Episode 4 Cat and Mouse

By the mid-1980s, intelligence had become one of the British state’s most important weapons in Northern Ireland, with covert surveillance teams working the streets of Belfast knowing discovery could prove fatal. In episode four of SAS: The Shadow War, The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley meets ‘Bob’, a veteran surveillance operator, and ‘Liz’, a pioneering former female intelligence operative speaking publicly for the very first time. They reveal how secret teams shadowed suspects, navigated anti-surveillance traps and operated alone in hostile territory. From a stolen submachine gun to the murder of Corporals Derek Wood and David Howes, the episode reveals how a single mistake could have deadly consequences, and asks why so much of Britain’s intelligence war remains secret. 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

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organisation with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Two soldiers are murdered at an IRA funeral in Belfast. They were dragged from their car and shot.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  Anyone who was caught conducting close surveillance, and there were a number of incidents where this did happen, the implications for you would have been torture, execution.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  They saw a whole bunch of people in front of them, panicked, turned right, got away from the crowds a little bit, then turned left and then drove right into the middle of this funeral procession.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  Eventually, the car's windows were put in and attempts were made to drag the two soldiers through them.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Tried to reverse out of it, got blocked in very quickly and then were dragged out of their cars, thrown into a park, stripped, almost naked, brutalised, badly beaten.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Identified as incorrectly as being members of the SAS.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  An order was given by the IRA, well, nut them then, kill them.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  And then somebody came up and using the gun that one of those soldiers had actually dropped, trying to come out of his car.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  They were both executed on that wasteland. So yes, the implications, if you got caught, were dire. Almost certainly, you would not survive.

• 1:57Sam Kiley?

  The two corporals from the Royal Corps of Signals were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But surveillance operatives faced the same jeopardy every day because intelligence gathering was essential to the special forces. Operators mostly worked alone and lightly armed, and they were surrounded by people who wanted to kill them.

• 2:23Sam Kiley?

  I'm Sam Kiley, world affairs editor of The Independent, and you are listening to SAS: The Shadow War.

• 2:35Sam Kiley?

  In this series, special forces soldiers are breaking cover for the first time to reveal their secret world, and in their own words.

• 2:45Sam Kiley?

  By the mid 1980s, at the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland, intelligence, not firepower, had become the British state's greatest weapon. But intelligence didn't just appear, it had to be gathered, one footstep at a time, by specially trained men and women. They knew that discovery meant death. In this episode, we'll meet the men and women who walked the streets and hid in the hedgerows, always in mortal danger. We'll hear why so much of their work back then is still secret today.

• 3:24Sam Kiley?

  But first, I spoke to SAS soldier and surveillance operator Bob, a veteran of two tours in Northern Ireland, and I asked him to explain why intelligence gathering became so important.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  When the army first went into Northern Ireland in response to the contemporary troubles in 1969, they were essentially positioned between, what are effectively two warring communities, to try and maintain the peace.

• 3:52Sam Kiley?

  These warring communities were Protestant loyalists who wanted to stay part of Britain, and Catholic Republicans who sought a united Ireland.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  But of course, the army itself then became the target, particularly for the IRA. And so in trying to respond to the violence that was being perpetrated against themselves, against the opposing entity over there, the loyalist community, and the various instruments of state, the policemen, the judges, etc., politicians,

• 4:22Speaker 02

  it found itself in an intelligence vacuum. Didn't really know what it was trying to respond to. How do you find these people? I mean, they're hiding their identities, they're operating from within the civil community, principally from the Catholic community, not exclusively, I have to say, but principally from the Catholic community. So how do you find out who they are, where they are, in order to be able to confound what they're doing, stop them doing what they were doing?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  So there are numbers of different ways you can do that. You can intercept communications, you can try and develop sources, human intelligence sources. But a third way of doing that is to go out and, with a start point, whether it's a building or a person that you know who is involved in this, begin to tell them around, to begin to follow them. So that's the application of physical surveillance, human surveillance, as opposed to technical surveillance. And you can actually then begin to blend those things together. So this particular organisation then was, very strongly in its early days, just doing physical surveillance. It was going out and staking out houses, businesses, people's places of work, etc.,

• 5:36Speaker 02

  and then following them around and trying to figure how they were linking up to other people. So if target A is talking to person B over here, then it's quite possible that person B is also a member of that organisation. And that's how you begin to build that intelligence picture. So this organisation, initially, an absolutely tiny organisation, it never was very big, I'm not going to give you the numbers of it, but it was absolutely tiny.

• 6:06Sam Kiley?

  The organisation that Bob is referring to was the then recently formed 14 Intelligence Company, known as the DET, a secretive covert intelligence unit established to work in Northern Ireland. Well, it's called 14th Intelligence Company, so.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 6:23Sam Kiley?

  About a hundred.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Can't tell you, but it's smaller than the company group, smaller than that, much smaller. So started tailing people around, beginning to build up something of a card index of people, targets, if you like.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  And then trying to collate that information into an intelligence picture. An intelligent picture could become exploited, either exploited by setting these people up, selling them up is probably the wrong expression, realising what they were doing. And then when they actually started to do something, maybe they're getting the police to come and arrest them or the army to come and arrest them. Or maybe just letting them continue on so that they can give you more intelligence. The more people that one person has met, the more people that become identified, then the bigger your intelligence picture becomes. And then as you become more sophisticated in this operation, you begin to introduce things like technical surveillance,

• 7:24Speaker 02

  whether it's cameras or whatever, use your imagination. And you can become more effective, utilise technical sources to further develop the picture.

• 7:34Sam Kiley?

  So that involved, from position of an operator, that means you've got to blend into the society. You've got to look the part and sound the part. You've got to have a backstory, a legend, as the spies call it.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  That's very true. This particular organisation wasn't a bunch of army soldiers, men and women, and I lean into the fact that there are women involved in this as well.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Not pretending to be a bottle of Guinness on a pub bar.

• 8:05Sam Kiley?

  Yeah.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so not infiltrating the IRA, infiltrating the paramilitaries, but observing them, usually observing from a distance. Sometimes a distance would be a decent distance, sometimes it would be pretty close up. But you're not pretending to be a member of the IRA, so it's not that form of internal surveillance.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  But yes, it does mean that you've got to go into hostile areas, you've got to go into very, very difficult areas.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Sometimes in circumstances where there is a lot of tension, and I can identify any number of occasions where I personally would have been conducting physical surveillance on the streets of Belfast, which is where I was primarily based, and going into dark alleyways, following these guys into dark alleyways, trying to figure what they're doing. Is something building here? Is there the prospect of being able to get the, either the police or the army to come in to do an interdiction? Because they're putting together a bomb, putting together a mortar, their intent on creating murder, mayhem and havoc. Or is it the question that they're just meeting? In which case you don't want to do any of that stuff. You need to allow it to run.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  And then maybe take a new target away, identify where that individual lives, where he works, who he is connected to. So yes, very close at times, stood off and just observing.

• 9:34Sam Kiley?

  But just observing isn't easy. Being a grey person in the crowd is a specific skill. Liz has that skill. Liz was first deployed to Northern Ireland in the spring of nineteen seventy seven, when she was just nineteen years old. And a year later, she joined Fourteen Intelligence Company, the detachment or the D E T. This most secret unit was trained by and worked with the S A S. That training is hard to undo.

• 10:06Sam Kiley?

  Liz is of course not her real name. She's never spoken publicly before, and I met her in the studio. And as I was about to discover even decades later, her training was still ingrained. What followed was an interview which left me wondering whether she's told me anything at all.

• 10:26Sam Kiley?

  Very unusual to be able to speak to anybody from Fourteen Intelligence Company, the D E T, what is now the S R R, Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Because by their very nature, you are the kind of most secret of the secret in, or should be, I guess. Can you describe for me though, what your role was particularly in the Northern Irish context?

• 10:56Speaker 05

  I am now in my mid to late sixties. And when I deployed first with the D E T, as it was called then, I was nineteen years old. The majority of the females pool that they were looking from were coming from the Women's Royal Army Corps, which was a very different thing from all the equal opportunities of the current service. And women then, and again, I'm not going to articulate this accurately, but they didn't carry weapons, for instance. So they were in support. And I think when I joined, I had a few scattering of A O levels. And if you had those, you then joined the Royal Military Police or the Intelligence Corps. So that's what I joined. And actually, the Intelligence Corps at that time was probably

• 11:42Speaker 05

  way for women in the armed services, was ahead of the game.

• 11:48Sam Kiley?

  There are tiny numbers of women in the special forces even today. But their role was pioneered in Northern Ireland with the D E T, long before twenty eighteen, when women were finally allowed in combat roles, at least officially.

• 12:02Speaker 05

  I think with the D E T, which was formed in nineteen seventy three, the founding joke was that two great big heavy things with headscarves on, sort of kissing and snogging on a dark night, just didn't work. So I think from the very outset, the commanders at the time sort of said, it was going to be so much easier if we put women on the ground. But I don't think that the actual political agreement to be able to deploy women in that happened until nineteen seventy eight. So the first three courses that went through were nineteen seventy eight. The recruiting process was probably a very ad hoc thing of, oh, I know somebody.

• 12:39Sam Kiley?

  Intelligence operatives were back then often recruited with a tap on the shoulder.

• 12:44Speaker 05

  The personalities or the characteristics for the D E T were a different beast from, say, two two special air service.

• 12:53Sam Kiley?

  The D E T recruited from within the military only, and anonymity was preferred. Tattoos, prominent scars, even obvious birthmarks could get you killed.

• 13:04Speaker 05

  I mean, the recruiting was fitness, intelligence, reliability and motivation. But I can remember many very small, usually Scotsmen, who would look like a wino. You know, they weren't six foot four and pistachio moustaches, so they had to blend into that environment.

• 13:30Speaker 05

  So my first tour was two and a half years. So you're working in, I say, an urban environment for me in Belfast. You get to know it like the back of your hand. But I laughed with somebody recently, I heard somebody say, you question them about their accent.

• 13:48Speaker 05

  I think once or twice, I went into a shop in the Andisand, Anditanda area of West Belfast. And I might have gone, mm, or whatever. But, you know, I'm well spoken and I would never have attempted to speak with an Irish accent. But so we weren't trying to integrate ourselves into those communities. We were very much working, you know, fitting in.

• 14:10Sam Kiley?

  But your role was surveillance?

• 14:12Speaker 05

  Our role with surveillance, incredibly complex, but it's also incredibly simple. And it's a series of moves from A to B. So, you know, you left your house this morning, you walked to the bus stop or whatever, a car came to pick you up, but you know.

• 14:27Sam Kiley?

  A car came, that's very glamorous, yeah, it happens all the time.

• 14:29Speaker 05

  But, you know, it is remarkably simple and it's so quick. If you're following somebody else in a car and they stop and park up and get out, you know, to have two people in the vehicle, somebody can just drop off and then react on to that on foot process. So the women had to do all, a lot of sort of training on combat and close quarter battle. Because you would be on your own, on foot, in very, very hard, hard areas of the city of Belfast, yeah. And for my time, we worked majority in West Belfast. So, you know, there were jobs in North Belfast or East Belfast, East Belfast being predominantly Protestant. And there were jobs where we worked against Protestant organisations.

• 15:13Sam Kiley?

  In those days, women were barred from combat roles. The Northern Ireland was different. Here, they were essential.

• 15:21Speaker 05

  It's never how it is in the movies, is it? Because always when you're dramatising surveillance, somebody drives off and you see the person drive off behind them. But surveillance was just.

• 15:34Sam Kiley?

  Slightly unconvincing, I've always found that.

• 15:36Speaker 05

  Yes, hours and hours of, you know, whether people were in urban O P's or whether technical devices or listening to or vehicles having devices, you know, tracking them.

• 15:48Sam Kiley?

  Did you put the bugs in and on?

• 15:50Speaker 05

  No, no, no, I mean.

• 15:51Sam Kiley?

  There was somebody else?

• 15:52Speaker 05

  Again, my memories are very junior. And my skills set was mobile surveillance, which is on foot, in a vehicle.

• 16:02Sam Kiley?

  Very high risk job. What would have happened if you'd been discovered?

• 16:05Speaker 05

  Well, I did, didn't have the pleasures, but I did the informing for the families of the two corporals that were murdered in Northern Ireland. Now, they weren't from the D E T, but they were attached arms or from that time. And so that's obviously your question, doesn't it? You know?

• 16:26Sam Kiley?

  You would have been killed.

• 16:27Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah.

• 16:30Sam Kiley?

  We'll hear more about how corporals Derek Woods and David Howes were pulled from their car and shot dead for being in the wrong place at the wrong time later in this episode.

• 16:42Sam Kiley?

  Did that weigh on you as a nineteen, twenty year old?

• 16:44Speaker 05

  No, not at all, because you're naive. So it was a great skill set to be young. And I wasn't the only young person. I mean, the majority were in their twenties sort of thing, but there were certain people. But yes, as a nineteen year old, I had no understanding of the threat.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  I remember when I first worked, before I even went to the detachment, I remember being shown by a special branch officer what, in fact Protestant women had done to a woman, a fellow female, who was going out with a soldier, for instance, and, you know, and they'd scalped her. You know, so it was a horrible image.

• 17:24Sam Kiley?

  Good grief. Did you yourself have any close calls?

• 17:31Speaker 05

  No, not really. I mean,

• 17:35Sam Kiley?

  I mean, close calls in an ordinary civilian sense.

• 17:38Speaker 05

  I laugh.

• 17:39Sam Kiley?

  Not close calls in the fact that you spend your entire working life in the special forces sense. Liz was trained to give nothing away. She just can't shake her ingrained resistance to speaking to people like me, or indeed anyone, about her work in the shadows. She knows this and insisted on a second interview session when she opened up a little.

• 18:02Speaker 05

  So I did an awful lot of time on the instructional side. And so much of the instructional side for Northern Ireland was based on small stories about where things went wrong.

• 18:12Sam Kiley?

  Indeed.

• 18:12Speaker 05

  So that you learn. But for myself particularly, I remember working against the I N L A.

• 18:19Sam Kiley?

  The I N L A was the Irish National Liberation Army, another republican faction fighting for a united Ireland.

• 18:27Speaker 05

  And luckily, in the end, they all imploded and sort of shot each other. There were two characters, and I could name them, but I shouldn't do that because it's always very emotive, the Northern Ireland story, isn't it?

• 18:40Sam Kiley?

  No, we're literally here to try to tell the detail of what happened.

• 18:45Speaker 05

  So what is the level of murder? But they were particularly unpleasant group.

• 18:52Sam Kiley?

  Right.

• 18:53Speaker 05

  Very vicious and they would pick on very weak targets or things.

• 18:59Speaker 05

  They had committed many murders. And there were two situations, but I remember specifically walking through the Clonard, which is sort of urban areas, which is very sort of streets, very crisscross, very small. You know, the epitome of what you'd imagine for North, for West Belfast.

• 19:15Sam Kiley?

  Right, yeah.

• 19:16Speaker 05

  And, you know, they weren't discussing coffee mornings, but I remember walking down the street after them. And then they would have turned left. And you suddenly realise that you're being sucked into what, in very basic terms, is a classic anti-surveillance trap. Because all you have to do is see somebody behind you. Why would somebody else go three sides of a square? I remember thinking, oh, if I hadn't been female, if I'd been a young man in his twenties, those two, even though they were engrossed in their conversation, would have.

• 19:48Sam Kiley?

  Would have pinged you.

• 19:51Speaker 05

  There were numerous occasions where you were asked, especially as a woman, to either park a vehicle because it was a, in fact, an observation post because it had an operator inside it. And when you parked that vehicle, you had to park it incredibly accurately. Because if you're talking about angles of somebody looking out of a tiny hole, out of a boot, if you park your vehicle six inches too long, almost, they're going to lose the sight of the doorways, whatever it is that they're there for. But you had to be so right on making sure that the interior was the right interior for that particular vehicle.

• 20:32Speaker 05

  I remember doing cover for a close target recce. And in fact, the close target recce was, I think it was against, yes, it was against a Protestant target. So we were parked up on the Shankill Road. And all we were there for, myself and a male partner, was just to cover the guys going in and doing some technical attack on some explosives, I think they were.

• 20:56Sam Kiley?

  Messing with.

• 20:57Speaker 05

  They were messing with. But as we approached our vehicle coming back, in those days, one of the support weapons we had was the little M10 machine guns, which is a very small square. Now, it might seem a bit crazy to you, but we had one of our support weapons in the glovebox. And as we came back to our car, I remember him saying to me, and he just, we kept walking. And all he spotted was the glovebox had the little interior light, and he knew that somebody had been into our vehicle.

• 21:31Sam Kiley?

  They'd stolen your gun.

• 21:32Speaker 05

  Stolen our gun. But I remember the partner, recognizing the interior light was on, we kept on walking, walked down the Shankill Road a little bit.

• 21:41Sam Kiley?

  But that's the point, is that one little thing that's slightly off.

• 21:44Speaker 05

  Tiny, tiny, tiny things that could.

• 21:46Sam Kiley?

  And if that light had been broken.

• 21:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:49Sam Kiley?

  Then what would have happened then? I mean.

• 21:51Speaker 05

  Well, again, they would have thought we were Catholics.

• 21:54Sam Kiley?

  They might have attacked you.

• 21:55Speaker 05

  Up to badness and, well, they would, yeah.

• 21:57Sam Kiley?

  He would have come for you.

• 21:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:00Sam Kiley?

  She's never publicly spoken about what she got up to in Northern Ireland. And she's doing so now, she says, to put the work of special forces soldiers like her into context amid the threat of prosecution under new British legislation. She won her special forces parachute wings and the Queen's gallantry medal. She survived. Others did not.

• 22:25Sam Kiley?

  I put it to Surveillance Unit Commander Paul that allowing these very young people to risk their lives must have been difficult. As an officer, you're in an operations room, running these very small one, two-person teams very often. I mean, several of them, groups, no doubt, out on the ground. Was that a responsibility that weighed heavily on you? I mean, knowing that these people your age, young people, were out there in, very much in harm's way?

• 22:57Speaker 06

  Everybody's done the training. You know, the teams, the degree of trust within the teams was very high. And you're also very reliant on, you know, the experienced operators in the teams as well, to be making some of the important calls. So, yeah, I don't think, you know, maybe it's a function of youth. I don't think any of us lost any sleep over it. But there were, there were a number of incidents where operators had to use lethal force in order to prevent themselves being captured. You know, in at least one case, somebody confronted by two terrorists in an alleyway, and being in the process

• 23:40Speaker 06

  of being manhandled by them, but managing to get themselves free and kill the terrorists involved. Another one with somebody being chased by pyre in a car, being fired at, and eventually finding the car disabled and therefore having to, you know, return fire from the car. Yeah, I mean, they wouldn't happen very often, but when they did, it brought home to you why you'd gone through the training that you had done and underscored the fact that, you know, arguably, when, when things are, because if surveillance going well and is staying covert, you know, one of the great risks is perhaps a false sense of security and complacency. And, you know, some of these, these incidents often,

• 24:24Speaker 06

  if nothing else, serve as a timely reminder of just what the risks were out there.

• 24:33Sam Kiley?

  Like Liz and Commander Paul, the operative we're calling Blue would only talk to me if his identity was kept secret.

• 24:49Sam Kiley?

  Back in March 1978, Blue was coming to the end of what he describes as an uneventful tour in Northern Ireland. He was looking forward to going home and having a well-deserved rest.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  So, so we were scouting on behalf of a technical operation that was going to be mounted later that night. So we were tasked, have a look at the city and just see, just get a feel, you know, is it very active, is it very quiet? You know, if it's quiet, we'll go ahead. If it's active, we'll probably abort. So, so, so we kind of, I took like the southern end of the city and he took the north. So, so we were like, you know, quite some distance apart. So not as if you, you've got your, your body run the next corner, you know, you know, you just, so, so, anyway, so we started to scout the, the city. And unfortunately, it was the anniversary of internment.

• 25:42Sam Kiley?

  Internment, which is imprisonment without trial, was first imposed in Northern Ireland by Edward Heath's Conservative government in 1971, under the Special Powers Act, in an effort to suppress violent unrest. It was highly criticised at the time and lasted until December 1975. During that time, 1,981 people were interned, 1,874 nationalists and 107 loyalists.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  So clearly, there was lots of bonfires, lots of demonstrations, because it's the anniversary of internment. So clearly, the locals weren't happy. So we were reporting this back to HQ and saying, obviously, there's bonfire here, bonfire there. And, and, and just at the point where we were reaching where, you know, somebody was gonna, would have said, okay, right, let's abort. Clearly, this is not a good night. And we should never have gone out on this particular night. Anyway, and so, but before that message came out, it was too late because I, I was going down this particular road in Derry. And, and I drove through this, this crossroads. And at this crossroads, there were about 20 youngish

• 26:58Speaker 03

  guys, you know, sort of 18, 19, that kind of age group. And they weren't blocking the road, they were on this grass verge, just to the side of the road. But as I drove through the, through this crossroads, all of them, all their eyes were focused on me. And I thought, you know, I didn't look at them. At the corner of my eye, I could feel these stares.

• 28:01Speaker 03

  And as I kind of drove through this junction and drove past these individuals, the road very, very, very slightly kind of bent to the, to the, to the, to the left. And so you couldn't quite see around the corner. It wasn't a very sharp left-hand bend or anything. So I couldn't see where it was around the corner. Anyway, so I went another, maybe 50 yards or so. And as I started to turn this left-hand bend, the whole road across, you know, quite across the road, was blocked with, you know, beer barrels, you know, anything they could grab hold of. So there was physical kind of blockages on the road, in addition to, I don't know, maybe 30, 40 guys. I mean, there was a lot, a lot, a lot of men. So,

• 28:44Speaker 03

  again, first thing that came to my mind was, they don't know who I am, because otherwise I'd be incoming fire, you know, end up. So, so, and I thought, I can't drive through them clearly, you know, because there's all these barricades. The only way out is to go back, because you couldn't turn left, couldn't turn, turn right. Because of course, again, they choose these places carefully to trap you. And so I very gradually just came to a stop, again, no sudden movements. And, and I thought, right, I'm going to do a two-point turn, not a three-point turn, two-point turn's a little bit quicker. None of this kind of Hollywood stuff where you do like a jockey and all that. I mean, that just telegraphs to everybody that clearly you've got an issue and you want to get away quickly. So I just stopped, that's all, a two-point turn. So I start, so I pulled up with all

• 29:29Speaker 03

  these people around me, you know, and, and, and so I started to commence doing a two-point turn. And, and they were all, you know, kind of looking inside the car, thinking, you know.

• 29:40Sam Kiley?

  They're right up close to you.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Oh, they're right up close, right. But they were allowing me, they weren't blocking me trying to do my, my two-point turn. And as I was doing my two-point turn, the only thing I can really focus was, don't crunch the gears. Don't crunch the gears. Because if you crunch those gears, it's going to telegraph to them that, that you, there's an issue here, that you're nervous. And why would you be nervous if you're one of them coming back from a night shift? You know, you wouldn't be. And, and so, so I commenced my two-point turn. And like I say, they're all there, all looking. And, and then when I completed my, my two-point turn, and before I started to drive away, well, in fact, just as I was driving away.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  I gave this little crowd a little bit of a wave. So as I drove away, I just, you know, like doing about one mile an hour, I gave them a little wave, just like a little bit of an acknowledgement, and very, very gradually pulled away from them. And, um, and so clearly they thought it was one of their own. They didn't sort of bang on the window, try to engage with me in conversation, anything like that. And that's maybe because I was acting cool and they didn't, they didn't think that was necessary. But as I drove back to this crossroads, what I'd noticed, these fifteen, twenty, uh, youngish guys, um, it kind of immediately dawned on me who they were now. Um, because now they were far, far, far more intimidating than they were before. Before, they were just looking

• 31:04Speaker 03

  at me. This time around, they were very alert. And I, and it dawned on me, that was what the military calls the cut-off group.

• 31:12Sam Kiley?

  The cut-off group was positioned further back from the roadblock to prevent anyone from escaping.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  The other lot probably were armed, but not this crowd. But they would have, in my opinion, would have engaged with bricks, stone, bottles, anything at all, to, to basically bring the vehicle to a, to a stop. And then they would have just swamped me like the two corporals.

• 31:34Sam Kiley?

  The mob murder of Corporals Derek Wood and David Howes was a notorious incident. It reveals the dangers of a misstep in Northern Ireland. And Bob picks up the story.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Two in one of the tours I did there, there were a couple of young signalers that were attached to our organisation, a very well-known incident, where

• 31:55Sam Kiley?

  In Andersonstown.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  In the Andersonstown district of West Belfast.

• 31:59Speaker 07

  A silver car drove quickly towards the procession. Taxis at the head of the cortege moved towards it, and within seconds, it was surrounded by mourners who began to shout and try and get inside at the two occupants.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  They quite simply were doing a little bit of military tourism they shouldn't have been doing. They hadn't been adequately briefed that day, um, that there was going to be a funeral procession, uh, taking place out of St Agnes Church. And they drove along the, uh, the Falls Road, which then becomes the Andersonstown Road. And they saw a whole bunch of people in front of them, panicked, turned right, um, got away from the crowds a little bit, then turned left and then drove right into the middle of this funeral procession, which you would have seen, uh, being filmed on, uh, national news media. Tried to reverse out of it, got blocked in very quickly and then were dragged out of their cars, thrown

• 32:50Speaker 02

  into a park, stripped, almost naked, brutalised, badly beaten, um, identified as incorrectly as being members of the SAS. Um, an order was given by the IRA, well, nut them then, kill them. Thrown over a fence, uh, loaded into the back of a, a black taxi, driven onto some waste ground, uh, close to the, uh, the church. Um, the pair of them tried to make a break for it, tried to run, they didn't get away. Uh, they were beaten severely again. And then somebody came up and using the gun that one of those soldiers had actually dropped, trying to come out of his car, uh, they were both executed on that waste line.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  So yes, the, uh, the implications, if you got caught, uh, were dire. Um, almost certainly you, you would not survive.

• 33:43Sam Kiley?

  At the heart of the Northern Ireland conflict was the constant surveillance of groups like the IRA, their informers and friends. Everybody was at it, the police, MI5, the military and the special forces. They were all working slightly different angles. So I asked Bob, what happened to all this information? How useful was it? Now, if we look at some of the operations that arguably brought the IRA to the, to the, to talks, that demonstrated them that they couldn't win militarily, um, there were a series of violent incidents in which a number of IRA people were killed in what

• 34:23Sam Kiley?

  the military said were attempts to arrest them. Um, any of these incidents where there were people killed. But I can't believe, and, and would I be right in not believing that, given your background in fourteen, the British intelligence didn't know who the local brigade commander was, who was in charge of logistics, who was their boss, what the chain of command was in the IRA. If you've got that kind of granular detail, you know, kind of when and where an attack is going to go on, you surely know who the bosses are.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  No, all those people were known about. This is why it, it actually, you actually bringing that up makes it absolutely laughable that there should be a suggestion that the UK state was engaged in a process of shoot to kill, of just going out there, state- authorised slaughter would be the way that the IRA would characterise the SAS.

• 35:15Sam Kiley?

  Right, because if you were, you'd be killing the bosses.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Correct. Yes. And very deliberately, uh, the British never conceptualised Northern Ireland in the context of perhaps, um, uh, additional protocol, uh, number two, I think it is, of the, uh, uh, the Geneva Conventions. It never characterised this as being a war. Um, under the Geneva Conventions, if you characterised it as being a, a war, all you'd need to do would be to clearly identify the enemy and then you can apply lethal force against those individuals.

• 35:44Sam Kiley?

  Britain didn't treat the troubles as a war. All military activity was subject to UK domestic law and civilian rules governing the use of lethal force. Can you explain, I mean, and this is not on behalf of, it's just sort of, explain to me why, when these incidents are brought up, we are not given this intelligence context?

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Okay, well, the intelligence is held tight. And some people would think, from a conspiratorial point of view, that it's held tight for unethical reasons. Most of the intelligence remains secret because it's vitally important to protect the sources from where the intelligence emanated. So if it was a human intelligence source, quite clearly, you've either got to remove him and send him abroad with a completely assumed identity and all the members of his close family, um, or you leave him living in that community and sooner or later, uh, somebody will come for him and probably kill him. So very clearly, you need to keep those sources tight. If the sources come from elsewhere,

• 36:52Speaker 02

  diplomatic intelligence sources, uh, technical intelligence sources, it is vital that we maintain the secrecy, uh, uh, around those sources. We do not want hostile intelligence actors in the contemporary era to know how as we do it. It's why I said, coming to this interview, that I would not give any details about precisely how we would conduct covert surveillance. Very important that those techniques remain protected. We have an ethical responsibility to the human intelligence sources and we have, um, a tactical responsibility to protecting the intelligence capabilities moving into the future.

• 37:40Sam Kiley?

  The secrecy surrounding intelligence sources continues to shape today's arguments over investigations that date back to the 1970s.

• 37:52Sam Kiley?

  But all the secrets of that period were the accumulation of tiny pieces of data gathered at extreme cost.

• 38:03Sam Kiley?

  In the next episode, we'll discover the price paid when a surveillance operation goes wrong.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  So they cocked their weapons and in a millisecond after that, they just opened up with everything they had.

• 38:19Speaker 03

  So I was shot three times and of course I'm trying to stop the, the, you know, the bleeding with my, with my hands.

• 38:34Sam 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 Adhahali for The Independent Studio.

• 38:58Sam 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.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organisation with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.