URBAN: What is the mission on an ambush?
SAS MAN: You know what the mission is on an ambush, everybody knows what the mission is in an ambush.
URBAN: Tell me what you think it is.
SAS MAN: I know that when you do an ambush you kill people.
During the 1980s the term ‘ambush’ was replaced in SAS orders in Northern Ireland by ‘OP/React’, short for ‘Observation Post/Reactive’, according to an SAS man who served there. He says an OP/React order is ‘to all intents and purposes an ambush’ and believes it was a cosmetic change prompted by RUC sensitivity over the word ‘ambush’. It is apparent that the soldiers concerned still believe they are involved in precisely that, so I will continue to use the term in accounts of actions which may have been officially described as OP/React missions. The key point is that when the intention is to apprehend armed terrorists, SAS men say their orders usually refer to a ‘hard arrest’.
There is no shoot-to-kill policy in the sense of a blanket order to shoot IRA terrorists on sight. Rather the knack is to get IRA terrorists, armed and carrying out an operation, to walk into a trap. Killing an unarmed IRA member may create a martyr, but if the same person were carrying a gun, even committed republicans may feel the operation was, in some sense, fair. Peter Morton, the Parachute Regiment CO who later wrote about his 1976 tour in Northern Ireland, says of the death of Peter Cleary, ‘it was certainly a pity that the first occasion on which a terrorist was killed by the SAS was not more clear-cut; the ideal would have been to shoot an armed terrorist.’ Some of those who have carried out covert operations in Ulster refer to lethal force being used in such a way as to appear fair and within the law as the ‘clean kill’.
The idea that it is the appearance of what has happened that may, in terms of undermining support for the IRA, be more important than the reality is not confined to members of the SAS or Special Branch. The Northern Ireland Office said, in a letter to Amnesty International in 1985 on the subject of disputed killings by the Army and police, ‘The Government and the security forces themselves recognize that it is in their interest to avoid controversies over the use of lethal force by members of the security forces.’ The Freudian slip, if it may be termed such, is that the civil servant chose to emphasize the avoidance of controversy rather than the needless use of lethal force itself.
Army commanders understand that incidents in which special forces have been involved may be subjected to intense scrutiny by the media and by republican propagandists. Someone who held a key post in the security forces recognizes that in SAS ambush-type operations against the IRA the public perception of what happened is all important and that there is no room for error: ‘If we don’t get them and destroy them totally or get them with the cleanest of cuts, then it is always assumed that it was not done properly. If it is not perceived to be an immaculately clean kill, it is automatically assumed to be wrong.’
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Between December 1983 and February 1985, a period of just over one year, the Intelligence and Security Group was to shoot dead ten people in Northern Ireland, eight of them IRA members, following a period of five years in which the SAS had killed nobody. Why, then, did security chiefs choose the shooting option?
The answer lies partly in the activities of the IRA and the ways which security chiefs felt were open to counter them. In 1980 the number of terrorist incidents was at its lowest for many years. With the public disorder provoked by the hunger strike campaign in 1981, incidents began to climb again. The trend was not a marked one, but security chiefs were alarmed at the improved efficiency of the attacks, say those involved in policy-making at the time. The IRA was, in effect, able to kill more people in each of its attacks.
More importantly, the summer of 1983, which saw successful appeals against many of the convictions obtained from supergrass evidence, represented a depressing setback for those who believed that the courtroom was the best arena for cutting back the IRA, rather than the shoot-out. The supergrasses Sean Mallon and Jackie Goodman had withdrawn their evidence in 1982. Patrick McGurk, the Dungannon man, had dropped his evidence against eight people in October. And Robert Lean, claimed by the RUC to be a senior Belfast Provisional, had not only withdrawn his evidence during the same month, but had gone on to appear at a press conference deriding the way the police sought to incriminate people. Although the government continued with its supergrass prosecutions, the IRA had succeeded in checking them.
However, the most bitter blow had come on 25 September 1983, when prisoners in H-Block 7 at the Maze succeeded in overpowering their prison officers. One of them, who was stabbed, subsequently died of a heart attack. They had then commandeered a kitchen lorry and escaped from the prison. During the dragnet which followed, the security forces quickly re-captured sixteen prisoners. Another twenty-two escaped, among them some of the most ruthless terrorists imprisoned during previous years. The Chief Inspector of Prisons later described the incident as ‘the most serious escape in the recent history of the United Kingdom prison services.’
The IRA exploited the incident fully, organizing a press conference in which several escapees took part. Some of the fugitives went abroad – the organization accepting that they wanted no further active role in the fight – but others returned to the forefront of the campaign. Among the escape’s ringleaders was Seamus McElwaine, captured by the SAS in 1981, who soon returned to bring death to the countryside of south Fermanagh. Another
