by Mark Urban
Many of the killings have happened in circumstances where the victim was defenceless. A female UDR soldier was shot dead as she lay in bed. Others have been killed in front of their children or mothers. Delivery people have been ambushed on their rounds. These attacks have the effect of hardening members of the security forces, often making them callous to the plight of Catholics claiming harassment or other infringements of their civil liberties. IRA claims that members were defenceless when shot by the SAS are met by security forces members with rejoinders about the IRA’s own standards of ‘fairness’ in shooting people dead on their front doorsteps. Although senior officers recognize the moral danger in drawing parallels between their own behaviour and that of the Provisionals, they accept that for many of the soldiers running night-time roadblocks the realities are different.
The selection of soft targets also carried with it an implicit admission by the IRA of its increased difficulties in attacking soldiers on patrol. In 1973 or 1974, for example, the number of British soldiers killed exceeded the number of locally recruited (UDR or RUC) people. But the Provisionals understood both the greater role being played by these forces as a result of Police Primacy and the fact that it had become more and more dangerous for them to take pot shots at regular Army patrols. In 1983 five regular British Army soldiers were killed, compared to ten UDR members and eighteen RUC members; and in 1984 nine regular Army soldiers were killed compared to ten UDR members and eight police officers. Most of the UDR murders and many of those of RUC members took place when they were off-duty.
Cumulatively, attacks on soft targets had the effect of ‘needling’ people – making soldiers and police more likely to overreact, thus handing propaganda success to the paramilitaries. The tactic would, in turn, make many others leave the UDR or police, and draw others into loyalist terrorism. The covert operators were well aware of the effect of such killings on morale but found it hard to pre-empt such attacks. The number of people who know in advance about an attack on an off-duty UDR soldier or RUC officer is small compared to that required for many other types of operation. The two or three terrorists carrying out the attack and their ASU commander might be the only people who knew who was going to be attacked, when and where. ‘Dickers’ might have a good idea of the target but no clue as to when he or she would be killed. Those sent to hijack the getaway car could give a clue to the timing but probably have no clue as to why the vehicle was needed. A quartermaster might know when it would happen, but not the target.
Security chiefs had decided by 1983 to devote significant resources to the task of trying to protect soft targets. The Intelligence and Security Group was involved, as were the Close Observation Platoons which were part of various infantry battalions serving in Ulster. The COPs were given their duties by the TCG operations centres. Some of their missions were based on informer intelligence identifying a specific threat to an individual, but high-grade information of that kind was normally given to the Int and Sy Group, leaving the COPs with little better to operate on than local hearsay and the guesswork of intelligence officers.
An insight into the work of the Close Observation Platoon which was part of the Queen’s Own Highlanders, based at Aldergrove during the years 1983 to 1985, was provided by the Regiment’s magazine. The COP commander reported: ‘Tasking kept us employed, providing soft-target protection for off-duty UDR men. This was accomplished in varying styles with some patrols living on premises and others under dung heaps and hedges.’
The Highlanders did not encounter the IRA during these duties – like most covert operators their many hours spent lying-in-wait had passed without incident. Only the best intelligence could make possible a different outcome.
Late in 1984 the Special Branch obtained a very unusual tip-off. The SB learnt about a planned IRA attack on a part-time UDR member near Dungannon. In the fuzzy world of counter-terrorist intelligence, all of the details are rarely present. Intelligence chiefs did however believe the tip was sufficiently reliable to make a covert operation worthwhile.
Int and Sy Group surveillance experts and SAS men were directed by the local TCG to formulate a plan to catch the UDR man’s would-be killers in the act. The area around the junction, where a haulage contractor called Capper and Lambe is based, was placed out of bounds to other units – a standard procedure in covert operations designed to keep patrols who did not need to be briefed on the operation away from danger and to prevent a ‘blue on blue’, an accidental engagement between soldiers or police officers. It is not possible to say with certainty why this point was chosen to intercept the IRA members, but local people say that the Provisionals intended to ambush a UDR officer who regularly drove past Capper and Lambe’s yard in an armour-plated car on his way to Dungannon.
Just after 8 a.m. on 19 October 1984 the IRA team arrived in a yellow van, a vehicle which they had hijacked in Coalisland. There were at least ten SAS men in the area: a couple were hidden behind bushes near the entrance to the yard; and eight more were in three unmarked cars. As the IRA members’ van went by the soldiers tried to block its path, but they failed and opened fire.
Frederick Jackson, a forty-eight-year-old plant hire contractor who was just driving out of Capper and Lambe’s, having supervised some work there, was hit in the chest by a bullet fired by one of the soldiers. The car rolled back into the yard, crashing into a petrol pump. Jackson stumbled from the vehicle, calling for help and collapsed inside a shed. He died later.
In spite of the SAS presence in the area, and a fusillade of shots at the van, the Army was unable to prevent the Provisionals from escaping. They made their way by foot across a motorway bridge and, despite the presence of a helicopter in the area, were soon in the sanctuary of the strongly republican area to the north of the Mi. The RUC said Jackson had been killed in the crossfire. The IRA disagreed, saying its members had not opened fire when Jackson was hit. However, the dumped van was found to contain many spent cases and the IRA did not deny that its members had engaged the soldiers.
At 8.37 a.m. a police inspector at the local station directed units to the scene, having received phonecalls from local people. He countermanded these orders after an SB officer told him that the area was the scene of a gunbattle between Provisionals and security forces ‘specialist resources’.
The operation had been a débâcle. Unusually specific intelligence had presented the soldiers with an opportunity which had gone badly wrong. The reservist had been saved but an uninvolved man going about his business was dead and the terrorists had escaped. The death led to suggestions that the soldiers had mistakenly believed Jackson to be a member of the IRA team and had killed him deliberately.
It was difficult to imagine someone less likely to have appeared to pose a threat to the soldiers than Jackson, a middle-aged Protestant businessman. The dead man’s family asked questions about why it had taken so long for him to receive medical attention. This left nationalists asking whether he had been allowed to die because the troops thought he was a republican. The fact that Jackson was hit by a single shot, however, would seem to support the official view – that he was hit by a stray round rather than engaged deliberately by the SAS in the belief that he was a terrorist. Regardless of whether Jackson’s death was an accident or a mistake, a Protestant who witnessed the IRA members’ escape from Tamnamore told me, ‘I don’t wish to denigrate the SAS, but they made a real bitch of it that day.’
An incident like that at Tamnamore prompted many questions which are impossible to answer either here or in a court without knowing exactly what information the SB had before the attack – and the Stalker affair shows how jealously such ‘crown jewels’ of anti-terrorist intelligence work are guarded. The most generous interpretation – to the TCG and SAS – is that they had no idea who was going to carry out the attack and had no choice but to stake out the area. Telling the UDR officer to stay away from work might only have endangered others. The fact that the terrorists escaped might support the view that the RUC had no idea
who they were and where to find them afterwards.
The other extreme is to suppose that the SB had a very good idea about who was going to carry out the attack, because the circle of knowledge about killing soft targets tends to be so small. If they did, then they could have prevented the attack in other ways – methods which will be discussed in chapter twenty-two – but chose not to because they wanted to send a signal to the Provisionals by catching an ASU attempting to kill a soft target and obtain a ‘clean kill’ for the SAS. The terrorists’ subsequent escape might then represent sloppy police work, in that suspects could not be tied to the incident, because the SB officers never expected to have to furnish evidence to a court.
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More elaborate IRA plans carried a higher risk of compromise by informers or by simple mishap. A group of IRA members wanted to stage a ‘come on’ attack near Kesh in Fermanagh later that year. The plan involved placing a very large (900 lb) bomb in a culvert beneath the road outside the Drumrush Lodge, a country restaurant. A call would then be made to the police that firebombs had been placed in the Drumrush Lodge. As the security forces arrived at the scene the bomb would be detonated by an observer using a command wire.
Just after 9 p.m. on 1 December 1984 several IRA members hijacked a blue Toyota van in Pettigo, across the border in Donegal. They collected several milk churns packed with explosives, probably while still inside the Republic, and then went to Drumrush. In the van were at least four IRA veterans: Tony MacBride, a twenty-seven-year-old former Irish Army soldier who had done time for firearms offences; Kieran Fleming, who had escaped from the Maze; James Clark, another member of the Maze jailbreak who had been serving a sentence for attempted murder; and Patrick Bramley, aged twenty-four. The IRA said later there had been five men in the van; the Army that there had been only four. Republicans say there were other Provisionals in the area too, keeping a look-out.
SAS soldiers arrived in the area. Soldier A, a thirty-four-year-old SAS NCO, said in his later court deposition, ‘As a result of information received we were on the look-out for a blue van of foreign make.’ The soldiers had driven into the area by 11.30 p.m., according to Soldier A, which was one hour before a woman rang Kesh RUC station with the ‘come on’ warning about firebombs at the Drumrush Lodge. The soldiers’ task was made far more difficult as there was thick, freezing fog that night, cutting visibility to a few metres.
According to the Army, Soldier A was accompanied by two other men and there was a second unmarked car with another four troops in it. According to an SAS man, their mission was to intercept the bombers following an informer tip-off. It is unclear, though, whether this was regarded as an ambush or an arrest-type mission. Certainly there were enough troops to have mounted an ambush once they had established the IRA unit’s location.
Things did not go well for the soldiers. They sighted a suspicious van and the two cars went into position to block both ends of the road on which it was parked. Soldier A’s car was parked further away from the van, on a narrow section of the road bordered by hedges. By simple bad luck they had stopped their car just a few feet from where two or three IRA members were preparing the firing point for the bomb. The IRA men, who were on the other side of the hedge, watched as two of the SAS men, Soldiers A and B, got out of the car and began to walk towards the van. Each of them was carrying an HK53 5.56 mm compact assault rifle and a 9 mm pistol. Another SAS man, Soldier E, stayed with the car to keep in radio contact with the others. Versions of what happened next differ.
The IRA members decided to open fire on Soldier E, after which there was pandemonium. Getting up from behind the hedge, they shot at point-blank range. Lance-Corporal Alistair Slater died. The twenty-seven-year-old soldier, who had combined a public school education with service in the ranks of the Parachute Regiment before passing selection and serving with B Squadron, 22 SAS, became the second member of the Regiment to be killed in action in Ulster.
After the shots, several of the IRA members decided to run for it. Tony MacBride had stayed with the blue van. He was not carrying a gun and it seems he also tried to run. Statements by the soldiers to a later inquest indicated that MacBride was first captured but then ran off and that the soldiers, thinking he might have taken one of their rifles, opened fire on him. The IRA claimed that MacBride had been apprehended, beaten and shot before other volunteers attacked the SAS, killing the Lance-Corporal and wounding two others.
Both versions are discounted by someone who is familiar with the Army’s internal version of the case, who suggests that there was no struggle, as the soldiers suggested in their court depositions, but that the soldiers simply saw MacBride running away and shot him. It is important to establish when the soldiers knew their comrade was mortally wounded, because this might have led them to shoot MacBride out of a desire to avenge their fallen comrade.
The soldiers’ statements make no mention of hearing the shots which killed Lance-Corporal Slater. Instead they simply say that they discovered him lying by the car after they had apprehended MacBride and before he tried to escape. The omission of any mention of having heard the shots is extraordinary, since they would undoubtedly have heard rifle fire so close. The four SAS men who were in the other car would also, surely, have heard the exchange. If there really was another SAS team, why didn’t they then come forward to assist their colleagues? Soldiers A and B make no mention of them playing any role in these events.
A woman living 100 metres from the scene told the Irish News that she was woken by two shots. ‘A flare was fired into the sky, and she heard several more shots and then saw a second flare fired. This was followed by a burst of rapid fire.’ The soldiers said that they had fired warning shots at MacBride, and then a flare to see him more clearly; they had then apprehended him after which there was the struggle, escape and then the fatal shots were fired.
The other explanation for what the witness heard is this. The first shots were the IRA men attacking the SAS man. Lance-Corporal Slater’s colleagues returned fire and, it would seem, fired the first flare. As one group of IRA men escaped, Soldiers A and B fired another flare and opened fire as their targets disappeared into the mist, killing MacBride.
Bramley and Clark entered a house near Pettigo, before hijacking the family car. Gardai officers saw the car stop and turn around at a checkpoint. It was pursued by a police car and the men were arrested. The British government subsequently filed for their extradition. In 1990, after a long legal battle, the Irish courts refused to extradite Clark, the IRA member who had escaped from the Maze, on the grounds that he might be beaten up by prison officers if he was returned.
Fleming disappeared without trace. After a few days the IRA issued an appeal to anyone who might know his whereabouts. On 21 December his corpse was found. He had jumped into the Bannagh River while escaping from the scene. Fleming had been wearing several layers of bulky clothing, in an attempt to keep warm on that bitterly cold night, and had drowned.
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Despite the death of Frederick Jackson in the Tamnamore incident, security chiefs were still determined to catch terrorists in the act of attacking a soft target. But the kind of intelligence required to make such an operation possible could not be produced on demand – however high in the security forces command structure the officer asking for it might be. Nevertheless, two months after the bystander was killed, the Group found itself involved in a large-scale operation in Londonderry. As in the Tamnamore incident, the SB found itself with unusual information about a threat to the life of a security forces part-timer. An intelligence officer says an informer gave them ‘the perfect tip-off’ about a forthcoming attack on a UDR reservist who worked at the Gransha psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of the city.
It wasn’t quite perfect because the security forces kept the hospital under observation for about two weeks before finally they secured a result. The operation was a large one, probably involving more than twenty-four members of the SAS, Londonderry Detachment of 14 Intelligence
Company and SB. They used at least five unmarked cars.
The SB expected the attack to take place at around 8.30 a.m. when shifts changed and the man they knew to be the target arrived by bus at the hospital. The IRA team would attack in a way employed by the Derry Brigade before. On 28 March 1982, RUC Inspector Norman Duddy had left the Strand Road Presbyterian church with his two sons. Two hooded terrorists had appeared on a motorcycle. They shot Inspector Duddy as he got into his car, leaving the children with their mortally wounded father.
At 7 a.m. on 6 December 1984 a group of SAS and surveillance soldiers were briefed at Ebrington Barracks, Londonderry, by a major, later referred to as ‘Soldier F’. It is probable that he was either the Army special forces Liaison Officer to the TCG or the OC of 14 Company. The soldiers must have received much the same briefing as they had during previous days, when they had been on the same assignment. Soldier F said he told them their task was ‘to abort if possible a terrorist attack and to apprehend the terrorist or terrorists involved’.
The men then went to Gransha in their collection of unmarked cars – two Fiats, a Volkswagen Jetta, a Capri and a Toyota. Some were armed with a 9 mm pistol and an HK53, others with a pistol and an MP5K. The Heckler and Koch MP5K is a shortened version of the 9 mm sub-machine-gun used by the SAS at the Iranian embassy and can be concealed under clothing.
Two IRA men – Daniel Doherty, twenty-three, from the Creggan estate, and William Fleming, nineteen, a resident of the Waterside district – had drawn weapons from an IRA quartermaster. They were carrying a holdall with a revolver, an automatic pistol, gloves and balaclavas as they climbed on to their motorcycle, which had been stolen some time before. Doherty took the handlebars, with Fleming riding pillion.
As they made their way into the hospital grounds their progress was observed by the soldiers in unmarked cars, who passed information between them by radio. According to the intelligence specialist quoted earlier, another SAS man had got on to the bus on which the UDR man was travelling.
