by Peter Taylor
Grieve dashed back to New Scotland Yard to confer and remembers hearing the blast, watching the windows shake and seeing a red glow in the sky in the east.2 It was seven o’clock. When he arrived at Docklands’ South Quay, he looked at the devastation and tried to come to terms with the size of the task that lay ahead. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t ask yourself, “Gosh! Where do I start?”’ he said. In his thirty years as a detective in the ‘Met’, he had never seen devastation like it before, at least not that he would have to deal with directly. ‘I was looking at half a billion pounds’ worth of criminal damage, two deaths, seventy Grievous Bodily Harms (GBHs), and three hundred-odd injuries of one kind or another,’ he told me. He consoled himself with the fact that he was surrounded by a ‘highly experienced team of detectives, trained over the past twenty-five years, who were totally unfazed by the scale of the task.’
Grieve began by triggering the public’s response. Over the years during which the IRA had targeted the capital, the ‘Met’ had developed a strategy known as ‘Communities Defeat Terrorism’ in which the public’s help was enlisted and every scrap of information it provided was sifted and analysed. In Northern Ireland, getting information from all sections of the community was not easy when some members of one side supported the IRA, but in London, where the entire community was ranged against those who sought to terrorize it, it was a different story. As Grieve explained, the strategy was to make the environment as hostile as possible for the terrorist to operate in.
I would argue that communities defeat terrorism. Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung and all of them tell you the terrorist as the irregular fighter swims in the sea of the population. You poison that sea for them and you make life very difficult. You make it difficult for them to hire houses, make it difficult for them to move about, make their documentation difficult, make it difficult for them to get transportation, make it difficult to get reconnaissance. Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) makes them extraordinarily nervous. You can make this a hostile environment, and that, hopefully, drives them into the democratic process. They decide terrorism’s not worth the candle.
Soon Grieve and his team had identified the bomb-truck and traced its route by scrutinizing the videos from motorway cameras. A computer-generated picture of it was widely disseminated through the media and the public was asked to help by ringing a specially dedicated hot-line. The 300th call provided the lead that Grieve’s team had been hoping for. ‘Your bomb-truck was parked on a piece of wasteland outside my business,’ the caller said, ‘and there’s material still here that they threw off the vehicle.’ The bomb-truck had been spotted in River Road, Barking. Police officers on their hands and knees did a finger-tip search of the area and finally came up with a vital clue that put SO 13 on the trail of the bombers. Specialist police officers found a thumb-print on a Truck and Driver magazine discarded in River Road that matched a thumb-print on an ash tray at a truck stop on the M6 outside Carlisle, which matched a thumb-print on the loading ticket on the Stena Line ferry from Belfast. With the help of the RUC, the prints were meticulously checked against the records of every IRA suspect on file but all enquiries drew a blank. ‘We looked everywhere for him,’ said Grieve, ‘but we had no idea who he was.’ He became known as ‘The Triple Thumb-print Man’.
The bomb-truck’s trail led to South Armagh and Grieve was determined to follow it through. The RUC warned him just how difficult and dangerous it would be to collect the kind of evidence they were looking for. ‘One of the things they said to us was, “How many casualties are you willing to take amongst yourselves, us and the army if you carry out the kind of search regimes that you carry out in London?”’ He was advised that searching a particular house or premises for several days on end would entail ‘substantial casualties’. Grieve and the RUC worked out a plan that would enable the team to operate to maximum effect with the minimum danger under the RUC’s careful security control. By this time, the team knew what they were looking for. ‘We became experts in paint chipping, welding and aluminium extrusion,’ Grieve said. He was not prepared to let the IRA rest untouched in its redoubt. He and his team shared the same view: that the IRA had come to London to plant a bomb, and now they were coming to South Armagh to get them. They found the forensic evidence they were looking for on the farm where the IRA had prepared the bomb-truck but they failed to get any closer to identifying ‘The Triple Thumb-print Man’. He remained at liberty, unknown and untouched – at least for the time being.
The Docklands bomb was only the beginning of the IRA’s renewed offensive which had been planned months before. The tactic employed became known by the security forces and intelligence services on both sides of the Irish Sea as ‘focused terrorism’, the objective being to cause as much disruption as possible without killing or injuring civilians. The IRA knew that it was vital not to alienate Sinn Fein’s growing political support that was the launch pad for the next phase of the ‘struggle’. The IRA had presented itself as the occupant of the moral high ground by blaming John Major for insisting on decommissioning and reneging on the promise of all-party talks following a cessation. To hold that ground, the IRA needed to be wary of what it did once it returned to ‘war’. ‘New’ Sinn Fein voters would probably accept IRA attacks on military installations in the North and economic targets in Great Britain but would not be supportive of operations that resulted in civilian deaths.
In the run-up to the British General Election of 1 May 1997, which was to see the landslide victory of Labour’s Tony Blair, the IRA gave warnings of bombs on England’s motorway and rail network and at the Aintree Grand National. The result was chaos with no inconvenience to Sinn Fein’s electorate. The IRA intended to take care, not that that meant its attacks would be any less devastating. The intelligence services were caught on the hop, suspecting that the IRA would end its cease-fire but not knowing when or where. The Docklands ASU got under the wire, not least because the operation was planned and prepared in South Armagh which, to the intelligence services, was almost the dark side of the moon.
Nine days after the South Quay bomb, S013 and MI5, to whom the ‘Met’s’ Anti-Terrorist Squad now worked, had a breakthrough when a young IRA Volunteer, Edward O’Brien (21), blew himself up with his own bomb in London’s Aldwych. He had boarded a Number 171 double-decker bus carrying a take-away food bag and had been standing by the door of the bus when the bomb exploded, killing him and injuring the bus driver, another passenger and three bystanders. O’Brien, who had been a ‘sleeper’ in London for two years, was a ‘clean skin’ who had never come to the attention of British intelligence. Not even his family, who lived in the Irish Republic, in Gorey, County Wexford, knew their son had joined the IRA. The family was strongly anti-republican and issued a statement condemning all paramilitary organizations ‘unreservedly’ and saying that they wished to have nothing to do with them. When Grieve’s men searched O’Brien’s flat, they found 15 kg of Semtex, 20 timers, 4 detonators and ammunition for the Walther 9 mm handgun he was carrying when he died.3 They also found a new list of IRA targets.4
But the IRA’s next target was not on the list. On 15 June 1996, a 3,500-lb lorry bomb exploded in the centre of Manchester, injuring 200 people and causing damage estimated to be between £100 and £300 million. Again, there was no intelligence that it was coming. Grieve believed it bore all the hallmarks of an impromptu operation designed to have maximum impact with minimum of planning, thereby reducing the risk of the perpetrators being caught during the preparatory stage. ‘Manchester said that they’d changed their tactics. When you look at that device, there were fairly strong indications that it was set up and delivered in a fairly short time-scale without doing all the complex, sophisticated things that they did around the Docklands bomb. It looked like “get in and out fairly quickly. Pick up the bomb-truck over here, load it here and deliver it here.”’ Although the vehicle used in the Manchester bombing was purchased in England, Grieve had little doubt that the bomb itself was m
ade up in South Armagh.
By the early summer of 1996, with Docklands and the centre of Manchester reduced to bomb sites, things did not look good for what Grieve referred to as ‘UK Counter-Terrorism PLC’. This was the umbrella anti-IRA front of the ‘Brits’, embracing Northern Ireland and the mainland and utilizing the resources of RUC Special Branch, the ‘Det’, the FRU (though its name had been changed after the Brian Nelson controversy), MI5, the ‘Met’ and Special Branch officers in London and around the country. After Manchester, to the relief of intelligence chiefs, ‘UK Counter-Terrorism PLC’ came good. The operation was code-named ‘Airlines’ and involved over 100 police officers and 100 officers from MI5. On 4 July 1996, Dublin-born Donal Gannon (33), one of the IRA’s most experienced ‘engineers’, was spotted in London by CCTV at Tooting Broadway Underground station in South London. Given the way that the intelligence services work, it is unlikely that this was the first sighting or knowledge that Gannon was in town. There was almost certainly prior intelligence, in this case probably from MI5 and possibly MI6 agents in Ireland, that he and other experienced IRA men were on their way.
The IRA had assembled one of the most experienced ASUs in many a year to carry out one of its most audacious attacks. They planned to shut down London by blowing up six of the main national grid electricity substations encircling the capital at Amersham, Elstree, Waltham Cross, Canterbury, Weybridge and Rayleigh. ‘Shutdown’ date was planned for 22 July 1996. The operation was based on the IRA’s ‘S’ (for ‘Sabotage’) plan in which it had hoped to do a similar thing at the outset of its wartime mainland campaign in 1939.
Different agencies used different code-names for Gannon. MI5 called him ‘Paradise News’ and S013 called him ‘Felt Tip’, presumably after he had been watched copying from The Electricity Supply Handbook at a public library in Lavender Hill.5 Gannon was followed to 58 Woodberry Street in Tooting where other members of the ASU were identified, including John Crawley (39), a former US Marine who had been gaoled for gun-running after the Marita Ann was seized by the Irish authorities in 1984 off the coast of Kerry with seven tons of American arms on board; and Gerard Hanratty (37), who had been arrested in Germany in connection with the IRA’s European campaign. Intensive surveillance also led the ‘watchers’ to other members of the ASU and a house at 61 Lugard Road in Peckham where thirty-seven large wooden boxes fitted with batteries, electrical circuits, and timer power units (TPUs) were found. The TPUs were being electrically charged in the cellar. The Semtex (estimated to be around 133 kilos) that would have pulled the plug on London’s power supply was never found, although the police searched more than 7,000 lock-up garages and similar premises in South London. As a consolation, however, they did find forty stolen vehicles and uncover more than £1 million worth of drugs and stolen property.6 It is almost certain, given experience in Northern Ireland, that the premises in both Tooting and Peckham had been bugged. On 15 July 1996, a week before ‘shutdown’, S013 moved in and arrested eight men believed to be members of the ASU.
When the case came to court in June 1997, one of the accused, Gerard Hanratty, put forward the defence that the reason no explosives had been found was that they did not exist. He claimed from the dock at the Old Bailey that the plan had been to make ‘dummy’ bombs with icing sugar which, when X-rayed, looked just like Semtex. The theory was, according to Hanratty, that the authorities would then do the IRA’s job for it by turning off the electricity supply so bomb-disposal experts could ‘defuse’ the ‘explosives’. He said the IRA had no wish to alienate public opinion at a delicate stage in the peace process ‘by massive explosions’.7 Hanratty’s defence did not convince and, at the end of a fifty-six-day trial, six of the eight accused were sentenced to a total of 210 years for conspiring to cause explosions. Hanratty and Crawley were amongst the most senior IRA men ever convicted in England. Prosecuting counsel, Nigel Sweeney QC, told the court that, had the IRA’s updated ‘S’ plan succeeded, it would have been ‘the coup of the century for the IRA’.8 John Grieve knew that ‘UK Counter-Terrorism PLC’ had struck a powerful blow against its enemy.
I would have said it was one of the best teams that the IRA ever put together. We thought it was the mainland ‘A Team’ as every single member of it [of those convicted] was highly skilled with a long track record of commitment. Their downfall on this occasion was that they had to send a team that was willing and able to operate in this hostile environment. So they had to send people who would not betray themselves because of their nervousness and who understood how the world over here operated and could detect surveillance. They were very good at looking behind them. The trial at the Old Bailey heard how they would walk along, looking for evidence of surveillance offices, looking for earpieces in people’s ears, looking for microphones, looking for second people in cars. They were very slick but they just weren’t as good as the surveillance teams that were behind them.
No sooner had the ‘Airlines’ arrests been made than MI5 and SO13 were involved in an undercover operation against another IRA ASU based in London. It was code-named ‘Tinnitus’. In August 1996, two IRA men, Brian McHugh and Patrick Kelly (not the ‘Brighton bomber’), arrived in England to meet three men in London: Michael Phillips who worked as a British Airways engineer at Gatwick; James Murphy, an assistant groundsman at Latymer Upper School in West London; and Diarmuid O’Neill, who had been born in England and had worked in London for a number of years, having been a pupil at the prestigious London Oratory school.9 The plan was to succeed where the mainland ‘A Team’ had failed and attack power supplies and other targets in London and the south-east.
As in the ‘Airlines’ operation, the ASU was put under surveillance and followed for six weeks. A listening device was placed in their base, a flat at 38 Glenthone Road, Hammersmith. Undercover officers watched O’Neill doing a ‘recce’ of the power supply to the Channel Tunnel and visit premises in Hornsey where they subsequently discovered ten tons of home-made explosives (ten times the amount used in the Manchester bomb), 2 lbs of Semtex, 3 AK 47s, 2 car booby-trap devices, 2 handguns and 13 timer units. Police described it as a terrorists’ ‘one-stop shop’. Undercover experts, again using custom and practice pioneered by the ‘Det’ in Northern Ireland, ‘de-activated’ the weapons and detonators so that, if they were used, nothing would happen.
But ‘Tinnitus’ did not end as planned. At 5 a.m. on 23 September 1996, armed police from Scotland Yard’s Tactical Firearms Unit, S019, stormed the Glenthone Road flat where O’Neill was staying. The room had been searched by undercover officers beforehand and no weapons had been found. The surveillance equipment likewise gave no indication that there were weapons in the flat.10 Officers from S019 smashed down the door after the duplicate key had failed to work and swamped the room with CS gas. In the confusion, two of the officers opened fire and shot O’Neill six times. One of them, code-named ‘Kilo’, said he thought O’Neill’s body language ‘was aggressive’ and, because there was no reply to the shout of ‘Show me your hands!’, he believed his life was in danger.11 O’Neill was unarmed when he was shot. He died from his wounds a few hours later in nearby Charing Cross Hospital. Preliminary police reports said he was shot in a gun battle. No weapons were found in the flat. At the trial at the Old Bailey, three of the four accused were convicted on 16 December 1997 and gaoled for sixty-seven years for a plot to launch a bombing campaign in England.12 Michael Phillips, the British Airways engineer, was acquitted.
Since the ending of its cease-fire in February 1996, the IRA’s tactic had been to hit England in the belief that it would force the ‘Brits’ to honour their pledge of all-party talks and drop the insistence on decommissioning as a prerequisite. But it also resumed its more politically conscious campaign in Northern Ireland, albeit at a less intense level. This may have been because of the IRA’s desire not to alienate its growing electoral support or because the activities of British intelligence made it difficult to do otherwise. Perhaps it was a combination of the two. Killin
g soldiers and policemen, in particular in urban areas like Belfast and Derry, had become increasingly difficult not only because of pre-emptive intelligence but because their body-armour was designed to withstand most of the rounds the IRA could fire at them. Nevertheless the IRA’s attacks made up in publicity what they lacked in frequency. On 7 October 1996, in a security breach of massive proportions, two car bombs were driven into Army Headquarters (HQNI) at Lisburn through the ‘Pass Holders Only’ lane. Warrant Officer James Bradwell (43) was standing thirty feet away when the first bomb went off and then was caught again by the second whilst being treated for his injuries. He died in hospital four days later, never having recovered consciousness. Although he had been in his regiment for nineteen years, it was his first tour in Northern Ireland. He was due to retire in three years’ time. Thirty-one other people were injured in the two blasts.13
Four months later, on 12 February 1997, the IRA killed a second soldier, 23-year-old Lance-Bombardier Stephen Restorick from Peterborough. He was hit by an IRA sniper’s high-velocity bullet whilst manning a checkpoint in the village of Bessbrook in South Armagh. His parents, John and Rita Restorick, were devastated. It was what they had always feared since Stephen first went to Northern Ireland. ‘He always wanted to go into the RAF like his father and grandfather but recruitment was cut back and he wasn’t interested in the trade he was offered,’ Mrs Restorick told me. ‘He’d been unemployed for a few months and out of sheer desperation he went and signed on for the army. He knew it was the last thing I wanted him to do, but it was his life and he just saw it as a good career. I’d heard that there was a sniper working in South Armagh, and I always told Steve to keep his head down but there’s nothing you can do if you’re on a checkpoint. He was just a sitting duck.’
