Peterhead (17 page)

The SAS were her “get out of jail” card and the end of the siege was dramatic. One eyewitness recently told me his memories of this secret and sudden action almost a quarter of a century ago. This experienced officer was working in another prison at the time, but he had vital knowledge of the fabric and layout of Peterhead and had served there. He could be very valuable to the SAS in their attempt to free the hostage and end the riot. He knew every nook and cranny in the prison. He was attending a 9am meeting of heads of departments in his then current prison billet. By chance another old Peterhead executive was also there. They had no inkling how their lives were to change that day when the phone rang with the latest news of the desperate state of affairs up north and a dramatic request for them to get involved. These two guys were needed urgently. No one explained exactly why. They were just told to get ready immediately for a move north. Literally within minutes they were in an unmarked car heading for the scene of the action. The mystery trip and the speed of it all was unsettling. This prison service veteran, now enjoying a quiet retirement, told me it was the journey of a lifetime. There was no chitchat between the driver, his colleague and the two passengers, who by now had guessed they would soon be involved in perhaps the most dramatic siege in Scottish prison history. Pleasantries on the weather, the passing scenery and such like were clearly out!

It was a high-speed drive through towns and villages. At every traffic light, or possible slow spot, there was a police presence. The car sped northwards unimpeded by speed limits or traffic lights. For the occupants it was a real life thrill ride that had the adrenalin pumping and the imagination working overtime.

At the prison itself, events were moving fast. The prisoners were still in the loft blockading the stairs with any debris they could find. The prison officers could not get near enough to the rioters to control the situation. But the stand-off was nearing a dramatic conclusion. As the two prison service veterans were being ushered into a conference with the senior executives of the prison, a group of 4x4s were leaving a nearby old airfield. The passengers had descended from a Hercules military transport aircraft which had flown them from Hereford and they were whisked to the back door of the prison. Suddenly about twenty tough-looking guys in fatigues and carrying what looked like cricket bags full of kit were in the prison. The Peterhead staff mostly did not know who they were. But they had the authorisation to enter the jail and immediately talked to the men running the operation against the holed-up prisoners. The atmosphere was chilling. The hit squad wore trainers rather than boots to facilitate walking across the slippery roof tiles, they had flash-bang gas canisters and gas masks. They were armed and dangerous. The “cricket” bags did not contain linseed-oiled bats but staves of the sort that would have come in handy in a Glasgow gang fight.

There was no attempt at good mornings or any small talk or handshaking as they burst into the makeshift HQ of the prison officers attempting to control the riot, now in its fifth day. My eyewitness told me wryly that manners were not in the skill set of these guys. They clearly had a job to do. The newcomers called each other by their first names or nicknames, there was no sergeant this or captain that. It was Andy, Bill and Matt or whatever. They fizzed with energy and exuded competence. Ladders and ropes were also in the kit. And explosives.

The prison officer who knew most about the layout of the prison was grabbed and pushed in front of a long deep window that spanned two or three storeys, ending up just below the attic and quizzed, “What is that frame made of?”

“Cast iron, I think,” he replied but that did not wash with the newcomers.

“Don’t think – tell us what it is made of,” they snapped aggressively.

He stuck with cast iron and in seconds ladders were up the wall and “gelly” placed round the frame and it was swiftly blown out, leaving access to the upper floors. The need for speed was heightened by the fact that some prisoners in other parts of the jail had spotted something going on and were shouting warnings to the men in the attic. Even after the window had been blown out the access to where the hostage was held involved walking along slippery ridge tiles.

A forward squad of four of the SAS men launched themselves into action, dragging their sticks and weapons up into the roof of the prison and letting off stun grenades. They attacked the rioters, wielding the staves with expert violence and taping the prisoners up as they fell. When the rioters were safely restrained the men in fatigues simply left them there on the floor to be sorted out by the prison service. They spent little time talking to the Scottish police and headed back to their waiting aircraft. The whole action had lasted less than a quarter of an hour, the climax taking just a few minutes. The rescuers who had very possibly saved the life of the hostage were back at their HQ in England in time for a second breakfast. There was no triumphalism before they left Peterhead as speedily as they had arrived. Dangerous men themselves, they had brought a daring end to the siege. My eyewitness said he had never seen anything so scary or so effective in his life. But the atmosphere changed when the time came for him to return south – and he was given a train ticket for his trouble. No high-speed secret service limo this time. But he had witnessed history.

Recently the second-in-command of the SAS operation told the
Daily
Record
’s Maggie Barry what it was like viewed from the army side. He said it was quite a technical operation, in which “we had to do explosive entries into different wings of the prison” and seven or eight guys had to walk along the parapet of the roof on a ledge only a few feet wide. All this in the pitch dark. His story of the breaking up of the riot was low-key, as you might expect from a soldier. Indeed one of his memories of that dramatic day was that he would not forget it, as on the Saturday he was due to play squash for the army in Portsmouth and had to cancel it, thus ruining his weekend!

But even years after the SAS men had returned south in their “Hercs” this remarkable episode was not completely over. It would be the subject of rumour and speculation for years before the real story eventually emerged. And, as in the London siege before it, the secretive SAS were dragged into a court case and further details of the rescue of the hostages came into the public arena. In January 1993, six years after the event, a claim for £30,000 damages by thirty-two-year-old John Devine was heard in the Court of Session in Edinburgh. One of the SAS squad flown so dramatically to the prison to end the siege was accused of “setting out to teach the prisoners a lesson.” The soldier was only identified as “T” and he said, “It was not true that his attitude was whatever you do with prison warders you do not monkey around with the SAS.” Devine had made the cash claim against the by then Secretary of State for Scotland Ian Lang. The court was told that one prison officer had been a hostage for more than 100 hours (Jackie Stuart) and another had also been held as a hostage and sustained a broken ankle and was released.

Court 8 was a bizarre scene. It was divided by a seven-foot-high screen to hide the identity of Soldier T. The soldier said he was trained to deal with counter-terrorism incidents and that he was an expert in the release of hostages. He said that on arrival at the prison he and his fellow SAS men were briefed that the rioters holed up in D Hall were dangerous and they were shown photographs of them to help identify them. He said his squad were given batons, gas canisters and flash-bang grenades. It was decided that “T” and six others would break through a hatch in the roof of the hall. This was about 3am and it was still dark. They were near to the hatch when prisoners in other parts of the jail saw them and started shouting warnings to the ringleaders. Soldier T told Alastair Dunlop, QC for the Secretary of State, that this “compromised” the mission. At this point the soldiers got the go-ahead to attack and dropped two flash-bang grenades into the hatch and “T” entered first with a torch to use in the dark.

He told the court: “As I entered the attic space I came across the prison warder. I moved towards him and checked that he was okay and he was just passed behind me to the next person.” He then said that almost instantly he saw a rioter coming towards him, apparently with a knife in his hand. “I moved towards him and struck his forearm and then struck upwards to strike his face. The first blow was to disarm and the second was to enable me to move closer and put him off his balance.” He denied striking the prisoner about the head with a baton at any other stage and said that the prisoner was not thrown twelve feet from the attic to the gallery below. Cross-examined by the legendary QC Lionel Daiches, he denied saying or hearing his colleagues say, “You’re going for a spin, pal.”

The lawyer than said, “Weren’t you absolutely certain you were going to teach him a lesson, the sort he would remember?”

Soldier T relied firmly, “No.”

When Mr Daiches suggested that Mr Devine’s head was being “burst open” when he was not opposing the SAS in any way, the answer was again a firm no.

When the court resumed the next day John Devine’s claim was thrown out. The jury took a mere thirty minutes to reject his civil action for his alleged injuries in the affair. But the defeated party took some satisfaction, if not money, from the court action. Devine’s lawyer, Cameron Fyfe, said, “The fact that the case proceeded to court, and in particular to a jury, is for him a victory in itself. For years the authorities refused to admit that the SAS was used to bring the Peterhead siege to an end.” He went on to say his client wanted him to highlight his frustration in getting the case to court. “We came up against a great deal of resistance and Mr Devine was granted legal aid only at the last minute. This situation should not be allowed to arise again.”

Later it was confirmed that Jimmy Boyle, the controversial convicted killer who went on to a career as a sculptor and artist via the Barlinnie Special Unit and who had caused so much trouble in Peterhead himself, had helped financially in the legal costs in bringing the case to court. Boyle said after the conclusion of the case that the main principle of the case was established “that the SAS were held accountable for their actions in open court.” That was a highly personal verdict and one that might not have the support of those who have had their lives saved in the actions, many unpublicised, by the Special Air Service.

One of the pleasures of historical research is uncovering the nuggets of massive understatement contained in the official records. The newspapers’ habit of calling the prison The Hate Factory says a lot about Peterhead in a few words. No understatement there. Years of violence between prisoners and their jailors, riots, dirty protests, it is all encompassed in the nickname. The prison service now, rightly, on the eve of the opening of a new super jail on a site adjacent to the old one, does not hide from the facts but it does put it a bit more delicately. Officially it says, “Peterhead has had a somewhat troubled history, not least the number of disturbances and rooftop protests in the late 1980s.” Too true, and the story of the SAS intervention may have been unique but it happened during one riot of many. And the ordeal of Jackie Stuart was not a solitary happening.

The previous year in November 1986 there had been another dangerous riot in the prison and again a warder was taken hostage. This time he was John Crossan and he was, like Jackie, extremely lucky to escape with his life and survive the incident physically uninjured, though he was held by desperate knife-wielding men for four days of mental torture. I am always concerned that so often the survivors of hostage taking are described in newspaper reports as “unhurt” – as if the mental anguish of being held blindfolded with a knife at your throat was not an injury. At times Mr Crossan’s captors threatened that they would cut his fingers off. And perhaps worse.

It began on a Sunday and ended on a Thursday. Previous to the actual riot there had been a disturbing feeling in the prison that all was far from normal. The officers in A Hall had, it seems, been warned that it was best to patrol in twos if possible. The closed environment of a prison can magnify rumours and emotions and brew up fears. The men who ran the prison were convinced that trouble lay ahead. John Crossan was the unlucky one taken hostage by convicted murderers who had knives as weapons.

What lit the torch paper? As in the case of the later SAS riot, who really knows? As in most prison riots the pressure pot blows open in something of a spontaneous outbreak of violence. Bad blood between jailer and jailed simply erupts. At the trial of the hostage takers in Peterhead High Court, Mr Crossan denied that prison officers in riot gear had been beating their sticks noisily against their shields outside A Hall as claimed by inmates. It was remarked at the trial that it would be most unusual for officers to be in riot gear before the riot even started! John Crossan also denied that when the trouble did start the officers sprinted for the exits and he had simply been left behind. Three lifers, Andrew Walker, William Ballantyne and John Smith, were convicted for their part in the riot and ten years to be served concurrently were added to their sentences, and these new convictions were to be taken into account when the possibility of parole came up. The three admitted mobbing and rioting and seizing John Crossan and blindfolding him. The three accused also admitted assaulting fifteen officers by forcing them to leave A Hall by threatening their colleague. And to setting fire to A Hall and causing damage that cost more than a quarter of a million pounds to put right.

A fourth convict called Anderson was found not guilty, which resulted in John Smith laughing and declaring, “That is a burden off my shoulders.” Earlier in the trial he had shouted out in court that this particular jail mate was innocent. Smith was an interesting man and in his defence Donald Robertson QC read out a letter his client had written. In it there is much insight into the thinking of prisoners and the appalling conditions in Peterhead at the time. Lord Murray the judge was told: “Can anyone ever understand the horrors of prison without being part of it, feeling the anxieties of it, knowing the helplessness, living in desolation? Prison life does not provide the creative environment and training needed for a man to make a new beginning on the outside. Instead it is geared to using the men as labour, punishing if necessary and disregard [
sic
] their inner spirit as of no consequence. Physical and mental brutality does exist in Peterhead. This matter can only be resolved with the introduction of rehabilitation. If the prison authorities insist on treating prisoners like animals then prisoners will continue to act like animals. Prisoners, including myself, have been described as incurable psychopaths, subversive and hell-bent on destruction. This can only be described as an excuse rather than a truth. I ask you, have prisoners been given the chance to express themselves in any other way? Certainly not in Peterhead.”