The Road to Balcombe Street

The IRA Reign of Terror in London

Steve Moysey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136748585
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Road to Balcombe Street: The IRA Reign of Terror in London is the highly detailed account and analysis of law enforcement negotiation lessons learned from the infamous hostage standoff between the London Metropolitan Police (the Met) and four members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the winter of 1975. With eye-witness and first-hand testimony, this book examines the events leading up to the clash and their political context as well as how both sides handled the hostage situation and the strategies and tactics used by the police to safely diffuse the volatile situation.

Comprehensive and readable, The Road to Balcombe Street: The IRA Reign of Terror in London looks at not only the six days making up the standoff but places the confrontation in unique historical context by giving a detailed summary of IRA activity in London in the years leading up to the siege. In addition, this vital study explores the aftershocks arising from the apprehension of the IRA team as well as the hostage negotiation lessons learned in the conflict. This useful resource also features a thorough bibliography and list of electronic resources.

The Road to Balcombe Street: The IRA Reign of Terror in London is a useful resource for practicing law enforcement negotiating teams and professionals; history, sociology, and social psychology students and educators; and general readers as well.

Foreword

Acts of terrorism, by their very nature, are intended to appear random and unpredictable designed to cause maximum psychological impact. In this well-researched and well-written book, psychologist Dr. Steven Moysey traces the destructive and apparently random path taken by one of the most ruthless and murderous gangs of IRA terrorists ever to operate with such vicious consistency on the mainland of Great Britain. He covers the bombing, shooting and kidnapping offences carried out by this small group of determined killers and outlines in authentic (and dare I say exciting detail, as he triggers my own memory) the events leading up to their eventual capture when they were caught in a trap carefully placed and sprung by the London Metropolitan Police on 6th December 1975. Moysey clearly outlines the randomness and unpredictability which was the hallmark of this particular Active Service Unit and which was epitomised by: bombs left in shop doorways on one day; a doorstep shooting and killing the next; the murder of a child cancer physician, by placing a booby trapped bomb under the wheels of his neighbour's car; and opening fire from an automatic weapon on crowded restaurants and hotels while speeding past in a stolen car. In one evening alone in early 1975 no less than seven timed bombs were placed in shop doorways and under fuel storage dumps in and around London.

But although this almost daily switch of methods and likely targets helped them evade early identification and capture, their continued success, (which included the death of one of our top explosives experts), the very randomness itself contained a pattern which allowed the Metropolitan Police Anti-terrorist Squad to set a sophisticated trap into which, on the cold and damp evening of 6th December 1975, the most murderous IRA gang which had ever operated on the British mainland inadvertently entered as they attempted to carry out yet another deadly shooting by opening fire on a high class West End restaurant crowded with pre-Christmas diners. The terrorists, facing armed officers for the first time in their campaign of violence and finding themselves cut off in a part of the City, ran into a small block of Council flats, entered No. 22b, placed a gun to the head of the woman occupant and called to the pursuing officers that they would shoot her if the officers made a move to enter. The officers, knowing of the murders already committed by the terrorists knew this was no idle threat; they would carry it out. So began the siege of 22b Balcombe Street which with armed terrorists inside, who were more than capable of killing their hostages, and armed police covering the premises from the outside, presenting the police, and indeed the government, with a grave dilemma as to how this situation could be resolved.

[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: "Foreword." Imbert, Lord Peter. Co-published simultaneously in Journal of Police Crisis Negotiations (The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 8, No. 1. 2008, pp. xxi-xxii; and: The Road to Balcombe Street: The IRA Reign of Terror in London (Steven P. Moysey) The Haworth Press, Inc., 2008, pp. xiii-xiv. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: docdelivery@ haworthpress.com].

Steven Moysey tells the story of the build up to the siege, which was to last six days, with great skill and thoroughness. He examines the state of mind of the hostage takers and the hostages during the stand off, and particularly the terrorists' psychological motivations for their actions and what drove them to stay the course of a hopeless siege and resist the relentless negotiation tactics employed by the police for a whole week.

Moysey's research included perusal of all press reports and pictures by journalists at the scene and lengthy and probing interviews with the main players on the police side. I admit to enjoying the exercise of casting my mind back 30 years and, with him, re-reading the transcripts of the many hours of interviews which my then boss, Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Nevill and I had with the four terrorists following their capture.

This is the first comprehensive and all embracing account of the events leading up to the hostage taking incident at Balcombe Street and the successful and peaceful efforts to secure the release of the victims and surrender of the perpetrators. I congratulate Dr. Moysey on his deep and meaningful research and his comprehensive and well written account of this hostage taking episode, the style of resolution of which has become a classic example throughout the democratic world for police procedure at such difficult and sensitive incidents.

Lord Peter Imbert, QPM
Her Majesty's Lord-Lieutenant of Greater London
City Hall
Westminster, London
May 30th, 2007

Acknowledgments

The research and writing for this book could not have been completed without the help and support of many different individuals and groups. Firstly, I need to thank my wife Monica for her tireless support and apparently endless patience in dealing with the piles of paper that accumulated around the house and in my office as I worked on the manuscript. I need to also thank The Haworth Press for making the publishing a relatively painless process and especially Dr. Jim Greenstone, of the Journal of Police Crisis Negotiations, for being a believer in the book when it was just an idea based on a previous academic paper.

Many former officers from London's Metropolitan Police came forward with their recollections of the IRA terror campaign between 1974 and 1975 and several were critical to reconstructing the events of December 6th 1975 that resulted in the start of what became known as the Balcombe Street siege. I would like to thank Bob Fenton for his dual role as both a voice in the events of that night and as a contact person for the several thousand retired CID officers in his role as Secretary of the Association of Ex CID Officers of the Metropolitan Police. Through Bob, I was able to interview many police participants including Ron Chapman, Derek Wilson, Alec Edwards, David Waghorn and others who have requested that their names would not used in the book. I would also like to thank Alan Hill, FIFireE, formerly of the West Midlands Fire Service, for his excellent first-hand account of the Birmingham pub bombings in 1974.

Other people made a significant impact in the hunt for research material such as the staff at the British Newspaper Library, and big thanks go to Erin O'Connor at the BBC written archives for her tireless help in tracking down tidbits of information, and Kate Parsons of the Press Association and Alan Moss of History by the Yard for their help in researching images for the book. Several members of Scotland Yard's SO15 Counter Terrorism Command deserve a mention for the help and time they extended to me, but because of the nature of their work I cannot name them.

[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: "Acknowledgments." Moysey, Steven P. Co-published simultaneously in Journal of Police Crisis Negotiations (The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 8, No. 1,2008, pp. xxiii-xxiv; and: The Road to Balcombe Street: The IRA Reign of Terror in London (Steven P. Moysey) The Haworth Press, Inc., 2008, pp. xv-xvi. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-8OO-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: docdelivery @haworthpress.com].

I have enormous thanks for two very special people and the outstanding contribution they have made to the research for this work. Firstly, I have to thank Lord Peter Imbert, QPM JP, along with his staff of Edna Partridge and John Hope. Lord Imbert responded to a request for help from me as a researcher working on a book on Balcombe Street and he did not hesitate in offering his assistance. As someone who has researched and studied the events around the Balcombe Street siege for some time, I still get goose bumps recalling the afternoon of November 14th, 2006, sitting in a car with Lord Imbert and his personal driver Mike outside number 22 Balcombe Street. We were parked on the opposite side of the street to number 22, under the third floor apartment window of 20 Dorset Square where, for six days, Superintendent Peter Imbert and Chief Superintendent Jim Nevill had conducted negotiations with four members of the IRA Active Service Unit holding Mr. and Mrs. John and Sheila Mathews hostage. Almost 31 years later, I was being afforded a privilege by the now Lord Imbert as I sat there and listened to his razor sharp recollections of the events of 1974 and 1975 leading up to the siege.

Final thanks go to John Purnell, GM QPM, for his generous donation of memories around events of the 6th of December 1975. After several phone interviews, John had offered to walk me through the events in person that resulted in the siege. I met John Purnell in London on a bright February morning at the junction of Oxford Street and Portman Street where we retraced the steps taken by John and Sergeant Phil McVeigh, as they gave chase to the IRA team that had eluded capture for well over a year. John's calm recollections of a night filled with both abject terror and remarkable courage helped to put the events into a very clear perspective for the author. I am indebted to John for a quite special morning of recollections and his candid honesty about his own thoughts as he faced the most dangerous moments in his distinguished police career.

This book is therefore dedicated to law enforcement officers every-where who, behind the scenes, quietly go about the task of combating crime and terrorism in our cities, and to those special people who manage the most delicate and potentially deadly situations in law enforcement: The hostage negotiators.

Introduction

This book is, at its core, about a hostage negotiation episode that occurred in London over six days in December of 1975. The hostage takers were four members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) that made up an Active Service Unit (ASU), sent to Britain by the IRA's General Headquarters (GHQ). They had been sent to England, under a cloak of relative anonymity, to wreck havoc on the capital, which they did with some success and notoriety for fourteen months. Their mission was to force the government of Harold Wilson to pull out the British troops from Northern Ireland and allow the six counties of Ulster, controlled by the British, to integrate with the Republic of Ireland. Their mission was part of a struggle that dated back over 200 years. The six days they spent as hostage takers was the direct result of the outstanding work on the part of London's Metropolitan police (the Met) in trapping them in a dragnet operation, designed to entice them one more time onto

the streets of London to ply their deadly trade of terror. The six days were the culmination of a fourteen-month collision course the ASU and the Met had been set on since the IRA group became active on the streets of London, with the one side seeking to avoid detection, and the other side desperate to track the terrorists down to stop further death and destruction in the nation's capital. The British had become accustomed to seeing the scenes of carnage and mayhem, on the nightly news broadcasts and in the papers, inflicted on Northern Ireland by the Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups as they waged a vicious sectarian war. The British public had been exposed on a few occasions to the car and parcel bombs of the IRA, but not since WWII had they been exposed to the concentrated violence the London ASU was to inflict during the campaign of 1974 and 1975. In order to understand the six days of intense pressure, psychological tension, careful maneuvering of the negotiators and the stoic resistance of the hostage takers, we need to trace the steps that both the hunted and the hunters took that drove the ASU to hold John and Sheila Matthews, in their own home, hostages for their cause.

[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: "Introduction." Moysey, Steven P. Co-published simultaneously in Journal of Police Crisis Negotiations (The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 8, No. 1, 2008, pp. 1 -4; and: The Road to Balcombe Street: The IRA Reign of Terror in London (Steven P. Moysey) The Haworth Press, Inc., 2008, pp. 1-4. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: docdelivery@ haworthpress.com].

Hostage taking is as old as civilization itself. The spectrum of holding people or possession hostage is very broad, i.e., I have something you want in exchange for something you hold dear or value. Psychologically, we can hold ourselves hostage in jobs or relationships we should have left, or never entered, arguing with ourselves and negotiating a mental truce between the dissonance creating forces so that we can stay in place and accept the situation. We hold others hostage to our own wants and needs, and negotiate to get our own way. We go through life negotiating with bosses, spouses, coworkers, car salesmen, our children and ourselves.

The spectrum of hostage situations, therefore, can be broad and at one end benign and innocent, where at the other end it can be deadly dangerous to the hostages, hostage takers, and those trying to intervene and bring the situation to a hoped for peaceful resolution. At this extreme end of the hostage spectrum, resolution negotiations are never easy and never part of a win-win scenario. By the very nature of the situation it cannot be so, and that is where the skill, intuitive or trained, of the negotiators comes into play. At this deadly end of the spectrum, the hostage situation can take on many forms, each with their own special unique twists. A suicidal ex spouse, high on methamphetamine, holding a family member hostage until he can speak to his former wife. A distraught dismissed employee, holding former coworkers at gunpoint until someone agrees to give her back her job. A group of armed criminals in a botched hold-up, finding themselves trapped in the establishment they were attempting to rob with terrified employees and customers. Each of these situations requires a different, measured response from the law enforcement officers responding to the call for help. And then there are the deliberate, carefully planned and executed hostage episodes, such as the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege, where six armed revolutionaries of the Democratic Revolutionary Movement for the Liberation of Arabistan (DRMLA) seized the Iranian Embassy at No. 16 Princes Gate, London. Such situations can be a negotiator's nightmare, as the motivation to actually come out alive and or release the hostages cannot always be readily established, or assumed to exist. Then there are the "accidental" hostage situations, such as occurred on the night of December 6th, 1975, that involved four highly trained and experienced IRA urban guerillas. These men were not common criminals trapped during a failed bank hold-up. They were determined, disciplined members of the IRA who had absolutely no intention of giving up easily, and for reasons that were best known only to them.

Their opponents were equally skilled and just as determined to secure the safe release of the hostages. Chief Superintendent Jim Nevill and Superintendent Peter Imbert had been searching for the IRA men for the preceding fourteen months, having spent that time repeatedly sifting through the debris of numerous bomb sites and the remains of the human tragedies created by the fiendish handiwork of the four Irishmen. The six days of the siege at Balcombe Street had been almost inevitable, in some respects, with several interconnecting layers, rather like a Russian Matryoshka doll, with elements hidden inside each other. On the macro scale, the IRA were attempting to hold the British Government hostage by the campaign of violence it unleashed on the British mainland, while the British desperately sought a solution to the Troubles that would keep the Protestant parties satisfied and avoid a spiraling escalation to the already horrific sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Similarly, the British wanted the Irish Government to understand what life could be like in the Republic if they did not assist them in their fight against the IRA. On the micro scale, the ASU were playing a catch-me-if-you-can routine with the Met's bomb squad, who had almost nothing to go on in terms of who they were going after. They had fingerprints that linked one key member of the team to several incidents and locations, but could not establish a recognized identity that connected the prints to any police records in Britain or the Irish Republic. Both the IRA team and the Metropolitan Police Bomb squad were on a collision course that resulted in the six days of the Balcombe Street siege, as a direct result of the fact that the type of investigations the Bomb squad had to conduct were essentially new and different from those they had looked into in the past. The sheer volume of incidents that the ASU unleashed on the capital made the traditional detective work of the Met ineffective in their hunt for the IRA men, forcing the police into uncharted territory in terms of innovative methods of detection and apprehension of terror suspects in a pre-CCD camera London. It was their fate to meet at Balcombe Street.

In this book, we will examine the road that brought the two opposing forces together in Balcombe Street. We will examine the political context of the deliberate campaign of violent terrorist activities perpetrated by the ASU, for without the situational context, we cannot begin to understand the men and their motivation in carrying out the unspeakable acts of violence on the streets, shops, pubs and restaurants of London. We will look at how both sides handled the hostage situation, and then examine the pros and cons of the strategy and tactics used by the Met, and how the lessons from this event apply to other such situations, or if they can be transfer to similar cases. This will give us a framework of how law enforcement and hostage negotiators handle such volatile situations.

doi:10.1300/J173v08n01_01

Chapter 1
Background to the 1974-1975 London ASU Campaign

During December of 1973, Harris Duggan, Sr., received a visit from members of the Provisional IRA at his home in Feakle, County Clare in the Republic of Ireland. They came to Mr. Duggan with heavy hearts and bad news. His son, Harris "Harry" Duggan Jr., was dead, killed on active service with the IRA while on an operation in the North. He had been buried, with honors, in a local cemetery, so Mr. Duggan was told. On receiving the news, Duggan Sr. spent several days searching for his dead son's burial site, but could not find it no matter where he looked. His son had turned twenty-one on his last birthday the previous October. The younger Duggan had been a carpenter, a good trade, and had hoped to go to Canada where he had a job opportunity, but the Canadian authorities had turned down his application for a visa. Rejected, he joined the Provisional IRA. The police on both sides of the border wanted conversations with Harry Duggan regarding certain criminal activities, but now he was dead. Young Harry had been born in Kilburn, London, where he lived with his parents until the age of three, when his father brought him back to Ireland to settle in his native County Clare. The younger Duggan would grow up hearing the tales and exploits of the Republican struggle against the British.

News of Duggan's death reached the Garda, the Irish police force, soon after his father had been told, resulting in Duggan's file being removed from the list of active subversives that the Garda maintained on known members of paramilitary organizations, such as the IRA. At around the same time as Harry Duggan's death, another IRA operative disappeared. Eddie Butler, from Castle Connell, County Limerick, had joined the provisional IRA in 1972, a year of increased recruitment for the IRA. He had carried out minor activities for the IRA, such as selling Republican newspapers, but was not wanted for any major operations. He was 24 years old at the time of his disappearance, presumed to be the victim of the sectarian violence between the Republican Nationalist and Unionist Loyalist paramilitary forces, or a victim of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and British Army, his body dumped in some remote hedgerow to be picked at by crows.

[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: "Background to the 1974-1975 London ASU Campaign." Moysey, Steven P. Co-published simultaneously in Journal of Police Crisis Negotiations (The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 8, No. 1,2008, pp. 5-35; and: The Road to Balcombe Street: The IRA Reign of Terror in London (Steven P. Moysey) The Haworth Press, Inc., 2008, pp. 5-35. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: docdelivery@ haworthpress.com].

However, the facts did not match the circumstances. Duggan was not dead, and Butler was not a victim of the sectarian violence either. In preparation for an audacious terror campaign in the heart of the British mainland, the IRA would build them new identities. They had been selected, and volunteered, for a mission to strike at the British Government, through the mechanisms of terror, should the hoped-for truce and changes in the North not materialize. They were being made ready, along with others, through training in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• PART I
• PART II
• Index