An intelligence officer relates one incident where it was known that an IRA. team was to travel along a particular route on its way to an attack. They arranged for a car ‘accident’ to take place on the road. ‘There wasn’t a uniform in sight,’ he recalls, ‘but it was assumed that they would get unnerved sitting in the tailback, thinking the police were about to arrive.’ The ploy succeeded.
Such operations can also be used to channel terrorists in a particular direction. One intelligence officer believes, ‘You can say, “Let’s persuade the operation to go this way by putting a heavy presence in an area” – it comes down to the rules of war and deception.’
IRA members are acutely aware of surveillance and informers. Many attacks are called off after what communiqués refer to as ‘suspicious security forces activity’. In some cases they are duped by the TCG. In others they may simply have imagined innocent patterns of traffic to be connected with undercover operations. Sometimes, rarely, the compromise of a covert observation post or car may alert them to the presence of real danger. These contests of nerve increased during the mid 1980s and contributed to the slow decline in IRA operations. Republicans admit in private that most of their operations are cancelled but stress in public the increasing amount of preparation which has to go into an attack if it is to be successful in current conditions. The fact that surveillance and thwarting operations are more easily carried out in the bustle of urban life contributed in particular to the continuing decline in IRA activity in the cities.
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Despite all these methods for avoiding and pre-empting confrontations with terrorists, there were still some instances where security forces did select the option of an aggressive operation. In February 1986 security chiefs authorized an Army undercover operation in the village of Toomebridge, County Londonderry. An IRA arms cache at the rear of a house, among some outbuildings, was placed under observation. It contained an Armalite rifle, which subsequent tests were to show had been used in several killings, and an FNC rifle. On the evening of 18 February two unmarked cars drove into the village. Five SAS soldiers were dropped by the two cars and made their way to positions behind the buildings. Soldier A, a thirty-eight-year-old senior NCO, said later that there were reports of terrorists in the vicinity of the buildings and ‘We had been instructed to take up the most suitable positions to apprehend them.’
A car arrived and shortly afterwards two men appeared at a gap between two of the outbuildings which is a few feet wide, the soldiers said. Francis Bradley, a twenty-year-old local man, went into the yard and the soldiers opened fire. Soldier A said he had called ‘Halt!’ but, ‘Before I could say any more the gunman turned sharply as if to confront me.’ Bradley had picked up the rifle and turned it towards the soldiers, the Army said. He was hit by eight bullets and died a few minutes later.
The soldiers arrested Colm Walls, forty-six, owner of the house and Barney McLarnon, fifty-three, who had been driving the car. The logic of the soldiers’ evidence was that McLarnon had accompanied Bradley into the back yard, something which he denied.
None of the three men belonged to the IRA or INLA. Bradley had been questioned by the police and, it was subsequently claimed, threatened by them, but had never been charged with any offence. There can be little doubt that the Provisionals would have said Bradley was a volunteer if he had been: the importance of martyrs being greater in the republican movement than the chance to make propaganda capital out of the death of a non-member. But if Bradley was not a Provisional, what was he doing recovering a weapon?
Local people suggest that the IRA pressurized Bradley into moving the weapons on its behalf. After the shooting, a man in Toomebridge told the Irish News, ‘It is common knowledge that soldiers have been lying in the fields around the house for the last two weeks.’ The locals felt that the soldiers had mounted a stake-out and were intent on shooting whoever came into the yard.
The possibility that the SAS soldiers might have been unknowingly compromised in an ambush position opens many lines of speculation. It is, for example, possible that the local IRA knew there was a chance their cache was under observation and therefore chose to risk somebody else’s life rather than one of their own member’s when the time came to move the weapons. The possibility that the cache had been under surveillance for several days also prompts the question why the Army did not send in Weapons Intelligence Unit experts to render the weapons safe in the event of a confrontation with those who came to collect them.
During the inquest one year later forensic evidence was used to challenge the soldiers’ version of events. One bullet had hit Bradley in the buttock – its impact was consistent with having been fired as he knelt to recover a weapon, rather than standing up. The post-mortem examination showed he had been killed by a burst of three bullets fired from about 3 metres away as he lay on his back. It appeared from the analysis of his wounds that Bradley had been hit by four bursts of fire. The first had hit his buttock, he had then been hit in the arms. The third burst had caught him down the left side, injuring his arm, leg and one bullet entering his armpit. The fourth, fatal, burst had been fired by the soldiers after they had moved forward from their positions with Bradley lying on his back and presumably incapacitated after already being hit by five rounds.
The inquest also led
