Hit several times, Kelly fell close to the cabin of the van with blood spreading out around him from a fatal head wound. Realizing what was happening, the experienced Jim Lynagh and Patrick McKearney scurried back into the van, but died in a hail of bullets that tore through its side panel. Donnelly had scrambled back into the driver’s seat, but was mortally wounded in the same rain of bullets before he could move off. After ramming the mechanical digger into the side of the building, the driver, Arthurs, and another terrorist, Eugene Kelly, died as they tried in vain to take cover behind the bullet-riddled Toyota.
Even as the driver of the mechanical digger was dying in a hail of bullets, O’Callaghan was igniting the fuse of the 200lb bomb with a Zippo lighter. He then took cover beside Gormley.
The roar of the exploding bomb drowned out even the combined din of the GPMGs, assault rifles and Armalites. The spiralling dust and boiling smoke eventually settled down to reveal that the explosion had blown away most of the end of the RUC station nearest the gate, demolished the telephone exchange next door, and showered the football clubhouse with raining masonry. The mechanical digger had been blown to pieces and one of its wheels had flown about forty yards, to smash through a wooden fence and land on the football pitch. Some of the police and SAS men inside the building had been injured by the blast and flying debris.
When the bomb went off, Gormley and O’Callaghan tried to run for cover, but Gormley was cut down by heavy SAS gunfire as he emerged from behind the wall where he had taken cover. O’Callaghan was cut to pieces as he ran across the road from the badly damaged building.
But the IRA men were not the only casualties.
Because the GPMG teams hidden in the copse were targeting a building that stood close to the Armagh road, the oblique direction of fire meant that they also fired many rounds into the football pitch opposite and into parts of the village, including the wall of the church hall, where children were playing at the time. In addition, three civilian cars were passing between the RUC station and the church as the battle commenced.
Driving in a white Citroën past the church and down the hill towards the police station, Oliver Hughes, a thirty-six-year-old father of three, and his brother Anthony heard the thunderclap of the massive bomb, braked to a halt immediately and started to reverse the car. Unfortunately, both men were in overalls similar to those worn by the terrorists, so the SAS soldiers hidden near the church, assuming they were terrorist reinforcements, opened fire, peppering the Citroën with bullets, killing Oliver Hughes outright and badly wounding his brother, who took three rounds in the back and one in the head.
Travelling in the opposite direction, up the hill towards the church, another car, containing a woman and her young daughter, was also sprayed with bullets and screeched to a halt. In this instance, before anyone was killed the commander of one of the SAS groups raced through the hail of bullets to drag the woman and her daughter out of the car to safety. Miraculously, he succeeded.
The third car contained an elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Herbert Buckley. Both jumped out of their car and threw themselves to the ground, to survive unscathed.
Another motorist, a brewery salesman, had stopped his car even closer to the main action – between the IRA’s Toyota and the copse where the two GPMG crews were dug in – and looked on in stunned disbelief as a rain of GPMG bullets hit the blue van. During a lull in the firing, he jumped out of his car and ran to find shelter behind the bungalows next to the police station. He never reached them, for after being rugby-tackled by an SAS trooper, he was held in custody until his identity could be established.
When the firing ceased, all eight of the IRA terrorists were found to be dead. Within thirty minutes, even as British Gazelle reconnaissance helicopters were flying over the area and British Army troops were combing the countryside in the vain pursuit of other terrorists, the SAS men were already being lifted out.
The deaths of the eight terrorists were the worst set-back the IRA had experienced in sixty years. During their funerals the IRA made it perfectly clear that bloody retaliation could be expected. It was a threat that could not be ignored by the British government.
‘It is the belief of our Intelligence chiefs,’ the man addressed only as ‘Mr Secretary’ informed the top-level crisis-management team in a basement office in Whitehall on 6 November 1987, ‘that the successful SAS ambush in Loughgall last May, which resulted in the deaths of eight leading IRA terrorists, will lead to an act of reprisal that’s probably being planned right now.’
There was a moment’s silence while the men sitting around the boardroom table took in what the Secretary was saying so gravely. This particular crisis-management team was known as COBR – it represented the Cabinet Office Briefing Room – and all those present were of considerable authority and power in various areas of national defence and security. Finally, after a lengthy silence, one of them, a saturnine, grey-haired man from British Intelligence, said: ‘If that’s the case, Mr Secretary, we should place both MI5 and MI6 on the alert and try to anticipate the most likely targets.’
‘Calling in MI5 is one thing,’ the Secretary replied, referring to the branch of the Security Service charged with overt counter-espionage. ‘But before calling in MI6, would someone please remind me of the reasoning behind what was obviously an exceptionally ambitious and contentious ambush.’
Everyone around the table knew just what he meant. MI6 was the secret intelligence service run by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. As its links with the FCO were never publicly acknowledged, it was best avoided when it came to operations that might end up with a high public profile – as, for instance, the siege of the Iranian Embassy in London in May 1980 had done.
‘The humiliation of the IRA,’ said the leader of the Special Military Intelligence Unit (SMIU) responsible for Northern Ireland. ‘That was the whole purpose of the Loughgall ambush.’
‘We’re constantly trying to humiliate the IRA,’ the Secretary replied, ‘but we don’t always go to such lengths. What made Loughgall so special?’
‘The assassination of the Lord Chief Justice and his wife the previous month,’ the SMIU leader replied, referring to the blowing up of the judge’s car by a 500lb bomb in the early hours of 25 April, when he and his wife were returning to their home in Northern Ireland after a holiday in the Republic. ‘As Northern Ireland’s most senior judge, he had publicly vowed to bring all terrorists to justice, so the terrorists assassinated him, not only as a warning to other like-minded judges, but as a means of profoundly embarrassing the British government, which of course it did.’
‘So the ambush at Loughgall was an act of revenge for the murder of the Lord Chief Justice and his wife?’
‘It was actually more than that, Mr Secretary,’ the SMIU man replied. ‘Within hours of the assassination of the Lord Chief Justice – that same evening, in fact – a full-time member of the East Tyrone UDR was murdered by two IRA gunmen while working in the yard of his own farm. That murder was particularly brutal. After shooting him in the back with assault rifles, in full view of his wife, the two gunmen stood over him where he lay on the ground and shot him repeatedly – about nineteen times in all. The East Tyrone IRA then claimed that they had carried out the killing.’
‘And that was somehow connected to the Loughgall ambush?’
‘Yes, Mr Secretary. We learnt from an informer that two ASU teams from East Tyrone were planning an attack on the RUC police station at Loughgall and that some of the men involved had been responsible for all three deaths.’
‘Was this informer known to be reliable?’
‘Yes, Mr Secretary, she was.’
‘And do we have proof that some of the IRA men who died at Loughgall were involved in the assassinations as she had stated?’
‘Again, the answer is yes. Ballistics tests on the Heckler & Koch G3 assault rifles and FNCs