At 1.30 p.m. on 11 August 1978 IRA terrorists hijacked a Toyota van. Several automatic weapons were recovered from a cache and an operation set in train. Lance-Corporal Swift had been spotted in his parked car on a layby off the Letterkenny Road in the Brandywell area of Londonderry. At about 3.30 p.m. the Toyota pulled up in front of his car and at least two terrorists opened fire from the rear of the van. The Lance-Corporal was killed. The Army Press Office said he had been ‘in plain clothes and on duty’ when he died.
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Whatever the dangers of such work, there was a consensus among security chiefs that plain-clothes surveillance could yield still better results. So, from 1976 to 1978 there was a proliferation of special units besides 14 Intelligence Company’s detachments which were intended to do similar work, albeit in less demanding situations. The Army and the RUC did not agree a master plan, rather there was general agreement that many more soldiers and policemen could be used for such duties without crowding the existing Army surveillance unit. An entire detachment of 14 Company could be tied down on mobile and static observation of a single suspect and there were, after all, a great many more suspects whom the intelligence experts wanted watching. The need for these teams was such that the RUC would have found it hard to oppose the Army’s commitment of many more men for observation duties because, despite the advent of Police Primacy, people at Knock understood that the Army had a great many more operatives to call upon than the RUC could muster.
Major General Dick Trant, appointed Commander Land Forces at Lisburn in 1977, was the driving force behind a large expansion of Army surveillance resources. Trant, a tall man with the genial manner of a country vicar, wanted to restore to each unit the capability for intelligence-gathering which had been lost when infantry battalions were relieved of their reconnaissance platoons during an Army reorganization. Complementing 14 Company, the CLF had at his disposal a force, formed little more than a year before, of a few dozen soldiers from various units serving in Ulster called the Northern Ireland Patrol Group. He decided that this arrangement was not satisfactory, partly because the soldiers stayed for a few months only and partly because they were not properly trained.
Major General Trant decided to introduce Close Observation Platoons, units of thirty in each of the battalions serving longer ‘residential’ tours of up to two years and in one of the four-month tour battalions, the one based in south Armagh. The COPs, as they became known, would take the best soldiers from the battalion and give them expert training in observation techniques. The CLF and brigade commanders would be able to use the new platoons anywhere in Ulster, not just inside the area of responsibility of the particular battalion to which they belonged. COPs were to become important in establishing the regular patterns of activity among ASUs and movements of key republicans. Although 14 Intelligence Company or SAS operators were usually brought in when there was good intelligence of a forthcoming operation, the COPs often provided the basic data about an area and IRA activities in it.
Lisburn leaked details of the new groups, which in press briefings were described as ‘SAS-type units’, in the hope that proliferation of such groups would intimidate the IRA. In June 1977 The Times announced ‘First of 300 Arrive for Army’s New Undercover Drive’. The number was something of an exaggeration, there being about 200. The journalist noted that they were going to gather information designed to bring suspects to trial but added, ‘The Government is also expecting publicity about secret Army activities to increase their deterrent value.’
The Parachute Regiment, battalions of which had retained their own reconnaissance unit, known as Patrol Company, was to take an important role in training the COPs and the new surveillance units of the RUC. Chief Constable Kenneth Newman was naturally interested in expanding the surveillance activities of his force. Under Police Primacy the RUC were meant to be taking over the direction of security matters and he did not want them to be left out of what he felt was an important area of operations.
The Special Patrol Group (SPG), the RUC’s mobile anti-terrorist unit, had in 1976 set up a firearms and observation unit called Bronze Section. Its members were selected for special training in undercover activities and initially operated mainly in the Belfast area. Michael Asher, a former soldier in the Parachute Regiment who joined the SPG as an ordinary police constable, describes various Bronze Section activities in his book Shoot to Kill. Asher’s account suggests that most Bronze operations, many of which were based on informer intelligence, were failures. The RUC surveillance operators, like their Army counterparts, adopted beards and long hair en masse. They appeared, he wrote, ‘exactly like policemen trying to look like ordinary citizens’. In some respects, the RUC’s occasionally farcical early experiments with Bronze Section were reminiscent of the Army’s experience with the Mobile Reconnaissance Force.
Asher says that on one occasion the SPG was deployed by Bronze Section following intelligence that a loyalist assassination squad was going to kill a Catholic lawyer. The police lay in wait all day outside the lawyer’s flat, until ‘it occurred to one of the Bronze Section’s bearded men to check if he was in’. It was only then that they discovered the target of the loyalist death squad had emigrated to Canada.
Partly as a result of such episodes, partly in recognition that Bronze Section performed too broad a function, in that it dealt with firearms as well as observation, senior RUC officers decided to establish a new surveillance unit. They were impressed by the results obtained by 14 Intelligence Company and wanted to
