In December 1978 the ambushes stopped and for five years, until December 1983, the SAS did not kill anybody in Northern Ireland. Of course during this period IRA members were killed by normal Army patrols, the RUC and, in one incident, by 14 Intelligence Company. However, an analysis of all published sources on deaths in Ulster, including Sinn Fein’s own ‘Roll of Honour’ of fallen volunteers, shows that during 1979 to 1980, for example, only one IRA member was killed by the entire Army in Northern Ireland.
But if the SAS had been reined in, who was responsible? The answer appeared to lie at the top of the security forces command structure. During the days when SAS operations had been confined to south Armagh control of operations was wielded at a relatively junior level. The commanding officer of the Army’s battalion in the area was often in charge, sometimes seeking higher authority – from 3 Brigade in Portadown for certain operations.
With the extension of operations throughout Northern Ireland in 1977 arrangements had changed. An SAS sabre squadron, about seventy-five soldiers, has a headquarters and four smaller units called troops. A troop is commanded by a captain, usually in his late twenties, and should consist of sixteen soldiers, although there are often less.
One troop remained at Bessbrook in south Armagh in the area controlled by 3 Brigade, but the other three were placed elsewhere. One went to 39 Brigade, the Belfast area, another to 8 Brigade in Londonderry. The fourth troop remained at a central location under the personal control of the CLF. Although the other troops were notionally attached to the three brigade headquarters, this was largely an administrative convenience. One officer describes the arrangement: ‘It made sense to dot them around, from the point of view of getting places faster. If CLF had nothing for them to do, they went to the brigade commander.’ However, in most cases the SAS were under the control of the CLF. This system of command and deployment was conceived late in 1977 and probably remained in effect until late 1980 or early 1981. The advantage of the system was that it gave the regions their ‘own’ SAS men, ready to respond rapidly in an emergency. The problem was that it dispersed SAS efforts, when they might better have been concentrated at the place where the best intelligence was available.
After 1978, the CLF still had opportunities to use them for ambushes, had he wanted to. One officer holding a pivotal position at Lisburn says, ‘There were a lot of occasions when we knew what the terrorists were going to do.’ But the key personalities, and with them attitudes to the use of lethal force, had changed.
In February 1979 James Glover, the General Staff brigadier who had written several influential intelligence reports when in Whitehall, arrived at Lisburn as CLF, after promotion to major general. Major General Glover argued against ambushing the IRA. He was acutely aware of the importance of funerals in sustaining the republican movement and he wanted to get killing out of the headlines.
The tradition of martyrdom is a long one and it plays an important role in confirming the status of model republicans on families who have lost a member fighting for the IRA. The funerals of volunteers become set-piece demonstrations of solidarity in which the precise circumstances of the person’s death are often forgotten as the mourners succumb to emotion. The funeral of a Provo volunteer, maybe still a teenager, in which thousands marched behind the coffin, was important in confirming the status of people who might otherwise have never earned any kind of respect in their community.
The idea that martyrdom increased the IRA’s support and should therefore be avoided at all costs had been expressed by several officers at Lisburn between 1977 and 1978. But others had argued more forcibly that ambushes were worthwhile, principally because they deterred others from carrying out terrorist crime. Now the balance of power in the argument shifted.
James Glover had already written a highly classified paper spelling out his belief in the need for significant changes in the organization of military intelligence while he was still a brigadier in London. He knew that intelligence was the key to preventing terrorist outrages and that it was going to be harder to get it following the IRA’s evolution towards a cellular structure. Major General Glover summed up his preference for agents rather than ambushes years later in an interview with the BBC TV programme Panorama: ‘I always used to say, “Bring me a terrorist who can work for me and don’t give me a dead terrorist”.’
Although Major General Glover worked in 1979 for the same GOC who had advocated the aggressive use of special forces before, Lieutenant General Creasey, there were other changes at senior levels. Roy Mason, the Secretary of State who believed in putting military pressure on the IRA had been replaced, following the Conservatives’ general election victory in May 1979, by Humphrey Atkins. And while Chief Constable Kenneth Newman had initially agreed with the deployment of the SAS he had become increasingly sceptical about what they could achieve in the complex circumstances of Northern Ireland. Many RUC officers considered the Boyle episode at Dunloy to have been an extraordinary display of ineptitude by the Army. And while Lisburn considered
