The horrific tit-for-tat sectarian killings that had stained the closing months of 1975 were but a prelude for the even greater horrors of the first few days of 1976. I was in South Armagh at the time and vividly remember the fear that gripped both communities as killers from both sides pulled the triggers of raw sectarian hatred. The loyalist UVF from mid-Ulster struck first in a co-ordinated attack that left six members of two Catholic families dead. None had any paramilitary connections.
The UVF’s first target was the Reavey family who lived in a small cottage in the village of Whitecross in South Armagh. It stood on its own away from the main village and surrounded by fields. On Sunday evening, 4 January, Mrs Reavey and her husband had gone to visit a relative, leaving three of her sons at home, Anthony (17), Brian (22) and John Martin (25). There were no undue concerns about security and the key was left in the door as was still customary in areas where there had been no trouble. Just after 6 o’clock, as the boys were watching television, at least four masked gunmen walked in and opened fire. John Martin was killed immediately and Brian seconds later as he tried to make for the bedroom. Anthony got to the bedroom and, terrified, crawled under the bed where the gunmen shot him and left him for dead. He recovered but died in hospital less than a month later when he suffered a relapse from the gunshot wounds. Forty-three spent cartridges were found amongst the pools of blood. Later that evening, a deeply shocked Mr Reavey went on television and made a plea. ‘He said he didn’t want any retaliation and didn’t want anybody to suffer the way we had suffered,’ Mrs Reavey told me. ‘He didn’t want anybody shot in retaliation for our sons. He said he would forgive them and made us kneel down that night and pray for the ones who killed them. He said it was worse for them than it was for us because they had to live with what they’d done, killing three innocent young men.’
I was making a film for Thames Television’s This Week programme at the time and went to the Reaveys’ cottage the night of the wake. I remember army helicopters raking the night sky and the fields below with powerful searchlights, probably more to show a security force presence that to deter the UVF. I had never been to an Irish wake before and found it difficult at first to come to terms with seeing John Martin and Brian immaculately laid out in their coffins, powdered and lifeless and bordered by dozens of mass cards. There were no tears as family friends filed past to pay their respects before being served with tea and sandwiches by Mr and Mrs Reavey. The order and calm seemed unreal after the unimaginable ordeal the family had been through. I met Mrs Reavey again twenty-four years later. Remarkably she seemed little changed although the pain and the memory of that night were still there. ‘The years have been hell,’ she said. ‘I think of the boys all the time but I’ll soon be coming to the end of my days. I hope that the ones that shot them will be found out before I die. Nobody was ever arrested for the killing of them and we never heard who did it.’ Robin Jackson, the UVF commander from Mid-Ulster who is believed to have planned and ordered these killings and many more, is now dead. He was known as ‘The Jackal’ and died of cancer in 1998, a few weeks after the Good Friday Agreement was signed.
Ten minutes after the Reavey brothers were shot, another Catholic family, the O’Dowds, were having a post New Year sing-song around the piano at their home in a village near Gilford fifteen miles away.1 In an obviously co-ordinated attack, another group of UVF gunmen burst in and sprayed the room with automatic weapons, killing three members of the family.
The twin killings in one small corner of the province were to have an even bloodier climax twenty-four hours after the Reavey brothers and the O’Dowd family were gunned down by the UVF. Around tea-time on 5 January 1976, a dozen workers were being driven home in a minibus to the village of Bessbrook from the Glenanne textile factory in which they worked. It was a wet, dark, miserable evening. The driver and ten of the workmen were Protestants and one was a Catholic. The bus took the same route every day and on this occasion the passengers were not surprised to see a man in army uniform with a red light step out into the road and wave the bus down at a place called Kingsmills: given that they were only a couple of miles from Whitecross, where the Reaveys had been shot the night before, everyone on board fully expected army patrols to be thick on the ground that night. All were ordered out of the bus and made to stand spread-eagled against the side.
Alan Black was one of the passengers. ‘We thought the van was going to be searched, which is the most natural thing in the world,’ he told me. ‘We had nothing to hide so no one was worried.’ Nevertheless, Alan was a little surprised that the driver had not been asked for his licence. As he got out of the bus, Alan saw a dozen men in combat jackets lined up in the road. They were carrying automatic weapons and their faces were blackened with ‘cam’ (camouflage) cream. He was even more surprised at what he heard next. The man who had stopped the bus then barked, ‘Who is the Catholic?’ Alan thought this a bit strange, as it was not the kind of question British soldiers normally asked. Suddenly fearing that they had not been stopped by the army but by loyalist terrorists bent on killing their Catholic workmate, two of the Protestants standing next to him put their hands on top of his to stop him moving out.
However, the men were not loyalists but members of the South Armagh IRA, and it was clear that they already knew who the only Catholic on the bus was. The man who did all the talking grabbed him by the shoulder and ordered him to run off down the road. One of the gunmen made sure that he did. Then, with the eleven Protestants lined up against the side of the minibus, the man issued a single command. ‘Right!’ Automatic fire ripped the evening air for about ten seconds, although to Alan it seemed an awful lot longer. ‘The gunfire was deafening, like something you have in your worst nightmare,’ he recalled. ‘I could not believe it the first time I was hit. I could not believe it was happening. It was total unreality. But the pain was real enough.’ Then there was absolute silence, the only noise being the metallic sounds of guns being re-loaded. The IRA then opened fire again to make sure that all eleven Protestants were dead and no witness survived.
Miraculously Alan Black did although he was shot eighteen times. ‘When the shooting stopped, there was not a sound. There was just dead silence. There was not a word, not a noise, nothing. I watched them walk off down the road. They were wearing Doc Marten boots.’ Alan lay there, with the rain trickling down his face, in unbelievable pain, convinced that he was going to die and putting his fingers in the bullet holes to try to stop the blood coming out. Eventually a schoolteacher arrived on the scene and started to say a prayer for the dead. Ambulances and the police soon followed. Alan was rushed to hospital and made a remarkable recovery, although he is still haunted by the memory of that dreadful night. To this day, he cannot understand why it happened.
It was calculated. That’s what made it so hard to take. Ten lads that would not harm a fly and just wiped out. They didn’t mean to leave anyone alive. How do you reason with people that would go out and do that? They knew when they were putting on their uniforms, when they were blacking out their faces, when they were hijacking the van that was used to transport them out here, they knew what they were going to do. How can they live with themselves? I just don’t know.
I remember watching the funerals. The drizzle never stopped. It was as if the sky was weeping too. The massacre was claimed by the South Armagh Republican Action Force, the group responsible for the slaughter at the Tullyvallen Orange Hall. In fact it was the South Armagh IRA, allegedly acting without the authority of the IRA leadership. After Kingsmills, the tit-for-tat killings in South Armagh stopped.
Two days later, on 7 January 1976, Harold Wilson announced he was sending in the SAS for the purpose of ‘patrolling and surveillance’. Such a public announcement was unprecedented as the Regiment’s operations are normally shrouded in secrecy. In the wake of the sectarian bloodletting and the public outrage it caused, Wilson had to be seen to be doing something, and sending in the SAS in a blaze of publicity gave the impression of a firm Government, prepared to hit back at the IRA.
Initially, some members of 14 Intelligence Company were not impressed. ‘They were about as much use as tits on a goldfish,’ one of them told me. Only a handful were deployed to South Armagh, primarily to put the ‘frighteners’ on the IRA which, under the circumstances, seemed a not unreasonable thing to do. Few men were available as most of the Regiment were still involved in fighting rebel tribesmen, known as adoo, in strategically important Oman, although the operation was brought to a successful end in September that year, thus releasing more of its ‘troopers’ for service in the province. It was not as if the SAS had not set foot there before. Members of D Squadron, 22 SAS, were deployed with the regular army in 1969 and a handful had been present ever since attached to other regiments.2 Apparently the decision to deploy the SAS was not warmly greeted in every quarter of the Regiment, one of whose members at the time told me, ‘No bugger wanted to go. It wasn’t an attractive job and the vast majority didn’t want to get involved in Northern Ireland. We may be daft but we’re not stupid.’
Operating in ‘Bandit Country’, as South Armagh had become known, was very different from fighting in Oman and winning the hearts and minds of the tribesmen as the SAS had so successfully done, thus turning the tide of the campaign. In fiercely republican villages like Crossmaglen there were few hearts and minds to be won. Even more difficult was the fact that, unlike in faraway places, the enemy could not be followed to its safe havens over the border in what was known as ‘hot pursuit’. The Irish Republic was a sovereign state and jealously guarded its territorial integrity although it knew that the IRA was operating from the border counties of Monaghan and Louth adjacent to South Armagh. To the SAS the border was a line on a map that was as big a challenge as the IRA. Inevitably, shortly after its deployment, the Regiment was involved in a series of controversies.
The first occurred on 12 March 1976 and involved Sean McKenna (23), whose father had been one of the eleven detainees subjected to the Five Techniques immediately after internment in 1971. The young McKenna was living in a small, two-roomed cottage a couple of hundred yards over the border near Edentubber. The SAS had no doubt that he was a senior commander in the IRA and better out of circulation. He had already been acquitted of murder at two separate trials in the previous four years.3
McKenna thought he was safe but he was not. According to his own account, he was asleep in bed in the early hours of the morning when two men came in through the window, made their way through the kitchen and kicked down his bedroom door against which he had wedged a chair.4 Both were wearing civilian clothes. One of them put a 9 mm Browning pistol to his head and told him not to move. A flashlight was then shone in his face to make sure the intruders had the right man. McKenna was then told to get out of bed slowly and put on his clothes. One of the men gave him a choice: to come quietly or resist and be shot. He was then taken across several fields and across the border where he says three soldiers in uniform were waiting. One of them sent a message over the radio, ‘We have our friend.’ The SAS men then handed him over with the instruction to shoot him if he made a wrong move. McKenna was then formally arrested and taken to the village of Bessbrook in South Armagh in whose disused mill the SAS, the regular army and the RUC were based. He was interviewed there by the RUC and made statements that resulted in his being sentenced to a total of 303 years for offences ranging from attempted murder to bombings, possession of firearms and explosives and membership of the IRA. According to one SAS source involved in the operation, ‘He was sure he was going to be shot when he was told to get dressed and go outside. He couldn’t stop talking and gave away everything he knew without having been asked a single question. When he was handed over to the RUC he was genuinely astonished and delighted to see them.’5
The army, of course, never admitted that McKenna had been lifted from across the border or that the SAS had been involved. Instead they issued a cover story saying that he had been found, drunk and incapable, staggering along the Northern side of the border. Whatever the exact truth, one of the IRA’s most wanted men in South Armagh was now safely locked up in the Maze prison. As far as the authorities were concerned, the end justified the means. After the Kingsmills minibus massacre, few would have argued. McKenna later came within hours of death on the IRA’s first hunger strike in 1980.
A month later, on 15 April 1976, the SAS lifted another IRA man they had been watching, Peter Cleary (26), a ‘Staff Officer’ with the 1st Battalion of the South Armagh PIRA who was ‘on the run’ across the border. Cleary was about to get married to his girlfriend and surveillance revealed that he made regular visits to see her at the house where she was staying a few hundred yards on the Northern side of the border. That evening, he was spotted making one of his visits, having left his car a few hundred yards away in the Republic. Around 10 o’clock, he was watching the television news about an IRA attack on a helicopter in Crossmaglen when the SAS arrested him in a situation of some confusion. Their presence had already been revealed when a neighbour, alerted by the barking of dogs, shone a torch into a ditch and illuminated two soldiers, one of whom then fired a warning shot.6 Helicopters were called up from Bessbrook, and Cleary was taken outside to await their arrival. According to the SAS soldier who was left to guard him, Cleary attacked him and tried to escape. The soldier shot him three times and said he had no chance to issue a warning.7 (Witnesses later said that Cleary had been beaten up by the SAS before he was shot.) Bessbrook was then radioed and told to have a body bag ready on the landing strip.
The following day, HQNI issued a statement that said that Cleary, who was wanted for questioning by the police in connection with several serious crimes in the area, had tried to escape and ‘assaulted the soldier guarding him and in the ensuing struggle was shot dead’.8 Word was put about, presumably by the authorities and duly reflected in the English press, that Cleary had been wanted for questioning in connection with the Tullyvallen and Kingsmills massacres as well as a 300-lb landmine attack a fortnight earlier that killed three soldiers of the Royal Scots Regiment near Cleary’s home in Beleek.9 At his wake, Peter Cleary lay in his coffin, dressed in his wedding suit. The IRA refuted the SAS account of what happened and claimed that Cleary had been picked out for selective, coldblooded assassination. Whatever the truth, there is no doubt that the kidnapping of McKenna and the killing of Cleary within months of the Regiment’s deployment sent a clear message to the IRA. The SAS meant business.
But D Squadron’s operations in the border area suffered a severe setback and embarrassing blow late at night on 5 May 1976. Two SAS soldiers in plain clothes, one in an overcoat and green shirt, the other in a brown jersey and white shirt, were arrested at a checkpoint manned by the Garda and the Irish army about half a mile on the Irish side of the border. They were driving a Triumph Toledo with an Armagh registration. One was an Englishman and the other one of several Fijians serving with the Regiment. In their car was a Sterling sub-machine gun, a Browning pistol and eighty-two rounds of ammunition. A large map marked with certain houses on the Irish side of the border was also apparently found in their possession. Around three and a half hours later, six other SAS men, four in plain clothes and two in army uniform, in a Hillman Avenger and Vauxhall Victor, were also arrested by the Irish police at the same checkpoint. Between them they were carrying three Sterling sub-machine guns, two Browning automatic pistols, a pump-action shotgun and 222 rounds of ammunition.10
The British presented the incident as a ‘map-reading error’. The whole incident had elements of farce about it and gave the Regiment’s reputation a severe knock. The troopers of D Squadron might be deadly marksmen but clearly left a lot to be desired when it came to orienteering.
Precisely what the first SAS car was doing across the border has never been convincingly explained by the authorities, but I understand that the first pair of SAS men were going to pick up or relieve two of their colleagues who were manning a Covert Observation Post (COP) on the Irish side of the border. When they did not return, the six others were sent out to find them. The eight SAS men were arrested and charged under Section 30 of the Republic’s Offences Against the State Act. One of those detained is alleged to have said, ‘Let us go back. If the roles were reversed, we would let you back. We are doing the one bloody job.’11
Although British officials can smile today when you mention the SAS’s map-reading shortcomings, there was little amusement at the time as it became a major diplomatic incident between the British and Irish Governments. There was great embarrassment at Stormont Castle where a new Permanent Under Secretary, Brian Cubbon, had just been installed at the Northern Ireland Office in succession to Frank Cooper. ‘I could never understand the “map-reading error”’, he told me. The eight SAS men were released on bail of £40,000, guaranteed by the British Embassy in Dublin, and returned to stand trial on 7 March the following year. Cubbon was phlegmatic. ‘My own view was that we’d just got to put our hands up for this one and if the Irish wanted to go through a trial with damage limitation, then we had to make the best of it. It was a bad episode and it was an affront to Irish sovereignty.’
At their trial, the SAS men were acquitted of the charge of taking weapons into the Republic with intent to endanger life, which could have carried a penalty of twenty years in gaol. They were admonished and fined £100 each for taking weapons into the Republic without firearms certificates. The Garda then handed the weapons back to the British army.12 It was hardly a glorious page in the Regiment’s history. The apparent reluctance of many of its troopers to become involved in the conflict seemed to be justified by events. SAS involvement in Northern Ireland did not have an auspicious beginning. To the IRA, the initials now meant ‘Special Assassination Squad’.