Captain Robert Nairac GC

Why Re-Investigate One of the Darkest Moments in the Troubles?

I did not intend to look into the abduction, murder and disappearance of Captain Robert Nairac GC.

Some years ago I assisted former diplomat turned author Alastair Kerr when he was looking into Nairac’s time on his Sandhurst commissioning course.

Kerr’s book Betrayal: The Murder of Robert Nairac GC (2015; 2017) remains the most comprehensive study of the life of Robert Nairac.

When read in conjunction with Toby Harnden’s excellent Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh (1999; 2024), there really is no excuse for walking away from both books without a full appreciation of what Captain Nairac encountered during his time in the Irish borderlands.

I had gone back home to Belfast to research my next book, Enemies Within, on the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) terror group.

I was also in Derry to work on a more personal project that may result in a book or, more likely, a short media project sometime in the next year.

So, when a close friend dumped a file on my lap regarding Captain Nairac’s disappearance, I decided to set off on a journey that would take me into the dark heart of ‘Bandit Country’ and the Provisional IRA squad responsible for Robert Nairac’s forced disappearance.

This file did not come to me by accident. I have been made aware of a small but determined group of veterans who have begun a renewed search for the remains of Captain Nairac.

They are not people who normally step out of the shadows and so have asked me, via an intermediary, to look again at the evidence available to see if we can ascertain exactly what happened to Robert.

There are merits to looking again at a case like this.

It remains one of the more high profile forced disappearances of the Troubles and the only one of a serving British Army officer or soldier.

I’ve spent a good deal of my career as an academic lecturer at Sandhurst teaching Officer Cadets and Officers about the big picture of international relations.

Yet, much of my professional research over the past quarter of a century has given me a broader and deeper appreciation of the minutiae of British Army operations in a variety of its theatres since the end of the Second World War.

I am particularly interested in how our officers have responded to the security challenges facing them, whether that is in the small wars and insurgencies they battled in Palestine, Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya, Aden, Northern Ireland, Iraq or Afghanistan.

I am a historian by training (my first degree was in Modern and Contemporary History), which has seen me read into a broad conceptual sweep of topics from the English Civil War to the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and Ireland since the plantation to the present day.

I have also become somewhat curious about the cerebral challenges facing those officers who worked in intelligence, for it is on intelligence operations that we see all aspects of British fighting power (conceptual, physical and moral) come together to demand more from our young men and women.

With that in mind there is no better exemplar of the moral and physical courage demanded by the nation of those who we send off to fight on our behalf.

Captain Robert Nairac is one of those whose story opens a much bigger conversation about what we ask our brave servicemen and servicewomen to do while on operations, the nature and changing character of the adversaries they face, and, of course, the legacy this leaves for future generations.

In the course of the past few weeks I have learned more about the Provisional IRA and British security forces operations in the mid to late 1970s than ever before.

What I have uncovered about the Provos, in particular, and, crucially, about how they operated and what they likely did with Captain Nairac’s body is astonishing.

Watch this space for more revelations in Part Two of my series on Captain Robert Nairac GC, coming in a few weeks’ time.