Stalker had decided that he needed to interview a number of senior RUC officers, including Chief Constable Hermon and his deputy, under caution. He wanted to know why the original internal inquiry had found out so little. His removal came just before he expected finally to get access to the hayshed tapes and to carry out these interviews.
In 1990 attempts by the police to prosecute Kevin Taylor collapsed. Taylor had been ruined by the prolonged inquiries into his activities and regarded his suffering as having been the price of removing Stalker. The Greater Manchester Deputy Chief Constable resigned in March 1987, convinced the investigation into his dealings with Taylor had been linked to the Northern Ireland inquiry.
Stalker later wrote philosophically about his battle of wills with Hermon: ‘I respect, if not admire, the way in which Sir John Hermon took the fight to me. He protected the force and himself from intrusion by me into its anti-terrorist efforts and practices, and he succeeded.’ Stalker concluded, ‘I was expendable, he was not.’
After Stalker’s dismissal, the shoot-to-kill inquiry was taken over by Colin Sampson, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire. Among those at Lisburn and Knock who observed the affair at first hand there is general hostility to Stalker. Senior officers, both police and Army, usually use the word ‘naive’ when describing him. For the most part, however, they do not deny the substance of his findings. It would seem, rather, that the Army too enjoyed the considerable operational independence which Chief Constable Hermon had won for the security forces and resented Stalker’s investigation because it involved outside scrutiny of sensitive operations.
When Chief Constable Sampson delivered his report in 1988, he said that several officers had been guilty of conspiring to cover up what had happened during the three incidents. However, the government decided that no action would be taken against the men for reasons of ‘national security’. Chief Constable Hermon, in his 1988 annual report wrote: ‘What can now be said is that Mr John Stalker and Mr Colin Sampson both stated what the RUC had always insisted: that there was no ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy … at last the allegation so harmfully and sensationally publicised for so long has been proved false.’
The Chief Constable’s confident summary of Stalker’s views needs qualification. In February 1988 Stalker told The Times: ‘I never did find evidence of a shoot-to-kill policy as such. There was no written instruction, nothing pinned up on the notice-board. But there was a clear understanding on the part of the men whose job it was to pull the trigger that that was what was expected of them.’
The idea that the police officers involved in the shootings had not been given explicit orders to kill, but had been led to think that was what was required of them, is endorsed by a veteran RUC man. He claims that senior officers, when visiting the RUC’s special units, had made it clear that they were men chosen to act as the force’s cutting edge in the anti-terrorist effort. The RUC man says, ‘I believe that Sir John would demand the ultimate without thinking it through.’
In June 1988 the Northern Ireland Police Authority, a watchdog designed to oversee the force, discussed whether to investigate observations made by Mr Sampson about the behaviour of Chief Constable Hermon, Deputy Chief Constable McAtamney and Assistant Chief Constable Forbes. This was blocked by just one vote of the sixteen-strong authority.
In 1991 Peter Taylor reported on BBC television that Colin Sampson’s recommendations had actually been tougher than Stalker’s. Sampson had suggested that the RUC officers involved in the hayshed shootings should be charged with conspiracy to murder and that MI5 as well as police officers should be charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice. In the latter case, the proposed charges resulted from the fact that Security Service officers were believed to have destroyed a tape of the hayshed shooting after they knew that Stalker had asked to hear it. My own inquiries confirm Taylor’s summary of Sampson’s findings. Peter Taylor used these revelations to support his thesis that Stalker’s removal from the Northern Ireland inquiry was unconnected with his criticisms of the RUC. The new information shows that even if the reporter is wrong and people did conspire to remove Stalker because they feared his findings, that Colin Sampson proved an even tougher proposition.
Those who directed security policy at Stormont had undoubtedly drawn their own conclusions from the shootings. The price of admitting to serious misdemeanours on the part of the security forces is, to the mandarins of the Northern Ireland Office and the ministers they serve, usually too high. Instead, changes designed to ensure that there would be no repetitions of such killings were made, some of them put into effect even before Stalker had arrived in Ulster.
Without doubt the affair showed how powerful the SB had become by the early 1980s. A senior Army officer who served at Lisburn during the mid 1980s notes, ‘Special Branch runs the intelligence operation. It is Army policy that the RUC SB has all the intelligence which we gain. The reverse is not true.’ But the affair had shown the need for greater supervision of the Branch and in 1984 John Whiteside, the Head of CID, was made Senior Assistant Chief Constable in charge of both CID and SB. Understandably, some SB officers were none too happy at being placed under the control of the one-time head of this rival department.
During this period, several SB officers, of the rank of chief inspector, superintendent and chief superintendent were pushed out of the force. But the fate of at least two of them adds weight to suggestions made by some RUC officers that they had to take the blame for mistakes by the
