Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (31 page)

By convention, the secret life and death of the SAS was carved on the regimental clock tower at Hereford. Not to be listed as killed-in-action on the tower was known, in the self-mocking culture of the SAS, as “beating the clock.” But after Princes Gate, the Iranian Embassy job in 1980, the postwar SAS was a secret no more. Life in the public—and media—eye would prove very much more complicated.

The Oman War ended in victory in 1976 for the Ruler, Sultan Qaboos, a British ally who had been trained at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. He had also served with a Scottish regiment in Germany. Oman was to become an invaluable asset for American as well as British forces in their operations in the Gulf and beyond. Back home in London, the U.K. government was struggling with the renewed Irish War. Seven years of violence and counterviolence by the IRA, Loyalist terrorists, and British security forces were in stalemate. In January 1976, a perplexed prime minister committed the SAS to Northern Ireland by way of a press release, without informing the Army. This was seen, and meant to be seen, as a major escalation of British armed force in Ulster. The SAS, sure enough, was opaque at that time. Such stories that did circulate, usually in the left-wing press, were the dirty end of fairyland as portrayed by the Brothers Grimm. The Nationalist Irish—mainly Catholics—were convinced that this mysterious entity, the SAS (“SAS=SS,” republican graffiti proclaimed) was the source of all Britain’s dirty operations. It was a pantechnicon into which Ulster’s Catholic minority loaded their suspicions. At first, this impression was a useful psyops weapon against the IRA, but it also became counterproductive.

In fact, the British had been running undercover operations in Ireland’s renewed war for around six years when the SAS was committed by Prime Minister Harold Wilson to that conflict. Many of these misadventures were less than useful. Captain Fred Holroyd, an undercover military intelligence officer in Northern Ireland, described “how the rule of law and order was not what it seemed, and I would encounter illegalities on my own side which would severely dent my sense of purpose.” He alleged that the SAS had a cupboard in its armory containing 9-mm Browning pistol barrels, extractors, and firing pins which had been officially declared unfit for use, and destroyed. In fact, “these parts could be placed in normal issue Brownings, fired, destroyed and replaced with the original ‘official’ parts. This would make it impossible to connect the weapon with any shooting: there would be no ballistic evidence.” In 1973, Holroyd attended a lecture by Brigadier (later General) Frank Kitson, an innovator during the counter-insurgency war against the Kenyan resistance (including President Barack Obama’s kin). Holroyd concluded, “The logic of the use of infiltration, pseudo-gangs and deep interrogation to defeat terrorist opposition, was…compelling.” Holroyd would discover, the hard way, what that strategy implied.

Meanwhile, “on the evening of Kitson’s lecture there was a party in the Officers’ Mess. An American approached me dressed like a U.S. Cavalry Officer…. He quietly proceeded to try to recruit me, along with two other captains from the course, into the CIA.” Holroyd believed that this was not real. It had to be an initiative test run by his instructors. “When I spoke to my Colonel, he assured me that the approach was genuine. At that moment I realised just how different my work would be from anything I once expected.”
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The SAS, in fact, had made a brief foray into Northern Ireland before 1976, to look for Loyalist arms smugglers. The free-fire zone of Oman, out of media eyes, was more to its liking. When Prime Minister Wilson announced that the SAS was to join the Irish struggle, the regiment had just eleven men to spare. Several were recovering from wounds sustained in Oman. It was not just the IRA and its allies that believed in the regiment’s mystique. So did the British government. It was not until the bloody theater of Princes Gate, 1980, that the myth was made real and public.

By then, the Irish War—in which the first British soldier was killed by the IRA in 1970—and the Munich Massacre of 1972 had triggered a mutation in the Army. The SAS responded to Munich by creating a Counter Revolutionary Warfare cell. In Ireland, influenced by Kitson and other Special Forces innovators, the conventional “Green Army” (so called because of its standard disruptive-pattern camouflage) invented the Military Reconnaissance Force. Operating in civilian clothes, employing ex-IRA informers, it followed suspects around Belfast by car with a photographer concealed in the luggage boot. In 1972 an MRF two-man patrol fired at two men at a bus stop in a drive-by shooting. The gun they used was a museum piece, a Thomson submachine gun favored by Al Capone’s gang. “The rattle of a Thomson gun” was also celebrated in an Irish republican ballad. The soldiers were prosecuted but cleared of illegality after claiming they fired in self-defense. MRF was further exposed when a mobile laundry service it ran, disguised as the Four Square Laundry, was ambushed by the IRA, killing the driver. His woman assistant, a legendary Intelligence Corps NCO known as “Mags,” escaped. Until then, the Four Square was a successful commercial enterprise, cleaning garments at bargain rates thanks to the military budget. All the clothes were forensically tested for the presence of explosives in a year when Ulster was racked by 10,268 shootings and 1,382 bombings in which 468 people, most of them civilians, died violently. Another MRF front was a massage parlor, also compromised by an IRA double agent.

The MRF was rapidly replaced by a new team known by various names. These included 14 Intelligence Company and/or “The Dets” (detachments). Its creator was Brigadier Bill Dodd, a former SAS officer who had served with the Secret Intelligence Service and returned to the army. After he retired he was in charge of the BBC’s personnel department. Fourteen Int. Company was a covert intelligence agency that used women and men able to memorize faces, places, and details of suspects’ homes, which they frequently burglarized, sometimes to plant hugs, hidden cameras, and tracing devices on weapons and explosives. They also had to be able to shoot their way out of trouble. Fourteen Int. Company had considerable success as well as one spectacular failure.

The failure was Robert Nairac, a handsome young boxing champion from Oxford University, by 1977 a captain in the elite Grenadier Guards. A Catholic, he identified with the underdog culture of Ulster, while collecting intelligence on the IRA. He acquired a Belfast accent, learned to sing rebel songs, and went on the road to the badlands of South Armagh, on the border with the Irish Republic. His Intelligence controller, Major (later Colonel) Clive Fairweather, warned Nairac that he had been targeted but “he did not seem to take it seriously. I showed him a report that the IRA were ‘going to get the curly-haired little SAS man called Danny.’ He laughed at me.”

On 14 May 1977, a year after the SAS was publicly committed to the Irish War, Nairac walked into the Three Steps, an IRA bar in Dromintee (population around 300) in County Armagh. He did not trouble to let his headquarters know exactly where he was. When the time for his expected check call had passed, Fairweather shrugged. Nairac had failed to make check calls before, as a result of which SAS men were sent on a wild-goose chase to ensure his safety. Posing as an IRA man from the Ardoyne district of Belfast, Nairac entertained the locals with his big presence and seductive voice. He was still making fatal mistakes. He had left his pistol, in its shoulder holster, in the glove compartment of his car in case, as he raised his arms while responding to applause, the holster might be spotted. He also asked a local woman how he could cross the border without been spotted by British security forces. The local IRA were summoned to check him over. The pub band, scenting trouble, said they were leaving and suggested Nairac go with them. He said no, thanks.

Nairac walked out of the bar alone into the darkness of the car park. As he reached his car, he opened the door and leaned forward to retrieve his pistol. Several large hands snatched the scarf around his neck and pulled him backward. He was then set upon by a dozen men and fought back hard. Half conscious, he was hustled across the nearby Irish border into the republic and again savagely beaten. An IRA man impersonating a priest invited Nairac to make confession or be shot. Nairac replied: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” When he refused to give his captors any further information, a gun was brought. The first attempt to shoot him failed when the assassin’s gun jammed. Finally, the deed was done. His body was never found. Rumors still circulate about its fate. One of his killers said, years later, “He never told us anything. He was a great soldier.” He was posthumously awarded the George Cross for his bravery. Two of those involved in the attack were given sanctuary in the United States for decades afterward.

During the early years of SAS involvement in Northern Ireland, the IRA was on the back foot, thanks to ambiguous incidents that gave credence to the common belief that Special Forces were running black operations including extra-judicial executions. Jealousy of SAS luster by other agencies, including the Royal Ulster Constabulary and intelligence agencies, encouraged this view. On 15 April 1976, Peter Cleary, an IRA officer arrested by the SAS fifty yards from the Irish border, uttered his last, desolate words to a friend as he was escorted toward an Army helicopter. “I’m dead,” he said. “What shall I do?” Minutes later, he was killed by three bullets fired from an Army rifle. The soldiers claimed that he had tried to snatch the weapon from his escort and paid the price. Another IRA volunteer, Sean McKenna, was already in custody, having been woken in his bed in the Republic by a British officer holding a pistol to his head. An uppercrust English voice murmured in his ear: “I want to explain the case to you. Do you realize that I could have shot you? If you want to put up a struggle or if you don’t want to come, say so. I will have no hesitation about shooting you now.” McKenna agreed to go quietly and was marched 250 yards into Northern Ireland where he was allegedly found wandering and drunk, before being handed over to the police.

Over the following years, two major constraints emerged to limit the effectiveness of the SAS and other Special Forces in their wish to achieve a military victory. The SAS intention, expressed by one of its commanders, was that “We are in Northern Ireland to kill the IRA.” Another spoke with relish of “an IRA cull.” Successive British governments limited that ambition with “the yellow card procedure,” requiring soldiers not to shoot unless they, or their comrades, or civilians, were at imminent risk of death. The rules specified: “You may only open fire against a person: (a) if he is committing or about to commit an act LIKELY TO ENDANGER LIFE, AND THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO PREVENT THE DANGER” [
sic
].

Yellow card rules resulted in one British Red Beret soldier’s being convicted of murder after he opened fire on a car driving at speed toward his checkpoint. All the signs pointed to an IRA attack. Private Lee Clegg’s first three shots were strictly defensive and lawful. The fourth, fired after the vehicle—and the immediate danger—had passed him, was not. The fourth shot killed a woman passenger. The soldier was automatically sentenced to life imprisonment.

After the yellow card was imposed on military planners, all operations were subject to police primacy so as to maintain the fiction that the Irish problem was not an armed conflict but an internal security issue. The SAS took careful note of such limitations and made sure that its lethal capabilities met ambiguity with ambiguity. Whether by coincidence or not, an unofficial “clean kill” policy determined SAS ambushes, sometimes set up after weeks of close surveillance of IRA targets. The unwritten clean kill rules required that the enemy was armed and intent on murder at the moment the SAS intervened. Some informed sources paraphrased this alternative, unofficial policy as “Big Boys’ Games, Big Boys’ Rules.”

When intelligence suggested that the risk was particularly high, the police were happy to receive SAS support in dealing with it. So it was that on the evening of 8 May 1987 an IRA team loaded a 200-pound bomb onto the shovel of a mechanical digger, covered it with a screen of bricks, and conveyed it nine miles along the back lanes of rural Tyrone to attack a police barracks at the village of Loughgall. An SAS team of more than forty men was waiting for the raid, some of its soldiers inside the targeted building with two heavy machine guns trained on approach roads, others in concealed sniper positions overlooking the area. The IRA convoy was led by a stolen blue Toyota van that drove cautiously into the killing zone, then out again. The SAS held their fire. The van halted in front of the barracks and Patrick Kelly, leading his hand-picked team of eight men, stepped out, rifle in hand, followed by two others. He pointed the gun at the building and started shooting. The attack was on. So was the turkey shoot. The machine guns cut down the men in the open and killed two still in the van, wearing flak jackets. That left two men who were the bomb team. One tried to ignite the bomb with a cigarette lighter, then ran for it, as did his companion. Both were shot dead before they had covered a few yards. There were also two civilian fatal casualties, brothers who drove into Loughgall before they realized that it was now a war zone.

A few months later, British intelligence officers stalked an IRA team that was clearly engaged in a reconnaissance of the U.K.’s Iberian colony, Gibraltar. Every week, a resident army parade would ceremoniously change the guard outside the governor’s residence, complete with military band. It was a Ruritanian ritual watched by hundreds of tourists. The IRA saw it as a bombing opportunity, a lovely day for an auto-da-fe similar to its bloody attacks on a Remembrance Day service at Enniskillen and the Royal parks bombings in London. On 6 March 1988, four SAS marksmen in civilian clothes, Browning pistols tucked into the backs of their jeans, followed three IRA volunteers as they parked a car near the parade area, then strolled like tourists around the center of Gibraltar. The soldiers had been briefed on the dangers of a new IRA weapon. This, they were told, was a car bomb that could be radio-detonated by pressing a cordless button hundreds of yards away. Not surprisingly, the SAS men were also on a very short fuse. As one later told an official inquiry: “We were told that all three [IRA] members could be carrying a device to detonate the bomb.”