Steven P. Moysey - The Road to Balcombe Street: The IRA Reign of Terror in London

The Road to Balcombe Street: The IRA Reign of Terror in London

The Road to Balcombe Street: The IRA Reign of Terror in London has been co-published simultaneously as Journal of Police Crisis Negotiations, Volume 8, Numbers 1 and 2 2008.

Monographie Separates from the Journal of Police Crisis Negotiations

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The Road to Balcombe Street: The IRA Reign of Terror in London, by Steven P. Moysey, PhD (Vol. 8, No. 1 and 2, 2008). Acomprehensive account of the build-up to and events of the Balcombe Street siege-the six-day standoff between Londons Metropolitan Police and the IRA in 1975.

The Road to Balcombe Street: The IRA Reign of Terror in London

Steven P. Moysey, PhD

The Road to Balcombe Street: The IRA Reign of Terror in London has been co-published simultaneously as Journal of Police Crisis Negotiations, Volume 8, Numbers 1 and 2 2008.

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The Road to Balcombe Street: The IRA Reign of Terror in London has been co-published simultaneously as Journal of Police Crisis Negotiations, Volume 8, Numbers 1 and 2 2008.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moysey, Steven P.

The road to Balcombe Street : the IRA reign of terror in London / by Steven P. Moysey.

p. cm.

A comprehensive account of the build-up to and events of the Balcombe Street siege : the six-day standoff between Londons Metropolitan Police and the IRA in 1975. Co-published simultaneously as Journal of Police Crisis NegotiationsTM Volume 8, Numbers 1 and 2 2008.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7890-2912-6 (hard cover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7890-2913-3 (soft cover : alk. paper)

1. Provisional IRA. 2. Political violenceEngland. 3. TerrorismEngland. 4. HostagesEnglandLondon. I. Title.

HV6433.G712P766 2008

942.10857dc22

2007036559

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.

The Road to Balcombe Street: The IRA Reign of Terror in London

CONTENTS

Lord Peter Imbert, QPM

About the Author

Steven P. Moysey, PhD, is an organizational psychologist who specializes in the areas of conflict resolution and negotiation. He holds a PhD from Tufts University in Management and Psychology, and spent several years as an adjunct member of the graduate school faculty focusing on the psychological and behavioral aspects of leadership and team management. His research and writing centers on conflict and negotiation with a particular emphasis on law enforcement hostage stand-off situation. Dr. Moysey has previously published on the Balcombe Street siege in the Journal of Police Crisis Negotiations. Born and raised in the UK, Dr. Moysey now manages his consulting practice from Grafton, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife, musician Monica Hatch, and their two Welsh Springer spaniels, while shuttling back and forth to London on research and consulting trips.

Acts of terrorism, by their very nature, are intended to appear random and unpredictable designed to cause maximum psychological impact. In this well-researched and well-written book, psychologist Dr. Steven Moysey traces the destructive and apparently random path taken by one of the most ruthless and murderous gangs of IRA terrorists ever to operate with such vicious consistency on the mainland of Great Britain. He covers the bombing, shooting and kidnapping offences carried out by this small group of determined killers and outlines in authentic (and dare I say exciting detail, as he triggers my own memory) the events leading up to their eventual capture when they were caught in a trap carefully placed and sprung by the London Metropolitan Police on 6th December 1975. Moysey clearly outlines the randomness and unpredictability which was the hallmark of this particular Active Service Unit and which was epitomised by: bombs left in shop doorways on one day; a doorstep shooting and killing the next; the murder of a child cancer physician, by placing a booby trapped bomb under the wheels of his neighbours car; and opening fire from an automatic weapon on crowded restaurants and hotels while speeding past in a stolen car. In one evening alone in early 1975 no less than seven timed bombs were placed in shop doorways and under fuel storage dumps in and around London.

But although this almost daily switch of methods and likely targets helped them evade early identification and capture, their continued success, (which included the death of one of our top explosives experts), the very randomness itself contained a pattern which allowed the Metropolitan Police Anti-terrorist Squad to set a sophisticated trap into which, on the cold and damp evening of 6th December 1975, the most murderous IRA gang which had ever operated on the British mainland inadvertently entered as they attempted to carry out yet another deadly shooting by opening fire on a high class West End restaurant crowded with pre-Christmas diners. The terrorists, facing armed officers for the first time in their campaign of violence and finding themselves cut off in a part of the City, ran into a small block of Council flats, entered No. 22b, placed a gun to the head of the woman occupant and called to the pursuing officers that they would shoot her if the officers made a move to enter. The officers, knowing of the murders already committed by the terrorists knew this was no idle threat; they would carry it out. So began the siege of 22b Balcombe Street which with armed terrorists inside, who were more than capable of killing their hostages, and armed police covering the premises from the outside, presenting the police, and indeed the government, with a grave dilemma as to how this situation could be resolved.