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"An extraordinary story of the death of
a very brave young man and a tragedy of our times"
- Frederick Forsyth
Mystery shrouds the disappearance and death of Grenadier
Guards Captain Robert Nairac, GC, kidnapped and murdered by the IRA
in May 1977. More than twenty years after his death, his story still
haunts the imagination, not least because of Nairac's extraordinary
courage and the fact that his body was never found.
In January 1976, at the height of the vicious undercover
war with the IRA, Robert Nairac, aged 29, received the call. Nairac,
a devout Catholic, student of Irish history and robust singer of Irish
rebel songs, was released from his duties with the Grenadier Guards
and seconded to the SAS with the specific task of intelligence liaison.
With his black Labrador for company, he was posted to the most dangerous
area of operations, the 'bandit country' of South Armagh. Here he was
plunged into the murkiest of intelligence worlds, awash with dirty tricks,
and riven by the internecine rivalry between M15 and M16. After months
of knife-edge operations undercover, Nairac was snatched from a South
Armagh pub where he had arranged to meet a contact; he was driven across
the border into the Irish Republic, interrogated and shot. Even his
captors admit he died like a hero, and he was posthumously awarded Britain's
second highest military honour, the George Cross.
But many questions remain: Why was he targeted? What
was Nairac's specific role? Why was he working alone and without backup?
Who was he meeting and why? What happened to his body? Could he have
been betrayed by his own side? Or was his death, as one British MP claimed,
in revenge for Nairac's involvement in secret killings? John Parker
at last answers those questions in this enthralling and disturbing book.
Drawing on unprecedented access to senior Army and SAS colleagues, and
interviews with friends from earlier days. the author provides a detailed
chronology of Nairac's undercover war in Northern Ireland. For the first
time, his exact security operations are revealed in vivid first-person
recall; this full, dramatic account will finally lay to rest the speculation
surrounding the death of an authentic British hero.
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Published by Metro in hardback in January 1999
and in paperback in 2000. |
