by Ed Moloney
Although McKenna had turned down the East Tyrone flying column proposal, Northern Command did order the unit to bomb and mortar police and UDR bases in 1985, although in this case the strategy was a limited one, aimed at frustrating the repair and renewal of security bases. The East Tyrone ASU spearheaded much of this activity, and a sort of flying column was set up—but it came together only for specific operations, and that made it very different from the full-time and secure column Lynagh and McKearney had in mind.
In December 1985 the East Tyrone ASU blew up Ballygawley RUC station and killed two policemen who were stationed inside. Then it mortared bases in Castlederg and Carrickmore. In the autumn of 1986 the police station in “The Birches” near Portadown, County Armagh, was devastated by a bomb carried to its target in the bucket of a mechanical digger. The Loughgall attack was supposed to be a repeat performance. East Tyrone was also to the fore in the offensive against building contractors. Two weeks before the Loughgall ambush, five ASU members took fifty-two-year-old Harry Henry out of his Magherafelt, County Derry, home in his stocking feet and shot him in the head. Henry’s brother owned a building firm that specialized in doing work for the security forces.
Although the IRA leadership had moved to meet some of the East Tyrone demands, Lynagh and McKearney felt it still fell far short of the sort of tactic they believed could cause a qualitative shift of fortune in the IRA’s direction. Relations between McKenna and McKearney in particular were worsening, and the number of operations carried out by East Tyrone kept to a minimum, as one dissident confidant recalled: “[McKenna] kept on knocking back ideas for operations and separating Padraig from the rest of the [East Tyrone] unit. He was excluded from the attack on The Birches for example, and it was like McKenna was trying to tell the others they didn’t need Padraig.”9
In the months between the 1986 Convention and the Loughgall ambush, McKearney began putting out feelers in Dublin and elsewhere in a bid to acquire weapons that would be used to arm the rebels if they decided to break free of the Provisionals. He was also in touch with the faction that had coalesced around the Provisional IRA renegade turned INLA leader Dominic McGlinchey, whose violent campaign in the South Derry countryside in the late 1970s was matched in its ferocity only by that in East Tyrone. McGlinchey, who had even less regard for the Adams leadership than the East Tyrone men, was in jail at this point, but his formidable wife, Mary, an experienced and ruthless operator in her own right, had assumed leadership of his group. The contacts between McKearney and the INLA were designed to test whether they could find common ground, but when Mary McGlinchey was killed in January 1987, shot dead by unknown gunmen as she was bathing her two infant sons, the liaison ended.
Nonetheless, in the spring of 1987, just weeks before the Loughgall ambush, the dissidents met to discuss their plans. The venue was Seamus McElwaine’s family home on the Monaghan-Fermanagh Border. “They sat down in North Monaghan and asked their colleagues whether it would be feasible to break away and form a separate organization which would put their flying column idea into practice,” recalled a former associate. “It was an informal meeting, seven or eight of them were present.”10 Naturally, the meeting was kept secret from mainstream IRA loyalists. Another source familiar with these events added, “The gist [of the meeting] was that they [decided that they] could get arms from their own sources and move away from the Provos.”11
Jim Lynagh and Padraig McKearney did not live long enough to put whatever plans they had made into action. Since their deaths in the Lough-gall ambush the search for an explanation of what went wrong that day has obsessed many Tyrone republicans. Was there an informer and, if so, who was he? The obsession caused near-paranoia to grip the IRA in the brigade area. Patrick Kelly’s successor as OC, Brian Arthurs, went as far as splitting East Tyrone in two to see if this could isolate the guilty party, and for a long time brigade operations were suspended altogether while internal investigations were carried out.
Certain features of the Loughgall operation suggested the possibility of a more innocent explanation. Glaring mistakes were made in the planning and execution of the bombing which inadvertently could have put the British on the trail, mistakes that spoke of a reckless overconfidence and care lessness. There were, for instance, no probes made around Loughgall before the attack. This was routine practice in South Armagh, where, before am bushes or other IRA operations, sheepdogs were sent into adjoining fields to flush out under cover soldiers. Nor was there any effort to give the attackers the protection of covering fire just in case something went wrong. Such sloppiness at this late stage possibly indicated that other lapses had occurred earlier in the preparatory work and it is conceivable that this is how the British learned of the plan. An internal IRA investigation held afterward concluded that something like this might have happened, and that there had been a leak at the Monaghan end of the operation, although the precise source was never identified.12 The IRA leadership remains as much in the dark about what really happened as anyone else.
The number of theories suggesting that an informer had betrayed the unit have multiplied with the years. An Ardboe woman, Colette O’Neill, came under suspicion in 1989, for instance, and was briefly kidnapped by the IRA but rescued by the RUC, which seemed to have excellent information about her plight. She later made a deal with the IRA in which she agreed not to give evidence against her abductors if the IRA left her alone. In an interview with the author not long afterward, she denied being the Loughgall informer, although she admitted that a phone call had been made from her home to members of the ASU on the day of the operation, clearing the way for the bomb to be picked up. Another theory blames a ninth member of the ASU, who was supposed to be on the Loughgall mission but missed it. Although the man protested his innocence, not surprisingly he left for England not long afterward and has not been seen since.
Some British sources have claimed that electronic surveillance of the homes of two other Tyrone IRA members, Gerard and Martin Harte, near Omagh, put the British on the trail of the Loughgall operation.13 The same eavesdropping operation directed against their home led a year later to the death of the Hartes, lured into an ambush near their home by the SAS. The Harte brothers’ role in the Loughgall operation was to hijack the mechanical digger, and the sources say that electronic bugs picked up details of this part of the plan. Against this, local sources claim that while this may have happened, it did not necessarily mean the British would have known the target.
“Liam Ryan did the intelligence work for Loughgall, and he insisted that he had compartmentalized everything, that no single participant would have known all the details,” recalled a confidant of the Tyrone Brigade intelligence officer. “He felt [the leak] had to be at a centralized level; he would have concluded that it had to be higher up than Tyrone.”14 Other Tyrone IRA sources corroborate this and say that some of the minor members of the Loughgall team were not told about the operation until fourteen or fifteen hours beforehand, not enough time for the British to mount an SAS ambush on the scale of that which destroyed the ASU.15
Another factor may have led to the Loughgall ambush. Since the mid-1980s the IRA leadership had exercised tighter and tighter control over the IRA’s day-to-day activity as it became clearer that bad IRA operations, those in which civilians were put at risk or killed, could seriously erode electoral support for Sinn Fein. During the 1983 general election a huge bomb aimed at Andersonstown RUC station had wrecked homes in the streets where Gerry Adams had been canvassing for votes not long before. The Ivor Bell–Belfast Brigade revolt against Adams during 1983 and 1984 had led to the deaths of Edgar Graham, Jimmy Campbell, and Mary Travers, daughter of the Catholic magistrate Tom Travers. Adams had warned of the need for “controlled and disciplined” IRA actions at the 1983 Ard Fheis.16 After Sinn Fein’s poor performance in the June 1984 Euro election, he returned to the theme: “[T]here are a number of people who, while they voted for us in June 1983, may not have been able to tolerate some aspects of IRA
operations,” he cautioned. “I think it is fair to say there are varying degrees of tolerance within the Nationalist electorate for aspects of the armed struggle.”17 The ballot box was beginning to curb the Armalite.
Just before the death of Seamus McElwaine, killed by the SAS in County Fermanagh in April 1986, Northern Command got permission to vet most IRA operations in Northern Ireland in a bid to forestall further electoral damage. “There had been some bad operations, politically bad operations, and this was done to correct that,” recalled one activist. “McGuinness [the Northern commander] got authority from the Army Council to vet operations. Before that, area commanders would run through their plans in very general terms, for example, ‘I have a policeman or a British patrol,’ with the chief of staff or director of operations. Now people had to go into the detail of the operations.”18
IRA activists had an almost pathological fear of sharing operational intelligence with people they did not know or who did not come from their area. No one ever suggested that Martin McGuinness or any other senior figures at his level were passing on information to the British, but the very fact that the circle of operational knowledge was widened beyond those chosen to go on the mission heightened fears of leaks, surveillance and even treachery.
The vertical IRA structures introduced by Adams after his Cage 11 days combined with the greater political control exercised over operational matters made it easier, not harder, for British intelligence to penetrate the IRA’s nerve centers. The old battalion and company architecture was leaky, for sure, but whatever damage an informer did was usually confined to one small area. Even then it was a relatively easy task to isolate and identify the traitor. A well-placed agent in the remodeled IRA could by contrast cause enormous harm throughout the length and breadth of the organization and be pretty sure of getting away with it. Those on the ground who fought the IRA’s war were acutely aware of these dangers.
Loughgall was a case in point. The bombing was a Northern Command–directed operation, but Lynagh objected strongly to having to share vital details of the mission plan with others. Before the go-ahead was given for the operation he traveled to Monaghan to see Kevin McKenna to complain, and the two had a blazing row. “McKenna and Lynagh never saw eye to eye,” remembered one associate.19
But this alone does not explain the deep gulf of mistrust that separates many Tyrone republicans from their leadership beyond the county. To explain that, it is necessary to go back to the secret meeting of East Tyrone activists who gathered in North Monaghan in the spring of 1987 to discuss splitting from the Provisionals. “They made a big mistake by including someone who really shouldn’t have been there,” concluded an associate.20 This was a reference to a Belfast IRA man whose family had a record of long and loyal service to the leadership. No proof or evidence has ever been produced to show that he or anyone else told the leadership about the dissidents’ plot, but in the hothouse world of the IRA that hardly mattered. “This is the reason for all the suspicion around Loughgall,” said the same source.21
FROM THE TIME of the Loughgall ambush onward, it was more or less open season on the Tyrone IRA as far as the SAS and British intelligence were concerned. In August 1988 the SAS killed the Mid-Tyrone IRA members Gerard Harte, Martin Harte, and Brian Mullin. In October 1990 Dessie Grew and a ferocious young gunman from Galbally, Martin McCaughey, were ambushed and killed by undercover soldiers not far from Loughgall. In June the following year the remnants of the East Tyrone ASU died in an SAS trap in Coagh, between Ardboe and Cookstown. Lawrence McNally and Pete Ryan, both Monaghan-based operators, had been lured to the village by a sighting of a UDR soldier who, because of his alleged connections to loyalists, had long been an IRA target, but their car was destroyed in an SAS gun and rocket attack. Their driver, Tony Doris, was an IRA member from Coalisland. “After McNally and Pete Ryan that was it; we had nobody left,” commented one Tyrone republican.22
The SAS was not finished, however. In February 1992, undercover soldiers cut a swath into the next IRA generation when they killed the twenty-one-year-old student Kevin Barry O’Donnell, twenty-three-year-old Sean O’Farrell, nineteen-year-old Peter Clancy, and twenty-year-old Daniel Vincent in a set-piece ambush in the parking lot of the Catholic church in Clonoe, between Coalisland and Ardboe. The four died after a particularly pointless machine-gun attack on Coalisland police station mounted from atop a truck as it sped through the town. Once again, according to IRA sources in a position to know, Northern Command had approved the operation.23 In all four ambushes the British security forces’ intelligence had been excellent.
The impact of the British offensive is evident from the war statistics, which reveal a picture of a steady decline in IRA activity in Tyrone. In 1986, before the Loughgall ambush, according to the author’s analysis of the weekly IRA “War News” column published in An Phoblacht–Republican News, East Tyrone accounted for 21 percent of all IRA operations in Northern Ireland. But in 1987 that dipped to 9 percent. In 1988 there was some recovery in IRA activity to 16 percent; but thereafter the decline resumed: in 1989 to 13.5 percent, in 1990 to 16.4 percent, in 1991 to 8 percent, in 1992 to 11 percent, and in 1993, the year before the first cease-fire, to 9 percent.24 The IRA death toll tells the same tale. Up to April 2000, the IRA in Tyrone had lost 53 members, the highest death toll for any brigade area. But over half, 28, were killed in the five years between May 1987 and February 1992, compared with 25 in the seventeen years between 1970 and 1987. In other words, IRA deaths in Tyrone increased fivefold after the Loughall ambush.
The SAS was not alone in putting East Tyrone in its deadly sights. The years 1987 and 1988 also saw the beginnings of a concerted UVF assault against republicans and nationalists in the brigade area that in its way was more enervating than the undercover military ambushes. In an important sense the East Tyrone Brigade brought the calamity upon itself. The killings of Harry Henry in April 1987 and then a year later of Ned Gibson, a Protestant sanitation worker who was also a part-time soldier in the UDR, shot dead as he collected garbage in Ardboe, were regarded by Tyrone’s unionists as overtly brutal sectarian assaults, and they responded in kind. It was, however, the nature of the IRA’s response to the loyalist offensive that made the carnage in Tyrone such a significant milestone on the road to the 1994 cease-fire.
In the first twenty years of its existence the Provisional IRA had a simple if brutal attitude toward loyalist killings. This was to retaliate with excessive but deliberately directed violence against the unionist community. Two notorious incidents stand out as examples of what in practice this policy meant. The first occurred in early January 1976 when Provisional IRA gunmen halted a minibus carrying textile workers home from work near Kingsmills in South Armagh. They singled out the lone Catholic on board, told him to get out of the way, and then lined ten Protestants up against the side of the bus and riddled them with automatic fire. The incident was so horrific that the IRA was reluctant to admit responsibility, and instead a cover name, the South Armagh Republican Reaction Force, was used. The Kingsmills slaughter was the IRA’s response to the UVF killing in the days before of five South Armagh Catholics, members of two families.
The second example came in January 1981 when an eleven-man IRA unit, reportedly led by Jim Lynagh, broke into Tynan Abbey, an enormous mansion set in eight hundred acres of lush farmland near the Armagh-Monaghan Border, and killed its two occupants, eighty-six-year-old Sir Norman Stronge and his merchant banker son, forty-eight-year-old James. They then planted incendiary devices that set the abbey alight, destroying it in the fire. The family had been in Tynan for eight generations, and the Stronges were scions of the unionist establishment. Sir Norman had been Speaker of the Stormont parliament for a quarter of a century and his son had been a unionist MP at Stormont; his great-grandfather had been Speaker of the old Irish House of Commons. The reason for the IRA attack was clear. Five days before, UDA gunmen had made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the Tyrone republican leader Bernadette McAliskey,
which had left her and her husband, Michael, barely alive. The UDA attack was the latest in a series of assassinations of prominent nationalist and republican figures. The killing of the Stronges was designed to bring them to a halt.
The point about the Kingsmills and the Stronge killings is that most Provisional supporters believed that they had worked and that a speedy and violent IRA reaction of that caliber was the best, perhaps the only, way to stop such loyalist violence in its tracks. Such retaliations became accepted as part of the Provisionals’ view of the world. “It’s a lesson you learn quickly on the football field,” commented a Tyrone republican and GAA veteran. “If you’re fouled, you have to hit back.”25 The reprisal policy was part of what the Provisional IRA was about; it reached deep down into the group’s Defenderist roots.
But by the time the Mid-Ulster UVF began its killing in the autumn of 1988, IRA policy had begun to change. In November 1988 the UVF targeted the home of the Moortown Sinn Fein councillor Francie McNally, not far from Ardboe on the shores of Lough Neagh. Shots were fired through the kitchen window, and McNally’s younger brother Phelim was fatally wounded as he played an accordion. Three months later, in February 1989, the UVF struck once more against Sinn Fein. This time the target was fifty-eight-year-old Magherafelt SF councillor John Joe Davey, who was cut down in the driveway of his isolated rural home. Davey had been named under privilege in the House of Commons by the DUP MP for Mid-Ulster, the Reverend William McCrea, as an accomplice in the killing of a local Protestant security contractor in 1986. A veteran of the Border Campaign, Davey had twice been interned by the Northern authorities. The UVF was exacting revenge.
Army Council policy in relation to reprisals had changed significantly by this stage. Retaliations of the Kingsmills and Stronge variety were banned, as one IRA source familiar with the policy change explained: “John Davey was the first Sinn Fein councillor to be shot, but there was to be no retaliation because of [an Army Council directive] against political assassinations. Although there could be exceptions—Ken Maginnis [ex-UDR captain and the former Fermanagh–South Tyrone unionist MP] was one—and there could be special requests, basically that type of reprisal was politically unacceptable to Adams and company.”26
