The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  On the other hand, SAS patrols couldn’t adopt the aggressive fighting tactics that had served them so well in jungle and desert. In Borneo they had hit the enemy across the Indonesian frontier, but here they were not allowed to enter the Republic of Ireland – the natural resort of any terrorist under pursuit. They were also restricted to the same rules of engagement as any other British unit in the Province. They could open fire only if they had reason to believe a person was about to endanger life and there was no other means of stopping them, or if they had just killed or injured someone and there was no other way of making an arrest. Even then, shooting was only permissible after a warning.

  It was months before the SAS contingent built up to squadron strength. Some of the men came hot-foot from Dhofar, and lacked any special training for the Northern Ireland situation. ‘They came from the jebel and wadis of an Arabian kingdom where open warfare existed,’ Major ‘G’ commented, ‘and on to the streets of the United Kingdom, full of political and military restrictions and limitations. They had gone from one extreme to the other.’1

  From the start, the Regiment was caught in a knot of conflicting expectations. Their deployment had been accompanied by a blaze of media hype, including a twelve-minute BBC documentary showing SAS-men in training at Hereford. Hardliners saw the unit as a ‘death-squad’ brought in as a final resort to teach the terrorists a lesson they wouldn’t forget. Some even believed that the SAS shouldn’t be confined to the rules of engagement, and should be immune from prosecution. At the same time, the SAS was subject to closer-than-usual scrutiny by civil rights watchers and radicals, who regarded it as a fox let loose in the chicken-coop. ‘Is South Armagh so short of terrorist gangs … that it needs a new one to be imported?’ wrote journalist Claud Cockburn in the Irish Times. ‘… The SAS became famous during World War II and their deeds were treated as heroic rather than reprehensible. All such actions are applauded in an acknowledged war by people who find them horrifying or illegitimate unless a genuine war is going on. Now the Government is in the awkward position of … denying that it is waging war and yet defending the use of forces such as the SAS.’2

  The Prime Minister’s statement specified that the Regiment would operate ‘in uniform’ and carry the standard weapons issued to the British army. The rest of the army greeted their arrival with suspicion and resentment: the deployment of the SAS carried the implication that orthodox strategy had failed. Yet the Regiment was expected to clean up ‘Bandit Country’ following the same rules that had led to the problems in the first place. The SAS attitude was that they could either play it their way or go home.

  At first the troop patrolled the rolling gorse-covered downs, woods and meadows, wearing camouflage and carrying Bergens. They set up covert hides in hedgerows or copses, watching the movement of suspects in villages or isolated farmhouses, lugging in all their equipment. They manned the hides for up to ten days, without cooking or smoking, bagging excrement, peeing into plastic containers, talking in whispers. That they didn’t intend to confine themselves to this role, though, became evident when, within weeks of their insertion, they arrested Sean McKenna, a PIRA-man believed responsible for two attempted murders, two bomb-blasts, kidnapping and possession of firearms.

  In the early hours of 12 March, twenty-two-year-old McKenna was roused from sleep by two men wearing civilian jackets over combat trousers who had entered his house through a window and kicked in his bedroom door. One of them held a Browning 9mm pistol to his head and explained that if he put up a struggle or refused to come with them, he would immediately be ‘stitched’.

  Outside the house, the intruders were joined by a third man with a Sterling sub-machine gun. Though the men were evidently British soldiers, McKenna’s house lay at Edentubber near Dundalk, in the Republic of Ireland, about a quarter of a mile south of the border, where the British had no jurisdiction. McKenna was escorted over the border and taken to Bessbrook RUC station, eventually receiving a twenty-five-year sentence for his offences. The official story was that he’d been arrested wandering about, drunk, in a field on the British side.

  The SAS were able to pick up McKenna because they had access to intelligence of a higher grade than that provided by the local battalion. Major ‘G’ had been aware from the outset that the conditions under which they were supposed to function violated two of the three key principles of SAS operations: command at the highest level and intelligence at the highest level. In Armagh the SAS came under the commanding officer of 1 Royal Scots, and was limited to the intel provided by the battalion’s intelligence officer. It was to circumvent this that Capt. Robert Nairac was brought in.

  Nairac, whose murder by the IRA a year later would become a cause célèbre, was not and had never been an SAS officer. Since the Regiment’s first tour in Ulster, small groups of SAS-men had been working in the Province, mainly assigned intelligence duties. In late 1973 the SAS had helped set up a new undercover squad known as the Army Surveillance Unit – later 14 Intelligence Company. The unit had been developed from the SAS Northern Ireland cell by Captain Julian ‘Tony’ Ball, an ex-Parachute Regiment private who’d been commissioned in the Kings Own Scottish Borderers after serving in the ranks of 22 SAS. Another brainchild of Frank Kitson, lately commanding 39 Brigade in Belfast, the Unit had been created in recognition of the fact that SAS-men couldn’t pass themselves off as natives of Northern Ireland. As one ex-SAS commanding officer commented, at close quarters, even in plain-clothes, they tended to stand out.

  In effect, the Army Surveillance Unit was an ‘SAS’ squad raised for a specific environment, of the type envisaged years ago by Mike Calvert when creating the Malayan Scouts. Within a decade it would have become a fully-fledged member of the UK Special Forces Group. It recruited men – and eventually women – from other army units, and put them through a special selection. Designed and run by SAS staff, the course was highly demanding but without the long marches and heavy Bergens of SAS Selection proper. The Unit operated in three detachments, each assigned to the area covered by one of the three PIRA ‘Brigades’, and in its role of undercover surveillance it was highly successful.

  Nairac had worked closely with Tony Ball in setting up the unit that later became ‘14 Int.’ but according to witnesses never actually served with it. When the D Squadron troop was posted to Bessbrook, he was back with the Grenadier Guards in Britain. ‘G’ requested him specifically to act as liaison officer between the SAS and the RUC Special Branch. ‘Nairac was invaluable to us,’ he wrote, ‘in knowing … routes to Special Branch … They gave us the help that did enable us to apprehend five of the eleven top names on our list within two or three months. That was still with our eleven men …’3

  The second terrorist Nairac fingered was Peter Cleary, a staff captain of PIRA’s 1 Battalion in Armagh. Cleary had already been arrested by British forces and had since fled to the Republic, where he’d been given a three-year suspended sentence for firearms possession. In February, masked men in civilian clothes turned up at Cleary’s house in Belleek, on the northern side of the border, looking for him. They claimed to be Provisional IRA-men, but Cleary’s family tumbled them from their English accents, and believed they were SAS.

  In April, after three soldiers of 1 Royal Scots were blown up by a landmine in Belleek, the SAS found out from Nairac that Cleary was in the habit of visiting his fiancée, Shirley Hulme, in his sister’s house at Tievecrum, fifty metres north of the frontier. An SAS team staked out the house for three days, cammed up in a ditch nearby. At 1700 hours on the third day they spotted Cleary approaching the house, but stayed put until they were sniffed out by dogs, and clocked by a curious member of the family who shone a torch into the ditch. One of the SAS-men fired a shot in the air, and they closed in on the house. Cleary was identified by a man in civilian clothes – probably Nairac. They dragged the PIRA-man off to a field nearby, to await the arrival of a helicopter. Less than an hour after leaving the house, Cleary was dead.

  According to SAS
witnesses, all but one of the patrol went off to put down landing lights for the chopper, leaving Cleary alone with a single guard – an officer – armed with an SLR. Just as the heli approached, Cleary suddenly leapt at his minder and tried to grab the weapon. The SAS officer opened fire at hard-contact range, blamming off three shots. Cleary dropped dead at his feet.

  The shooting of Peter Cleary caused the first furore of the Regiment’s sojourn in Ulster. His family claimed that the SAS had beaten him up in a barn before pulling him off to the field, from where, only ten minutes later, they’d heard gunshots. The SAS said that Cleary had attempted to escape at the house, obliging them to restrain him by force, and that fifty-five minutes elapsed between quitting the house and the shooting incident. For many, Cleary’s death only confirmed that the SAS was operating as a ‘murder squad’. ‘Shot resisting arrest’ seemed an obvious euphemism for deliberate execution.

  Major ‘G’ admitted that some of the D Squadron boys arrived in Northern Ireland from Dhofar with a ‘hard-nosed attitude’, but pointed out that Cleary was too vital a resource to be shot out of hand. ‘In a tactical sense it was our loss too,’ he said. ‘It was the last thing we wanted.’4

  Very soon, though, the Cleary shooting was eclipsed by a scandal that brought into question the Regiment’s very competence. It began on 5 May, when two soldiers of D Squadron were halted by officers of the Garda Siochana – the Irish police – seven hundred metres across the frontier, in an unmarked Triumph 2000. The driver, Tpr. John Lawson, was wearing a brown pullover and a white shirt, and carrying a Browning 9mm pistol. The passenger, Cpl. Illisoni Ligari, a six-foot-two Fijian nicknamed ‘Horse’, who had taken part in Keeni-Meeni ops in Aden, was wearing a white overcoat. He was carrying a loaded Sterling sub-machine gun on his knees, hidden under a map.

  The men had crossed the border on the Newry–Dundalk road at about 2240 hours at a point code-named ‘Hotel One’, apparently unaware that there was a concealed checkpoint a little further on. When flagged down by Sgt. Patrick McLoughlin and Garda Murray, who were covered by a platoon of Irish soldiers, Lawson said they’d made a map-reading error. McLoughlin informed them that they’d brought firearms across the border illegally, and that he was arresting them under Section 30 of the Offences against the State Act. They were escorted to the Garda station at Omeath.

  Less than an hour later, McLoughlin and Murray stopped a Hillman Avenger and a Vauxhall Victor crossing the border at the same point. The cars were carrying another half-dozen D Squadron men, two of whom wore camouflage gear, the rest civvies. One man carried a sawn-off Remington shotgun, and the others Browning pistols or Sterlings. The driver of the first car, thirty-two-year-old Tpr. Vincent Thompson, told the police that they were looking for their two mates, who hadn’t reported in.

  McLoughlin replied that their comrades were in custody, and inquired how they’d come to cross an international border. Thompson said that they must have taken a wrong turn. When the sergeant ordered them to hand over their weapons, their senior rank, thirty-four-year-old Staff Sgt. Malcolm Rees, ex-3 Para, instructed the men not to comply. It was only when the cars were surrounded by Irish troops that the SAS-men finally submitted. They appeared in court in Dublin the following day, and were released on £40,000 bail.

  They were flown back to Bessbrook by chopper, where D Squadron’s OC, Major Brian Baty, MM, a former corporal commissioned in the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, ordered them straight to Aldergrove to be interrogated by the army’s Special Investigation Department. The other men in the troop protested that they shouldn’t be treated like criminals, but Baty was unsympathetic and ignored them, creating a near-mutiny. It was only when Director SAS Johnny Watts and the Regiment’s CO flew out to Bessbrook that the situation calmed down. Watts and the colonel told the group that if the men were put on trial, they would both resign.

  In fact, the SAS-men were caught in a cleft stick. If they admitted that they’d been ordered into the Irish Republic on a mission, it could cause a major breach in diplomatic relations. The only possible alternative was to persist in the ‘map-reading error’ scenario, which would hold them up to public ridicule.

  The episode set off the biggest press-bonanza yet. Some British newspapers were disgusted with the Garda, who they said could easily have turned a blind eye and sent the SAS back. The Sunday Times linked the incident with the human rights case being brought against the British government by the Irish in the European Court at Strasbourg, over alleged torture of IRA suspects. The Guardian called it a ‘border pantomime’. The IRA hailed it as an indication that British troops were involved in clandestine activities within the Republic.

  What the SAS were actually doing on the wrong side of the border has never been explained. The whisper in SAS circles was that it really was a map-reading error, but the indignation of the other D Squadron men at their OC’s asperity suggests that the teams were acting under orders: it has been said that they were hunting for a group of Irish National Liberation Front prisoners who had just escaped from Long Kesh.

  At the trial in Dublin a year later, Major Brian Baty told the court that he’d given orders for ‘a surveillance party’ to be mounted that night, but that SAS personnel were subject to the same rules as the rest of the army – that is, they were forbidden to cross the border. In the event, the ‘map-reading error’ story was accepted, and the court fined them £100 each. Neither Watts nor the commanding officer resigned. The real damage, though, was already done. ‘If that’s the elite then what the fuck must the rest of us be like?’ wrote Lt. Anthony Clarke, whose battalion, 3 Para, took over from 1 Royal Scots at Bessbrook that April. ‘Cowboys the lot of them; there are some guys I’ve recognized who failed our selection … so how did they get in the SAS? I wouldn’t give them the time of day … They are a joke.’5

  Though South Armagh was much quieter at the end of the first SAS tour, it was mainly because the bulk of the terrorists had simply moved out – a phenomenon familiar to the SAS from their time in Malaya. Many vets of Borneo and Dhofar couldn’t come to terms with the legal niceties involved every time they squeezed a trigger. Just as Johnny Cooper had done sixteen years earlier, some sought greener pastures as contract soldiers in the Middle East, or with the burgeoning private security industry. Looked at from the inside, the first deployment of the SAS in Northern Ireland had not been a great success. ‘It was never a happy hunting-ground for the Regiment,’ Major ‘G’ said. ‘It wasn’t our scene.’6

  86. ‘What the SAS are employed to do’

  When Peter de la Billière took over from Johnny Watts as Director, SAS, at the end of 1978, the Regiment’s reputation was at an all-time low. In Northern Ireland, the catalogue of errors that had begun with the arrest of the eight D Squadron men had continued on subsequent tours with the apparent flouting of the rules of engagement, and the shooting of innocent civilians. Each case had been turned into political capital by the Provisional IRA.

  De la Billière’s first problem was to deal with a court-case brought against Cpl. Alan Bohan and Tpr. Ron Temperley for the killing of sixteen-year-old John Boyle at Dunloy, in County Antrim, that July. It was the first time SAS-men had been charged with murder. The two soldiers were part of a four-man patrol staking out an arms-cache in a graveyard. Concealed under a fallen tombstone, the hoard consisted of an Armalite rifle, a pistol, an incendiary bomb, a combat jacket and a face-mask, wrapped in a plastic bag. At mid-morning on 10 July, a teenage boy named John Boyle approached the hiding-place. According to the soldiers, he took the Armalite from the cache and pointed it at them. Believing that Boyle was about to open fire, they shot him four times, killing him instantly.

  The problem, it turned out, was that the victim, John Boyle, was the person who’d reported the existence of the weapons in the first place. He had come across them while exploring the graveyard the previous day, and had immediately told his father, Cornelius, a local farm-labourer. After examining the cache for himself, Cornelius had phoned the
police at Ballymoney, who had dispatched Detective Constable George Millar to inspect it. Millar had passed on the intel to the army, and the SAS team had been tasked to keep it under observation.

  De la Billière had no doubt that his men had acted in good faith, and believed their story that the boy had pointed the gun at them. He was sensitive, he said, to the terrible responsibility placed on soldiers in life or death situations in Northern Ireland, and was convinced that John Boyle knew about the weapons because he was a low-grade operative of the IRA. In reality, no connection was ever found between any of the Boyle family and the Provisionals. In his eagerness to be seen as loyal to his men, de la Billière also ignored the fact that it was through John Boyle that the find had been reported to the police.

  The original autopsy had suggested that Boyle had been shot in the back, but de la Billière asked for a second examination, which disproved the allegation. Boyle had probably returned to the place simply because he was curious about the guns he’d found. The most likely scenario was that he’d lifted the rifle from the bag and stood up, facing the hidden soldiers. Seeing the rifle in his hands, the SAS-men thought the rules of engagement fulfilled, and shot him. As it turned out, they had not been in any danger, since though fitted with a magazine, the Armalite wasn’t loaded. Evidently John Boyle had neither the means nor the intention of shooting them, though Bohan and Temperley didn’t necessarily know this at the time.

  The judge, Ulster Chief Justice Lord Lowry, dismissed Bohan’s statement that Boyle had pointed the rifle at the soldiers as ‘self-justificatory and untrue’. While Temperley testified that the RUC had told them during the briefing that the cache had been discovered by ‘a ten-year-old boy’, this was denied by DC Millar, who insisted he’d made clear that the information had come from a family ‘with children between the ages of ten and twenty-four’. When asked why this didn’t appear in his written statement, Millar said that his original testimony had been altered by the Director of Public Prosecutions, and that he’d signed the final document on the assumption that this part had been ‘omitted for legal reasons’. Finally, Lowry acquitted the two SAS-men of homicide, but criticized Sgt. Bohan as ‘an untrustworthy witness’. It was clear that in the SAS story facts had been ‘modified’ to suit the circumstances, and, no matter how well-intentioned, that the two men had killed an innocent schoolboy.