Episode 1 Tethered Goat

Four miles south of Omagh, at the height of the Troubles, the SAS launched an ambush against an IRA unit suspected of carrying out a series of deadly attacks on soldiers. In the first episode of SAS: The Shadow War, The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley meets ‘George’, the former SAS ground commander who led the operation at Drumnakilly. He reveals how the mission unfolded – and the decisions made when it mattered most. But decades on, the battle over what happened in Northern Ireland is far from over. As former soldiers face renewed legal scrutiny, the episode asks: where does the duty to protect lives end, and the demand for accountability begin? Subscribe to The Independent All Access Membership https://www.independent.co.uk/Subscribe and unlock all eight episodes for just £1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I heard a car and it was definitely over revving and it was racing up the road and I thought, mhm, and about 30 yards from where I was, out popped, who I now know to be young Martin Hart, an open fire on me.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  And I counted his rounds. I said 50 and okay, it was 60, but nevertheless, I'll take that. So that burst was all around me and he was hanging out the car, the rear window, but he was still firing under the truck. And I remember thinking, because the guys were in the hedge behind me, I wonder where those rounds have gone, I hope nobody's hurt.

• 0:50Sam Kiley?

  That's George, a former SAS soldier. He's never spoken publicly before. In fact, no one outside the British Special Forces has ever heard the story he's about to tell. It took place on a country road in Northern Ireland, four miles south of Oma, in August 1988. It was a covert operation, the result of months of planning and surveillance. It would leave three IRA volunteers dead in a matter of minutes. I'm Sam Kiley, world affairs editor at The Independent, and you're listening to SAS:

• 1:30Sam Kiley?

  The Shadow War. In this series, SAS soldiers are breaking cover for the first time to reveal their secret world, and in their own words. Since the creation of the Special Air Service in 1941, the identities and even the actions of this elite military unit have been secret. Their work focused on irregular warfare from the Second World War through Malaya, Oman, to Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, and even maybe Ukraine. They're unorthodox and they operate outside of what would be widely considered to be military norms.

• 2:14Sam Kiley?

  There are only about 400 members of the regiment, and it's split into squadrons, A, B, D, and G. Those in turn are divided into troops that consist of about 16 members, each having a particular role like signals, demolition, medic, or sniper.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  We have the best Special Forces in the world. Like, I've worked with all the other ones, in some cases been us in the wrong ways.

• 2:38Sam Kiley?

  Al Khanz was recently a minister for the Armed Forces, and he is a former officer in the Special Forces himself.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  I'm adamant that we must protect them, right now while we're talking, they will be out and about all over the world protecting us, our interests, and indeed our country.

• 2:56Sam Kiley?

  Britain's Special Forces are world famous, but while they've inspired hundreds of books, TV shows, and movies, the reality is that SAS soldiers just don't talk. They're bound by strict non-disclosure agreements and an amurta, a code of silence. But for the first time ever, George, along with 16 others, are emerging into the daylight to give their accounts of the operations that they undertook. They reveal a glimpse of the work of the SAS in Northern Ireland during the time famously known as the Troubles.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  Northern Ireland, and in the streets of Belfast, British troops stand guard to keep the peace between Catholics and Protestants. It's commonly accepted that Northern Ireland's problems are the result of its religious divisions, which are themselves embedded some 300 years back in the province's history. But it's no longer so certain that religious hatred is the only flame that keeps Northern Ireland on the boil.

• 3:59Sam Kiley?

  We'll start in the 1960s. In Northern Ireland, tensions were rising after decades of political exclusion, economic inequality, and contested national identity for the Catholic community. Civil rights protests had escalated into sectarian violence, which saw the reemergence of armed organisations like the Irish Republican Army, the IRA, and loyalist groups like the Ulster Volunteer Force, the UVF. British troops were initially sent in as peacekeepers in August 1969. By the early 1970s, parts of Northern Ireland were effectively ungovernable.

• 4:39Sam Kiley?

  As violence intensified, the army became part of the conflict itself. I spoke to SAS soldier John, it's not his real name, who was in Northern Ireland during those early days of the conflict. He now studies the history of military involvement in Northern Ireland.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  I mean, wars of all hues and persuasions are driven by demographics. I mean, dare I say it now, we're looking at some big conflagration in the Middle East. The Middle East has the demographics to support wars, you know, there's hordes and hordes of young men. So we flipped to Northern Ireland, there was huge unemployment out there, particularly if you were a Catholic, where you perceived housing was set against you, work was set against you, and politically, you had very small, little representation. So this sort of summer of 69, you know, on the mainland here, it's the summer of love, out in Belfast, suddenly, the sort of protests that have been running for several weeks just absolutely exploded.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  It was last Thursday night that Diva Street, a Catholic pocket just west of the city centre, was set alight. That night, five people were killed and 120 injured in machine gun battles between police and gunmen.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  The RUC, who were the incumbent police force there, were completely caught out by the scale of it, the size of it. I mean, people sit in Britain and they sort of, they'll look at the form, you know, what happened in Yugoslavia, and they'll look at Africa, and they'll look at the Middle East and say, we could never do that. Believe you me, in Northern Ireland, people did the most appalling things to each other, and they're British. Protestants attacked the Catholic enclaves, the Catholics attacked the Protestant enclaves, people were burnt out their houses, their businesses were burnt down, their shops were burnt down. People, you know, it was the first use of petrol bombs, nail bombs, there was shooting, hundreds of people were injured.

• 6:33Speaker 05

  The buildings that you can see blazing have been set on fire by Catholics who are trying to roast out the Protestant snipers who've been shooting from the rooftops during the day.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  The paramilitary suddenly saw their opportunity to tool up, defend their areas, because they perceived, rightly or wrongly, that the RUC had failed to defend the various communities. Jim Callaghan was the Home Secretary, and Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister, and the decision was made, faithfully, to deploy the British Army into Belfast and into Derry and into some of the other towns where there was outbreaks of violence.

• 7:11Sam Kiley?

  The Irish Justice Minister had nothing to say to reporters as he arrived with his security advisers at the Northern Ireland office. Good morning, good morning. Before you go in, is there anything to say about the SAS? So, going in, so not, not, not in the top. Fast forward to 1976, and the SAS was sent in. They were tasked with dealing with the most violent and sophisticated terrorists in all of the groups. The IRA insisted that they were at war. The British government said that they were just criminals, but war it was.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  And of course, we didn't call it a war at that time, Sam, it was meant to be some sort of law and order situation.

• 7:50Sam Kiley?

  Former BBC Northern Ireland security correspondent Brian Rowan.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  It was the so-called Troubles, a term I think should be decommissioned, I think it's, it underscores the world we were in at that stage, the IRA heavily armed, dozens of troops on the ground. It certainly looked like a war and walked like a war when I was looking at it.

• 8:14Sam Kiley?

  For many years, the actions that George and his fellow soldiers took in Northern Ireland remained secret. But for George, in 2023, everything changed.

• 8:23Speaker 06

  The families of three IRA gunmen shot dead in County Tyrone in the late 80s are taking legal action against former Ulster Unionist Lord McGinnis, the government, and the chief constable. The move follows a recent RTE documentary on collusion.

• 8:39Sam Kiley?

  Over the decades that followed, the families of the three dead IRA gunmen pursued multiple legal avenues, trying to prove that they were killed illegally. In 1993, a coroner's inquest was inconclusive. In 2015, they launched a civil lawsuit that has still not been resolved. And in 2023, a judicial review found that the original police investigation was flawed. Each time, George has had to tell his side of the story. Each time, he is essentially being accused of murder, which is why George and other SAS veterans are facing different judicial inquiries in Northern Ireland and are speaking out.

• 9:23Sam Kiley?

  Retired and in their 60s and 70s, they now face years of litigation with a possibility of jail. They say they were doing their jobs, and no more.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  I think it's useful to step back and look at it. I mean, there are more casualties and more service personnel killed or wounded in Northern Ireland than there were in Iraq and Afghanistan put together.

• 9:44Sam Kiley?

  Al Khanz, former minister for the Armed Forces.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  And I think one of the biggest problems with this subject is that people forget the visceral nature of the Northern Ireland conflict, which is all too clear in the minds of the veterans and those that had to live through it. And I always say this, actually, I said it in the house, you know, it wasn't that long ago where we had to check under our cars that we as politicians were targets, not to mention the veterans or individuals on leave from being in the military to those still serving. They had to check under their cars, check their rooms before they went home at night because the IRA was one of the most effective terrorist organisations in the world.

• 10:19Sam Kiley?

  Brian Rowan.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  So, while we had sides in conflict, we also have sides in peace. And I think one of the poisons still in our process is that whole question of the past and that whole question of legacy. And I'm not talking about people who are looking for information about what happened to a loved one, I'm talking about the nonsense of some still, that this notion that you can win in the peace, what you didn't win in the conflict.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  So if we send 10 soldiers to jail, or we send 10 more Republicans to jail, or 10 more loyalists to jail, is that answering the past? And is it addressing the questions of the conflict period? No, it's not, because the people we will send to jail are those in the lower ranks. And that allows those who, you know, give orders, whether it was within the IRA organisation, or give orders to the SAS, to exit the stage without any accountability.

• 11:24Sam Kiley?

  Time has made it hard to give an accurate or ethical account of what happened on the front lines of the shadow war decades ago. Well, there's no morality in that, to seek to make veterans, you know, sacrificial lambs in a process. I mean, these are people who did what they were ordered. Philip Barden is a solicitor helping soldiers to defend against so-called lawfare. In these cases, none of these cases involve any allegations that people went out with an intention to kill. These cases are all about whether or not you had an honest belief 30, 40, 50 years ago that you were entitled to fire.

• 12:09Sam Kiley?

  You know, that's what these cases are about. How can you possibly seek to go back such a period of time and establish what belief you had on that particular day? It's just an impossibility. And what the government's not doing is grasping with the actual reality of these cases. But for men like George, this is personal.

• 13:12Sam Kiley?

  George was the ground commander for the Drumna Killie operation codenamed Triennial in 1988, four miles south of Omer. The plan was to arrest an infamous active service unit of the IRA who'd been responsible for a spate of killings over the past few months. By 1988, the IRA had become far more sophisticated and far more effective at killing. The conflict was escalating dramatically. The BBC's Brian Rowan lived through it all.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  Well, in the late 1980s, I don't think anyone here was thinking about peace. We were in conflict, we were in war. The IRA had been armed by Gaddafi and by Libya. They had Semtex explosives, they had new weapons, RPG7s, flamethrowers, new rifles, loads of ammunition. And we were coming up to the 20th anniversary of the deployment of the army in Northern Ireland, and there was an IRA push at that stage. So when I think about 1988, I think about the Lisburn bus bomb, where six soldiers were killed after a fun run, a Semtex bomb underneath their vehicle.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  And then we get to the Ballygolly bus bomb months later, and eight soldiers, if I'm recalling it correctly, were killed. A bomb exploded at the roadside when their bus was taking them to barracks. There was the beginnings of some background peace talking at that stage, the leader of the SDLP, John Hume, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize. His party began to engage in conversations with Gerry Adams. But no one, no one had much hope for those talks. What we, what we were seeing was an escalation in the armed campaign, and peace, peace seemed a million miles away.

• 15:19Sam Kiley?

  George is old school, blunt, confident, seldom challenged. Forged in SAS training, he was tempered in conflict. George, just take us through your career. Where did you start in the army? Why did you go into the SAS? And how did you emerge at the other end as Regimental Sergeant Major?

• 15:41Speaker 07

  Probably worth mentioning, obviously, in fact, very poor working class. Father was disabled in the mines. Came from a very bright family, actually, academics, but working class. But I was hell-bent on joining the army. I'd sat and listened to my father and some of my sort of extended relatives who had been in Aiden and all that stuff. It just lit up all areas of my brain. And at the first opportunity, against my father's wishes, I sort of basically ran off and joined the service, 15 and a half.

• 16:13Sam Kiley?

  He first joined the Coldstream Guards, but George wanted more, so he found his way to the regiment's Pathfinder Unit. And when that was disbanded, he had little choice: back to bearskins and red tunics, or go for selection to the SAS. Then came Northern Ireland.

• 16:32Speaker 04

  Police in Northern Ireland believe yesterday's security operation in County Tyrone killed the local leader of the IRA and two men whom the police say played a prominent role in terrorist crimes. The precise circumstances of the men's death are still unclear. The rumours that the SAS were involved are not being denied, but few details are being added.

• 17:01Sam Kiley?

  I wanted him to take me back to that day in the summer of 1988, and hear in his own words what really happened. Because George's story exemplifies exactly what has become so contentious all these decades later. Was there a shoot-to-kill policy? George, I want to go back over Drumna Killie because I think that the, the kind of, what I'm learning is that these incidents shouldn't be seen out of context. They're not, quote unquote, just exchanges of gunfire or whatever it is, but the, the

• 17:46Sam Kiley?

  intelligence picture that led up to them is often not available.

• 17:52Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 17:55Speaker 07

  It was called Triennial, and it was up Triennial 3. There's a clue in that. This team had murdered people for fun for a decade, and they were run by a guy called Gerry Hart, who was an architect, a very well-educated guy, very high up in the IRA's command structure, very well-trusted in that whole east-south Tyrone sort of ecosystem of terror.

• 18:24Speaker 07

  They had a programme, and they used to, roughly one incident a week. And it was his brother, Martin Hart, and a whole gaggle of sort of lowlife that used to support them. And Brian Mullin, who got his new boiler suit for that job specifically. I didn't know that at the time, it was all afterwards. But they had tried to kill this individual, and I'm going to say, I can't remember his employment, but he was ex, I think he was ex-UDR. So in a sense, that's academic. The fact is, we're going to kill a civilian.

• 19:02Speaker 07

  And we worked with the police to try and figure out how we could mitigate that. But priority one for us every time was to save lives. We never played god with risking somebody who had been targeted. So we employed a whole range of tactics to mask our intent. But what was happening was that they were more frustrated by the fact that they couldn't sort of tick this one off the list, because they had another one. We hadn't really factored that in, and it didn't become apparent until the day. Because he'd organised the team to be led by his brother, Martin Hart, who had, the

• 19:47Speaker 07

  week before, conducted the Ballygolly roundabout bus bomb, killed all those soldiers unarmed and all the rest of it, the family's bus coming back from Alder Grove back to Ormack to the barracks there. But yet, they couldn't do this simple thing. So psychologically, they were frustrated, and Gerry Hart was leaning into them, saying, you need to get this done.

• 20:12Sam Kiley?

  The three IRA men in the car, brothers Gerard and Martin Hart, plus Brian Mullin, are notorious. killers, part of a local IRA unit, the East Tyrone Brigade. Gerard Hart, the most senior, is part of the leadership of the IRA. And it's been a busy month of violence. That August alone, the IRA killed eighteen and wounded over thirty in two hundred gun and bomb attacks. The Hart brothers need to keep up the pace of killing.

• 20:43Speaker 07

  In terms of the planning, we had a big planning day with the police and I remember thinking, there's really only one way this is going to work is to like go beyond because you don't want to risk anybody's life. Yet you have your duty that you have to perform. And there's a whole mixture of things. And it just dawned on me when we were going through the different options. And I said, I'll do it.

• 21:11Sam Kiley?

  The SAS motto, as everyone knows, is who dares wins.

• 21:16Speaker 07

  And that was when the idea was born that I would replace the intended target. His daytime job was delivering coal from Omar. Because it was just to the, it was between Omar and Carrickmore. And we'd done this once before. We, actually, one of the IUC guys decided to do it. Bless him, he, it'd be fair to say he wasn't as confident. He's a policeman. Good guys, bloody good guys. The idea was to put the coal truck driver in plain sight. Our information was good and we knew they were keen and there'd been words said.

• 22:01Speaker 07

  So I set the operation up and I parked the truck.

• 22:08Sam Kiley?

  You're the target.

• 22:09Speaker 07

  The tethered goat.

• 22:10Sam Kiley?

  Tethered goat.

• 22:10Speaker 07

  That's a very good word.

• 22:20Speaker 07

  So I stopped the truck. It's quite a narrow road where it was and took the front wheel off. I am stuck. I'm not going anywhere. And one of the Bravos came past in a car, I remember.

• 22:47Sam Kiley?

  What's a Brav?

• 22:48Speaker 07

  An individual. In a light blue foxhole Vida. He was giving me the eyeballs, but I'm going. So we're live. Question is, how live? And there was a lot of, because we had the surveillance screen out and, and those guys in the debt, have you heard of the debt?

• 23:15Sam Kiley?

  Yeah, just explain what a surveillance screen is and what the debt were doing in it.

• 23:20Speaker 07

  The, the debt are the detachment from Forty and Inn and Security Group and three debts in Northern Ireland, two principally, well, one in the city and two rural, one in the north, one in the south. And their passive surveillance link to us, but gathering intelligence and they provide strategic level intelligence about command structures and it's a fabulous organisation. So that screens out because we're on the point. When you're on the point, you can't see anything, you can't hear anything, you're just there. And the screen's out looking and they got a couple of sightings, but nothing serious. But we knew, okay, it's rolling.

• 24:05Speaker 07

  And then the Bravo came past. And I'm having to sort of act the part with, you know, the boiler suit on and the donkey jacket and truck. And it went on and on, I thought, they haven't gone for it. So I put the wheel back on and then I took it off again. It was about an hour. And I remember I got a message from the desk where some of the police were. And they said, oh, that's about it, we'll, we'll wrap this. I said, no, no, I don't, I don't feel that. And what I was saying was, in any way, what's it going to do with you? This is a military operation. The police liked to play with us, they loved the idea that they got these military, especially

• 24:49Speaker 07

  us, under their control or influence, not control, influence. But they used to inveigle themselves into the ops rooms and just sort of listen and suggest things. He'd go, no, this is military, this is our stuff. You've done your stuff, you've given us what we need. And that was a line that was always sort of based on really good relationships, fantastic individuals. And he said, no, no, no, he said, I think it's gone. I said, no, I'm going to stick out this. I said, leave it with me. And I mean literally fifteen minutes later. I remember I was fiddling around, I mean, in the middle of the road.

• 25:31Speaker 07

  And I heard a car and it was definitely over a ribbing and it was racing up the road and I thought, hmm. And about thirty yards from where I was, out popped who I now know to be young Martin Hart, and opened fire on me. And I counted his rounds. I said fifteen, okay, it was sixteen, but nevertheless, I'll take that. So that burst was all around me and he was hanging out the car, the rear window, offside. And they were all hooded and all that sort of thing. So what I did was I just very quickly went to the blind side of the truck. So he couldn't, but he was still firing under the truck.

• 26:16Speaker 07

  And I remember thinking, because the guys were in the hedge behind me, I wonder whether the rounds are gone, I hope nobody's hurt. Because it was a long burst. So as I was round the, the kind of rear and near side, which was on the verge. And the car screeched past me and they stopped. And I heard car doors opening. There was no, it was a period of about four or five seconds when there wasn't any firing.

• 26:54Speaker 07

  And then there was holy hell on, because our guys just opened up on them. Because up until that point, they couldn't see them because all they could see was the back of the truck. So if you look at it and me. And they said, when you ran around the truck, you were smiling. I think he is perfectly mad. But I wasn't, I was happy because it's working. So I flipped round the side, suddenly this car screeches in, in part, right in front of him. I mean, as close as we are now, it was a very narrow road. And the driver was Gerry Hart, who shouldn't have been driving on the day. The leader in that area. And he turned and looked and he saw one of my men in the hedge and he went, yeah.

• 27:39Speaker 07

  And that was it, they were over. The guy in the back, sorry, he was in the passenger seat. Before the fire opened up, he was out, he was a big guy, he'd bought a brand new boiler suit for the day, party suit. And he ran round the back. Now, I, they could have missed him and he could have been in my six o'clock because he was coming around the front of the truck. But a very good friend of mine who died last year, bless him, Billy Smith, had taken it upon his own initiative to sort of look at everything, see what was happening. And he came round the left. And as this guy ran towards me, because he would have got me looking at the car, would have got me from behind, from a distance of five yards.

• 28:24Speaker 07

  And, and Bill engaged him and blew him straight back over the road. And that was the end of him. And that was the end of the operation. And what we did then was a normal form. Call in the HMSU, scenes of crimes. You know, choke dust and all that sort of stuff, mark how many, how many rounds did you fire, all that stuff. And you get into the post op and away you go. But what's important is, it's, and Mrs Thatcher came to see me. And she said, promise me you'll never do that again. And I said, well, no.

• 29:05Speaker 07

  Because that's what we have to do.

• 29:09Speaker 07

  It's all part of the risk. It's what we have to do to do what you expect us to do and save lives. Because their list would have gone on and on and on and on and on, ad infinitum.

• 29:22Sam Kiley?

  With hindsight, knowing what you now know, as in you, you, you would have thought about this at the time in terms of the writing, lessons learned, post-operation report and so on.

• 29:33Speaker 07

  No, we don't do that.

• 29:34Sam Kiley?

  Could, well, could you, but you would have studied what you'd done to learn better from it, no doubt, thought about it.

• 29:40Speaker 07

  No. The, the, the one piece of kind of legacy from that was in the inquest, how we were handled by lawyers and what I said in like six hours or whatever of cross-examination. That was interesting as a learning exercise.

• 30:00Sam Kiley?

  Why was that interesting and what did you learn?

• 30:04Speaker 07

  Well, it's interesting because they're trying to say you were a murderer. Well, you're not. And the fact is, I stood there and a bloke opened fire on me. Now, the fact is, he got it wrong because he thought it was some innocent guy he was going to murder. It's just like a bad day, you picked like the wrong enemy. But nevertheless, first principle is true. You tried to kill somebody and you got killed. So I'm not, I don't see the, the problem. And my right, my fundamental right is to save my life and the people who are, it's my duty to protect, which in the first instance is a team. So, and they tried, every of them to sort of turn it over.

• 30:43Speaker 07

  But I said, no, I'm not, I'm not buying it.

• 30:48Speaker 07

  If, if we didn't do it and we hadn't mounted the operation with these guys, the top team in that area at the time, they'd just blown up the Bali Goli bus bomb. You remember when all the soldiers were blown up, going back to home? When they were on fire and all that sort of stuff. This was this team just the week before. They're good at what they do. Just absolute terror. And I said, you know.

• 31:12Sam Kiley?

  Is it conceivable that when that car screeched to a halt after they passed you and you'd run into cover behind the truck? Could they have been arrested at that point if somebody had shouted? What, what would have the risks been to you and the rest of the team if they had paused and said, the game's up, lads, put your hands in the air?

• 31:34Speaker 07

  There was a pause, you remember what I said?

• 31:36Sam Kiley?

  Hmm, for a few seconds.

• 31:38Speaker 07

  It was, it felt like a few seconds.

• 31:40Sam Kiley?

  Might not have even been that long.

• 31:42Speaker 07

  But Youngheart was firing until I lost sight of him and he was hanging out the, the car window, pointing his rifle. I think, you know, because he's right-handed, that was it. So at a certain point, again.

• 31:59Sam Kiley?

  He'd have lost angle on.

• 32:00Speaker 07

  He's not a professional, he can't shoot with both arms like we do. We just change arms and suddenly you're left-handed. You, you, you kill a lot of problem-stone dead. So he, the threat is imminent and, and the question therefore is, is it reasonable? Uh, because you've gone past a certain point. And, you know, to dispel the, uh, the notion that we were some Einsatz group going around Ulster, shooting people because they were in the IRA, nonsense.

• 32:36Speaker 07

  I think we arrested about seventy-nine or eighty and shot about seventy-six, no, seventy-two. So if we were this, obviously well-trained, well-resourced killing team, there wouldn't be anybody arrested.

• 32:50Sam Kiley?

  George believes that he was doing his job within the law, but for many in the Republican camp, there remains an unproven suspicion that there was a shoot-to-kill conspiracy.

• 33:05Sam Kiley?

  The Drumnichily operation represented an operational shift towards using undercover SAS units as the primary weapon to neutralize the IRA's most effective fighters. It was the start of a push sanctioned by the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, to take the fight to the IRA. In terms of the examination that you faced in the inquest of Drumnichily and other incidents, are there any that you, with the benefit of hindsight, think, you know, in the heat of the moment, we made a bad call?

• 33:45Speaker 07

  No. No. I, I'm, no.

• 33:49Sam Kiley?

  I mean, playing devil's advocate here, sure, DPP said no case to answer, you know, the, the system at the time could be accused of a cover-up. If, if there was a quote-unquote shoot-to-kill policy, then you would expect the state to...

• 34:06Speaker 07

  You always shoot to kill. You never shoot to wound.

• 34:10Sam Kiley?

  Well, that, yeah, indeed, but you know what I mean by the shoot-to-kill. I mean.

• 34:13Speaker 07

  It's one of those IRA.

• 34:14Sam Kiley?

  I know it is, I know it is, but I'm still going to put it to you because, um, there is a public, not, I don't think there's a public perception that some aspects, elements, possibly Republican elements, are making the argument that the state at the time was, was required people like yourself to go and, and, and carry out these operations with the intent to end life. Now, I, I accept you've made a very powerful argument that that wasn't your intent or indeed your orders, but the allegation is there.

• 34:52Speaker 07

  We were the most overseen, regulated thing by nature of what we did.

• 35:02Speaker 07

  And, I mean, yes, we killed people, but it was generally because of what they did.

• 35:09Sam Kiley?

  How do you keep a lid on that as a leader?

• 35:13Speaker 07

  It's, it's an odd amalgam of people. Every one of them's a general.

• 35:18Speaker 07

  It's fact, you ask any of the commanders, it's the worst thing you can do is try and command these guys. I mean, you are technically in command, but it's tenuous. It works, it's a bit communist, to be honest, it's fairly flat, it's not like a straight up and down chain of command. So everybody's invested.

• 35:38Speaker 07

  It's not like the captain tells the lieutenant, who tells the sergeant, who tells the corporal, who tells the lance corporal, no, no, no, no. Everybody's in it.

• 35:48Speaker 07

  Um, so no, I, I, I, I just can't remember any incident where anybody sort of did the gung-ho, let's shoot everybody. I mean, they'd be gone in a heartbeat because it's just so inconsistent with what we are.

• 36:07Speaker 07

  It's offensive.

• 36:12Sam Kiley?

  The secret Drumnichily operation is typical of SAS work in the Northern Ireland conflict. And over the next seven episodes, we'll hear firsthand about many more. But in episode two, we'll hear how the SAS, which had been working in the shadows in Northern Ireland for several years, was thrust into the limelight in, of all places, London.

• 36:39Speaker 07

  So my role was to go in through the roof with the team.

• 36:43Speaker 07

  Smash through the skylight, threw a ladder down, the lads went down. We then followed in, cleared the top roof.

• 37:00Sam Kiley?

  The Shadow War is an Aura Studios production for The Independent, hosted by me, the World Affairs Editor, Sam Kiley. It was produced by Will Aslett, edited and sound designed by Keith English, and the line producer was Claire Cotrell. Executive producers were Mark Popcovitz for Aura Studios and Olivia Foster and Rod Adahaly for The Independent Studio.

• 37:24Sam Kiley?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of SAS The Shadow War. Want to hear all the episodes without waiting? Then join Independent membership today for just a pound for your first six months. To join, head to independent.co.uk forward slash subscribe.

• 37:45Speaker 05

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