The shootings in Armagh also produced grave doubts in the minds of those at Stormont and Lisburn that the RUC could be trusted to execute specialist operations of the type performed by the SAS. The future of the HMSUs and SSU, the most highly trained of the firearms squads, therefore came under review. An officer serving in a key position at Lisburn at the time of the ‘shoot-to-kill’ incidents reflects: ‘Police Primacy is 100 per cent correct, but when it comes to mounting specialist operations against terrorists, you’ve got to ask: is that a job for policemen? Police Primacy had inevitably led towards a police desire to run the whole thing, so there was a build-up of police special units. But the whole Stalker affair caused them to think twice.’
Some soldiers in the Army’s special forces took pleasure from the failure of the RUC’s efforts. ‘Your British soldier is far more tolerant. You imagine an RUC man who gets a chance of slotting a Catholic. Will he be more tolerant than an SAS man?’ says one member of the Regiment.
Senior officers at Lisburn expressed their views more tactfully. You couldn’t expect the RUC to match the SAS, says one, because the SAS is recruited from a pool of people which is so much larger. This is true – the HMSU and SSU members represented about one in eighty of the strength of the RUC whereas the SAS numbers about 400 out of the British Army’s total strength of 155,000 – one in almost 400. Furthermore, the SAS troops sent to Northern Ireland form a much smaller number, recruited from experienced men within the squadrons. In this sense the SAS were more ‘élite’, having been chosen with greater selectivity.
RUC officers looked on the whole affair with bitterness. As on previous occasions an investigation by outsiders was bringing about a fundamental realignment within the force. Many RUC officers agreed with Stalker about one thing: that the constables who belonged to the special squads felt badly let down by their senior officers. The shootings had exposed the fact that the police, unlike the Army, lacked the skills to protect their officers from difficult questions. One RUC officer involved in the affair says: ‘Soldiers will be taken away to some other part of the world. You can’t do that with us, we live here. You have to make sure that we uphold the law and live with it. Sometimes you wonder if the senior officers really realize what the men are going through. It seemed to us that the Army had things much better sewn up.’
Within a few months of the Armagh incidents, the will within the RUC to deploy its special units on missions to confront terrorists had collapsed. One senior officer says, ‘As a result of the tremendous pressure Hermon was under he used the military more than he did before.’ Training of the SSU by SAS men and paratroopers appears to have been stopped. The RUC’s special units were given different tasks, often acting as back-up to the SAS, sealing off an area rather than facing terrorists themselves. The idea expressed by some Army officers at the time of the reduction of SAS strength in Ulster that they might be pulled out altogether was quietly forgotten. The TCGs were once more giving the critical role to the Army.
During an interview with a senior Army officer who had witnessed Stalker’s investigation first hand, I said that what surprised me about the whole affair was not that the RUC had been caught feeding false versions of the shooting incidents to the media and the CID, but that Army special forces had done it so many more times and got away with it. He smiled and explained that cover stories were vital to protect the sources and methods of sensitive operations. Such operations, he said, must be allowed to continue ‘without being held ransom to that mythical commodity you call truth’.
17‘Ambush’: A Matter of Interpretation
Towards the end of 1983 the SAS did something they had not done in Northern Ireland for five years: they killed members of the IRA. Shoot-outs of a kind which had happened between 1976 and 1978 began to occur once more. The tone of spokespersons at Lisburn or Knock was often to imply that these incidents were the result of chance encounters between Army ‘patrols’ – the term SAS was never used on the record – and terrorists. In fact, in many cases these incidents were the result of deliberate choices by people armed with foreknowledge of terrorist crime.
Some were to assume that the government had simply ordered the SAS to eliminate terrorists. But according to people who have served at the heart of covert operations in Ulster, stark, explicit orders to kill would have been both unpalatable and unnecessary. Understanding the practical consequences of the change in mood which took place in the second half of 1983 requires a knowledge of Army tactics – in particular that of the ambush.
To many civilians the word ‘ambush’ carries no lethal connotation. One dictionary defines it as ‘to lie in wait’. This might imply a mission to arrest as well as to shoot somebody. To anybody trained by the British Army, however, the word has quite a different meaning. The manual in use by the Army during the early 1980s to train soldiers in Northern Ireland-type operations, Land Operations Volume III – Counter-Revolutionary Operations, says, ‘An ambush is a surprise attack by a force lying in wait upon a moving or temporarily halted enemy.’ An attack of this kind could be against the law in the United Kingdom, in that soldiers may only use the minimum force necessary to
