One of the better pieces on the case that I have read from journoland, a 2-page spread c/w photos and graphics in today's Herald. Sorry, I don't have the technology for the graphics and couldn't find the piece in their online edition at <a href="http://www.sundayherald.com" target="_blank">www.sundayherald.com</a> .
Sunday Herald 3 Feb 02 Print Edition. 2 Articles, pp 12 & 13.
Seven years on, will the Chinook pilots finally be cleared?
As the Lords prepare to reveal their findings on 1994's fatal Mull of Kintyre crash, Torcuil Crichton examines a long fight for justice.
Catch up: When an RAF Chinook Helicopter crashed over the Mull of Kintyre in 1994, 29 people died including 25 senior intelligence officers. The latest of a long string of inquiries into the tragedy will report this week. Families of some of those who died hope it will finally clear the two pilots of blame and reveal the true cause of the crash.
The crew logbook of the Royal Navy Sea King scrambled from Prestwick captures, as well as anything, the sequence of events on the Mull of Kintyre on the evening of June 2, 1994.
“What a horrible one. Scrambled at 1810 (local), airborne 1817 with basic details of a helicopter being heard flying over Mull of Kintyre lighthouse followed shortly by a loud bang. Heard on route that it was a Chinook – thought initially 5 or so souls on board [later confirmed at 29] so ensured that other units (including our standby crew) were also scrambled. Arrived on scene approximately 1845 … Closed accident scene from the south of the Mull, found 4 or 5 lines of fire in the heather on the hillside but cloud and smoke prohibited any cliff transit to the crash site. Landed at landing pad near lighthouse to assist with casevac [casualty evacuation] if required (we weren’t!)…”
Twenty-nine people, including 25 of Britain’s top intelligence officers in Northern Ireland, were killed when Chinook ZD576, en route from Northern Ireland to Scotland, crashed into the Mull of Kintyre in the RAF’s worst peacetime accident. But instead of becoming another tragedy remembered only by grieving families and friends on each anniversary, the Mull of Kintyre crash has turned into a cause célèbre, a fight to clear the names of the pilots who were blamed amid claims of a technological scandal and cover-up.
In seven years the case has also acquired a symbolic status. It is seen as a struggle for truth against an intractable British military establishment that cannot admit, in the face of mounting evidence, that two of its senior officers may have gone too far in finding the helicopter’s pilots grossly negligent.
There have been at least six enquiries into the circumstances of the crash – ranging from the Scottish fatal accident enquiry to a Royal Aeronautical Society enquiry – but the truth is that nobody will ever know for sure why Flight Lieutenants Jonathan Tapper, who was 28, and Richard Cook, 30, flew into the hillside in the mist on that Thursday evening.
What their families want to establish is not the exact cause of the but that there was not enough evidence to damn the reputations of their sons The latest and final inquiry, a house of Lords select committee investigation, will reveal its findings this Tuesday. For five months now the committee - led by Lord Jauncey of Tullichettle, a former Scottish law lord, and also comprising three QCs and an engineer - has gathered evidence, listened to witnesses and mulled over their opinions.
The last person to see the Chinook in fight on that evening was an amateur yachtsman who was at sea off the Mull of Kintyre. He saw the helicopter flying below cloud in straight, level flight about 200-300 ft above sea level, The top of the Mull was shrouded in cloud, but the crew had not planned to fly over it in any case.
Flight Lieutenant Tapper indicated on the navigation computer that the first waypoint, a lighthouse on the tip of Kintyre, had been reached, and entered a second waypoint, Corran, which was about 90 miles away. That required a turn to the left which would allow the Mk2 Chinook to fly around the Mull. But for whatever reason the manoeuvre was never executed and ZD576 crashed into the hillside, broke up in flames and bounced along the moor in pieces.
A civilian fatal accident inquiry and an RAF board of inquiry followed. Neither concluded by blaming the pilots. The RAF thought human error was “likely" but also that a "major technical malfunction could not be ruled out".. .But the RAF then overturned its own conclusion.
Two senior officers, Air Chief Marshal Sir William Wratten and Air Marshal Sir John Day, reviewed the board of inquiry and found Flight Lieutenants Tapper and Cook posthumously guilt of gross negligence - the equivalent of manslaughter. They had flown too low and too fast approaching the foggy Mull of Kintyre. No question, no doubt.
On top of the grief of losing their sons, the accusation was a devastating blow for the pilots' families. They immediately began to campaign to have the ruling overturned. After seven years they and their supporters sense they are about to score a victory against the MoD - but they exercise caution.
Far away from Westminster, far away from the Mull of Kintyre, Mike Tapper has been waiting a long time. The retired bank manager from Norfolk who lost his son in the Chinook crash is sure that the marathon campaign will not be over with Tuesday’s report, whatever verdict it might contain. To sustain him he has only bitter experience.
"We've been through the fatal accident inquiry, we've been through the Channel Four inquiry and then the totally unsatisfactory House of Commons select committee, who just accepted everything the MoD told them," he says. "We've had the public accounts committee and now the Lords inquiry what I’m saying is that we have been here before."
Last week Lord Chalfont circulated a memo to all members of the parliamentary Mull of Kintyre group, which cajoled and campaigned for the Lords inquiry warning them that the outcome may not go in their favour. Lord Chalfont, a former military intelligence officer and minister of state, is the driving force behind the group and has already said he will accept the inquiry's verdict as the final outcome.
"Either we will succeed or the air marshals will be vindicated, but it is such an obvious miscarriage of justice that I think the report will have an enormous impact on the MoD," says Lord Chalfont. "If the Lords find there is too much doubt to condemn the men I can’t see how anyone, even the Prime Minister could refuse to take action,"
The doubts over the verdict centre primarily on safety fears over the Mk 2 Chinook among RAF pilots. It was seriously unreliable in its first months of operational service, and the belief among the men who flew it is that it was rushed into service.
The Mk 2 Chinook's engines were fitted with FADEC (full authority digital electronic control) software, which controls fuel flow to the front and rear engines and therefore also controls the power output. The computer system was plagued with glitches. A year before the crash MoD experts at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire, the RAF's official test site, refused to recommend the Chinooks carrying the new system. But the MoD, down to half-strength in its Chinook fleet, pressed on, and the system was introduced the following year.
The pilots at RAF Boscombe Down had on two occasions - including the day before the crash - refused to fly Chinooks fitted with FADEC. The RAF maintains that these refusals were unconnected to the system itself.
Flight Lieutenants Cook and Tapper both told their parents they were worried about the safety of the Chinooks, Cook asking his father, a former Concorde pilot, on three separate occasions to look after his family.
"'You will look after Sarah and Eleanor?' That was his wife and daughter," recalls Cook senior "On the last occasion I said, 'Come on, Rick, what is it?' He said, 'Dad, the aircraft is not ready and we are not ready. We have had too little time to sort it out.' Three or four days later he was killed."
In Brighton, in a corner of Tony Collins's home office, are three suitcases full of evidence on the Mull of Kintyre crash and FADEC software. Collins, a journalist with the unglamorous trade magazine Computer Weekly, is the Bob Woodward of the Chinook campaign - the hack who was handed a pile of software readouts to analyse and who uncovered a scandal.
In 1997, three years after the crash, Channel Four News approached Computer Weekly with a copy of an independent assessment of the FADEC computer system that the MoD had commissioned. Collins analysed it, expecting to find perhaps five or six inevitable glitches recorded. In the event there were 486 anomalies in the software.. ."I was astonished that it related to a helicopter that was in service. This wasn't a banking system or a newspaper computer, this was safety-critical software," says Collins.
"The first thing I did was seek out the MoD's case and find out why they had found the pilots negligent, I put myself in their shoes because I couldn't get involved in a campaign if there was strong evidence against the pilots. I was surprised by the lack of evidence. There was more and more evidence of problems with the software emerging and scant evidence to back their case.”. .Investigations uncovered that, while the MoD maintained that FADEC did not compromise the safety of ZD576, it was at the same time suing the makers of the system after a near-fatal crash in 1989 - a fact it withheld from the Air Accident Investigation Board. The MoD did not inform the air accident investigators of the case, according to armed forces minister John Reid, because "we sued them for negligence in their testing procedure. We did not sue them because of a failure in FADEC."
In fact, material obtained by Computer Weekly reveals that the MoD's case against the manufacturers, Textron Lycoming, was almost entirely based on the alleged faulty design of Fadec.
Collins's findings and the subsequent publicity garnered by Channel Four re-ignited the Chinook campaign and propelled it into the Commons. The magazine published Rough Justice, a 160-page on-line report into the Chinook crash, and more than 90 MPs signed a motion calling for a new inquiry. The Ministry of Defence issued a rebuttal of the report two hours before it was published.. .That changed things for Collins. “From then on the campaign was really fuelled by the MoD making lots of factually incorrect statements. When we wrote Rough Justice we thought they would see good grounds for a new inquiry, but after that we realised they had a fixed position no matter what new evidence came to light."
It was Collins's first expeflence ot the military's “sanctity of command” - the unwritten principle that does not allow the MoD to overturn the decision of senior officers, regardless of subsequent information For Collins this is now the issue at the heart of the campaign. He has not been the only person to encounter it.. .Computer Weekly's findings and the Channel 4 campaign drew the attention of the House of Commons public accounts committee, which accused the MoD of 'unwarrantable arrogance' in dismissing its voluminous report and year-long investigation.
Another Commons committee, the defence select committee, had gone along with the MoD's findings, though some opposition members, notably Lib Dem Menzies Campbell, accused the government of putting pressure on Labour members to accept the MoD line. By then Malcolm Rifkind - a defence minister at the time of the crash, who had told parliament that the men were grossly negligent - had changed his mind after reading the evidence of FADEC failure. He became an influential supporter of the campaign. A former minister was now accusing the Whitehall mandarins and the military of getting it wrong on the Mull of Kintyre crash.
In Whitehall they are waiting too. In theory the Ministry of Defence could simply ignore the findings of the Lords inquiry. Its outcome will not overturn the findings of the two senior officers but defence officials know it would be obtuse to dismiss it as it did the public accounts committee.
"Their lordships have taken this very seriously and we will be taking cognisance of what they say," said an MoD official who has monitored the evidence and the proceedings of the inquiry. "Legally, technically, we could say that it doesn't matter a jot, but we won't be putting ourselves in that position."
Why the MoD has proved so resistant to pressure has baffled those outside the case. But one encounter with Air Chief Marshal Sir William Wratten - OBE, CE, AFC (retired) - soon dispels any confusion. In public statements, on television, in the committee room giving evidence to the Lords inquiry, Sir William has never displayed a scintilla of doubt over his decision. He is of a completely unbending military mindset that simply will not contemplate, once a decision has been made, that it could possibly be mistaken, far less overturned.
His colleague, Air Marshal Sir John Day, still serving in the RAF, told the inquiry that finding the pilots guilty had been the most difficult decision of his life. It had, he recalled, required "moral courage” the kind of mettle he displayed when, in front of the pilots' parents, he said that there was no doubt Tapper and Cook had "breached all the safety rules".. .Tapper and Cook were trained to break all the safety rules. They were both special forces pilots, an elite who knew how to fly low, fast and in the dark, They could hide helicopters behind hedgerows and pick out rainfall glinting off an electricity line before they flew into it. Is it possible, with such a precious cargo aboard, that they blew it and simply flew into the hillside?
Their lordships are keeping their opinion close to their chests. The words of one expert witness, Squadron-Leader Robert Burke, an acknowledged authority on the Chinook, started a rumour that the Lords were wavering towards the view that the crash was due to a technical error. Burke himself thinks they wanted to hear more because the MoD had submitted extra information on technical aspects of the aircraft after the deadline for evidence had passed, which in turn indicated that the military were rattled by the inquiry. Or so the Westminster rumour mill went.. .The families are now bracing themselves for a result, as convinced of their cause as the air chief marshal is of his. Their campaign slogan is that justice has no expiry date - but they have waited a long time. "You get used to hunkering down and not using too much energy in times like . .these," says Mike Tapper.
SECOND ARTICLE
This is not the first case in which the official military line has been called into question. Diplomatic Editor Trevor Royle looks back at the MoD’s dishonourable history of smears and deceit.
Like any other large organisation with thousands of employees, the Ministry of Defence is not without its share of inertia, back-stabbing, inefficiency and cover-ups. Vast sums are spent on equipment that sometimes fails to work. Budgets are allowed to rocket and political interference can lead to complications as civil servants and ministers take precedence over service personnel.
As one insider puts it. there is a tendency for the whole organisation to be overcome by "a heavy element of bureaucratic inertia". cock-up is common, he insists - but conspiracy is rare.. .Inter-service rivalry also abounds. It is not uncommon for senior officers to push the claims of their own services, even if efficiency is impaired, and in the army this can extend to unhealthy competitiveness between regiments and corps. In the spring of 1982 the colonels of the Welsh and Scots Guards lobbied hard for their regiments to be included in the task force to retake the Falkands, even though many military critics thought they were not “match fit" for winter warfare. At the same time the claims of the Queen's Own Highlanders, the regiment on standby for service overseas, were ignored.. .But because the work of the MoD concerns national security - the passengers on the RAF Chinook that crashed near the Mull of Kintyre in 1994 were drawn from the intelligence community in Northern Ireland - any suspected breach sends senior officers into overdrive. With a determination which is understandable, steps are taken to correct the problem and limit the damage, but this need to plug gaps can create further difficulties. "Once you get into security matters, common sense gets suspended," says the same source, who is familiar with cases similar to the Chinook inquiry, “People get excited because they’re into a secret and want to keep it to themselves. Conspiracy theories abound and it gets difficult to see the wood for the trees."
The recent case involving Nigel Wylde, a retired lieutenant-colonel, is frequently cited as an example of the MoD getting into all sorts of trouble because it starts something it cannot stop. Wylde was arrested in 1998 on five charges of leaking confidential information about military computer systems to the author Tony Gerrachty. Both men were seized simultaneously early in the morning by MoD police. Their papers and computers were confiscated and, although they were released on bail, their telephones were tapped and they had to endure constant surveillance.
The charges against the two men were absurd - information was freely available I about the Vengeful and Crucible computer surveillance Systems mentioned by Geraghty in his book The Irish War - but even though the MOD police appeared to have little or no evidence with which they could support the charge against the men under the 1989 Official Secrets Act, the case was pursued with relentless ferocity.
Eventually both cases were dropped, first Geraghty's and then - grudgingly - Wylde's, but not before both men had suffered financial loss and numerous indignities.
During the proceedings it became clear that Wylde had made enemies in the intelligence community, and there were suggestions that he was the target of senior officers who bore a grudge. In 1997, the year before he was arrested, he had led a team from a private computer company which investigated the army's computer-based communication and information systems in Northern Ireland - and its findings were damning. The system was labelled "a disgrace”; a finding which was not calculated to make Wylde the most popular retired soldier in the eyes of the top brass.
Inevitably, not all the case's facts are known - the MoD produced public interest immunity certificates to prevent their release. For future investigators, the probable outcome is that they will be airbrushed out of history.
That is what happened when two RAF Lincoln bombers strayed over the East German border in March 1953 and one was shot down by patrolling MIG 15 fighters. All seven crew were killed, four in the crash and three when their parachutes unaccountably failed to open.
The RAF insisted that the Lincolns were unarmed and had simply made a navigational error, but at the time was widely assumed that they had been on a spying mission - a suspicion that was nourished when ammunition was found at the wreck site.
Later, the crashed Lincoln disappeared - in more ways than one. Every RAF aircraft has an official photograph, but not this one. Equally conveniently, the relevant pages from the records regarding the incident have been lost.
In the worst cases, history can be rewritten to put the writers in a better light and denigrate those unable to defend themselves. The most notorious example was the decision taken by senior officers to blacken the name of Major-General Orde Wingate, the commander of the Chindit forces in Burma, when the official history of the second world war was written in the 1950s. Wingate was a brilliant soldier but a difficult man whose rudeness was famous and whose temper was legendary.
While raising his forces, who fought behind Japanese lines in Burma in 1943 and 1944, Wingate had made many enemies among senior officers in India. After he was killed in a plane crash in March 1944 they took their revenge. The official history was supposed to be an accurate and disinterested record of all operations in the second world war, but the leading author of the Burma volume, Major-General S Woodburn Kirby, redrafted the facts to put the Chindits and Wingate in a bad light and belittle their achievements. Kirby had been director of staff duties in Delhi and had clashed with Wingate: it was assumed he was biased, but nothing could be proved.
When Major-General Derek Tulloch, Wingate's second-in-command protested, he was threatened with arrest and imprisonment in the Tower of London. It was some 40 years before the true facts about the biased writing of the Burma volume of the official history were unearthed and published.
Trevor Royle is the author of Orde Wingate: Irregular Soldier (Phoenix, £14.99).