The course began gently with sessions on lock-picking. These took place in a special room packed with locks of every kind — doorlocks, padlocks, everything — plus a key-cutting machine, for us to use to manufacture our own. Outside we learnt to open cars with a slim jim, a long sliver of metal like a ruler, with hooks on it and small sections cut out.
Something else new to me was photography. We were taught to use cameras with short-focus lenses, for recording serial numbers of weapons and suchlike, and also telephoto monsters, for taking covert long-range pictures of people who might be players. We developed, printed and blew up our own shots in the darkroom on site.
At the same time, we did exercises like Kim’s game, in which we were each given a bunch of mug-shots to study, and then, in a live parade, asked to identify any of the faces we’d been looking at. It was drummed into us that our lives might depend on recognizing a key player at a key moment.
A more active pursuit was fast driving, for which the police came down and took us out one-to-one. Most of us were already pretty competent, but we all got sharpened up. We put in big mileage on narrow country roads, such as we’d be using in Ireland, and learned to drive fast but safely. Then they took us to a big municipal car-park, empty in the early hours of the morning, where we used vehicles fitted with a special attachment — a frame which was mounted under the car, like a cradle on small wheels, with hydraulic controls that enabled the instructor to take most of the weight off the tyres. My teacher had a dial with a scale of one to five, and at five the Cavalier became like a turd on black ice, spinning at the slightest provocation. Here we learnt J-turns, yanking on the handbrake to spin the car in its own length.
The best session, though, was on the morning the police took us to a breaker’s yard and we bought a load of old bangers for about £50 apiece, to practise ramming. To get out of an illegal VCP or knock a hostile vehicle off the road you need to know what you’re doing, and for half a day we behaved like lunatics in full-sized dodgems, hammering the shit out of each other.
Another big issue was weaponry, principally the G3s, the Heckler & Koch 7.62mm rifles which are the standard weapon in Northern Ireland. With a magazine holding twenty rounds, and an excellent mechanism that hardly gives any stoppages, the G3 is ideal for firing into cars, since its penetration is far greater than that of the lower-powered Armalite. The longs (rifles are known as ‘longs’, pistols as ‘shorts’) at LATA were numbered with white paint on the butt, and I got No. 7, which I always reckon is lucky for me. Each of us also got an HK 53, a smaller, neater rifle, 556 calibre, good for tucking under the front seat of a car; and a Sig — properly a Sigsauer P 226 — a 9mm pistol, accurate and reliable, and not prone to stoppages. We were told to carry weapons on exercises, just to get used to them, but at night they went into a lock-up in a classroom, and it was the duty-sergeant’s job to make certain they were secure.
At that time the situation in Ulster was pretty bad, and almost every day there was news on TV or in the papers of another atrocity. One afternoon not long into the course the daily programme billed a brief on the political background in Northern Ireland, and the way special forces fitted into the fight against terrorism. Before the lecture, nobody seemed to rate the importance of this topic very highly; the afternoon was fine and hot — definitely not the sort of conditions for sitting in a Portakabin classroom — and a couple of the lads tried to skive off on some pretence. But the moment the talk started, everybody was hooked.
The speaker introduced himself as Chief Superintendent James Morrison of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. He was quite an elderly guy, grey haired, grey faced, grey suited, grey all over. Even his voice was grey: a monotone so quiet it was difficult to hear. He perched his arse on the front of the table and spoke without props, notes or gestures; yet what he said had us leaning forward in our seats.
‘It’s war you’re going to,’ he began. ‘It’s war and nothing else, so it is. It’s been going on for twenty-five years, and I’ve been in it all that time. I still don’t understand Northern Ireland, and I never will. But I do believe we’d be doing a lot better if we’d dropped more of the enemy on operations. I wouldn’t send somebody out just to shoot three or four of them; but on specific operations, of which we’ve had knowledge, it would have put a heck of a lot of fear into them if we’d killed a few more. I shouldn’t be saying this to yous fellers but, flip, I am.’
That had us fairly hooked, and nobody moved as he went on to outline the way special forces fitted into the campaign against terrorism, in combination with the green army, the RUC, Special Branch and various other intelligence organizations. He then sketched in the nature and behaviour of the IRA. He described how the original IRA, known as the Stickies, had turned away from violence and become doves. Today’s hawks were the Provisional IRA, or PIRA (in his accent, ‘Payra’). He sketched their organization: at the top, the Army Council, and under that the Northern and Southern Commands — one for Ulster, one for the Republic. The task of the Southern Command was to organize terrorist attacks on the mainland. In the north there were three brigades, sub-divided into small cells known as ASUs, or Active Service Units, which formed the core of IRA activity.
Fragmentation was the name of their game, he said. Each cell probably consisted of only three or four people: a bomber, a shooter, a driver, and maybe one other. Very often they did not know each other; they didn’t even know their colleagues’ names. The intention was that if anyone was caught, it was impossible for him to give anyone else away. Fragmentation also made life more difficult for the informers — or touts — who might squeal on one phase of a job, but would rarely be able to find out about the operation as a whole.
Morrison told us how the players spent their lives targeting policemen, endlessly trying to pick them up as they left work and follow them back to their homes. ‘I tell you — just the other day they targeted one of my officers. I’ll call him John. The man came home from work at eleven o’clock at night. He hadn’t been indoors a minute before a call came from a friend in Special Branch. “Look, John,” says the caller, “close your curtains. There’s somebody in your back garden. Don’t worry — they’re ours. If anyone comes to your front door in the next few minutes, let them in, and they’ll look after you.”
‘Sure enough, more people came. They stayed the night. They told John that some form of attack on him was imminent. They expected it to be a UCBT — an under-car booby trap — and they had people outside ready to grab the bomber. They waited all night, and no one came. Something had spooked them. All the same, John had to move house…’
On and on went the hypnotic voice, telling us about deep hides, concreted over or sealed into houses behind false walls, where quartermasters would store weapons and ammunition for months or even years. We heard of transit hides, less elaborate caches, where one man would deposit a weapon and another would collect it to do a particular shooting. He told us how the IRA staged burglaries to decoy the police into killing areas, and how they themselves would never risk firing a rifle or a rocket from a position that didn’t afford them a clear escape route.