Episode 7 The Price of Peace

As the peace process gathered pace in Northern Ireland, the war on the ground did not simply stop. In episode seven of SAS: The Shadow War, The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley hears how the mission changed as political negotiations moved closer to a deal. Former SAS commanders describe hunting an IRA sniper team, mounting a huge surveillance operation and, increasingly, being told that restraint mattered as much as force. One commander recalls warning his men that, in the context of the peace process, the death of an IRA member could carry consequences far beyond the battlefield. As the Good Friday Agreement approached, the episode asks how soldiers adapted when winning the fight was no longer the only objective, and whether the shadow war helped bring the conflict to an end. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasia pro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Car crashes injure over a million of us every year. Because we're human.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  For over a decade, Waymo's been building a driver that's safer. Statistically, 10 times safer in the cities we serve. Not because humans aren't enough, but because they're everything.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Based on over a 94% reduction in serious injury or worse crash rates. Learn more at waymo.com.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  In this particular scenario, at this particular moment in history, we as soldiers must recognize the life of a terrorist is, on behalf of our nation, worth more than our lives. If one of us die, it isn't going to bring the peace process out. But if one of them die at this particular moment, it could do.

• 1:38Sam Kiley?

  That's Colonel Richard Williams. As the Northern Ireland peace process gathered pace, there were 19,500 British troops and 8,500 police facing off against less than 1,000 IRA. They were still fighting a war, but now killing the enemy could threaten the peace process. So that demanded a different kind of soldiering. I'm Sam Kiley, World Affairs Editor at The Independent, and you are listening to SAS: The Shadow War, the story of the conflict in Northern Ireland, revealed for the first time by Britain's secret soldiers in their own words.

• 2:24Sam Kiley?

  Sectarian violence erupted in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, with Republicans demanding unification with the Irish state. The British Army was sent in. Protest turned to extremist violence and terror attacks. The troubles had begun. And soon, a shadow war was underway. By the 1980s, the IRA was riddled with informants and losing its tactical edge at home. Looking for leverage in future peace negotiations, the IRA intensified its attacks on mainland Britain. In 1996, Surveillance Operative Bob

• 3:06Sam Kiley?

  found himself in a race to stop a massive attack. There were 10 tonnes of explosives, 50 IRA operatives, and one target: London.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  A colleague of mine said recently that when we call it the troubles, it sounds like a bad night out in Glasgow. Yeah, I've always hated the term. It's an awful expression. What it was, was actually a violent, armed, brutal insurrection against the British state. That's the reality. That's the IRA campaign. Taking your campaign to the mainland of the United Kingdom by bombing bands, military bands who are rehearsing, killing a dozen or more at a single go, bombing buses that are transporting soldiers around the country, bombing pubs that are frequented by members of the armed services, but also by members of the general public, and killing dozens.

• 4:02Sam Kiley?

  200 people have been injured in a bomb explosion in the centre of Manchester.

• 4:07Speaker 06

  While the police were checking a suspect van with a remote-controlled device, the bomb went off, an uncontrolled explosion.

• 4:15Speaker 05

  Bombing financial centres, the Bishopsgate bombing. It's a £500 bomb that did something like £1 billion worth of damage to built infrastructure. But it destroyed about 25% of the soft trading of the city of London.

• 4:32Sam Kiley?

  This was a well-planned attack aimed at the centre of government. On fire in Whitehall, the van used to launch mortars at 10 Downing Street while the war cabinet was in session.

• 4:42Speaker 05

  Mortaring 10 Downing Street. One of those mortars went off in the garden at the back of the cabinet office there, where just a few minutes earlier, the entire cabinet had been sitting. The Brighton bombing, which almost killed Margaret Thatcher and her entire cabinet. Bombings on the European mainland at military bases. This is an extraordinary level of violence. And the IRA was being defeated coming into the mid 1990s. It had been substantively defeated in the province. Almost every operation it tried to undertake, almost every one of those operations was going wrong for the IRA. They didn't know which way to turn. They decided on one last grand hurrah to force the British state

• 5:24Speaker 05

  into ceding control of Northern Ireland to the South. And that was by exporting their campaign once again to the mainland. So they conducted a series of operations over the span of about a year, trying to put massive bombs once more into the city of London. And over that period of time, I found myself being seconded to a national intelligence agency to conduct surveillance at the national level against those ASUs. From an alternative intelligence source, we managed to identify five members of an IRA ASU active in London. Three of them so-called sleepers, and two of them bought in from the province.

• 6:06Speaker 05

  And their aim was to put 10 one-tonne bombs, all to be detonated at the same time on the same day, dotted around London. And the targets were Downing Street, Bishopsgate, number two, a bunch of others, you know, power stations, critical, what you term critical infrastructure. And indeed, even one just to be detonated at the South Minns Service Station as a mass casualty effort to kill as many members of the public as possible. So how do we know that was the case? Well, you had that intercept, but through the application of surveillance, we identified a lockup garage in West London.

• 6:50Speaker 05

  And having looked inside the lockup garage, actually more than one, I think, 10 tonnes of homemade explosives, about £200 booster charge, I think called ANFO, a small amount of dynamite, C4 or whatever. And a couple of dozen weapons, in my recall, some thousands of rounds of ammunition. And the idea was that the five-man ASU would have 10 trucks waiting with the bombs all prepped on the backs of the trucks. And about 50 members of the IRA would fly in from different locations throughout Europe, all on the same day, congregate at this lockup, and then drive out their trucks to their individual targets, abandon their trucks, walk away, fly out.

• 7:35Speaker 05

  And a couple of hours later, all those bombs would go off.

• 7:43Speaker 05

  The police were drawn into this, of course. They're involved in surveillance. And the reactive side of it, the SAS, were drawn into an appraisal of what we would do, what the SAS would do. Unsurprisingly, rather than wait for 50 heavily armed members of the IRA to turn up, and who knows what would transpire in the area of the lockup garages, the chief constable decided to police it out. And what that means is just move against the five members of the ASU and disrupt the operation at that point.

• 8:17Speaker 05

  So they did. The two guys that had been flown in from the province were actually staying in a bed and breakfast in Hammersmith. And so police special operations went in there, tiptoed along the corridor, and were just going to break down the door and go in there.

• 8:38Sam Kiley?

  The police crashed through the door and shot IRA quartermaster, Dermot O'Neill. They say he'd sourced the tonnes of explosives found earlier in London.

• 8:49Speaker 05

  And that was the end of that operation. A massive disruption of what would have been by far the largest operation the IRA had ever mounted.

• 9:00Sam Kiley?

  A year later, in 1997, Tony Blair became Prime Minister, and Sinn Féin, led by Gerry Adams, entered negotiations. Publicly, the focus moved toward ending the conflict. Did this mean the SAS took a different approach? SAS soldier Bob picks up the story. Do you feel that it was a mistake for there to be, for the want of a better word, a sort of soft pedaling through the 90s? Can you give me some examples of where there was a softer approach taken? And the reason I ask is if there was a softer approach taken, why wasn't it taken sooner?

• 9:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily say softer approach. I'd say a more restrictive approach. So we weren't deployed as much. An example of good restraint or a different approach was the sniper. We worked against the sniper for many.

• 9:53Sam Kiley?

  Tell me about the sniper. Who's the sniper?

• 9:55Speaker 06

  Sniper in South Armagh, they'd been around South Armagh for a number of years with Isfido shooting soldiers. And his kill rate was quite high. And we spent a lot of time hunting him down.

• 10:09Sam Kiley?

  The sniper was part of a four-man team from the South Armagh Brigade. Two of them, Michael Carreher and Bernard McGinn, were notorious for their involvement in the latest shooting of the last British soldier to die in the troubles. So just describe more about his history. Because I think that that's something that people also forget is that amidst all this, there were bomb makers, there were active service units using Dusche's 12.7 heavy machine guns. It was all kind of, it sounds quite infantry. And then you have these, there were a lot of snipers in Northern Ireland. Was this guy kind of one of the best?

• 10:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, he was a unique man, and he was good. He was good. And the support network he had, surrounded him, protected him. It took us years to get him. And we spent a lot of assets. Hunting him down, trying to find him. We had him, we probably had him nearly a couple of times, but he always managed to get away. And he killed a lot of people. And they used to have a, they used to use a shogun vehicle and they'd have a hole in the back with a barrel sticking out where the number plate was. And they would line up with a five O rifle, shoot a young soldier and then clear off.

• 11:15Sam Kiley?

  Straightforward as that?

• 11:16Speaker 06

  Straightforward as that. They'd plan it, look at it, then you'd hear all various information parts coming across. We knew he was out there. And then, you know, within a matter of hours, you'd have a dead man on the ground, dead young lad on the ground. The last one rest, he was shot while checking the lady's driving licence and the lady, you know, he shot in front of the lady.

• 11:38Sam Kiley?

  I detect more than a lack of respect for him.

• 11:41Speaker 06

  I don't disrespect many people who, who carry a weapon for the right cause. But he, yeah, disrespect for him completely.

• 11:55Speaker 06

  Uh, he was eventually captured with his weapon and arrested. You know, so there's, there's a restraint angle. He was arrested because he complied with the commands on the day when, when the boys turned up.

• 12:10Sam Kiley?

  And the man commanding the boys, better known as the SAS, at the arrest of McGinn and the other snipers, was SAS commander Tom. He has never spoken publicly before about the details of that arrest. And we've disguised his voice.

• 12:28Speaker 05

  Um, my time with special forces there was, there's, the SAS had a composite troop drawn from across the whole regiment that was used in Northern Ireland for, you know, arrest type operations. Um, and I was lucky enough to be in commander there for one year.

• 12:48Sam Kiley?

  And what period was this in?

• 12:50Speaker 05

  This was ninety seven, nineteen ninety seven. So in the context, there'd been a ceasefire. And then that had been somewhat dramatically ended by the Docklands bomb. So I think suddenly got hot when I was there.

• 13:05Sam Kiley?

  I mean, as far as you can recall, you get posted in as the troop commander of a special forces unit working in Northern Ireland, under the umbrella of a peace process. Did you get any briefings about how you would operate in the context of that peace process?

• 13:24Speaker 05

  No, they're absolutely the same.

• 13:27Sam Kiley?

  But you weren't, were you briefed that, that, you know, it was a delicate situation and, and you need to kind of operate with kid gloves? I mean, other people who've operated in this, in the same period said that there was a kind of, an increased concern from the political echelons that the peace process, come what may, should succeed.

• 13:47Speaker 05

  My attitude was that, you know, it's still the same rules of engagement as it ever was. Yeah, there was, you know, underlying, but there'd been an underlying peace process for decades at that stage. He was probably getting closer. But you don't, um, change your rules of engagement or, or anything because of that. I mean, it's still the same law that dictates how you operate.

• 14:11Sam Kiley?

  So can you tell us more about the use of this, this sniper, this fifty caliber, which I think was an American made Barrett in the end? Civilians will be unaware of quite how powerful and extraordinary this weapon is. I mean, it's very much a battlefield weapon, very long range, very large round, could do massive amount of damage to anything it hits or sometimes even comes close to. How did this, the use of this weapon affect your time there?

• 14:41Speaker 05

  Well, we were very much, you know, trying to catch this fella. So just to give you a bit of context, yes, it is extremely powerful. Um, they were using it at quite close range. Um, because quite frankly, they were not very good shots. Um, you know, technically, yes, you could shoot people from, you know, kilometer away. But, um, I ever said that a hundred and fifty meters was a better range for them because they weren't much good. Uh, however, I mean, bloody dangerous at that range, no matter how good your body armour is, is if it hits you in the centre of mass, you're a dead man. Um, and at this stage, I think the total tally is, he killed nine people.

• 15:25Sam Kiley?

  Wow.

• 15:25Speaker 05

  Um, and the ninth was just after I arrived. And then, a few weeks later, he took another shot and hit somebody in the hip rather than centre of mass sort of thing. So the poor guy was a policeman. I mean, he will never walk again properly. When a fifty cow hits you, your bone and everything else is, goes out the other side with it.

• 15:52Sam Kiley?

  Walk us through the kind of effort made to catch this, this killer.

• 15:57Speaker 05

  Well, we were aware that, um, he was operating, a small team, um, we knew from a vehicle. And over the next few months, I can't give the details, what information we did or didn't have. But I suppose it was constantly for about three months. And when you deploy forward, you need lots and lots of manpower that you don't normally have. The troop was a, a small unit. So you'd have to get more people flown across from Hereford. Helicopter, you know, the expense of this, this sort of back and forwards, back and forwards. Lots of, lots of police involved.

• 16:35Sam Kiley?

  An SAS troop in Northern Ireland usually consisted of at most thirty men. If they needed more for a specific operation, they'd be sent from the mainland.

• 16:46Speaker 05

  You've got the regular army operating in this area as well. And you obviously can't have them running around the place when you've got a sniper out trying to kill people. Obviously, that didn't always work perfectly because there was that, um, one policeman who did get shot. Um, but it was a sustained effort for, yeah, three, nearly four months.

• 17:11Sam Kiley?

  And, and did you catch him in the end? And if so, how?

• 17:14Speaker 05

  Yes, we did. We, um, one afternoon, it was in a, a small farm complex just outside Cross McLean, I think. We're in broad daylight and we knew going on to the target. I didn't go on, I was, you know, the fact controller with all the agencies, the police, the this and that and all the rest of it.

• 17:33Sam Kiley?

  This was one year before the Good Friday Agreement was signed.

• 17:37Speaker 05

  But yeah, we didn't know the exact this or that. But just bear in mind, in it, there was at least one sniper who killed nine people with a fifty cow weapon, fifty cow sniper rifle, and a couple of other AK forty sevens and some quite determined people there. So when you're going into that farm complex, you know, we're all professional, but you're still, it concentrates the minds a bit that you've got some people there who have killed and are quite determined to kill again.

• 18:07Sam Kiley?

  And enthusiastic about killing British soldiers above all.

• 18:10Speaker 05

  Yes, yes. Soldiers or, and or policemen.

• 18:15Speaker 05

  We had on the ground on that day, probably about a hundred SAS, thirty of whom were there permanently, the rest sort of reinforced. Um, we had some other, um, surveillance units. There was a specialist police, uh, unit as well. We did, you know, from the handover tea, handover the people to the police as soon as possible. So I suppose in total, a couple of hundred people. Uh, so that's quite difficult to keep all that sort of below the radar in broad daylight in someone like, uh, South Ammar, you know, South Ammar, everyone knows everyone. They would tend to go out and say, who are you? What are you doing here? You know, to protect them, their operations and stuff.

• 19:01Sam Kiley?

  Yeah, one forgets. I mean, people forget that the IRA have dickers out, watchers, which were known as dickers to the military.

• 19:07Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, it was a, they had a fifty man, fifty person bicking screen around.

• 19:13Sam Kiley?

  Wow.

• 19:13Speaker 05

  The, the team itself. So very, very difficult in broad daylight, uh, to have got on target without the cover being blown.

• 19:22Sam Kiley?

  But you, I mean, but you somehow managed this. How is it possible to arrest these individuals at, at, in the final moments, rather than, um, have to use lethal force? Because, I mean, the pattern in the past has often been people such as this quite want to go down fighting, don't they?

• 19:40Speaker 05

  They did put up resistance, there's no doubt about that. They, you know, they thought because they believed their own propaganda that we're just going to turn up and turn them into teabags, as they used to call it. Uh, which is absolute nonsense. But that, they did slightly believe that. So they, they were fighting for their lives, as it were, when they're, you know, in, in a panic, you imagine these people are suddenly pocked out of nowhere.

• 20:03Sam Kiley?

  Can you describe what, what, what did your team do? How did they pop up from nowhere? Did they just drive up in a van? Did they emerge from a hedge? How did it unfold?

• 20:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, they, they were in a barn complex.

• 20:20Speaker 05

  It's a nice sort of gated complex where no one can see them.

• 20:29Speaker 05

  We did manage to get on to target without anybody knowing. And I would say the, a total of eight went on to target immediately. The rest kind of laid, but that was enough to deal with it. And when suddenly, uh, SAS blokes turn up in the midst of it, and they thought they had a secure dicking screen around them that, you know, nobody could get through. It was quite satisfying for everybody to have got on in that manner. Um, and they were absolutely startled, surprised.

• 21:05Speaker 05

  It was basically a four man team.

• 21:10Speaker 05

  Um, the sniper himself, he sniffed something was wrong. And he wasn't in with the other three. And he, the moment sort of things went live and noisy, he was off in a shot, absolute shot. And luckily, somebody out of the corner of their eye, they saw, you know, a man running at high speed. Um, and he and a couple of others gave chase. Otherwise, he would have got away. Um, but yeah, there's quick thinking, you know, there's, people have got to think on their feet. Um, and they got him, he made it a couple of hundred meters and then uh, was knackered basically as it hid under a bush, a big thorn bush.

• 21:55Speaker 05

  But they saw where he went and they got him out. Um, and the rest were all sort of taken in, in the, uh, bound complex. And very soon afterwards, handed over to the police. So we got police on scene and, you know, as forensics and all this other, um,

• 22:14Speaker 05

  procedure to make sure you get convictions for it afterwards. The police have confirmed that two rifles have been recovered. One was a Barrett .50 with a telescopic sight and the other, an AK-47 assault rifle.

• 22:26Sam Kiley?

  A quantity of ammunition for both rifles was also found.

• 22:31Sam Kiley?

  McGinn was handed three life sentences for murder in 1999. And that included the killing of the last British soldier to die during the troubles, Lance Bombardier Stephen Restorick. On top of that, he got 490 years for other IRA offenses. McGinn was released after serving 16 months under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from Ted's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over a hundred dollars off your first year at camtasia pro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Car crashes injure over a million of us every year.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Because we're human.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  For over a decade, Waymo's been building a driver that's safer.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Statistically, 10 times safer in the cities we serve.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Not because humans aren't enough,

• 23:59Speaker 01

  but because they're everything.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Based on over a 94% reduction in serious injury or worse crash rates. Learn more at waymo.com.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Hi, this is Nikayla Matthews-Acole from Side Hustle Pro. This holiday, the difference between buyers just checking things out and checking out comes down to the last few clicks. PayPal Checkout is a trusted conversion engine fueled by 400 million active PayPal and Venmo accounts. Add Pay Later and turn holiday shoppers into regulars. 96% of Pay Later shoppers are repeat users. PayPal is built for all business. Get started at paypal.com/business. Disclaimer, PayPal Pay Later data, eight markets, March 2025 to February 2026. Repeat users, more than one Pay Later purchase in the past year.

• 24:47Sam Kiley?

  By the mid 1990s, it was clear that neither side was going to win. There was no alternative to peace. The SAS believes that it played a big part in forcing the IRA to talk. Tell me more about the IRA, their nature and their evolution. You had, you had eyes on these people for a significant period of time. You know, and what was it that really brought them to the negotiating table?

• 25:14Speaker 05

  Well, what brought the IRA to the negotiating table, without a shadow of a doubt, is that they'd been pressured to such an extent militarily and through processes of intelligence and subversion of members of their own organization. They didn't know who to trust within their own organization. And the consequence of that was that they felt they couldn't mount a single operation without that operation being compromised. In other words, they had lost the military, the military battle.

• 25:44Sam Kiley?

  The special forces believed that the battle was being won in the shadows.

• 25:51Sam Kiley?

  Richard Williams, then a young captain, took command of an SAS troop at one of the most sensitive points in the peace process.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  One ends up being commanding the SAS troop in Northern Ireland at the end of one's SAS troop commanding tour. So relatively speaking, you go there with a, with a lot of experience and a lot of Northern Ireland-specific training. But when, when we arrived, when I arrived there, um, the peace process was very advanced. And every operation conducted by conventional or special operations forces or police forces or intelligence forces was all geared

• 26:37Speaker 03

  to supporting that peace process. In so many respects, by that moment, the IRA that had been a very active and dangerous element of Northern Irish and British, I say society, but the environment, you know, bombing Downing Street and so on, was on the back foot. And they'd transitioned to talking their way to a solution. And so we had to be incredibly careful or mindful of the fact that the talking shop was having its day. And everything that we need, we were going to do, if we were going to do anything at all,

• 27:18Speaker 03

  was going to be geared to that very sensitive period of negotiations. We did a number of operations there. Uh, and in the main, it actually, um, turned out to be against elements of the IRA that were conducting criminal activity to raise money or to support their operations or to intimidate in certain areas by a criminal activity. And so into those circumstances, you can imagine me having the conversations with my very experienced and good and very well-trained and disciplined troops. And saying, right, let's look at possible outcomes here. We go into this hypothetical box where there's terrorists and you in it.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  And what could happen as a result of that combat, um, action, if a combat action is initiated, is a terrorist is killed and you walk away alive. That scenario has the potential to unpick this peace process that we're doing. Look, in this particular scenario, at this particular moment in history, we as soldiers must recognize the life of a terrorist is, on behalf of our nation, worth more than our lives.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  It makes you think, doesn't it?

• 28:38Sam Kiley?

  They didn't just turn around and say, fuck that, boss. If somebody waves a gun at me, he's going to get the good news.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  If someone waved a gun at them and looked like they were going to kill friends, their colleagues or themselves, they were perfectly when they're right to kill them. But what I wanted them to do was to look where possible for any opportunity to attain moral superiority. I mean, that's not in a sort of I'm right, you're wrong sense, but in terms of-

• 29:03Sam Kiley?

  A political sense.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  Kill the courage, kill surprise was very important. Do whatever you can to make that other guy think twice before he goes for his guns.

• 29:17Sam Kiley?

  A soldier's belief that his life was worth less than a so-called terrorist was the fallout from the political compromises offered to Republican paramilitaries to achieve peace. Early release from jail and so-called letters of comfort meant that IRA members still on the run did not risk arrest based on available evidence. No such pass was given to British forces. Which seems ironic because the special forces believe that they played a major role in forcing the IRA to negotiate. Others, like journalist Mary Kelly, who reported for the Belfast Telegraph and lived through the peace process, are not convinced.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  I think, uh, I think, I think it is a theory. I think it is a theory. I think it's a theory more beloved of people who believe in the military standpoint. I think it was a factor, but I don't think it was the overriding factor. I think the factor that really brought an end was the notion that Sinn Fein had learned post 1981 that they could pursue a political strategy.

• 30:31Sam Kiley?

  That strategy came from the surprise election of IRA member Bobby Sands to the British Parliament. He was, at the time, on hunger strike in the May's Prison, a few miles south of Belfast. It showed the Republicans that they could now gain political support among the wider nationalist communities and even beyond.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Their votes were increasing all the time, but they went down anytime there was a major IRA incident. So they were learning the lesson that politics was a possible way out. I think there would have been a world, there would have been a war weariness as well. You know, a lot of Republicans spent some very long years in, in, in- And there were some people who came out of prison and didn't particularly want their young, their kids going through this, the same kind of life that they had led. There also were, were some people who thought that the IRA had been very much penetrated

• 31:35Speaker 01

  by informers, which, you know, some of them were at the very heart of the Sinn Féin movement, like people like Dennis Donaldson, like Freddie Scapatici, who was known as Stickknife. I mean, he was a very senior IRA operative who had been responsible for, he'd been part of what the IRA called the nutting gang, where he, his job was supposedly to root out informers, but clearly he was rooting out people who were suspicious of him. So there, there was a sense that it was, it was going nowhere.

• 32:11Sam Kiley?

  They could win through the ballot box.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Well, yes, I mean, there was famously Danny Morrison's quote where he said, um, that they would take power with the arm a light in one hand and the ballot box in the other. But they'd learned from the time of the hunger strikes, from the success of Bobby Sands, that they could actually do that. And as it turned out, they overtook the other nationalist party, the SDLP. And now they're in government. Now there'd be a lot of ex IRA people who are pretty sore at the idea that they spent maybe 20 years in prison for, you know, an administration up at Stormont.

• 32:52Sam Kiley?

  Well, that, that's the, the, the other side of the claims of betrayal, I guess, over this, uh, the consequences of the peace process.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 33:00Sam Kiley?

  Brian Rowan, former BBC Northern Ireland security correspondent.

• 33:05Speaker 05

  I think in the end, um, I think all sides recognised that we were in a military steelmate. So if you, if you look at Gibraltar, if you look at Loch Call, if you look at Drumnichilly, the army might think in those situations, they're winning. If you look at Ballygolly, if you look at the Lisburn bus bomb, if you look at the bomb at the Deal Barracks, if you look at the mortar bombs that are fired towards Downing Street, then the IRA might have had this view on, on occasions that it was winning. But, but I think the big interventions, politically and militarily, are in that, that phase of the, the early nineties, where you have a British Secretary of State saying that it was difficult to envisage a military defeat of the IRA. And then that asked the question

• 33:47Speaker 05

  of the IRA, could they militarily defeat the British? Both could cause each other a lot of harm, a lot of damage, but could they actually win? And I think it is in the understanding that, that neither side could win, that we then find a way and a path to the peace process and eventually to the, to the, the ceasefires and the political agreements.

• 34:12Speaker 07

  The idea that if one side wins something in Northern Ireland, the other losers is gone. The essence of what we have agreed is a choice. We are all winners or all losers. It is mutually assured benefit or mutually assured destruction.

• 34:30Sam Kiley?

  On the 10th of April, 1998, the Good Friday Agreement was signed. Seventy-one per cent of the Northern Irish voters backed it, as did 94% in the Republic. After 30 years of conflict, peace had become possible.

• 34:49Sam Kiley?

  It's been forward 30 years, and many in the special forces believe that their role in bringing about that political agreement has been widely smeared, and they risk prosecutions decades later for actions fought for the British government through what they call lawfare. SAS Commander David is one of those with experience of this warfare in the courts.

• 35:17Speaker 05

  The government or various governments have wanted to draw a veil over the operations that were conducted against the IRA, despite the fact that they succeeded. The IRA would not have come to the, to the conference room had, had we not won the shadow war against them in the eighties and nineties. But despite the fact that that policy, that, that, that doctrine, if you like, of the application of specialist military support in, in response to high-grade intelligence worked, there has been a reluctance on the part of government to kind of own that, to, to, to trumpet it. And I think it's partly because they are sensitive to the, to the kind of feelings, if you like, of Sinn Féin and the nationalists,

• 35:59Speaker 05

  and partly because they felt it, there was a bigger game to play in terms of bringing nationalists on side and making the Good Friday Agreement, which I entirely get, I understand that. But the problem we are, we're at now is, after 30 years of that process, there's been a gradual acceptance, unchallenged, of the other side's view of operations. And that has distorted the picture, if you like, of, of what we did in Northern Ireland.

• 36:21Sam Kiley?

  Do, do you think that, that, in your words, acceptance of, of what the other, what the IRA, the nationalist movement, their, their, their version of, of history, do you think that that is because there is a concern at, at, in government levels, that if they don't accept that form of history, that history could repeat itself?

• 36:41Speaker 05

  I think that is certainly true. I, I, I say certainly true, I mean, I don't even know that for a fact, but I think it's very likely to be true. Yeah, yeah.

• 36:48Sam Kiley?

  So it's easier to throw you guys, in your view, under the bus than, um, do a full kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission process here? Because one of the intriguing things to me is that the, it, it, as part of the Good Friday Agreement, the military echelon, they, they were left out of the conversation, if you like. Why do you think that was?

• 37:11Speaker 05

  Well, I think, I'll answer that question in a second, but I mean, going back to what you said at the beginning of your statement there, I think the history of Ireland, the history of British involvement in Ireland going back, you know, centuries, but particularly the last hundred years, has been of the British government kind of kicking the can down the road whenever it's been difficult. So, so there's been a long history of kind of pushing things into the long grass. And in this case, I think, Good Friday Agreement came along, lots of compromises were made, you know, I think it formally accepted a good thing. But a lot of loose ends not tied up, to be tied up later but never actually tied up. And so a lot of the stuff was allowed to kind of dangle at that point. And I think the bit about, for example, you talked about the, the inequality between the treatment

• 37:55Speaker 05

  of terrorists and the treatment of soldiers, was a loose end that should have been gripped at the time, should have been called out immediately afterwards, wasn't, and is still with us.

• 38:05Sam Kiley?

  But, but I wonder whether it was a loose end or incompetence, and I agree with you, that if, if anybody smells a conspiracy, there'll be a cock up. But was there an assumption, do you think, at the time, that there was no need to ask or, or write in immunity for the military because it was explicit in the legal framework under which you were operating at the time?

• 38:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think there are a couple of issues going there. I mean, one is that there was, I think, particularly amongst unionist MPs and activists, there was an unwillingness to sign up to anything that provided equality in terms of kind of, um, equal-handed.

• 38:44Sam Kiley?

  Sort of moral.

• 38:45Speaker 05

  Moral, moral, if you like, between the terrorists and the soldiers. So, so there was that going on at an emotional level. I think there was also, um, at a kind of legal level, um, and by the way, I fully subscribe to this view, there was a sense that no one should get away with a crime. And I agree with that entirely. I've never heard a soldier, never heard a soldier suggesting that, that they should get away with a crime committed in Northern Ireland. If I've committed a crime in Northern Ireland, I expect to be held to, held to account. And, and to my knowledge, none of my men did. So, so, um, I think there were two things going on there, basically. But, but for, so I think, for whatever reason, um, it was accepted that the terrorists, um, be they in jail or be they being investigated, or be they simply suspected terrorists, should, should be essentially

• 39:28Speaker 05

  let off. I mean, we can argue about immunity. The current, the current government will say quite accurately that no immunities were given because they weren't, but prisoners were released wholesale from prison. Um, you know, terrorists were given less of comfort so they're no longer being investigated. It was immunity but by another name, if you like. But soldiers were not.

• 39:53Sam Kiley?

  At the time, would you, if somebody had come along and said, here are your immunity papers, would you have been pissed off? Insulted? Would you have said, what the hell do I need this for?

• 40:03Speaker 05

  I would have kind of laughed and put it in my pocket and carried on with life. I mean, I, I don't believe I need immunity from, um, from criminal proceedings because I don't believe I've committed any crimes. But, but I would have been happy to put the thing in my, in my, in my back pocket for, in case it was ever necessary.

• 40:20Sam Kiley?

  In the next episode, we will find out what the consequences of this new lawfare are for special forces either serving or retired now and in the future.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  I think there've been one or two suicides. It's definitely led to family breakups, mental problems for veterans, et cetera, et cetera. A hundred per cent, a hundred per cent.

• 40:42Speaker 06

  There were bombs going off in every major city from Birmingham to, to London. Major explosions on the British mainland. Try and explain that to a judge, a jury.

• 40:50Sam Kiley?

  It's massively difficult because it's incomprehensible in today's society.

• 41:05Sam 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 design 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.

• 41:29Sam 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.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over a hundred dollars off your first year at camtasia pro dot com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Car crashes injure over a million of us every year because we're human. For over a decade, Waymo's been building a driver that's safer. Statistically, 10 times safer in the cities we serve. Not because humans aren't enough, but because they're everything.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  Based on over a 94% reduction in serious injury or worse crash rates, learn more at waymo.com.