In June 1991, an SAS unit lay in wait in the village of Coagh, County Tyrone, after intelligence suggested an IRA team was preparing to assassinate an off-duty soldier. Within seconds of the gunmen arriving, three men were dead.

In episode six of SAS: The Shadow War, The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley meets ‘David’, the former SAS commander who planned the operation. He reveals how a British soldier was used as a decoy, how the trap was set and how the decision to open fire unfolded in a matter of seconds.

Decades of legal scrutiny followed. Alongside another extraordinary SAS encounter involving Bernadette Devlin, the episode asks the question at the heart of these operations: when do you arrest, and when do you shoot?

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On St Patrick’s Day 1978, a covert surveillance mission in rural Londonderry went catastrophically wrong.

In episode five of SAS: The Shadow War, The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley meets ‘Blue’, a former 14 Intelligence Company operative speaking publicly about the night he and a fellow soldier were ambushed while watching a farm linked to wanted IRA man Francis Hughes.

Shot three times, with one bullet tearing through his stomach, Blue was left bleeding heavily in the dark, his radio failing and help far away. What followed was a desperate fight to stay alive, improvise first aid and get a message out. It is a story of instinct, split-second decisions and survival, and of the brutal consequences when a covert operation collapses in seconds.

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By the mid-1980s, intelligence had become one of the British state’s most important weapons in Northern Ireland, with covert surveillance teams working the streets of Belfast knowing discovery could prove fatal.

In episode four of SAS: The Shadow War, The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley meets ‘Bob’, a veteran surveillance operator, and ‘Liz’, a pioneering former female intelligence operative speaking publicly for the very first time. They reveal how secret teams shadowed suspects, navigated anti-surveillance traps and operated alone in hostile territory.

From a stolen submachine gun to the murder of Corporals Derek Wood and David Howes, the episode reveals how a single mistake could have deadly consequences, and asks why so much of Britain’s intelligence war remains secret.

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