'What if we'd wiped out IRA chiefs?'

THERE'S a photograph of Jack Leyton ready for work in the 1970s. With his fashionable sideburns, stubble and longish hair - and wide shirt collar outside a woolly jumper - he could be another brickie already dreaming of his cold pint at the end of a day's hard graft.

Appearances can be deceptive, for Jack was a special forces operative who kept suspected members of the IRA under surveillance - anyone from Martin McGuinness down.

Based in Derry, his covert duties regularly took him into the nationalist neighbourhood of The Bogside - an area synonymous with The Troubles. It was the scene of Bloody Sunday in 1972, when 13 people were shot by soldiers during a civil rights march. Another man was said to have died of his wounds several months later.

It wasn't a comfortable place for a soldier with a British accent masquerading as an innocent electrician or mechanic.

Jack began his surveillance role in the mid-1970s, working undercover for the rest of the decade. In the early days he was flown back to England to see his wife and children for just one weekend every six weeks.

Life in Northern Ireland had its “moments”, to say the least, and left him with a lasting distaste for republican paramilitaries who employed guns, explosives and nails rather than words and reason.

It hurt, for instance, to see Martin McGuinness - who has admitted being second-in-command of the Provisional IRA's Derry brigade in the 1970s - seated at the heart of government in the first power-sharing deal.

He served as Minister for Education in the Northern Ireland Executive between 1999 and 2002 and is today Deputy First Minister.

“I find it absolutely sickening, I really do. I honestly despise them, because I know what they've done,” says Jack, who today lives in north Suffolk.

“In my heart, I think it had to be resolved politically, but it's just the way it was done: without a single weapon having been seen to be handed in or destroyed. Mass murderers are freely walking the streets - and that sticks in my craw. It really does.

“One of the reasons I wrote the book was to get it out of my system. I thought I could tell the public how it could have been resolved - although I know it was highly unlikely.

“Seeing all these people being let out of the Maze prison and knowing what they'd done... they should be left to rot.”

He wrote the first few pages of Deliver Us from Evil in 1997 and has now self-published it as a paperback.

It's a fast-moving story with swift dialogue and an intriguing plot - and, thanks to its author's covert background, smacks of authenticity.

The tale asks if the Irish situation had to end the way it did. What if the Government, instead, had had the nerve to wipe out the IRA using ex-Special Forces personnel? The dangerous mission - to find and destroy the IRA without implicating his political masters - falls to former paratrooper and 14 Intelligence Company operative Major Sam Longdon and his carefully-chosen experts.

Is that what Jack would have liked to have seen in real life? And could it have really happened?

“No, I don't think it could, realistically. I don't think any Government would have allowed it,” he says, pointing out they could have “taken out” figures such as McGuinness and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams at any time if so desired.

Tempting thought, though.

“I actually knew loads of guys who, had that been real, would have said 'Yeah, count me in.'

“If you'd taken out the seven-man IRA council, and then the 12-man executive committee, followed by the quartermasters, the intelligence guys and the explosives experts, who would want to step into dead men's shoes, knowing that people were bent on eradicating the movement?

“It would have sent shockwaves through the IRA and I think it would have encouraged them to come to the table. I don't know.”

If Britain had pursued such a course of action, it would probably have damaged its relationship with America, where folk from politicians to policemen tossing a dollar into a collecting tin have backed the republican cause from afar - often, he suspects, without knowing anything like the full story. Jack was dismayed at the way successive British Governments have “bowed down” to the IRA. There was a stage in the 1980s when the Army was winning, he says.

“It was after Maggie Thatcher put an extra £50million into the intelligence war in Northern Ireland, and that was at the height of the hunger strikes.

“She was banging the table and saying 'No, no, no' to the opposition, when people were saying 'We must do something about these deaths.'” He was unhappy that the eventual decommissioning process wasn't conducted by international weapons inspectors.

He'd have preferred to have seen symbolic TV pictures of a big pile of guns being flattened by a bulldozer, rather than having to rely on the words of others that arms had been handed in.

“They haven't let all their weapons go,” he says sceptically. “They've got bunkers in the south...” Jack, now in his 60s, joined the Royal Navy at 15. He spent 18 months at HMS Ganges, near Ipswich, training in visual signals, but left the Navy after three years to earn some money in Civvy Street when his father died.

He was soon back in a uniform, though, being called up for national service and ending up in the Suffolk Regiment - now the Royal Anglians.

Jack spent more than 20 years in the Army, serving from Cyprus and Aden to Northern Ireland during the time of Bloody Sunday.

He's got a picture of himself as a uniformed rifle-carrying soldier on the streets of Armagh and another in Derry.

His last six years were spent in the province with “14 Int”, the clandestine special forces unit that watched the IRA and its supporters, rising to the rank of sergeant-major.

Originally, there were three detachments: one each in South Armagh, Derry and Belfast.

He and his colleagues worked directly for Special Branch, Northern Ireland. “They were the ones that had all the touts, all the informants. We were on the ground, in civvies, and basically it was following people by foot, car, chopper.”

After 14 Intelligence Company and the SAS were brought under the same Special Forces umbrella, Special Branch would thus provide source information, the plain-clothed team would act on it, “and the SAS troop on the ground would come in when they needed to do the executive action - whether that was arresting or whatever...”

It was dangerous; highly dangerous. Undercover operatives on the streets didn't talk unless they had to. If they had to, they'd try to disguise their British accents. At times, Irish actors came in to give voice-coaching. Survival depended upon being able to blend into the background. “You've got to be the grey man.”

Every day brought the risk of a bullet - Jack says there were times when he himself was followed - but he insists his strange job was actually great fun, even though he lived on a knife-edge.

One day, for instance, the surveillance team was following a well-known terrorist. When they were told to “lift off” - leave and go back to base - Jack faced a three-quarter-mile walk back to his car. In The Bogside, you didn't want to be hanging around...

Through his concealed earpiece he could hear other members of the team telling the control they were back in their vehicles. “Juliet complete... Whiskey complete... ”

As he walked, he noticed a car carrying an IRA ASU - active service unit - they'd been following the week before. The four men stopped outside a shop and one went in.

Jack, dressed in mechanic's overalls and carrying an oil filter with a disguised camera in it, knew he needed to find out what they were doing.

He sat on a low wall in front of terrace houses opposite the shop, “hoping they'll think I'm waiting for my lift home. I can see them pointing over the road, and the eyeballs are staring.

“All this time I'd been frantically trying to call, but my 'comms' had gone down. I could hear, but I couldn't send. Then I heard someone on the desk say 'Where's Delta? Better send someone back.'

“I thought 'Thank god for that.'

“By this time these guys are actually walking across the road towards me, and I'm thinking 'Well, I know he carries that (a weapon)... I know he carries this... not sure about those two... ”

Jack had a satchel with a concealed submachine-gun inside, “so all I had to do was put my hand through and just squeeze the trigger. Just as they were, literally, 15 yards away, my 'mate' comes screaming up in his car and waves to me - 'Oh, there's my lift' - and I got in and zoomed off.”

He confirms that the undercover soldiers of 14 Int were responsible for some casualties, “but it wasn't intentional, in as much as it was to protect themselves.

“When you had a confrontation like that, and some guy did twig who you were, if he was armed he was fair game. And because we knew who they were, and they didn't know who we were, we always had the edge.”

Did he shoot or kill any IRA member? A slight pause and an old-fashioned look. “No, I wouldn't do that... ”

Did he ever get shot at?

“Not in the way that you're asking.

“We were in south Derry, in bandit country, on the edge of a wood. It was horrible: boggy, gorse grass, and it was winter. We were watching this farmhouse and we knew that at some stage there would be a meeting” - of IRA men.

“We'd been in there for days, watching. Sure enough, one night these cars appear. So we say we'll go forward and get the registration numbers. Then the guy I'm with - he's braver than me - says “Come on; we'll go round the back and see what we can see through the windows.”

“Unbeknown to us there were sentries posted, and they did open fire, but they didn't know who we were and we just scarpered as fast as we could.”

The risks did increase as time went on and the republicans sensed they were under surveillance.

“We lost, over the period, at least half a dozen guys who were either compromised or who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“After the IRA got wiser, the role went technical: jarking weapons” - bugging a weapons cache - “and using hidden cameras and recording equipment.”

Initially MI5 sent over technical guys, who'd never fired a gun in anger and who effectively had to be nursed by 14 Int. They had to be secreted into premises at 3am, say, and got back to safety again without anyone noticing.

It became a huge pain.

“I had one guy turn up in white trousers and a fluorescent blue jacket! We had to find him an old boilersuit or something.”

In the end, intelligence operatives were sent on technical courses, so they didn't have to wait for specialists such as locksmiths to come from England.

Such work wasn't for everyone; nor was everyone born with the physical and mental qualities for the role.

The training course Jack went on lasted for more than four-and-a-half months, with people dropping off along the way either because they didn't meet the required standards or because they realised it wasn't for them.

“Out of 200 on my selection, at the end there were only 13. And then after three months in Ireland there were only nine of us left.”

One volunteer who didn't have the nerve for it was a sergeant from an infantry regiment, who left his post during a surveillance operation. It's not that he wasn't brave, though...

He returned to his regiment, then serving in South Armagh. Two weeks later, out on the streets, his group comes across a post office van with the back doors open and parcels piled up.

“This guy senses something's wrong and, as he's giving instructions to his team, a machine-gun opens up from the back. Three of his guys are killed, he's out of ammunition, so runs over and picks up their weapons and is shooting back.

“It's reckoned he hits two of them - they were firing from behind a steel plate in the back of the van, through a gap like a letterbox - before the van roared off. A bit later he gets the Military Medal.”

Serving in Northern Ireland certainly called for a mindset that civilians can barely imagine.

“When I left, it took me three years to adjust,” Jack admits.

“Over there, you were always on the look-out. Each guy had a montage of about 12 'faces', which you'd memorise. Between you, you'd have hundreds. Looking at every car coming towards you, it was second nature to go 'face, registration number, face' as it went past. If it clicked that he was one of yours, you spoke over the radio and something was done about it.

“It took me three years to stop doing this in England after I finished. And you were constantly checking your mirror. Even today, if I think a guy's been on my tail for a while, I will go round a roundabout twice. It's so inbred in me.”

Is there still a risk of reprisal, or is that just a melodramatic thought?

“No, it's not. I would imagine orders have been put out that we're not to be touched - in light of the peace process - but I'm sure there's a few of them left that would still love to get one of us.”

n Deliver Us from Evil costs £10.95 and is available from www.arimapublishing.co.uk

ISBN-13: 978-1845491796