The Docklands Bomb: Executing Peace

This programme contains some scenes

which some viewers may find upsetting.

Canary Wharf sent the message that peace and war are both options

and neither one is a given.

There was a sense that these were the militants,

these were the extremists,

these were the people against the peace process.

The IRA repeatedly felt that the only way

they could get the British to listen to them is violence.

-BILL CLINTON:

-You must stand firm against terrorists.

You must say to those who still would use violence

for political objectives, "You are the past.

"Your day is over."

HUGE EXPLOSION

SCREAMING AND SIRENS

The Docklands bomb pointed into the heart of darkness of the IRA

in South Armagh.

It was the moment of truth.

ALARMS WAILING

The calculation of the IRA was that a bomb in London

was worth ten bombs in Belfast.

And a bomb in a sensitive area was worth a lot more

than one in the middle of nowhere.

We had Baltic Exchange and Bishopsgate,

which were on a huge scale.

And, with effectively the city under attack,

this wasn't just a small car bomb going off, something like that.

This was causing really very major damage,

actually destroying buildings,

which is something London wasn't used to.

ALARMS WAIL

They wanted to demonstrate that they were a force to be reckoned with,

and, yes, that it was a way of putting pressure on John Major

and on the British government.

So, where are you going to be safe?

That was the real concern.

The Docklands area was just really a place,

a part of London everyone had forgotten about.

So the development that went into it was really very exciting.

But the tide was running against the men of violence, at that stage.

APPLAUSE

We are demanding of Mr Major's government

that he takes decisive steps, now,

to move the situation forward

in a fundamental way

and that means fundamental political and constitutional change.

Clearly, we wanted something that was more than just

a temporary ceasefire,

because we made clear all along we did not wish to negotiate

under the duress of a threat to return to violence.

The United States had always lined up with the British point of view

and no American president would have dared to interfere

or be seen in Belfast

or Northern Ireland before this

and, yet, here was Clinton breaking a 225-year tradition,

and landing in Belfast on Air Force One, so...

It was one of the most historic moments I've ever witnessed.

Clinton coming when he did...

..these were moves where the Americans were trying to help us

to consolidate a process that was clearly coming under strain.

The Clinton visit

actually produced a fair degree of euphoria.

There was a degree of scepticism amongst Unionists...

but particularly the speech he made and the points which he covered then

had a really big impact.

APPLAUSE

You must stand firm against terror.

You must say to those

who still would use violence for political objectives,

you are the past.

Your day is over.

Violence has no place at the table of democracy.

The Irish government, the British government,

the IRA were all locked in stasis at that point.

And you were looking for some outside force,

which is what America was always going to provide.

I felt, arriving in Belfast, that, yeah, there were problems,

but they were not sufficient enough to break the ceasefire.

Let us join our prayers in this season of peace

for a future of peace in this good land.

Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

But little did we know, little did he know...

that the ceasefire was over,

and that the IRA were planning the Docklands bomb.

The IRA's so-called England Department,

the part of the IRA that planned and executed bombings in Britain,

that was run out of South Armagh.

It was the IRA's heartland,

an area where they could operate with relative impunity.

The reputed Chief of Staff of the IRA lives in South Armagh,

on the border.

You've also got IRA snipers here,

"Sniper at work" signs on the lampposts.

The sniper team in South Armagh

was pretty high profile and certainly being very effective

for the Provisional IRA.

The shooting happened just after 1:30 on the outskirts

of Crossmaglen.

The soldier was a member of the foot patrol, when a gunman opened fire.

Locals reported hearing one shot.

The soldier was hit in the chest and died a short time later...

They would have shot from the car, a mile away perhaps.

The soldier or police officer was killed, car left the scene.

They had built up a reputation.

You know, signs on the streets. "Watch out, snipers about."

It was definitely mentally very draining.

We knew the terrorists. We knew them well, actually.

We knew very much who was doing what.

I mean, yes, they were pretty hard to catch.

We were consistently hearing the same thing...

that the Unionists really didn't trust this process

and they needed the decommissioning, in order to have their own politics

moving forward, and the Nationalists were...

..really in need of some more from the peace process,

to show progress for this end of this violence.

I personally never supported the violence,

I thought it made it harder.

Others in the IRA felt that it was the only way to get

the British to talk to you.

CAMERAS CLICKING

Almost anybody concerned with the health of the peace process

was very worried about the lack of progress

towards the comprehensive negotiations that had been promised

and then, Sir Patrick Mayhew put decommissioning on the table

as a new precondition for political talks.

We can't and, therefore, we won't,

fudge the issue of arms and explosives.

We don't ask for everything all at once, that would not be realistic.

But if Sinn Fein and the other parties associated

with the paramilitaries have truly given up justifying violence,

then there is no longer any need for paramilitary weapons, is there?

INTERVIEWER: Could we say that speech by Patrick Mayhew

set in train the events that led us ultimately to Docklands?

I think any analyst who comes to write the history,

with the benefit of records and so on, in the future will, I think,

give it a significant place.

In my view, that was probably the single most serious mistake

made by any of the governments involved in the peace process.

The IRA guns are silenced.

That we have this unprecedented opportunity for peace

and that we must build upon it, and move the entire situation on,

and that includes, of course, the decommissioning of all the weapons.

How are you, Peter? I'm glad we are sharing this moment of history.

Certainly I, and, I think, others,

didn't anticipate just what a difficulty

decommissioning was going to turn out to be.

I mean, I think we counted every month in 1995

where there hadn't been any killings was a bonus.

But later that summer,

there was a preoccupation with the problems over the marches

and Drumcree.

GUNSHOT

GUNSHOT

What I remember the concern being in the centre of government,

in Number Ten, was doing what we could,

grasping at the positive initiatives

that would help to keep the process going.

CAMERAS CLICKING

We had to try to figure out a way to create a process

that would permit the entry of the paramilitary groups to negotiations,

but at the same time, allow the constitutional parties to stay in.

On both sides.

The mechanism that the British government had chosen,

prior decommissioning of weapons,

simply wasn't feasible.

None of the paramilitaries would agree to it,

and even some of those who advocated it publicly,

said to us privately, "We know it won't work.

"You guys have got to figure out a way around this."

CROWD SHOUTING

When the president decided to go to Northern Ireland, in the fall,

it was really frustrating,

because there was just no movement on the peace process.

The decommissioning had become an issue

way out of proportion, in the nationalist community's view.

And we knew that Adams was trying to avoid a split in the IRA,

that the entire IRA was not on board.

INTERVIEWER: Do you remember, through that period in 1995,

hearing any concerns about a split within the Republican movement,

if the British government and the Unionists stuck to this demand

that decommissioning would have to happen first?

Yes, I do remember talk of that,

but... And I remember there was some intelligence reports about that.

CROWD SHOUTING AND CHEERING

They gave them a little running room to see,

but if it didn't deliver on the agenda for the nationalist community

they would pull the plug out from him.

We knew he was walking quite a tightrope.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

This was huge symbolism

and that was the moment that seemed to crown the trip.

But then Gerry came over, after the handshake, and came with us,

and said, "Come with me", and we went down the street.

We were asked to go to a particular house in West Belfast,

and we arrived, really not expecting what happened.

DOG BARKS

Niall O'Dowd and I met with Gerry Adams, just himself,

and he told us that if the peace process didn't bear fruit quickly,

the ceasefire was not going to last.

There was a very dire message,

which was given to us in no uncertain terms.

Gerry said, "When are they going to stop kicking the dog?

"The dog is sleeping"...

..being the IRA.

It's not engaged in actions.

Whether it has arms or not is really not the key,

it's a question of whether it uses arms. That...

And the more they kick the dog,

the more the dog is going to wake up and go back to its old habits.

In this tiny Belfast housing estate,

we were told very much that, no, things were very bad,

that we could expect something very bad, unless something improved.

INTERVIEWER: You were being told by Gerry Adams, effectively,

that the ceasefire was over

and that this was the fault of the British government?

Well, I don't know we that we were told that it was over, per se,

we were told that it would be over, unless...

And the "unlesses" were talks,

and a deferral of the decommissioning issue.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

For people to do their holiday shopping

without worry of searches or bombs.

To visit loved ones on the other side of the Border

without the burden of checkpoints or roadblocks.

To enjoy these magnificent Christmas lights

without any fear of violence.

Peace has brought real change to your lives.

APPLAUSE

We definitely felt, leaving that house, it was on the brink.

And we went to the town hall in Belfast thinking, "My God.

"This might be the worst-ever moment of the whole thing,

"where it should be the happiest one."

That was a pretty stiff, cold bucket of water

thrown over my high expectations.

Ten...

ALL: Nine...

eight...

seven...

six...

five...

four...

three...

two...

One!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

So, when President Clinton was here,

speaking at the front of City Hall,

and telling terrorists that their day was over,

South Armagh was already preparing to bomb London?

Yes.

-I said it then, I'll say it now.

-That's a fact?

-Yeah.

-They would have had to have been doing that?

-Absolutely.

You just don't wake up in the morning and say,

"I'm going to bomb London" and load it up that night.

The workforce,

the active people that come in and load the heavy-duty stuff

into the lorry, to them, it's just a job,

you know, they'll not know the target,

they'll not know where it's going.

They'll know it's a bomb, because that's what they're packing,

and you know, weeks, months later,

it happens.

I mean, South Armagh IRA has always been very much based

around families, interconnected by marriage,

but you know, you're talking about six or eight families

of brothers and sons, sometimes grandsons,

sometimes working together on the same operation.

This is where trust, you know, ran through people's blood.

CHOPPER WHIRRING

There was a sense that these were the militants,

these were the extremists,

these were the people against the peace process.

These were very dangerous people,

who had a number of other skills and tactics.

It's the sort of skills you find in rural communities, you know,

where you want to be mending your own farming equipment yourself,

you want to be able to weld, and put your tractor back together again,

and where you find the tools about that you need,

and you find odd pieces of angle iron and aluminium

to build the truck that they did.

It was an unusual-looking vehicle,

and the bomb was buried deep into the fabric of the vehicle,

and welded into place, so that it could survive...

As long as the terrorists kept their nerve,

it could survive a cursory search.

The first time it comes over,

on 15th January,

there is no bomb inside the vehicle,

so the dummy run gave them the opportunity

to test the various security systems,

you might call them,

or chokepoints, where they might be at greater risk on the way in.

Looking for traffic officers on the route,

all the things that might cause them risk.

They fitted it up with a tachograph and everything,

it looks like what it is,

which is a vehicle that is being used to transport

second-hand vehicles to and from Ireland.

Napoleon said time spent on reconnaissance is rarely wasted.

We said in our report

that we did not think prior decommissioning was feasible,

but we suggested the possibility

of parallel negotiation and decommissioning,

that you begin talks

and you try to do both talk and decommissioning in parallel.

We approached it with a sense of urgency

because we believe that is what the situation demands.

I think we were a little bit...

..shocked, in a way,

by the idea he came up with of parallel decommissioning.

While the decommissioning of arms may be segregated in theory,

in the real life of Northern Ireland,

it is interwoven with many other issues

and with much history.

John Major chose to deal with it in a particular way,

by not focusing on that particular bit of his report,

but by picking up the idea which was, sort of,

buried rather obscurely in the report, about elections.

We believe, that in the light of the Mitchell Report,

there are two ways in which all-party negotiations

can now be taken forward.

The first is for paramilitaries to make a start

to decommissioning before all-party negotiations.

They can, if they will.

If not, the second is to secure a democratic mandate

for all-party negotiations

through elections especially for that purpose.

Would he now fix a date for all-party talks,

rather than the 17 months that he has wasted up till now?

CLAMOURING

And could I...

I live with it, you don't.

CLAMOURING

It was clear that, despite the Clinton visit,

despite the Mitchell initiative,

that John Major just couldn't bring himself

to do what needed to be done.

I always saw John Major as the guy who,

if you start with the Downing Street Declaration,

he knew there was a door, the door was open,

he peeked through the door, but he could never go through the door.

I think there wouldn't have been Canary Wharf

if the British reaction to the Mitchell proposal had been,

"OK, talks start on March 1"

and, you know, "We'll follow this formula."

If the ceasefires were to break down,

we might receive very little, if any, warning and without doubt,

many of the key targets would, as before,

be on this side of the water.

I don't think we necessarily thought that,

"OK, this is going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

"This is the last thing that's going to break the ceasefire,"

but in any case, we had to react in the way that we had to react

and everybody has to, sort of, take their positions in these things

and then try and work it out from there.

Although we didn't think it was going to help, I don't think

we thought that this was necessarily the end of the peace process.

I don't know that I ever said, "Well here it comes, here comes the bomb."

I don't think I would ever rule out myself to do that,

almost becoming complicit in the bomb.

They know exactly what they're doing

and where they're going to go to.

They absolutely replicate the dummy run.

They stay the night in Carlisle, in the truck stop.

And then head all the way towards London.

Here you are on the old agenda once again.

The guns have been silenced for the last 18 months.

I mean, would you prefer they weren't silenced?

Mr Adams knows that those guns should never have been used

in the first instance.

They keep on saying they're now silent and give themselves

a pat on the back. It's a lot of codswallop. He knows that.

At River Road, I would think they're a bit nervous by that time.

They were driving from River Road in the East End of London...

..to put it right in the heart of the Docklands.

They know that they have to put the vehicle down,

tell whoever is in control that the vehicle is in place,

then the calls can go in, "There's a big bomb in the Docklands."

There's clearly two of them.

And they park it, set the...set the timer...

get out and walk away.

Typical Friday evening.

The six o'clock bulletin being put to bed.

I've sat there at the news desk and a phone call came through.

A Northern Ireland accent, a man said, from six o'clock that evening,

the IRA ceasefire would end.

Initially, there was a sense of disbelief.

A friend of mine came down and said,

"Come on, let's go and have a glass of wine."

I started getting messages - "Phone the commissioner, urgently."

And I hadn't even got the glass up to my lips.

And they just kept coming.

I was in the White House, in the West Wing, and I got a call

from Gerry Adams that he'd been hearing things,

basically warning us that he thought this was going to happen.

I had a call from Nancy Soderberg,

because they'd also heard from Sinn Fein that,

I don't know exactly what the message was,

but I think it was to the effect that, from Gerry Adams,

that, "The ceasefire's going to break and it's not my fault."

-HE LAUGHS

-Erm, something like that.

We go over to Peter Sissons in the newsroom, for a news report.

According to reports on the Irish state broadcaster RTE,

in Dublin, the IRA has broken off its ceasefire.

The television and radio station received a call,

claiming to be from the IRA, early this evening.

And frankly, my first reaction was, "RTE have got excited about this.

"This doesn't make sense. There's just no point in,

"from the point of view of the Republican movement,

"in having a ceasefire and then resorting to violence."

It was only going to do damage to the Republican movement.

The Commissioner said to me, "The ceasefire is broken

"and we think there's a bomb in the Docklands."

The IRA, they said, "You've got an hour to clear the area."

And they were desperately clearing it.

At six o'clock, I came on duty. I reported to my control centre.

I placed on my uniform and I went to work.

RADIO CHATTER

At about 6:30 to 6:45,

Inam phoned up, saying that, "We've been told to leave the premises."

RADIO CHATTER

I could hear John Jeffries, one of our members of staff,

could hear him in the background laughing and joking.

I think he was talking to PC McGrath.

And Inam was saying, "We're coming out, we're going,

"we're just going to make the premises safe and we're leaving."

I started to realise something might have gone wrong

when I saw police vehicles in the road.

But we had no warning whatsoever there was a bomb in Marsh Wall.

We had no warning whatsoever.

RADIO CHATTER

LOUD EXPLOSION

We saw this whoosh of light, a long, flat flash across the horizon.

You could see, looking right across London,

it was a big bomb had gone off.

SOBBING, WHIMPERING

Initially, I thought, "Where's that light...?"

I thought, "Well, that's... Where's that come from?"

And then, then, actually,

I was blown into the air and I woke up with all rubble on top of me.

SIRENS

I couldn't hear, initially, very well.

Erm... I dug my way out the wreckage.

Erm...

And I remember thinking... I knew I was alive.

I knew I was alive at that time.

But I remember thinking to myself, where had everything gone?

And I could see people on the road...

some with horrific injuries. Appalling injuries.

About 7:10, one of my sellers that work at Fleet Street with us

said, "Look, a bomb's gone off around Docklands,

"have you heard anything?" I said, "No, let me call the shop quickly,

"but they haven't reported in."

So I called, called, called, numerous times

and we went straight to...the scene.

And it was all cordoned off.

We were told by a police officer that,

"Look, all the injured people

"have been moved to different hospitals."

Hundreds of people are injured by flying glass.

A scene of utter devastation, you know,

like anything you've ever seen in a movie,

and, you know, that sort of flickering light

from the Fire Brigade and torches and all that,

like a scene from the apocalypse.

Shortly before six o'clock this evening...

Can you speak up, please?

Shortly before six o'clock this evening,

there were a series of warnings, coded, of a recognised nature,

that brought the police and the emergency services here.

Whilst they were clearing the scene,

an explosion occurred at seven o'clock.

There have been a number of casualties.

It's too early to say the precise nature of those casualties.

The Metropolitan Police has never dismantled its ability

to respond quickly to this kind of incident.

Thank you.

Irish violence returned to the streets of Britain tonight,

cruelly, unexpectedly and with a deafening retort.

Even at lunchtime today,

Sinn Fein leaders were talking about the ceasefire holding.

Tonight, they were nowhere to be seen.

-Are we ready to go?

-Yes, we are. I am.

-Gerry Adams, did you know this was going to happen?

-No, of course not.

Why did you not know?

I mean, you've had this whole run-up to the ceasefire,

where you were advising the IRA, you persuaded them

that the best option was to go with the nationalist consensus,

you've at times attempted to preserve that ceasefire since.

It seems outrageous and strange that they would take a decision like this

without consulting either you or some of your senior colleagues.

Well, none of the senior Sinn Fein people

and presumably none of the Sinn Fein people were consulted

and it's no surprise the IRA would not consult Sinn Fein

about military operations.

'You look at it and you think, where do you start,

'with this scale of devastation?'

How do you even begin?

Stay to the swept area, please.

-JOHN MAJOR:

-Sinn Fein must decide

whether they are a front for the IRA,

or a democratic political party

committed to the ballot and not to the bullet.

BILL CLINTON: The people of Great Britain do not deserve

to have this violence wreaked upon them.

We will not stop in our efforts until peace has been secured.

Do you look back now and see it as an intelligence failure?

Well, it WAS an intelligence failure, in the sense that

whenever anything like that happens

and you don't know and you can't prevent it,

it is, in that sense, an intelligence failure.

But, erm, there have been

a lot of intelligence failures over the years.

I think it was suggested that this had come from South Armagh.

Within the first few days,

48 hours, I would have thought,

the finger was pointing towards the engineers in South Armagh.

Did you immediately think that South Armagh...

-Yes. Yes.

-..IRA were responsible for this?

The only ones it could have been. South Armagh. And I was right.

You knew straightaway?

Instinctively knew. Didn't know through anybody telling me.

Just instinctively knew, "That has to be South Armagh."

We know this vehicle has been in the border area

for a considerable time, between November of '95 and January of '96.

Did you see it parked outside somebody's house

in the last few weeks? Have you seen somebody working on it?

Perhaps you work in the motor trade, perhaps in the conversion industry,

have you seen somebody working on this vehicle?

We make the appeal and show the picture of the truck.

A call, number several hundred, comes in

from somebody who clearly knows what he's talking about,

who says, "I'm telling you, that truck was here

"at River Road, Barking, on this piece of waste ground."

Exhibit officers go out there, talk to him,

look at what they've got,

instantly recognise that they've got something very useful here and said,

"We've got to fingertip search this and see what we've got here."

That gives us the Truck & Driver magazine. We find the tachographs.

Anything else inflammable inside the tyre, I think

they would probably have wanted to burn it.

That was their MO, get rid of anything.

So I think it was probably taken out of the vehicle to be burnt

so it would disappear.

I think they were spooked at that point,

that there's some suggestion that there was engineers working nearby,

or maybe even the people who gave us the information

showed too much interest in them and they didn't get to burn it.

That gives us a thumbprint on that magazine, so you've got a start.

We eventually track back to where that was bought

and you start matching the tachograph with the CCTV

from the motorway, so you get to track the bomb vehicle backwards,

if you like, up to Carlisle.

That gets us to room 107 in the truck stop.

It's lucky that the cleaner hadn't polished the ashtray,

because there is his thumbprint on that.

They get to Stranraer, get the ticket back from the ferry

and there is his thumbprint on the Stenna ticket.

The initial three thumbprints,

which tell us that we can link the three sites, are,

one, on the trucking magazine,

two, on the ashtray in the truck stop at Carlisle

and, three, on the ticket

for the ferry that brings it over.

So, here we've got three thumbprints.

We went through all our records and there was nothing coming up,

which is quite unusual because, nine times out of ten,

we would have had suspects in custody at some point

through the Troubles and they would've been fingerprinted.

So for us not to get a hit,

if you like, on that was quite significant.

We had evidence from the bits of truck

that looked as though they had been cut from something else.

So, you were looking for...

it might just be an inch chopped off to make it fit,

or filings. It was that sort of stuff we were looking for.

We also knew that the truck had been painted a different colour,

so there would be paint splashes that you can perhaps match.

Now, none of those things

would prove an individual was attached to it,

but it might give us that that was where the truck

had been made or adapted.

Then, together, that would begin to give you a picture.

That operation, in personnel, planning, finance,

was probably the largest I've ever witnessed.

If successful, it had the opportunity

of literally taking out a team in South Armagh.

Were you sceptical about its, um...

its ambitions?

Not sceptical. However... the longer you leave evidence,

the less opportunity you have of getting it

and that could be for a whole lot of reasons - weather, contamination -

so, for an investigator, as I would have been, yeah, I would probably

put the chances quite low in getting what they were setting out to get.

LOUD EXPLOSION

It was a Saturday morning and, I think,

the morning of Trooping the Colour

when we suddenly heard that news, which was very grim.

A huge lorry bomb devastated Manchester city centre,

injuring 200 people,

the first time the IRA had struck

since the Docklands bomb in February.

From a criminal investigation point of view, we were struggling...

to put it mildly.

We needed solid, solid evidence.

So we were not getting that and we were aware we weren't getting it

and, from my point of view and my team's point of view,

the morale was low because we weren't achieving, cos it was...

it would've been our team that would've put them away,

so we were starting to feel that weight on our shoulders.

23-year-old Lance Bombardier Stephen Restorick

was shot as he chatted to a motorist...

The soldier died after being hit by a single bullet

while manning a vehicle checkpoint.

When that happened,

we were full-on, in terms of we knew that this was it.

They would have gone to a vantage point,

waited for an opportunity, and the opportunity,

if it had presented itself, they would have shot a soldier dead.

The opportunity didn't present itself.

On the way back, the wheel literally came off their vehicle

and I think you could see quite clearly that the axle

had gone into this farm. You could see the mark, the arc.

So they couldn't take the trailer anywhere.

They came back the next day

and there was a reception committee waiting for them

and they were detained by the British Army.

The police have confirmed that two rifles have been recovered.

One was a Barrett .50 with a telescopic sight

and the other an AK-47 assault rifle.

A number of arrests have been made,

although police have not confirmed how many.

I was at a Bryan Adams rock concert

and I got a phone call,

"OK, we've arrested the sniper team," and I said,

"Congratulations, that's wonderful."

"We've got the car," um...

"We got the rifle," um...

"And we've got them all alive,"

which was really good, and he said...

"And the fingerprint officers had a look

"at the first set of fingerprints

"they've taken from the people they've arrested,"

he said, "And your..." He just took one look at it

and he said, "This is the triple thumbprint man."

Once they'd got his complete set,

they identified that McArdle was

up to his neck in the Docklands.

Not only was he caught for being in the car, with the rifle,

but also he was the suspect in the Canary Wharf bomb

and that was, in the policing world, that was just like,

you know, it was like winning the lottery.

This was a very clean arrest operation.

It's a very fragile political process

and I'm sure that that filtered down,

right down to the SAS, and I think that,

if there had been half a dozen IRA martyrs created that day,

then the peace process could have taken a very different turn.

It's fascinating that Bernard McGinn was even part of the team,

because he was from County Monaghan so he wasn't a South Armagh man.

There's this sort of sense that they were betrayed

by somebody who wasn't one of them,

and, you know, there will still be questions

about why you allowed an outsider,

an outsider being someone not from South Armagh, into that operation.

And, once he started talking, it all came tumbling out.

He gave names of the IRA volunteers.

He talked about Michael Caraher being the sniper

on the Lance Bombardier Restorick operation,

when Bernard McGinn had ridden shotgun in the passenger seat

with an AK-47, and that Michael Caraher had actually taken the shot.

He gave the names of the people who mixed the Docklands bomb

and so it was the kind of information

that the British authorities

very, very rarely got about South Armagh and it was a real break,

not just in the sniper investigation,

but in the Docklands investigation.

The bomb truck would have had to have come probably right round

and then up Marsh Road, so it's on the right,

on this side of the road, to park.

Bits of the bomb truck finished up in the dock.

Bits finished up half a mile down there.

It was very, very good teamwork

and it includes the Royal Ulster Constabulary,

it includes MI5 and the intelligence people,

it includes the British Army,

not to mention elements of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force.

This was the United Kingdom Anti-terrorism plc.

-JOHN MAJOR:

-Those negotiations will start on 10th June.

We're determined not to allow terrorism

to interfere with the democratic process.

There can be no ministerial talks with Sinn Fein

and nor can Sinn Fein take part in negotiations

without a restoration of the ceasefire.

The great irony, to me,

is Canary Wharf got the Republicans to the table.

The British are so much...the words are here and the actions are there.

And the actions of the British are,

"Yes, you can bomb your way to the conference table."

That's really what Canary Wharf was.

It was the moment of truth.

It was the moment that sent the message that...

peace and war are both options

and neither one is a given.