Just after 8 a.m. on 19 October 1984 the IRA team arrived in a yellow van, a vehicle which they had hijacked in Coalisland. There were at least ten SAS men in the area: a couple were hidden behind bushes near the entrance to the yard; and eight more were in three unmarked cars. As the IRA members’ van went by the soldiers tried to block its path, but they failed and opened fire.
Frederick Jackson, a forty-eight-year-old plant hire contractor who was just driving out of Capper and Lambe’s, having supervised some work there, was hit in the chest by a bullet fired by one of the soldiers. The car rolled back into the yard, crashing into a petrol pump. Jackson stumbled from the vehicle, calling for help and collapsed inside a shed. He died later.
In spite of the SAS presence in the area, and a fusillade of shots at the van, the Army was unable to prevent the Provisionals from escaping. They made their way by foot across a motorway bridge and, despite the presence of a helicopter in the area, were soon in the sanctuary of the strongly republican area to the north of the Mi. The RUC said Jackson had been killed in the crossfire. The IRA disagreed, saying its members had not opened fire when Jackson was hit. However, the dumped van was found to contain many spent cases and the IRA did not deny that its members had engaged the soldiers.
At 8.37 a.m. a police inspector at the local station directed units to the scene, having received phonecalls from local people. He countermanded these orders after an SB officer told him that the area was the scene of a gunbattle between Provisionals and security forces ‘specialist resources’.
The operation had been a débâcle. Unusually specific intelligence had presented the soldiers with an opportunity which had gone badly wrong. The reservist had been saved but an uninvolved man going about his business was dead and the terrorists had escaped. The death led to suggestions that the soldiers had mistakenly believed Jackson to be a member of the IRA team and had killed him deliberately.
It was difficult to imagine someone less likely to have appeared to pose a threat to the soldiers than Jackson, a middle-aged Protestant businessman. The dead man’s family asked questions about why it had taken so long for him to receive medical attention. This left nationalists asking whether he had been allowed to die because the troops thought he was a republican. The fact that Jackson was hit by a single shot, however, would seem to support the official view – that he was hit by a stray round rather than engaged deliberately by the SAS in the belief that he was a terrorist. Regardless of whether Jackson’s death was an accident or a mistake, a Protestant who witnessed the IRA members’ escape from Tamnamore told me, ‘I don’t wish to denigrate the SAS, but they made a real bitch of it that day.’
An incident like that at Tamnamore prompted many questions which are impossible to answer either here or in a court without knowing exactly what information the SB had before the attack – and the Stalker affair shows how jealously such ‘crown jewels’ of anti-terrorist intelligence work are guarded. The most generous interpretation – to the TCG and SAS – is that they had no idea who was going to carry out the attack and had no choice but to stake out the area. Telling the UDR officer to stay away from work might only have endangered others. The fact that the terrorists escaped might support the view that the RUC had no idea who they were and where to find them afterwards.
The other extreme is to suppose that the SB had a very good idea about who was going to carry out the attack, because the circle of knowledge about killing soft targets tends to be so small. If they did, then they could have prevented the attack in other ways – methods which will be discussed in chapter twenty-two – but chose not to because they wanted to send a signal to the Provisionals by catching an ASU attempting to kill a soft target and obtain a ‘clean kill’ for the SAS. The terrorists’ subsequent escape might then represent sloppy police work, in that suspects could not be tied to the incident, because the SB officers never expected to have to furnish evidence to a court.
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More elaborate IRA plans carried a higher risk of compromise by informers or by simple mishap. A group of IRA members wanted to stage a ‘come on’ attack near Kesh in Fermanagh later that year. The plan involved placing a very large (900 lb) bomb in a culvert beneath the road outside the Drumrush Lodge, a country restaurant. A call would then be made to the police that firebombs had been placed in the Drumrush Lodge. As the security forces arrived at the scene the bomb would be detonated by an observer using a command wire.
Just after 9 p.m. on 1 December 1984 several IRA members hijacked a blue Toyota van in Pettigo, across the border in Donegal. They collected several milk churns packed with explosives, probably while still inside the Republic, and then went to Drumrush. In the van were at least four IRA veterans: Tony MacBride, a twenty-seven-year-old former Irish Army soldier who had done time for firearms offences; Kieran Fleming, who had escaped from the Maze; James Clark, another member of the Maze jailbreak who had been serving a sentence for attempted murder; and Patrick Bramley, aged twenty-four. The IRA said later there had been five men in the van; the Army that there had been only four. Republicans say there were other Provisionals in
