Tony Gormley crouched over the JCB’s bucket, igniting the two fuses with a Zippo lighter. Then he, O’Callaghan and Arthurs sprinted towards the group around the van. At that moment, gunshots seethed across the road from the SAS-men hidden in the copse, and from the others near the station. Rounds slewed along the tarmac, palpitated into the JCB, drumfired into the van’s bodywork. Arthurs tried to take cover behind the van. The other two turned and darted in the opposite direction.
Arthurs was hit in the head and body from both sides, and slumped across the tarmac in a shower of blood. Kelly was zapped in the torso, and slap though the temple. He fell against the driver’s door, leaving a daub of gore, his rifle clanging on the road. The van-driver, nineteen-year-old Seamus Donelly from Aughnaskea, stomped gas, but was hit by slugs that slashed through the door and window. He lurched out of the cab and staggered across the road seeping blood. He clambered over the locked gate of the football pitch, and had managed to totter ten metres through the field when he was shot down.
Padraig McKearney and James Lynagh, the men who had planned the attack, were in the back of the van with two other PIRA operators. Despite the fact that they were wearing flak-jackets, they were all cut to bloody shreds by a tattoo of rounds that punched through the vehicle’s thin sides.
Seconds later, the two-hundred-pound charge in the JCB kerauned in a blast-wave that lifted the RUC station’s roof clean off and demolished the building’s nearest wall. Debris splattered fifty metres. The JCB came apart in shards of hot steel – one of its rear wheels whirled across the road and plumped down on the football pitch.
Gormley made twenty metres before gunfire took him down. O’Callaghan, still carrying his assault-rifle, popped a round or two, and was peppered back and front as he crossed the road. He bit the tarmac seventy metres from where the bomb had gone up.
The shooting went on for five minutes and the SAS-men fired twelve hundred rounds. When it stopped, there was a deathly silence. Then some of the SAS-men hopped out of cover and moved forward cautiously to examine the bodies, while their partners covered them. According to Scott Graham, all eight PIRA men were dead with multiple wounds. Whether this is entirely true is questionable: Arthurs was found to have a wound from a shot that had been fired downwards through the top of his skull, and O’Callahan had been shot behind the ear.
A hundred and thirty metres along the road, up the hill towards the church, two more men had been shot. They were two brothers, Oliver and Anthony Hughes, who’d driven into town in their white Citroën, completely unaware that anything was going on there. As they came over the hill, they heard the bomb go off. At the wheel, thirty-six-year-old Anthony Hughes, a father of three, stopped the car and rammed the gear into reverse. ‘There was a heavy burst of gunfire from behind us,’ Oliver Hughes recalled. ‘I heard the back window of the car smash and at the same time heard Anthony shout … I felt a sharp pain in my back and a burning in my stomach. I lost consciousness.’2
The Hughes brothers were not members of the IRA, and had no links with any terrorist organization. They had taken a short-cut through the village on their way from dropping off the daughter of a friend at an orchard nearby. Though it was later claimed that they had been ‘caught in crossfire’, forensic evidence proved that the car had been hit by fifty rounds fired from the back – in fact from an SAS cut-off group in the garden of a house only ten metres away. The SAS said that they believed the brothers were about to open fire, and thought they were IRA-men because they were wearing blue boiler-suits like the others. Actually, they were wearing the suits because they’d spent the day repairing a lorry drive-shaft. Anthony Hughes had been killed instantly. Oliver survived, despite two rounds through the back that collapsed a lung, one in the shoulder, and another in the head.
The Loughall incident was the greatest single victory the British army had scored against the IRA since the Irish War of Independence in the 1920s. The Intelligence and Security Group had known about it long in advance. The PIRA unit’s explosives cache near Coalisland had been under twenty-four-hour surveillance by the covert Special Branch unit, E4A. Once again, though, an SAS ‘clean kill’ had been marred by the death of an innocent civilian.
In Republican west Belfast, the Loughgall killings sparked off the worst rioting for years. Hundreds of youths took to the streets and began lobbing petrol bombs at the police, who dispersed them with salvoes of rubber bullets. There were disturbances and protests all over the Province, and the funerals of the eight ‘martyrs’ were turned into paramilitary parades. ‘Loughgall will become the tombstone for British policy in Ireland,’ announced Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, ‘and a bloody milestone in the struggle for freedom, justice and peace.’3
The veiled threat implied by Adams’s words was taken seriously by British intelligence. It was clear that sooner or later PIRA would go for a massive revenge-killing against British forces. The only questions were where and when.
91. ‘Unholy priesthood of violence’
That November, radio-tecs in Gibraltar picked up a powerful radio pulse on a military frequency, emanating from an unknown source in Spain. For the past two years, Ministry of Defence technicians had been involved in a deadly competition with PIRA in the field of radio-controlled bombs. From relatively simple devices used to control model boats and aeroplanes, PIRA bomb-makers had progressed to transmitters that armed explosive devices by coded signals, and couldn’t be jammed by army blocking frequencies. By 1985 they had discovered the ‘white band’ – an area of the electronic spectrum where military ‘inhibitors’ couldn’t operate. The unidentified pulse detected in Gibraltar set alarm bells ringing, and the British Embassy in Madrid asked the Spanish police to keep their eyes open for terrorist suspects.
On 5 November, three days before a PIRA bomb in Enniskillen killed eleven civilians and injured sixty, police at Málaga airport on Spain’s Costa del Sol spotted a PIRA operator named Daniel McCann. The thirty-year-old commander of the Provisionals’ Clonard battalion, in west Belfast’s Lower Falls area, McCann was a butcher’s assistant and former hospital employee who was suspected of killing two off-duty RUC detectives the previous August, in a bar near Belfast docks. He was travelling on a false passport in the name of Robert Wilfred Reilly.
Spanish detectives followed McCann discreetly to the seaside resort of Torremolinos, where he met with two other suspects, a man travelling in the name of Brendan Coyne, and a woman whose stolen passport bore the name of Mary Parkin. Coyne was Sean Savage, a twenty-three-year-old PIRA bomb-maker from west Belfast. The identity of ‘Mary Parkin’ remains unknown.
British intelligence suspected that PIRA was planning a bomb attack on British forces in Gibraltar. An assessment suggested that the most likely target would be the public changing-of-the-guard ceremony, which took place on Tuesdays in Gibraltar’s Main Street. Specifically, the best place for a bomb would be the assembly point for the band of 1 Royal Anglian Regiment, currently on garrison-duty on the Rock.
On 3 March an attractive Catholic woman whose passport gave her name as ‘Katherine Smith’ flew from Dublin to Brussels, and on to Madrid and Málaga the following day. ‘Smith’ was thirty-one-year-old Mairead Farrell, from Andersonstown in west Belfast, who had already served a ten-year prison stretch for planting a bomb in the Conway Hotel. The same evening, Daniel McCann and Sean Savage arrived in Málaga on a flight from Paris, and met up with Farrell at the airport. They booked into a hotel in Torremolinos.
In the morning, a man calling himself John Oakes hired a red Ford Fiesta from a car-hire company in Torremolinos. The same day, Oakes drove the car to Valencia, where he picked up a hundred and forty pounds of Semtex explosive. The Semtex may have been brought in by a PIRA back-up team: two PIRA suspects, a man and a woman, had been clocked at Valencia in February.
At about 2200 hours the same day, Saturday 5 March, Mairead Farrell hired a white Ford Fiesta in Torremolinos in the name of Katherine Smith. Farrell drove the car to Marbella and parked it
in the basement car park of a building called the Edificio Marbeland. Before first light on Sunday morning, the red Ford Fiesta hired by John Oakes pulled up in the car park, with the Semtex on board. It was transferred to the white Fiesta.
A third car – a white Renault 5 – had been hired in Torremolinos on Saturday morning. This car was eventually parked in Gibraltar, in the area where the changing-of-the-guard ceremony was to take place the following Tuesday. Whether it entered Gibraltar on Saturday or Sunday, and whether driven by Sean Savage or John Oakes, is disputed. The official British line was that Sean Savage was seen parking the car in the Plaza in Gibraltar at about 1250 hours on Sunday 6 March.
An MI5 surveillance team made a positive ID of Savage, and watched him lean on the Renault for a few moments. They observed him fiddling about with something inside the vehicle that they couldn’t see. Savage appeared to have entered Gibraltar unnoticed, but one Spanish police officer alleged later that the Renault had been shadowed by their anti-terrorist squad, who informed the British that they were ninety per cent sure it wasn’t carrying a bomb. On Sunday afternoon at about 1430 hours, Farrell and McCann crossed the border into Gibraltar on foot, having left the red Fiesta in a car park at La Linea, two miles away. The Semtex was still in the white Fiesta at Marbella.
On Saturday, a twelve-man SAS team from the Pagoda squad flew into Gibraltar. Their deployment had been sanctioned personally by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in late February, on the strength of a top-secret report from the Joint Intelligence Committee. The report was the result of a four-month-long surveillance operation by MI5, concluding that a PIRA active-service unit was planning to bomb the changing-of-the-guard parade in Gibraltar on 8 March.
The SAS were briefed by their troop commander, ‘Gonzo’ – later referred to as ‘Soldier E’ – on the basis of intel passed to him by an MI5 Northern Ireland expert, ‘Mr O’. Gonzo told the boys that one or more of the terrorists would be armed, and that at least one of them would be carrying a remote-control button to activate the bomb. The SAS were to observe the normal rules of engagement: the terrorists were to be arrested if possible, shot if there was any likelihood of a threat to themselves or to the public. The SAS groups were supported by MI5 watchers, and by teams of armed local Special Branch officers. ‘Our orders were clear,’ one officer commented later, ‘[the terrorists] were to be arrested, or, if necessary, shot.’1
MI5 officers had made Farrell and McCann as they crossed the frontier. Farrell was carrying a leather handbag. McCann wore a white shirt and grey slacks. The MI5 team passed the news of their arrival to the SAS force commander, Soldier ‘F’, in the hastily established SAS ops room. Authority was officially handed over to ‘F’ by the Gibraltar Commissioner of Police, Joseph Canepa.
The SAS assault-team consisted of only four men, divided into pairs. They were dressed in jeans and bomber-jackets, and carried 9mm Browning Hi-Power pistols in their back waistbands. The Brownings’ magazines held twelve rounds, and each man had three spare magazines in his pockets. They were each equipped with a concealed radio – one of the pair was tuned into the surveillance network, the other to the ops room. Before deploying, the SAS teams were told that a bomb had been planted in the area of the assembly point.
McCann and Farrell met up with Savage near the parked Renault. When the watchers reported they’d moved away, and were roaming around the city centre, the police-chief reclaimed authority from the SAS. Shortly, though, the three suspects returned to the vicinity of the car. One of the MI5 surveillance team, ‘H’, recalled that they exchanged a joke and moved off with smiles on their faces. ‘It was a chilling moment,’ he commented later. ‘I felt that these were evil people who were prepared to spill blood.’2
The three terrorists were walking back in the direction of the Spanish border. As the watchers tailed them, a bomb disposal expert attached to the SAS, ‘Soldier G’, did a recce of the Renault to assess whether it might contain a bomb. He didn’t notice any displacement of the suspension such as would be caused by a big explosive charge. One known PIRA method, though, was to use a ‘blocking car’, put in to reserve the parking-space for the vehicle carrying the explosives, which would be brought in at the last moment. However, the intelligence brief had stated that on this operation there would be no blocking car.
‘G’ also knew that a lighter charge – up to thirty pounds of Semtex – wouldn’t cause any noticeable displacement. Such a bomb would still be capable of doing terrible damage: if detonated during the parade, it would not only take out the fifty soldiers involved, but in all probability would kill and injure scores of onlookers. The casualty projection was around three hundred. For ‘G’, though, the tipping point was the radio-aerial in the centre of the Renault’s roof. While the car was fairly new, the aerial appeared old. ‘G’ told the police that the car was ‘suspicious’. This gave the Commissioner of Police, Joseph Canepa, grounds to arrest the terrorists on suspicion of conspiracy to murder. He handed authority back to the SAS for the final time.
It became clear afterwards that the three terrorists were walking back to the border because their mission was complete. None of them was armed, none of them carried a ‘button’, and there was no bomb in the Renault. The parade wasn’t due for another forty-eight hours, and they had evidently entered Gibraltar on a reconnaissance operation. They were wary of surveillance, though: MI5 personnel noted that they continually looked around and glanced in the wing-mirrors of cars as they passed. McCann and Farrell walked in front; Savage trailed behind.
They wandered up Winston Churchill Avenue, a double-carriageway leading towards Spain, with a large flat-block and a Shell petrol-station on the right-hand side. Before reaching the Shell station, they halted for a few moments to chat. Then Savage turned back towards the town centre, possibly intending to pick up the car.
The first SAS-team – Soldiers ‘A’ and ‘B’ – were already trailing the terrorists. Savage walked directly towards them and actually bumped one of the SAS-men with his shoulder as he passed. The new development bothered them, as they thought Savage might be going back to detonate the bomb. Leaving him for the second team following behind them, they closed in on Farrell and McCann.
As the two SAS-men moved in, McCann looked straight at Soldier ‘A’. Their eyes locked. The smile on McCann’s face was wiped off in an instant, and ‘A’ knew he knew. ‘The look on McCann’s face, the alertness, the awareness of him,’ ‘A’ recalled, ‘he looked at me, then all of a sudden his right arm, right elbow, actually moved across the front of his body … At that stage I thought he was definitely going for the button.’3 The SAS-man was already drawing his pistol. He said later that he intended to shout ‘Stop!’ but wasn’t aware whether the word came out or not. He flipped the safety, squeezed the trigger, fired a round into McCann’s back, the 9mm slug smacking through his ribs and blipping out from his chest. In a split-second blur, ‘A’ saw Farrell make a move towards her handbag and shot her in the face. As McCann tottered, ‘A’ pumped another round into his body.
‘A’ ’s partner, Soldier ‘B’, standing in the road on his left, said later that he’d heard ‘A’ make a garbled shout, and registered gunshots. He didn’t have time to see whether they came from the terrorists or his mate. He spotted only Farrell’s movement towards her handbag and believed she was going for the ‘button’. He slipped out his Browning and shot her twice in the back as she reeled forward from A’s bullet. The rounds pulped her heart and smashed her spine. He switched fire to McCann and shot him in the jaw and head. As Farrell sprawled on the path, he shot her again: he couldn’t see her hands and thought there was still a chance she might activate the bomb. Three of his rounds missed, and slapped into petrol-pumps in the Shell station in front of him.
At that moment a police siren wailed and a police car skidded up beside them. The car was driven by Inspector Revagliatte of the Gibraltar police, who was unconnected with the operation. ‘A’ and ‘B’ had already donned black berets for quic
k identification. They jumped into the car and were whisked off to the Ops room to report to their boss.
Later, some eye-witnesses claimed that the siren had gone off before the SAS-men opened fire, and it was this that made Farrell and McCann turn sharply. Certainly it was the almost simultaneous noise of the siren and the gunshots that caused Sean Savage to whirl round on SAS-men ‘C’ and ‘D’, about a hundred and thirty metres away. Savage had just hung a left off Winston Churchill Avenue into a tree-lined boulevard when he heard the shots, spun round and went into a crouching stance. As ‘C’ yelled a warning, Savage made a movement towards his hips. ‘I fired,’ ‘C’ said later. ‘I kept on firing until I was sure he had gone down and was no longer a threat …’4 As ‘D’ grabbed his pistol, a woman on a bicycle suddenly swept between him and Savage. He shoved her out of the way and fired nine rounds into the bomber’s body. The 9mm bullets fractured his skull, broke an arm and a leg, and punctured a hand. Savage was later found to have taken sixteen bullets, and sustained twenty-seven wounds.
The SAS and MI5 teams were back in the UK by nightfall. By then, the government had already released a statement claiming that a bomb had been found in Gibraltar, and that three suspects had been killed by the police. This deliberate disinformation – following the principle that the first statement is the definitive one, and subsequently difficult to refute – was confirmed by a Ministry of Defence spokesman the following morning, alleging that a large bomb had been defused.
The revelation of the truth created a furore that hadn’t been seen since the Iranian Embassy siege. This time, though, the SAS were cast in the role of villains. There had been no bomb and no ‘gun-battle’ – eye-witnesses alleged that the SAS had shot the terrorists as they were surrendering, or ‘executed’ them as they lay helpless on the ground. The fact that they’d been allowed to enter Gibraltar even though under surveillance was seen as a deliberate plot to take them out. ‘The evidence,’ said human rights researcher Father Raymond Murray, ‘suggests the intention was always to shoot the members of the IRA team.’5
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