The available logs show a regular pattern of activity by the Bomb Squad in Belfast sometimes the unit is at the scene of an explosion or violent incident arresting suspects, more often the regular military is radioing it with intelligence about suspicious cars or people. Log sheets from 39 Brigade – Kitson’s Brigade – are available for May 1971 through to July but not for the autumn months following the introduction of internment that August. Got into Red Vauxhall Cresta, new car – didn’t take Regd No.
Man had dark hair with a scots accent, grey suit white shirt As the commander got out of the veh, man had his hand on a pistol in his belt – very luck (sic) not to get shot. Man got out of a white Vauxhall waved down a mobile. Some one in the Bomb Squad slowed a patrol down using a pistol – more details to follow but a very dangerous practice. They were radioed in by soldiers from the Ist Bn Light Infantry. This unit was known as the Bomb Squad and a flavour of its modus operandi and membership can be gleaned from log sheet entries from the evening of May 16th and 17th, 1971. One of the first responses to this growing crisis was the creation of a mobile unit of plainclothes soldiers, in radio contact with British bases around Belfast, who patrolled the city in civilian cars in the hope of intercepting bombing teams either en route to targets or on their way home after delivering their deadly loads. The pressure on the British Army to respond grew accordingly. The bombs exploded during the night and the next day thousands of angry Orangemen were obliged to march past devastated streets and wrecked shops and businesses, helpless witnesses to the gravest threat to the NI state since its foundation.Īs the summer lengthened and the bombings escalated, Unionist anger intensified, fueling demands for a crackdown on the IRA and strengthening political extremists like Ian Paisley and their working class Loyalist counterparts in the paramilitary groups.
SINN BOMBSQUAD WATCH SERIES
In one spectacular and provocative act that July the IRA orchestrated a series of explosions along the route of the annual Twelfth Orange parade in Belfast.
In the spring and summer of 1971 the IRA started to intensify its commercial bombing campaign in Belfast, partly in the hope of forcing the British to introduce internment before intelligence on the nascent Provisionals had improved, but also in the knowledge that this would destabilise Unionist politics.
SINN BOMBSQUAD WATCH ARCHIVE
However a close study of documents now available from the British government’s archive at Kew in Surrey, makes it possible to put some flesh on the otherwise bare bones, enough perhaps to construct a working theory to explain the origins of the MRF. Aside from the widely-held belief that the MRF was the brainchild of Brigadier Frank Kitson – the commander of the British Army in Belfast between September 1970 and April 1972 – and that it was largely modeled on the pseudo-gangs that he created to counter the Mau-Mau during the Kenyan uprising of the 1950’s, precious little is known about the genesis of the unit which was the precursor of undercover British military activity during the Troubles.
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