How London police uncovered the IRA’s Great Britain Brigade

The London Daily News, June 1987

The Great Britain Brigade was born out of an IRA disaster. In March 1979, Brian Keenan, who had run the IRA’s English operations for four years, was arrested in Belfast and flown to London to face trial for plotting to cause explosions. That winter, in a desperate attempt to get him back, his successor, Richard Glenholmes, led a high-powered IRA team to London, where they laid plans to fly Keenan out of Brixton Prison by helicopter – but they too were arrested.

The loss of Keenan and Glenholmes, who were both given long sentences, gutted the IRA’s English operation. To the Army Council in Dublin it was the last in a long line of foul-ups in mainland units: one had been arrested when its members got drunk and started shooting up an Indian restaurant in Manchester; another had been captured after jumping a red light outside a police station in Liverpool and drawing weapons on the policeman who flagged them down; another had been exposed after giving a policeman false names and then forgetting them. Glenholmes, himself, had never beeen authorised to try and free Keenan.

The Army Council learned its lessons and decided to put mainland operations on a new footing by establishing a special unit in Dublin, outside British jurisdiction, with its own director of operations and a permanent staff. The new unit was told to invest in long-term planning, to work with the Army Council in maximising the political impact of its attacks, and to ensure there were no more unauthorised adventures.

The man put in charge was Owen Coogan, known as Ownie or Jug Head, then aged 31, a veteran of the IRA’s 2nd Battalion. He was already a prime target for the security forces in Northern Ireland, which had first arrested him in April 1973 and then recaptured him when he escaped by hiding in a dustcart. He was also a suspect for the 1978 bombing at La Mon restaurant outside Belfast in which diners were burned alive.

His second-in-command, Michael Hayes, had a very different background. He had been living in Birmingham when the ‘the troubles’ broke out in Northern Ireland in the late Sixties and was an early member of the reformed IRA on the mainland. The Special Branch identified him and, in 1975, asked the Home Secretary to deport him. The Home Secretary refused, but Hayes went to Dublin anyway, where he continued his work with the Provisionals.

Coogan and Hayes appointed another Belfast veteran, Albert Flynn, as the unit’s intelligence officer with the job of researching potential targets and locating safe houses and supply routes on the mainland.

These three were to become the cornerstone of the Great Britain Brigade. They learned not to rely on ordinary volunteers; instead, they picked their brightest and best and gave them special training. Where possible, they chose people who had no criminal record or history in Republican politics. Failing that, they concealed their identities with wallets full of carefully forged documents.

They learned not to store military equipment in their English safe houses, for this only gave police the bonus of a hoard of evidence. They decided, instead, to bury their arms in caches in the countryside. They learned not to use the flights and ferries from Northern Ireland which were watched by Special Branch; instead, they entered England through neutral points like Brussels and Paris, where the over-stretched branch could afford only minimal scrutiny.

They built up their strength slowly. Three London bombs in the winter of 1980 were little more than calling cards. It was the next year, in the autumn of 1981, when the Great Britain Brigade mounted its first major operation in London, using all the new tactics it had gleaned from studying past failures.

It was just before noon when the wave of emergency calls broke over the communications room at Scotland Yard. The message was switched straight upstairs to the duty officer in the Anti Terrorist Cell – explosion in Chelsea; injuries; bomb suspected.

Outside Chelsea barracks, in Ebury Bridge Road, there were two dead bodies and many screaming people. Irish Guardsmen were dragging wounded friends out of their twisted coach which had taken the brunt of the explosion. Some of them had six-inch nails embedded in their flesh.

Uniformed police who had been on foot patrol in the Kings Road were already running to the scene, radioing for ambulances and back-up.

The scene that Saturday in October 1981 marked the devastating arrival in London of the IRA’s new brigade. That autumn, they put down five devices, four of which exploded. They killed three people, including a bomb disposal man; maimed a senior army officer; stretched police resources to the limit; put millions of Londoners in fear of their lives;and cost West End stores a small fortune in lost Christmas business. The number of people passing through Father Christmas’s grotto in Oxford Street dropped from 5,000 a day to 64.

They then left the country and returned to Dublin undetected. In terrorist terms, it was an entirely successful operation.

However, just as the IRA had improved its effectiveness by creating the Great Britain Brigade, so, too, the police had been learning from experience. In the 1970s, their responses had often been muddled and slow; intelligence was patchy and rarely shared; there was a shortage of specialist skills; crucial clues were literally thrown away at the scene of explosions.

But as the new IRA brigade hit London, the Anti Terrorist Branch was better prepared than ever. It had its own intelligence cell, staffed by Special Branch officers; an array of forensic experts in the background; and a new, systematic procedure for dealing with the site of an explosion.

When the bomb went off outside Chelsea barracks on October 10, police attacked it in waves: bomb disposal men made sure the area was safe; exhibits officers picked up immediate clues; artists and photographers recorded the scene: forensic officers looked for fingerprints. Sweepers cordoned off the area, split it into zones and spent four days gathering every scrap of debris. Then they handed everything to the scientists who sifted it zone by zone, and tried to reconstruct the incident.

As more bombs went off in the following weeks, they repeated the exercise. They also poured energy and resources into the inquiry: they took hundreds of witness statements and released descriptions; appealed for help from landlords; found out exactly how the bombs were made and where the components came from; drew up a list of suspects and checked their whereabouts.

They trawled through data at ports and airports; organised a mass search of lock-up garages; traced vehicles used by the bombers and went back into their histories. This huge operation took them down dozens of dead ends, and then yielded one vital breakthrough: the Chelsea barracks bomb had been contained in a white Commer van.

Tracing back, they found it had been bought by a man with an Irish accent, in Barking on September 17. He had given a receipt for the van’s purchase and left his print on it. The print belonged to Patrick James ‘Flash’ McVeigh, then aged 30, who had opened his criminal record in Belfast at the age of 14.

He had been at the heart of IRA activity in Belfast since 1971: jailed for 10 years in 1973 for terrorism; an IRA training officer in the Maze Prison during his sentence; wounded in an assassination attempt by the Official IRA on his release in 1977: part of Gerard Tuite’s unit which bombed London in the winter of 1978; and now the first member of the Great Britain Brigade to be unmasked.

McVeigh’s companions were still only shadows taking shape in the memories of witnesses: there seemed to be a woman who had borrowed some jump leads to start the white Commer van a few days before the Chelsea bomb. And there were two other men: one short and chubby; the other with curly hair and a baby face. But they were no more than identikits.

The Anti Terrorist Branch were still hunting down leads when, eight months later, the Brigade sent a new team back to London, killing 11 people and injuring 60 more in the two park bombings of July 20, 1982.

They were particularly savage attacks: some of the guardsmen in Hyde Park had had their skulls crushed by their ceremonial helmets; military bandsmen in Regents Park were torn in half and so mutilated that police had only their medals by which to identify them.

The police machine rolled into action, collecting every fragment from the two bomb scenes. They even conducted post-mortems on the dead horses in Hyde Park to recover shrapnel evidence from the carcasses. Dredging the lake in Regent’s Park, they found an attache case, thrown away by the bombers.

They followed the clue voraciously: they traced the manufacturers of the case in Taiwan; found only 1,000 had been exported to the UK, of which only 500 had been sold before the bombing; and then tried to trace every shop which had sold one. But it yielded nothing.

They had a tip that the Brigade had bought a flat and trawled through every estate agent in South East England looking for it, without luck.

They reconstructed the scene in Hyde Park and found two joggers who recalled seeing a man taking photographs of the horse guards twice during the week before the bomb. They said he was in a white Ford Cortina with a black vinyl roof and stripes clown the side. That car then became the most wanted object in London.

The Anti Terrorist Branch contacted every commander in the Metropolitan Police, the City of London force and British Transport police and got them to search their records for a sign of it. They then organised a huge secret search of the whole of London on the night of August 25. Meanwhile, they trawled the Police National Computer and came up with thousands of possible leads to pursue, and spread the search to every police force in England and Wales. Yet again, it yielded nothing.

Finally, one of their long shots paid off. They took the registration number of the blue Marina which contained the Hyde Park bomb and tried to trace its movements through car parks and parking tickets. They discovered that on the day of the explosion, the car had spent the morning in the NCP car park Knightsbridge. They recovered the ticket and found one of the bombers had left a finger print on it.

It belonged to John Anthony Downey, then aged 30, a Provisional volunteer since 1971, wanted for murders and bombings on the border, suspected of mainland bombings in the mid 1970s, formerly a member of the IRA’s Northern Command, and now the second member of the Great Britain Brigade to join the wanted list.

The Anti Terrorist Branch also identified two other men who helped Downey bomb the parks. One was from Londonderry, where he was wanted for murdering a policeman as well as shootings and bombings; the other, who had briefly lived with Downey’s wife, was now on the run after being given bail in Belfast on conspiracy charges.

A picture of the new Brigade was beginning to emerge. A year later, the whole picture came out in one dazzling operation.

On October 26, 1983 – the second anniversary of bomb disposal officer Ken Howarth’s death in the Oxford Street Wimpy Bar – two forestry workers were clearing woodland on a country estate near Pangbourne in Berkshire when one of their rakes caught in a piece of plastic sticking out of the ground. Looking closer, they found it was a dustbin lid, covered in soil and leaves and concealing a whole dustbin buried up to its neck in the woods. Lifting the lid, they found the bin was full of weapons.

They called the local police, who called the Army to make sure it was safe. When they unloaded the bin, they found, among other things, 118 pounds of explosive, 63 detonators, 39 timing devices, two pistols, two revolvers, two rifles and a sub-machine gun – “the most comprehensive collection of terrorist equipment and materials ever seen in this country,” as it was later described.

The next day, searching the area, they found a second buried bin containing more bomb-making equipment and a stash of documents including birth certificates and driving licences. Now, the Anti Terrorist Branch’s painstaking collection of evidence from bomb sites paid off.

By making microscopic comparisons with the burned and broken fragments collected from London’s streets, scientists could link the material in the Pangbourne dump to every bomb placed by the Brigade in the previous two years – a spool of flex that had been used to detonate the Chelsea barracks bomb; timers and magnets that been used in the attack on former Commandant General of the Royal Marines Sir Steuart Pringle; microswitches and detonators that had been used in Oxford Street; improvised batteries like those at Sir Michael Havers’ home; and specialist radio equipment used in the park bombings.

But more important, the dump was a treasure trove of evidence. Now the shadowy figures from the winter of 1981 stepped forward. There were numerous traces of “Flash” McVeigh, confirming his involvement, but they were also able to identify his co-conspirators.

The woman from the unit turned out to be Evelyn Glenholmes, whose father Richard had been arrested so disastrously in 1979, herself known as an arms courier and scarred by a bullet wound in the leg. The chubby bomber was Paul Kavanagh, then aged 26, involved with the Provisionals since his schooldays, wanted for robberies and hijacks in Ireland and for arms running in Europe. The baby-faced bomber was Tommy Quigley, also 26 and, like Owen Coogan, a veteran of the 2nd Belfast Battalion.

And as a bonus, they found evidence of one of the Provisionals’ foremost bomb designers, Desmond Ellis, then aged 29 and believed to be the architect of the new generation of sophisticated electronic devices now favoured by the Provisionals.

The Yard launched a huge follow-up operation. They found driving licences and credit cards in phony names. They trawled the intelligence banks of every police force in the country looking for a reference to any of the names which might lead them to an address. But knowing names was not enough to stop the bombers.

Still at liberty, Paul Kavanagh and Owen Coogan arranged to divert a shipment of arms on its way from Europe through Dublin to Belfast. Kavanagh paid a trawler skipper £1,000 to take him and the arms from the port of Balbriggan out into the Irish Sea, where he transferred to another vessel which landed him on the English coast.

Weeks later, on December 10 1983, Kavanagh and another Belfast volunteer, John Connolly, started using the new cache to launch a Christmas campaign. A bomb exploded outside Woolwich barracks, destroying the guard room.

Three days later, a potential disaster was averted when a young traffic warden spotted a bag hanging on a parking meter on a crowded pavement in Philimore Gardens, Kensington. It contained 10 pounds of explosive and an electric detonator, but it was made safe by bomb disposal men.

Four days later, London’s luck ran out when Kavanagh and Connolly detonated a 30-pound car bomb outside Harrods. It killed six people, including three police officers, and injured 92 others.

The terrifying attack was the prelude to the Anti Terrorist Branch’s most frustrating episode. Five weeks later, Special Branch had Connolly, Kavanagh and the rest of the Harrods unit in their sights for 48 hours but, as we revealed in the London Daily News last week, they lost them without ever telling the Anti Terrorist Branch what they were doing.

But that was only the most flagrant example of a bitter lesson which the Anti Terrorist Branch was learning. They could work as hard as they liked detecting terrorists – but actually imprisoning them was another matter.

Known members of the IRA’s Great Britain Brigade:

John Connolly. Aged 29. Prime suspect for the Harrods bomb. Now at liberty in Eire.

Owen Coogan. Aged 39. First head of the Brigade. Suspect for the murder of 12 people in the 1978 bombing of La Mon restaurant in Belfast. At liberty.

John Downey: Aged 35. Wanted for 1982 park bombings. Now at liberty in Eire.

Desmond Ellis. Aged 34. Wanted for supplying bombs for London campaign of 1981. In prison in Eire.

Albert Flynn. Intelligence officer to the Brigade.

Evelyn Glenholmes. Aged 29. Wanted for London bombings of winter 1981. Now at liberty in Eire.

Michael Hayes. First deputy head of the Brigade. Now at liberty in Eire.

Paul Kavanagh. Aged 31. Jailed for life for London bombings in 1981. Harrods suspect. In prison in England.

Patrick Magee. Aged 36. Jailed for 1984 Brighton hotel bomb. Suspect for mainland plots in 1978 and 1983.

Patrick Murray. Aged 43. Suspected of helping Magee in Brighton bomb and 1983 plot. At liberty in Eire.

Sean O’Callaghan. Aged 34. Named in 1983 for plot to assassinate British politicians. At liberty in Eire.

Thomas Quigley. Jailed for life for London bombings in winter 1981. Now in prison in England.