‘Uncovering the Truth about the British role in the north of Ireland (Part III)’ by Joe McVeigh

‘Operation Motorman’, was introduced by the British army and the British government in July 1972 as a deliberate strategy to put an end to the insurgency created by the Civil Rights movement. Towards the end of October, as ‘Motorman’ was about to finish, British army chiefs with the approval of their political masters in London, decided to concentrate on the border areas of Fermanagh and Tyrone.  They directed that a large number of British soldiers mostly belonging to the Argyll and Sutherlands, based in Bessbrook, County Armagh should travel by helicopter to south Fermanagh to Newtownbutler.  They were directed to a field near the farmhouse belonging to a man called Michael Naan and they were told to set up a base there. This was deliberately planned in preparation for the assassination of Michael Naan, a local farmer who was active in the Civil Rights campaign in Fermanagh. 43 soldiers were sent in to carry out their mission of putting an end to civil rights campaigning in Fermanagh. Most of the support for the civil rights campaign came from south Fermanagh. The leader of this ‘special’ mission was a member of the SAS, Major Jeremy MacKenzie, who belonged to the Queens Own Highlanders and who came from Omagh, county Tyrone. The soldiers chosen were from the Argyll & Sutherland regiment (13 platoon and 14 platoon of ‘D’ Coy).

Within a week after they arrived they had accomplished what they were sent to do. They had killed Michael Naan and his neighbour, Andrew Murray, who happened to be with him at the time. They almost immediately returned to their base in Bessbrook in County Armagh.

The truth about these murders in Fermanagh would never have been discovered but for an unusual occurrence in May 1978, when a member of the Argyll regiment got a guilty conscience after the brutal killing of a prostitute, Helen Rytka, in Huddersfield, Yorkshire. She was the ninth woman to be killed in that area. The informant thought these killings were similar in brutality to the killings in Fermanagh in 1972. The informant called the police in Huddersfield and told them that he thought that a member of the Argylls, might be the man responsible for the killing of Helen Rytka. The informant (Mr A) told the police that he thought it was Sergeant Hathaway who was responsible for the Yorkshire killing because some six years earlier he was with him on a tour of duty when he and others killed two farmers in Fermanagh with knives. He felt that the man who murdered the women in Yorkshire, also using a knife, might be this soldier of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, which was, at that time in 1978, based in Catterick, Yorkshire.

One month later when nothing had happened, the informant phoned the Daily Mirror in Manchester and gave them the same information also adding the name of another member of the Argylls, Sgt John Byrne. In December 1978, when nothing was being done with the information that he had given to the police, the informant went to the police in Glasgow and also to the Scottish Sunday Mail with his story. On 17 December 1978 the newspaper published the story on the front page. The informant gave the police the names of those he knew to be involved in the murders in Newtownbutler because he thought some of them could be linked to the murders of the prostitutes in Yorkshire. Except for MacKenzie, the soldiers belonged to D Company of the Argyll and Sutherland regiment of the British army.

Detectives investigating travelled around Britain and Germany to interview the members of the Argylls that were suspected of the killings. They interviewed Lance Corporal Chestnutt (31) in Aberdeen in February 1979, Sgt John Byrne (38) in Colchester in March, and Lieutenant Andrew Snowball (28) in April. At first they denied all knowledge. It was June before they got to interview Hathaway then serving in the 1^st Armoured Division in Neinburg in West Germany. At first he protested but then he broke down and confessed. “I did the killings. I killed them. I have been having nightmares about it.”  Apart from Chestnutt who was working on an oil rig, the rest were still in the British army.

These four were brought to court in Belfast to stand trial in January 1981. At first they pleaded ‘not guilty’. The trial lasted four days because of adjournments each time that Hathaway broke down.  Hathaway and Byrne got life sentences, while Ian Chestnutt got four years and the Army captain who sent them out, Captain Andrew Snowball, got one year for covering up afterwards.  The trial came to an abrupt end when they changed their pleas to ‘guilty’. The judge, Mr Justice McDermott, said he took into consideration the soldiers ‘genuine remorse’ but added there was ‘no excuse for what happened.’

The killing of people involved in the civil rights movement was part of the Kitson strategy of: 1. striking fear into the local nationalist communities and 2. making it appear that what was happening in the north was a sectarian conflict and 3. presenting the British role in Ireland as ‘pig in the middle’. The ‘Pitchfork’ murders in Fermanagh show how the Kitson strategy was implemented and how it succeeded in its aims especially in the south of Ireland. The national broadcaster, RTE, even to this day continues to talk about the two sides in the north. They have bought the propaganda that the British army was needed to keep the peace between these two warring tribes in the north.

The full story about Brigadier Frank Kitson and ‘Operation Motorman’ in the north in the early 1970s has yet to be told. What we already know tells us a lot about British strategy and how they deliberately escalated the violence using undercover soldiers and pseudo loyalist gangs like the Military Reconnaissance Force (MRF) and the UDA to carry out assassinations so that the British could present the conflict as a sectarian war. When the full story is revealed, it will challenge a lot of the assumptions about the role of the British in the north during the Civil Rights campaign and afterwards. RTE will soon have to revise their representation of the conflict if their reporting is to have any credibility. At present it has no credibility.

(Local historian, Brian McDonald has written a detailed account of the murders of Michael Naan and Andrew Murray- The ‘Pitchfork’ Murders-Uncovering the Cover-up.)