Preface to the New Edition

When I completed the manuscript for Bandit Country some 25 years ago, I told myself I would never return to South Armagh. I had named too many names and disclosed too much about the inner workings of the IRA's military leadership. I had always intended to immerse myself in this place apart and write its definitive history without having to worry about my future personal security or having to work in Northern Ireland again. I moved to the United States shortly before publication in November 1999.

In some ways, I need not have worried. The reception to the book was extraordinary, and I received generous praise from some Irish republicans - though it was often privately communicated - as well as from former British soldiers, RUC officers, intelligence operatives and ordinary readers. Sales at Newry's main bookshop, the closest to South Armagh, broke records. I sat in a storeroom signing copies - it was not considered prudent for me to be out there with the customers - as they flew off the shelves. It may be apocryphal, but I was told that some senior IRA figures would not put money in my pocket by buying the book so instead arranged for copies to be stolen.

It was 15 years after publication when I broke my private vow and went back to South Armagh. I drove in a rental car, spoke to no one and did not linger. Some things had changed, but much hadn't. The notorious Golf and Romeo watchtowers had come down, the army base at Bessbrook Mill - where I had once been locked in a room for a day with access to a dozen filing cabinets full of classified records - had closed, and there were no helicopters in the air. In Crossmaglen, Borucki sangar, named after a soldier killed in the town in 1976 and inside which four Grenadiers had nearly perished when it was set alight in 1992, was no more. The Royal Ulster Constabulary had been disbanded and replaced by the Police Service of Northern Ireland. But there were no police on the streets and scant evidence of the London or Belfast government's writ extending this far south. Outside Murtagh's bar, just off Crossmaglen's main square, the strike mark from the .50 calibre bullet fired by Volunteer Micheál Caraher from a Barrett rifle, killing Guardsman Danny Blinco, was still carefully preserved. It was apparently a local point of pride.

Publication of Bandit Country led to greater scrutiny of the IRA in South Armagh and the unmasking of some of its prominent figures. I noted in 1999 that for legal reasons the pseudonyms 'the Undertaker' and 'the Surgeon' had been given to two of the most senior figures within the South Armagh Brigade. The Undertaker was Patsy O'Callaghan, who died of natural causes in a Drogheda hospital in 2021 at the age of 67. Although his obituary described him as an IRA volunteer, he had become disillusioned with the Provisional movement's leadership and aligned with dissident IRA members who wanted to continue the armed struggle. After his death, former US Marine and one-time senior IRA man John Crawley described O'Callaghan as 'a dynamic and daring resistance fighter who habitually led from the front'.

Two years after Bandit Country was published, Seán Gerard Hughes, then aged 40, of Drumintee, South Armagh was accused of three counts of false accounting and eight counts of obtaining by deception. His lawyers stated that he 'could not get a fair trial anywhere in Northern Ireland' because my book had identified him as the Surgeon. In 2002, Hughes was named in the House of Commons under parliamentary privilege as an IRA leader. His properties were seized due to suspected fraud seven years later. In 2015, charges of IRA membership against Hughes were dropped. When Bandit Country was first published, Hughes had been virtually unknown. After Bandit Country, Micheál Caraher's brother Fergal, shot dead by Royal Marines in 1990 in an incident in which Micheál was wounded, was claimed by the IRA as a member. As my book detailed, for propaganda reasons Fergal had previously been identified only as a Sinn Féin member. When their father Peter John Caraher - whom I had interviewed - died in 2011, he too was identified as an IRA volunteer and described by a Sinn Féin MP as 'one of the unsung heroes of the republican struggle'.

Like the gangster Al Capone, Thomas 'Slab' Murphy, the godfather of the IRA in South Armagh, was eventually convicted for tax evasion. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2016. The Irish Times noted: 'In 2006, long after the peace process was established, it took 400 British and Irish soldiers, PSNI and Garda officers and officials from the Criminal Assets Bureau and the British customs and excise to mount a raid on his farm complex of house, sheds, offices and oil tanks.' On the loyalist side, William Frazer, the son of a UDR man killed by the IRA in 1975, died of cancer in 2019. During the research for Bandit Country, Frazer asked me to provide him with the names, addresses and workplaces of IRA members in South Armagh. I refused. Frazer later leaked historic documents to Ian Paisley, the Democratic Unionist Party leader, that detailed the names of innocent Catholics and connected them to the Kingsmill massacre of 1976, in which 10 Protestant workmen were killed. Paisley used parliamentary privilege to read out the names in the House of Commons. Two senior police officers separately told me that Frazer had supplied weapons to loyalist paramilitary organisations.

The passages in Bandit Country about Irish police officers Garda X and Garda Y colluding with the IRA in the 1989 killings of Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Bob Buchanan - the most senior RUC officers to die in the Troubles - caused a firestorm. Senior Garda and RUC officers flew out to Washington D.C. to question me about the allegations, which I had laid out in painstaking detail. Ironically, my principal sources had been Garda and RUC officers, but it was clear that these trips were bureaucratic exercises in ticking boxes and finding nothing. Eventually, however, an inquiry was ordered by the Irish government. In 2013, after a £12.5 million investigation lasting eight years and testimony from 198 witnesses, the Smithwick Tribunal confirmed the allegations published in Bandit Country nearly 14 years earlier. Enda Kenny, the Irish Prime Minister, described the collusion as 'absolutely shocking', while Martin Callinan, the Garda commissioner, issued an unreserved apology for treachery that was 'beyond comprehension'. Garda X was retired Detective Sergeant Owen Corrigan, who died in Dundalk in February 2022. The Smithwick Tribunal concluded that Corrigan had passed information to the IRA. Corrigan had been in Dundalk Garda Station on the day Breen and Buchanan were killed.

The March 2024 interim report from Operation Kenova - the investigation into the activities of the IRA man and informer codenamed Stakeknife by his British Army handlers - concluded that on occasion the British authorities allowed murders to take place to protect its informers. Stakeknife was Fred Scappaticci, named in Bandit Country as a member of the IRA's so-called 'nutting squad' - the unit that, ironically, was used to interrogate suspected informers. Bandit Country established that the IRA bombmaker Paddy Flood, whose body was dumped on the South Armagh border in July 1990 after being executed by the nutting squad, had not been an informer. In all likelihood, Flood was set up by the British to divert attention from a senior IRA man who was the real informer. Scappaticci died in April 2023. It is only now, a quarter-century after Bandit Country was first published, that fuller details of the 'dirty war', an intrinsic element of the Troubles, are coming to light.

I had long known that Bandit Country had been recommended by army units in Northern Ireland as required reading for British soldiers. The Smithwick Tribunal received an RUC document in which a detective chief inspector said Bandit Country contained 'perhaps hundreds of matters which could be the subject of police investigations and further inquiry'. What gratified me most, however, was a message I received the day after the Smithwick report from a Garda officer who had served in Dundalk, telling me that 15 or so of his colleagues had 'read my much-cherished copy' of Bandit Country, which was being used as 'a training tool' for all new officers in the area.

An author's duty to protect the identity of a source ends when that source dies. Sadly, that became the case when Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, the commanding officer of the Welsh Guards, was killed in action in Helmand, Afghanistan, in 2009. During my research for Bandit Country, Rupert, then a captain in the Welsh Guards, was an intelligence liaison officer with responsibility for South Armagh. His was essentially the same role as that of Captain Robert...