Braver Men Walk Away Page 16

  The disruptive effects of the incendiary were monitored by the IRA and the lessons well learned; two decades later, in 1991 and 1992, incendiaries were again used for a major campaign. The intervening years brought some modifications: cassette tape carriers containing timer chips rather than wristwatch parts were used.

  Overreaction by the relevant authorities to the latest threat of the incendiary was doubtless expected by the IRA and certainly exploited to the full: it took only a very small device left in a railway carriage or a London Underground train to ensure maximum publicity, the dislocation of public services, and the disruption of the economic life of the capital. Endangering life or property was not the prime motive.

  The closing down of complete sections of a city’s thoroughfares or its transport systems merely because a small fire might puff into life is unjustified – not least because it is precisely what the terrorists have intended. The chances of encountering an incendiary on the London Underground are infinitely less than having one’s fingers caught between the sliding doors. The prospect of injury is even more remote: if an incendiary went off under the cushion on which you were sitting you’d have to be extremely slow to suffer more than a warm posterior. Unless you’re holding an incendiary in your hand with your face pressed close to it, serious injury is well-nigh impossible. The explosive content is not much more than that of an ordinary box of household matches.

  Unfortunately there was soon a deliberate policy shift by the IRA which meant that innocent people became a direct target.

  It was Thursday, 23 August 1973. I’d been tasked to the radio mast at Crystal Palace, where some sort of package had been spotted. En route, though, I was diverted to Baker Street Underground Station: someone had found a bag which they thought contained a bomb – they’d opened it up and seen what appeared to be an alarm clock with wires attached.

  I didn’t discount it but was highly sceptical: no matter how well-intentioned, the finder very probably had an overactive imagination; there was no history of the IRA leaving package bombs in London’s public places.

  My driver switched on the police car’s headlights and blue beacons and used the two-tone horn to carve a way through the 5 p.m. rush-hour traffic. They’d closed the Underground Station. People were milling around outside, waiting for the place to reopen. A police officer led me across the station foyer and ticket concourse and pointed to the bag, one of those Swinging London affairs with a huge Union Jack on either side. It was leaning against the window of a chemist’s shop.

  The shop had a dual-aspect frontage: one set of windows looked out on to the concourse, the other set on to Baker Street. I moved in closer, thinking about the positioning: unlikely though it still seemed, if this was a bomb it was certainly in an ideal position. An explosion at this time would send glass scything through the crowds of home-going commuters.

  I looked up from the bag to find myself staring into hundreds of faces pressing up against the windows on the Baker Street side. Clearly, we still had a lot to learn about crowd control and safety zones. I told the police to get everyone as far back as possible immediately and then examined the bag.

  The man who’d reported it had been correct. This was no wild flight of imagination but a modified alarm clock with wires connected to an Ever Ready PP9 battery, a detonator and about 3 pounds of plaster gelatine (a very powerful high explosive based on nitroglycerine). The clock was set to fire the bomb at 5.37 p.m., the peak of the rush hour when the death and injury toll would have been at its highest. I did a rapid evaluation of the circuitry, worked out what I thought was its probable path, cut the detonator wires and then cautiously and carefully unpacked the rest of the bag.

  I was in the middle of doing so when what had been a completely deserted concourse suddenly filled with people: a train had come in and disgorged its passengers. Horrified, I watched as more and more people stepped off the escalator and surged towards me. Utter chaos ensued; quite how London Transport could close off one of its stations yet still have a train-load of passengers coming in was beyond my comprehension. London indeed had a lot to learn.

  Eventually the concourse was cleared again. I finished unpacking the explosive and the IRA phoned in a bomb warning. Had it not been for a passerby sensing something suspicious about the bag, we would only have had this warning to go on. At the height of London’s rush hour the amount of time allowed by that warning was unlikely to have been enough.

  The Baker Street attack was the first example in the current IRA campaign of indiscriminate bombing of the mainland civilian population. Its conception marked a change in policy and its outcome a change of tactics: after Baker Street the IRA took care to hide its bombs from plain sight. In Belfast the population had been taught by long experience never to go anywhere near a suspect package; in London, in 1973, members of the public were less circumspect in their approach.

  The Baker Street attack also ushered in a policy of bomb warnings which neither public nor media have as yet fully comprehended: the system of ‘coded calls’. Even today the public think that if the IRA telephone a warning and accompany it with a code word, then the authorities should immediately jump to it in the certain knowledge that the message is not a hoax. This is not so. IRA killers do not have some sort of code book with a list of authorized and non-authorized words, and nor do the people they choose to call. Which means the only time you can be sure you have received an authentic warning is after you’ve found an authentic bomb or after it has gone off.

  From 1973 onwards it was not unusual for the Metropolitan Police to receive up to 200 hoax calls a day, at least fifty of them with alleged code words. The hoaxers read that this was IRA practice and so invented their own; we had no way of finding out what was real and what was not.

  Even the authentic warnings were not what they seemed: many incorporated a code word which had been heard before but omitted to give a precise location and/or time; others would use a nonsense word but be slightly more specific about location and timing. While it is in the IRA bombers’ interest to pretend to the public that they always warn of a bomb, it is not in their interest to provide full and accurate details. The warning system is an integral part of the terrorism campaign and warnings are worded in such a way that vital information is withheld in order to confuse the authorities and divert blame away from the bombers.

  Unfortunately there are people in the UK, Europe, Australia and the USA who actually believe the propaganda of terrorism, who are conned by the heroic myth of the IRA. Even the media still inadvertently contribute to the myth of the bombers’ invincibility. For instance Semtex, a commercial explosive, is said by many a newspaper which should know better to be five, ten, fifteen, even twenty times more powerful than TNT. The truth is, Semtex is 1.3 times more powerful: 10 ounces of the stuff equals 13 ounces of TNT.

  An ordinary plastic explosive, Semtex is made in Czechoslovakia and comprises the manufacturer’s own RDX (cyclo-trimethylene-trinitramine), PETN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate) and plasticizer. It was first assembled in the 1960s when the manufacturer was supplying PETN and RDX for the filling of military shells. At the end of the production run they wondered what to do with the surplus. Thus Semtex became the Woodbine of all explosives (English Woodbine cigarettes were popularly believed to be filled with the sweepings from the cigarette-factory floor).

  A pound of RDX or a pound of PETN has virtually the same explosive power as a pound of Semtex. The fact that the IRA got their hands on it never endowed the terrorists with some ‘super-powerful’ weapon; they used it not because they were clever but because Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi gave it to them by the ship-load in full knowledge of its intended use.

  In the wake of the Lockerbie bombing, representatives of the manufacturers of Semtex came to Britain and offered to incorporate within the explosive an element which would give off a distinctive smell – providing that the British-manufactured PE4 (Plastic Explosive 4) was likewise modified. In making the offer, the Semtex people were aware
of the fact that, like the British PE4, the American C4 and the French Plastique, Semtex is capable of both civil and military application; the addition of a tracer element would seriously inhibit any wartime use because sabotage and demolition charges could be detected.

  The Semtex representatives could not have been more open, more honest, or more helpful. But though Britain was delighted with the initiative, it refused to make the very modifications that it wished others to undertake. The offer was rejected. Czechoslovakian Semtex, like British PE4, is still extremely difficult to detect.

  Yet another phase of 1973’s undeclared war on London by the IRA was heralded by the letter bomb: between 21 and 25 August eleven were sent through the post. Only two of them detonated and these, thankfully, were only partial detonations; we caught up with all the others before they could do any harm.

  The bombs had various classic hallmarks: oily stains on the front, similar handwriting of the names and addresses. Unfortunately once again we found ourselves having to deal with hoaxes – which dramatically increased after television showed what a letter bomb actually looked like. Though this kind of publicity was bound to encourage the idiot hoaxers, I approved of the TV coverage because knowledge is armour.

  In February 1974 Reginald Maudling, a former Cabinet Minister, unwittingly opened a letter bomb at his country home. Fortunately only the detonator went off, injuring his thumb while ripping out the envelope and scattering small pieces of the unexploded charge across his carpet.

  Mr Maudling was unable to tell me anything significant, which wasn’t surprising; what was curious, though, was the state of the room.

  The Explosives Office had by now handled dozens of letter-bomb incidents and where only the detonator had gone off there was always plenty of explosive material to collect for forensic examination. Here there was very little: a few crumbs inside the envelope, a few crumbs on the floor. A letter bomb usually contained around 3 ounces of nitroglycerine-based explosive; where was the rest of the charge?

  And then Mr Maudling’s little white dog came into the room. By its movements I knew immediately what was wrong: it was suffering from an extreme case of NG head, obviously the result of having eaten the scattered explosive when no one was looking. The dog died a day or so later; the Irish Republican Army had won yet another glorious victory.

  10 p.m., Friday 29 August 1975: my driver had picked me up from home to take me to the Bungalow. Almost immediately the call had come through: suspect bomb, Kensington Church Street. I went on the air and said I’d take it; I’d be there in less than fifteen minutes.

  I had no sooner settled deeper into the seat of the Range Rover, ready for a high-speed dash through the streets of the city, when Roger Goad came on. He had been doing a job in Slough and was now heading back into London. He was within three or four minutes of Kensington. I advised Base Control that Roger was taking the job and that I would go on to Cannon Row.

  10.10 p.m.: the third message of the evening came through. It was Roger’s driver, Peter Clary. There’d been an explosion. Roger was dead.

  The Range Rover swerved through the mesh of side streets, the lights on, beacons flashing, horn blaring.

  We stopped near the top of Kensington Church Street, unable to make any further headway because of the crowds and the cars and the cordons.

  A lone police constable was almost lost in the chaos. He was young and he was doing his best but communications were a shambles: he had no way of making contact with Incident Control. I tried getting through from the Range Rover but it was no good – the radios were jammed with calls.

  I shouldered my way past the crowd and was motioned through by the PC. I walked into the open space and the silence beyond the cordon. Roger was still lying there, out on the street.

  I knelt down beside him, unaware of the fragments of glass that dug into my knees. Black shadow pooled between the orange street lamps. The nearby shop windows were dark. Roger would have died instantaneously. He hadn’t been wearing any protective gear but it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference: the injuries were massive. I examined his body, not thinking of Roger as he used to be, as the friend I had last spoken to only fifteen minutes earlier. Roger was gone. The injuries would help to explain why.

  Eventually I straightened up. I had assessed which parts of the body had sustained the greatest damage and thus the greatest impact. I could now visualize Roger at the moment when the explosion occurred: he must have been hunched down when either the timer ran out or something which he was touching initiated detonation.

  I moved away from the body and stepped over the K Shoes sign. The bomb had been in the shoe-shop doorway; its force had reduced the façade and interior to matchwood. Ladies’ and gents’ shoes lay negligently on the pavement and the road.

  The night fled by. Even if I’d had any inclination to brood over Roger’s death, time was against it. There were unsubstantiated rumours of a second device, and everyone in the area had started seeing bombs everywhere. I found myself rushing to and fro between the main incident scene and the nearby streets. By night’s end I’d dealt with three jobs within the cordons and eight beyond. Seven of these proved routine; the eighth was only a very small box. It sat in the shadowed doorway of a shop in Notting Hill Gate, just outside the cordoned area. It was like the sort of box you would carry a cake in.

  I moved in close. I wanted to get a detailed X-ray of the lower interior of the box. If some mechanism or configuration of circuitry and switches had been responsible for detonating the bomb that killed Roger (rather than the timer running out), it must have been deep down, hidden from plain sight – and not easily captured on X-ray by the portable scanner.

  I tried to get the X-ray into exact alignment, but there was very little space within the narrow doorway. In the end I finished up with my head almost touching the floor, my face a few centimetres from the box. The box moved.

  There was only a second or so in which to register it: the rustling sound, the sudden movement, the cold black terror that bit with heart-stopping suddenness. Only a second or so, and then I was staring at – a mouse.

  One of us had to be more terrified of the other, but you couldn’t have said which. The mouse didn’t so much turn and run as vanish. I was left taking deep measured breaths, my face still almost touching the box.

  It didn’t take long to finish the X-raying and prove that the cake box was empty except for a few crumbs. I didn’t feel self-conscious about completing the work; better to proceed as planned than wind up under a headstone reading Here Lies Peter Gurney, Frightened By A Mouse Then Killed By A Bomb.

  I packed my things together, headed back to Kensington Church Street and supervised the evidence search (the systematic sweeping up and collecting of all materials from the outermost periphery of the blast to the seat of the explosion). Daybreak came at 5.30 a.m.

  The day that followed felt heavy and muted. An increasingly weary disbelief filled the Bungalow. We waited for the forensic report to come through, for the explanation of why Roger died.

  Several explosives officers flatly refused to believe it could have been anything other than the timer running out, that bad luck rather than misjudgement had caused Roger’s death. I could understand the general feeling: if you convinced yourself that the timer was responsible, you could take comfort from the fact that the chances of being caught in a similar situation were very small. But if you admitted that Roger had been killed by an anti-handling device, you were acknowledging your own vulnerability: if someone as professional and as experienced as Roger could be killed by an IED then so, too, could you.

  You had to believe in your own skill. Self-doubt was dangerous. You would die if your luck ran out but you would not die because a bomb had outwitted you. Yes, every device had the potential to kill you, but you knew that and legislated for it just as you contended with your own nature, your own fallibilities.

  So we waited for the forensic report, and got on with the duties of the day. There was no
weeping for Roger because explosives officers rarely if ever show emotion; it’s in the nature of the job that you are ruled by your brain rather than your heart. There was sadness for Roger’s wife, Maureen, and his two young daughters, a kind of shared awareness of their pain and loss. There were moments when I would glance up, suddenly conscious of the fact that I’d been about to say something that related to Roger as if he were still with us. But those moments were rare, and rapidly passed.

  The forensic scientists concluded that the timer had closed and initiated detonation of the bomb. The report didn’t alter the sadness of Roger’s loss, but it did make a difference to those who lived on: at the Bungalow, the deep and unspoken anxiety felt by several officers was replaced by an equally deep and unspoken sense of relief. Roger died because his luck ran out. Ironically, as an explanation for a death, it was the only explanation that could be lived with.

  8

  Return to Sender

  An explosives officer doesn’t normally keep track of the progress of a criminal investigation. Incidents come and go, some of them hoaxes, some false alarms, and some of them the real thing. You deal with the situation, make your report, and log it for use in the event of a future prosecution. Many of the jobs to which you’ve been tasked tend to slip from memory as the years go by; some do not.

  On 14 December 1977 a suspect parcel was delivered to the Croydon home of a local councillor renowned for some fairly controversial views. The police were called in and what followed became one of the most intriguing criminal cases I have ever encountered.

  The parcel was waiting for me in the Charge Room when I arrived at New Addington Police Station. It was unusual to be dealing with a suspect device inside a police station, but the officers who had brought it in had assumed – dangerously so, in my view – that the thing would only go off when it was opened.

  I started X-raying the parcel. It was a bomb all right, but the X-ray image showed what appeared to be an initiatory system based on a photo-electric cell. The container was covered in smooth wrapping paper; the cell seemed to be just inside the container. Obviously, the instant you removed the wrapping paper and opened the box, light would flood in and be detected by the cell.