by Mark Urban
Shortly after Patrick Gilmour’s abduction, Jackie Goodman, a senior INLA man, withdrew his evidence. Goodman had been wounded in an internal feud and then arrested on the word of another supergrass. It is believed that the police exploited his feelings of betrayal by fellow INLA members and as a result he agreed to give evidence against twenty-seven people. While in protective custody in England, awaiting the trial of his associates, Goodman underwent a change of heart. His wife returned to Belfast and obtained assurances that the INLA would allow him to return to Ireland unharmed if he retracted his evidence.
Despite the collapse in the second half of 1982 of the McKeown, Mallon and Goodman cases, there were still many other cases brought as a result of supergrass evidence going through the courts. Nevertheless, by the end of 1982, many in the RUC expressed growing reservations about the wisdom of bringing any new supergrasses into play. This feeling was particularly strong in the plain-clothes branch: as a veteran detective in the RUC puts it, the problem with putting sources on the witness stand is that ‘you use them up too quickly’, and the overall intelligence picture suffers.
The credibility of the supergrass system received a further blow in October 1983 with the appearance at a hastily called press conference in west Belfast of the IRA member and supposed supergrass Robert Lean. He had given the slip to detectives at Palace Barracks, where he was staying pending the trial of twenty-eight people being held on his evidence. Lean said at his press conference that he had no real evidence against any of them, rather that, ‘The RUC did all the writing, read it over to me and I signed it.’ He said the detectives had been particularly keen for him to implicate Gerry Adams. Lean denied that he had been a member of the IRA and said he had decided to retract his statements as soon as he had made them. Some intelligence officers were left with the suspicion that Lean had been part of a deliberate IRA plot to undermine the supergrass cases.
During the years which followed a series of appeals by people who had been convicted on the word of informers was to lead to the end of the supergrass system. Successful appeals were launched: by those convicted on the evidence of Bennett, the UVF member; by eighteen of those convicted solely on Black’s word (in other words, where there was no other corroborative evidence); by eight of those named by the Derry Brigade informer Quigley; by two of those fingered by McGrady; and twenty-five people named by Harry Kirkpatrick, an INLA supergrass.
Of the sixty-five people convicted in this way who appealed, all but one were released. And of the 120 people convicted on the evidence of the ten principal supergrasses, sixty-seven were released after subsequent appeal. (Sixty-five were convicted solely on informer evidence; other evidence had been offered in the other two cases.) The appeal judges had in several cases found supergrasses to have been liars who implicated other people simply to get off serious crimes themselves. McGrady, for instance, had admitted to three murders, Bennett to one. Kirkpatrick, meanwhile, had perjured himself during the trial. The judges in these appeal cases effectively ruled out any further sentencing based only on the word of an informer.
Despite the success of these appeals many in the security forces were convinced that the majority of those released were guilty and only regretted the expenditure of informers on inconclusive court cases. Not long after the members of the Belfast Brigade implicated by Black had been released on appeal, an Army intelligence officer told me that the number of incidents in their part of the city had gone up – in his view, as a result.
Although the world of the informer had been largely discredited in the courts, it nevertheless remained the world which continued to provide the security forces with the bulk of their operational intelligence – information on which they were sometimes required to make life and death decisions.
The supergrass system had brought alarm to many republican enclaves. But the reaction to the arrests among ordinary residents varied. One Army officer recalls a humorous response in north Belfast to a painted republican graffiti which warned ‘Remember Chris Black’. Somebody had added, ‘I hope to God he doesn’t remember me.’
15
Reasonable Force
Early in the 1980s the Army rethought the deployment and operations of its SAS contingent in Ulster following the shift in early 1979 from ambushing terrorists to observing them for long periods in the hope that evidence could be gained which would lead to their prosecution and conviction. This rethink was led by Army commanders who considered the arrangements which had developed since the expansion of SAS operations outside south Armagh to be unsatisfactory in several ways. First, the deployment of one troop in each of the three brigade areas, with the Squadron’s fourth troop as a central reserve, was an inflexible one. Lisburn wanted the ability to switch the entire SAS contingent from one place to another with the minimum of delay.
The SAS Regiment was also finding practical problems sustaining squadron tours in Northern Ireland. Each tour normally lasted between four and six months, with a period of preparatory training before and a period of leave afterwards. With four operational squadrons, this meant that SAS soldiers rarely had a sustained period away from Ulster. It also involved the Regiment in a constant turnover of personnel, resulting in few soldiers getting to know the complex situation in Northern Ireland really well.
This disruption, in Army jargon a lack of ‘continuity’, did not affect the surveillance operators of 14 Intelligence Company to the same degree. They were based in Northern Ireland for longer tours – usually for a minimum of one year. Detachments of the surveillance unit contained some soldiers on their second or third tours with years of experience of that type of covert warfare in that particular place. The SAS, on the other hand, needed to keep its soldiers proficient in a wide variety of skills from the jungles of Brunei to the Arctic fjords. There was also a feeling at Lisburn that the SAS should be drawn organizationally closer to 14 Intelligence Company.
As a result of these priorities a new structure was created to act as the executive arm of Army intelligence in Ulster. Major General Glover, who had been so influential in the development of other aspects of intelligence co-operation in Ulster, was the architect of the change. The plans do not seem to have been put into effect until late 1980 and early 1981, by which time Major General Glover had been succeeded as CLF by Major General Charles Huxtable.
The new operative group took the cover name Intelligence and Security Group (Northern Ireland) which, confusingly, had already been in use for some time by 14 Intelligence Company alone. It was more often known among its soldiers as ‘Int and Sy Group’ or simply ‘The Group’. As with previous cover names it suggested a unit carrying out an entirely different and more routine sort of business. There are Intelligence and Security Group headquarters in Britain and Germany (the group in Germany having been involved in operation WARD described in chapter thirteen) but they are a collection of Intelligence Corps sub-units, whose daily activities consist mainly of paper-pushing. They are certainly not operational units of SAS soldiers and surveillance experts.
With the formation of the Group, the number of SAS in Ulster was reduced from a squadron strength of around seventy men to a reinforced troop of just over twenty. For the first few years these men were provided by whichever squadron was doing a six month stint at Hereford as the Regiment’s Special Projects team – ready for an emergency anywhere in the world. In the mid-1980s this changed and the Northern Ireland troop separated from the squadrons. It became, in the words of one SAS man, ‘a posting like any other’. The men selected went for one year, allowing greater continuity in Ulster while enabling the Regiment’s four squadrons to concentrate on other types of training. However, SAS reinforcements were always available for transfer to Ulster at short notice.
Under the new arrangements, the SAS element and 14 Intelligence Company were brought together under a single commanding officer. The CO of Int and Sy Group was able to deploy the three surveillance detachments and the SAS soldiers together or separately, according to the natur
e of the mission. The SAS unit was to be held at a central location, ready to move quickly to any part of Ulster. Furthermore, the activities of the Group and of RUC special units were to be integrated by the Special Branch’s three Tasking and Co-ordination Group (TCG) headquarters.
During 1980 to 1981 members of the Int and Sy Group were involved in a number of successful operations against the IRA. In several cases they were able to apprehend terrorists without firing a shot.
On 2 May 1980 eight IRA men with an M-60 machine gun were cornered by the SAS at a house in Belfast’s Antrim Road following an intelligence operation. The security forces planned to cordon off the area around the building, but a vehicle accidentally broke the cordon and two Morris Marina Q cars went into action carrying eight heavily armed SAS troops. As they piled out, the IRA opened fire and Captain Richard Westmacott was struck by two bullets – the first SAS soldier to be killed by the IRA. The remaining soldiers then rushed into the wrong house. They were withdrawn and the IRA men later surrendered, only to escape from the Crumlin Road jail five weeks later.
In September 1980 the SAS mounted an operation at an arms cache in Tyrone. A sniper’s rifle had been hidden in a hen coop. In 1978 two IRA men and John Boyle, the Dunloy farmer’s son, had been killed in similar circumstances. However, in this case the weapon is thought to have been doctored by Weapons Intelligence Unit experts. When two members of the IRA, Francis Quinn and Thomas Hamill, came to recover the rifle, the SAS men therefore knew they would be safe. Quinn and Hamill were both sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment.
On 14 March 1981 SAS men surrounded a farmhouse near Rosslea in County Fermanagh. Inside were Seamus McElwaine and three other IRA men. McElwaine, although only twenty, had built an extraordinary reputation for himself. He had joined the IRA at sixteen and carried out his first killings as a teenager, boosting his terrorist status.
McElwaine had carried out several close-range shootings of local members of the security forces. In February 1980 he had shot dead Alexander Abercrombie, a forty-four-year-old part-time corporal in the UDR and father of four, as he drove his tractor. Seven months later he killed thirty-six-year-old Reserve Constable Ernest Johnston as he climbed out of his car outside his house. Despite being younger than most of the other local volunteers, McElwaine soon gained command of his own unit. A subsequent biography of him in the Sinn Fein newspaper An Phoblacht/Republican News stated, ‘Seamus gained plenty of operational experience, so much so that by the time he was nineteen he became OC of the IRA in County Fermanagh.’
Arresting somebody like McElwaine requires careful planning and excellent intelligence work. The task facing the soldiers outside the farm buildings on 14 March 1981 was made still more difficult by the fact that those inside possessed an arsenal of weapons. They had four rifles – an Armalite, an Mi carbine, a Ruger rifle like those issued to the RUC and a German-made assault rifle – as well as 180 rounds of ammunition.
Int and Sy Group had conducted an extensive surveillance operation against McElwaine and the other four members of his ASU. They decided to surround the house, but make no attempt to storm it. In a fashion reminiscent of the American police during the prohibition era, the Group called to the IRA members inside the house telling them they were surrounded and should come out with their hands up. Faced with this hopeless situation, they complied.
A fifth member of the unit was subsequently arrested at a different location, but was tied by forensic evidence to the farmhouse. In May 1982 the five-member unit received sentences ranging from ten years to life. McElwaine himself was found guilty of the murders of Corporal Abercrombie and Reserve Constable Johnston. The judge, who described him as a ‘dangerous killer’, recommended that McElwaine should serve at least thirty years.
The break-up of McElwaine’s ASU represented something of a textbook example in the use of special forces. The reasonable use of force during these years to a large extent demolishes the notion that the SAS will open fire whenever they have the opportunity to eliminate an armed member of the IRA. Clearly, in this case the orders not to use force were well understood. It may be in the disposition of an SAS soldier to invoke ‘big boys’ rules’, but during these years the Army clearly discouraged them from doing so.
Despite the success of this operation, Int and Sy Group remained vulnerable during their surveillance operations. The death of Corporal Paul Harman in Belfast in 1977 (see chapter four) had underlined the risks run by 14 Intelligence Company personnel when on duty in their unmarked cars.
On 28 May 1981, at a time when tensions were high due to the hunger strikes, a young Army officer belonging to the Londonderry Detachment of 14 Intelligence Company climbed into his unmarked Opel Ascona car. According to an intelligence officer, he went through the city to conduct a reconnaissance for a forthcoming operation on the other side of town. It was only on his way back that his journey was interrupted.
The car’s progress had been noticed by a group of IRA members. George McBrearty, the twenty-three-year-old leader of an ASU from the Creggan, and three colleagues set off in a hijacked Ford Escort to intercept the Opel.
As the Opel approached a road junction the Escort swerved in front of it and two men carrying Armalite rifles got out. The young officer, armed with a 9mm Browning pistol with a 20-round magazine cannot have felt he had much hope against four men carrying more powerful weapons. McBrearty went to the front of the car and Charles Maguire went to the back. The officer got out of the car and stood behind the open door.
McBrearty turned his back and the officer grasped his moment. He drew his pistol and fired nine times at him. All but one of the rounds went into his back. He then turned and faced Maguire, who was still standing at the back of the car, stunned. He shot Maguire in the head twice. Jumping into the car, the soldier fired at the Escort, hitting a third IRA man, Edward McCourt, twice. As he pulled away one of the IRA members opened fire at the Opel shattering two of the windows and peppering its side with bullet holes. The officer escaped, unlike Maguire and McBrearty who both died from their injuries, and he was subsequently decorated for his actions.
Shortly after the incident an RUC patrol arrived on the scene and came under sniper fire. The police returned fire but are not believed to have hit any IRA members.
The incident was followed by deliberate attempts to disguise the truth of what had happened. The IRA, smarting from the death of two men and the capture of another because of the actions of a single soldier, claimed that there had been two more cars containing five more ‘SAS men’ who had opened fire on its unit.
Those critical of the Army version of events have cited several possible indicators that more soldiers were involved. Several weapons were handed in for testing besides the officer’s 9mm pistol. But these were found to be Ruger revolvers and an M1 carbine belonging to the RUC patrol which was ambushed on the scene later. It was also pointed out that there was a discrepancy between the soldier’s statement to police investigators that he had only fired eleven times, whereas the IRA members appeared to have been hit by more bullets. It is possible that the soldier’s statement was mistaken on this point. I am confident that the officer was the only member of the security forces involved. Unusually, I was able to confirm this with both republicans and soldiers. A senior republican admitted to me during the preparation of this book that their version of events was entirely false, and they had known it to be so at the time; they maintained instead that the IRA members had died because they had exercised soldierly restraint, not opening fire immediately on somebody of whose identity they were unsure.
Maguire and McBrearty were the only IRA men killed by Army undercover units during the five years from December 1978 to 1983. Even some republicans recognized that the shoot-out was started by the IRA – one man with a pistol would hardly have wanted to get involved in a fight with four men with assault rifles.
At the inquest in 1988 into the deaths of the three IRA bombers killed in Gibraltar, an SAS officer – ‘Soldier F’
– who was called as a witness suggested that the arrest of Seamus McElwaine’s unit and of Quinn and Hammill proved that their Regiment did not gun people down. Soldier F told the court, ‘The ratio between arrests and kills is 75 to 25 in percentage terms in favour of arrests.’ People who have served in covert operations in Northern Ireland suggest that the great majority of those arrested by the SAS were apprehended prior to December 1983, pointing to a significant change of tactics after this date in favour of aggressive ambush operations.
*
One joint police/Int and Sy Group operation which to my knowledge has not been revealed before as an episode involving undercover units occurred in July 1982 in Belfast. According to an officer who was closely involved, the operation was mounted after intelligence was received that the IRA intended to blow up the RUC band.
Intelligence led the covert operators to believe that the terrorists would attempt to detonate a bomb close to a bridge across the River Lagan in Belfast. At about 5.30 p.m. on 9 July 1982, surveillance teams sighted two vehicles – a Datsun and a Cortina – in a lay-by off the Annadale embankment. The cars moved off crossing the Lagan on the Governor’s Bridge and heading along Stranmillis Road. A police vehicle checkpoint (VCP) had been set up at the end of Stranmillis Road. Before it got to it, the Datsun stopped and its driver, Bobby Brown, aged twenty-two, got out. Special plain-clothes police firearms units then moved in, arresting Brown and the occupants of the Cortina – twenty-eight-year-old Thomas McKiernan and Siobhan O’Hanlon, aged twenty-one – which was stopped at the VCP at the junction of Stranmillis and Malone Roads. Police recovered a pair of gloves from the scene which were later shown to have traces of explosive.
