Another incident occurred one month later. At 10.50 p.m. on 5 May 1976 four SAS men in an unmarked car were apprehended by a member of the Gardai, the Republic of Ireland police force, at Cornamucklagh. The Army later claimed they were on a reconnaissance mission and had made a map-reading error. Two more cars were sent out when the soldiers were missed. They too followed the road down to the border and misread their position, only to be detained by the same zealous Garda. By the end of the night the Irish police had arrested eight SAS men and held three cars, four sub-machine guns, three pistols and a pump-action shotgun.
One year later the men were tried in Dublin on charges of possessing arms with intent to endanger life. They were acquitted because, the judge said, the prosecution had not proved that the soldiers had crossed the border intentionally. The same officer who maintains the SAS abducted Sean McKenna insists that the later border incident did indeed arise out of map-reading errors. But given that courts in the Republic are unlikely to have sympathy for the SAS, the significance of the acquittal lies in the fact that prosecutors failed to provide solid enough evidence to obtain convictions.
All the same, despite the pleas of innocence and the verdict of an Irish court, the incident provided the IRA with an opportunity to propagandize what they saw as incontrovertible proof of the Army’s operations in the Republic. In the bars along the border speculation about the SAS’s cross-border abduction and assassination activities could be fleshed out with details of the soldiers’ parent unit, of unmarked cars and of sub-machine guns and pistols.
It is important to see the SAS men’s error in the light of the other accidental border violations which were taking place at the time – because it is unmarked in many places, the frontier could easily fool soldiers. One incident, which could have been even more serious than that involving the SAS, is related by a member of the Parachute Regiment. A patrol commanded by a colourful NCO nicknamed ‘Banzai’ was landed in a field by an RAF helicopter. The pilot had made a map-reading error, putting the soldiers down too far south, well inside the Irish Republic. When Banzai and his patrol sighted Irish Army armoured cars and troops moving to the north of them, they concluded that they were witnessing an invasion of Northern Ireland. Alarmed, British Army officers were readying their own armoured cars to fight the Irish Army before it was realized that Banzai’s patrol was inside the Republic.
There was further controversy in July 1976 when two men were arrested by British soldiers as they worked in a field inside the Republic. It was subsequently established that they were unconnected with terrorism and they were released. But, again, the incident was used by Sinn Fein to cast doubt on the legality of SAS operations and so rally support for republican terrorism.
In April 1977 the Bessbrook Squadron was involved in a second fatal shooting. Seamus Harvey, an IRA man, was killed as he approached a parked car in the village of Culderry. SAS soldiers had been lying in wait following a tip-off that the car was to be used by terrorists. It had already been used in an incident in which a soldier had been killed. Harvey, carrying a shot-gun, was killed in a gun battle after other IRA members, in concealed positions, apparently opened fire on the soldiers. The Army said that at least two other IRA members were just behind Harvey, claiming that one had been injured though neither was captured.
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Events like these in south Armagh and over the border in the Republic represented the first signs that a new policy of stepping up undercover operations had been adopted by the security chiefs in Army and police headquarters (at Lisburn and Knock respectively). The commitment of a whole SAS squadron in early 1976 gave them an essential new tool in their covert war against the IRA which was then rapidly evolving into a more professional fighting organization than it had been in the early 1970s.
Two years after the deployment of D Squadron, this aggressive new strategy for combatting terrorism, which involved an extension of SAS activity outside its initial area of responsibility in south Armagh, bore its first fruit. The shooting of Paul Duffy in February 1978 in county Tyrone was just one incident in a pronounced shift in policy on the part of the police and Army. Beginning in 1977, intelligence resources in Northern Ireland were switched away from the publicly visible ‘Green Army’ to small, highly trained units of specialists, whose operations were cloaked in secrecy.
There had been many undercover operations before then, certainly, but the number and scale of them increased significantly. Whereas in 1975 the Army had fewer than 100 soldiers in Ulster whose main task was clandestine surveillance, by 1980 this number had trebled. Similarly, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), which began to assume overall responsibility for the campaign against terrorism in 1976, also developed a variety of specialist surveillance and firearms units of its own.
One important factor in the move towards a new consensus on security policy was the effect of new personalities in positions of political and military leadership. In 1976 Roy Mason took over as secretary of state for Northern Ireland: the one-time coalminer took a less cerebral approach than his predecessor Merlyn Rees. A key security adviser recalls that Mason seemed uninterested in political initiatives, believing simply that Ulster needed substantial economic help and that the pressure on the IRA should be stepped up. He had no hesitation about escalating operations against them, and said publicly that he intended to
