The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  There is no evidence in Security Service files that it countenanced or assisted a shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland. In 1988, however, it became embroiled in the shoot-to-kill controversy as a result of Operation FLAVIUS, which successfully prevented a PIRA attack on the Gibraltar garrison. In Gibraltar, as on the rest of the continent, the Service had the lead counter-PIRA intelligence role which it did not yet possess in the United Kingdom. On 6 March 1988 the three members of a PIRA active service unit, Seán Savage, Danny McCann and Mairéad Farrell, who were preparing an attack, were shot dead in Gibraltar by military personnel in civilian clothes who said they believed that the ASU was about to detonate a car bomb by remote control and/or to draw their weapons. The confusion which followed encouraged claims that the military believed no such thing but were following a deliberate shoot-to-kill policy, in league with the Security Service and the Thatcher government. BBC Radio 4 News reported at 7 a.m. next day: ‘It’s now known that the three people shot and killed by Security Forces in Gibraltar yesterday were members of the Provisional IRA. It’s thought they were challenged while trying to leave Gibraltar after planting a huge car bomb in the centre of the colony.’ After the news, the Armed Forces Minister, Ian Stewart, interviewed on the Radio 4 Today programme, congratulated the Gibraltar government and added: ‘There was a car bomb found which has been defused.’ All the morning newspapers also reported that a bomb had been found and that the terrorists had been armed. Some claimed that there had been a shootout. Later that day, however, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, gave a different account of the deaths of Savage, McCann and Farrell:

  On their way to the [Spanish] Border, they were challenged by the Security Forces. When challenged, they made movements which led the military personnel, operating in support of the Gibraltar police, to conclude that their own lives and the lives of others were under threat. In the light of this response, they were shot. Those killed were subsequently found not to have been carrying arms.

  Howe added that no car bomb had been discovered on the Rock.27

  Savage and McCann had been under surveillance for some time since intelligence had revealed that they were preparing for a continental operation. The Security Service considered the introverted Savage ‘probably PIRA’s most effective and experienced bomb-maker’.28 A later Republican obituary described him as ‘a quiet and single-minded individual who neither drank nor smoked and rarely socialised’, but attended Mass regularly and helped his parents care for his Down syndrome brother.29 The much more extrovert McCann was later remembered by friends as a good family man and devout Catholic who ‘liked nothing better than a bit of craic at the local pub’.30 The RUC and Security Service saw a different side of McCann. Though aged only twenty-nine, he was regarded as one of the Provisionals’ most experienced and ruthless hitmen, and was thought to be responsible for as many as twenty-six killings. A stamp in his passport which revealed that in mid-November 1987 he had been at the La Línea border crossing between Spain and Gibraltar was one of a number of pieces of intelligence which pointed to preparations for an attack on the Rock. By this time the Security Service had discovered that the ASU had gained a third member: Siobhan O’Hanlon, an explosives expert, devout Catholic and committed feminist who would always insist on doing her share of the digging when constructing weapons hides. On 25 November F5 warned the Gibraltar authorities by telex of the danger of a PIRA attack. At a meeting with the Governor soon afterwards, it was concluded (correctly) that the ASU probably intended to bomb the ceremonial changing of the guard, involving up to fifty soldiers and bandsmen. PIRA preparations for the bombing, however, were delayed for several months by cancellations of the changing of the guard due to renovation of the Guard Room and roadworks along the route of the procession.31 In mid-December F5/0 and A4/0 visited Gibraltar to discuss A4’s role when the ASU returned – which it now seemed clear would not be until the changing of the guard resumed in the New Year. A4’s surveillance team sent to the Rock during Operation FLAVIUS was to be its biggest deployment so far, either at home or abroad.32

  It was believed that, if the members of the ASU were arrested in Spain before they were ready to go ahead with an attack on the Gibraltar garrison, they would face only minor charges. All were regarded by the Security Service as ruthless terrorists who remained at liberty in the UK only because of the lack of usable evidence against them and would kill again unless brought to justice on this occasion. At a meeting in Gibraltar on 15 February, the Governor, Director FX, F5/0 and a JIC representative therefore agreed that the ASU should be allowed to travel to Gibraltar with their explosives, so that they could be caught red-handed. This strategy, however, would require the assistance of the military: ‘The Gibraltar police had never fired a shot in anger and simply did not have the manpower. It was common sense to deploy the most professional body against such hardened terrorists.’ On 18 February, after Mrs Thatcher had approved a secret military deployment on the Rock (whose details remain officially classified), F5/0 and the army commander flew to Gibraltar to brief the Governor and the Police Commissioner. The military team arrived from Britain a few hours later and began joint exercises with the A4 surveillance team next day.

  On 20 February Siobhan O’Hanlon was spotted at the La Línea border crossing. She was kept under surveillance as she walked into Gibraltar, studied a poster announcing the resumption of the changing of the guard, then – confident in the justice of her homicidal cause – entered the cathedral to pray and light a candle. Next day she phoned McCann to say she had very good news and would be staying until 23 February (the date when the changing of the guard resumed). The Governor and Mrs Thatcher agreed that the ceremony could go ahead since McCann would not arrive in Gibraltar in time for an attack to be mounted on the 23rd. The A4 surveillance team reported that, when O’Hanlon turned up for the changing of the guard on that day, she remained expressionless throughout the ceremony. Her mood became more animated when she left the Rock and phoned McCann, telling him excitedly, ‘Everything went great today!’ On 24 February, however, she noticed Spanish surveillance, returned to Northern Ireland and dropped out of the ASU. O’Hanlon was replaced as the third member of the ASU by Mairéad Farrell, later remembered by a journalist who knew her as ‘small, determined, angry, ready to sacrifice her life and anyone else’s to her cause, ready for whatever comes her way’. During the ‘dirty protest’ Farrell had been officer commanding thirty PIRA women prisoners.33

  A4 surveillance map of the route taken by Siobhan O’Hanlon in Gibraltar on 20 February 1988 while making preparations for a PIRA attack on the British garrison.

  On 4 March McCann, Savage and Farrell were seen meeting at Málaga airport. Within hours a Command Group, chaired by the Gibraltar Commissioner of Police and including representatives of the various security forces involved in Operation FLAVIUS, was operational in The Convent, the Office of the Governor General, in constant radio communication with a seventy-strong response team on the ground. The role of the Security Service throughout FLAVIUS was to co-ordinate intelligence collection, circulate intelligence assessments, plan the response to the ASU, and ‘guide and advise the [Police] Commissioner as the operation unfolded’. The Spanish security service, the DSE, was asked not to follow McCann, Savage and Farrell after their meeting at Málaga on 4 March, for fear that, like O’Hanlon eight days earlier, they would spot the surveillance. As a result, contact with them was lost until they arrived on the Rock on Sunday 6 March.

  A4 set up an observation post (OP) overlooking the Spanish border in the hope of detecting the arrival of the ASU. They had a difficult task. On Sundays more than 25,000 people crossed into Gibraltar, and the OP had only five to ten seconds to observe each car. As a result it failed to spot Savage crossing the border in a rented Renault 5 on the morning of 6 March. At 12.50 p.m. Savage parked the Renault near the assembly point for the changing of the guard ceremony due to take place on the morning of Tuesday the 8th. It was another two and a quarter hours,
however, before he was clearly identified. McCann and Farrell crossed the border on foot and were observed entering Gibraltar at 2.25 p.m. At 3.10 McCann, Farrell and Savage were seen sitting on a park bench looking intently at the Renault parked by Savage. When they began heading back towards the Spanish border, the Commissioner signed a warrant instructing the military to arrest all three. Meanwhile the EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) commander mistakenly reported, after a hurried inspection of the Renault, that it appeared to contain a bomb and that an old aerial on the car might be part of a radio-controlled detonation system. As Savage, McCann and Farrell approached the outskirts of Gibraltar, they suddenly spotted the military team keeping them under surveillance. The sequence of events which followed quickly became, and still remains, highly controversial.

  Republicans claimed that the three were gunned down in cold blood, victims of the Thatcher government’s alleged shoot-to-kill policy in Ireland. A much publicized Thames Television documentary, ‘Death on the Rock’, produced eyewitnesses who claimed that the Provisionals had been shot while trying to surrender. The soldiers’ version of events, given later at an inquest, was quite different. The movements of Savage, McCann and Farrell had convinced the military team that they were either about to detonate a car bomb or about to produce weapons, and the team took the split-second decision to shoot to kill. There is no persuasive evidence that the decision was premeditated. F5/0 later recalled: ‘News of the shooting was greeted with a stunned silence in the [FLAVIUS] Ops room. Then bedlam broke out as the police had to arrange the evacuation of the area of the [supposed] car bomb and A4 arranged to pack up. At 1606 hours control was passed back to the police.’ Press lines had been prepared to announce the arrest of the ASU. Had there been a premeditated shoot-tokill policy, press lines would have been ready to cover the shootings. But there were none. Hence the confusion which followed the ‘stunned silence’ in the Gibraltar Operations Room when news of the shootings was received. The muddled sequence of news stories which preceded the Foreign Secretary’s statement on the following day was evidence of official cock-up rather than, as some alleged, conspiracy.

  The fact that McCann, Farrell and Savage were shot rather than arrested derived from the incompleteness of the intelligence available at the time (a common characteristic of even the best intelligence). There was very good intelligence on the identity of the ASU members, their previous movements and their target. The fact that they were unarmed, however, was not discovered until after they had been shot. McCann’s past record as a ruthless gunman, probably responsible for twenty-six deaths, made it reasonable to believe that he and his colleagues would be carrying guns. There was good reason also to believe that the ASU was planning ‘a button not a clock job’ – a bomb detonated by remote control rather than by timer. It now seems probable that this had been the original intention of the Gibraltar operation and that the decision to use a timing device came as the result of a PIRA change of plan of which the Security Service was unaware. It was not until after the shootings that a Ford Fiesta rented by the ASU was discovered in an underground Marbella car park containing a partly constructed car bomb with 64 kilos of explosive, 200 rounds of Kalashnikov ammunition and a timing mechanism. Only then was it realized that Savage’s Renault 5 had, in all probability, been used simply to reserve a parking space in Gibraltar for the Fiesta which was to be driven on to the Rock during the morning rush hour on 8 March before the changing of the guard. Had the bomb in the Fiesta exploded during the ceremony, there would have been civilian as well as military deaths. Operation FLAVIUS undoubtedly saved many lives.

  Though the attempted bombing of the Gibraltar garrison had ended in operational disaster for the Provisionals, they probably had the better of the prolonged media controversy which followed. While acknowledging that Farrell, McCann and Savage were PIRA ‘volunteers’, Republican spokesmen also claimed that they were victims of a British shoot-to-kill policy, similar to that which was alleged to operate in Northern Ireland. The Thames Television World in Action documentary ‘Death on the Rock’, broadcast on 28 April, reached no definite conclusion but, lacking full information, lent some support to that claim. The presenter announced: ‘We have interviewed four key witnesses to the shootings. Their accounts raise serious questions about what really happened that afternoon; for they say that the British soldiers opened fire without warning, and none of them saw the IRA bombers make any threatening movements.’ A later independent inquiry commissioned by Thames Television found that the claim that ‘none of them saw the IRA bombers make any threatening movements’ was ‘not a fair reflection’ of the statements made by two of them.34 ‘Death on the Rock’ also ignored the possibility that there might have been good reason for the security authorities to fear that Savage’s car contained a remote-controlled bomb. Unaware that the Spanish DSE had been asked not to follow the members of the ASU after their rendezvous at Málaga airport on 4 March for fear that they would detect surveillance,35 the programme included a dramatic but inaccurate reconstruction of how both Savage’s Renault 5 and a red Fiesta hired by McCann and Farrell were ‘expertly tailed’ by ‘plain-clothes officers of Spain’s elite anti-terrorist squad’ to the Gibraltar border on 6 March while ‘a police helicopter made sure that the watchers [in the cars] made no mistake’, keeping the British constantly informed of the cars’ progress.36 Another inaccuracy in ‘Death on the Rock’ was its assertion that ‘British security officials’ identified Savage from the moment that his car entered Gibraltar and allowed him ‘to drive through unhindered’. The presenter told viewers: ‘Just why the British security men did not stop a car that only two hours later came under suspicion as a dangerous car bomb is one of the key questions . . .’37 Though founded on a basic misunderstanding about the sequence of events, that question has since been frequently repeated in studies of the Gibraltar shootings by writers unaware that Savage was not identified until more than two hours after he had parked the Renault 5.38

  On 30 September the jury at a Gibraltar inquest ruled by nine to two that the three members of the ASU had been ‘lawfully killed’. Mrs Thatcher wrote formally to the DG asking him to pass on her ‘warm appreciation’ to the members of the Service who had given evidence in the Gibraltar inquest and ‘to the Service as a whole for its part in thwarting an action which would have caused untold loss of life’.39 The DG replied that in recent months the Service had ‘received much ill-founded public criticism’, and that the Prime Minister’s letter was therefore ‘particularly valued’.40 ‘Death on the Rock’, however, had a greater public impact than the Gibraltar inquest, winning ‘best documentary’ awards from both the Broadcasting Press Guild and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA).41

  Operation FLAVIUS provided dramatic, if somewhat inaccurate, public evidence of the Security Service’s growing counter-terrorist role. A brief prepared for Patrick Walker’s first meeting as DG with Margaret Thatcher in January 1988 concluded: ‘The most significant recent development has been the marked growth in the number of staff employed in FX Branch (Counter-Terrorism) in the last two years. This growth has been achieved partly at the expense of K Branch (Counter-Espionage) and F Branch (Counter-Subversion).’42 The DG’s 1986–7 Annual Report to the Home Secretary showed that FX Branch now had 171 staff as compared with 192 in K and 110 in F Branch.43 The priority of counter-terrorism continued to rise. During 1987–8 the Security Service produced 1,100 terrorist threat assessments as compared with 750 in the previous year, but believed that, because of lack of resources, this still fell short ‘of what we would wish by way of background research’. In 1988 FX was renamed G Branch, a minor administrative change which, however, emphasized the increased status of counter-terrorism within the Security Service and removed the confusion caused by the fact that both F and FX Branches previously had F sections.44 The first Director G, Stella Rimington, was also the first woman to become a Security Service director.45 G Branch won some support within senior management for its beli
ef that it needed more resources to deal with the growing terrorist threat. Director P noted in September 1988: ‘If we are not to seriously reduce the effort of our management reforms, the increase in terrorism means we must EITHER increase our resources OR cut back on non-terrorist intelligence activity.’46

  Three months later came the most homicidal terrorist attack ever to take place in Britain. On the evening of 21 December 1988 a PanAm Boeing 747, flight PA 103 en route to New York, crashed on the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing all 259 passengers and crew as well as eleven people on the ground. Though most of the passengers had boarded at Heathrow, over thirty had started their journey in Frankfurt on a Boeing 727 which connected with the 747 and bore the same flight number; other passengers transferred from other flights and joined PA 103 at either Frankfurt or Heathrow.47 Surveys of the wreckage and analysis of information from the air-traffic control radar recordings and the aircraft’s flight recorders showed that PA 103 suffered catastrophic damage while cruising at 31,000 feet, breaking up as it fell to the ground.48 A bomb attack was immediately suspected. After a hunt for debris over an area of some 800 square miles stretching to the east coast of Scotland, detailed forensic examination found traces of explosive in a metal luggage container. Further painstaking forensic and intelligence investigation eventually identified the suitcase which had contained the bomb. The bodies and body parts strewn for many miles around Lockerbie had also to be identified, then linked to particular items of baggage. The Service sent several officers to join the intelligence cell at Lockerbie run by the Strathclyde police. With support from Service headquarters, they acted as the link between the front-line investigators on the scene and the foreign security and intelligence agencies whose assistance proved of crucial importance in pinning down responsibility for the attack. Most of the immensely difficult and harrowing investigation into the disaster would have proved impossible had the explosion occurred over the Atlantic. The fact that PA 103 was brought down over land was an accidental by-product of the weather conditions. The flight to New York from Heathrow frequently took other routes which would have left the aircraft wreckage on the seabed at a depth which would probably have made recovery of the flight recorder and forensic examination impossible. Chance as well as good intelligence thus played a crucial part in the resolution of the case.