The IRA later described Lynagh as ‘commander of a unit’. He held sway over a group of IRA members in Monaghan, north Armagh and east Tyrone. Some later reports were to describe him as overall commander of the IRA in the border region, although it seems more probable that he led groups of members on specific missions in the area he knew well. ‘Lynagh saw himself as the leader of a guerrilla band, not a member of a terrorist cell’, says an Army intelligence officer.
His modus operandi bore little resemblance to that of many other IRA leaders. Whereas other commanders might arm only one or two volunteers, Lynagh would lead ten or twelve with assault rifles to carry out a mission. This tactic had the advantage that it made them very difficult to arrest. In January 1981 Lynagh was believed to have led twelve members in an attack on the house of Sir Norman Stronge, the eighty-six-year-old former speaker of the Stormont assembly and long-serving MP for Mid Armagh. His son James, who had succeeded him as Official Unionist member for the constituency, was also home. Both men were killed. The local police sent several officers in an armour plated car in an attempt to head off the terrorists. As the IRA gang left the gates of Tynan Abbey, the Stronge residence, they riddled the car with automatic fire. The police survived but were pinned down and unable to prevent the gang’s escape.
The disadvantage of operating in such a large group is that it makes it more vulnerable to informers. But Lynagh was not greatly concerned by this possibility, as the men around him were tied by close bonds of loyalty. Many were part of the same committed republican community in Monaghan. Lynagh had been a close friend of Seamus McElwaine, the south Fermanagh commander killed in April 1986 who also lived in the border county.
After Lynagh’s release in 1986 he was kept under close surveillance by the Gardai, an Army intelligence officer says. The flow of information from the South had improved greatly following the Anglo–Irish Agreement.
Lynagh and Paddy Kelly were keen to join forces for a ‘spectacular’ along the lines of Ballygawley and The Birches, devising a plan to repeat their technique used at The Birches to attack a small police station in the north Armagh village of Loughgall. Throughout late 1986 and early 1987, however, intelligence officers in the North frustrated them from doing so, says someone serving in a key position at the time. What Lynagh and Kelly did not know was that they were under intense surveillance and that there was an informer in their midst. On several occasions the coming together of various ASU members presented an ‘indicator’ of a forthcoming attack, says the intelligence expert. These attacks were deterred by stepping up patrols by local UDR units and by other measures.
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On 25 April, at about 8.30 a.m., the IRA blew up Lord Justice Maurice Gibson and his wife Cecily. Northern Ireland’s second most senior judge, and the man who had spoken of bringing terrorists to the ‘final court of justice’, had been driving back from holiday having taken the ferry to a Southern Irish port. The Gardai had accompanied them to the border but the RUC was not there to meet them. The RUC had stopped escorting VIPs on the border road because they had had several constables killed on such duties. In May 1985 four RUC officers had been blown up at Killeen in south Armagh while on escort duties. The incident produced a chill in relations between Jack Hermon and his opposite number in the Republic.
As Lord Justice Gibson’s car crossed into the North a 500 lb bomb was detonated at the side of the road. The affair caused profound embarrassment to the British government. There were claims that details of the Gibsons’ route might have leaked out of Gardai headquarters, and also the usual Unionist calls for more security on the border.
On the evening of the same day as the Gibsons died there was another terrorist attack. William Graham, a forty-four-year-old Ulster Defence Regiment full-timer from Pomeroy in east Tyrone, was working in the yard of his farm when two masked men carrying assault rifles walked up behind him. Graham’s wife, seeing what was about to happen, shouted to him to run. For some reason he did not hear her and the two IRA men opened fire. A post-mortem examination was to show that Graham was shot in the back and fell forward. The two IRA men stood almost over him and continued shooting him as he lay on the ground. At least nineteen rounds were fired. The east Tyrone IRA said that they had carried out the killing.
Superficially, there seemed little to distinguish Graham’s death from those of the scores of other reservists killed in their homes by the IRA. In fact, it was closely connected to the events which were about to unfold at Loughgall. Ballistic tests were to show that assault rifles recovered at Loughgall were the same ones used to kill Graham. But there are other connections between the incidents.
A member of the security forces in a position to know alleged to me during the preparation of this book that Graham’s killers
