LITMIR.BIZ

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Herron was doubled over with laughter.

      Later he told me he had doctored the shotgun cartridge to teach me a lesson – a lesson that could mean the difference between being done for robbery and being done for murder. One of my duties as a UDA volunteer was the procurement of funds and that meant robbing banks and post offices. With robberies come have-a-go heroes, and Herron warned me that doctoring a shotgun cartridge and filling it with grains of rice would be the difference between stunning and immobilising a wannabe hero and killing them.

      Herron introduced me to a secret gun club in North Down. I was just seventeen years old. Judges, barristers and policemen were among the members of this state-of-the-art shooting gallery. The G-Club was underground, hidden beneath a well-known local landmark. Membership was closed: you couldn’t walk in off the street and join. It didn’t advertise: you had to be invited. The club had a rifle range, moving targets and pop-up targets and was equipped with .303 rifles and .22 target pistols.

      Through Herron I learnt to be an assassin. I learnt to be an independent soldier. He taught me how to kill without a gun. He showed me how to garrotte a person with the brake cable of a pushbike by looping it in a specific way. It was foolproof and guaranteed to cause instant death. I learnt about anatomy and how to use knives. He showed me how to stab by inserting the knife and twisting up and in. Just sticking a blade into flesh would not cause death, he told me. You have to know where the vital organs are and puncture them in order to precipitate death. I was shown that any instrument and any implement could be turned into a deadly weapon. Perspex can be fashioned into a blade and a piece of plastic or wood such as a knitting needle or even a pencil can be used to kill. He showed me the exact spot on the neck to kill someone by what he called ‘scrambling their brains’. The procedure didn’t cause a massive blood loss, just a tiny surface puncture mark.

      Herron taught me to be self-sufficient when I was on the road. Even when staying in trusted safe houses there were golden rules: carry your own bed linen and your own towels, wear Vaseline on eyebrows and eyelashes, coat the hair in gel or wax, wear tight-fitting kitchen gloves at all times, eat Mars bar sandwiches and only drink water. He told me to carry plastic bags and take my solid waste home and burn all clothes after an operation including footwear. Once back from active service, burn everything.

      He pioneered interrogation schools by bringing hand-picked men from other areas to train me in surviving long, tough sessions at the hands of the RUC. His technique was simple. He ordered two volunteers to be the security forces, who would try to get a confession from me, the pretend suspect. He would stand in a corner of the room and watch, but he never spoke. The ‘cops’ would beat, kick and threaten me. They split my lip, my internal organs were kicked and my neck was almost broken with the weight of heavy, wet towels lashed across it. Sometimes someone’s nose would get broken in these exercises. Herron had recreated what happened in holding centres like Castlereagh. The volunteers worked in pairs: good cop and bad cop. One would shout abuse and scream threats to get a result. The other would calmly try to reason and appeal to my vulnerable side. The sole object of the exercise was to not reveal the phrase given by Herron at the start of the session. Grown men broke down. I broke down.

      It was elite services training, I know that now. Herron had turned me into an assassin primed for every eventuality and every situation. He taught me skills for protecting myself but he was also thinking of his own safety. He had me earmarked for my first job in the UDA – as his bodyguard.

      I asked him from whom or what he needed protection.

      He answered, ‘Everybody, kid, especially our own.’

       5

       TOMMY HERRON

      WHEN I WASN’T IN THE QUARRY BEING TRAINED I SPENT MOST OF MY TIME AT TOMMY HERRON’S HOME, SITTING ON THE STAIRS LISTENING, LEARNING AND TALKING TO HIM. He liked the stairs. He called them his neutral space and he always kept his legally held weapon within reach. Herron confessed that he was on constant alert for a gunman who might break in his front door and open fire. He would laugh and say he would do his best to blow their brains out first. Many of my new associates thought he was bad-tempered, stern, unapproachable and unpredictable. To me he was a father figure. He took a personal interest in my fledgling UDA career and I wanted to impress him. He singled me out for special attention and I wanted to repay the compliment. Under his guardianship, I thrived.

      With Herron’s guidance my training became more intense and more specialised. He taught me martial arts and unarmed combat. He taught me how to punch someone in the heart to stop it beating and cause rapid death. In his mind the business of killing had to be swift and it had to be clean. I asked Herron where he learnt his skills and he just laughed in my face and told me to mind my own fucking business. To this day I believe he was a trained assassin and can only speculate as to where he learnt the skills he handed down to me.

      It may seem unbelievable to some but Herron had a soft side and he liked to look after those he cared about and who were close to him. One day, as we practised shooting in the quarry, he said to me, ‘If you are ever in trouble and you need to leave Northern Ireland, call this number.’ On the paper was a name and a London telephone number. When I rang it a female voice answered. I asked for the person and was told he wasn’t available but to ring back on a certain day and at a certain time. When I finally spoke to the man, I told him I was a friend of Tommy Herron’s and that he’d given me the name and number plus a guarantee of help if ever it was needed. The voice on the other end of the phone said he could find me work anywhere in the world. He said he supplied top-grade ‘security’ for select clients all over the world. He asked whether I wanted to be on his books and I said yes. The man was hiring mercenaries.

      I was enjoying my new life in the ranks of the UDA. I felt I had found what was missing in my life. In the first weeks after joining very little was asked of me by my superiors. I knew that time would change that. I knew it was inevitable that I would soon be on the road on active service. In the meantime I shadowed Tommy Herron. While I acted as his bodyguard, I was also learning. He had four men acting as his personal security, including me, and he rotated us at random.

      I chanced upon a photograph of Herron recently and it awakened old memories. He’s been dead almost thirty years now but I can still hear his gruff voice. It was an old newspaper cutting illustrated by a very bad picture. In it he is frowning and looks like he is ready to blow someone’s head off. The photo revealed nothing about his personality and character. Herron was a hothead. He was rash and quick-tempered and probably would have blown someone’s head off, but he was also an intelligent and astute soldier. Neither the article nor the photograph showed anything of the Herron I knew and portrayed nothing of the man I remember, a man with a sharp brain, impressive intellect and remarkable powers of persuasion. Listening to Tommy speak, I really believed anything and everything was possible. Even the media were seduced by his charisma. Journalists flocked to his press briefings. He knew how to handle them and when he held court, anything was possible. Once he produced rubber bullets that he said had been doctored by the British Army. There had been rioting in East Belfast and four bullets were found with razor blades, four-inch nails and batteries attached to them. One was even split and rebuilt using fine wire. On impact it would have turned into a deadly bolas.

      We spent a lot of time together in Davison’s Quarry and he liked to show off his shooting skills. He loved emptying magazine after magazine into oil drums and the bodies of scrapped cars. He had a good eye and could even shoot in circles or in rows. He would roll up his sleeves, coolly take aim and say to me, ‘Watch this.’ He was a first-class shot.

      The Ulster Defence Association remains one of Ulster’s biggest paramilitary organisations and was legal until 1992, when the then Secretary of State, Sir Patrick Mayhew, proscribed it. It was formed in 1971, when Ulster was on the brink of all-out civil war, as an umbrella body for Loyalist ‘defence associations’ springing up in Protestant areas of Belfast, Lisburn, Newtownabbey and Dundonald. It adopted a motto, Quis Separabit, roughly translated as ‘None Shall

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