I have not found people prepared to corroborate the allegation that the IRA was allowed to kill Graham. I have included it because the person making it was, I believe, saying what he believed to be the truth. That some of the people who would carry out the Loughgall attack were involved in Graham’s killing seems highly probable. The person who made the allegation against the intelligence officers in charge of the operation says that a footprint from a training shoe found in the mud of Graham’s farmyard matched one of the shoes on one of the men who would carry out the Loughgall operation.
What several other interviewees have confirmed is that the ASUs who were preparing to attack Loughgall police station had indeed been under surveillance for weeks before the attack. Several sources have also told me that there was at least one informer in the east Tyrone IRA. Graham’s killing appears therefore, at the very least, to have represented a major error on the part of those conducting the intelligence operation against Lynagh and Kelly’s units. The Graham incident may be comparable to John Stalker’s discovery that the death of three police officers at the Kinnego embankment in 1982 was highly embarrassing to the RUC because the explosive used to kill them had been removed from a hayshed which was under surveillance at the time.
The evidence of the footprint, the guns, the east Tyrone IRA’s own claiming of the attack and the fact that nobody else was ever to be charged with Graham’s killing all suggest that his assailants were among those involved in the forthcoming Loughgall operation. It may be that the Provisionals simply gave their watchers the slip on the evening of 25 April 1987 or that not all of them were under surveillance at the time. If this was not the case, it may suggest that the desire to protect an informer or to allow an ambush to proceed on the best possible terms might lead the intelligence officers to sacrifice the lives of members of the security forces.
Although Graham’s killing appears in all probability to have been carried out by Lynagh and Kelly’s units, there is no evidence to tie them to the Gibson killings. But it was following the events of 25 April, an intelligence expert says, that security chiefs decided to allow the terrorists’ plan to attack Loughgall police station to run. An ambush would be prepared in Loughgall as ‘an act of revenge’, he says – adding that the military plan had been cleared at a very senior level. The operation would draw together informer intelligence, expert surveillance and the firearms skills of the SAS – all of the elements practised during the previous decade.
The ASUs involved once more began preparations for the co-ordinated series of actions which would need to be carried out to stage the attack. Early in May, a few days before the plan was due to go into effect, Lynagh and another man were stopped by the Gardai while out walking. Local people say they were hoping to find a weapon on him, so that he might be charged again for possession. They found nothing, but the incident showed ‘how closely he was being watched’, according to a local. Lynagh slipped across the border and the Loughgall plan moved into effect.
24Loughgall, 8 May 1987: Prayers and Tapdancing
Loughgall is a small, overwhelmingly Protestant village in north Armagh. It is in what the locals call ‘orchard country’, where the slopes of the rolling countryside are dotted with apple trees. It is 13 kilometres from Armagh city, which can be reached in about fifteen minutes by car, and somewhat further from Dungannon, which is twenty or twenty-five minutes away.
The RUC station in Loughgall is a small affair, opening limited hours in the morning and afternoon. It is normally run by a sergeant and three or four other officers. As you approach the village from Armagh, the road slopes gently downhill and there is a walled copse on the right. This is Balleygasey Road; the RUC station is on the left, between a row of small bungalows which are occupied mainly by retired people and a former UDR barrack building, the local football team’s clubhouse, and a small, operator-less telephone exchange. The road then curves slightly to the left and goes uphill into the main part of the village. A church stands at the top of this slope, in the centre of Loughgall. Along the right side of Balleygasey Road is a football field.
In 1987 Jim Lynagh and Paddy Kelly planned to destroy Loughgall police station after it had closed at 7 p.m. Because the RUC officers would normally have left by this time, it would appear that their aim was not to kill but to destroy police stations, as they had done at The Birches. As with the previous attack, they intended to use a digger with a bomb in its excavating bucket to crash through the gates in the wire fence which surrounded the station.
The operation to intercept the IRA team had been taking shape for some days before the attack. Intelligence authorities at the TCG and special forces experts of the Int and Sy Group knew that Lynagh would lead a large, heavily armed group against the station. They also knew from The Birches attack that the preparation for the operation could involve dozens of people across long distances. They decided to bring in enough of their own people to deal with the situation. It was to be, in the words of an officer briefed on the operation, ‘a massive ambush’.
Commanders decided that
