The Special Branch TCG North mobilized Army and RUC units to mount an operation against the ASU. During the early part of February the ASU and undercover soldiers danced a gavotte through the rolling countryside around the town. A squad from the RUC’s N Division Mobile Support Unit was also sent to the area. The DMSU was there to act as a QRF for the undercover soldiers and to move in and secure an area in the event of a battle with IRA members. From time to time areas were placed out of bounds to security forces vehicles in case they ran into the IRA ambush. The manoeuvrings ended on 23 February.
On 22 February four SAS soldiers had travelled down from Londonderry after being briefed there by intelligence officers. From conversations with a soldier familiar with the case, it would appear that they had been told the probable location of the ASU’s arms dump. That night three soldiers went to investigate the cache. It does not appear – despite the strength of later nationalist feeling to the contrary – that their intention was to mount an ambush that night.
The Army knew from intelligence that they might encounter anything up to five or six terrorists, so it hardly seems likely that they would have chosen to ambush them with just three men. The three soldiers in question took up a position overlooking a suspected IRA arms dump. A fourth soldier was manning the radio at a nearby security forces base, where he was in charge of the Quick Reaction Force. It would appear that the four who had travelled down from Londonderry were not the only Int and Sy Group soldiers in the area that night. There were probably two others riding in an unmarked car whose mission was to back up the team in the Observation Post. Their role seems to have had more in common with that of the surveillance team which was attacked at Dunloy, for example, than with the deployment of groups of six to twelve SAS men at incidents like Tamnamore or the Gransha hospital. Indeed, in its first report of the incident the Sinn Fein newspaper An Phoblacht/Republican News stated that the British soldiers had probably been engaged in ‘routine surveillance work’, although it gave a confused version of where they had been.
One journalist who has covered the Strabane incident suggested to me that the three men in the OP were in fact surveillance operators rather than members of the SAS. I do not believe this, having had their identity as SAS soldiers confirmed by two members of the Regiment and a senior security forces officer. Were they then SAS soldiers sent simply to see what they could find out, or were they on an OP/React mission – in other words an ambush – where they understood they would be clear to engage any terrorist who appeared?
Once again, the numbers of men committed would seem to indicate that it was a genuine observation mission. It was to become a hallmark of SAS OP/React missions that far more soldiers would be deployed than the two or three considered appropriate for a real OP.
On the same night, the IRA unit had been out trying to ambush a police car. Five ASU members spent the early hours of 23 February in a fruitless wait for quarry. When their patience was spent, Declan Crossan, twenty-one, and another Provisional took off their rubber gloves and handed their weapons to the other three for returning to a cache. Crossan and the other person made their way home. Charles Breslin, a twenty-year-old believed by the police to be the ASU commander, Michael Devine, twenty-two, and his brother David Devine, sixteen years old, walked along carrying the weapons. They were wearing rubber gloves and balaclavas. The anti-armour grenades had been placed in a holdall along with the gloves worn by the other two men. Each of the men carried a loaded assault rifle.
The area where the soldiers were waiting is in a steeply sloping field. At the bottom of the slope runs a thick hedge on the other side of which is a road. A largely Catholic housing estate, known as the Head of the Town, lies along the other side of the road, overlooked by the field. There is a house opposite the estate which nestles in a cutting in the hillside. Behind the building there is a nearby vertical six-or seven-foot slope at the top of which runs a hedge. The soldiers were lying there, looking uphill into the field. It is believed that the IRA members planned to hide the weapons at the side of the enclosure at a point which could be overlooked by the OP.
According to a soldier who spoke to me, the SAS soldiers heard the three Provisionals before they saw them, though this was not what was said later by the Army. As the IRA men walked past the SAS soldiers, only a few metres away, the soldiers opened fire without warning with their HK53 assault rifles. Soldier A fell down the steep bank into the house’s back yard. In the confusion both Soldiers A and B radioed their back-up team to report a contact.
Soldiers B and C carried on firing. Soldier C said in a statement, ‘At this time I heard voices in front of me saying something like “They’re over there – get them”.’ Whether or not it is true that one of the terrorists said this, none of the IRA weapons was fired and two still had their safety catches on when examined later. The SAS men carried on pouring fire into the prostrate IRA men, who were only 5 to 6 metres away, reloading their weapons with fresh magazines
