O’Neill went back and in December the Crown case against her alleged abductors collapsed. In an interview with the Sunday Tribune newspaper she denied that she had been the Loughgall informer. But there can be no doubt that O’Neill was closely involved with the group of people who planned the bombing. She admitted in the interview that the phonecall on the morning of Friday 8 May 1987, giving the go ahead for the Loughgall attack, had been made from her home. The Crown lawyer had noted during a hearing of the kidnapping charges against Corr and Arthurs that O’Neill was the ‘alleged’ Loughgall informer.
A senior security forces officer who played a key role in the operation told me, ‘Loughgall was a plum – it was an exceptionally heavy team of good operators. The temptation was there to remove them in one go. The terrorists played into our hands and everything went our way. Was it a decision to kill those people? I don’t think it would have been phrased like that. Somebody would have said, “How far do we go to remove this group of terrorists?” and the answer would have been, “As far as necessary.”’
Loughgall was the apotheosis of the ‘clean kill’, a cleverly planned exploitation of intelligence resulting in the humiliation of the IRA. Whether supplying the republican movement with eight new martyrs furthered or hindered the cause of peace is another matter.
Conclusion
The advent of Police Primacy in 1976 – which granted the RUC the authority to direct all security operations, including those of the Army – coincided with a pronounced shift towards the improvement of intelligence-gathering and the establishment of more effective methods for its exploitation. Throughout the ten years which followed, the importance of the ‘Green Army’ – groups of uniformed regular soldiers – in confronting terrorism fell as the role of the undercover forces grew. This is illustrated most graphically by the statistics of IRA men killed. During the period from the commitment in 1976 of an SAS squadron to south Armagh to late 1987, conventional units of the Army killed nine IRA men and two members of the INLA. During the same period, the SAS and 14 Intelligence Company killed thirty IRA members and two INLA. This is despite the numerical superiority of the regular Army: whereas the combined strength of the SAS and 14 Company in Ulster has never normally exceeded 150 soldiers, the regular Army fluctuated between about 9000 and 14,000 during this period.
It is harder to be specific about the figures for arrests and convictions. I believe that covert work has increased in importance in the building of cases against suspects, but that the bulk of such work is still carried out by uniformed police and soldiers. From December 1978 to December 1983 the Army’s special forces themselves carried out many arrests. The ‘supergrass’ convictions, which, despite the success of many later appeals, had a pronounced impact on the terrorist infrastructure, also developed as a result of the most important covert activity – agent-running.
It is important to note that from 1976 to 1987 the RUC and Army only ever killed republican terrorists with their undercover units. Loyalists, although responsible for many scores of killings during the same period, have never been subjected to an ambush at one of their arms dumps, for example. On the other hand, many loyalist terrorists have been convicted of serious crimes. In 1990, for example, there were about 260 republican and 130 loyalist prisoners in the Maze. This shows some correlation between convictions and the respective levels of violence perpetrated by the two wings of terrorism in Ulster. Unlike in the mid-1970s, when the two sides produced similar levels of violence, throughout the 1980s, the republicans killed considerably more people than the loyalists.
The special forces did not carry out action based on intelligence which was likely to result in the death of loyalist terrorists. Security forces officers tend to argue that this is because the loyalists are not a threat to the security forces themselves. But the fact that loyalist paramilitaries were not killed by Army and police undercover squads raises two key points: first, it further discredits the idea – so frequently voiced in the authorities’ dealings with the courts and media – of chance meetings between undercover forces and armed republican terrorists, since the odds of stumbling on and shooting a loyalist would appear to be almost as high. Second, it heightens the sense of injustice felt by many nationalists.
The ambushing of republican terrorists by the security forces has generally been followed by public expressions of approval from loyalist politicians. Clearly, such SAS operations are popular in the Orange ghettos where intense frustration is felt at the frequent inability of the security forces to prevent the killing of off-duty police officers and UDR soldiers. Even if the Westminster politicians in charge of security are not guilty of deliberately applying the ambush weapon in a sectarian way, they are at the very least culpable of acquiesing in this state of affairs. It would be surprising if they did not appreciate the value of such operations in soothing militant loyalists and bolstering the morale of the security forces – particularly those recruited locally.
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Several phases are discernible in the development of the forces designed to act on intelligence. Although the SAS arrived in south Armagh in early 1976, it only really began to operate as the cutting edge of the intelligence effort in late 1977 and early 1978. During this period the SAS squadron began operating throughout Northern Ireland, and the first centre for fusing intelligence and covert operations, the Tasking and Co-ordination Group at Castlereagh,
