Former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith has recalled the abduction and murder of his former Army comrade Captain Robert Nairac during the Troubles.
As he recounts in the Mail’s groundbreaking new podcast, Sir Iain, 70, was serving in ‘very dangerous’ Northern Ireland with the Scots Guards when Captain Nairac was kidnapped, killed and secretly buried.
The remains of the ‘tough guy’ 29-year-old Grenadier Guards soldier, who was working undercover, have never been found.
Speaking on From Bomb to Ballot: The History of Sinn Féin, Sir Iain says: ‘I remember Robert very well, yeah. He was a nice guy. Terribly nice.’
The Chingford MP goes on to add: ‘He [Captain Nairac] thought he was meeting somebody who would give him some information about what was going on. In fact, the IRA were waiting for him. It was a set up.’
The soldier was taken from a pub in south Armagh and then moved across the border to Flurry Bridge in County Louth, where he was killed.
Sir Iain remembers how, after the soldier’s abduction, ‘bits of other people’s teeth’ were found near where he was taken. ‘He’d obviously had a hell of a fight,’ he says.
The politician was just 22 when he was posted to Derry at the height of the Troubles.
DON’T MISS: The Mail’s John Lee delves into the evolution of Sinn Féin, exploring its roots in the Troubles and interviewing key figures to understand the party’s past and future.
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When he arrived in Northern Ireland he was one more than 28,000 British soldiers stationed there.
He remembers Northern Ireland as having been a ‘very dangerous place for a British soldier to be’.
‘And Derry, which had already had a long history of sectarian tension and violence, was fast becoming the epicentre of the conflict,’ he adds.
Sir Iain also remembers another soldier being ‘sniped and killed’ shortly before his unit was due to go on patrol.
The former minister, who served as work and pensions secretary under David Cameron, trained at naval training school HMS Conway and then attended Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.
After passing out in 1975, he spent six years in the Scots Guards, rising to the rank of captain.
He also saw active service in what is now Zimbabwe and served in Canada and Germany.
Speaking of Captain Nairac, Sir Iain adds: ‘We think they tried to execute [him], somehow the pistol didn’t go off or something, and then there was another attempt, and finally they, I think he broke free, then they caught him again, and finally they killed him.
‘And his body’s disappeared completely, and there’s, no one’s ever said where he was buried.’
Captain Nairac was one of 17 people known as the Disappeared who were killed and secretly buried by paramilitary groups.
In August, a new search for Captain Nairac’s remains was launched but ended in October without success.
The soldier, who trained with the elite SAS, was posthumously awarded the George Cross.
The citation praised the resistance of the Oxford-educated officer to his abductors and his bravery under ‘a succession of exceptionally savage assaults’ which failed to break him.
All seven episodes of From Bomb to Ballot: the history of Sinn Fein are available now.