Despite the success of this operation, Int and Sy Group remained vulnerable during their surveillance operations. The death of Corporal Paul Harman in Belfast in 1977 (see chapter four) had underlined the risks run by 14 Intelligence Company personnel when on duty in their unmarked cars.
On 28 May 1981, at a time when tensions were high due to the hunger strikes, a young Army officer belonging to the Londonderry Detachment of 14 Intelligence Company climbed into his unmarked Opel Ascona car. According to an intelligence officer, he went through the city to conduct a reconnaissance for a forthcoming operation on the other side of town. It was only on his way back that his journey was interrupted.
The car’s progress had been noticed by a group of IRA members. George McBrearty, the twenty-three-year-old leader of an ASU from the Creggan, and three colleagues set off in a hijacked Ford Escort to intercept the Opel.
As the Opel approached a road junction the Escort swerved in front of it and two men carrying Armalite rifles got out. The young officer, armed with a 9mm Browning pistol with a 20-round magazine cannot have felt he had much hope against four men carrying more powerful weapons. McBrearty went to the front of the car and Charles Maguire went to the back. The officer got out of the car and stood behind the open door.
McBrearty turned his back and the officer grasped his moment. He drew his pistol and fired nine times at him. All but one of the rounds went into his back. He then turned and faced Maguire, who was still standing at the back of the car, stunned. He shot Maguire in the head twice. Jumping into the car, the soldier fired at the Escort, hitting a third IRA man, Edward McCourt, twice. As he pulled away one of the IRA members opened fire at the Opel shattering two of the windows and peppering its side with bullet holes. The officer escaped, unlike Maguire and McBrearty who both died from their injuries, and he was subsequently decorated for his actions.
Shortly after the incident an RUC patrol arrived on the scene and came under sniper fire. The police returned fire but are not believed to have hit any IRA members.
The incident was followed by deliberate attempts to disguise the truth of what had happened. The IRA, smarting from the death of two men and the capture of another because of the actions of a single soldier, claimed that there had been two more cars containing five more ‘SAS men’ who had opened fire on its unit.
Those critical of the Army version of events have cited several possible indicators that more soldiers were involved. Several weapons were handed in for testing besides the officer’s 9mm pistol. But these were found to be Ruger revolvers and an M1 carbine belonging to the RUC patrol which was ambushed on the scene later. It was also pointed out that there was a discrepancy between the soldier’s statement to police investigators that he had only fired eleven times, whereas the IRA members appeared to have been hit by more bullets. It is possible that the soldier’s statement was mistaken on this point. I am confident that the officer was the only member of the security forces involved. Unusually, I was able to confirm this with both republicans and soldiers. A senior republican admitted to me during the preparation of this book that their version of events was entirely false, and they had known it to be so at the time; they maintained instead that the IRA members had died because they had exercised soldierly restraint, not opening fire immediately on somebody of whose identity they were unsure.
Maguire and McBrearty were the only IRA men killed by Army undercover units during the five years from December 1978 to 1983. Even some republicans recognized that the shoot-out was started by the IRA – one man with a pistol would hardly have wanted to get involved in a fight with four men with assault rifles.
At the inquest in 1988 into the deaths of the three IRA bombers killed in Gibraltar, an SAS officer – ‘Soldier F’ – who was called as a witness suggested that the arrest of Seamus McElwaine’s unit and of Quinn and Hammill proved that their Regiment did not gun people down. Soldier F told the court, ‘The ratio between arrests and kills is 75 to 25 in percentage terms in favour of arrests.’ People who have served in covert operations in Northern Ireland suggest that the great majority of those arrested by the SAS were apprehended prior to December 1983, pointing to a significant change of tactics after this date in favour of aggressive ambush operations.
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One joint police/Int and Sy Group operation which to my knowledge has not been revealed before as an episode involving undercover units occurred in July 1982 in Belfast. According to an officer who was closely involved, the operation was mounted after intelligence was received that the IRA intended to blow up the RUC band.
Intelligence led the covert operators to believe that the terrorists would attempt to detonate a bomb close to a bridge across the River Lagan in Belfast. At about 5.30 p.m. on 9 July 1982, surveillance teams sighted two vehicles – a Datsun and a Cortina – in a lay-by off the Annadale embankment. The cars moved off crossing the Lagan on the Governor’s Bridge and heading along Stranmillis Road. A police vehicle checkpoint (VCP) had been set up at the end of Stranmillis Road. Before it got to it, the Datsun stopped and its driver, Bobby Brown, aged twenty-two, got out. Special plain-clothes police firearms units then moved in, arresting Brown and the occupants of the Cortina – twenty-eight-year-old Thomas McKiernan and Siobhan O’Hanlon, aged twenty-one – which was stopped at the VCP at
