on a defenceless young
soldier, a member of a good Catholic family, one of their own, who had dared to join the British Army.
The torture and killing of Private Best would become a watershed in the IRA’s campaign in Londonderry. Hundreds of women, most of them Catholics, turned out for his funeral, venting their rage on the IRA for daring to kill one of their own, an innocent youth of nineteen who had decided to leave the troubles behind him and seek a new life in the British Army, as many young Catholics had done before.
The killing caused such violent argument and dissension within the ranks of the Official IRA that, as a direct result, the Officials issued a statement repudiating violence and announcing an end to all violent action. From that time on, the Official IRA turned instead to political aims, leaving the hard men of the Provisional IRA to take the centre ground, declaring themselves the only true saviours of the Catholic and nationalist causes.
At Lisburn headquarters, however, a decision was taken that, come what may, the IRA thugs who had beaten, tortured and murdered young Best would be traced, hounded and killed in retribution for their evil deed.
One morning in mid-June, Don returned from a briefing at Lisburn with the news that intelligence sources had traced one of the men primarily responsible for the torture and murder of Private Best and we had been selected to deal with him. Don had been shown a photograph of the wanted man.
He had quit Londonderry and the Official IRA and moved to Belfast where he had been welcomed by the hard men of the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional IRA. Because of his record of torture and killing, the wanted man had been treated almost as a hero and made most welcome.
Intelligence officers had heard rumours that the man would be on the move again shortly, leaving his safe house in Belfast perhaps later that day. His destination was unknown and therefore he would have to be traced, lifted and dealt with that very day and in broad daylight. The safe house was on the edge of a strong Catholic area south of Belfast.
