by Mark Urban
A plan will then be formulated by the Int and Sy Group in close collaboration with the TCG. Their operation, by this stage given a code name, will then be referred to the CLF for approval. He may then refer it up to the GOC and chief constable and they in turn may tell the Secretary of State. This is likely to take the form of a brief conversation in which the Secretary of State is told that there is an opportunity to deal a significant blow to the terrorists. If asked, the Secretary of State usually responds that the general or senior police officer should do what they think is right. Once approved, the plan is then passed on to the surveillance teams and SAS who must carry it out.
Many of the operations approved either at ministerial or lower level come to nothing because of the unreliability of informer intelligence. The soldiers return to camp several days later without sighting the terrorists.
The process of formulation and approval of such operations may be compared in some ways to the idea of loading the rifle of one soldier in a firing squad with a blank bullet. This has sometimes been done to allow all members of the firing squad to believe that they personally were not responsible for the death of their target. In the same way a general may distance himself from what the officer quoted earlier referred to as the ‘pretty obvious’ consequences of a successful pre-emptive operation by referring the matter for higher approval. The Secretary of State may feel he or she is not responsible because it is easier to accept the advice of the security chiefs than to reject it. The plan, as it is finally approved, will then switch the responsibility back to the twenty-eight-year-old SAS corporal or police sergeant who has to carry it out, because only the people on the spot can interpret the rules of engagement.
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The organizational and tactical changes in the SAS in the early 1980s are also important in judging the attitudes of soldiers on whom such responsibilities fell. The move from occasional squadron tours by all four of the Regiment’s sub-units to the sending of individuals to a reinforced troop of just over twenty soldiers in Ulster, which ultimately followed the establishment of the Int and Sy Group, had important consequences. There were undoubtedly benefits – notably that individuals served for longer, becoming more familiar with the Northern Irish scene. But this new pattern of sending people to Northern Ireland restricted the number of soldiers who gained experience of such operations, increasing their suspicion of outsiders, as well as the ties between them.
The captains sent to command the troop in Northern Ireland sometimes found it difficult to exercise control over it, according to a member of the Regiment. After the death of the SAS officer Captain Westmacott in 1980 it became increasingly rare for SAS officers to go out on observation duties or ambushes with their men. Officers are normally relegated to the Ops (operations) room at a local security forces base. Without them in the field, the soldiers are more likely to revert to ‘big boys’ rules’ if they sight a terrorist. Most, if not all, of the fatal incidents involving the SAS which occurred during the period 1983 to 1985 took place in the absence of an officer.
After the Falklands War in 1982, the SAS admitted large numbers of soldiers from the Parachute Regiment. A Parachute Regiment major had become officer commanding of the Training Wing and, according to several people who served in the SAS at the time or attempted to get into it, the criteria for selection shifted towards an emphasis on the aggressive mentality of the airborne forces and away from the more traditional SAS values. The Regiment began to fail more people who could not meet its standards of selection; its numbers dropped as a result – a phenomenon known at Hereford as ‘creeping excellence’. These problems brought the OC of Training Wing and Commanding Officer of the Regiment, a member of the Royal Corps of Transport, into conflict during the mid 1980s. The CO felt that too many Paras were getting through selection and too few from all other types of regiment. Even the Director SAS and his successor the Director Special Forces, the London-based brigadier with overall responsibility for such troops, intervened in an attempt to get Training Wing, dominated by Parachute Regiment NCOs who had been in 22 SAS for years, to let more non-Paras in. The consequence of these differences, says an SAS man, was that by the mid 1980s the Regiment was falling well below establishment, many troops having ten or twelve soldiers rather than sixteen. The proportion of Paras, who make up about one in seventy-five of the Army’s overall strength, reached 52 per cent in 22 SAS in the mid 1980s, according to one regimental officer.
The consequences of this influx of paratroopers are hard to quantify. Those non-Para members of the Regiment who are prepared to discuss the issue maintain that the airborne soldiers are more violent, less likely to consider the consequences of force and less likely to propose alternative solutions to problems, than men from other regiments. However, an SAS soldier from the Parachute Regiment says the idea that their influx into Hereford had any particular effect is ‘exaggerated’.
Michael Asher, who served in Ulster with the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment early in the 1970s, describes their mentality graphically: ‘We begged and prayed for a chance to fight, to smash, to kill, to destroy … we were unreligious, apolitical and remorseless, a caste of warrior-janizaries who worshipped at the high altar of violence and wanted nothing more.’ In the late 1970s, Asher served in the Territorial Army SAS. He comments, ‘They were not truculent and sadistic, as the Paras had been. You could see that they might kill easily, but never for the love of it.’ Those who were alarmed by the advent of a ‘Para mafia’ in 22 SAS in the mid 1980s argue that the influx of paratroopers had virtually eliminated the distinction described by Asher.
Against the background of ‘creeping excellence’ the change in the pattern of SAS deployment in Northern Ireland introduced a further element of selection. Individuals could not be posted to the troop in Ulster unless they passed a course lasting about three months at Hereford. Although most did go through, the Northern Ireland course provided the NCOs with experience of Ulster who ran the course with an opportunity to filter out those who were considered ‘unsound’. That many of the veteran NCOs were Paras shifted the definition of what qualities were desirable, say some SAS soldiers, away from the use of stealth and cunning and more towards an acceptance of violence.
18
The Group in Action
It was early on the evening of Thursday 1 December 1983 when an Army special forces officer arrived in Dungannon in Tyrone. He had been called there following a tip-off from an informer. The Special Branch asked him to organize a covert search of the area called Magheramulkenny, near the village of Coalisland. The Army’s undercover specialists went into action before first light.
A senior NCO in the SAS, afterwards referred to as ‘Soldier A’, carried out a search of a small field surrounded by an embankment topped with a thick hedge. In the hedge he found an Armalite rifle, a shotgun and a bag containing balaclavas, gloves and other clothing. Subsequent ballistic tests were to show, according to the RUC, that the Armalite had been used in twenty-two shootings since 1979 including four killings – all of them of off-duty members of the security forces in the Dungannon area.
Several hours later, at 3 a.m. on 2 December, Soldier A briefed five other SAS soldiers on the task ahead. In a subsequent written statement he said, ‘It was my intention on this mission to apprehend any terrorist attempting to take any weapons or clothing from the cache, and the members of the group were briefed accordingly.’ He told them that they should only open fire in accordance with the Yellow Card rules and after he had attempted to issue a challenge.
Before dawn the six SAS soldiers had put themselves into positions around the field. They were split into three groups of two. All but one of them was armed with an Armalite AR15 rifle, the sixth carrying an HK53. The HK53 was something of an SAS favourite, being of the same compact, reliable design as the Heckler and Koch MP5 9 mm sub-machine-guns used at the Iranian embassy but firing a more powerful 5.56 mm round, like the Armalite.
Two of the groups positioned themselves over
looking the cache. They were about 30 metres away from the IRA weapons behind another part of the embankment. The third group were further away, lying in a ditch about 50 metres from the others and 10 metres from the lane which runs past the field. It is close country – small fields are surrounded by thick hedges and the ground around the field is undulating and often waterlogged.
For two days nothing happened. One soldier in each pair remained alert at all times, with the other often resting in a sleeping bag. The pair in the roadside ditch heard the comings and goings of passers-by, a few feet away from them. The soldiers had to ensure that they remained undetected by such people, who might have been scouts for the Provisionals. It is partly the skill and self-discipline of SAS soldiers, in their ability to remain undetected for days while exposed to the elements, which results in them being given such missions.
At about 3 p.m. on Sunday, a brown Talbot car with three men in it pulled up. Two of the men made their way through a gap in the hedge towards the hidden guns. Colm McGirr, twenty-two, and Brian Campbell, nineteen, were both Provisionals from the Coalisland area. The other man stayed with the car, which had been parked just off the road in a gateway.
According to the soldiers’ later statements, McGirr went straight towards the hedge and pulled out the Armalite which he handed to Campbell. Soldier A used his radio to alert the others. As Campbell had turned and began to head back to the car, and McGirr was still kneeling by the cache, Soldier A says he shouted the challenge ‘Halt, Security Forces!’.
The men did not reply, but McGirr ‘pivoted round, pointing the shotgun in my direction’, according to the SAS man, who opened fire. Campbell, now running towards the car, appeared to turn threateningly too, the SAS men said, and was also engaged. McGirr was hit by up to thirteen bullets, according to later examination, and died immediately.
Although several soldiers were firing at him from only 20–30 metres away, Campbell was hit just twice. The man at the car, realizing it was a trap, jumped in and started the engine. The soldiers fired at the car, shattering its windscreen. As the Talbot pulled away Soldiers E and F, who had been waiting in the roadside ditch, also opened fire. As the car sped past them Soldier E fired ten rounds at it, several of which were believed to have hit. The car was later found two miles away, spattered with blood, but with no driver.
The soldiers moved forward to the shot IRA members. Campbell was still just alive. Soldier D said in his statement:
There was one exit wound at the front of his left shoulder from which he was losing a lot of blood. I put a shell dressing on this. I did not dress the entry wounds as they were not bleeding. At this stage he was going into deep shock and having difficulty in breathing. I immediately inserted a plastic breathing tube in his throat to assist his breathing and placed him in the coma position. I stayed with him checking his pulse and pupils for about five minutes until he died.
At Lisburn the incident was regarded as a success. But the IRA made various allegations about what had happened, allegations designed to deprive the Army of its ‘clean kill’ and to outrage local nationalists. The Provisionals said that the driver of the car disputed the soldiers’ claim that there had been any shouted warning. They also alleged that the men had been shot before they had reached the arms cache and were therefore defenceless. A priest called to the scene reportedly confirmed that both bodies were lying near the fence, suggesting that they were shot as soon as they entered the field.
Were the soldiers really ordered to arrest them or was it an ambush? Would the soldiers have done things differently if they had wanted to apprehend them?
During the previous few years, there had been several occasions when the security forces had found arms caches. Sometimes, for example when an informer from the County Down IRA had provided them with a machine gun, they had responded by ‘jarking’ weapons; at others by making them jam if fired. In certain instances, for example following the discovery of the sniper’s rifle on a farm near Dungannon in 1980, arrests followed.
The IRA was aware of the possibility that the weapons might have been tampered with, saying after the McGirr/Campbell shooting that, ‘In all probability the ammunition had also been removed from the weapons.’ The RUC stated that the weapons had been loaded when recovered. However, it is clear from both the IRA and Army statements that the weapons had only been there for a short time: before the soldiers went in they realized that the guns were likely to be removed quickly from the hedge.
Soldier A stated that it appeared the cache ‘was only a temporary location and may be moved in the immediate future’. The Provisionals said the weapons had been left there just two days before the shooting, which would mean they were put there after the soldiers were in position. Either way it would seem that the possibilities for getting in experts to doctor the weapons would be limited in such a short space of time. This would not have precluded Soldier A simply unloading the guns, but once the SAS party was in position they would have wanted to do nothing which could have revealed their presence to any observer.
There is, however, a simpler question about the soldiers’ behaviour which may cast light on their orders. The soldiers could not arrest the men before they picked up the guns, since the IRA men could have argued in court that they had known nothing about the weapons and had simply been local people out for a stroll. But Soldier A could have waited for the weapons to be placed out of reach, in the car, before issuing his challenge.
If they had been armed with cameras as well as Armalites the SAS men could have photographed whoever recovered the weapons. It was mid afternoon and none of them was wearing a balaclava. The car could then have been followed by surveillance experts and the weapons recovered from their new location. Such a scheme would carry a risk that the men would shake off the surveillance team and the weapons be used in more killings. The soldiers had no guarantee, however, that conditions for photography would have been so good because the pick-up could have happened at night. Such risks had been taken between 1979 and 1982, and would be again in later years, but the commander of this operation was clearly unwilling to take them, or was under different orders.
There is one important possible piece of evidence suggesting that the soldiers were on orders to ambush and that, even if they didn’t know exactly who would collect the weapons, they did know which direction they would drive off in. Soldiers E and F, the two by the road, were described in the Army version as being a ‘cut-off’ group. In their statements some of the soldiers referred to the task of the ‘cut-off’ as being to apprehend people. Soldier B said it was ‘to cut off anyone trying to escape’.
First, it can be asked: why only one cut-off group when it was a through road? The terrorists could, after all, go the other way. Perhaps the Army did not tell the inquest court, to which its soldiers’ statements were submitted, that there were more than six SAS men in the area. Or perhaps the soldiers had intelligence which led them to believe that the men recovering the weapons would head in that particular direction. If the latter, what else had the informer said about the people who would collect the guns? Was the whole incident avoidable?
Second, the use of the term ‘cut-off group’ has a quite specific meaning. It is part of the language of the ambush: Land Operations Volume III uses the term only in its section on ambushes, saying the role of the cut-off groups is ‘to prevent the enemy escaping from the killing area’ (see chapter seventeen).
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During late 1983 and early 1984 the Intelligence and Security Group staged many other operations which produced no particular results. But in February 1984 undercover soldiers were, highly unusually, to find themselves out-manoeuvred in such an action. In a bloody sequence of events, the Provisionals tried to take the initiative against the covert operators. It happened in Dunloy, the north Antrim nationalist enclave where several years before John Boyle had been shot dead mistakenly by SAS soldiers in a graveyard.
Overlooking the main village is Carness Drive. The kerbstones in the D
rive are painted in the colours of the Irish tricolour. There are a few houses on each side of the road and then the Drive curves uphill where, after 20 or 30 metres, there is another small group of houses. At the point where the road curves it comes close to a farmer’s field. The Hogans – a strongly republican family – live at No. Ten, which is on the main part of the Drive before the curve. Intelligence specialists believed Henry Hogan, twenty-one, was a committed member of the Provisionals’ north Antrim ASU. He had only come into the village one month before, after the family left its previous home following loyalist intimidation.
A surveillance team from 14 Intelligence Company was tasked to keep the house in Carness Drive under observation. The watchers chose to site a covert Observation Post near the bend in the road, behind two wooden garden-type sheds. This position put them close to the Hogans – about 80 metres away, with a direct line of sight to the front door. They were able to approach the OP from across the field behind the sheds.
Sergeant Paul Oram, a twenty-six-year-old from the 9/12th Royal Lancers who was serving his second tour with the surveillance unit, was in charge of the OP. He was close to the end of his tour with 14 Intelligence Company and had just become a father. Another soldier was with him. The IRA said there had been a third soldier in the OP, but this was not confirmed by the security forces. The surveillance operators were armed with pistols and compact sub-machine-guns for self-defence. As is normal procedure for the unit, there was a back-up team close to the OP and a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) at a nearby security forces base.
