I distinctly remember the news footage of Carron as he was released from Crumlin Road jail. He had been given bail to fight the Westminster by-election in the Fermanagh-South Tyrone constituency and I remember thinking the authorities were stupid to release him because the first chance he got he’d jump the border. Carron did go on the run in the Irish Republic and was captured, but the British government failed in their bid to extradite him. He claimed he was on a ‘Michael Stone hit list’ and the RUC were involved in wanting him killed. The Irish government listened and refused to extradite him. I regret that I did not assassinate Owen Carron. The fact he was caught with an automatic rifle was proof enough for me.
It was November 1984. The year was almost over and the UFF was responsible for just one death. Republicans had killed forty-nine people. I vowed that by New Year’s Eve the UFF would be able to add at least one more figure to their year total. Nineteen eighty-five would bring a major change for the UFF. It would see the start of an all-out assault on the Republican movement. In the meantime I was frustrated. Carron hadn’t worked out. I needed to kickstart the UFF’s new campaign.
An intelligence officer gave me a montage of mugshots of ten men and asked me to pick one. I studied the ten faces and decided on number one. It was my intention to work my way through the whole sheet. Number one was Patrick Brady. I chose him on a Thursday evening. The following morning he was dead. Brady was a milk deliveryman for Kennedy Brothers’ Dairy in South Belfast. He was thirty-five, married with two daughters and lived near the Upper Falls Road.
After I chose Brady, the intelligence officer handed me an individual file in a brown envelope. It was a substantial file and expertly put together. I told the UFF that I would only agree to the sanction if the file proved Brady was a legitimate target, otherwise I wouldn’t do it. It contained photographs and documents confirming exactly what I needed to know. Brady was a legitimate target. He was a member of Sinn Fein. Some of the papers in his file were very professional. There were notes on people that he met and associated with, along with times and places. It gave the name of his wife and two daughters. Best of all were the grainy black and white photographs, grabbed from a video of the most recent Sinn Fein annual conference in Dublin, clearly showing Brady standing on stage beside Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.
The file also showed that Brady used his milk run to gather information in West Belfast. I agreed to the sanction. From the file, I had a clear profile of his every move, from house to car and car to work. It took him just five minutes to drive from his home in St James’s Crescent in West Belfast to the dairy on the Boucher Road, where he would pick up his milk float and do his round. The file showed him to be a big man, at least twenty stone. I knew he wouldn’t be able to run away from me. I was fit. If he did try to escape, I could catch him.
I burnt his file in a dustbin in my backyard and, as the flames destroyed the pictures and notes, I mentally chose my weapons. It had to be a big gun like a shotgun. It would take more than a revolver or a pistol to kill this heavy man. I chose a Remington 45 pistol and a Remington automatic shotgun using number-four cartridges. The weapons were sourced privately. I had two men to accompany me on the hit, one an experienced operator and a young lad who was to be blooded on his first sanction. The young driver and myself did a dry run the night before using a clean car. I told him nothing about the hit. I didn’t want him to have any time to think about it. I assessed the possibility of killing the target at his home but decided against it. I knew I had a window of time to carry out the sanction. Luck was on my side. Milkmen started work early, and that meant my escape routes would be traffic-free and the security forces thin on the ground.
In the early hours of 16 November I made my way on foot to the nearby Stormont Hotel. I knew I could get a car in the hotel car park because the odd tourist and businessman chose the place for overnight stays. I picked a brown Ford Cortina, hot-wired it in seconds and calmly drove off, tooting my horn at the night watchman. He waved back, thinking I was a member of the night staff going home.
At Braniel Primary, I collected the first of my associates. The young lad was hiding in bushes and had the weapons that I had collected and given to him the night before. They were wrapped in a tartan blanket and placed on the back seat. I moved into the passenger seat and the youngster took the wheel. Full of enthusiasm, he drove off and asked what the job was. It was his first operation on active service and I didn’t want to unnerve him. I told him it was a robbery and we were going to rob the payroll clerk who worked for the dairy on the Boucher Road. I explained to him the drill: we pull up, we park the car, we rob the dairy, we leave. Later, when the operation was completed, I would explain everything to him.
On the outskirts of the city we picked up the second member of the squad. I crawled into the back seat and he got in the front. Dressed in his trademark boiler suit, gloves and monkey hat, he was an experienced volunteer who knew the drill. If my gun failed, he would open fire on the target. If we were attacked by Republicans or the security forces, it was his job to return fire. He shocked me by announcing he wanted to get out of the car and couldn’t go through with the operation. I looked at him and asked him to repeat what he’d said. He said he didn’t want to be involved and wanted out of the car.
The driver started to slow down and I could hear the panic rising in his teenage voice when he asked what was wrong. The back-up man repeated his request. The car was doing fifty miles per hour. I told him if he wanted to go, then he was free to go; all he had to do was open the door and jump. I said the car wasn’t slowing or stopping for him just because he had taken a fit of the ‘girlies’. His hand was on the door handle. I told him to think about what he was doing and that he could change his mind, but he shook his head violently. I yelled at him to open the door and jump. And he did. He sprang from his seat on to the open road. I heard the bounce as he hit the tarmac but I didn’t look back. He was big and ugly enough to look after himself.
He had let me down. I was determined that he wouldn’t compromise the sanction. I was determined the target would be assassinated even with an unblooded volunteer as my deputy. The poor lad was confused and kept asking, ‘What’s up?’ and ‘Why did he panic?’ I told him I would explain later. In fact, I had no idea why the back-up man chickened out and so had no explanation for the driver. The back-up man had been on sanctions before, but I was clueless about his behaviour. I put the pistol on the seat between the driver’s legs, the barrel pointing forward. I felt his fear, so I joked with him about not moving in case he blew his testicles off. He laughed, but it was a nervous laugh.
We were on the Boucher Road and had arrived with time to spare. I told my driver we were looking for a white Volvo 340. It was still dark. I told the lad to drive to St James’s Crescent and there we saw Brady’s Volvo parked outside his red-brick terraced house. I explained that the man we wanted was a wages clerk who kept the payroll money overnight and we were going to jump him as he set off to work. A police Land Rover pulled up alongside us. I urged the youngster not to panic and to give a little nod of acknowledgement, and the Land Rover kept moving. We left St James’s Crescent to take up position at the dairy, and parked directly opposite it. The radio was on, playing a tune called ‘Blue Monday’. The volume shot up and the driver turned around to look at me, saying he loved the song and was going to buy the single later that day.
Out of the corner of my eye I caught the white Volvo and all my senses kicked in. The radio was flicked off. I told the driver to gently pull up alongside the car. This had to be timed to perfection. We couldn’t linger. Brady had to be shot on the street. I couldn’t follow him into the dairy. I had also been ordered to shoot Brady’s young helper, and chose the lighter revolver for this part of the operation. The shotgun was loaded and sat on my lap. I waited for my moment. We pulled up alongside the Volvo. I wound down the window. At this point Brady was out of the car and at the passenger side. He couldn’t lock his door from his side and walked roun
d to the other side to use the key.
Brady’s move gave me an extra five seconds. I heard the driver say, ‘Let’s go, jump out, that’s our man’, but I didn’t jump out. I had a perfect line of vision. The barrel of the shotgun was perched on the open window. I could see the target clearly and he knew what was about to happen because he dropped his car keys and tried to run. I zeroed in with the Remington and fired. I hit him once in the chest and I heard him call for his mother. As he fell, I shot him once in the head. I twisted in the car seat and pointed the shotgun at his helper, who was standing with his mouth open in shock. He was standing under a street lamp and I could see his face clearly in the light. Paul Anthony Hughes was a very young, skinny kid who looked about twelve. I had my orders to shoot him, but I couldn’t do it. I later learnt he was a stand-in helper. I fired one shot into the wall and screamed at the driver to get moving, boot to the floor.
Tyres spinning, we sped towards Tate’s Avenue. I loaded the shotgun with three more cartridges. This extra firepower was a precaution in case we got into difficulties with the Army or police. Driving along Shaw’s Bridge, we were passed by several police cars going at top speed, obviously making their way to the scene of the shooting. The driver never spoke. His hands were clamped to the steering wheel. It was a frosty morning and I felt the car slide from under us when we hit some black ice. I told the lad to slow down, but he never acknowledged me. The car kept gaining speed. I told him again to slow down, and the car skidded to a halt. He looked at me. He didn’t speak. He just looked like he was about to burst into tears.
‘The money … what about the robbery? I thought it was a robbery for the UFF.’
‘You have done your first hit. We executed a Republican.’
I felt like a bastard. The youngster was thrown in at the deep end and had been blooded without even a second’s notice. He just shook his head and drove on. We dumped the car in a lovers’ lane near the Upper Braniel Road and walked across fields for a couple of miles before going our separate ways. I put the weapons in the hide on Shandon golf course. I arrived back home at 8am and changed my clothes in the shed. I always kept spare trousers and shirts there for a quick change after coming back from active service. Leigh-Ann was up, getting breakfast for our baby son. I needed her out of the house, so after Daryl was fed I gave her money and asked her to do some shopping. The fire had been kept burning overnight and I burnt all my clothes. I took a bath, scrubbing every inch of my skin and hair. It was the only way to destroy the cordite residue that had been absorbed into my skin.
In my paramilitary life I had a ritual. I never looked at newspapers and I never watched television reports. The radio was my only source of news. Mid-morning bulletins confirmed Patrick Brady’s death, and that same day the UFF claimed responsibility for the murder in a telephone call to Downtown Radio. I tried to look at Brady’s death in a detached way. He was a soldier and I was a soldier, and in war soldiers die. I didn’t want to expose myself to the human aspect, the grieving widow and the weeping children, because that’s when it becomes real. That is when a target becomes a human being. The grief and pain of the target’s loved ones would be enough to make me stop. I wasn’t a trophy Loyalist, unlike many of my colleagues. I tried to look at it as a job that had to be done. I tried to see the target as a target, not a human being, but when I pulled the trigger a little part of me died too. I tried not to feel anything, but I did. Only a monster would feel nothing. When you take a man’s life you lose part of yourself and part of your humanity for ever.
But that night I did see the Belfast Telegraph. On the front page was a picture of the body of Patrick Brady lying on the road covered with a blanket. The headline told how the UFF claimed responsibility for his murder. John McMichael’s brigade claimed it. Leigh-Ann showed me the paper and said it was a terrible crime and she felt sorry for his poor wife and daughters. I agreed with her. Another dead body on our streets was a sad and terrible thing. Reaction to Brady’s death was swift. Sinn Fein admitted he was a member of their organisation but his funeral bore no paramilitary trappings. Mourners included Gerry Adams and his closest adviser, Danny Morrison.
A few weeks later I met both of the men who accompanied me on the sanction. I gave the driver fifteen hundred quid out of my own pocket and told him the UFF wanted him to have it. I apologised for his baptism of fire and he said he understood. I never worked with the lad again and I understand he never took part in another UFF operation. The back-up man’s paramilitary career was also finished and he never again worked on active service. No one would touch him after he jumped from the car, because no one trusted him. He had bottled it and now had paramilitary baggage. When we met he told me that he was in his forties and active service was a young man’s game. He told me he was too old and too tired and he couldn’t run the risk of being shot or sent to prison. He said he knew the time was right for him to leave. We shook hands and parted. I never saw the man again.
After my arrest following Milltown in March 1988, Tommy ‘Tucker’ Lyttle, brigadier of the West Belfast UDA, would publicly deny that I had anything to do with Paddy Brady. He told the press that the man responsible was a hired mercenary and not a member of the UDA/UFF. Brady’s wife even repeated this in a subsequent television interview. Her husband’s name appeared on a UFF intelligence file circulating in South Belfast. It was a UFF-sanctioned operation.
After Brady I dedicated myself to the elimination of known Sinn Fein and PIRA operatives. It was my intention to work my way through the montage. Number two on the sheet was Robert McAllister. My attempt on his life would take place on the same day as my wedding to my second wife, Leigh-Ann Shaw. She was just nineteen when we married, and came from a middle-class area called Glenview, bordering the Braniel estate, and had been living with me for some time after my break-up from Marlene.
Robert McAllister’s son was serving a prison sentence for having information useful to terrorists. The lad had been caught with the car registrations of several senior Loyalists, including John McMichael and Supreme Commander Andy Tyrie. The intelligence file told me his father and grandmother lived on the Ormeau Road. I was ordered to assassinate Robert McAllister. John McMichael supplied me with a Mills 36 hand grenade for the job. I took it from his base in the snooker hall at Lisburn, concealing it in a tub of chocolate doggy treats, and transported it to my arms hide hidden in the door panel of my car. The grenade was a Second World War weapon, brutal and effective. The Mills 36 was dubbed the ‘chocolate bar’ because of the tiny fragments of metal which spread when detonated and also because, like a chocolate bar, ‘everyone gets a bit’.
But I had a problem. I had seen a file on McAllister’s son, but I wasn’t sure about McAllister himself. In my heart I was uncomfortable with the operation. I had promised to target only Republicans and active Sinn Fein members. Robert McAllister was neither.
My attempt on McAllister’s life came right in the middle of political unrest. From July 1985 there had been sporadic violence in Protestant areas when the RUC prevented Orangemen marching through streets in Portadown. The political climate was also hotting up. There was more and more dialogue between London and Dublin and that made my blood boil.
I checked McAllister’s house and decided the only option was to blow up the car by attaching the grenade to the steering column with cables. I didn’t want to go into the house and kill the target there. He lived with his elderly mother. I didn’t want her to be harmed in crossfire or to witness the execution. At four o’clock on the morning of my wedding to Leigh-Ann Shaw, I wired McAllister’s car. I slid under the bonnet and attached the Mills using a pushbike brake cable, but I needed a second cable. I didn’t have one and was forced to improvise with my bootlace, which I tied to the grenade pin. When the car was put in gear, the Mills would explode. Men who worked in the nearby Ormeau bakery were arriving for work and some had to pass McAllister’s car, parked on a sidestreet near his home. As I worked quickly and quietly to attach the Mills, one stopped and
spoke. He said, ‘Hiya, Rob, having problems with the motor again?’, but kept walking. Hours later I exchanged vows with Leigh-Ann and took time from the wedding celebrations to listen to the radio news. The bomb never exploded. It was spotted by one of McAllister’s colleagues as he arrived for work later that day. I saw the footage of the car being towed away by a police vehicle to be detonated by an Army bomb-disposal unit.
Unknown to me, UFF intelligence officers had in fact targeted McAllister because they couldn’t get to their real target, his son. So they got to the son by trying to kill his father.
My marriage to Leigh-Ann fared little better than my first marriage. We had two children together – Daryl and Lucy – but our marriage started to fall apart within six months. I wasn’t committed to her, and started seeing someone else. But it took a long time for the divorce to go through.
Politically, Northern Ireland was moving up a gear and my paramilitary life was also shifting into top gear. In November 1985 the Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed at Hillsborough Castle, the official residence of Northern Ireland’s Secretary of State. The signatories were the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and the Irish Premier, Dr Garrett Fitzgerald. In my eyes it was the beginning of the end of Northern Ireland’s British status. The political pundits dressed it up, saying it was the most far-reaching political development since 1921, when Northern Ireland was created. I disagreed. It was Northern Ireland’s death knell. The communiqué issued after the signing said the aims were to promote peace and stability, the reconciliation of the two traditions, the creation of a new climate of friendship and cooperation in combating terrorism. The radical feature of the Agreement was that it set up a joint ministerial conference of British and Irish ministers backed by a permanent secretariat at Maryfield. I was incensed; Protestants and Loyalists were being led by the nose to a united Ireland. We were being handed, wholesale, over to Dublin.
None Shall Divide Us Page 7
