The Search for Robert Nairac / Telegraph Magazine

 I was lucky. By chance I asked directions from one of the few locals, a farmer, who knew where the search site was. I followed his pick-up through the labyrinthine lanes that criss-cross the Irish border south of Newry, then half a mile down a dirt track past fields of cows and maize. There he pointed out a mechanical digger working a hundred yards away.

I drove on and parked at the gate of a small, enclosed patch of rough land, scarcely two acres in total. Yes, I thought, this would be a good place to bury a corpse. It was remote, far from prying eyes and a mere stone’s throw south of the border. 

The digger was excavating one corner of the field, scraping off the surface soil and heaping it into conical piles. Its operator apart, there was just one other man present, an investigator wearing a high-vis jacket and standing near a dumper truck.

I introduced myself as a journalist. He asked me to leave, adding that all work would cease until I did. I readily complied, because I earnestly hope the search succeeds. In doing so it would finally resolve one of the most painful and protracted mysteries of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, and bring a measure of peace to the bereaved family of one of the most compelling characters of that tragic time.  

Forty-seven years have elapsed since a dashing, daring and charismatic young British army captain named Robert Nairac was abducted and killed if not by the Provisional IRA itself, then by its supporters. 

Since then six men have been convicted for his murder, while three more were on the run. 

Since then the 1998 Good Friday Accord has ended the Troubles and the republican movement has helped the authorities recover the remains of 13 civilians whom it abducted, killed and ‘disappeared’ for various alleged transgressions. 

But it has never helped in the case of Nairac, the only soldier amongst the 17 so-called ‘Disappeared’. It has instead remained silent amid, or while fostering, a welter of cruel, unfounded rumours about his deeds and his fate.   

That the first physical search for Nairac’s remains is finally underway is due almost entirely to a solitary former IRA man, acting independently, who made it his personal mission to locate them because his own life had once once saved by a kindly British army medic.

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Nairac was no ordinary soldier. Astonishingly, my friendly farmer remembered walking home from school in South Armagh nearly half a century ago and Nairac offering him a lift in his green Morris Minor.

He was born in Mauritius in 1948, the youngest of four children of a Roman Catholic eye surgeon, Maurice, and Anglican mother, Barbara. A year later the family moved to Britain when his father was offered a job in Sunderland.

He was raised on stories of derring do - Rudyard Kipling, Bulldog Drummond, T.E.Lawrence. He was educated at Ampleforth, the Catholic public school, where he became head of house, a school monitor and played in the Ist XV. He visited Ireland with Irish school friends and fell in love with it. He was a devout Catholic. He kept ferrets and a polecat. When he was 14, his older brother, David, died of a viral infection, putting more pressure on him to succeed. 

At Lincoln College, Oxford, he studied medieval and military history. He did not excel academically, earning a third class degree, but impressed in other ways. 

He played rugby for the University’s 2nd XV. He revived its boxing club, winning a blue. He was an avid falconer and kept a hawk in his room. He loved bare-knuckle boxing, once beating off an attack by four skinheads. He was a fly fisherman. He went wild-fowling on the Severn estuary at dawn, his family having by then moved to Gloucestershire. 

He was fun, gregarious and adventurous, but had a dark side too. His biographer, Alistair Kerr, believes he was sexually assaulted at school. He had a nervous breakdown at Oxford. He suffered bouts of depression.

Luke Jennings, a friend and fishing companion of Nairac’s, told me he had a “romantic” sense of duty and sacrifice fuelled by a “heady brew” of stories about Catholic martyrs, World War Two heroics and his brother’s early death. 

He joined the Grenadier Guards during his last year at Oxford, sitting his finals in uniform. After  Sandhurst, he began the first of his four tours in Northern Ireland in 1973. He cultivated the people of North Belfast with his charm and empathy and coached at a boys’ boxing club.

He began his fourth tour in 1976. By then he was an undercover intelligence operative tasked with collecting intelligence on the IRA in the lawless ‘bandit country’ of South Armagh where 160 members of the security forces died during the Troubles.

He had developed strong views on how to defeat the IRA. He had written classified papers arguing that the “war” could only be won through intelligence, not by “out-ambushing or out-shooting” the enemy. That meant infiltrating tight-knit republican communities, nurturing contacts and creating dossiers on every inhabitant. He had effectively written his own job description and, prophetically, put the chances of an army intelligence officer surviving a tour in South Armagh at “less than 50 per cent”.

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Today the old linen mill in Bessbrook, County Armagh, is a derelict eyesore with boarded-up windows. “It’s a shame and a disgrace,” a shopkeeper told me. But during the Troubles it was a fortified army base boasting Europe’s busiest helipad because it was so dangerous for soldiers to travel by road.

By May 1977 Nairac was 28, nearing the end of his tour and set for promotion to major. He had a reputation as a risk taker,and enjoyed considerable freedom of manoeuvre. At 9.35pm on the 14th he left Bessbrook on a mission that was either absurdly brave, absurdly reckless or both. Refusing any back-up support, he went to the Three Steps Inn, an IRA haunt ten miles away in the tiny village of Drumintee, hoping to meet a potential contact.

An accomplished mimic, he posed as Danny McErlean from North Belfast. He wore long hair, patched jeans, heavy boots and a donkey jacket, with a false driving licence and a 9mm Browning pistol concealed in a holster beneath his arm. He drove a red Triumph Toledo equipped with a concealed microphone, powerful radio and panic button. At 9.58pm he radioed Bessbrook’s ops room to say he had arrived.

From court cases, defendants’ confessions and witness statements much is known about what happened next. It was a Saturday night. A band was playing. The pub was packed. As the evening wore on he joined the band to sing at least two republican rebel songs, The Broad Black Brimmer and The Boys of the Old Brigade. 

But something about his behaviour attracted suspicion - perhaps his frequent visits to the gents, or his refusal to remove his jacket despite the warmth. As a stranger in that tight, wary community he would have stood out anyway. 

Nairac left the pub shortly before midnight. He was attacked and severely beaten in the car park by at least two men - a former boxer named Terry McCormick and Pat Maguire - while others looked on. Nairac was fit and strong, and fought back, but when his pistol dropped from its holster McCormick grabbed it, put it to his head and told him: “Don’t move, you fucker, or I’ll shoot you.”

He was bundled into the back of an orange Ford Cortina driven by Kevin Crilly. McCormick and Maguire sat each side of him, while a fourth assailant, Daniel O’Rourke, occupied the front passenger seat. Two more, Gerard Fearon and Thomas Morgan, followed in another car. Another pair, Michael McCoy and Owen Rocks, stayed in the car park.

Nairac was driven three miles to Flurry Bridge, an old stone bridge over the Flurry river which forms the border at that point. Today it is a beauty spot - the clear river flowing through lush meadows in a wooded valley threaded by a long-distance walk called the Tain Way. Only the sound of the nearby Belfast to Dublin highway disturbs the tranquillity. 

Nairac would have seen it very differently. His assailants were mostly IRA sympathisers, not members, so Crilly and O’Rourke drove to Dundalk to find a proper IRA man. They returned with Liam Townson, who was drunk and had retrieved a .32 revolver from a hiding place in a stone wall en route.

Nairac was leaning against the bridge, barely conscious after brutal interrogation, but giving nothing away. As Townson dragged him into the field he made one last attempt to escape, but Maguire hit him over the head with a wooden post. Nairac then asked for a priest, realising he was going to die. In the small hours of that Sunday morning, Townson put his revolver to his head and pulled the trigger three times before it worked.

“I shot the British Captain. He never told us anything. He was a great soldier,” Townson told the police later.

Killing Nairac was a terrible mistake. Given time, the IRA hierarchy could doubtless have extracted priceless information from him about the army’s intelligence operations in Northern Ireland. 

A huge manhunt began at dawn after the army found Nairac’s Triumph and signs of a fight in the Three Steps car park. On the 16th the IRA announced it had “executed” Nairac after interrogating him. On the 18th two anglers found bullet casings and evidence of a struggle at Flurry Bridge, but by then the IRA had removed his body.

Soon after that Townson was arrested south of the border and sentenced to life imprisonment. O’Rourke, Fearon, Morgan, McCoy and Rocks were arrested in the north. Morgan was given life for murder, O’Rourke ten years for manslaughter, McCoy five years for kidnapping and Rocks two years for withholding information. McCormick, Maguire and Crilly went on the run.

In 1979 Nairac was posthumously awarded the George Cross, the peacetime equivalent of the Victoria Cross. The citation said he had been “subjected to a succession of exceptionally savage assaults in an attempt to extract information which would have put others’ lives and future operations at serious risk. These efforts to break Captain Nairac’s will failed entirely.” It praised his “exceptional courage” and “acts of the greatest heroism in circumstances of extreme peril”.

But the fate of his mortal remains remained a mystery. It was rumoured that they had been disposed of in a nearby meat processing plant. It was claimed that he had colluded with some egregious paramilitary atrocities including the so-called Miami Showband and Kingsmill Massacres. Nairac’s mother died in 1999, still hoping against hope that her son might somehow still be alive.

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So much has changed since those dark days. The 1998 Good Friday Accord brought a fragile peace to Northern Ireland. In 1999 the British and Irish governments created the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR) to find the remains of the Disappeared, effectively promising informants immunity from prosecution. Days later a coffin containing the remains of Eamon Molloy, an alleged informer abducted by the IRA in 1975, was left in a remote graveyard scarcely a mile from where the search for Nairac’s remains is now happening.

Since then 12 more remains have been recovered from the bogs and beaches where they were buried, most with IRA help, but not Nairac’s. 

In 1999 the IRA admitted executing nine of the Disappeared, but Nairac was not on the list. Jon Hill, the former detective inspector from London’s Met who is leading the search, told me the IRA has never cooperated on Nairac’s case. ”What they’ve said is simply that they can’t help on that one,” but offered “no explanation”. 

Geoff Knupfer, Hill’s predecessor as the ICLVR’s chief investigator and the former Manchester detective chief inspector who found the victims of the Moors murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, told me the Commission had “approached all those convicted (of Nairac’s murder) and got nowhere”. 

Perhaps the IRA regards Nairac, the only soldier amongst the Disappeared and one accused of loyalist collusion, as beyond the pale. Knupfer said people had told him: “Nobody will help you because he was a villain”. But it seems strange that an organisation which fought to remove the British army from Ireland should frustrate the repatriation of a soldier’s remains. Moreover, the ICLVR has investigated and debunked the allegations that Nairac colluded with loyalists. 

Possibly those who actually buried Nairac - as opposed to those who killed him - have themselves died, but it seems unlikely they would take such a coveted secret to their graves. Conceivably the IRA is ashamed of Nairac’s botched and unauthorised murder, and fearful his remains would reveal just how brutally he was beaten.

The omerta, the code of silence, extends beyond the IRA. Today’s South Armagh is transformed from the Troubles era. Gone are the police checkpoints, the army’s hilltop observation posts, the helicopters clattering overhead. Gone, too, are the ‘IRA’ and ‘Sniper at Work’ signs nailed defiantly to telegraph poles. Buildings are no longer bedecked with the Irish tricolour, but with the orange and white banners of Armagh’s victorious Gaelic football club. Visitors now cycle and walk in the beautiful countryside dominated by Slieve Gullion mountain. 

But the IRA’s shadow lingers. Most people I spoke to thought Nairac’s remains should be returned to his family, but few dared say so openly. “It’s still very raw around here,” said my friendly farmer. “There’s very much a silence,” Hill concurred. “There’s always an undercurrent of ‘this is still a very dangerous place and there may still be people around who don’t want to see us talking’.” 

At the Three Steps pub, a low, cream-coloured building with a sign proclaiming Cead Mile Failte (‘a hundred thousand welcomes’), Sean McCreesh, whose late father was landlord at the time of Nairac’s abduction, refused to talk to me. Nor would his sister. “Noone talks about it around here,” she said. (As I left, I noticed that McCreesh Funeral Directors operate from an adjacent building, offering the very service denied to Nairac.)

I even visited Liam Townson’s home on a housing estate in the nearby village of Meigh. Like the five others convicted for Nairac’s death, he was released from prison long ago, having served 13 years for firing the fatal shot. In 2021 he was spotted standing just feet from Prince Charles, and taking pictures, when the future king visited the nearby Slieve Gullion Forest Park. I hoped he might finally agree to talk about what happened so long ago.  

Townson’s grey, pebble-dash house was flanked by flower pots and an impressive bed of nasturtiums. An orange Citroen stood in front. A woman scurried into the house as I approached. A CCTV camera swivelled and focussed on me as I rang the door bell. But nobody answered.

Of the nine men involved in Nairac’s killing only Terry McCormick has spoken publicly. He told Darragh McIntyre, a BBC Northern Ireland journalist who found him in Philadelphia in 2007, that he was “absolutely ashamed of what happened that night. I’m absolutely disgusted with myself.” He said a senior republican later told him that Nairac’s body was buried, partially disinterred by an animal, then reburied elsewhere at the landowner’s insistence.

McCormick died three years ago.

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The first proper search for Nairac’s remains began in March when a geophysics company used ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry.to survey the site for signs of disturbed earth. Since late August two mechanical diggers have been scraping away the topsoil, two or three inches at a time, while forensic archaeologists look for signs of disturbance. The search has been complicated by the fact that the site is on a 14th-century battlefield, the Battle of Faughart. 

“It’s a very slow process,” says Hill, but the fact it is taking place at all is down to a solitary former IRA man with a well-developed conscience.

He is an anonymous contact of Gordon Adair, a BBC Northern Ireland correspondent who covered South Armagh. He told Adair he grew up in Crossmaglen, joined the IRA after the Troubles began, was imprisoned for possessing a rifle and escaped with 18 others in 1974 by blowing the prison gates off with gelignite.

Weeks later he was seriously wounded while attacking the army barracks in Crossmaglen. He was being roughed up by British squaddies, and feared they would kill him, when he saw a Royal Marines medic approaching. “I can hear his words - ‘leave him alone, he’s a soldier’,” he told Adair. “This man saved my life.”

The contact said the medic’s humanity “created an indelible mark on my own sense of fair play and moral compass”. He was deeply affected by Nairac’s story, left the IRA and embarked on a 30-year quest to locate his remains. “In a different conflict in a different period and a different epoch I’d have been very proud to have Robert Nairac on my side. He was a very brave man,” he said.

He spoke to many republicans - some helpful, others not - and took his findings to the ICLVR two years ago. Hill would not confirm or deny that his information had triggered the search, but said the information that did trigger it had been rigorously assessed and was “credible”.

Several times since he joined the ICLVR in 2006 Hill has called families of the Disappeared to say their remains have been found. He has witnessed their elation, their joy at finally being able to give their loved ones decent Christian burials. “You can’t measure what it means to them,” he says. “The person who was killed suffered on that night but no more, but the families have continued to suffer and it’s a real torture for them.”

Nairac is survived by two elderly sisters, Rosemonde and Gabrielle, who have endured that “torture” for half a century and now have at least a chance of ‘closure’.

Gabrielle is in poor health, but Hill speaks to Rosemonde. “She doesn’t want to get her hopes up, and doesn’t want it on her mind all the time even though it is,” he says. “The more she’s engaged with it the more it consumes her and takes over her life, and she really doesn’t want it like that because it doesn’t do her any good until he’s found. All it does is create more pain and anguish.”