According to Soldier A, the engagement started because the terrorists heard him alerting the other soldiers to their presence – on hearing his words, ‘All three gunmen swung their rifles towards us.’ The person familiar with the case says things happened differently. The SAS men heard the sound of footsteps and the ‘chinking’ of the petrol bombs in their crate which, he says, the Provisionals were carrying. He says the petrol bombs had either been taken with the men for possible use on the ambush or were being moved from another cache. The IRA men put the crate down as they came through the thick hedge from the road into the field. It is likely that they wanted to put them into the same arms cache as the other weapons. The OP commander, although not there with the mission of mounting an ambush, took an on-the-spot decision to engage the men, which they did, without warning, as they walked past.
On the morning the inquest ended John Fahy, solicitor for the Breslin family, withdrew from the proceedings saying they had served only to rubber stamp unlawful killings. Mr Fahy says the inquest was ‘a waste of time, it served no useful purpose’. There is such a thing as a lawful killing by the security forces, he adds – meaning a sincere adherence to the Yellow Card rules – but he believes that in the Strabane case, ‘The police and Army got together shortly after the incident and worked out the version they were going to tell the world.’
Lawyers who have acted in such cases say they think there is ample scope for soldiers to enter into a conspiracy to disguise the true facts of an incident. SAS soldiers leave the scene of an incident almost as soon as the shooting has stopped. They have the opportunity to discuss what they will say with their officers before being interviewed by CID officers. The soldiers are normally accompanied during their interviews by an officer of the Army Legal Service, an expert in the legal use of lethal force.
While officers who have served at Lisburn are prepared – on condition of anonymity – to say that the exploitation of intelligence offers deliberate choices, to ambush or not to ambush, and to say explicitly that the policy on such engagements has changed over the years, the court depositions of SAS soldiers involved in shootings do not reflect this. Instead, they consistently attempt to give the impression that the soldiers only ever used lethal force when they were themselves in immediate danger.
There was William Hanna, the unarmed bystander shot at Ballysillan in 1978 because the SAS men said he suddenly reached for what they thought was a gun. Colm McGirr, shot at the arms dump in Coalisland in December 1983, had ‘pivoted round’, pointing a shotgun, according to the soldier who shot him. William Fleming, despite having been knocked off a motorcycle so hard at the Gransha hospital that his leg was shattered, began, in the soldier’s words, ‘raising himself’ and pointing a gun. The Strabane IRA men had ‘swung’ their weapons simultaneously towards the soldiers.
Reading these statements, one would conclude that the difference between the periods 1976 to 1978 and 1983 to 1985 and the five-year period in between when nobody was shot by the SAS could be accounted for only in terms of the desire of IRA members to ‘reach’, ‘pivot’, ‘point’ or ‘swing’ towards SAS soldiers with real or imagined weapons. Someone who relied on the official version of such incidents would be left concluding that the years when the SAS succeeded in making arrests, despite the fact that in the cases described in chapter fifteen the IRA members were armed or near an arms cache, were the years when everybody refrained from making any sudden movements.
Officers who have served at Lisburn in positions where they had a knowledge of covert operations will readily admit to having misled the press after such incidents. ‘There is a world of difference between what you say to the press, in the immediate aftermath of an incident, and what you say in a court,’ said one, who nevertheless would not deny that false stories had been given to courts too.
The desire of Special Branch officers to protect informers and the nature of technical intelligence-gathering was at the root of the deception uncovered by Stalker. Among many Army officers there is a feeling that telling the court the full story would compromise intelligence sources, make their men reluctant to carry out dangerous assignments and discredit them in the nationalist community. They argue that the supporters of Sinn Fein are so entrenched in their position that gestures of openness will bear no reward for the security forces. Remaining tight-lipped about such operations may feed allegations of cover-ups and “shoot-to-kill” policies, but prosecuting people for their part in covert operations will simply allow republican propagandists to say ‘I told you so’, they argue.
Some officers in covert operations regard courts as a dangerous inconvenience. They feel republican lawyers use the proceedings to obtain operational information about special forces. One officer says, ‘There is all this talk about “shoot-to-kill”. What do you think the IRA do – shoot-to-tickle?’ He argues that republican use of court proceedings is
