With the formation of the Group, the number of SAS in Ulster was reduced from a squadron strength of around seventy men to a reinforced troop of just over twenty. For the first few years these men were provided by whichever squadron was doing a six month stint at Hereford as the Regiment’s Special Projects team – ready for an emergency anywhere in the world. In the mid-1980s this changed and the Northern Ireland troop separated from the squadrons. It became, in the words of one SAS man, ‘a posting like any other’. The men selected went for one year, allowing greater continuity in Ulster while enabling the Regiment’s four squadrons to concentrate on other types of training. However, SAS reinforcements were always available for transfer to Ulster at short notice.
Under the new arrangements, the SAS element and 14 Intelligence Company were brought together under a single commanding officer. The CO of Int and Sy Group was able to deploy the three surveillance detachments and the SAS soldiers together or separately, according to the nature of the mission. The SAS unit was to be held at a central location, ready to move quickly to any part of Ulster. Furthermore, the activities of the Group and of RUC special units were to be integrated by the Special Branch’s three Tasking and Co-ordination Group (TCG) headquarters.
During 1980 to 1981 members of the Int and Sy Group were involved in a number of successful operations against the IRA. In several cases they were able to apprehend terrorists without firing a shot.
On 2 May 1980 eight IRA men with an M-60 machine gun were cornered by the SAS at a house in Belfast’s Antrim Road following an intelligence operation. The security forces planned to cordon off the area around the building, but a vehicle accidentally broke the cordon and two Morris Marina Q cars went into action carrying eight heavily armed SAS troops. As they piled out, the IRA opened fire and Captain Richard Westmacott was struck by two bullets – the first SAS soldier to be killed by the IRA. The remaining soldiers then rushed into the wrong house. They were withdrawn and the IRA men later surrendered, only to escape from the Crumlin Road jail five weeks later.
In September 1980 the SAS mounted an operation at an arms cache in Tyrone. A sniper’s rifle had been hidden in a hen coop. In 1978 two IRA men and John Boyle, the Dunloy farmer’s son, had been killed in similar circumstances. However, in this case the weapon is thought to have been doctored by Weapons Intelligence Unit experts. When two members of the IRA, Francis Quinn and Thomas Hamill, came to recover the rifle, the SAS men therefore knew they would be safe. Quinn and Hamill were both sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment.
On 14 March 1981 SAS men surrounded a farmhouse near Rosslea in County Fermanagh. Inside were Seamus McElwaine and three other IRA men. McElwaine, although only twenty, had built an extraordinary reputation for himself. He had joined the IRA at sixteen and carried out his first killings as a teenager, boosting his terrorist status.
McElwaine had carried out several close-range shootings of local members of the security forces. In February 1980 he had shot dead Alexander Abercrombie, a forty-four-year-old part-time corporal in the UDR and father of four, as he drove his tractor. Seven months later he killed thirty-six-year-old Reserve Constable Ernest Johnston as he climbed out of his car outside his house. Despite being younger than most of the other local volunteers, McElwaine soon gained command of his own unit. A subsequent biography of him in the Sinn Fein newspaper An Phoblacht/Republican News stated, ‘Seamus gained plenty of operational experience, so much so that by the time he was nineteen he became OC of the IRA in County Fermanagh.’
Arresting somebody like McElwaine requires careful planning and excellent intelligence work. The task facing the soldiers outside the farm buildings on 14 March 1981 was made still more difficult by the fact that those inside possessed an arsenal of weapons. They had four rifles – an Armalite, an Mi carbine, a Ruger rifle like those issued to the RUC and a German-made assault rifle – as well as 180 rounds of ammunition.
Int and Sy Group had conducted an extensive surveillance operation against McElwaine and the other four members of his ASU. They decided to surround the house, but make no attempt to storm it. In a fashion reminiscent of the American police during the prohibition era, the Group called to the IRA members inside the house telling them they were surrounded and should come out with their hands up. Faced with this hopeless situation, they complied.
A fifth member of the unit was subsequently arrested at a different location, but was tied by forensic evidence to the farmhouse. In May 1982 the five-member unit received sentences ranging from ten years to life. McElwaine himself was found guilty of the murders of Corporal Abercrombie and Reserve Constable Johnston. The judge, who described him as a ‘dangerous killer’, recommended that McElwaine should serve at least thirty years.
The break-up of McElwaine’s ASU represented something of a textbook example in the use of special forces. The reasonable use of force during these years to a large extent demolishes the notion that the SAS will open fire whenever they have the opportunity to eliminate an armed member of the IRA. Clearly, in this case the orders not to use force were well understood.
