4 Field Survey Troop

1974 bombings

According to a report in the Boston Hearld in 1999 on the British involvement in the 1974 loyalist bombings in the Republic of Ireland:

The most in-depth examination of British intelligence involvement came in 1993, when Britain's Yorkshire Television broadcast a shocking documentary about the bombings. Interviewing Irish detectives and accessing never-before-seen files on the bombings, Yorkshire TV found that eight suspects' names - all of them UVF members from Belfast and Portadown - were given to the RUC within weeks of the bombings. The list included Portadown's Robin Jackson, nicknamed "The Jackal," a UVF man believed responsible for as many as 50 other murders during the war. He died of cancer in October.

At the time, both British intelligence and the RUC were running numerous agents within Portadown UVF. As such, Irish investigators said, attempts to pursue the suspects met with RUC indifference. Yorkshire TV also turned its spotlight on an army unit tagged 4 Field Survey Troop, based in the '70s in Castledillon, County Armagh, "to provide and process aerial photographs, ground surveys and mapping for the army." A former member of the unit told Yorkshire TV, "We were . . . trained in weapons, for sabotage with ex-plosives, and assassination. We also crossed the Irish border with explosives to booby-trap arms dumps and for other missions."

Britain has emphatically denied both charges of covert arm operations in the South and of army collusion with loyalist paramilitaries. The British say 4 Field Survey Troop was what it appeared to be - a map-ping unit. Unfortunately - and, some charge, quite conveniently - Britain also says all records of the now-defunct unit were destroyed in 1988.