Soldier A stated that it appeared the cache ‘was only a temporary location and may be moved in the immediate future’. The Provisionals said the weapons had been left there just two days before the shooting, which would mean they were put there after the soldiers were in position. Either way it would seem that the possibilities for getting in experts to doctor the weapons would be limited in such a short space of time. This would not have precluded Soldier A simply unloading the guns, but once the SAS party was in position they would have wanted to do nothing which could have revealed their presence to any observer.
There is, however, a simpler question about the soldiers’ behaviour which may cast light on their orders. The soldiers could not arrest the men before they picked up the guns, since the IRA men could have argued in court that they had known nothing about the weapons and had simply been local people out for a stroll. But Soldier A could have waited for the weapons to be placed out of reach, in the car, before issuing his challenge.
If they had been armed with cameras as well as Armalites the SAS men could have photographed whoever recovered the weapons. It was mid afternoon and none of them was wearing a balaclava. The car could then have been followed by surveillance experts and the weapons recovered from their new location. Such a scheme would carry a risk that the men would shake off the surveillance team and the weapons be used in more killings. The soldiers had no guarantee, however, that conditions for photography would have been so good because the pick-up could have happened at night. Such risks had been taken between 1979 and 1982, and would be again in later years, but the commander of this operation was clearly unwilling to take them, or was under different orders.
There is one important possible piece of evidence suggesting that the soldiers were on orders to ambush and that, even if they didn’t know exactly who would collect the weapons, they did know which direction they would drive off in. Soldiers E and F, the two by the road, were described in the Army version as being a ‘cut-off’ group. In their statements some of the soldiers referred to the task of the ‘cut-off’ as being to apprehend people. Soldier B said it was ‘to cut off anyone trying to escape’.
First, it can be asked: why only one cut-off group when it was a through road? The terrorists could, after all, go the other way. Perhaps the Army did not tell the inquest court, to which its soldiers’ statements were submitted, that there were more than six SAS men in the area. Or perhaps the soldiers had intelligence which led them to believe that the men recovering the weapons would head in that particular direction. If the latter, what else had the informer said about the people who would collect the guns? Was the whole incident avoidable?
Second, the use of the term ‘cut-off group’ has a quite specific meaning. It is part of the language of the ambush: Land Operations Volume III uses the term only in its section on ambushes, saying the role of the cut-off groups is ‘to prevent the enemy escaping from the killing area’ (see chapter seventeen).
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During late 1983 and early 1984 the Intelligence and Security Group staged many other operations which produced no particular results. But in February 1984 undercover soldiers were, highly unusually, to find themselves out-manoeuvred in such an action. In a bloody sequence of events, the Provisionals tried to take the initiative against the covert operators. It happened in Dunloy, the north Antrim nationalist enclave where several years before John Boyle had been shot dead mistakenly by SAS soldiers in a graveyard.
Overlooking the main village is Carness Drive. The kerbstones in the Drive are painted in the colours of the Irish tricolour. There are a few houses on each side of the road and then the Drive curves uphill where, after 20 or 30 metres, there is another small group of houses. At the point where the road curves it comes close to a farmer’s field. The Hogans – a strongly republican family – live at No. Ten, which is on the main part of the Drive before the curve. Intelligence specialists believed Henry Hogan, twenty-one, was a committed member of the Provisionals’ north Antrim ASU. He had only come into the village one month before, after the family left its previous home following loyalist intimidation.
A surveillance team from 14 Intelligence Company was tasked to keep the house in Carness Drive under observation. The watchers chose to site a covert Observation Post near the bend in the road, behind two wooden garden-type sheds. This position put them close to the Hogans – about 80 metres away, with a direct line of sight to the front door. They were able to approach the OP from across the field behind the sheds.
Sergeant Paul Oram, a twenty-six-year-old from the 9/12th Royal Lancers who was serving his second tour with the surveillance unit, was in charge of the OP. He was close to the end of his tour with 14 Intelligence Company and had just become a father. Another soldier was with him. The IRA said there had been a third soldier in the OP, but this was not confirmed by the security forces. The surveillance operators were armed with pistols and compact sub-machine-guns for self-defence. As is normal procedure for the unit, there was a back-up team close to the OP and a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) at a nearby security forces base.
Somehow the IRA discovered the existence of the OP. According to one version of events the Provisionals became suspicious following the discovery of a transmitting device in a weapon hidden in Dunloy. But an Army special forces soldier who was serving in Northern Ireland at the time says members of 14
