IT was said to be the largest single loss of life suffered by the IRA throughout the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Thirty years ago tomorrow, on May 8, 1987, eight IRA gunmen were shot dead in an SAS ambush as they tried to storm a police station at Loughgall, in South Armagh. They had used a JCB earthmover packed with 500lbs of explosives to break down the gates – but the RUC garrison, acting on an informer’s tip-off, had been evacuated 48 hours earlier. The area was staked out instead by SAS troops and police marksmen.

Reports said around 1,000 bullets were fired into the IRA men's bodies. Among the dead, who were posthumously referred to by republicans as the ‘Loughgall martyrs’, was ‘The Executioner’ – Jim Lynagh, one of the IRA’s most notorious gunmen. The dead also included an innocent civilian passerby, Anthony Hughes.

A 2002 book, A Secret History of the IRA, by Ed Moloney, claimed that the eight had actually been planning to form a rival armed republican faction. Now, 30 years after the killings, another book – Secret Victory: The Intelligence War that Beat the IRA – reportedly says that Margaret Thatcher, the then Prime Minister, and her Secretary of State, Tom King, knew about the ambush in advance.

The Herald:

The book, by a former RUC Special Branch officer, Dr William Matchett, says Thatcher was informed about the killing of IRA members in ‘shoot-to-kill’ operations. It defends the conduct of the RUC during the Troubles, and rejects allegations that the British security forces colluded with Loyalist paramilitaries - despite huge evidence to the contrary.

A noted US academic, Anthony H. Cordesman, has said the book provides a “vital case-study in counter-terrorism” at a time when the West “needs every lesson it can get”.

Secret Victory receives its London launch at the Policy Exchange tomorrow lunchtime. Matchett will speak about the book and his experiences, and afterwards take questions.

Matchett, who had a 30-year-long career in Northern Ireland, is no ordinary ex-RUC officer. He went on to implement police-building programmes in Iraq and Afghanistan, run by the EU and the US Defence Department. He has a PhD, and currently works as a senior researcher at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for Conflict Intervention at the National University Ireland, Maynooth.

The sales pitch for his book will seem bizarre to some, claiming as it does that the IRA was “the Islamic State of its day” and that Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan are “similar” wars. In these, it adds, “an insurgency like the IRA/Sinn Féin mix is the main problem. A proven solution is the rule of law, where police intelligence dominates because investigative practices fail. The approach - widely misrepresented and commonly misunderstood - devastated the IRA …. The IRA was forced into a ceasefire.”

It continues: “Had this been disclosed in promoting the peace, nations would have benefited and lives saved. But the political endgame was botched. Unrepentant insurgents in government tainted security to sanitise their past. IRA leaders became peacemakers. Others contemplating conflict watched. Al-Qaeda was encouraged. New York’s twin towers stood tall. Peace had a price.”

Matchett has also queried Gerry Adams’s ‘freedom fighter’ remark at the graveside of his friend and colleague, Martin McGuinness, recently. Writing in the Belfast Telegraph, the author observed: “The difficulty with using the term ‘freedom fighter’ is that it is claimed by many other organisations”.

He said Khalid Masood, who murdered PC Keith Palmer during the Westminster terror attack, would claim to be a freedom fighter. “So are Osama bin-Laden, Mullah Omar and Jihadi John.

“In my opinion, this is the category McGuinness fits into for most of his adult life, the time-span the Sinn Fein president [Adams] was referring to. The old adage still stands. One person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist. But it is one or the other. A person cannot be both at the same time”.

Republicanism, he noted in that same article, is renowned for “false claims of victimhood. It unashamedly romanticises terrorism and rewrites history”. The conduct of the media and “various leaders” over McGuinness’s death “was gut-wrenching for innocent victims of terrorism”. What was broadcast around the world “did little to expose” McGuinness’s “dark side and much to hide it. Violent extremists of every type will be encouraged”.

Secret Victory has been praised by a number of prominent figures, among them General David Petraeus, who was the US army commander of coalition forces during the troop surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, and later the head of the CIA. Petraeus describes the book as a “superbly researched, highly readable, and very thoughtful examination of the strategy that defeated the IRA – and of the implications of that model for contemporary challenges”.

In the words of Emeritus Professor Arthur Aughey, at the University of Ulster, the book shows how the RUC Special Branch operations “so confined the capacity for terrorism that it made possible the conditions for political agreement.”

Why did Dr Matchett write the book? In a brief video introduction, he gives a simple answer: “The motivation to write something like this came from working on programmes, police professionalisation missions, in Iraq and Afghanistan, where people, particularly Americans, were asking, what was it like for the police, the challenges they faced, in Northern Ireland’s conflict?

“Essentially, this book is an account by practitioners, police officers, who actually policed an armed conflict. It’s from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.”