Active service unit

And were they followed all the way from Northern Ireland to Gibraltar? What was the sort of in- s- surveillance picture and, and when did you, as the SAS, get involved?

We knew, we'd been briefed that there had been and, and was surveillance, not all the time, but part of the time in Spain, uh, ag- against these, uh, three members of, w- who made up the Active Service Unit for the IRA.

Um, a- and, and, and, uh, and, and then we were told at very short notice, uh, that they were going to, um, mount the operation, uh, in the following days.

Uh, and in fact, uh, a really critical item therefore in the chronology was a briefing at which not only us, but also the surveillance operators, uh, the technical people, the, the, the, the, uh, the ATO who's, um, the ammunition technical officer, the sort of bomb person in the British military who was, uh, with his team, and indeed, very importantly, the Gibraltar police, the, the police commissioner were all there on the night of the 5th, 6th of March, midnight briefing, quite close to the Convent.

And then, uh, you had this woman called Mairead Farrell, who'd already done, done time in, in prison, uh, for the bombing of the, of the Conway Hotel in Belfast, um, who was a close associate of the McCanns.

And then the third person was Sean Savage, uh, who was a known, a known bomb-maker.

Those were the three people who made up the so-called Active Service Unit, ASU.

And, and further points on them which are very relevant, uh, is that, uh, it was considered that there was a high likelihood that at least one, if not more of them, would be armed, uh, with weaponry of one sort or another, and that, uh, at least one, if not more, would be, uh, uh, equipped with the so-called button job to detonate what we anticipated through well-founded assumptions would be a radio-controlled device.