South Armagh Sniper (1990–97)

The South Armagh Sniper is the generic name given to the members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army's (IRA) South Armagh Brigade who conducted a sniping campaign against British security forces from 1990 to 1997. The campaign is notable for the snipers' use of .50 BMG calibre Barrett M82 and M90 long-range rifles in some of the shootings.

Origins
One of the first leaders of the Provisional IRA, Seán Mac Stíofáin, supported the use of snipers in his book Memories of a Revolutionary, attracted by the motto "one shot, one kill". The majority of soldiers shot dead in 1972, the bloodiest year of the conflict in Northern Ireland, fell, in effect, victims of IRA snipers.

About 180 British soldiers, Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and prison staff members were killed in this way from 1971 to 1991.

The AR-18 Armalite rifle became the weapon of choice for IRA members at this time.

The British Army assessment of the conflict, Operation Banner, asserted that the IRA sniping skills often did not match those expected from a well trained sniper. The report identifies four different patterns of small arms attacks during the IRA campaign, the last being that developed by the South Armagh sniper units.

The rifles
During the 1980s, the IRA relied mostly on weaponry smuggled from Libya. The regular shipments from the United States, once the main source of arms for the republicans through the gunrunning operations of George Harrison, were disrupted after he was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1981. The smuggling scheme suffered a further blow when the Fenit-based trawler Marita Ann, with a huge arms cache from Boston, was captured by the Irish Naval Service in 1985.

However, between the mid-1980s and the 1990s there was some small-scale activity, leading to the purchase of US-made Barrett M82 and M90 rifles, which became common weapons for the South Armagh snipers. According to letters seized by US federal authorities from a Dundalk IRA member, Martin Quigley, who had travelled to USA to study computing at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, the organisation managed to smuggle an M82 to the Republic of Ireland just before his arrest in 1989. He was part of a bigger plot to import electronic devices to defeat British Army countermeasures.

In August 1986, another M82 had been sent in pieces from Chicago to Dublin, where the rifle was re-assembled. At least two of the M90 rifles were bought as recently as six months after the first IRA ceasefire. It was part of a batch of two sold to Michael Suárez, a Cuban resident of Cleveland on 27 January 1995 by a firearms dealer; Suárez later passed the weapons to an Irishman, who finally shipped the rifles, their ammunition and two telescopic sights to the Republic. An unidentified leading figure inside the IRA sniper campaign, quoted by Toby Harnden, said that: "What's special about the Barrett is the huge kinetic energy... The bullet can just walk through a flak jacket. South Armagh was the prime place to use such weapon because of the availability of Brits. They came to dread it and that was part of its effectiveness."

Three of the security forces members killed in this campaign were instead the victims of 7.62x51 mm rounds. Five missed shots belonged to the same kind of weapon. Harnden recalls a Belgian FN FAL rifle recovered by the Gardaí near Inniskeen in 1998 as the possible source of these bullets.

Shootings
Contrary to the first British army assessment, or the speculations of the press, there was not just a single sniper involved. According to Harnden, there were two different teams, one responsible for the east part of South Armagh, around Dromintee, the other for the west, in the area surrounding Cullyhanna. The volunteer in charge of the Culyhanna unit was Frank "One shot" McCabe, a senior IRA member from Crossmaglen. Each team comprised at least four members, not counting those in charge of support activities, such as scouting for targets and driving vehicles. Military officials claim that the Dromintee-based squad deployed up to 20 volunteers in some of the sniping missions. The teams made good use of dead ground in order to conceal themselves from Army observation posts.

Between 1990 and 1997, 24 shots were fired at British forces. The first eight operations (1990–1992), ended in misses. On 16 March 1990, the Barret M82 was used for first time by the IRA. The target was a checkpoint manned by soldiers of the Light Infantry regiment on Сastleblaney Road. A single .50 round pierced the helmet and skimmed the skull of Lance Corporal Hartsthorne, who survived with minor head injuries. In August 1992, one team mortally wounded a Light Infantry soldier. By April 1997, nine servicemen, seven from the Army and two from the RUC, had been killed. An RUC constable almost lost one of his legs in what became the last sniper attack during the Troubles.

Another six rounds achieved nothing, albeit two of them near-missed the patrol boat HMS Cygnet, in Carlingford Lough and another holed Borucki sangar, a British Army outpost at Crossmaglen square. On 31 July 1993 at 10:00 pm a British Army patrol which had set a mobile checkpoint on Newry Road, near Newtownhamilton, was fired at by an IRA's sniper team. The British soldiers returned fire, but there were no injuries from either side. The marksman usually fired from a distance of less than 300 metres, despite the 1 km effective range of the rifles. Sixteen operations were carried out from the rear of a vehicle, with the sniper protected by an armour plate in case the patrols returned fire. At least in one incident, after the killing of a soldier in Forkhill on 17 March 1993, the British Army fired back at the sniper's vehicle without effect. The IRA vehicles were escorted by scout cars, to alert about the presence of security checkpoints ahead.

Two different sources include in the campaign two incidents which happened outside South Armagh; one in Belcoo, County Fermanagh, where a constable was killed, the other in West Belfast, in June 1993. An RUC investigation following the latter shooting led to the discovery of one Barrett M82, hidden in a derelict house. It was later determined that this rifle was the weapon responsible for the first killing in South Armagh in 1992. Another Barrett is reported to have been in possession of the IRA team that took over for two hours the village of Cullaville in South Armagh in April 1993.

A third unrelated sniper attack, which resulted in the death of a British soldier, was carried out by the IRA at New Lodge, North Belfast, on 3 August 1992. Two other soldiers were wounded by snipers at New Lodge in November 1993 and January 1994. Two people were arrested and a loaded rifle recovered in the aftermath of the latter incident. On 30 December 1993 Guardsman Daniel Blinco became the last soldier killed by snipers in South Armagh before the first IRA ceasefire in 1994. His killing, along with the reaction of the MP of his constituency was covered by the BBC "inside Ulster" services, which also showed Blinco's abandoned helmet and the hole made by the sniper's bullet on the wall of a pub. The tabloid press of that time started calling the sniper 'Goldfinger' or 'Terminator', the nicknames current in Crossmaglen's bars. The last serviceman killed by snipers at South Armagh, Lance Bombardier Stephen Restorick, was also the last British soldier to die during The Troubles, on 12 February 1997. Restorick's killing resulted in a public outcry; Gerry Adams called his death "tragic" and wrote a letter of condolence to his mother.

Caraher team captured
The ceasefire put in place by the IRA on 31 August 1994 gave an opportunity to the British to collect intelligence from the local community to be used against the snipers. The truce was strongly resented by South Armagh IRA members. Even when the ceasefire was ongoing, an alleged member of the Drumintee squad, Kevin Donegan, was arrested by an RUC patrol in relation to the 1994 murder of a postal worker in the course of an armed robbery.

When the IRA broke the ceasefire by bombing the London Docklands in February 1996, some volunteers had already abandoned the organisation, while others had turned to criminal activities. The period after the ceasefire saw little IRA activity in South Armagh.

Following two successful attacks in 1997, on April 10 a Special Air Service unit captured four men from the sniper team based in the west of the region, responsible for several deaths. After a brief fist fight, James McArdle, Michael Caraher, Bernard McGinn and Martin Minnes were caught in a farm near Freeduff and handed over to the RUC. The British troops were under strict orders to avoid IRA casualties. A Barrett M90 rifle was seized, which forensic and intelligence reports linked only to the 1997 shootings. It was hinted that there was an informer, a suggestion dismissed by the Ombudsman report.

McGinn provided the RUC with a lot of information about IRA activities, and even betrayed Frank McCabe, the IRA commander behind the sniper campaign, but he eventually withdrew his statement. According to Toby Harnden, one of the key players in the British campaign against the South Armagh sniper was Welsh Guards' Captain Rupert Thorneloe, who worked as an intelligence liaison officer between the 3rd Infantry Brigade and the RUC Special Branch. Thorneloe, who reached the rank of Colonel, was killed in July 2009 by an improvised explosive device, during the war in Afghanistan. Another senior figure involved in the British efforts against the sniper squads was SAS Staff Sergeant Gaz Hunter, whose experience in South Armagh dates back to 1975. Despite the sense of relief among British forces after the arrests, there was concern over the other two Barrett rifles still in possession of the South Armagh Brigade.

One of the IRA volunteers captured, Michael Caraher, was the brother of Fergal Caraher, a Sinn Féin member and IRA volunteer killed by Royal Marines at a checkpoint on 30 December 1990 near Cullyhanna. Michael, also shot and wounded, had lost a lung in the aftermath. Despite some witnesses claiming that the shooting was unprovoked, the Marines involved were acquitted by Lord Chief Justice Hutton. The shooting of Guardsman Daniel Blinco took place on the second anniversary of the killing of Fergal Caraher. Michael Caraher was thought to be the shooter in several attacks, but he was only indicted for the case of the maimed constable. He was defended by solicitor Rosemary Nelson, later killed by the loyalist organisation Red Hand Defenders. The other three men of the sniper team were convicted in 1999 for six killings, two of them unrelated to the sniping operations (the deaths of two men when one of the team's members, James McArdle, planted the bomb at Canary Wharf in 1996). While the capture of the sniper unit was the single major success for the security forces in South Armagh in more than a decade, the big picture showed that by then the IRA and Sinn Fein had achieved huge political gains towards their long-term goals. The men were set free 18 months later under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. The Dromintee sniper party was never caught.

Conclusions


The IRA sniping activities further restricted the freedom of movement of the British Army in South Armagh by hindering their patrols. The MoD issued a new type of body armour, which was both expensive (£4,000) and too heavy (32 lbs) for use on patrol. The morale of the troops was so low that some servicemen had to be disciplined for remaining in shelter while under orders to check vehicles. A British major said that: "That meant that to some extent the IRA had succeeded in forcing troops off the ground and it made helicopters more vulnerable so we had to guard against using them too much."

The IRA strategy also diverted a large amount of British security resources from routine operations to tackle the threat. Until the 1994 ceasefire, even the SAS was unable to prevent the attacks. However, the truce between 1994 and 1996 made security surveillance easier for the RUC and the Army. This led to the success against the Caraher team. The security forces planned to set the ground for an SAS ambush by deploying a decoy patrol, but this counter-sniper operation failed twice. At the end, the sniper squad was tracked to a farm complex and arrested there.

By the second IRA ceasefire, another team was still on the run, and two Barrett rifles remained unaccounted for. The campaign is viewed as the most efficient overall IRA operation in Northern Ireland for this period.

A Highway Code-style sign saying "SNIPER AT WORK" was mounted by the IRA near Crossmaglen and became an icon of the republican cause.