Braver Men Walk Away

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993

Copyright © Peter Gurney 1993

Peter Gurney asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780006379805

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008219406

Version: 2016-09-20

Dedication

For Sheridan – who waited.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

1 Early Years

2 Army Life

3 Desert Demolitions

4 The Growth of Terrorism

5 Belfast

6 The Bungalow

7 The IRA in London

8 Return to Sender

9 The Bomb-makers

10 Terror from the Middle East

11 The Wimpy Bar

12 Still Here

Epilogue

Glossary

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Introduction

It was the picture which did it: one moment it was hanging neatly on display in my office, the next it was on the floor. The morning of 7 February 1991 had been wholly unremarkable, the capital as grey and cold as the day I’d first joined the Explosives Office. But now, at 10.08, just as I was walking back to my desk in Cannon Row Police Station, cup of coffee in hand, everything changed. When a heavy bomb goes off in the distance you hear a rumble, the echo of the sound wave bouncing off buildings. When a bomb goes off near by you hear a distinct crump! like the one I’d just heard. It was followed by another lesser sound.

I sprinted to the doorway and yelled at the Control Room to find my driver.

Someone answered: ‘You haven’t been tasked yet.’

‘When pictures start falling off my wall,’ I shouted, ‘I don’t wait to be tasked.’

My Range Rover was in the yard, already loaded; my driver and I threw ourselves into it and hurtled out through the car park and into Whitehall. On my right I could see a vehicle on fire, a white Ford Transit van parked at an angle and away from the kerb. It was the only sign of anything wrong but it didn’t explain the noise of the explosion – a sound like that and the Transit should have been blown to tiny pieces.

I grabbed an inspector who was trying to usher civilians away from the scene and asked him what had happened. ‘That van,’ he said. ‘There’s been an explosion in that van.’

This was obviously not going to get us very much further. I ran to the van. Through the flames and smoke I could see burning blankets hanging out of the back. I could also see something else: a hole in the roof and three mortar-launch tubes. I tried to get close enough to drag the blankets clear – they might have laundry marks on them (vital forensic evidence) – but the heat was too great and besides, I had heard only one major explosion. A mortar bomb contains 40 pounds of explosive; if two were still in the van then they could be cooked-off by the fire and blow up or be blasted anywhere along Whitehall. Because the mortars were being cooked-off rather than carefully aimed and launched, they could either travel the full distance of their 350-yard range or drop down anywhere along the flight path.

I went round to the front of the Transit and found the Inspector again; he was doing an outstanding job, marshalling his men to get people out of the way. I pointed to the area ahead of the blazing vehicle where a bomb might well fall. ‘I want that area cleared,’ I told him. ‘I need a clear path two hundred yards wide and four hundred yards either end.’

At this point a TV camera crew turned up and caught me on film, waving my arms like a demented scarecrow in front of the blaze. It made for the kind of image television adores but right then I wasn’t so much bothered about what TV was doing to me as what a couple of mortar bombs could do to Whitehall: 140 pounds of metal casing and explosive was likely to come crashing down through someone’s roof from a height of over 250 feet. The buildings on either side of the flight path had to be cleared.

No sooner had I given these instructions than another police officer came running towards me from the direction of Downing Street. Considering the circumstances, he was remarkably calm: ‘There’s been an explosion in the garden of Number Ten …’

I raced down Whitehall and turned into Downing Street. This was obviously the mortar bomb – the crump! I’d heard in my office. It was Brighton all over again; the terrorists were out to get the government itself, but this time it was a meeting of the War Cabinet, called into session to review the latest developments in the Gulf War.

The front door was open, a policeman standing just inside. I told him to warn everyone to stay inside and keep in the middle of the building. The officer then guided me through Number Ten’s maze of corridors, down stairs and around corners and finally out into the rear garden. At the far end, the smoking remains of a cherry tree testified to how near the bombers had come to attaining their objective.

(There are many things which an explosives officer cannot know at the moment an incident is unfolding, and in this case I had no idea what sort of tree it was until much later – when I met Mrs Thatcher in a lift at New Scotland Yard. She had been visiting the Met’s headquarters and I had been lunching with the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, when I was introduced to her as the Expo who had dealt with the Downing Street mortar attack she said: ‘Oh, yes: that was when the poor cherry tree was destroyed.’)

I walked across the wide expanse of lawn to the shallow crater near the tree. Judging by the crater’s depth and the number of windows which had been smashed in the building it seemed that the mortar bomb had actually detonated above ground rather than on impact. It may, indeed, have actually hit the upper branches of the tree.

Just then another police officer materialized at my side and said something which both relieved and alarmed me: there were two more bombs, but they were lying outside on Treasury Green, a small grassed area next to Horse Guards Parade. According to the officer, it didn’t look as though they had gone off … yet. He unlocked the gate for me and showed me the bombs. One was embedded tail first and had obviously malfunctioned; the explosive charge appeared to have ignited rather than detonated, vented out by a low-pressure explosion, and was now spread out all over the place. The other, however, lay on the ground, apparently intact.

I moved in close. They were big, these mortar bombs, 6½ inches in diameter and 4 feet long, with the fuze secured to the nose of the bomb by four large bolts. This type of fuze is very sensitive and, as the whole area had been cleared, I decided that now was the moment to remove it. Unfortunately I couldn’t raise my driver on the radio because the buildings were blocking the signal, so the policeman raced to Number Ten’s boiler room and collected an adjustable spanner which I needed to undo the bolts.

The fuze used in these bombs was quite a simple affair. In essence, it featured a heavy weight (the slider) which would be locked into place by a special safety pin. This pin would be ejected on firing the bomb and leave the weight free to move about inside the fuze body. On impact, the weight would strike the internal percussion cap and fire the bomb. It was therefore essential that the slider should not move now, otherwise there would be one Expo in the same state as the poor cherry tree.

Without moving the bomb, I examined as best I could the state of the fuze. Through the ¼-inch-diameter hole for the safety pin I could see the empty hole in the slider into which the pin had originally been set. To prevent the slider from moving, I needed some kind of safety pin of my own. I found a twig lying near by and wedged it into the hole. It wasn’t ideal but I hoped it would hold long enough for me to deal with the fuze.

This was not going to be easy: I didn’t dare risk any movement of the mortar because the twig might snap or fall out, leaving the weight free to slide about, yet I couldn’t simply hold the mortar steady – it was far too big and heavy to manhandle. And thus it was that I came to be sitting astride a mortar bomb outside the garden at Number Ten, working away with the Prime Minister’s spanner and trusting in the strength of a solitary twig.

It was cold out there on the bomb; I was thankful my fire-resistant trousers provided some degree of insulation against what I imagined to be the incisive chill of the mortar’s casing. Snow was falling now, the flurries borne on a sharp-edged wind; all around, a frosting of white began to spread.

I concentrated on the bolts, bringing the spanner into position and ignoring the stabbing needles of cold upon my face. I was, after all, used to working in every kind of weather condition; being stuck out here with an unexploded bomb in a snowstorm was nothing to complain about. Indeed, in a disconnected kind of way I was thinking that the morning was quite pleasant, for despite the wind and the snow flurries a comfortable warmth was seeping through, a warmth that was getting hotter and hotter and –

They must have heard my anguished yell halfway across London. God Almighty! My balls were on fire.

Somehow I managed to get off the mortar without moving it and fell sideways. Finally I stood upright, or almost upright, wracked by the terrible burning pain and the realization that if I didn’t do something about it soon I would never finish defuzing the damn bomb or sing anything other than soprano ever again.

I stared frantically around, looking for water – ice – anything to cool the blistering heat, and finally saw a small drift of snow against one of the trees. I opened my flies, scooped up the snow and thrust a handful into my trousers. If it meant frostbite, then so be it.

Bow-legged and sodden, I confronted the bomb again, thinking it was a bloody good job John Major and his Cabinet Ministers had been told to get into the centre of Number Ten, away from all the windows, otherwise they might have been looking out and wondering what the hell was going on. The bomb still lay there peacefully, giving no indication of its temperature. It couldn’t possibly be that hot simply through firing; there had to be something else going on that I couldn’t see. But second-guessing a bomb is something you never do; for all I cared it could start singing ‘Rule Britannia!’. What mattered was that it was still there, still intact, and if I didn’t get the fuze out soon …

There was no alternative: I sat down on it, clamped the spanner tight, wrenched it around a half-turn, then jumped up, waited for my backside to cool, sat down again, did another half-turn, jumped up again and waited again; sit down, half-turn, jump up, sit down, half-turn, jump up. I didn’t dare look up at Number Ten to see if anyone was watching or if men in white coats were coming to take me away.

One bolt out, then another; sit down, half-turn, jump up. I had rarely met a more exhausting bomb in my life. Finally the work was finished. I eased the fuze out, stared inside the bomb and discovered that all the explosive had been burnt out. I could see a gap between the fuze housing and the bomb body, a gap caused either by internal pressure or structural distortion on impact. The burn-out had sent the casing almost incandescent, and I, all unwittingly, had chosen to sit astride it when it was almost at its hottest.

The area was now safe as well as secure and the clear-up could begin. I walked away with a preciseness of tread more appropriate to a ballet dancer than an explosives officer, I hoped no one would ask why.

The snow was falling much faster now, coming down from a low opaque sky to settle on the ground and gradually cover the gravel of Horse Guards Parade. It was the kind of surface you couldn’t brush clear; if we were going to collect all the various bits of forensic evidence lying around – pieces of fuze, casing, explosive – then the search team would have to move fast.

They didn’t. When I asked why, I was told the evidence could not be collected until it had been photographed in position.

‘But by the time the photographer gets here,’ I said, ‘there won’t be any evidence to see.’

‘Sorry. It’s procedure. We have to wait.’

And so we waited until the photographer eventually came and took a very expensive and highly scenic set of pictures which showed Horse Guards in winter, covered completely by a smooth, unbroken blanket of pure white snow.

I gave up on the Horse Guards situation and headed back to Whitehall. Here the search team was collecting the evidence, sweeping the road and pavement clear. I contemplated the burnt-out Transit and thought how thoroughly well-prepared this particular terrorist operation had been. Most weapons are fired by line of sight; when using a mortar, however, it is not necessary to see or be seen by a target. The bomb is lobbed high over any intervening obstacle and falls from the sky.

In order to target the Prime Minister and the War Cabinet on the morning of Thursday, 7 February 1991, the bomber had to drive into Whitehall – one of London’s most sensitive areas – and park in exactly the right place and at exactly the correct angle under the very eyes of armed Ministry of Defence police on guard at buildings on either side of the road.

There was no way this could have been done by guesswork; the range and angle would have had to be calculated in advance with the aid of a large scale street map and photographs. To ensure the van was accurately positioned on the day of the attack, the terrorists had probably stuck strips of adhesive tape on the windscreen of the van. The tape would have been lined up with a predetermined point – perhaps buildings opposite – to make certain the van was in line with the target.

Witnesses reported seeing a man leaping from the vehicle shortly before the ‘explosion’ – before the mortars blasted skywards through a hole in the van’s roof. A motorcycle pulled alongside, the man jumped on to the pillion, and the bike roared off again. The incident lasted only a few seconds; the bomber had been working with a firing system which allowed no time for error or delay, knowing full well that any vehicle which parks in Whitehall is going to be almost instantly checked by watching police.

By my calculation, the van was only five degrees or so out of line. Had it not been, then all three mortars would have hit 10 Downing Street.

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