The foul-ups and loopholes which have let IRA bombers go free

The London Daily News, June 1987

Five powerful men sat round the table: the head of Special Branch; an MI5 director; and a trio of civil servants from the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Northern Ireland Office. They had all studied the manila file, marked Top Secret, which lay in front of them.

It was an intelligence dossier on John Anthony Downey, the IRA man who, two months earlier, had come to London and organised the slaughter of 11 unarmed soldiers in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park. It contained his biography, his criminal record, his history with the IRA and a summary of the damning evidence which tied him to the two ferocious bombings.

The five men made up a high-powered Whitehall committee whose job was to oversee the fight against Irish terrorism. But that day, in September 1982, they were forced, despite their considerable power, to concede defeat. They agreed to relay the name of the guilty terrorist to the Prime Minister with their recommendation that no action should be taken. Five years later, John Downey is still free.

The impotence of the British security establishment to deal with him is a pointer to an extraordinary untold story. For while the government has placed the highest priority on capturing the IRA teams who have terrorised London, the truth is that they have often been defeated, even though the Anti Terrorist Branch has given them the evidence which they needed to pinpoint the guilty men.

There are numerous reasons for this failure. Some are political, revolving around the problem of getting other governments to co-operate; some are operational, like the disastrous misunderstanding and friction between police and intelligence units; some are legal, concerning the admissability of evidence and the technicalities of the law; and some just come down to being too short of resources to do the job.

Downey’s escape was typical. His name emerged from the thousands of man hours poured into the investigation of the London park bombs of July 20 1982, after a fingerprint was found. The print clearly belonged to the bomber; Downey was a likely candidate; the problem was to get a set of his prints to make the comparison.

The simple answer would have been to ask the police in Dublin, but that was not possible. As a senior Whitehall source said: “The Irish Republic is a foreign country, and foreign countries do not just hand over their criminal intelligence. Ireland obviously also has its own recent history of trouble with Britain, so even if they want to be co-operative, they are afraid of being called Brit Lovers.”

To solve the problem, the Anti Terrorist Branch had to use highly sensitive intelligence sources of their own. They got their set of prints, but the source had to be protected. The result was that they could not admit they had the evidence. This was not the first time that the problem had occurred. But it was aggravated by the brutality of the bombings.

“Since the end of 1979, our arrests of Irish terrorists had been entirely fortuitous,” said one source. “It was obviously going to remain like that because of the guile of the new generation of Irish Republican activists. We had to turn our minds to the preventative front, and, if necessary, use some unconventional methods – not illegal, but unconventional.”

What this meant in Downey’s case was that they ‘blew’ him in the press. After the Whitehall committee’s meeting, Scotland Yard held a press conference and released a pencil drawing of their ‘suspect’ for the park bombings; but it was no ordinary artist’s impression. They knew exactly what Downey looked like but they could not admit that they had the evidence to nail him, so they went as far as they could by publishing a portrait of Downey and presenting it as an impression of an unknown suspect.

They also published accurate details of his age, height and colouring. This gave them the chance to try and flush out new witnesses and also sent a clear signal to Downey that he had been identified and that he had better forget any plans he might have had to return to the mainland to carry out more bombings.

Nine months later, they blew him again. But this time the circumstances of their secret source made it possible to admit that they had identified him. So they republished the drawing along with his name and the wry comment that: “The artist’s impression which was published last year is said to bear an extraordinarily close resemblance to Downey.”

This increased the pressure on Downey. It also increased the pressure on Dublin to do something about him. The most obvious step would have been to agree to his extradition to London to face trial. But it is that apparently simple step which has proved the most difficult to take. To this day, no IRA terrorist has ever been extradited from Dublin to London.

The Anti Terrorist Branch keeps a special book called the Warrant Register. It lists the names of those IRA mainland activists for whom warrants have been issued, and records the outcome. It makes desperate reading. Going right back to 1973, it is a catalogue of political failure.

There in tidy columns are the letter-bombers whose prints were found on devices which arrived in London and failed to explode; the mainland bombers who left evidence of their presence strewn round abandoned English safe houses; the back-up men who hired the cars and rented the flats and left their finger-prints behind them. All neatly listed.

Some have been caught. Tommy Quigley, whose prints were all over the arms dump found in a wood near Pangbourne, Berkshire, in October 1983, strayed north of the Irish border in December 1983, apparently unaware that he had been identified. He was arrested, flown back to London and given a life sentence.

His old comrade, Paul Kavanagh, who was a key member of the Great Britain Brigade, suffered the same fate after making the error of travelling from the safety of Dublin to Belfast for St Patrick’s Day 1984. They were both convicted of the winter 1981 bombings in London which killed three people. But Patrick ‘Flash’ McVeigh and Evelyn Glenholmes who worked with them are still in Ireland, as is Desmond Ellis who supplied the technology for the bombs.

Downey and two other men who have been identified as his co-plotters in the park bombings are there, too. The prime suspect for the Harrods bomb, John Connolly, the most wanted terrorist of all, is also listed. The list goes on and on.

There are warrants for notorious IRA men, like Brendan Swords, who is still active in Dublin more than 10 years after he left his finger prints all over a flat full of explosives in south London. Scotland Yard did once try to persuade Dublin to extradite him, but the Irish Foreign Ministry complained that Swords was being charged with conspiring to cause explosions when he should have been charged with conspiring to murder, and the warrant got no further.

There are outstanding warrants for no less than seven IRA men who belonged to Gerard Tuite’s team which bombed English cities in the winter of 1978 and left their fingerprints in three safe houses. Two of them have been arrested and released without charge in the Irish Republic since then; all have been traced to their current homes by intelligence.

The Warrant Register’s dismal roll-call is not even the end of the story. It makes no mention of the IRA men who have been identified by British and Irish intelligence but against whom there is no formal evidence. These include the two commanders of the Great Britain Brigade, Owen Coogan and Michael Hayes; and their intelligence officer, Albert Flynn – all still free to operate from their refuge in Ireland.

The blockage is political – the Irish Government’s fear of being identified with the hated Brits – but also legal, for it is the view of the Irish courts that crimes committed on behalf of the IRA are political and, therefore, exempt from extradition. The result, invariably, has been that the warrants have not been executed. In the rare cases where they have been, it has caused chaos.

The two attempts to extradite Evelyn Glenholmes collapsed in fiasco as the Irish courts found technical faults with the warrants. “We were partly to blame,” one senior source confessed. “There were tiny faults in the warrants, the sort of technical faults which no court over here would be in the slightest bit worried about. There is no doubt that the Irish courts look for loopholes.”

The alternative is to try terrorists in Dublin for offences committed on the mainland, something which is technically possible under the 1976 Criminal Law (Jurisdiction) Act. It has worked once – in the case of Gerard Tuite in 1982 – but no one in Whitehall is expecting to see it work again.

Immediately after the Tuite case, Scotland Yard sent papers on three more IRA men to the Irish authorities and asked for them to be tried in the same way. But the attempt foundered in a swamp of legal arguments.

In the eyes of the Anti Terrorist Branch, the problem with Dublin is the problem with governments around the world: the off-shore banking havens which launder the IRA’s money through secret accounts; the other courts, notably in the United States, which regard IRA activity as political; the regimes which would rather let a terrorist go than make themselves targets by handing him over; and the reluctance of the Foreign Office to upset its relationship with other governments by pushing too hard for a tougher approach.

Yet there are equally grave problems nearer to home. The chaotic incident in January 1984, described in Monday’s London Daily News, when Special Branch let the Harrods bombers slip through their fingers, is part of a destructive pattern in the relationship between different elements of the security community.

It is partly a structural problem: intelligence on Republican terrorists is the job of Special Branch on the mainland; of MI5 in Northern Ireland; and of MI6 in the Irish Republic. The organisations do not pool their information; nor do they share it with the Anti Terrorist Branch or any other police force. They all deal with each other on a ‘need-to-know’ basis.

“How do they know what I need to know?” asked one senior figure. “I don’t know what they’ve got; they don’t know what I’ve got; and it’s only when you put all the fragments together and start to interpret them and try and understand them that you learn anything.

“It can be very frustrating. If someone I’m interested in turns up in Ireland, I can’t talk to the Irish police, I’ve got to go through Special Branch. And they may not mean to be obstructive but they filter the information. It’s the same in Europe.”

Communications from Special Branch to other parts of the police are often so vague that they are meaningless. They issued a warning before the park bombings, suggesting that there might be an IRA attack, without indicating what part of the country, what sort of target or even what form of attack they were thinking of. Tantalizingly, they described their source as particularly reliable and left it at that.

Two days before the Brighton bomb, Ministry of Defence intelligence issued a warning to all police forces. In London, it was not even passed down to the Anti Terrorist Branch, who first heard of it when a desk sergeant in Surrey rang them to say he had arrested a suspicious Irishman and wondered if he had anything to do with the warning. The next day, Special Branch circulated their own warning but refrained from providing any detail.

Failure to communicate between the different groups can turn the structural problems into a disaster. In May 1983, an Irishman in Blackpool approached his local Special Branch and told them he had been asked to help set up an IRA attack: the target was a pub used by soldiers from the nearby Weezon army camp. For two weeks, the local Special Branch watched as their informant and two IRA men reconnoitered their target. Then they got too close and were spotted.

The bombers made a break for it and, after a car chase through Blackpool and Preston, escaped through Wales to Dublin. At no stage during those two weeks was the Anti Terrorist Branch told what was going on. One of those two bombers was Patrick Magee: the Anti Terrorist Branch was then holding fingerprint evidence that linked him to the winter 1978 bombs in London, but they were never given the chance to arrest him. The next year, Magee returned to the mainland and killed five people and injured 32 others in the attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton.

These problems of liaison have, in some respects, got worse. Until 1983, the Anti Terrorist Branch had its own intelligence cell, staffed by Special Branch officers, but it was lost during Sir Kenneth Newman’s reorganisation of Scotland Yard.

Money has caused other problems. When the IRA hit Harrods in December 1983, the Anti Terrorist Branch launched an inquiry that was to involve 3,060 phone messages, 895 telexes, 5,577 police actions and 2,600 witness statements. And they were expected to do this without the benefit of a computer. This meant trying to collate and cross-refer this avalanche of information on a paper filing system, which collapsed under the strain.

At the same time, the scientists were working at full stretch analysing the material found in the Pangbourne dump two months earlier and looking at two other bombs which had gone off in the preceding 10 days. They had only four scientists, one assistant and four support staff.

After Harrods, they were presented with a total of 282 dustbins of debris and seven skips. It was vital that they should sift the material quickly, but they were physically unable to do it. They asked for help, but all they got was encouragement.

There have been attempts to solve the problems. Special Branch and the Anti Terrorist Branch have been brought together under one senior officer. The Whitehall committee has been beefed up with more senior civil servants to improve the overall strategy. The Anglo-Irish agreement is intended to improve co-operation on security.

It remains to be seen whether changes like this can break down the obstacles. If John Downey and the rest of the Great Britain Brigade remain at liberty they will have failed.

IRA bombers beat the Prime Minister’s security precautions and were poised to attack the British cabinet a full year before the explosion at the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984 which killed five Conservative supporters and left 32 others injured.

UPDATE: A later attempt to prosecute John Downey for the Hyde Park bomb collapsed at the Old Bailey in central London in February 2014 when it was disclosed that he was covered by a secret agreement with the British government guaranteeing that he would not be tried for any offence committed in the UK. It turned out that similar agreements had been made with 186 other IRA suspects as part of the deal to persuade the Provisional IRA to give up their armed struggle.

* SIDEBAR 1: An IRA terrorist succeeded in getting inside the Prime Minister’s hotel in Blackpool, scene of the previous year’s Conservative conference, where he had the British Cabinet at his mercy – and he did it without being detected. It is still not known why the IRA did not strike home when they had the chance.

It was only after the Brighton blast, when the IRA in Belfast boasted that this was the second time that they had breached Mrs Thatcher’s security, that police returned to the Imperial Hotel where she and most of the Cabinet had stayed during the 1983 Blackpool conference. Checking through the register of guests for the weeks preceding the conference, they found a chilling entry – Mr R Walshe. It was the same name that had been used by IRA bomber Patrick Magee when he booked into the Grand Hotel in Brighton.

And the timing was the same. Mr R Walshe had stayed at the Imperial on the night of September 17 1983 – a month before Mrs Thatcher was due there. The Brighton bomber had left his bomb with a long-delay timer four weeks before the Cabinet arrived at the Grand Hotel with all their security paraphernalia.

The worst fears of police were confirmed when they visited the address in south London which ‘Mr Walshe’ had given to the Imperial: it was not even a private house. It belonged to a catering company who had never employed, or heard of, anyone of that name. Police organised a meticulous search of the Imperial Hotel, concentrating in particular on the bathrooms. The Brighton bomb had been hidden behind the panels of a bath. They found nothing at the Imperial and breathed a sigh of relief. But they never discovered why the Conservatives had been given a 12-month reprieve from the bloody attack.

*SIDEBAR 2: Kensington, December 13 1983. Monica Wood, aged 18, had been a traffic warden for less than a month. So, when she saw the suspicious bag hanging from a parking meter on her beat in Phillimore Gardens, she was not sure what to do.

She knew there had been a bomb in Woolwich only three days earlier and she could see the streets were crowded. She stopped a young man walking off a nearby building site and asked his advice. He peeped into the bag, saw wiring and a battery and told her he thought it was dangerous. After trying to clear the pavements, they ran to the police station around the corner to raise the alarm.

After the bomb had been made safe it was discovered that the young man who had helped to save so many Londoners’ lives was a former member of the Provisional IRA. He had been interned in Belfast in the early 1970s and had come to London to start a new life. By chance, he was working near the IRA’s chosen target. He spent the rest of the day persuading the police of his innocence.