Dungannon had a mostly Catholic population and many of the Protestants lived intermingled with the Catholics, even members of the RUC. A Protestant police officer lived in the main housing estate in the town. Every day he said goodbye to his wife and children, drew his gun, opened his front door and paused to check up and down the street. He would leave the house, gun in hand, and walk down his garden path to his car, which was parked in the street outside his house. After checking the car for bombs, he drove to the RUC station not far away. In the two years I was there he was never interfered with. His strange existence was not an uncommon one in Northern Ireland.
Dungannon and its outlying towns and villages were always good for some action. One day while I was walking through the town a 500-pound bomb exploded in the main shopping street. It took out every window for a half-mile radius and wiped out every shop within a hundred yards. The PIRA had parked a horse-box in the street packed to the roof with ampho, a low-grade explosive made from high-nitrate fertiliser and diesel fuel. The Provos telephoned the RUC to warn them and the street was cleared of people just in time. I was several streets away and was sprinkled by falling debris.
Every day seemed like the one before. The only thing that seemed to change was the weather. No one I knew, on our side, that is, was in any way passionate about the conflict. But the IRA could always be counted on to sting us once in a while and stoke our fires. Only a few months earlier, they had blown up Lord Mountbatten and members of his family, including children. I was in Warren Point when I heard the news about the bomb on his boat not all that far away. It was the first time I felt a personal, bitter anger towards the IRA. From a purely soldiering point of view, within the IRA and its many splinter groups, such as the Provos, there were a lot of men who demanded respect because of their skills, and several, mostly of the old school, had a sense of honour. But the IRA also had their fair share of bone-headed, murderous cowards, especially among the younger generation. Those were the ones we really wanted to get our sights on. But attacking civilians in their shops and pubs is not just a terrorist strategy. Unfortunately, politicians discovered by the end of the First World War that if civilians were brought into the actual physical conflict it could affect the outcome of a war.
While the Provisionals were conducting operations to make the world take notice of them, they were also planning one that would force British Military Intelligence to take them far more seriously than they ever had before. If the IRA had been successful they could have taken 14 Int out of the game for many months with the loss of many of our lives.
Military Intelligence had no idea at the time, but the IRA had done what had been thought impossible: they had completely broken our radio codes.
On my 14 Int selection, during the communications instruction phase, we were taught a basic code system. Every Det had its own codes for places and objects such as cars, or buildings, which we would have to learn as soon as we arrived. There were general codes for hospitals and police stations, for instance, but specific locations, such as the various pubs and car parks and the betting shop in Dungannon, all had their own code names. Army Intelligence were aware that the PIRA would monitor our transmissions when they could, but it was not seen as a threat. Secure comms were available. That system worked by scrambling a voice before it was transmitted. The receiver, set to the same complex coding mechanism, unscrambled the words for the listener. Even the most sophisticated monitoring systems would take months to unscramble a single transmission. But the new system’s introduction was not expected for several years because, as I said, it was deemed unnecessary.
Living in Dublin at that time was a young Irish electronics genius whose hobby was communications and code-breaking. When the IRA heard about him they asked if he would like to join the cause. He was not a passionate supporter, but he was an egomaniac and keen to get recognition for his genius. With some gentle stroking he was recruited.
The IRA brought him to Belfast and gave him all the equipment and finance he needed. His target was the 14 Int Detachment that worked the city.
His first objective was to establish the frequencies the Det used. Our system was set up so that when an operative sent a transmission it never went directly to the person you were talking to, even if they were standing right beside you. It would be picked up by one of many dishes dotted all over the province and re-broadcast, but on a different frequency. It was not long before the man from Dublin had found several of the frequencies the Det used and set about monitoring them. His next task was to compile a list of all the codes they used and find their meanings.
He knew that many of the codes were for locations. The big step was to find the meaning of one location code. Once he did that it would lead to another. To achieve this he had to actually locate the source of one of the transmissions; physically track a transmission to an operative on the ground and follow him until he could identify a code used that indicated where the operator was, then mark that on the map. It would not only break a code, it would also identify an actual operative. He spent weeks cruising Belfast in search of a target. It was only a matter of time before he got one.
The operative was parked in a street watching an IRA suspect. When he gave his coded location the Dublin boy plotted the operative’s location on his map and ticked that code off. When the operative moved off, the Dubliner followed him and, listening to his communications, ticked off the meanings of other codes. When other operatives gave their location as one the Dubliner knew he would race over there and identify the source. After several months the young genius had compiled detailed descriptions of most of the Det’s operatives and their cars, and had deciphered most of their codes. The IRA kept the operation top secret; neither Military Intelligence nor the Dets had any idea that the code had been broken.
Fortunately, the IRA godfathers in Belfast decided not to be greedy with this advantage right away. Had they been, they might have used the information to set up a series of hits to wipe out as many of the Det’s operatives as they could in one go. Perhaps they decided against that because it was more complicated than it sounded. To start off with they set up a pantomime operation to keep the Det occupied while they conducted real operations elsewhere in the city. This worked fine for a while, but obviously operatives were beginning to sense something had changed on the streets. They were seeing known targets and watching them exchange items and information, but nothing was coming of it.
While all that was going on in Belfast we were working hard in Dungannon to crack the Tyrone ASUs who were one of the most energetic in the province at that time. The head man in Dungannon was Tommy Shammy. We had found Shammy through information gained from the bug in the toilet in Warren Point. Tommy was well aware we were on to him and that we would pounce hard if he made a mistake. But he was a smart one and kept us on our toes. If we made a mistake he would jump on us just as quickly.
Tommy was high ranking enough to be privy to the code-breaking operation that was going on against the Det in Belfast, and he put in a request to utilise their new-found communications genius against us. His request was granted.
Tommy’s plans for us were not as sophisticated as those of his colleagues in Belfast. He wanted some body counts, plain and simple. Dead undercover operatives on the IRA’s yearly accounting sheets always looked good.
As Dungannon was a fraction of the size of Belfast it was not long before the young Dubliner had us all tagged and our codes broken. Tommy could not have been happier. All he had to do now was choose his time and his target. I had the dubious honour of being his first target, and I only have one explanation for how I survived.
We all have a sixth sense. A common example is when, for no apparent reason, you look up to see a person watching you from across the street or from a window in a house or a car beside you in traffic. In most people this is rarely developed beyond that. But if there is one job that helps develop it, it is deadly undercover work – although only if you are receptive to what your mind is trying to tell you. Some operatives refused to listen to that sense, or did not trust in it. I can’t say I ever took it seriously, beyond the examples just mentioned, until one night in Dungannon when it undoubtedly saved my life.
Things had gone strangely quiet in the weeks leading up to that night. We travelled to Dungannon every evening in search of leads and came back empty-handed each time. Something was definitely not right, but no one could put a finger on it. The night in question, we had the town fully staked out using eight operatives one-up in eight cars. We were all parked up, in and around the outskirts of the town, in locations we considered secure. I was parked on a piece of waste ground in the centre of the town which was used as a car park by shoppers in the daytime. It was at the rear of the main street and at night was dimly lit and deserted but for a handful of cars. I was watching a pub fifty yards away across a street. Standing in the doorway, sipping a beer, was Sean O’Dilly, one of Tommy’s lieutenants. It was unusual for O’Dilly to be standing there in the doorway and not inside with the rest of his gang. When I arrived in the car park code-named Bear Cage I reported my position over the radio. I sat in the darkness and watched O’Dilly for over an hour. He moved back into the pub every now and then for a refill, but spent most of the time in the doorway. He occasionally glanced in my direction, but that was OK. He was always suspicious and would always be on the lookout. I knew he could not see me in the car where I was parked in the shadows. My M10 was on my passenger seat under a newspaper.
Nothing else was going on in the town. The radios were silent with the inactivity. Back at the operations room the bleep and second-in-command sat back twiddling their thumbs as they had every night for the past few weeks. I poured myself a cup of coffee from my flask.
Suddenly a sensation rushed through me. I felt incredibly uneasy, in a way I had never felt before. I sat up and looked all around the outside of the car – I always kept my window wound down a few inches to prevent condensation. There were shadows everywhere, walls, garbage bins, the unlit backs of the unoccupied shops, but no sign of life. O’Dilly was still in the doorway of the pub. Then the hairs went up on the back of my neck and I felt a huge surge of what I can only describe as a kind of fear. By now fear affected me the way it affected all seasoned special forces operatives. I channelled it into aggression. I would strike out mercilessly at the first clear sign of a threat. But I couldn’t see anyone. The sense was so strong in me that I did something I never thought possible for me – not based on just a feeling. I started my engine and drove out of there, taking the back way out of the car park to avoid O’Dilly.
‘One Three Charlie, mobile,’ I called over the radio.
A few seconds later the second-in-command came over the net. ‘What’s up?’ he asked.
‘I’m outta here. I feel a little warm,’ I said which meant I felt I was being watched.
‘Who can take over Bear Cage?’ he asked casually.
‘No,’ I cut in. ‘Bear Cage is hot. We should call this off.’
Whatever an operative did on the ground the desk had to back up. There was no debate. The operative knew better than the man running the ops room, no matter what his rank was. Another operator the other side of the town had a similar awkward feeling and came on to the net.
‘Two Seven Bravo, I agree. Going mobile.’
Yet another operative went mobile. I had started something.
‘OK,’ the 2IC said, giving in, ‘hard rock.’ This was the code to come home. ‘All call-signs check.’
Each of the operatives in turn called in and when they were all accounted for we headed back to the Det.
As soon as we got home we gathered in the TV room for prayers (brief-debrief). The Det commander was waiting for us as we came in one by one to sit in chairs facing him behind his little podium in front of the TV.
‘So. What’s going on, lads?’ he asked, directing the question mainly at me.
I told him I could not give an explanation other than it didn’t feel right. Other operatives agreed with me. Many had felt uneasy. In the last few weeks something had been different about the town. The Det commander didn’t know how to deal with this. It was most unusual and he had never experienced anything like it before. He never went out on the ground with us – his job was in the Det running the operations – but he was smart enough to appreciate the difference. We suggested pulling off the ground entirely for a few days.
‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ he replied to that. ‘This is a major operation. It’s what we’re here for. What do I tell London? We’re pulling off because it doesn’t feel right?’
He had a point, but we had one too, though we could not explain it.
He looked at us for a moment while he considered the situation.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘we can’t pull off without a reason. Let’s continue for a few more nights.’ If we’re still not getting anything, and if you still feel the same way, then we’ll pull off and rethink it. OK?’
There was nothing we could say. We were here to do a job. We could not do it sitting in the Det wondering why we were uncomfortable. Perhaps the only way was to face it and flush it out. An advance to contact, so to speak. But that usually meant waiting for a soldier to take a hit before knowing where the enemy were.
I went to my little room and lay awake for hours wondering if there was anything I had seen that could have made me react the way I had. By dawn I had fallen into an uneasy sleep.
The following night, we went out to Dungannon again. One of us wasn’t coming back.
We arrived in Dungannon via the motorway, which was the safest and least conspicuous route, all one-up and at intervals of several minutes. We took up positions around the town, careful not to use locations we considered over-used, shut off our engines and sat in our cars, waiting for any activity.