Thatcher’s executions

In his new book ‘The Sorrow and the Loss - The Tragic Shadow Cast by the Troubles on the Lives of Women’ veteran journalist Martin Dillon highlights the impact of the conflict on women, including IRA Volunteer Mairéad Farrell. In this extract he provides an account of how former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher personally oversaw an SAS shoot-to-kill ambush that claimed Mairéad's life along with two other republicans, Daniel McCann and Sean Savage in Gibraltar in 1988, 37 years ago this week.

Early on that March morning, Thatcher was going through her customary routine in 10 Downing Street, laying out the Sunday newspapers on her desk. She liked browsing the tabloids first, especially The Sun, which was read by her most loyal followers.

Its front-page headline was ‘Easter Coach Outcry’.

Apparently, clubs, coach companies and pubs were concerned about some new Department of Transport regulations limiting coach travel.

The author of the article told a wonderful story about media magnate Rupert Murdoch, who entered a room in his Sun newspaper premises to find its executives drinking from large brandy glasses.

An indignant Murdoch later remarked that they were drinking his Scotch from ‘goldfish bowls’.

Thatcher’s husband, who loved a tipple, would have enjoyed the story. Her eyes may also have settled on a Times article warning that inflation had risen to 18.4 per cent; a revelation that threatened her premiership.

Later that morning, military and intelligence figures arrived at No. 10 to brief Thatcher in an upstairs room known as GEN42.

No one knew how it acquired its name, just that it was where secrets about Northern Ireland were discussed.

A direct line to Whitehall and a satellite link to Special Air Service (SAS) HQ in Hereford kept everyone aware in real time about events in Gibraltar, with minute-by-minute reports on the surveillance of the IRA trio. The British military operation had been given the name ‘Operation Flavius’.

Thatcher’s ‘boys’, as she liked to refer to soldiers of the SAS, were in Gibraltar to eliminate targets, not to arrest them. This was to be a repeat of the killings she ordered after Airey Neave’s murder.

We do not know what Mairéad Farrell’s plan was once Savage proved he could park his car beside the governor’s residence and leave it there for several hours without arousing suspicion.

Would she have gone back to Torremolinos and returned to the Rock the following Sunday with the other car containing the powerful Semtex explosives or would the two IRA operatives in Torremolinos have been tasked with delivering the bomb to the Rock? But on that Sunday, after Savage parked the rental car and walked away from it, the trio began strolling casually along Winston Churchill Avenue with McCann and Farrell some distance from Savage.

Perhaps, they planned to go for lunch or visit the underground caves, but whatever their plan, it did not come to fruition because this was the moment three armed SAS soldiers sprang into action. Farrell spotted two of them leaping over a fence near a petrol station and running towards her and McCann.

She instinctively raised her hands in the air and so too did McCann.

He even tried to shield her with his body, realising that these armed strangers were professionals and meant business.

I wonder whether Mairéad Farrell expected to be arrested as she raised her hands, as had happened outside the Conway Hotel. It was not to be.

This time, she was shot three times in the face and neck from three feet or less away. While she was lying on the ground, she was shot a few times in her back.

McCann was shot twice in the chest and head and three times in the back as he fell. Both were then shot again at very close range.

Savage saw the shooting and took off running with another SAS soldier in pursuit.

He shot Savage in the back, bringing him to the ground, and then shot him eighteen times at close range. It was overkill; a pathologist later wrote that Savage was ‘riddled’.

The killing of the three was observed by reliable witnesses. While the SAS shooters claimed that the trio looked like they were reaching for weapons, the evidence of the witnesses proved this to be a lie.

It was a triple execution.

British papers were quick to offer false narratives provided by British intelligence disinformation specialists, who had already prepared the groundwork for what they would tell the media.

Bogus stories were fed to the tabloids about a bomb in Gibraltar in a car parked by Savage and that the trio had the capability to detonate it remotely, which led to the SAS being forced to take them out.

However, it seems clear to me that Farrell and her companions were allowed to enter Gibraltar without a bomb that morning so they could be liquidated. This was Thatcher’s revenge. She was sending a personal message to the IRA leadership.

Urgent Appeal