As the tactics and procedures for handling human source intelligence developed, so the operations of the SAS changed, and became more ambitious. Several of the early incidents involved encounters at arms dumps: these were places where the soldiers had reasonable confidence that somebody might turn up if they waited long enough. During the 1980s such operations became rarer; instead the SAS aimed to catch republican terrorists in the act of attacking security forces members or installations.
Ambushes were discontinued after December 1978. There followed five years in which the SAS did not kill anybody. This period is interesting, not least because it disproves the idea that lethal confrontations between IRA members and special forces are inevitable. It resulted to some extent from the RUC’s desire to take on the more adventurous side of covert operations itself.
There are several reasons for supposing that the killing of six people in late 1982 by members of one of the RUC’s Headquarters Mobile Support Units may have been an aberration rather than a return, sanctioned at the highest level, to an ambush policy using RUC rather than Army special forces. Most importantly, the RUC’s special units had conducted a good many operations in the two years prior to those incidents, and these had brought them face to face with terrorists without resulting in shootings. The arrest of the team which planned to bomb the RUC band in Belfast in July 1982 is one example.
The conduct of the HMSU incidents gave rise to direct political pressure for the RUC to abandon any aggressive special forces operations. But they also resulted in a series of conspiracies at various levels of the force, designed to protect its members from prosecution and from criticism by the Stalker inquiry. The legacy of distrust which these events left between Stormont and Knock meant that the declining role of the SAS in Ulster was checked. The Armagh shootings were a disaster for those senior figures in Stormont and the security forces who believed that the police could supplant the SAS.
From December 1983 there were more SAS ambushes and a pattern of occasional ‘executive action’ based on informer intelligence emerged. These operations were considerably more sophisticated than those carried out by the SAS during its earlier period. The art of the ‘clean kill’, according to people interviewed, was to eliminate members of the opposition so cleverly – ideally catching them armed and on the way to carry out an attack – that even committed republicans would feel there was little they could complain about.
I do not believe that special forces operations were resumed as a result of an explicit order from politicians. Rather, my research suggests that the key role in advocating ambushes is played by middle-ranking police and Army officers, such as a Regional Head of Special Branch or the commanding officer of the Intelligence and Security Group. The attitude of those at the top of the RUC and Army in Northern Ireland is obviously important, but in the cases described to me that attitude has been more one of acceptance than of initiating a wave of ambushes. Officers like Lieutenant General Richard Lawson, GOC from 1979 to 1982, or Major General James Glover, CLF from 1979 to 1980, were explicitly opposed to the aggressive use of Army special forces. Some of their successors have simply chosen not to veto the proposals for such operations made by more junior officers.
Some of the incidents involving special forces during the years 1983 to 1987 were not initiated by the Army. The Dunloy shooting in 1984 was started by the IRA. The killing of three IRA men in Strabane in 1985, an incident which aroused considerable media interest, probably started as an observation mission rather than an ambush, even though that is what it turned into.
In other cases – Coalisland in 1983, Tamnamore and the Gransha hospital in 1984, the shooting of Seamus McElwaine in 1986 and, most famously, the 1987 Loughgall incident – the evidence indicates that it was the soldiers’ intention to ambush from the outset. Interviewees have told me explicitly that this was the case.
When I began this study, I was open to the idea that ambushing the IRA might help to lower the level of terrorist violence. All of my research, however, convinces me that it does not and that, on the contrary, such operations carry significant human and moral costs.
What then did these killings achieve? At the simplest level they made a good many members of the security forces feel better. Most soldiers who have served in Northern Ireland or police officers who live there are prepared to admit to satisfaction at seeing terrorists get their ‘comeuppance’.
Advocates of ambushes argue that they are one of the few ways of deterring terrorists. The IRA itself admits that the level of covert surveillance deters them from carrying out many more attacks. They are less comfortable about admitting that the presence of so many informers in their ranks has a similar effect. However, it is entirely different to suppose that the fear of death, rather than the fear of imprisonment, has reduced the level of terrorism.
Clearly neither side in the argument can prove conclusively whether the level of terrorism would have been higher at certain times without the use of ambushes. What we can be certain of is that during the early 1980s – the period of no SAS killing – terrorist violence was at its lowest level since 1969. There were many reasons for this, notably the republican movement’s decision to divert resources from fighting to Sinn Fein’s grassroots political activity. Claims that times were more peaceful because such operations had stopped cannot be proved,
