By the mid-1980s, the SAS and the ‘Det’ had become known as the ‘Group’. Its undercover soldiers not only worked together but lived together when an operation was under way. Between 1983 and 1992, the ‘Group’ shot dead one member of the INLA and thirty-five members of the IRA, including many of the Provisionals’ most seasoned operatives. The SAS killed twenty-eight of them and the ‘Det’ killed eight. By this time, except where operational circumstances required, the SAS was no longer permanently co-located in the three ‘Det’ areas but based at Aldergrove as a resource that the TCGs could draw on when necessary. The SAS was now not only centralized but its soldiers were stationed in the province for twelve-month tours of duty instead of six.
After the intense controversy that engulfed the HMSU in the wake of the six killings in the autumn of 1982, the SAS came into its own once again: not that it had been idle during the preceding four years, it just had not been killing ‘terrorists’. All that was to change. Significantly, the vast majority were killed in rural areas. There were to be no more shoot-outs in built-up city streets. But although the SAS got most of the ‘kills’, for often that could be the culmination of its operational role, the groundwork of the ‘Det’ and other agencies with which it worked lay behind every one. 14 Intelligence Company was now a highly experienced, highly trained and highly effective counter-terrorist force. The introduction of women had transformed it, giving its operators greater flexibility and cover.
Through the mid-eighties and early nineties, ‘Anna’ and ‘Mary’ were closely involved in several of the operations of the ‘Group’ although not necessarily together, and they sat alongside the SAS at TCG briefings prior to a likely ‘contact’ with the IRA. They assert categorically that, although it has almost become enshrined as fact in nationalist and republican folk memory, there was no ‘shoot to kill’ policy. They say the SAS were never instructed to bring the IRA back dead not alive. The Yellow Card rules applied.
Although there may not have been a ‘shoot to kill’ policy in the sense that the SAS were instructed to bring back dead bodies, none the less, when soldiers did open fire, they were instructed to shoot to kill not to wound. Lord Mayhew, who as Sir Patrick Mayhew was Northern Ireland Secretary between 1992 and 1997, put it graphically. ‘If you do shoot, then you don’t shoot to tickle, you don’t shoot to miss, you do shoot to kill,’ he told me. ‘This thing about “shoot to kill”, as though it’s sort of self-evidently wicked, is absolutely wrong. It’s nonsense. You don’t shoot to do other than kill in the circumstances where the law permits you to shoot.’
‘Anna’ and ‘Mary’ were involved in operations that drew on a variety of intelligence data: ‘jarking’; information from agents; MI5 listening devices planted in the homes of key IRA ‘players’, sometimes as they were under construction, as a long-term intelligence investment; ‘Mk 1 Eyeball’ surveillance on the ground and, later, from hidden video cameras transmitting live, colour pictures that would even indicate the colour of the household rubber gloves an IRA member might be wearing.
When some or all of these ingredients came together, ensuring minimum risk to the SAS and maximum surprise to the IRA, an operation would be triggered. Such were the circumstances in place on Sunday 4 December 1983 when three men from the Coalisland unit of the IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade, Brian Campbell (19) and Colm McGirr (22) and a third person, went to retrieve two weapons from a cache hidden in a patch of brambles in a heavily overgrown field.1 One was an Armalite with a magazine fitted and the other a shotgun. Two black hoods and gloves were also part of the cache. One of the weapons, perhaps the Armalite, had been ‘jarked’ by the ‘Det’ and tracked for some time. It had already been used in four killings and eighteen other shootings.2 McGirr and Campbell were ‘bad boys’, one ‘Det’ operator told me. TCG South had a choice, either to ‘lift’ the weapons or ‘do something’. It chose the latter and the SAS staked out the field. According to the account of the soldiers involved, a car drove up and McGirr and Campbell got out and went to the cache, leaving the third man, the driver, in the car. McGirr retrieved the weapons and handed the Armalite to Campbell whilst he held onto the shotgun. One of the SAS men said that as he shouted ‘Halt! Security Forces!’ the two IRA men turned with their guns. ‘I then thought that my life was in immediate danger, and fearing for my life and that of my comrades, I opened fire.’3 McGirr and Campbell were both shot dead by the SAS soldier and other members of the team. McGirr was hit thirteen times and Campbell twice. The driver managed to escape, although he was badly wounded by shots the SAS fired at the vehicle. He is believed to have been taken across the border where he survived, although he has never fully recovered from his injuries. The car was later found, covered in blood. The survivor subsequently said that when McGirr and Campbell were shot, ‘neither was armed nor were they at any time challenged to stop. Those who carried out these killings … had every opportunity to stop and detain us all… but they chose to open fire without any warning.’4 One of the ‘Group’ involved in the operation assured me that a warning was given. He also said that the third man survived as a ‘cabbage’.
Just over six months later, the SAS struck another blow at the IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade. There was intelligence that an ASU was to carry out an incendiary bomb attack on a kitchen fittings factory in the Ardboe area along the shores of Lough Neagh on 13 July 1984 to mark the third anniversary of the death of the hunger striker Martin Hurson, who came from the East Tyrone village of Cappagh. Eight SAS soldiers took part in the ambush. According to their account, they had the area around the factory under surveillance when, through the night sights of their rifles, they saw men coming towards them, one of whom seemed to be wearing a hood. When the nearest IRA man was about thirty metres away, one of the soldiers said he issued a challenge, ‘Halt! Hands up!’ In his statement the soldier said, ‘This man raised his hands up very fast. I believed he was going to shoot me so I fired one aimed shot at the centre of his body. I heard him scream.’
The man who fell was William Price (28) from Ardboe. He was subsequently hit with three other bullets, including one to the head which killed him. His sister, who later examined the body, said his head was blown apart like the shell of an egg.5 Two pistols were found by and near the body. Two other members of the ASU, Raymond Francis O’Neill and Thomas McQuillan, were arrested by the SAS. It was evidence that the SAS could and did make arrests in appropriate circumstances. They were subsequently convicted and sentenced to nine years.
There was a macabre postscript to the killing. When members of the SAS and the ‘Det’ operators returned to base, having put three IRA men out of circulation, one of them for ever, there were celebrations in the bar as invariably happened when the ‘Group’ celebrated an IRA ‘kill’. (They argued that if the IRA celebrated the death of a soldier or policeman, why should the ‘Brits’ not do the same?)
For the killing of William Price, a cake was baked, iced and decorated in the shape of a cross. It bore the inscription ‘R.I.P. PRICE. ARDBOE’. I understand it was not the first or the last of its kind. It brought to mind the ancient custom of a tribe eating its enemy. When I visited William Price’s parents – simple country folk who apparently had no idea that their son had joined the IRA – and told them about the cake, they expressed no surprise.
The final operation by the ‘Group’ before the ‘spectaculars’ that were to mark the rest of the decade was almost the settling of an old score. The victim was Seamus McElwaine, an IRA commander who had been arrested by the SAS in 1981 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He had been part of a mass break-out from the Maze in 1983 and had become active along the Fermanagh border once again, going backwards and forwards from his ‘billet’ in County Monaghan. The SAS, however, finally brought his second run to an end on 26 April 1986. McElwaine and another IRA commander, Sean Lynch, were attending to a culvert bomb, unaware that the firing point was under surveillance. Both IRA men were armed and wearing combat gear. The SAS opened fire, killing McElwaine and wounding Lynch who, like Francis Hughes after his fire-fight with the ‘Det’ in 1978, crawled away to hide. Again like Hughes, Lynch was discovered by the ‘green’ army and the RUC, given medical attention and survived. He was duly tried, sentenced to twenty-five years and sent to the Maze where he subsequently became the prisoners’ OC. The judge said Lynch was not a soldier but a criminal. Republicans accused the SAS of finishing off the wounded McElwaine whilst he lay harmless on the ground. At the funeral, Martin McGuinness, who gave the graveside oration, described him as ‘an Irish freedom fighter murdered by British terrorists’.6
All the shooting incidents in which the ‘Det’ were involved happened in the first half of the decade. All the operators came from North ‘Det’. Given the circumstances of some of the shootings, it was not surprising that they were put down to the SAS. At one point it appeared that the ‘Det’ was assuming its offensive role. In two confrontations, two and a half months apart, the operators of North ‘Det’ shot dead five armed IRA men on ‘active service’. Several operators told me that at this period TCG North preferred to use the ‘Det’ in circumstances where the SAS would normally have been deployed. The first incident took place on 6 December 1984 and involved William Fleming (19) and Daniel Doherty (23) from the Creggan who had recently served a four-year sentence in the Republic for possession of explosives and IRA membership.7 Two of Fleming’s brothers were in prison and a cousin had drowned in the River Bannagh only four days earlier whilst trying to escape after a gun-battle between the IRA and the SAS. When there was intelligence that the IRA were planning to kill a part-time member of the security forces who worked at Derry’s Gransha psychiatric hospital, the ‘Det’ placed Fleming and Doherty under surveillance and, on the day of the planned operation, tracked the motorcycle on which they were to carry out the attack.
Just before 8 a.m., the time of a shift change, the two IRA men entered the hospital grounds with Doherty driving and Fleming on the pillion. Both were armed.8 The ‘Det’ was ready. One of the operators in an unmarked car said he saw a motor bike coming towards him and the pillion rider was armed with a gun. He said he shouted an order to stop at which point the pillion passenger ‘raised the handgun and pointed it towards me’. The operator rammed the bike, knocking Fleming to the ground. The operator said Fleming then pointed a gun at him and he shot him twice with two bursts of three rounds.9 Although the bike had been rammed, Doherty managed to ride on to be faced with another operator from the ‘Det’ team. The soldier opened fire at Doherty ‘because I feared for my life’. The bike finally crashed, throwing off the dying or dead Doherty who had also been hit by a burst of fire from another operator. In all, the ‘Det’ team fired fifty-nine rounds at the two men. A forensic examination showed that six shots had been fired at Doherty whilst he was on the ground.10 Both men had wounds to the head. Unionists were jubilant at the operation. Gregory Campbell, a local politician from Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, put their thoughts into words. ‘I am delighted that the two IRA men were intercepted and executed by the undercover army squad. The only way the IRA will be dealt with is when they are executed. They deal in death and must be dealt with by death.’11 Nationalists were horrified and asked why, if there had been intelligence on the operation, Fleming and Doherty could not have been arrested instead of being killed. At their funeral, Martin McGuinness said that only the freedom fighters of the IRA could bring Britain to the negotiating table. Elsewhere, Gerry Adams said the British ‘do not want to take prisoners. They only want dead bodies.’12
Just over two months later, on 23 February 1985, three operators from North ‘Det’ shot dead three more IRA men, Charles Breslin (20), Michael Devine (22) and his brother, David Devine (16). Breslin and Michael Devine were regarded as ‘serious players’. The shootings took place near the Head of the Town district in Strabane, a small border town fifteen miles south of Derry. Special Branch had received intelligence that an IRA unit was going to attack a police vehicle with an improvised armourpiercing grenade launcher and then shoot any surviving RUC officers as they tried to escape. The IRA scheduled the attack for 4 a.m., the time when the police vehicle was expected to drive by, presumably on its routine patrol. But in the early hours of that morning, the vehicle did not come. Breslin and the Devine brothers and two other IRA men waited to launch the attack and, when there was a ‘no show’, they decided to call off the operation and return their weapons to the ‘hide’ in a nearby field. The ASU then split up with Breslin and the Devines heading back to the field.
What they did not know was that the ‘Det’ had the ‘hide’ under surveillance. One or more of the weapons may have been ‘jarked’. It appears the three IRA men almost stumbled upon the ‘Det’ when they were only a few yards away from their O.P. According to one of the soldiers who opened fire, he told his two colleagues to ‘watch out’, at which point ‘all three gunmen swung their rifles towards us’. ‘I knew then we were in a contact situation and that the lives of myself and my colleagues were in immediate danger,’ the soldier said.13
The three operators fired a total of 117 rounds from two HK 53 rifles and a Browning pistol at the IRA men, killing all three. The rifles Breslin and the Devines were carrying – two Belgian FNs and a mini-Ruger – were found at the scene. The three IRA men had not had a chance to fire them. Ballistic tests proved that they had been fired before in four separate attempted murders and one actual murder.14 At Breslin’s funeral, Gerry Adams said he had been shot by ‘a British terrorist SAS gang’. The action of the operators involved showed that they had learned the lesson from their former colleagues in North ‘Det’ during the exchange between ‘Jay’ and ‘John’ and Francis Hughes in 1978 in which ‘Jay’ had been killed after issuing a challenge.
In the first four years of the decade in which the gloves appeared to have been taken off, ‘Group’ activity accounted for twelve IRA men and one member of the INLA.15 More bodies were to follow.