Martin McGuinness commander of Óglaigh na hÉireann

gizmo555 wrote: »

Because they kidnapped Don Tidey, held him captive at gunpoint and decided to shoot their way out when the Gardai and Army started to close in on them. As reported in today's Irish Times:

Gardaí and troops were combing Derrada Woods on December 16th [1983] when, unknowingly, they came upon the gang’s hideout. The IRA opened fire without warning and threw a grenade. Pte Kelly and Garda Sheehan were killed instantly.



Sorry, blacken whose name?

Problem was it was a stun grenade, it never killed anyone.


Within seconds of opening fire, Don Tidey's kidnappers threw a stun grenade in the direction of the searchers in the woods closest to them. (Gardai were to say later that evening that at least one of the two deaths was caused by shrapnel from a hand grenade. This was untrue.)

With their nearest adversaries reeling from the effects of the stun grenade, the IRA men concentrated on escaping. They took two Gardai and a soldier near them captive and ordered them to run ahead of them towards the top of the wood. Along the way they captured another Garda. As the gang, dressed like soldiers, emerged from the wood, they overpowered two members of the Army who earlier had been given the task of providing cover for the searchers inside. Having taken some of the weapons belonging to their hostages, the gang ran off.

http://politico.ie/component/content/article/5574.html

In follow-up searches of the fields where the Provos had made off they disscovered a transistor radio, tuned to pick up "Echo Basel Rudolph" conversations.
One could pick out the Task Force members pulling up to report for duty by the cars they drove. Asconas, Carinas, Sentras, the classy, middle of the market range. All of the men had Belgian-made UZI sub-machine guns, more often than not, on view. The weapons, most suited to shorttrange combat, rise and veer right when firing and can go through some hundreds of rounds per minute. Task Force men carry six magazines, each of which holds thirty rounds.

The Army's Ranger corps were a much more elusive lot.

Unlike the ordinary soldiers who carry Gustav sub-machine guns or FN rifles, Rangers are equipped with the HK subbmachine gun range as used by the SAS during the Iranian Embassy siege in London. There's a hesitancy among Army spokespersons to say anything about the special nighttsights and French-manufactured night surveillance equippment the Rangers had in South Leitrim. The daily briefings where they got psyched up were held in the strictest seccrecy and, faces blackened, they were gone out on duty with the minimum of fuss.

According to an official handbook, one of the roles of the Defence forces is "to aid the civil power (meaning, in practice, to assist when requested, the Garda Siochana who have the primary responsibility for the maintenance or resstoration of the public peace and for internal security)."

The discovery of the IRA's Ballinamore hide-out and the searches afterwards were a unique landmark in Garda/ Army cooperation.

At times it was a flimsy alliance. On Tuesday morning December 20 a local Garda Superintendent was asked had any guns been found during the search of recent days.

"We have found no guns."

Shortly afterwards an Army spokesman confirmed that a soldier's rifle, missing since the Derrada wood incidents on the previous. Friday had been found the previous day.

It wasn't until the following day, Wednesday, that the Garda Press Officer, Supt Noel Anderson, confirmed that as well as locating the soldier's rifle on the Monday, searrchers had also found a sub-machine gun and a blood-stained jacket, presumably belonging to the kidnappers.

Communications was sometimes a problem in the search areas, too. On the afternoon of Thursday December 20 a television crew got approval through the Garda Press Officer to film the search operation in the Cromlin area and a marked Garda patrol car was provided to accompany it. Once out the road though, official approval meant nothing: an irate Garda Sergeant, usually based at the training centre, ordered the cameraman away from the area as he artempted to begin work. Two days before the same sergeant had mistakenly allowed a camera-crew through a :'::O'CktJoint. thinking the Ford Granada car full of detecc~5.

On Sunday afternoon, December 18, Chief Supt McNally emerged from one of his conferences and thought aloud:

"The reekers are up there somewhere but how do r get them out?"








.............The whole op looks like a total ballsup, like so many large ops against the PIRA in the south in the 80s.

Recruits used to search, no secure radio channel (the PIRA unit simply monitored where they were), cops armed with Uzis many had never even fired, it was a recipe for disaster.

The biggest scandal is there has never been an inquiry.