Big Boys' Rules

by Mark Urban

  It may be that some of those interviewed were willing to talk to me because I had been a member of the regular Army for nine months in 1979. I served in the Royal Tank Regiment, but I did not do so in Northern Ireland, and this book is not based in any way on my own reflections and experiences while in uniform. It is a journalist’s appraisal of the dilemmas facing both police officers and soldiers, and of the government policies they are expected to carry out.

  I am aware, of course, that certain categories of information are useful to terrorists, and consequently I have not used the names of living people unless their views have already been published. This rule has been applied to protect the potential victims of loyalist as well as republican terrorism. I have not given the location of barracks housing Army and police special units, to avoid them being chosen as targets. And I have concentrated on tactics and technology used by undercover units already known to have been compromised.

  Some members of undercover units whom I interviewed argued that an emphasis on incidents in which people had been killed would provide a false impression of their duties in Ulster. I have tried to give examples of operations where nobody was killed, but the fatal incidents are, by their very nature, the most documented and the most open to question.

  I do not examine the shooting of three IRA members in Gibraltar in 1988 in any great detail, as I wanted to concentrate on events that have been less subject to media interest and scrutiny. It is in any case these events which provide the context crucial to an understanding of the soldiers’ behaviour and of the authorities’ attitude during the inquest procedures in Gibraltar.

  Shortly before this book was published, I was contacted by the Secretary to the D Notice Committee, a semi-official body which liaises between journalists and government departments. His intervention followed expressions of concern from the Army and the Security Service about the possible contents of my book. I agreed to allow them sight of proof copies, which were by that stage circulating among certain journalists. The Secretary asked that changes be made to the book on fifteen separate topics. In only four cases was I satisfied that alterations were required. The Secretary presented new and compelling arguments that these points constituted a real threat to life. I was satisfied that removing them did not diminish in any way the investigation of key issues contained in the book.

  Finally, I would like to thank the various people who helped me with the project, including Susanne McDadd, my editor at Faber and Faber; Walter Macauley and Kathleen Higgins, librarians of the Belfast Telegraph and Irish News respectively; Vincent Dowd and Beth Holgate for their helpful comments on the manuscript; and all those who agreed to be interviewed – without whom this book would not have been possible.

  Mark Urban

  April 1992

  PART ONE: 1976–1979

  1

  First Blood

  It was just after five on a dark February evening in 1978. Two young men, members of the Irish Republican Army, were speeding in a white Volkswagen along a road near Ardboe in the county of Tyrone. The area to the south west of Lough Neagh is a bastion of the republican community in Ulster. The men were on their way to recover several small home-made mortar bombs which had been hidden in a farmyard; one of them was about to be killed by the SAS.

  The car pulled up, the men got out and walked into the farmyard. As twenty-year-old Paul Duffy picked up one of the mortar bombs he was hit by a burst of rifle fire, which killed him almost instantly. The other man turned and ran back towards the Volkswagen. As he started the car the windows were hit by bullets, and he was showered with glass. He got away, but later surrendered himself for medical attention. He had three bullets in him, but survived.

  This type of incident was to be repeated many times by the SAS in Northern Ireland. Several suspected IRA men had been arrested in the area two days before the Duffy operation. An informer had told the security forces about the mortar bombs and their imminent collection. The soldiers had been in hiding for two days and nights, waiting for someone to appear.

  Duffy was not the first IRA man to be killed by soldiers of the SAS, but the operation marked an important step in the struggle against republican terrorism. Until the beginning of 1978 the SAS had been under orders to remain in south Armagh, close to the border with the Irish Republic, the area the popular press calls ‘bandit country’. Now they were to be employed throughout Northern Ireland – a development which followed a period of uncertainty about how the security forces should exploit their most sensitive intelligence and their most highly trained soldiers.

  The British Army is normally unwilling to confirm or deny either the presence of SAS soldiers in an area or their participation in a particular incident. This policy stems from a desire to increase the mystique surrounding the Regiment, and from the need to protect its members and the sources of intelligence on which it acts. But on this occasion Army commanders were keen to spread the word that things had changed. The Army’s Headquarters Northern Ireland (HQNI) press office at Lisburn confirmed ‘that the patrol which killed a terrorist … and wounded another came from the Special Air Service’. Reporters were also told of the change in policy allowing the soldiers to operate outside south Armagh. The Army was sending a clear signal to the Provisionals.

  *

  It was in January 1976 that the first twelve members of the SAS, Britain’s most highly trained military unit, arrived at Bessbrook in south Armagh. The strongly Protestant community in the village was living through a grim period of sectarian killings. Both Protestant and Catholic death squads had been stalking the countryside of south Armagh, and had killed twenty-four civilians in the six months before the SAS was committed to the region.

  For the small community of Bessbrook those first weeks of 1976 were a time of crisis. Following a killing by Protestant terrorists of five local Catholics, a group calling itself the ‘South Armagh Republican Action Force’ had stopped a bus and gunned down eleven men who were on their way home from work. Only one survived. The bus driver, a Catholic, was released. Most of the dead were from Bessbrook. It was this incident – and the loyalist response to it – which prompted the then prime minister, Harold Wilson, to send the SAS to south Armagh to supplement the regular Army, which had been in Northern Ireland since 1969.

  SAS squadrons had previously been deployed in Northern Ireland in 1969 and 1974, and several SAS men had served there in other units, but there has always been an air of secrecy surrounding the Regiment’s role in the region, so it is worth examining the structure and practice of the unit to separate some of the myth from the reality. The 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, or 22 SAS as the special forces unit is correctly known, is based in Hereford. It only recruits from other Army units and usually takes officers for three-year tours. They tend to be in their mid to late twenties when they first attempt selection. Most are not graduates, although many have been to public schools. These young officers have a limited effect on the Regiment’s ethos, since they are attached to it for a finite period, even if some do go on to a second or third three-year tour later in their career; for other ranks there is no fixed leaving date – ‘Once you’re in, you’ve cracked it,’ as one SAS man describes it. The ordinary soldiers almost invariably epitomize the working-class culture of the sergeant’s mess. Many become indispensable and long-serving regimental characters. The only officers who stay in the Regiment are normally raised from the ranks after a career as a non-commissioned officer (NCO).

  The novice SAS soldier is given the rank of trooper – equivalent to private – regardless of his rank in his parent regiment. However, the soldiers do not suffer financially: they usually receive the pay of a rank above their pre-SAS status and a special forces bonus of several pounds a day. If they leave Hereford they are restored to their pre-SAS rank.

  SAS soldiers tend to be more mature and fitter than their counterparts in the Army, but the idea that they are particularly intellectually gifted is, by and large, incorrect. One SAS officer says, ‘Th
e ordinary bloke is just thinking about his next team task. He’s just wondering whether it’ll be abroad and whether to buy a new hi-fi when he gets back.’

  The most experienced soldiers are concentrated in the SAS Training Wing, which is responsible for the twice-yearly selection of new recruits. Some other NCOs can be found running training in the two Territorial Army SAS Regiments. Some of the older SAS soldiers have become psychological casualties, referred to Army hospitals after years on operations, or have been given a training posting as a reward for their service. Two of the SAS veterans who have recently published memoirs admit to having spent time under psychiatric observation. Not surprisingly, the Ministry of Defence is unwilling to discuss whether the number of SAS soldiers who succumb to mental disorders is higher than that in the Army as a whole.

  Most of those who serve in 22 SAS retain the cap badge of their parent regiment, and may return to their old unit, even after years at Hereford. Any soldier can be ‘returned to unit’ (RTU’d) if he falls foul of the Hereford hierarchy. Attitudes to service in the SAS vary in different parts of the Army. In the Parachute Regiment, which supplies much of Hereford’s raw material, failure to pass selection or being RTU’d can carry a considerable stigma. The natural desire to avoid being RTU’d prevents many soldiers from voicing misgivings about orders or challenging the Training Wing NCOs who have such a strong influence on the ethos of the Regiment. In other regiments, where members rarely become members of the SAS, a soldier who tries for selection will be respected whatever the outcome of his attempt.

  Officers and soldiers usually spend about five months after selection undergoing SAS training, which ranges from practising ambushes to learning medical skills and the Regiment’s special signals system. They serve in one of the four sabre squadrons – A, B, D and G (Guards) – usually for at least two years. Then they may move to the Training Wing, which undertakes many of the SAS’s more sensitive tasks outside Britain, or to other specialized parts of the Regiment.

  SAS selection requires enormous physical stamina. The four weeks of evaluation culminate in a 45-mile endurance march to be completed in twenty hours while carrying a 50lb bergen rucksack. To meet this challenge many candidates will train for up to a year in their spare time, pushing themselves for months over difficult terrain in all weathers and enduring pain from injuries.

  Officers are selected largely by the Regiment’s veteran NCOs, and many tend to feel they are still being judged after they have passed. As one says, ‘In general they have contempt for what they call “Ruperts”. They do not listen to reason. The only way to earn their respect is through physical achievement – which makes it rather difficult to discuss the finer arguments about our role.’

  Many hours of an SAS soldier’s training are spent on the range, acquiring a high degree of proficiency with different weapons. Specialized courses include sessions in the ‘Killing House’, where soldiers are confronted with various situations in which they must make split-second judgements about whether to fire, with live rounds, at targets. Training emphasizes the need to open fire, with the minimum of hesitation, if the target is recognized as hostile. In some exercises fellow soldiers stand among dummies, placing their lives quite literally in the hands of their comrades who burst into the room and have to disable the ‘terrorists’.

  SAS soldiers are scornful of civilians who believe that it is possible, western-style, to shoot a weapon out of a person’s hand or to disable someone with shots to the legs. In the terror of close-range combat a soldier cannot waste time aiming at a fast-moving limb; he is trained to shoot at the trunk – putting as many bullets into a person as is necessary to ensure they will be unable to use their weapon.

  The skills which the SAS was meant to bring to Ireland were those fostered by the Hereford regime. A soldier who has the self-discipline to push himself across the Brecon Beacons with a huge bergen on his back in sub-zero temperatures will have the stamina to lie in wait for days in a hole in the ground, defecating into a plastic bag and sleeping in soaking wet clothes while waiting for a terrorist to arrive.

  But the new arena of Northern Ireland was to reveal some vital defects of the Hereford system. Judgements between friend and foe were rarely as simple as in the Killing House. In Northern Ireland soldiers faced the threat that the enemy might shoot them first. Classroom doctrines about controlled ‘double taps’ – bursts of two rounds – were often forgotten in the terrorist battleground when SAS soldiers would let fly dozens of bullets, sometimes at people who were no more than bystanders.

  The introduction of the SAS in Ulster was a political act. The symbolic value of sending an élite squadron to Bessbrook, the village from which most of the eleven victims of the 1976 bus shooting came, was clear. Although a London newspaper derided the despatch of twelve soldiers in January 1976 as a ‘token’ presence, in fact they were merely an advance party: several weeks later the SAS sent its D Squadron, numbering seventy-five, to Bessbrook.

  From the outset, the SAS’s presence was publicized for political ends. Even though secrecy was vital to the type of operation the SAS wanted to conduct, various political figures and members of the security forces were keen to exploit the propaganda value of the Regiment. The republicans also understood, even before the SAS arrived, that fear of these anonymous British Army bogeymen, highly skilled in killing, could be exploited for their own purposes. The Regiment’s acronym became associated with every mysterious happening. It acquired a mystique akin to that of the hated and feared Black and Tans, the local troops levied by British governments in Ireland in the 1900s who had a reputation for brutality. Thus the SAS were to become leading players in the propaganda contest to win the hearts and minds of the people of Ulster.

  Merlyn Rees, the Northern Ireland Secretary at the time, later reflected that the commitment of the Regiment, which had gained a fearsome reputation in the counter-insurgency campaigns that accompanied the dissolution of the British Empire, had not been clearly thought out: ‘It was more presentational and mystique-making than anything else.’

  But by sending the SAS to south Armagh Harold Wilson also provided the Army with a valuable resource for covert warfare. Army chiefs wanted to use the SAS not to separate feuding communities but to prosecute their struggle against the highly effective armed republican movement. One IRA unit in south Armagh seemed able to kill soldiers with impunity – forty-nine had been shot or blown up there since the commitment of the Army to Northern Ireland in August 1969.

  However, the arrival of the SAS further complicated the struggle between the police and the Army for control in Ulster – a struggle dominated by the personalities of the security chiefs. The SAS’s mission in Northern Ireland was to be governed by the interaction of key figures in these establishments and by their differing interpretations of how the troops under their command could use lethal force yet remain, or appear to remain, within the law. Confusion about the exact role of the SAS even extended to some Army officers. One, writing anonymously in The Times, stated that the SAS would be ‘told to do what the Army has so far failed to do, kill terrorists’. However, he went on to explain that ‘to anyone who knows [the SAS] well, the IRA claim that they have been used as undercover assassins in Northern Ireland is absurd’. Such a confident distinction between an assassin and a soldier carrying out an order to kill terrorists is less than clear, given that a simple order to eliminate terrorists whenever possible would be against the law in Britain.

  There was even uncertainty as to who should command the troops. On paper the Army’s chain of command was clear. Initially, the SAS Squadron was under the control of the head of the local regular Army unit, a lieutenant colonel commanding the battalion based in south Armagh on a four-month tour. But those in authority higher up the security forces hierarchy tried to exert their own influence. As the sensitivity of the Squadron’s operations became apparent, the local battalion commander would increasingly refer them to his superior for approval – to the commander of 3 Brigade i
n Portadown, or even to the Commander Land Forces, the officer responsible for all Army operations in Ulster.

  Although the Squadron was under the Army’s jurisdiction, it soon became clear that the initiative for using it often came from the police, especially as the RUC’s informer network provided the SAS with the best intelligence for its operations. A system of liaison officers was set up to make the Army the executive arm of police Special Branch intelligence, but the lack of clear lines of authority and continuing personality clashes hampered matters. Two years later, in 1978, special regional centres were created to control SAS activities; their evolution will be described in Chapter 10.

  During the early months of the SAS presence in Northern Ireland, there was a scarcity of intelligence good enough to use for covert operations. The Bessbrook Squadron undertook duties much like those of the more conventional Army units posted to the area. SAS troops went out on patrols lasting several days, mounting observation posts, checking cars and moving across country with the intention of countering terrorists in action. But in time the Squadron came to specialize in surveillance and ambushes based on the highest quality intelligence available to the security forces.