by Mark Urban
If they had used their Brownings to finish the men off at very close range there would have been other signs. The Provisionals’ clothes might have shown powder burns and 9 mm spent cases would have been found near the bodies. But examination of the clothing was impossible: the RUC had destroyed it. The forensic scientist recovered eighty-three or eighty-four spent cases from the scene. When he realized forty-two were unaccounted for he tried to go back, but was told by the RUC he could not for ‘operational reasons’.
It may be that both HK53s did indeed jam. There may be some other explanation for the use of the 9 mm pistols. In the heat of the moment a soldier may have mistaken an empty magazine for a stoppage and drawn his pistol. But, remarkably, even some leading members of the security forces and of the administration at Stormont believed that the IRA men had been given coups de grâce. One senior figure told me, ‘One thing one couldn’t be sure of after Strabane was whether they were finished off afterwards … there was heavy anecdotal evidence that they were.’
There is another, equally curious, aspect to the evidence at the inquest. An RUC Scene of Crime Officer told the court that two crates, one of empty milk bottles, the other containing eleven petrol bombs, were found in a hedge near where the shootings took place. He said he did not think the petrol bombs were connected with the incident and consequently their existence was left out of almost all press reports on the shooting. However, during the course of our interview, the soldier familiar with the shootings mentioned the crate of petrol bombs, indicating it had an important role in the incident. He maintained his story despite my mistaken insistence, based on an initial reading of press cuttings and the soldiers’ statements, that there had been no petrol bombs.
According to Soldier A, the engagement started because the terrorists heard him alerting the other soldiers to their presence – on hearing his words, ‘All three gunmen swung their rifles towards us.’ The person familiar with the case says things happened differently. The SAS men heard the sound of footsteps and the ‘chinking’ of the petrol bombs in their crate which, he says, the Provisionals were carrying. He says the petrol bombs had either been taken with the men for possible use on the ambush or were being moved from another cache. The IRA men put the crate down as they came through the thick hedge from the road into the field. It is likely that they wanted to put them into the same arms cache as the other weapons. The OP commander, although not there with the mission of mounting an ambush, took an on-the-spot decision to engage the men, which they did, without warning, as they walked past.
On the morning the inquest ended John Fahy, solicitor for the Breslin family, withdrew from the proceedings saying they had served only to rubber stamp unlawful killings. Mr Fahy says the inquest was ‘a waste of time, it served no useful purpose’. There is such a thing as a lawful killing by the security forces, he adds – meaning a sincere adherence to the Yellow Card rules – but he believes that in the Strabane case, ‘The police and Army got together shortly after the incident and worked out the version they were going to tell the world.’
Lawyers who have acted in such cases say they think there is ample scope for soldiers to enter into a conspiracy to disguise the true facts of an incident. SAS soldiers leave the scene of an incident almost as soon as the shooting has stopped. They have the opportunity to discuss what they will say with their officers before being interviewed by CID officers. The soldiers are normally accompanied during their interviews by an officer of the Army Legal Service, an expert in the legal use of lethal force.
While officers who have served at Lisburn are prepared – on condition of anonymity – to say that the exploitation of intelligence offers deliberate choices, to ambush or not to ambush, and to say explicitly that the policy on such engagements has changed over the years, the court depositions of SAS soldiers involved in shootings do not reflect this. Instead, they consistently attempt to give the impression that the soldiers only ever used lethal force when they were themselves in immediate danger.
There was William Hanna, the unarmed bystander shot at Ballysillan in 1978 because the SAS men said he suddenly reached for what they thought was a gun. Colm McGirr, shot at the arms dump in Coalisland in December 1983, had ‘pivoted round’, pointing a shotgun, according to the soldier who shot him. William Fleming, despite having been knocked off a motorcycle so hard at the Gransha hospital that his leg was shattered, began, in the soldier’s words, ‘raising himself’ and pointing a gun. The Strabane IRA men had ‘swung’ their weapons simultaneously towards the soldiers.
Reading these statements, one would conclude that the difference between the periods 1976 to 1978 and 1983 to 1985 and the five-year period in between when nobody was shot by the SAS could be accounted for only in terms of the desire of IRA members to ‘reach’, ‘pivot’, ‘point’ or ‘swing’ towards SAS soldiers with real or imagined weapons. Someone who relied on the official version of such incidents would be left concluding that the years when the SAS succeeded in making arrests, despite the fact that in the cases described in chapter fifteen the IRA members were armed or near an arms cache, were the years when everybody refrained from making any sudden movements.
Officers who have served at Lisburn in positions where they had a knowledge of covert operations will readily admit to having misled the press after such incidents. ‘There is a world of difference between what you say to the press, in the immediate aftermath of an incident, and what you say in a court,’ said one, who nevertheless would not deny that false stories had been given to courts too.
The desire of Special Branch officers to protect informers and the nature of technical intelligence-gathering was at the root of the deception uncovered by Stalker. Among many Army officers there is a feeling that telling the court the full story would compromise intelligence sources, make their men reluctant to carry out dangerous assignments and discredit them in the nationalist community. They argue that the supporters of Sinn Fein are so entrenched in their position that gestures of openness will bear no reward for the security forces. Remaining tight-lipped about such operations may feed allegations of cover-ups and “shoot-to-kill” policies, but prosecuting people for their part in covert operations will simply allow republican propagandists to say ‘I told you so’, they argue.
Some officers in covert operations regard courts as a dangerous inconvenience. They feel republican lawyers use the proceedings to obtain operational information about special forces. One officer says, ‘There is all this talk about “shoot-to-kill”. What do you think the IRA do – shoot-to-tickle?’ He argues that republican use of court proceedings is an obscenity, given the way the IRA kills its own people suspected of informing or shoots defenceless reservists in their homes. If the republican movement believes itself to be at war with the British state how does it justify using its courts in this way? Oistin MacBride, himself a Sinn Fein activist, says in response: ‘We are not whingeing about the fact that he [Tony MacBride] died fighting the SAS, but he did have the right as a prisoner of war to be treated properly. I don’t think there is anything immoral about us challenging the legal process. There is a certain amount of natural justice that we are due.’
Those officers who question the right of coroners’ courts to pry into the world of covert operations sometimes say it is impossible to answer many questions because ‘there is a war going on’. Enoch Powell regards this as a dangerous argument which implies a moral equivalence between the two sides. In a television interview in 1988, he said: ‘The IRA isn’t a thing upon which war can be declared. If we make it a nation state and say we are going to treat you as a nation state and recognize you as a nation and declare war upon you, then you would in fact have installed the IRA in the very position which it seeks to attain by means of terror.’
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Disaster at Newry
Just a few days after the Strabane incident the IRA succeeded in launching a spectacular attack on the RUC – a blow characterized by some as the RUC’s equivalent to the Army’s lo
ss at Warrenpoint in 1979. The mortar attack on Newry police station demonstrated several things. It showed the IRA’s willingness to develop weapons to suit its own particular needs and its patience in persevering with such technology despite many years of failure.
In November 1983 the IRA had attacked Carrickmore police station with home-made mortars. They killed one police officer and injured several others, but, prior to Newry, this was the only real success which they had had with such weapons. The Provisionals’ willingness to carry on attempting such attacks seems something of a mystery in retrospect. Between 1973 and early 1978 they attempted a total of seventy-one attacks using such weapons without killing a single member of the security forces. The firing tubes and shells, usually made in workshops in the Republic, could not be made to sufficiently high tolerances to produce an accurate weapon. Many shells failed to explode, others scattered wildly off target – raising the prospect that an attack could go disastrously wrong and kill civilians.
Nevertheless, mortars continued to offer an important advantage to other means of attacking security forces bases. They allowed the Provisionals to remain some distance away from their targets, which meant it was a safer means of attack. Their continued use, despite so many failures, was partly a product of an attitude summed up by Sinn Fein publicity director Danny Morrison, when after the Brighton bombing he said, ‘Remember, we have to get lucky once.’
The ASU which attacked Newry police station used a heavy mortar, the design of which had evolved from much trial and error. Army explosives experts dubbed it the ‘Mark 10’ mortar. The mortar tubes were bolted on to the back of a Ford lorry which had been hijacked in Crossmaglen. Each tube was made from an oxy-acetylene cylinder with the top cut off. The tubes, each containing a bomb full of high explosive, were sloped at different angles to provide a scatter of shot around the target, increasing the odds of a hit.
Early in the evening of 28 February 1985 the lorry was driven through Newry. The driver got out, starting a timing device which was connected to a battery which would send the impulse to launch the shells. As it began to fire, some of the rounds overshot the target falling into the street in front of the police station. A group of police officers in the flimsily built canteen did not have time to take cover. The IRA had only to hit with one shell: each of them contained 40 lb of high explosive. When one crashed through the roof of the canteen nine police officers were killed.
The Newry attack was followed, like many other IRA ‘spectaculars’, by calls from politicians, mainly Unionists, for the government to ‘do something’, to ‘increase security’. Officers at Lisburn and Knock are philosophical about such demands. In this case they knew perfectly well that the loss of nine officers had followed years of almost complete failure with mortar attacks. But telling people that the IRA had simply been lucky was hard when questions are being asked about why so many soldiers and police officers were accommodated in temporary wooden buildings which offered no protection against mortar shells.
After Newry a major programme of construction, costing millions of pounds, was started to protect bases from mortar attack. This usually involved building blast-deflecting walls around the base of a building and a reinforced roof over the top.
Another aspect of the post-Newry ‘security review’ was the stepping-up of Army patrols around bases. This operation, code-named COUNTERPOINT, had several functions. There was a chance that the soldiers might encounter people preparing an attack, although all previous experience had shown this to be a remote possibility. Rather, COUNTERPOINT was intended to deter the IRA from planning such attacks. The generals at Lisburn well understood the value of visible Army patrols for frightening off would-be attackers. It was felt that if a side-street near a base was patrolled every few hours or even days the ‘dickers’ sent to scout out targets would report back that it was too dangerous.
RUC morale in Newry remained fragile in the months after the attack. Under directions from Knock, the police assumed responsibility for patrolling one of the most dangerous towns in Ulster. Many officers thought this a highly dangerous assignment which had been ordered without proper consideration by their chief constable, says an RUC man.
Matters came to a head after an attack on 26 July 1986. A sergeant and two constables were observing Newry’s Market Square from their stationary police car. Although armour plated, the vehicle’s doors were open. Three Provisionals approached the vehicle and opened fire. All three police officers were killed. As they turned to leave, one of the terrorists lobbed a grenade into the vehicle. It failed to explode.
After the attack an IRA member telephoned the Newry RUC station to taunt them. He said one of the police officers had been ‘squealing like a pig’ before they shot him. This was entered into the station log book and, according to a police officer, had an understandably damaging effect on morale. Although it is well known for police in certain rural areas sometimes to refuse to enter a particular area until the Army have swept it, what followed was highly unusual. The town’s constables and sergeants gathered and held an angry meeting. According to an RUC man who was party to the discussions which followed, they refused to go out on the streets unless the Army was brought back into the town. They said they would limit themselves to guarding the police station and courthouse.
Chief Constable Hermon agreed to seek the Army’s help once more and the situation calmed. The incident is cited by some police to show how out of touch their Chief Constable had become by not anticipating the near mutiny.
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Mortars were among a variety of weapons which the IRA manufactured itself. There were practical and financial reasons for doing so. Although properly manufactured mortars could be bought on the arms market, the Provisionals appeared to prefer the home-grown alternative. The anti-armour grenades carried by the men at Strabane were also a product of the IRA’s workshops.
During the 1970s the organization had acquired some RPG-7 anti-tank rocket launchers but had found them difficult to use. One projectile had missed a security forces vehicle and ended up landing in a school. The IRA designed its own anti-armour weapons. Grenades were designed on the shaped charge principle – a technique which involves packing explosive around a cone-shaped cavity to enhance its penetrative effect. The anti-armour weapons were designed either to fly a short distance to their target or as ‘drogue bombs’. The latter were grenades thrown underarm which deployed a small parachute so that the shaped charge would detonate at the right angle relative to the armour.
These improvized weapons sometimes proved dangerous to the firer. Charles English, a Derry Brigade volunteer, was killéd in August 1985 while attempting to use one of the anti-armour weapons. English had been one of the masked men who had fired shots over the coffins at the funeral of the men killed at the Gransha hospital. Though unreliable like the mortars, an anti-armour bomb was used to lethal effect during a later attack in Belfast’s Divis flats.
During the mid 1980s the Provisionals succeeded in obtaining virtually any modern firearm they wanted. Terrorists carried Belgian FNC 5.56 mm assault rifles and the more modern, compact, version of the Armalite. They even obtained the FNC rifles before many of the countries whose regular armies had ordered them. The Provisionals also obtained G3 rifles made by the German firm Heckler and Koch. From 1986 these firearms were supplemented by a large number of Kalashnikov firearms provided by the Libyan government. The Libyan shipments also included SA-7 shoulder-launched missiles and heavy machine-guns, both of which could be used against helicopters.
During the summer of 1985 negotiations were carried on in the United States between Noel Murphy, a resident of Boston, and Provisional sympathizer, and an arms dealer. They discussed a purchase of 500 Armalite rifles, Heckler and Koch MP5 sub-machine-guns like those favoured by the SAS and belt-fed M-60 machine-guns. After consulting with senior IRA figures in Ireland in January 1986, Murphy returned and told the arms dealer that he was also interested in buying Redeye portable anti-aircraft missiles. Mu
rphy was joined by Kieran Hughes, reportedly representing the Provisional leadership. In May, with the weapons about to be shipped, the dealer was revealed as an FBI agent and Murphy, Hughes and several accomplices were arrested.
As with mortars and drogue bombs, the preoccupation with shooting down helicopters eventually paid off. In May 1985 south Armagh Provisionals staged a complicated ambush near Crossmaglen. They had fitted a heavy machine-gun to a vehicle and covered it with a tarpaulin. They opened fire on an RAF Wessex helicopter which was using the Crossmaglen helipad. They hit the aircraft, but it did not crash.
In June 1988 they ambushed another helicopter with a heavy machine-gun near Crossmaglen. The Army Lynx was hit several times. While Lisburn determinedly used the phrase ‘forced to land’, anxious to deny the Provisionals the propaganda coup of admitting it had been ‘shot down’ it is clear that, in lay language, that is what happened. The aircraft landed heavily, injuring a crewman. IRA members were said to be closing in to finish off the crew with small arms when Army patrols arrived and saved them. Many Army pilots took to flying with an MP5 machine-gun for self-defence strapped to their seat after this. The damaged Lynx had to be carried off under a Chinook helicopter. Republican mural painters portrayed the aircraft as having had its tail shot off.
With its home-made mortars and anti-armour grenades and with its attempts to shoot down helicopters, the IRA demonstrated both its patience in waiting years, if necessary, to achieve its aim and its ability to improvise new weapons. The use of these mortars and anti-armour bombs had as much to do with the propaganda effects of using them and with letting the movement’s better technical intellects have their experiments, as it did with the weapons’ real effectiveness.
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