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The organizational and tactical changes in the SAS in the early 1980s are also important in judging the attitudes of soldiers on whom such responsibilities fell. The move from occasional squadron tours by all four of the Regiment’s sub-units to the sending of individuals to a reinforced troop of just over twenty soldiers in Ulster, which ultimately followed the establishment of the Int and Sy Group, had important consequences. There were undoubtedly benefits – notably that individuals served for longer, becoming more familiar with the Northern Irish scene. But this new pattern of sending people to Northern Ireland restricted the number of soldiers who gained experience of such operations, increasing their suspicion of outsiders, as well as the ties between them.
The captains sent to command the troop in Northern Ireland sometimes found it difficult to exercise control over it, according to a member of the Regiment. After the death of the SAS officer Captain Westmacott in 1980 it became increasingly rare for SAS officers to go out on observation duties or ambushes with their men. Officers are normally relegated to the Ops (operations) room at a local security forces base. Without them in the field, the soldiers are more likely to revert to ‘big boys’ rules’ if they sight a terrorist. Most, if not all, of the fatal incidents involving the SAS which occurred during the period 1983 to 1985 took place in the absence of an officer.
After the Falklands War in 1982, the SAS admitted large numbers of soldiers from the Parachute Regiment. A Parachute Regiment major had become officer commanding of the Training Wing and, according to several people who served in the SAS at the time or attempted to get into it, the criteria for selection shifted towards an emphasis on the aggressive mentality of the airborne forces and away from the more traditional SAS values. The Regiment began to fail more people who could not meet its standards of selection; its numbers dropped as a result – a phenomenon known at Hereford as ‘creeping excellence’. These problems brought the OC of Training Wing and Commanding Officer of the Regiment, a member of the Royal Corps of Transport, into conflict during the mid 1980s. The CO felt that too many Paras were getting through selection and too few from all other types of regiment. Even the Director SAS and his successor the Director Special Forces, the London-based brigadier with overall responsibility for such troops, intervened in an attempt to get Training Wing, dominated by Parachute Regiment NCOs who had been in 22 SAS for years, to let more non-Paras in. The consequence of these differences, says an SAS man, was that by the mid 1980s the Regiment was falling well below establishment, many troops having ten or twelve soldiers rather than sixteen. The proportion of Paras, who make up about one in seventy-five of the Army’s overall strength, reached 52 per cent in 22 SAS in the mid 1980s, according to one regimental officer.
The consequences of this influx of paratroopers are hard to quantify. Those non-Para members of the Regiment who are prepared to discuss the issue maintain that the airborne soldiers are more violent, less likely to consider the consequences of force and less likely to propose alternative solutions to problems, than men from other regiments. However, an SAS soldier from the Parachute Regiment says the idea that their influx into Hereford had any particular effect is ‘exaggerated’.
Michael Asher, who served in Ulster with the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment early in the 1970s, describes their mentality graphically: ‘We begged and prayed for a chance to fight, to smash, to kill, to destroy … we were unreligious, apolitical and remorseless, a caste of warrior-janizaries who worshipped at the high altar of violence and wanted nothing more.’ In the late 1970s, Asher served in the Territorial Army SAS. He comments, ‘They were not truculent and sadistic, as the Paras had been. You could see that they might kill easily, but never for the love of it.’ Those who were alarmed by the advent of a ‘Para mafia’ in 22 SAS in the mid 1980s argue that the influx of paratroopers had virtually eliminated the distinction described by Asher.
Against the background of ‘creeping excellence’ the change in the pattern of SAS deployment in Northern Ireland introduced a further element of selection. Individuals could not be posted to the troop in Ulster unless they passed a course lasting about three months at Hereford. Although most did go through, the Northern Ireland course provided the NCOs with experience of Ulster who ran the course with an opportunity to filter out those who were considered ‘unsound’. That many of the veteran NCOs were Paras shifted the definition of what qualities were desirable, say some SAS soldiers, away from the use of stealth and cunning and more towards an acceptance of violence.
18The Group in Action
It was early on the evening of Thursday 1 December 1983 when an Army special forces officer arrived in Dungannon in Tyrone. He had been called there following a tip-off from an informer. The Special Branch asked him to organize a covert search of the area called Magheramulkenny, near the village of Coalisland. The Army’s undercover specialists went into action before first light.
A senior NCO in the SAS, afterwards referred to as ‘Soldier A’, carried out a search of a small field surrounded by an embankment topped with a thick hedge. In the hedge he found an Armalite rifle, a shotgun and a bag containing balaclavas, gloves and other clothing. Subsequent ballistic tests were to show, according to the RUC, that the Armalite had been used in twenty-two shootings since 1979 including four killings – all of them of
