Bandit Country - The IRA and South Armagh (472)

0:00Welcome to Cold War Conversations, the home of real stories of the Cold War. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans. Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot.

0:41The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com. But this was in name part of the United Kingdom, but it just felt like a place that was in one way beautiful and benign, but I knew all the stuff that had gone on there and that it was an IRA stronghold, and it was just completely different. During the Cold War, British soldiers fought an insurgent war against the provisional IRA in their own country.

1:27Probably the toughest location was South Armagh, where they had to travel by helicopter while watchtowers scanned fields and an IRA sniper could strike without warning. In this episode, journalist and Royal Navy officer Toby Harnden takes us inside his book Bandit Country, which describes the borderland of South Armagh, where the provisional IRA fought one of its most formidable campaigns. Harmden recalls arriving during the uneasy peace of 1996, meeting IRA members and security personnel and learning how family ties, local knowledge and the Irish border made the South Armagh Brigade unusually effective.

2:07We explore its sniper teams, homemade mortars, intelligence networks, the massive London and Manchester attacks, Libyan weapons and attempts to bring down British helicopters. I'm delighted to welcome Toby Harmden to our Cold War conversation. Most of the story of the Troubles happened against the backdrop of the Cold War. It was going on at the same time. Now, obviously, Cold War ended at the end of the 80s. And so by the time I was in Northern Ireland, which was 96, it was over. I grew up with Greenham Common and mutually assured destruction and all that. And many of the soldiers that served in South Amar had been based in Germany and were Cold War troops.

2:54I'd grown up in Manchester, including many visits to Manchester Museum, by the way. And I was a new journalist. I spent 10 years in the Royal Navy, which is unusual entree into journalism. I'd been to Northern Ireland once, but it was just a sort of senior officer's visit where I was the bag carrier and I was following him around. But I was fascinated by the place. I'd grown up in a kind of Irish Catholic environment, if you like, in Manchester. Lots of kids' parents were Irish at school, so I was always interested in Ireland. But when I got there, it felt familiar. Belfast felt familiar. It felt a little bit like Manchester in the 70s, so it was 20 years behind.

3:30It had that sort of grim, gritty feel to it. So it didn't feel alien. Everybody spoke English, and obviously some Irish people spoke Irish, but very few. So it wasn't like being in the Middle East where I went to subsequently. And I guess I was innocent, naive, whatever you think. I just thought, if something goes bang, I'm going to go there. If there's somebody to talk to, I'm going to knock on the door. And I'm just going to present myself as a reporter and just go to things. And it was surprising. Maybe a lot of journalists were jaded. But a lot of people didn't do that. So often I would be the only person at the scene of a bomb, for instance, late at night or a shooting, and I start talking to a police officer or sometimes the British military, and I'd always get something useful and make some kind of useful contact.

4:22and with South Armagh I wasn't naive to the extent that I was unaware of dangers I was very careful about it in some ways I knew what had happened to Robert Nyrack who's a Grenadier guards officer who disappeared body still not found in 1977 and I had some some good advice from people including no matter how comfortable you feel always have a plan always know where your car is, always have your car key ready in your pocket and be ready to leave very quickly. And I'd also seen the footage of the corporals in 1988 who were killed by a mob and executed by the IRA during an IRA funeral. So I could see how mobs work and how things would go badly wrong.

5:11Somebody gave me the very good advice to never pretend to be something or somebody that I wasn't. Never skulk in the background and think I could merge in. and South Armagh is a very rural place. If you're from the next village, you're going to be noticed, nevermind some English reporter. I made sure to always be very straightforward, to say who I was, to go to the front and shake the hand of the Sinn Féin person or whatever and be really upfront about what I was doing, which was I was researching a book on South Armagh and I got very into their history. I'm fascinated by history anyway and the history of South Armagh is really fascinating.

5:49and that was a sort of a way in because I could go to historical events commemorations it built a little bit of credibility that I actually knew what had happened in the border campaign in the war of independence and of course you can't go up to somebody who is in the IRA or is connected it's secret organization and say so you know what's happening with the England bombing campaign at the moment but you can talk to them about what might have happened 50 years ago. And so I guess that's how I did it. It wasn't sort of rocket science or any sort of secret sauce, but I think with any research, you just show up as who you are, all your experiences you bring to bear.

6:31So I was talking to the security forces, obviously the fact that I've been in the Royal Navy helped. If I was talking to somebody who was Irish, the fact that I was a Catholic and grown up in Irish Catholic area, I might stress that a little more. I wasn't pretending, but always trying to build, establish some kind of bond and build a rapport and just listen to what people had to say. What was it like talking to these people, particularly people who you knew were members of the IRA and thinking what they were capable of? What was that like? People are people. And even the people who might do the most terrible things or the things that I would completely disagree with, you can still find a bond.

7:21And a lot of Irish people, Protestant and Catholic, are great fun. There's drinking, there's stories, and there are always redeeming characteristics about a person. And I've learned over the years to separate what I feel and what I think and my opinion from other people's. And so I covered US politics. I can talk to people on the far right, on the far left, all points in between. And just be interested in why they are the way they are and why they think the way they think. and just take it at face value and not try to impose what I think on them. And so with Irish Republicans, IRA members, it's not surprising if you grow up with literally the shadow of watchtowers in South Armagh, which is almost entirely Catholic with British soldiers patrolling the fields and helicopters and this sort of lineage of rebellion in a place of rebellion, that you might join the IRA.

8:29And that was a view that was very common amongst British soldiers as a sort of respect for the enemy. So it wasn't actually that hard to spend time with IRA members and listen to their experiences and what they had to say. And often they were more nuanced and complicated individuals than we might think from stereotypes or newspaper reports. you talk in the book about South Armagh being a place apart for the IRA can you tell me what you mean by that I remember the first time I went into South Armagh which was June 1996 and I'd just been in the Republic of Ireland the been the IRA had I think they botched a robbery and they'd shot an Irish police officer and this was after the ceasefire had ended so the ceasefire ended the first ceasefire in February 96 with the Docklands bombing where I was actually in Canary Wharf when that happened and I think this was just before the Manchester bomb in June 1996 so it's that sort of period of an uneasy peace there was no ceasefire there were talks on the horizon the IRA campaign wasn't going full tilt but they were still doing a lot of stuff and I heard on the radio a report that the Metropolitan Police were in South Armagh connected to the Docklands bomb investigation and there were British soldiers in there and there's a big security operation going on and I saw this sign I think it said Fork Hill 7 and I knew that Fork Hill was in South Armagh that was where the arrest and search operation was going on and so i just turned left and it's just as i crossed the border going north and as i got in there there were british soldiers in the undergrowth there were police officers in full like forensic suit those white suits that we saw them during covid and it was incredibly so the watchtowers um and then this this undulating rural terrain but this was in name part of the united kingdom it just but it just felt like a place that was one way beautiful and benign but i knew all the stuff that got on there and that it was an ira stronghold and it was just completely different and when i say south armar it's i really thought of it as north laud which was the north and northern part of county laud which includes dundalk which is across the border and the ira area that that stronghold is really north laud and south armagh almost completely catholic so no loyalists to speak of very very few protestants the border runs right through it um thomas slab murphy who was the ira chief of stuff that at the time fairly unknown figure is now has been convicted of tax evasion and stuff and it is has become much better known his farm was on the border so literally some of his barns were in the republic of ireland some of his barns were in northern ireland which was very useful for smuggling and making money and also obviously for ira activities and so in this area you had about six or eight families stretching back generations all intermarried who from a sort of farming background but also a lot of sort of vehicles and machinery as well.

12:01And they ran the IRA, extremely tight-knit brothers, wives from a different family. And I could go back to the 1920s and see that their fathers and grandfathers and sometimes mothers and grandmothers as well had been involved in the Republican struggle. And so for the British, it was very unforgiving territory. And that's why you had these watchtowers, the Romeo and golf watchtowers, which were manned, but were festooned with cameras and listening devices. And they would monitor the one of them was there particularly just for Slav Murphy's farm, essentially. And they would monitor the area there was no virtually no travel by road so from the mid-70s uh the british military was really forced into the air and so patrols uh would happen by a helicopter would pick up a platoon in cross mcglen or four kill or newton hamilton base and fly across south armar drop them in a field if there was a summons or a police investigation going on there would always be an insertion by helicopter and the police would not operate separately so it was just a completely different place the british army and mi5 and the royal australian cavalry were on the back foot in the way that they weren't in in the rest of northern ireland the ira sort of controlled the territory they had the weapons hides usually south of the border they although they were very heavily monitored, they were clever at using dead ground.

13:45They knew exactly the parts of terrain where they could not be observed from the watchtowers. That's where they would gather and operate and move weapons. And I mean, if you go back to the Border Commission in, I think, 1920, lots of people would say that they screwed up because they should have drawn the border the other way. And if South Amar had been in the Republic of Ireland, it would have been very different. But it really was a sort of an anomaly, which the IRA used to its advantage. And so by the time I was there in the mid 90s, and late 90s, the England department was being run from South Armagh.

14:23So the Manchester bomb was mixed in South Armagh, and it was a South Armagh operation. So was Docklands, so was Baltic Exchange, so was Bishop's Gate. So all that was being run from South Armagh, directed by the IRA leadership, and the Sinn Féin leadership as well, the broader Republican movement. It's really one organisation, Sinn Féin and the IRA, as part of the Republican movement. You had the chief of staff, Slade Murphy, living there. You also had a sniper campaign going on. So you had at least one, probably more, 50 calibre rifles and single-shot attacks on IUC and British Army. So it was really this place which was like nowhere else in Northern Ireland.

15:08The South Armagh Brigade was uniquely effective and autonomous almost from the rest of the IRA. How did that happen? That couldn't have been purely its proximity to the Irish border? No, I think it developed over time. So if you look at, say, a comparable area like East Tyrone, the British had much more success in East Tyrone than they did in South Armagh. So many more IRA volunteers were killed. Across the course of the Troubles, relatively few IRA volunteers were killed or imprisoned from South Armagh. A number were, but nothing like the numbers you got in urban areas, Derry and Belfast and even East Tyrone and Fermanagh.

15:55and I think over the course of the troubles the IRA was increasingly infiltrated so with informers technical devices and I think there was some infiltration of South Armagh would like to believe that it was never infiltrated I think there is evidence they were particularly later on but it was very difficult. And so I think the IRA increasingly over time felt that if we want a secure operation, if we want something with no leaks that's unlikely to be informal, we'll get South Amar to do it. And South Amar was extremely suspicious of outsiders, including people from Belfast, Derry, anywhere else.

16:42So it was only people they knew. And sometimes they would use people who weren't in the IRA but were just farmers or broad sympathizers but it was always people they knew and so that concentration of activity that I was witnessing in the mid to late 90s I think developed over time it certainly wasn't the case in the early 70s and in fact when the trouble started South Amar was a little bit slow in getting involved compared to Belfast and Derry. In the book, you describe the respect that the British Army had for the South Armagh Brigade. And there's various occasions where they actually stand and fight rather than just melt away.

17:28So were they having any specialist training that was helping there or any particular weapons that they had that were more effective? A number of them trained in the Middle East, and particularly Libya throughout the course of the trouble. And Sathamar was involved in procuring weapons from Libya. So Thomas Slav Murphy travelled to Libya. He was on the beach. There's a great scene in the book where Tom Murphy's on the beach at clogger strand in the Irish Republic, wading sort of knee-deep as these big boxes of munitions from Gaddafi in Libya are coming ashore. and I'm like Thomas Lab Murphy who at least in terms of his demeanor and I spoke to him once he didn't say very much back it was in a courtroom in Dublin in I think 1997 98 but he comes across as a sort of ignorant illiterate farmer now I think he's a lot cleverer than that and that's a demeanor and image that helped him externally and possibly even internally within the IRA but I think he's actually quite a sophisticated thinker and military strategist.

18:44But because of the nature of the area, they were able to train with relative impunity very nearby, sometimes even in South Amar itself, but certainly across the border in Monaghan or Laos. So I think there was a military proficiency of the sort of rural guerrilla, if you like, that they did develop. And it's true that the British army, a couple of relatives actually of victims were upset by some of the comments from British soldiers in the book. They did have a degree of respect, and they felt that there was a purity, to use maybe an odd word in this sort of context, about the fight in South Armagh, where it was one army, the British army, against another army, the Irish Republican army.

19:39And it wasn't sullied by the sectarianism that you got in lots of other parts of Northern Ireland, because there were very few Protestants. Now, the big asterisk with that, there was some absolutely horrific incidences, including the King's Mills Massacre in 1975, which was most certainly sectarian, where I think it was 10 Protestant workers were killed. Basically, a bus was stopped, the 10 Protestants were killed, one survived, and the Catholic was allowed to live. And so that was a purely sectarian killing, and that was a reprisal for Protestant killings as Catholics. So I don't want to portray the IRA and South Armagh as sort of choir boys who, you know, love Protestants or anything.

20:26But generally speaking, you didn't have that extra dimension of loyalism and sectarianism because it was all Catholics. And so I think to a degree, the British had the technology and the ability to surge in terms of numbers. The IRA had the knowledge of the local area and the history and the support of the people, but that made it a pretty even and fair fight, if you like, and certainly that was the prevailing view amongst British forces who served there. You talked about the weapons from Libya. Was there any IRA contact with the Eastern Bloc at all? Cold War history deserves to be remembered.

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21:41real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans. Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at vanta.com. That's a really good question.

22:23I don't know. Certainly with Southamara, I didn't find any evidence of it. Now, later on, with the real IRA, Splinter Group, there was certainly efforts to procure weapons from former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, because after the Cold War, place was awash with weapons. the IRA did see itself as oddly in a way but a sort of international Marxist organization so it had links with the PLO, Gaddafi and it identified with the Red Army faction, Bard and Meinhof, the sort of anti-imperialist struggle but certainly with South Amar I did not see any evidence. I'm sure they would have done if they could.

23:18Also ETA in Spain and later on even the FARC in Colombia. There were links with international terrorist, if you want, networks, but I didn't see any concrete connection with East Germany or the Soviet Union or its satellites during the Cold War. But I'm sure it was contemplated and they would have done it if they could. One of the tactics that they were particularly effective with is they obtained the Browning sniper rifle. And I think you alluded to it before, the use of these. But I think what was particularly chilling for the British forces is the IRA would put up these sort of like mock road signs saying, danger, sniper at work, with a picture of an IRA man holding an armor light.

24:07Can you just talk about that sniper campaign for me? So now I think there was a Barrett-50 that was used but the weapon that was captured in in april 1997 in south armar was a barrett 90 so a 50 caliber bolt action weapon that was initially designed to stop tanks that 50 caliber around can go through walls and armor. So it's not designed to kill a person, but obviously it could do a lot of damage to a person. So the IRA sniper campaign, I think they killed about 14 people in the end, RUC or British Army. And the most recent one being Lance Bomadeer, Stephen Resterick in 1997. And I was on the scene very shortly after that and spoke to his mother extensively.

25:08But obviously 14 members of the British security forces is a pretty good tally for the IRA. In the scheme of things, it's not very large numbers. It's really a psychological weapon. And certainly when I was there, British soldiers were absolutely terrified to go out on patrol. Now, many of the shots were not at particularly long distance. They were 400 yards away, sometimes even a little bit closer. They were not more than a mile away, although that's the range of the Barrett 90, but partly whipped up by the media, partly just, I guess, by people's own fears and imaginations. This one-shot paddy was the nickname of the sniper, and actually there were two sniper teams, not one.

25:55So there's more than one trigger man. Michael Carraher was the one who was arrested and convicted in 1997 from Cully Hanna, whose brother had been an IRA volunteer who'd been killed by the Royal Marines in disputed circumstances a few years earlier. But the IRA at some point decided to up the ante by, as you say, modifying the highway code, if you like. And so there would be these triangular road signs instead of men at work. There would be real road signs that would be repainted and put up on a telegraph pole. So instead of saying men at work, it would be sniper at work, and you see a silhouette of an IRA volunteer waving a rifle.

26:41And there were a number of those in South Amar. And for a period, I was very keen on getting one of them. I thought it would be the ultimate souvenir, but that wouldn't have been why. Sometimes the signs were booby-trapped. I mean, there is actually, they do have one in the Linenhall Library, the political collection in Belfast. And then also I heard a story, which is in Bandit country, of a local family after the IRA ceasefire in 1994, or possibly it was the second one, after the second one in 1997, they took a sign down, and then all their windows were smashed. And so the IRA liked to protect those signs.

27:21Sometimes there would be little modifications to it. So when the ceasefire ended in February 96, there were little signs saying, I'm back. And before that, there had been a little sign on it saying, on hold. And then there was another one that said, the sign that says, Richardson's Fertiliser, made in Ireland, tested in Britain or something like that, or in England or something like that. And that was a reference to the Fertiliser mix in IRA bombs. I did speak to an IRA man about the signs, a guy called Patrick Thompson, who'd been convicted of murdering four British soldiers and had been released.

28:04So this former prisoner, I was talking to him about the signs and I said, who came up with that? And are we allowed to swear on Cold War conversations or repeat? Yeah, we are. Okay. okay and i so i asked him about the sign and he said i don't know i won't do the accent but he said but it fair caught the fucking imagination didn't it and he had a sort of twinkle in his eye and so they realized that it was great publicity for them it was great for their morale and it got in the heads of british soldiers and there was a there was at least one recorded instance of faking patrol reports so they were so terrified they didn't want to go out on patrol and they was faking the records and certainly i think for you imagine an 18 year old from sort of birmingham or southampton or manchester going out into those fields and thinking that they were being watched and that any moment a 50 caliber round which is almost certain death could just rip through them it was terrifying and i saw the the inquest reports which included photos of autopsies of what those bullets can do.

29:18And I saw one of a guardsman and it just ripped through one side of his chest right through and come out the other. A massive exit wound, the size of a sort of bigger than a tennis ball. I saw another one, there's an image of it in the book of a ram that had gone through two dog tags on the chest of a soldier. And then there was another one where the soldier was crouching and was hit by the round the rest of the patrol heard the crack and turned around he was still crouching but he was dead and absolutely terrifying for a soldier so there's this there was a psychological element to the warfare there which was pretty ghoulishly clever if you like i remember seeing the tv news and you'd have that footage of soldiers on foot patrol and they didn't know where the the enemy was yeah and at any moment it death could have been just around the corner there one of the ira's most effective weapons were these mortar bombs these homemade mortar bombs was that a south armar innovation or was that an innovation that was created elsewhere?

30:37South Amar certainly had a very big role in it and so a lot of the mortars and I think they went up to was it mark 10 or did they even go up to mark 15 these I think those were classifications by the British but they started mark 1 and mark 2 they developed and many of the mortars there was one known as the barrett buster you know and I I think it was in a big, explosives pushed into a big gas canister. They were first used in South Armagh and certainly tested just south of the border. And they were fired at Downing Street at one point. And I think there were also 10 RUC officers in Newry that were in the 80s that were killed by South Armagh mortar.

31:29So they had a big part in that because if you're in the Belfast IRA, where do you test your weapons? You can't do it. You have to travel to the south, which is difficult, whereas in South Amar, it was literally in their backyard. And the fact that they were rural, but also very proficient with welding and fixing vehicles and modifying things and improvising, meant that the so-called engineering, which is weapons developed, the engineering department of the IRA, always had a very strong South Armour element and increasingly as the troubles developed. Yeah, I remember they closed Heathrow for quite some time because over a period of weeks, they kept launching them over the perimeter into Heathrow.

32:17And yeah, I was in Belfast in the 90s. I was doing some work at the Waterfront Hall and I found it such a strange place because it seemed so, it's a bit like you said at the start of the interview it seems so familiar yeah but really unfamiliar and i remember going to get a sandwich one lunchtime and i'm in this what looks like a regular british high street there's a walworth's and sainsbury's and stuff like that and there's these soldiers patrolling and standing in doorways aiming their rifles up and down the street and it was bizarre it was bizarre you've just that's your mention of that just brought it all back to me and and the ordinary people of belfast just going about their business as if they didn't exist and and as if it was totally normal and yeah i remember uh it was actually paddy short who was a i think a cousin of claire short labor mp who ran short's bar in cross mcglen and i remember him saying to me are the Brits you wouldn't even ignore them and so there was this kind of sense of just they were invisible but yeah it was very surreal because and obviously I distinctly remember the campaigns because I'm from London originally and remember the campaigns there and then I moved up to Manchester in June 96 and there's the bomb in Manchester and it was like what are these guys doing are they following me or what yeah yeah my my father and brother were on their way into town that day and hadn't had set off a bit late and hadn't got there so that was extremely close to home and the arndale center and all that and i'm actually helping a publication at the moment to look into what happened in manchester because it's hard to believe it's almost 30 years ago now but I think that was the biggest bomb ever exploded during the Troubles.

34:14And I think around 300 people were injured, but nobody was killed. It was an absolute miracle. And all of that came from South Armagh. We talk about the South Armagh Brigade. How many people were actually fighting for the IRA in Northern Ireland? So how many approximately were fighting in South Armagh? and how many were actually directly part of the armed struggle in Northern Ireland? Great question. It depends how you define it. Because if you have an IRA operation, say a sniper operation, you might have 50 or 60 people involved. But maybe only six of those might be volunteers. Other people could just be dickers.

35:02They were known as people who would keep watch and report things on a mobile phone or whatever, who might be teenagers who were destined for the IRA and just helping out in being tested. It could be just sympathetic members of the public, farmers, kind of people who had been involved. So in terms of actual volunteers, it would change over time. But in South Armagh, I would have said, and some would be more active than others and you age out and you're more into the planning and what have you, but 60 or 70. And in the whole of Northern Ireland, 250, 300, something like that. And again, it would depend and depend on how you define an actual volunteer IRA member.

35:54Wow. Because it just boggles the mind how disproportionate that number was to the number of British troops there were in Northern Ireland. And the fact that number really got Britain to the negotiating table. yeah it's a classic asymmetric warfare isn't it later in i've spent quite a lot of time in helmand later on around sort of 2009 and you have the might of the british army and u.s forces and all the equipment and technology and a bunch of guys in sort of dish dashes and flip-flops running around but it's their terrain and it's alien to the whatever you want to call it, the invading force, occupying force, the foreign force.

36:49And so, yeah, absolutely. Now, there's an ongoing debate, and I'm not even sure exactly where I am on this about who won. Did the IRA bomb the British to the negotiating table? I think there's certainly a strong element to that, because if you look at the economic damage in the city of London and Manchester, there was just this sense from the British government that we just can't, we can't deal with this, so let's do a deal. Equally, you can argue that the IRA was heavily infiltrated, elements of Sinn Féin were co-opted, and they accepted a deal they could have had in the mid-1970s, and Northern Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom to this day.