Episode 6 The Last Resort

In June 1991, an SAS unit lay in wait in the village of Coagh, County Tyrone, after intelligence suggested an IRA team was preparing to assassinate an off-duty soldier. Within seconds of the gunmen arriving, three men were dead. In episode six of SAS: The Shadow War, The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley meets ‘David’, the former SAS commander who planned the operation. He reveals how a British soldier was used as a decoy, how the trap was set and how the decision to open fire unfolded in a matter of seconds. Decades of legal scrutiny followed. Alongside another extraordinary SAS encounter involving Bernadette Devlin, the episode asks the question at the heart of these operations: when do you arrest, and when do you shoot? 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.

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• 1:12Speaker 03

  If we break it down into kind of a series of events. Car stops. Weapons are shown. Weapons are pointed at the soldier. The go is given. The foot team start to deploy. The side of the lorry drops and the soldiers in the lorry have to make the decision now. Is this man in the back of the car about to kill their colleague? And at that point, shots were fired. Because in their judgments, it was an imminent threat to the life of the soldier.

• 1:52Sam Kiley?

  That's SAS Commander David. He's talking about an operation he ran in 1991, when three IRA volunteers were shot dead by his men. It all happened in seconds. So how do you know when to pull the trigger? Everything comes down to that split second decision, as it did at Coke, Northern Ireland, on June 3, 91.

• 2:15Speaker 05

  The three IRA men died during several minutes of sustained shooting on the main street in Coke. Uniformed soldiers, apparently acting on intelligence information, opened fire on the terrorist's Vauxhall Cavalier at about half past seven.

• 2:29Sam Kiley?

  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 and in their own words.

• 2:50Sam Kiley?

  In this episode, I'm going to find out what it's like to command an SAS unit on a lethal operation. This particular op took place in Coke County, Tyrone. It's important, not just because three IRA volunteers were shot dead in seconds, but because the legal battle that unfolded around those few seconds has run for decades.

• 3:12Speaker 05

  A solicitor representing two of the men's families claimed the operation was designed to avoid their arrest.

• 3:23Sam Kiley?

  SAS Commander David trained as an officer at Sandhurst and then went to an infantry regiment. But he was soon bored, so he entered selection to the SAS, passed and was soon deployed to Northern Ireland as a young officer in charge of an elite unit. He was trained to run an SAS machine, but he was still awed to see it in action. As a young officer, you know, if you got the call all of a sudden, there's a problem. How quickly could you get the guys out the door?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Essentially, everyone was on pretty much immediate notice to move. And I remember on one occasion, being in the ops room, which was a porter cabin stacked on top of another porter cabin at the top of a flight of steel steps. And we got a crash out. We had something going on, I think it was in South Ammar, and we had to get a team down immediately. And I remember giving the order from the ops room and then going out onto the steps to go down to my own room to get myself ready. And, and as I stood at the top of the steps, I looked down into what had previously been quite a kind of sleepy scene of not much going on, to see a huge amount going on. People, people working in all directions, and people changing number plates on cars, loading up weapons,

• 4:33Speaker 03

  testing radios, organizing the kit for the night. And, and it was interesting that none of them had required any instruction. No one needed to be told what to do. No one needed to be told how to do it. I remember thinking it was, it was like watching an extraordinarily well-built machine that was operating exactly as you needed it to operate. Every, every cog turning in the right direction, every cog meshing with the next cog. And within a, you know, minute, the first cars were leaving. And within, within a very short time, they'd be down in South Ammar. It was a very, for me, it was a, it was a kind of revelatory spectacle because with one word, one could launch this machine and it ran without any further effort.

• 5:18Sam Kiley?

  Most operations were planned after months of surveillance, often by the D E T. Their intelligence was always handed to the police. And the police then decided whether they could handle an arrest or call for special forces help. Okay, let's go back to one of the operations that you were involved in. You know, it's very dramatic, short-lived engagement. In movie terms, a kind of thrilling moment, but this is not fiction. This is fact and on the streets of Britain. What I'm interested to get at, once we've understood what happened there, is the process of authorization up through the system. Because unlike a lot of special forces operations since 9/11, where a huge amount of autonomy is projected down,

• 6:02Sam Kiley?

  not just into special forces, but actually into the regular army too. This was a different era in which, in theory anyway, your actions were very heavily scrutinized prior to and post-operation.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, and in, in the case of Coke, which is a good example, intelligence available to the police indicated that there was going to be an attack by the provisional IRA on an unarmed civilian who was an off-duty member of the UDR, and that there was an opportunity to preempt that attack and arrest the terrorists taking part in that attack. But that to do so was too hazardous and too risky and too complicated for the police to do. And therefore, that is a classic example of a task being passed to the military, in this case, special forces. Can you, can you solve this problem for us? The answer to which was yes.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  Obviously, a significant amount of planning and thought needed to go into how to do that. Not just how to do it effectively, but how to do it safely and how to do it legally. Because in all of these operations, we took the hugest care to make sure we operated within the law. Because whether we chose to agree or not with the principle that these were essentially law enforcement operations, it was government policy, these were operations in support of the police to enforce the law of the land, they were law enforcement operations.

• 7:26Sam Kiley?

  The SAS insists that they were not a trigger-happy bunch of chancers, that in Northern Ireland, they were operating under British domestic law.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  You asked about the issue of authorization. So the initial planning is obviously something done by myself in order to ensure that the operation objective could be achieved, the arrest of these people safely. The identification of the risks involved in that was obviously part of my job as well. But then the presentation of that plan to, if you like, the system to approve is something that is passed then to a dual chain of command. So there was a police chain of command that ran all the way up to the chief constable. And there was a military chain of command that ran all the way up to the commander of land forces, who's a two-star general. And each of those two needed to approve the operation before it could be conducted. So it was like a kind of dual key, if you like. They both needed to approve.

• 8:20Sam Kiley?

  Would they have been answerable to political masters further up the food chain?

• 8:24Speaker 03

  Absolutely, sitting on top of those is the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and sitting on top of him is the Prime Minister.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  Everybody within the chain of command, from Prime Minister downwards, everybody recognized that these sort of operations were high-risk operations. The purpose was to arrest terrorists in the act of committing a serious offense. The risk was that people were going to get hurt. Everyone knew that.

• 8:52Sam Kiley?

  So you put together this plan. How, I mean, how much planning time do you get between kind of, I mean, it's, how long is a piece of string, I know, but, but, but you, did you have long to plan for this one?

• 9:05Speaker 03

  The initial call that I received was, I think, on a, on a Wednesday morning, when I was asked to go down to, to a police organization called the Tusken Coordination Group. And, and I was told that there was intelligence to indicate that the IRA were going to carry out an attack on. It was then thought Friday morning. So that was basically 48 hours time. So I then had essentially 48 hours to plan an operation, get the operation approved, get all the preparation required, deploy the troops, et cetera, in order to meet a deadline that was about 48 hours hence.

• 9:40Sam Kiley?

  SAS soldiers spend their lives preparing for moments just like this.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  You're dealing with extremely experienced, extremely confident people. You don't need to say something twice. You often don't need to say it at all. Actually, things get done.

• 9:52Sam Kiley?

  And so the, the soldiers, the operators, the troops under your command, do they have a lot of input into this planning process?

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, certainly they would do. But, but in reality, because it happened quite quickly, the bones of the operation were kind of conceived within a couple of hours. And with a lot of these special forces operations, particularly counter-terrorist operations, what I found is that the bones of the operation often emerge quite quickly because they're often not very complicated, actually. But the, but the polish, the fine tuning evolves over a period of time. So a lot of the fine tuning and a lot of the polishing and a lot of the tweaking comes, if you like, from the, from the lower levels, if you like, of the organization because they're the experts and actually they can often come up with better ways of doing things.

• 10:37Sam Kiley?

  British forces had intelligence that an IRA team from the East Tyrone Brigade was planning to assassinate a part-time member of the army's locally recruited Ulster Defence Regiment as he waited for an early morning lift to work.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  Well, in, in this case, the, the big issue was that we knew when the terrorists were going to come, where they were going to come, and what they were going to try and do. We didn't know who was going to come, how they were going to get there, and how exactly they're going to murder their victim. So, and the other issue, of course, is they planned to do it in the middle of a high street in a, in a village.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  So immediately, there are a number of operational issues there. How do you ensure that you get adequate warning that someone's turned up? How do you have enough coverage of the area to cater for people arriving on a motorbike, in a car, on foot, on a bicycle? I mean, there's any manner of ways in which people can turn up. How do you deal with the public if the public are around? How do you ensure the operation can be run safely? So there's a lot of kind of operational unknowns. A lot of risks have to be anticipated, a lot of contingency to put in place. So those were the main challenges. And all done, of course, cognizant of the fact that it's not just me that has to be convinced that it's safe. I then have to be able to convince both the military and the police chain of command, as we talked about, because if they're not happy it's safe, they're not going to authorize it.

• 12:02Sam Kiley?

  And one of the principal issues here is going to be, well, twofold, I suppose. Can you safely arrest this person rather than kill them or people? And above all, the dangers of civilians was if I'm assuming that if there's going to be a danger of, I mean, how do you calculate the danger of civilian casualties?

• 12:23Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, you can't calculate it. What you have to do is make sure that the people who are on the ground are extremely well-trained or extremely competent at distinguishing between friend and foe.

• 12:33Sam Kiley?

  And of course, these are expensively trained. I mean, in today's terms, I think it costs six million quid or something to train this SAS soldier.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  But yeah, I mean, they're expensive to train, but they're also extensively trained. And one of the great things about being in the SAS was where you had limitless time and resources to train. So you trained and trained and trained until people got really, really good at what they did.

• 12:55Sam Kiley?

  So what went down that morning of May the 31st, 1991?

• 13:03Speaker 03

  The authorization was given on, I think, on the Thursday evening. And we deployed people during the night into various positions around the target area so that they could mainly act as cut-offs in the event that terrorists fled the scene on foot. The first stage of deployment was about getting in place some of the peripheral elements, which were designed mainly to make sure we had control of the area and also to make sure that we were able to intercept and cut off anyone who was trying to flee on foot or in vehicle. So it's kind of putting in place a covert cordon, if you like. There was then a deployment of a party of men who were going to be concealed so that they could deploy on foot onto the road as soon as the terrorists arrived and effect

• 13:48Speaker 03

  an arrest. But because there was likely to be a risk, because there was always a risk that the terrorists could open fire before they arrived, even if they were going to be two or three seconds away, that's still long enough to pull the trigger. There was another group of soldiers who were able to cover the area with firepower, if necessary, with weapons, so that if the terrorists arrived and instantly tried to murder their target, then there was a means of intervening to save his life. And I should point out also that the terrorist's target was removed from the scene and replaced by one of our soldiers, one of my soldiers.

• 14:21Sam Kiley?

  Who was in disguise, I understand.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Who was in disguise, exactly. So he, clearly protecting him was of extreme importance. And so it was necessary to have this group of soldiers whose job was to, in extremis, they could step in and save his life if the terrorists arrived and instantly tried to murder this guy. But the objective was always that once the terrorists exposed themselves as terrorists, we would be able to deploy on foot, arrest them, and that would be that.

• 14:45Sam Kiley?

  So the guys who were covering that, where were they? How many of them were there?

• 14:51Speaker 03

  They were in a small car park behind a building that is just opposite. And how many there were, about 12 of them, I think, roughly about 12 people, I think.

• 15:01Sam Kiley?

  That they were the guys who were going to deploy on foot to grab the terrorists? And then the guys covering them, were how many?

• 15:07Speaker 03

  There were four of them, and they were concealed in a lorry, which, one of the problems, of course, to conduct this operation in the middle of a village is that it's very, very difficult to find places to hide. And it was important because of the nature of their task that they were able to be deployed without a good view and that they could, if necessary, bring firepower to bear to protect the life of the other soldier. And so in the end, we decided to deploy a Trojan horse, if you like, a lorry that was modified to conceal soldiers within it that could be parked overlooking the site so that in the event the terrorists turned up, they could cover from there.

• 15:46Sam Kiley?

  The soldiers are hiding in the back of a flatbed lorry carrying scaffolding. All they had to do was drop one side, and they would have a clear line of sight of the decoy victim who was waiting for his pickup.

• 16:01Sam Kiley?

  And then you've got this extraordinary volunteer, I assume he volunteered, who was setting himself up as the decoy pigeon, you know? I mean, does he walk into this in the full knowledge that the IRRA has sent a team to kill him?

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, he does indeed. I mean, he's a very brave man.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  But you have to understand that, without wanting to have dramatized it, I mean, all of the men there were brave men. I mean, they were highly committed, highly professional, highly motivated people. Any one of them would have volunteered. This guy happened to match by build and size and kind of age the person who he was substituting. And so he was chosen. You know, he put his life on the line, literally.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  So everything was put in place for the Friday morning, and in Friday morning, we all waited for the terrorists to turn up.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  And as they say, suddenly, nothing happened.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  In fact, something did happen because at around about the time that we expected the terrorists to turn up, a man walked down from the middle of the village of Coke plainly checking out the target. I mean, he wasn't very good at it, and he was walking. He looked a little bit like a scene from Mr. Bean, you know, sort of hiding behind trees and unaware that, of course, he was being observed. But he was obviously checking out the target to see whether the target was there, to see whether, presumably to see whether he was still the same target, I don't know. And he loitered around for a few minutes, and then he wandered back up again and disappeared from view.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  And then nothing happened. And so about an half an hour later, it was clear the terrorists were not coming that day, so we lifted everybody off quietly. The people who were hidden came off at night, the people who, the lorry was driven away, et cetera. And we went off to kind of lick our wounds and work out why it hadn't happened.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  And interestingly, the police view, the IUC Special Branch view, was that it hadn't happened because the terrorists had been spooked by the lorry. Their view was, you've screwed this up, basically. You've put a lorry in place, it's too obvious, the terrorists recognized it, and then they'll come. I was pretty certain that wasn't the case. And luckily, we had some surveillance video footage, which showed this man walking down, showed him examining the target, showed him paying not a jot of interest to the lorry. And it was pretty clear that actually the lorry had nothing to do with it and that, for whatever reason, the terrorists had simply decided not to come that morning. And then I think on the Saturday, or maybe the Sunday, I can't remember, word came to

• 18:43Speaker 03

  the IUC Special Branch again that the terrorists were happy with what they'd seen, and they were going to come back on Monday morning and carry out the attack. So we rebriefed, did the same thing again, basically put roughly the same number of people in roughly the same places, repeated the exercise and waited for Monday morning.

• 19:03Sam Kiley?

  And what happened on Monday morning?

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• 21:13Sam Kiley?

  It's early on Monday, June 3rd, 1991. An SAS operation to prevent the assassination of an off-duty Alstair Defence Regiment soldier is underway.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  So at 7:25, the lorry was put in place, and everyone was ready.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  And at about 7:29 or thereabouts, one of the observation posts that was on the road that led between, led from Cookstown to Coke, reported a car that passed it

• 21:50Speaker 03

  that had three men in it, which was obviously immediately quite suspicious.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  A few seconds later, the same car passed another OP at the end of the bridge or near the end of the bridge into Coke, so now within a few hundred meters of the target. And it reported that the car now had one person in it. So the obvious implication was that two of them were lying down in the car at that point and hiding themselves from view. Everyone was now obviously at an high alert. And a few seconds later, the car pulled up on the road outside the car park, opposite the target, in front of the lorry.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  And then things happened really quite quickly.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  And a lot of this is, of course, from other people's testimony, because I should perhaps point out, I wasn't on the ground, I was in the operations room, but yeah.

• 22:36Sam Kiley?

  An operations room is where he can best command an operation at a secret location away from the target. He's in touch with his SAS team on the ground through radio and with D E T operatives who will warn him when the terrorists are close. He's also with the police.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  What the target substitutes saw is that as the car came to a halt, two men popped up, one in the backseat, had an AK-47 rifle, which he pointed out the window and took aim at the soldier. The soldier in question, at more or less simultaneity at that point, the side of the lorry was dropped by the soldiers in the lorry because they could see now that a weapon was being pointed at another person. Somebody gave the go, I'm not even quite sure who gave the go, someone gave the go, and various things happened. So the arrest group deployed on foot from behind the building to intercept the terrorists.

• 23:31Sam Kiley?

  So nobody's opened fire yet? I mean, they're seconds apart.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  You're talking about things that are seconds apart, exactly. So to the best of my knowledge, if we break this down into kind of a series of events, car stops, weapons are shown, weapons are pointed at the soldier, the go is given, the foot team start to deploy, the side of the lorry drops, and the soldiers in the lorry have to make the decision now, is this man in the back of the car about to kill their colleague, who is standing all of about 20 metres away by a wall?

• 24:10Speaker 03

  At that point, shots were fired, because in their judgments, and I'm sure they were right, there was an imminent threat to the life of the soldier. He, at this point, was, if he hadn't taken cover, he was taking cover, he was busy diving behind a wall, but this is happening within seconds, probably less than two seconds.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  And so some shots are fired at that point. The foot team deploys onto the road. Now, what happens next is a kind of, is what happens in real life, effectively. It appears that the driver had one foot on the accelerator and one foot on the clutch, and was killed in the first few rounds, because he appears to have let go of the clutch. The car leaps forward, careers up the road about 20 metres, veers to the right, crashes into a parked car and comes to a halt.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  So the arrest group have now deployed in the expectation of finding the terrorists right in front of the nav to run up the road a bit to where the car is now basically crashed.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  There's then further shooting as the terrorists emerge, because the terrorists, two of the terrorists emerge and are holding their weapons and indeed are threatening with their weapons. They emerge for a fight. And it subsequently turns out, the terrorists are all wearing body armour, they're armed with AK-47s, they have between them 180 rounds of ammunition. I mean, they're not coming here for a picnic, you know, they're coming here for a fight. And they get out of the car looking for a fight, and at that point, they're both killed.

• 25:51Sam Kiley?

  Would it, with the benefit of hindsight, is, could it conceivably have been possible that the arrest team could have said, it's, you know, it's game over, boys, give yourselves up? Was there, was there an opportunity at any stage in that very fast-moving situation that they could have said, it'd be more useful to keep these guys alive and ring them for their intelligence?

• 26:18Speaker 03

  Well, I think you're asking the wrong question there, because the arrest group never took the decision to kill them. The arrest group responded to what the terrorists were doing. To answer your question, yes, absolutely. I think the terrorists themselves would have had the opportunity as soon as, as soon as they started taking incoming fire, if you like, as soon as the first rounds were fired from the, from the lorry. And in fact, actually, if you were a terrorist in the car, as soon as you see the lorry side going down, you see the target jumping over the wall, it's pretty obvious you've been rumbled, if you like. At that point, it was obviously open to the terrorists to lay down their weapons and surrender.

• 26:54Sam Kiley?

  And to literally toss the gun out of the window?

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and, okay, let's roll the script forward four or five seconds. The car lurches up the road, veers to the right, crashes into a parked car. At that point, they can also get out of the car, throw their weapons down and surrender, but they didn't. So, so I think you're asking the wrong question about whether this, whether the assault, whether the arrest group kind of took the decision to kill them. That's not the way of viewing it at all. The arrest group were seeking to arrest them, but the terrorists got out fully armed and ready for a fight.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  Now, subsequent forensic evidence shows that at least one round was fired by the terrorists. It's not clear when it was fired and how it was fired, and there was so much noise going on, nobody really knows who, you know, who fired it or how. But at least one round was fired because one struck case was found amongst the forensic debris. There's a question mark over whether more than one round was fired, because I think of the 180 rounds of ammunition that the terrorists were carrying, only around about 100 bits of ammunition debris were recovered. So there's quite a lot of unrecovered debris, which may or may not have been struck. So it's fair to say, I think at least one round was fired.

• 28:06Sam Kiley?

  And so these guys are killed pretty much instantly. Well, what happened next?

• 28:13Speaker 03

  The operation is essentially over at that point. I mean, it's taken 10 seconds, let's say, and it's finished. We've done what we set out to do, which is to interrupt the terrorist attack, stop the attack, if you like, and seek to arrest the terrorists, but been obliged to use force to effect that arrest. So at that point, really, the special forces operation is over. There's then a kind of whole choreographed kind of post-operation procedure that swings into place. There are QRFs, Quick Reaction Forces, that arrive. There are police cordons that are set in place. The, you know, the whole mechanism and investigations of take, starts off from that point, and the SAS men withdraw.

• 28:53Sam Kiley?

  Under the law, there must be, and, you know, people have been killed, there will be an investigation into the circumstances that led to that. Did that happen?

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course. Under the process, there's a 24-hour period of grace that's granted between the instant occurring and the police statement's being taken. And the idea of that is that quite often, you have a situation where the, where the soldier giving the statement might have been hiding in a bush for a week, or, you know, in a situation of significant stress, or might even be injured or what have you. And it's, it was felt appropriate, and I don't disagree with the story, there should be a period in which he can kind of get his thoughts together before he gives a statement. So the, the, the statements were not taken instantly, as far as I recall, but they were taken within around 24 hours, I think.

• 29:39Sam Kiley?

  And that would include you as the...

• 29:41Speaker 03

  Well, strangely enough, no one took a statement from me for a while, strangely,

• 29:46Speaker 03

  which again, isn't as odd as it may sound, because of course, the police investigating are investigating to make sure that actions taken on the ground were within the law. So they're primarily focused on, you know, was force used? Yes. Was force appropriate? Yes. Was it excessive? No. So their, their, their investigation is relatively focused on the events that took place in the, in the square there in Coke. About a year later, I was asked to make a statement, and I went to the front door and made a short statement. But, but, but I didn't at the time.

• 30:25Sam Kiley?

  The decisions that David and his team took on that day in June 1991 came back to haunt them in 2022, 31 years later, with an inquest into the deaths. The families of the dead men claimed that they had been illegally killed. The coroner found that the shootings were justified, but he also found that the operation was not planned in a manner which minimised, to the greatest extent possible, the need for recourse to lethal force. The relatives later challenged the coroner's finding. They claimed that the IRA driver on the day, Tony Doris, should have been treated differently from the other

• 31:05Sam Kiley?

  two, as he was unarmed. In 2025, the High Court dismissed their petition. It ruled that the soldiers had used lethal force legally, and the judge observed that, I quote, "I find these grounds for challenge to be utterly divorced from the reality of the circumstances and challenges faced by Soldier B and the other soldiers." Unusually, the judge also expressed surprise that state-funded legal aid had been granted to the relatives in order for them to mount just such a challenge. The family then went to the Court of Appeal, which in 2026, again dismissed their case and upheld the original verdict. The family

• 31:48Sam Kiley?

  of the men killed by the SAS is now set to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

• 32:00Sam Kiley?

  What effect has this had on the men who were on the ground? Your guys? This process, this whole business, the investigations, the inquests and so on? How has that affected them?

• 32:12Speaker 03

  Well, I think that all of them would probably share with me a kind of frustration and irritation at being dragged back into their ancient history. I mean, you know, it is a very strange process to sit down and go through in quite fine, almost forensic detail, what you did thirty, thirty something years ago, under oath. Of course, for the soldiers who fired shots, they were potentially facing findings that would have perhaps put them in the frame for murder, which, which is obviously quite stressful. As it happens, the coroner, the coroner concluded that the men who fired shots did so justifiably and therefore their use of force was legal. But I suspect most of them feel, as I do, that it was much too late and to be meaningful

• 32:56Speaker 03

  in any way and was, and was largely, largely an exercise in some revisionism, really.

• 33:04Sam Kiley?

  Do you feel betrayed?

• 33:10Speaker 03

  Well, that's quite a big word. I mean, I think that

• 33:18Speaker 03

  the outcome of the inquest, from my perspective, is that the coroner concluded that I and three other members of the SAS had either planned the operation so incompetently that we were guilty of occasioning death through negligence. In other words, we'd been, we'd either misappreciated the risks, or we'd been careless, or we'd been just thoughtless, or whatever, slapped ash, and three men had died. Or we had planned it very carefully and, in his view, planned it in such a way the deaths were inevitable, in which case we're guilty of conspiracy to murder. Now, the fact that he concludes that, and I think he's wrong, obviously, the fact that he concludes that is not, does not equate to a charge of conspiracy to murder for this conviction.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  If we'd ever got to the point where I was charged with conspiracy to murder or were still convicted, I would feel highly betrayed, yes, for sure, because I didn't do anything wrong, I didn't do anything outside the norms of operations at the time, and we took huge care to make sure we operated within the law. And furthermore, the idea that it was a surprise to anybody that people got hurt on these operations is just laughable. And it's laughable, and everybody from the prime minister down recognised that these operations were high-risk operations because you were intervening at the point at which the terrorists were trying to murder somebody.

• 34:41Sam Kiley?

  The special forces and police authorities have been accused of collusion with violent loyalist paramilitaries. Along with the Koch operation, the SAS were involved in another incident, this one at Coal Island, County Tyrone, when a leading Republican was shot by loyalists. Tony, an SAS soldier, was on the ground when it happened on the 16th of January 1981.

• 35:10Sam Kiley?

  Were you there for, for the Bernadette Devlin incident, rather than arresting soldiers? Bernadette McAlister, born Bernadette Devlin, was a former MP. She was a respected Republican voice calling for the reunification of the island of Ireland, and this brought her and her husband into the crosshairs of loyalist killers.

• 35:31Speaker 05

  I was in airtroop at this stage, originally I was in mobility, trooper transfer. We were stationed up at, up in Hollywood Barracks. And we were on an operation somewhere in Belfast, in the days we were allowed in Belfast. So this was 81. We got a fastball from Frank Murray.

• 35:49Sam Kiley?

  Frank Murray was head of the police special branch in the southern region. He was the one who decided which bits of intelligence warranted an SAS operation.

• 35:59Speaker 05

  Get yourself to Cookstown, County Tyrone, which was about an hour's drive out of Belfast, if that, that speed.

• 36:08Speaker 05

  Got a briefing, hot briefing in the car, that there was going to be an assassination attempt on Bernadette Devlin. So there was, I'll just call him Carl, Kiwi and myself. I was the radio operator. Midwinter, January the 17th, if I'm not mistaken, was the date. And off we, off we trotted and we got on the ground. He'd be picked up later, because you never leave your vehicle unattended.

• 36:37Speaker 05

  Just at first light, there's still on the ground, minus, you know, zero degrees, basically. Driver, no, he.

• 36:49Speaker 05

  Carl went forward to look for an OP, that we can watch the house, because at that time nothing had been heard. And suddenly there was a pop, pop, pop, pop, of rounds being fired. So I was being the fastest runner out of the two, dropped my radio, with my armour-like M16 rifle, went forward, saw the brown Rover, bronze Rover, sitting on the driveway, engine running. And as I got there, three men exited the bungalow. The first one being Race Smallwood.

• 37:29Sam Kiley?

  Race Smallwoods was the driver on that day. He was a member of the loyalist paramilitary, the Ulster Defence Association.

• 37:38Speaker 05

  He came out, I could see the look in his eyes, shall I, shan't I? I ordered him to drop his pistol, which he duly did. Moved the three to the wall, having unarmed them all three, by which time Carl and Kiwi were with me.

• 37:53Speaker 05

  And a funny thing is always something funny. One of them said, which way's the wall, because his balaclava had flipped over his eyes and he couldn't say anything. That was quite amusing.

• 38:04Speaker 05

  And then there was a pregnant pause. Well, we knew there was a shotgun in the house, but we didn't know the state of play.

• 38:11Speaker 05

  We've got to get in there. So I entered first, followed by the other two.

• 38:19Speaker 05

  Her husband, Michael, was sitting against the wall with a gums dropped wound to the right arm with an arterial coming out, coming out of his bicep. And I went into the bedroom and found Bernadette lying on the floor, totally naked, with five bullet wounds in her front and back, because she obviously rolled off the bed. Maybe, maybe two people fired her, I never know. There were, there were stupid reports of nine rounds and that, it was five rounds, I counted them all.

• 38:52Speaker 05

  The three children were there, looking at me as if I was something on the bottom of their shoe. But the look, I'll never forget the look in their eyes, Sam, I mean, there was I there to help her, you know, we were there to help her. But, you know, they were so indoctrinated against the British Army and the British Government, even at that age, you know, she had to be about eight, eight years old, something like that, eight or nine, certainly no more than 10.

• 39:18Speaker 05

  So I covered up with a duvet, left the house, while Kiwi gave first aid to Michael.

• 39:25Speaker 05

  The radio battery was almost dead. I managed just to get the word contact out on the radio, so I knew I had passed that. And then I had to go and find a phone. So I gave my contact report. He asked me if he thought she would live. I said unlikely, but I was proven wrong, thankfully.

• 39:46Speaker 05

  And then get back through the perimeter and that was that.

• 39:58Sam Kiley?

  SAS soldiers say that they go in with the intent to catch an alleged terrorist about to kill, so that they can get them jailed for a long time. But it doesn't always work out that way. If they're in mortal danger or need to save someone else's life, they can shoot to kill.

• 40:17Sam Kiley?

  When to do that is at the heart of what being an SAS soldier in Northern Ireland was all about. I mean, the Devlin family and others, you know, the people who are suspicious of the military might say at this point, well, because they were Catholics and these gunmen were Protestant paramilitaries, they got off lightly. That shows that in other occasions, it would have been possible to arrest somebody even though they were carrying a firearm. What would you say to that?

• 40:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, of course, they always, they always believed that we were, you know, Prods first, Catholics last, you know? That wasn't the case at all. I mean, you know, like I said earlier, our mission was to arrest them.

• 41:03Sam Kiley?

  Looking back though, and being really honest, in that moment when you could have shot Smallwood, he came, comes out, he's brandishing a weapon, in all likelihood, you could have argued self-defence, he didn't, you had to order him to disarm. And that would turn out to be, just to, you know, as he, you said you sort of saw the look in his eye, the sort of shall I, shan't I? I mean, that is a, that is a microsecond that you have a decision.

• 41:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, microsecond decision.

• 41:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I could see he was ready. I mean, he was obviously pumped up, drilling, flowing, having shot an unarmed woman very bravely.

• 41:42Speaker 05

  He was pumped up, all right.

• 41:45Speaker 05

  But then he just dropped the revolver, because he knew he was going to And he went to jail for 15 years or whatever. He's dead now, thank God.

• 41:54Sam Kiley?

  But also in that split second, so he had a split second to decide to drop the weapon. You had a split second to decide whether or not to kill him.

• 42:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:04Sam Kiley?

  What was the instinct that stopped you in that moment? Was it that he was a Protestant? Was it, would it, would it have been different?

• 42:11Speaker 05

  No, it didn't matter what bloody creed or colour he was. Just see, I was watching the weapon. Your eyes are fixed on the weapon, not him.

• 42:20Speaker 05

  Your weapon is trained at his chest, obviously, safety catch off. I was waiting for him to react with a weapon or not, and he chose not to.

• 42:28Sam Kiley?

  Right. So had he raised their weapon, he wouldn't have got it very far.

• 42:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, he'd have been dead, simple as that.

• 42:32Sam Kiley?

  Yeah. And what about the other two? Did they, they dropped pretty quickly?

• 42:36Speaker 05

  No, they, they dropped their weapons immediately. They didn't put their hands in the air. They didn't want to play.

• 42:40Sam Kiley?

  An extraordinary moment. How did that feel? I mean, in the, or I suppose.

• 42:46Speaker 05

  No, I was quite elated, really. I mean, I didn't have anything against Catholics and I, I'd heard of Bernadette Devlin, of course. But I, I believe their cause was just, and I still do.

• 42:57Sam Kiley?

  The republican cause.

• 42:59Speaker 05

  Uh, so I was pleased that we got three scumbags off the street.

• 43:03Sam Kiley?

  Did you, when you say you believe their cause was just, you mean the, not the terrorists, obviously, but the republican cause itself?

• 43:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, well, the republican cause, yeah, for sure. I mean, 10% of the population. And then if you'd ever seen those slums, and I mean slums, that they lived in when I was on my tour with West Belfast in McCrory Park, Andersonstown in particular. You know, you knew that they were the second class citizens. Prost has always got the best jobs, the best housing. You know, the best working conditions. The police force, obviously, the RUC, the Royal Osterkamp Stabbury were pretty much 99% Protestant, weren't they?

• 43:40Sam Kiley?

  Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because you're not the first soldier from that period. I'm friends with many people, some of them you'll know.

• 43:50Sam Kiley?

  And I think to a man, they are nonviolent republicans.

• 43:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:55Sam Kiley?

  Which as a result of, and, and, and some of them have indeed been involved in killing.

• 44:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:00Sam Kiley?

  Members of the Irish Republican Army.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  Well, 81 was obviously a very heavy period because of the hunger strikes that had happened in the summer of that year. I think it was May 81, Bobby Sands was the first of the 10 republican prisoners, IRA prisoners to die on hunger strike. And it was a very, very fraught time. And Bernadette Devlin would have been something of a bete noire to, to the unionist community.

• 44:35Sam Kiley?

  Journalist Mary Kelly was born and brought up in Belfast. She covered the conflict for the Belfast Telegraph. And she knows most of the players on both sides of the divide.

• 44:45Speaker 03

  She was a very articulate woman, but she was very strong in her condemnation, particularly of the British Army. So in a way, it was kind of ironic that it was the British Army who saved her life. Because they happened to be on hand and then there were suspicions about, well, why, if they were so near, did the gunman manage to get through to her house and shoot her and her husband? I don't think that's been answered.

• 45:21Sam Kiley?

  The two operations that we've heard about this episode have one thing in common. They both come down to split second decisions, whether to shoot or not to shoot. And those decisions have consequences.

• 45:41Sam Kiley?

  In the next episode, after 30 years of conflict, a lasting peace is coming closer. But the IRA and the loyalists are not going quietly. Shootings and bombings are gathering pace. And while the politicians talk, the shadow war grinds on. And as peace gets closer, the special forces are held back, even when an IRA sniper begins to terrorise Northern Ireland.

• 46:07Speaker 03

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

• 46:22Sam 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 Popkovitz for Aura Studios and Olivia Foster and Rod Adahali for The Independent studio.

• 46:49Sam 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.

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