Ten-Thirty-Three

by Nicholas Davies

  ‘What happens to any innocent people who might be at the club that night?’ he was asked pointedly.

  ‘Well, that’s their tough luck,’ replied Nelson. ‘Serves them right for being in the fucking place.’

  ‘But you can’t go around shooting indiscriminately at innocent people; don’t you understand that?’ asked another FRU man.

  ‘We couldn’t care less,’ was Nelson’s reply. ‘We know that three or four Provo fuckers drink there nearly every night and we think this is a golden opportunity to wipe out a Provo ASU. From the photographs you gave us we have been able to identify four men who use the club on a regular basis.’

  ‘And what’s your plan?’ he was asked by the astounded FRU personnel who were alarmed by such a reckless and ill-thought-out operation.

  ‘Nothing has been finalised yet,’ Nelson replied, ‘but I’ve been asked to recce the area and the club. I want to find the best way in and the best escape route for our gunmen. I thought you might be able to help plan the operation, but if you don’t want to go along with the idea we’ll have to work out something ourselves.’

  Three days later Nelson returned with his plan. He seemed eager, indeed proud, to explain the details of the forthcoming mission: ‘We will employ a group of our men, perhaps four or five, armed with SMGs, break in through the main entrance and spray the entire place. They will take out as many as possible in the shortest possible time. We will of course aim for the men but if women get in the way that’s just bad luck. Three hijacked cars will be used to pick up the group afterwards. Inside the cars will be spare magazines in case anyone gives chase or tries to stop the vehicles leaving. Our men will be driven to other cars parked near by. They will change vehicles, abandon the first cars and drive back to Belfast. Another car will take all the weapons and return them to the quartermaster for safekeeping.’

  ‘Don’t you think the club will be guarded?’ Nelson was asked. ‘No Republican club which entertains known Provo hitmen would be left unguarded. How do you plan to get around that problem?’

  ‘We haven’t tackled that yet,’ he said, sounding as if the thought hadn’t yet crossed his mind.

  ‘Those guards would take out your men before they even got inside the club,’ one handler observed.

  ‘I doubt that,’ Nelson replied. ‘Our guys are shit hot.’

  ‘But how can you be sure?’

  ‘We’re looking into that problem; we’ll find a way round it, I expect,’ Nelson answered, sounding as if he was trying to remain confident.

  ‘What about the innocents who get caught in crossfire?’

  ‘They’re none of our business,’ he replied, ‘they won’t be targeted. We’re after the Provos.’

  A week later, Nelson returned and announced that the attack on the Monagh Road club had been aborted, having been considered too dangerous. Nelson had discovered that guards were always stationed outside, a twenty-four-hour surveillance camera was in operation and that the UDA had no idea from night to night how many Provos were in the club at any one time. He seemed undeterred by the setback, though, stating that the plan would probably be resurrected at some future date when more accurate intelligence was available. His handlers had no intention of supplying him with any further information about the club if the UDA were planning to machine-gun innocent men and women. On this occasion the Force Research Unit were prepared to stop the UDA gunmen at any price because they could not tolerate the idea of such indiscriminate slaughter.

  A few days later, Nelson requested another meeting with his FRU handlers, telling them of a new target his intelligence organisation had pinpointed. While surveying the Monagh Road club they had identified Gerard Martin Slane, a twenty-six-year-old married man with three young children. Photographs of the unemployed Slane, a suspected Provo activist, had been handed over to Nelson by Military Intelligence and he had been identified from those pictures when visiting the club. By checking Slane’s name with the Force Research Unit’s secret Crucible factsheet, Nelson was able to see that the man had been convicted in September 1985 for possession of a rifle and a magazine containing twenty rounds of ammunition. During the court case Slane claimed he had discovered the brand-new rifle in the outside toilet of his home shortly before the security forces arrived to search the premises. Frightened by the troops’ arrival at his home, Slane argued that in a panic he had thrown the rifle and the magazine over the wall. He was fortunate to be given a two-year suspended sentence at a time when many other Republicans were sent to prison for possessing such weapons.

  Thanks to the information passed to Nelson by British Intelligence, the UDA knew Slane lived in Waterville Street, in the Clonard area off the Falls Road in west Belfast. A UDA surveillance team had staked out the house for some time but had never seen their target visiting his family home where his wife Teresa and three children lived. The fact that Slane did not spend much time at the family home was not surprising – during the previous twelve months Provo activists had been advised by their leaders not to stay the night at their home address on a regular basis for fear of being tracked down by the security services or UDA gunmen. As a result, many men with Provo or Republican connections would live out of a hold-all, moving from address to address, never staying more than a few nights in one place, so that tracking them down became almost an impossible task.

  But the UDA believed that with luck they now had Slane in their sights, so they continued to watch the Monagh Road club. Whenever Slane left the club – usually in an Apollo taxi – the UDA surveillance team would follow. Three times in succession in the autumn of 1988 he made the mistake of returning to his home address, believing he was safe from attack.

  On the fourth night he was again followed by a UDA surveillance team. At 4.15 a.m., neighbours heard the roar of a car as it came racing down the road.

  One neighbour, who asked not to be identified, said, ‘I woke when I heard the car because not many people ever drive fast in this wee road. Then I heard car doors slamming and seconds later the sound of wood being smashed. I looked out of the window and saw masked men smashing down the door of the Slanes’ house. Three men raced inside and another remained outside. Seconds later I heard five shots and a woman’s screams. Then I saw the men running out of the house and they drove away.’

  Teresa Slane said they were asleep in bed when they were woken by the crashing, splintering noise from downstairs. She knew instinctively that someone had come to get Gerard but she thought it was the army wanting to search their house again. She told how her husband had leapt out of bed to confront the men and was standing at the top of the stairs shouting to those breaking in when the men below opened fire. He fell down the stairs, killed instantly. The Provisional IRA offered to give Slane a military funeral but the family declined.

  This had been a totally successful operation between British Intelligence and the gunmen of the Ulster Defence Association, with Nelson as the go-between. British Intelligence had provided the photographs of Slane and his home address; the UDA intelligence had correctly traced and targeted a man they believed to be a Provo activist. The UDA gunmen had provided the killers and the weapons. And only a handful of people had any idea that Britain’s Army Intelligence, working on orders from above to act aggressively, had been responsible for providing the information that led to the killing.

  But neither the Force Research Unit officers, Nelson nor the UDA hierarchy appeared to draw any distinction between the young Provo gunmen and bombers – those who were members of current IRA active service units – and the older generation of IRA members or supporters of the Republican cause, even targeting pensioners in their bid to spread alarm and fear amongst the Catholic community.

  One such victim was Francisco Notarantino, a sixty-six-year-old pensioner of Italian extraction who had lived in Northern Ireland all his life. Notarantino was one of the old school, a member of the Republican movement going back almost fifty years when he was jailed during the 1940s for involvement in anti-British
activities. He had also been one of the Republicans who had been picked up during the internment sweep of the 1970s and spent time in detention with scores of other supporters and sympathisers. Francisco Notarantino had always been a stalwart of the Republican movement, advising the younger generation, and he was still respected though he had played no active part in the new hardline Provo movement which had split from the Official IRA in the 1970s.

  Notarantino, the father of six daughters and five sons, was an easy target. He had been forced to give up his part-time job driving a taxi around Belfast some years earlier because of ill health. He spent most of his time at home and always slept in his house in Whitecliff Parade, in the Ballymurphy area of west Belfast.

  Shortly after half past seven on the morning of 9 October 1987, he and his wife were sleeping when four hooded gunmen arrived outside in a Vauxhall Cavaliet. Two jumped out of the car and kicked down the front door in a matter of seconds. They ran up the stairs and stormed into the old couple’s bedroom. The two pensioners were still in bed lying side by side. It made no difference that they were too old to defend themselves or even take any evasive action. The gunmen opened fire with handguns, hitting Notarantino in the chest as he struggled to get out of bed to tackle his attackers. The force of the shots made him turn round and the gunmen fired at him again, this time in the back. It is believed he died instantly. His wife was unharmed though badly shocked.

  One of Notarantino’s grandsons was asleep in an adjoining bedroom and he ran out onto the landing when the shooting began. The gunmen fired a warning shot at the teenager, slightly injuring him in the hand; he was lucky, for two other shots passed over his head, narrowly missing him. The gunmen fled down the stairs and escaped in the car that was still waiting outside. The killing had taken little more than a minute from the time the Cavalier drew up outside the house to when it sped off down the road. The car, which had been hijacked that morning in the Woodvale area of Belfast, was later found abandoned at Blackmountain Way in the Springmartin area. Police found no clues in the vehicle.

  West Belfast MP Gerry Adams said the victim had been a good friend of his father decades before and had been well known in Republican circles all his life. He added, ‘When the bedroom door was kicked in, Mrs Notarantino thought it was an army raid. She awoke to see a man in a boilersuit standing in front of her. Her husband struggled to get out of bed and was shot in the chest. Francisco was obviously a soft target for Loyalist gunmen.’

  Adams then went on: ‘I find it very strange that this area was crawling with Crown forces only yesterday. They swamped the place and the local Sinn Fein councillor, Stan Keenan, was stopped twice. Yet today at half past seven in the morning there was no one around at all, and armed men were able to come in and out of the area with no one around to stop them.’

  In that short statement Gerry Adams had highlighted one of the reasons why Nelson’s UDA gunmen were able to operate with impunity, somehow never being stopped or caught by either RUC or army patrols while carrying out their murderous evil deeds. On most of those occasions it was obvious that the FRU had put out a restriction order on the area to ensure the UDA gunmen would not be stopped by the forces of law and order.

  The murder of Francisco Notarantino in October 1987 forced people to face the fact that the senseless sectarian killings of the 1970s had indeed returned to Belfast. Many local politicians believed the killing was designed to inflict fear and despair into the hearts of both the Catholic and Protestant working-class communities. Gerry Adams said he did not know if the IRA would reply in kind to the killing of one of the Republican movement’s senior citizens. ‘The IRA has a policy of taking punitive action against the people who carry out these assassinations,’ he said, ‘though I am totally opposed to random sectarian shootings.’

  Workers Party spokesman Mary MacMahon also condemned the murder of Notarantino and said the killers were the enemies of the community: ‘Those responsible for such killings must be brought to justice and eliminated from society.’

  An SDLP candidate for the Lower Falls, Mrs Gerry Cosgrove, said Notarantino’s shooting was a pointless murder: ‘This type of killing is prompted by other sectarian killings committed by the paramilitaries on both sides. Both must share the blame for this loss of life.’

  This was a vain hope. The targeting and killing of known Provo activists, Republican supporters and sympathisers and even ordinary, decent Catholics with no connection with terrorist activities would continue thanks primarily to the help and assistance given to the UDA gunmen by British Military Intelligence. Most of the attacks were savage, brutal and quick.

  One such killing occurred in January 1988 when Billy Kane, a twenty-year-old Roman Catholic and suspected Republican activist, was shot as he lay on the sofa at his home in the New Lodge area of north Belfast at six in the evening. Outside, commuters were making their way home from the city in the dark and wet of a cold January evening, but this did not seem to deter the gunmen from carrying out their murderous operation.

  His brother explained in horrific detail what occurred: ‘Billy was fast asleep on the sofa and I was in the sitting-room with my sisters Carol and Nicola and our mother Bridget when the door was opened. We always left our front door on the latch so we could all come and go without bothering with keys. There was always someone at home so there seemed no need to lock the door. We thought it was our father returning from work but suddenly these two masked men carrying guns burst into the room, looked around and then walked over to Billy who was still lying on the sofa, and emptied a magazine into his body. They never said a word to him but just opened fire. As the gunmen left, one turned to the other and asked, “Did you shoot him right?” and the man turned back and fired another shot into Billy’s body. It was sickening.’

  After the murder, the two men went outside, jumped into a car in which two other men were waiting, and drove off towards the Loyalist Duncairn Gardens area. No one stopped the gunmen’s car and no one was arrested for the killing. Once again, the UDA had carried out an execution and once again it had been with the help and co-operation of the Force Research Unit and Brian Nelson.

  Sometimes months would go by between the time FRU officers alerted Brian Nelson about a suspect Provo or Republican supporter whom they suggested the UDA should target and the actual attack itself. One such target was Declan McDaid, a keen Republican.

  It was some time in late 1987 or early 1988 that FRU officers alerted their agent to the fact that he might care to check out Declan McDaid whom they suspected was heavily involved in Republican politics. For weeks at a time Brian Nelson, with the help of a number of his own part-time agents, tracked Declan wherever he went, whether it was to attend meetings or just enjoy a chat and a pint with friends in one of the Republican clubs of west Belfast.

  At meetings with his FRU handlers, Nelson would complain that he and his men were having problems tracking McDaid because he constantly changed his everyday movements, almost as though he realised he was being targeted. ‘He checks everything he does,’ complained Nelson on one occasion. ‘Before getting into a car he will check to see whether there is a booby-trap underneath; he will constantly check his car’s rear-view mirror to see if he is being followed, and when he walks anywhere at all he will stop and check whether anyone suspicious is following him. He acts as though he knows he is under surveillance but he seems to have no idea precisely who is watching him.’

  ‘Do you put various people onto him?’ asked one of his handlers.

  ‘Of course we do,’ Nelson replied, as if insulted by the question. ‘We sometimes use men and sometimes use women to tail him and we never use the same person too often. But we know he believes he is under surveillance. We hope he thinks it’s Special Branch or the army because that gives us a freer rein. We know he won’t try anything if he thinks the RUC are tailing him, but if he thought it was us, the UDA, then he might take aggressive action rather than keep running like he does now.’

  ‘Are you sure you ha
ve the right man?’ Nelson was asked.

  ‘Of course we have the right man,’ he replied. ‘We have the montages of him that you lot gave us and they match perfectly. Of course we’ve got the right bastard, there’s no doubt about it.’

  ‘Have you got a plan to take him out?’ he was asked.

  ‘No, not yet,’ Nelson replied. ‘We know where he lives but it seems a pretty secure place and difficult to make a quick entry. We’ve checked it out and it seems his house is well protected with a strong front door with secure locks; not just your run-of-the-mill yale lock which a bloody good kick can force open in seconds.’

  ‘Have you thought about knocking on his front door?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ said Nelson. ‘If we did that he might come out with a shooter or something. We don’t want to take any fucking risks like that.’

  Looking pensive, he went on, ‘This fucker is a real challenge. He knows we’re after him but he doesn’t know who we are or what we look like. Nor does he have the faintest idea where or when we plan to hit him. But we will, mark my words. He’s got it coming to him.’

  Finally, after months of surveillance work, the UDA decided in the spring of 1988 to go ahead and take out Declan McDaid. But this time, before carrying out the operation, Nelson didn’t bother to check with his handlers, nor did he go over the plan of attack as he usually did prior to any operation.

  On the evening of 10 May 1988, Declan’s brother Terence was with his wife Maura, their two daughters and his mother-in-law in their home in Newington Street off the Antrim Road in north Belfast. The two young girls had just gone upstairs to bed and Terence and Maura were watching television when they heard the sound of someone trying to break down the front door.

  Terence McDaid had never been involved with the Provos or with hardline Republican politics and he was not even a Sinn Fein activist. It made no difference to those two UDA gunmen who burst into his house that evening. They would ask no questions; they would not check the identity of the man they were about to murder.