In court, Bohan had lost his temper when the prosecution suggested that he’d been ordered to ‘shoot the person who approached the cache because he was likely to be a terrorist’. It was not a question of ‘orders’ but of mental attitude. The SAS were geared to fast, aggressive action when they saw lethal weapons in other people’s hands. This solution had served them well snap-shooting at Communists in the jungle, but it was not right for Northern Ireland.
De la Billière pointed out that if Boyle had been an armed terrorist the two soldiers might now be dead instead of him, and if they’d allowed him to escape they would have been accused of incompetence. This was true, but didn’t negate the fact that soldiers are always obliged to make moral decisions on the legitimacy of their targets. Even in Malaya, Borneo or Oman, where the Regiment had operated outside the law, the killing of non-combatants wouldn’t have been any more acceptable. Lofty Large, who, in Borneo, had refrained from ambushing an Indonesian longboat because it carried women and possibly children, never regretted his decision, despite discovering later that he’d missed an important target. ‘Neither I nor any man in the British army had ever intentionally made war upon women and children,’ he wrote. ‘I saw no reason to change.’1 Later, in the Falklands conflict, Sgt. Peter Ratcliffe would vow to get rid of a corporal who’d opened fire on civilians, telling him, ‘anybody would think we’re a gang of psychopaths’.
Despite the controversy surrounding D Squadron’s first emergency deployment in South Armagh, though, the Regiment was judged too good a resource to dispense with. The use of the SAS fitted in with the shift of emphasis from visible ‘Green Army’ patrols to undercover tactics, which the new GOC, Lieutenant General Tim Creasy, believed would cut down army casualties. It was also in line with the policy of ‘police primacy’ – giving a higher profile to RUC units. From now on, the four squadrons of 22 SAS would rotate through the Northern Ireland role on four-to-six-month tours, but would be spread throughout the whole Province. There would be troops in Bessbrook, Londonderry and Belfast, and a fourth in reserve under the orders of the Commander Land Forces.
The first major operation the SAS set up in Belfast, a month before the John Boyle incident, also involved the death of an innocent bystander. Through an informer, the RUC learned that a four-man PIRA Active Service Unit was planning to fire-bomb a Post Office depot in Belfast’s Ballysillan Road. The police knew the target, and the direction from which the terrorists would approach, but not the exact time of the attack. An SAS team was tasked to stake out the depot, together with police Special Branch and Special Patrol Group officers.
On the night of 20 June, the IRA-men – William Mailey, Denis Brown, James Mulvenna and a fourth whose name is unknown – commandeered a blue Mazda estate car from the Shamrock Club in the Ardoyne. They collected their incendiaries – webbing haversacks wrapped in rubber, each with a container of petrol, a primer, a timing-device, a detonator and a metal bracket. They parked the car in a side road near the Post Office depot and, leaving the fourth man at the wheel, stalked off to set up their bombs. The depot consisted of a building and a large compound for Post Office vans, with petrol-storage tanks containing thousands of gallons of fuel. Once ignited, the petrol would form a fireball that would blitz the houses nearby with burning gases and debris. The compound was surrounded by an eight-foot-high wire fence.
An SAS observer had been sited in a house looking directly down the ‘Loney’ – an alley that ran along the fence. There were several other SAS-men concealed in the compound, ‘cut-off’ parties at the ends of the alley, and a two-man ‘reaction team’ hidden in bushes nearby. At least one armed policeman formed part of the ambush group. The SAS had already been lying in wait for almost a week, and, according to one of them, Sgt. Barry Davies, the operator in the observation-post was fed up, and entertaining doubts about Special Branch intel. At about midnight that night, though, he saw three men marching boldly down the alley, almost touching the fence. ‘Before he could raise the alarm,’ Davies recalled, ‘one of the figures moved his arm – the first bomb was already arching its way towards the target.’2
According to another SAS-man, Tpr. ‘Scott Graham’, an ex-Para, there were four terrorists, wearing tartan scarves and carrying haversacks. The first bomber hurled a pack over the fence. ‘It landed with quite a thud,’ Scott recalled.3 He remembered that the men then halted, and laid the other haversacks on the ground. One of them, he said, ‘seemed to have taken out a pair of wire-cutters and began slicing his way through the steel fencing’.4 Scott and his oppo withdrew quietly from their post, making their way round the buildings.
Scott claimed that the two of them had moved silently to within about twenty metres of the group when one of the bombers looked up. Sensing that they’d been clocked, Scott bawled, ‘Halt! Army!’ Three of the men greased off down the alley, while the fourth stood his ground ‘and seemed to be going for a gun’.5 Scott yelled, ‘Fire!’ and the two men thrummed automatic fire from their Heckler & Koch MP5s. They advanced at a walk, spraying rounds. ‘Each time we emptied our magazines we pushed home another and continued firing,’ Scott said, ‘as the men ran in every direction, trying to escape the hail of gunfire.’6
Three of the bombers crumpled – the fourth continued running, and Scott wasn’t sure if he’d been hit or not. A moment later, the fleeing terrorist was confronted by one of the SAS-men in a ‘cut-off’ position, whose weapon had jammed. The soldier smashed the butt of his rifle into the bomber’s head, breaking his neck. Meanwhile, Scott and his mate walked up to the proned-out terrorists to check that they were dead. Scott recalled that by this time the place was already jammed with police vehicles and ‘hundreds of police officers’.7
Davies mentions only three terrorists. According to him, the two-man ‘reaction team’ jumped out of cover. They confronted the bombers, ‘two of whom were about to throw satchel-bombs’. One of the SAS-men rattled 9mm bursts from his MP5, dropping the pair of them. The third sprinted off down the alley, but the shooter stopped him with another torrent of rounds. The second SAS-man pumped off a magazine from his SLR, and just as he stopped shooting, two more men appeared at the end of the alley. The first SAS-man shouted a warning. One of the new arrivals dropped with his hands over his head, but the other tried to get away. The SAS-man fired a fourth time, killing him. Both Scott and Davies claim to have been present on the operation, but there are serious discrepancies in their accounts, and neither account is consistent with the statement issued by Army Headquarters at Lisburn shortly after the incident. Neither do they tally with the testimonies given by unnamed SAS-men at the inquest – presumably including both of them. The official press-release claimed that the ‘four’ terrorists were killed ‘in an exchange of fire’ – suggesting that the IRA were carrying firearms. This was not the case: no guns were recovered and the forensic evidence showed no sign that they’d handled firearms.
At the inquest, though, the SAS claimed that they’d ‘heard gunshots’ or had ‘thought they were under fire’. Davies suggested that the terrorists were shot because they had thrown or were about to throw ‘satchel-bombs’. This can’t have been the case if, as Scott says, three of the bombs were at that time on the ground. In any case, the bombs the IRA were carrying were incendiaries designed not to be thrown like grenades or gammon-bombs, but to be hooked on guttering or window-frames and detonated by a timer. This was the technique the IRA had used about three months earlier when blowing up the La Mon House restaurant in County Down, killing a dozen customers. Scott didn’t seem sure whether the bombers had cut through the fence, and failed to answer the question as to why they should do so if the bombs were designed to be thrown.
Neither was he definite about the number of terrorists involved. He initially mentioned ‘three or four men’, but thereafter continually referred to ‘four men’. He described how three bombers were shot, and another taken down with a blow to the head from a rifle-butt, but also admitted that ‘one of the bastards escaped’ –
a total of five.
It is the case that four men were killed in the incident, but only three of them were bombers. The fourth was William Hanna, a passer-by walking back from the Mountainview Club in the Shankill Road with his friend David Graham. Both Hanna and Graham were Protestants, and had no connection with the terrorists. The fourth bona fide IRA-man, whom Davies says remained in the car, escaped.
Davies claims that Hanna was killed trying to get away, and Scott says he was ‘hit by a ricochet’. At the inquest, though, soldiers ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ – one of whom must have been Scott – stated that Hanna was still alive when they approached him and ‘made a twisting movement as if to draw a weapon’. Two of them then pumped bullets into his body until he lay still.
David Graham testified at the inquest that he and Hanna had been walking along deep in conversation, when they were fired on ‘without warning’. He immediately fell on his face and rolled into the bushes nearby. It is probable that Hanna was hit in this first burst. Since Davies himself admitted that there was a cover-up, his insistence that a clear warning was given has to be regarded with caution.
Even though the SAS had killed a helpless bystander, the army considered the Ballysillan Post Office joba coup. No one expressed regret over the death of William Hanna, indeed, Davies, writing years later, said, ‘Had [Hanna] … remained still after the challenge, he would be alive today,’ as if the fault lay with the innocent victim. Far from apologizing, the army even resorted to the disgraceful tactic of trying to smear Hanna by claiming he was a Loyalist paramilitary – an accusation that, even if true, was completely irrelevant.
There can be little doubt that in the Ballysillan case, the SAS ignored the rules of engagement and opened fire on men they knew to be terrorists, killing a member of the public in the process. Scott expressed the sentiments of SAS-men on the ground perfectly when he complained that the politicians made the Regiment fight the IRA with ‘one hand tied behind their backs’. ‘If the authorities had given the SAS a free rein,’ he commented, ‘… we could have finished off the IRA years before. But we weren’t allowed to fight the way we could have done, with no rules. We had to keep to the … stupid “yellow card”, and were never permitted to take the initiative … The IRA could play as dirty as they wanted while we had to play by the bloody rules.’8
Despite the army’s satisfaction with the outcome, the RUC was not happy. Deputy Chief Constable Jack Hermon was so incensed that he told Commander Land Forces, Major-General Dick Trant, he didn’t want any further ‘shoot-outs’ on the streets of the capital. The Ballysillan job put the lid on aggressive SAS actions in Belfast for a decade.
Undercover ops continued outside the capital, however, with further controversy. In September, only weeks after the Boyle incident, SAS-men shot dead a twenty-three-year-old Protestant civil servant named James Taylor, who was out pigeon-shooting with two friends near Lough Neagh. Once again, Taylor had no link to any terrorist organization, and on this occasion he clearly had been shot in the back.
This was also the case with Patrick Duffy, whom the SAS killed two months later. Duffy, a PIRA quartermaster, entered a house in Londonderry known to hold a cache of firearms, which was being watched by an SAS team. He was later proved to have been shot twelve times in the back. The claim by SAS witnesses that he had spun round and made a movement suggesting that he was about to draw a weapon was discounted by forensic evidence.
By the end of 1978 the SAS had killed ten people in Northern Ireland, three of them innocent. Every case had been a peach for anti-government propaganda and had confirmed the public view of the Regiment as an execution-squad. Even Cornelius Boyle, father of the dead John Boyle, said later that he held no bitterness against the Regiment for killing his son, because ‘this is what the SAS are employed to do’.9
Questions were asked about the moral legitimacy of waiting until terrorists were in a position to threaten the public before taking counter-measures – measures that frequently ended in the death of the very people the SAS were supposed to be there to protect. In practical terms this was easy to answer: even if the SAS knew about an impending PIRA operation from an informer, the rules of evidence required that terrorists were caught in the act. Whether securing a conviction was more important than preventing an act of terrorism, though, was another moot point.
By the end of the decade, aggressive undercover ops had gone out of favour. The new emphasis was on long-term surveillance, and the painstaking collection of evidence to secure convictions. SAS commitment in the Province was scaled down. Instead of squadrons being rotated through the Ulster role, a permanent squad of twenty men, the ‘Ulster Troop’, was created, at first drawn from whichever squadron was on Anti-Terrorist duty, later independent. At the same time, the Army Surveillance Unit – 14 Intelligence Company – was enlarged and combined with the ‘Ulster Troop’ in the joint ‘Intelligence & Security Group’, which came under the command of an SAS officer. From now on, 14 Int. operatives and SAS-men were able to act together.
For Director SAS de la Billière, Northern Ireland had proved something of a nemesis. The ‘finest fighting regiment in the world’ had been exposed, in the eyes of the public, as a bunch of sinister killers who were unashamedly capable of taking out innocent teenagers, and weren’t even competent to navigate their way round country roads.
In an unprecedented letter to the Daily Telegraph in March 1979, following the false allegation that an SAS sergeant had raped the wife of a police surgeon in Ulster, de la Billière wrote testily, ‘I am disturbed at the increasing tendency to report on the SAS as if it were some secret undercover organization. In fact it is a corps of the British army, subject to both military and civil law in exactly the same way as any other corps.’10 Within a little over twelve months, though, the Regiment’s name was to be redeemed, and the SAS pitchforked to celebrity, when six terrorists of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Arabistan siezed the Iranian Embassy in London’s Princes Gate.
Part Four
BLACK OPS AND GREEN OPS 1980–91
87. ‘Blind or not, we’re going in’
In the Kremlin at Bradbury Lines, Major John Moss, ex-9 (Parachute) Field Squadron, Royal Engineers, currently OC B Squadron, 22 SAS, was handed a disturbing signal. It had come bouncing off a satellite from a patrol signaller almost nine thousand miles away, on the most southerly point of the American continent, Tierra del Fuego. The signaller, Mick Gibbons, Gordon Highlanders, was part of an eight-man B Squadron patrol that had been sent to recce an airfield at Rio Grande, on the Argentine side of the peninsula. It was the base for five Super Etendard fighter-bombers of the Argentine air force, armed with deadly Exocet missiles.
It was 18 May 1982, two years after the Regiment’s apotheosis at the Iranian Embassy in London. The war in the Falkland Islands had broken out seven weeks earlier, and B Squadron was due to embark on one of the most daring SAS schemes of the post-war era. They were to be transported in a pair of Hercules C130s to Rio Grande, where they would crash-land on the runway. The SAS-men would fast-ramp out in armed Land Rovers and on foot, and chop up the Super Etendards and their Exocet payloads with rockets and machine-gun fire.
Early that morning, an advance patrol under Captain Andrew ‘M’, Royal Hampshire Regiment, had landed near an isolated farmhouse twenty kilometres north of Rio Grande in a Royal Navy Sea King helicopter. ‘M’’s unit carried demolitions equipment and LAW 66mm rocket-launchers, and had the capacity to knock-out the Argentine hardware if the opportunity arose. Otherwise, they would put in a covert OP, observe the airbase, and vector in the main party.
The Sea King, of 846 Naval Air Squadron, had lurched horizontally off the deck of the Royal Navy carrier Invincible after dark the previous night. Invincible, one of two carriers of the Royal Navy Task Force, had steamed to within five hundred miles of the target, escorted by the frigate Brilliant. She had then turned round and headed back to the Falkland Islands, where she had put in a diversionary bombardment on
the capital, Port Stanley.
The Sea King had been stripped down to bare essentials to allow for extra fuel-tanks. Even with these modifications, she had only just enough fuel to reach the tactical area and hop across the border into neutral Chile. Once there, she would be ditched and the crew would go into escape and evasion mode. Originally, a D Squadron NCO, Peter Ratcliffe, had been tasked to stay with the aircrew and lead them out, but this idea had been scrapped in the need to keep the payload down to the minimum.
The aircraft flew low over the sea in blackout conditions, ducking long-range radar pickets. Her pilot, Lt. Richard Hutchings, a slim, moustachioed officer of the Royal Marines, was flying in unfamiliar passive night-goggles. Before the heli came in over the coast, her Omega warning system started bleeping, telling Hutchings that she’d been painted by enemy radar. For the SAS patrol sitting on the floor behind, tension spiralled. Hutchings took the aircraft down so low that her wheels were almost touching the sea. The Omega’s bleep faded, but moments later co-pilot Lt. Alan Bennett spotted the momentary distant flash of a signal flare. The Sea King passed over dry land, banked behind hills, and dropped into radar dead-ground.
When the pilot put the heli down at the preselected landing-zone, two SAS-men, Tpr. Gwynne Evans and Cpl. Mick Gibbons, jumped out and crouched on the desolate pampas in their white Arctic warfare suits, ready to go. Suddenly, Captain ‘M’ whistled his men back inside. He’d spotted a second signal flare in the distance, and believed the insertion had been compromised. He told the pilot to fly them across the border into Chile. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told his patrol. ‘It’s Chile after all.’
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