Finally, I would like to thank the various people who helped me with the project, including Susanne McDadd, my editor at Faber and Faber; Walter Macauley and Kathleen Higgins, librarians of the Belfast Telegraph and Irish News respectively; Vincent Dowd and Beth Holgate for their helpful comments on the manuscript; and all those who agreed to be interviewed – without whom this book would not have been possible.
Mark Urban
April 1992
PART ONE: 1976–1979
1First Blood
It was just after five on a dark February evening in 1978. Two young men, members of the Irish Republican Army, were speeding in a white Volkswagen along a road near Ardboe in the county of Tyrone. The area to the south west of Lough Neagh is a bastion of the republican community in Ulster. The men were on their way to recover several small home-made mortar bombs which had been hidden in a farmyard; one of them was about to be killed by the SAS.
The car pulled up, the men got out and walked into the farmyard. As twenty-year-old Paul Duffy picked up one of the mortar bombs he was hit by a burst of rifle fire, which killed him almost instantly. The other man turned and ran back towards the Volkswagen. As he started the car the windows were hit by bullets, and he was showered with glass. He got away, but later surrendered himself for medical attention. He had three bullets in him, but survived.
This type of incident was to be repeated many times by the SAS in Northern Ireland. Several suspected IRA men had been arrested in the area two days before the Duffy operation. An informer had told the security forces about the mortar bombs and their imminent collection. The soldiers had been in hiding for two days and nights, waiting for someone to appear.
Duffy was not the first IRA man to be killed by soldiers of the SAS, but the operation marked an important step in the struggle against republican terrorism. Until the beginning of 1978 the SAS had been under orders to remain in south Armagh, close to the border with the Irish Republic, the area the popular press calls ‘bandit country’. Now they were to be employed throughout Northern Ireland – a development which followed a period of uncertainty about how the security forces should exploit their most sensitive intelligence and their most highly trained soldiers.
The British Army is normally unwilling to confirm or deny either the presence of SAS soldiers in an area or their participation in a particular incident. This policy stems from a desire to increase the mystique surrounding the Regiment, and from the need to protect its members and the sources of intelligence on which it acts. But on this occasion Army commanders were keen to spread the word that things had changed. The Army’s Headquarters Northern Ireland (HQNI) press office at Lisburn confirmed ‘that the patrol which killed a terrorist … and wounded another came from the Special Air Service’. Reporters were also told of the change in policy allowing the soldiers to operate outside south Armagh. The Army was sending a clear signal to the Provisionals.
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It was in January 1976 that the first twelve members of the SAS, Britain’s most highly trained military unit, arrived at Bessbrook in south Armagh. The strongly Protestant community in the village was living through a grim period of sectarian killings. Both Protestant and Catholic death squads had been stalking the countryside of south Armagh, and had killed twenty-four civilians in the six months before the SAS was committed to the region.
For the small community of Bessbrook those first weeks of 1976 were a time of crisis. Following a killing by Protestant terrorists of five local Catholics, a group calling itself the ‘South Armagh Republican Action Force’ had stopped a bus and gunned down eleven men who were on their way home from work. Only one survived. The bus driver, a Catholic, was released. Most of the dead were from Bessbrook. It was this incident – and the loyalist response to it – which prompted the then prime minister, Harold Wilson, to send the SAS to south Armagh to supplement the regular Army, which had been in Northern Ireland since 1969.
SAS squadrons had previously been deployed in Northern Ireland in 1969 and 1974, and several SAS men had served there in other units, but there has always been an air of secrecy surrounding the Regiment’s role in the region, so it is worth examining the structure and practice of the unit to separate some of the myth from the reality. The 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, or 22 SAS as the special forces unit is correctly known, is based in Hereford. It only recruits from other Army units and usually takes officers for three-year tours. They tend to be in their mid to late twenties when they first attempt selection. Most are not graduates, although many have been to public schools. These young officers have a limited effect on the Regiment’s ethos, since they are attached to it for a finite period, even if some do go on to a second or third three-year tour later in their career; for other ranks there is no fixed leaving date – ‘Once you’re in, you’ve cracked it,’ as one SAS man describes it. The ordinary soldiers almost invariably epitomize the working-class culture of the sergeant’s mess. Many become indispensable and long-serving regimental characters. The only officers who stay in the Regiment are normally raised from the ranks after a career as a non-commissioned officer (NCO).
The novice SAS soldier is given the rank of trooper – equivalent to private – regardless of his rank in his parent regiment. However, the soldiers do not suffer financially: they usually receive the pay of a rank above their
