One of the unit’s first recruits was Captain Julian Ball. He had served in the ranks of the Parachute Regiment and had done a tour with the SAS. Promoted to officer, he got a commission in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers (KOSBs). Captain Ball passed selection for 14 Intelligence Company and commanded the 3 Brigade detachment of the unit, which used the cover name 4 Field Survey Troop. His number two, or liaison officer, was Lieutenant Robert Nairac, later promoted to captain.
Fred Holroyd alleges 4 Field Survey Troop was an SAS unit operating in Ulster before the government admitted the Regiment had been sent there. He also alleges that the unit was involved in ‘dirty tricks’, something which will be discussed in the next chapter. My research indicates that Captain Ball and Lieutenant Nairac were not in the SAS during their 1974 tour with the surveillance unit, the time when Holroyd met them.
Captain Ball went on to join the SAS in mid 1975, when he was listed as ‘22 SAS’ in his regimental journal. Lieutenant Nairac was never in the SAS; although he died later in Northern Ireland, his name was not inscribed on the clock tower at the Regiment’s camp in Hereford where all SAS men who fall in action are listed. During the 1970s there was no great sensitivity about listing a soldier’s assignment in a regimental journal as being to the SAS. It may strike the reader as odd that while the Army would lie to the press and even to the courts about its undercover activities in Northern Ireland, it would not do so in a regimental journal. The reasons lie partly in the fact that such journals are not intended to be seen by people outside the regimental community and partly in the carelessness of those who put such journals together. They often transposed a regiment’s classified list of where its officers and NCOs were serving into their journal without realizing the sensitivity of some of the information. Lastly, many of the officers who put such magazines together consider that inserting false information about someone’s posting in their regimental journal would be tantamount to deception of regimental brothers. While people assigned to the surveillance unit are sometimes not listed in their journals – or more often one of the unit’s cover names given here is used – I have never discovered, in many hours of research, one instance where the soldier’s posting was listed falsely.
One soldier from the unit who served with Captain Ball, who had won the Military Cross during his time with the KOSBs, remembers him as a highly unusual, instinctive soldier. He was a hard man physically – the soldier says, ‘Our joke about him was that his idea of a good time was to wrap himself in barbed wire and run about a minefield in the pouring rain.’ After two tours as an officer in the SAS he went to run the Sultan of Oman’s special forces. He was killed in a car accident in Oman in 1981.
Another example of a soldier who served in the special unit at the time was William Hatton. As a young NCO he was posted from the Parachute Regiment to the surveillance unit, where he became involved in many observation operations. Hatton subsequently went on to join G Squadron 22 SAS, reaching the rank of corporal. He was one of sixteen members of the Regiment killed in the Falklands War in 1982 when their helicopter crashed into the sea. Corporal Hatton’s official obituary reads: ‘He was present with his squadron on four operational tours in Northern Ireland when his vast depth of experience in the theatre was of quite inestimable value.’
Most missions carried out by 14 Intelligence Company involved either setting up static observations posts (OPs), or watching people from unmarked cars (Q cars). An OP in an urban area might be a derelict house or, in the countryside, a roadside ditch – neither offered much protection. Q cars were fitted with ‘covert radios’, invisible to the casual observer. But the presence of a strange car was in many areas noticed quickly – particularly as there was a tendency to use relatively new British-made saloons. Outsiders could become prey to the gun law of the republican estates where youths, often armed, hijacked cars for use by the IRA or INLA, or simply for the thrill of joy riding. Soldiers assigned to the unit usually carried a standard 9mm Browning automatic pistol for self-defence. Sometimes they also used small sub-machine guns – in the early days the American-designed Ingram and later the German Heckler and Koch MP-5K. They were not normally equipped with assault rifles, as the SAS often are in Northern Ireland, for unlike them 14 Company’s mission was not to confront paramilitaries but to watch them. Their weapons therefore had to be small enough to be easily concealed.
The IRA soon became aware of the stepping-up of surveillance. Overt OPs on the top of blocks of flats, like the Divis tower on Belfast’s Falls Road, announced their presence to everybody. Covert OPs allowed members of regular units and 14 Intelligence Company to observe suspects, seeing who their associates were. This in turn allowed the collators of intelligence at Lisburn and brigade headquarters to investigate links between meetings of particular individuals and patterns of terrorist activity.
Operators in the surveillance unit usually abandoned Army regulation appearance. One of its men remembers, ‘The long hair and beards were the result of typical soldier’s thinking. If there is something you are not allowed to do and then the rule is waived, then everybody does it.’ As a result they were in danger of creating another uniformity, albeit different to and hairier than that of the uniformed soldier on the street.
The difficulty of unobtrusive penetration of the tightly knit nationalist community meant that the presence of OP teams
