The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (37 page)

The first priority was getting the senior IRA members out of Mountjoy and back on the outside where they could plan more campaigns against the hated Brits. Although in the end he didn’t participate in the helicopter escape (which, as it turned out, was probably for the best, given how precarious the situation became during the escape itself), Joe Cahill, Twomey’s predecessor as Chief of Staff, was originally going to be one of those sprung, and according to interviews with some of the prison warders subsequently, was annoyed that he hadn’t gone.

Subtlety wasn’t the order of the day for the first attempt. The plan was for the three senior men to flee up a rope ladder that would be waiting to help them get over the outer wall. Explosives would be sent into the prison which they could use to blow through a door into the exercise yard. All seemed to be working according to plan: the explosives were infiltrated to Mountjoy, and a group of volunteers – under strict instructions to sacrifice their lives if necessary to ensure the senior men escaped, but specifically banned from shooting any members of the Garda (the Irish police) – threw the rope ladder over from a house adjoining the prison. But for some reason, the plotters hadn’t managed to reach the exercise yard, and the rope ladder was spotted. The volunteers were lucky to escape without being arrested, and interned, themselves.

Serendipity – the art of making discoveries by accident – often plays a key part in escape-planning. The guard dog who always needs to urinate at a particular point, thus slowing down the patrol by a vital fraction of a second, perhaps; or the vagaries of television scheduling. One Sunday in October, Irish television was airing a movie that included a particularly daring feat – a helicopter swooped into a prison compound and collected a group of inmates before disappearing into the middle distance. (It’s sometimes said that this was the movie
Breakout,
featuring Charles Bronson; this would be a little difficult since that film wasn’t released until 1975, although it was inspired by actual events, as shown in
chapter 35
.) One of those charged with coming up with an escape plan for Twomey and his colleagues was idly watching the film, and it occurred to him that this might be the right time to use this particular escape route.

It wasn’t the first time that the IRA had considered using helicopters, but previous plans had been put on hold because of the superiority of the choppers used by the British armed forces. It was all very well breaking someone like Gerry Adams out of the Long Kesh internment camp, but pointless if the British could scramble faster machines and recapture him almost immediately. However, that wasn’t a consideration with Mountjoy, in the middle of Dublin. The plan was discussed by the IRA’s General Headquarters staff, and given the seal of approval. There was a certain aptness to the choice of exit route: the Irish Minister for Defence Paddy Donegan was well known for travelling by helicopter. As the leader of the opposition would point out the day after the escape, “It is poetic justice that a helicopter is now at the heart of the Government’s embarrassment and in the centre of their dilemma. Indeed, it was hard to blame the prison officer who observed that he thought it was the Minister for Defence paying an informal visit to Mountjoy Prison yesterday because, of course, we all know the Minister for Defence is wont to use helicopters, as somebody observed already, as other Ministers are wont to use State cars.”

Halloween was chosen as the date for the raid, and eleven days earlier, on 20 October 1973, the IRA approached Irish Helicopters, a private hire firm based out of Dublin Airport. American businessman “Mr Leonard” wanted to charter a chopper for use by himself and his friends to photograph locations in County Laois. He needed a helicopter that would be big enough to carry him, his driver, and all of their heavy photographic equipment. The obvious choice was the French-made Alouette 2 machine, which could seat five people, and it was agreed that Mr Leonard would hire the helicopter on the afternoon of 31 October at a rate of £80 per hour of flying time. Irish Helicopters didn’t normally ask for a deposit – leading to
Time
magazine’s claim that the escape didn’t cost the IRA anything – but the manager recalled that Mr Leonard insisted on paying upfront. No doubt the IRA middleman was worried in case something should go wrong on such an important operation, and he was held liable if Irish Helicopters double-booked!

Word was passed to the men interned in Mountjoy, and although the plot was kept hidden from the majority of the prisoners, their help was needed to keep the guards distracted. A game of Gaelic Rules football was therefore set up for Halloween afternoon, which had the added advantage of presenting a nice circle in the middle of the yard as a guide for the pilot.

It all nearly went wrong because of the weather – not because the conditions were so bad that the helicopter couldn’t fly, but because the manager of Irish Helicopters thought that there was no way that Mr Leonard would want to take his photographs on such a dull day. He therefore didn’t hurry his lunch, and was more than a little surprised to find Mr Leonard impatiently waiting for him at the airport when he returned. Leonard explained that his cameraman and the equipment was waiting at a rendezvous en route, and he needed to get going. He was introduced to Captain Thompson Boyes, and explained that not only were they picking up equipment, but they’d also be removing the doors from the chopper to allow better filming.

In Mountjoy exercise yard, the potential escapees were beginning to worry that once again everything had fallen through. Joe Cahill, alongside some of the other prisoners, gave up watching the game and returned to his cell, thereby ensuring that he couldn’t take part. Twenty-three prisoners were left there, watched over by eight unarmed guards. At 3.40 p.m., the sound of a helicopter filled the air.

Fifteen minutes earlier, Captain Boyes had landed, as instructed, in a field near Stradbally. However, instead of collecting a cameraman and his equipment, he was faced with two masked gunmen. They told him very politely and firmly that if he followed the instructions he was given, he would not be harmed. Boyes was canny enough to recognize that he was caught up in an IRA operation, and, reassured to a small extent by the gunman’s mask, he did as he was told, and with one of the gunmen seated beside him, started to follow the path of the Royal canal into Dublin.

When he was told about the plan, Boyes raised his concerns: three extra passengers would make taking off very tricky, as would the enclosed walls of the exercise yard, if he couldn’t get sufficient upswing on the helicopter. He was told to get on with the job.

Hearing the arriving chopper, Kevin O’Mallon began signalling with white strips of cloth. The other prisoners started to surround the guards to prevent them from taking action as the helicopter came in to land. Mallon, O’Hagan and Twomey ran for the machine and started to board. For a moment, the guards thought that it might be a visit from Minister Paddy Donegan using his usual mode of transport, but the sight of the three IRA men getting into the helicopter soon disabused them of that notion.

Captain Boyes struggled with the overladen machine, as O’Hagan pulled Twomey up into the helicopter. A fourth IRA man tried to get on too, but was dissuaded rapidly by the chopper passengers from taking his escape attempt any further. Even so, the turbulence caused by trying to take off within such an enclosed area, combined with the weight of the helicopter, meant that it took much longer than anyone had anticipated before it rose over the walls of Mountjoy. To the evident amusement of the IRA prisoners left behind, one of the guards shouted out possibly the most useless instruction ever: “Close the gates! Close the f***ing gates!”

The volunteers who had managed to evade the authorities after throwing the rope ladder over the walls of the prison a few weeks earlier had been tasked with getting hold of a getaway vehicle and meeting the helicopter at Dublin racecourse at Baldoyle. They eventually commandeered a taxi, putting the driver out of harm’s way, but had to move away from the rendezvous when a Garda officer started to become suspicious. By the time they got back, the helicopter had landed, and the escapees were in the middle of hijacking a vehicle. They abandoned that in favour of the already-stolen taxi, and headed off.

To his intense relief, Captain Boyes was released unharmed; he had realized during the flight that he knew one of the men – O’Hagan – and he had been reassured by the IRA men that he wasn’t going to be harmed, and he would be paid. That turned out to be the case.

Although the Irish government were convinced that the men were smuggled out of the country, they had in fact simply been moved to various safe houses. The IRA released a statement: “Three republican prisoners were rescued by a special unit from Mountjoy Prison on Wednesday. The operation was a complete success and the men are now safe, despite a massive hunt by Free State forces.” Over 300 Garda detectives began a manhunt in vain, as bonfires of celebration were lit in Belfast. Within Mountjoy, one prisoner recalled, “One shamefaced screw apologised to the governor and said he thought it was the new Minister for Defence arriving. I told him it was our Minister of Defence leaving.” Eventually one of the largest security operations ever carried out on Irish soil got under way, with over 20,000 security personnel involved in the search for the three terrorists.

The consequences were immediate for the IRA men left behind in Mountjoy. Ten days after Twomey, O’Hagan and Mallon escaped, they were transferred to the maximum-security facility at Portlaoise. The perimeter was guarded by members of the Irish Army, and wires erected to ensure that no other helicopters would make unauthorized landings within the prison walls.

All three men were eventually recaptured. Seamus Twomey remained on the outside for the longest, evading capture until 2 December 1977, when he was spotted by Special Branch in Dublin during a raid on an arms shipment. After a short but high-speed car chase through Dublin, he was arrested, carrying with him highly sensitive IRA documents about the reorganization of the movement. He was sent to Portlaoise, and served the remainder of his term. He was released in 1982 and died in 1989.

J.B. O’Hagan was rearrested in early 1975 in Dublin, and sent to Portlaoise to finish his sentence, and then a further two years for his part in the escape. He continued to be involved with IRA activity until the peace process in the 1990s; he died in 2001.

Kevin Mallon, however, masterminded a second escape attempt, this time from Portlaoise. He was only free for six weeks after the helicopter escapade: he was arrested in the town of Portlaoise on 10 December 1973 and sent to the prison there. On Sunday 18 August 1974, he and eighteen other prisoners were able to blow their way out.

Three months before the successful breakout, the IRA prisoners’ hopes had taken a battering after an eighty-foot-long tunnel was uncovered. However, the Portlaoise Escape Committee were undeterred and decided to exploit a weakness near the laundry area of the prison. The laundry led to an outside stairway, which went down into a courtyard where the Governor’s House and the Warders’ Mess were located – as was a doorway which led out onto the streets of the town! If they could only break through that door, then they would be free.

The GHQ gave its approval to the plan, and arranged for explosives to be smuggled into the prison. The inmates began to make ersatz prison officer uniforms so that when the escapees were running through the courtyard, the troops stationed on the roof of the jail wouldn’t be sure whether they were prison officers or inmates, and therefore would hold their fire.

At 12.30 p.m. on 18 August, prisoner Liam Brown asked if he could collect an item from the laundry that he claimed he had inadvertently left there. When the guard gave permission, he was rushed by a group of prisoners, and the key to the laundry taken from him. The escapees then ran through the laundry and down the stairs into the courtyard. The fake uniforms served their purpose – the troops didn’t open fire, worried that they would be hitting prison officers, giving the IRA men sufficient time to reach the door to the outside, set the bomb and detonate it. As soon as that went off, of course, the soldiers knew what was happening and began firing over the heads of the escapees trying to persuade them to stop. However, they had to cease fire when genuine prison officers rushed into the courtyard!

There was confusion for some hours over how many men had managed to flee: in order to give those who had made it the maximum amount of time, the other prisoners refused to cooperate with the prison authorities, and wouldn’t allow them to carry out a headcount. Only when they were threatened with riot police did they relent. At that point, it was discovered that nineteen men – including Kevin Mallon – had made it, five more than the prisoners themselves had anticipated.

A massive manhunt began, with every outhouse in County Wexford searched, and the navy put on alert. But not one of the men was recaptured during the week-long searches. A further tunnel was masterminded by IRA man Eddie Gallagher after the success of the August escape but it wasn’t completed. “We tried to free others by tunnelling from Portlaoise hospital under the Dublin–Limerick road and into the jail. Sean Treacy, myself and two others were removing foundation stones from beneath the outer jail wall on the night Special Branch and [the] army raided our billet nearby and arrested the day shift who were asleep in the house,” he recalled in 2005. Kevin Mallon was recaptured in Foxrock in January 1975 and returned to Portlaoise; after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which was designed to mark the end of the conflict in Northern Ireland, he became a breeder of greyhounds.

The
Real Prison Breaks
version of the helicopter escape states bluntly that this was the first time that such a breakout was attempted; this was not the case. It also implies that a helicopter pilot would knock back a pint of Guinness before a flight!

Sources:

Time
magazine, 12 November 1973: “Ireland: The Canny Copter Caper”