One midsummer morning in 1992 I was lost in south Armagh while covering the abductions and killings by the IRA of three police informers. I stopped to ask directions from a man on a tractor whom I had passed on the same road maybe 30 minutes earlier. He smiled and asked: "Are you lost, Jim?" I admitted I was and as we had never met before, I asked how he knew my name.
He pointed out that I was obviously a reporter looking for the bodies. My car had Dublin plates. I was not with RTE, as there would be a film crew; or the Irish Independent because, he said, they wouldn't send a reporter to south Armagh. I was also not from, the Irish Press, because I was not "scruffy" enough - I was driving a two-year-old Toyota and wore a shirt and tie. So, I had to be from the Irish Times and their security correspondent was Jim Cusack. Welcome to south Armagh.
Believe me when I say this is the only time I have ever been recognised in this way. It could also, only have happened in south Armagh, the most militarised and politicised part of Ireland; the home of rebels and rapparees, from the 17th-century local hero, Redmond O'Hanlon, to Cuchulain and the present lot.
It is a place where, as one ex-RUC officer put it, there is obsessive stranger-watching, a defensive personality trait grown out of suspicion of clandestine activities of IRA guerrillas and the British Army and RUC undercover operations. The fascination from a British perspective - and Harnden's interest in it - lies in the inherent dangerousness of the locality to British political and military interests. It is a late 20th-century White Man's Grave for British Army commanders and successive Secretaries of State. Here the British Army suffered their worst single loss in the 30 years of Troubles with 18 paratroopers killed at Narrow Water on the same day that Lord Mountbatten (along with the 79-year-old Dowager Cranbourne and two teenage boys) were killed by the IRA in Sligo.
Here the strange British Guards officer, Capt Robert Nairac, disappeared while working "under cover". A product of Ampleforth, Oxford and Sandhurst, he genuinely believed he could pass himself off as a local. Poor Nairac, who was clearly delusional but something of a romantic, met a grisly end.
THE south Armagh IRA produced the huge bombs (known locally as "smokies") that devastated the City of London and Manchester city centre before the last ceasefire. The "Border sniper" roamed these hills taking the lives of seven soldiers and two policemen. This is the home of the "barrack buster" mortar, the heaviest piece of ordnance ever used against the British Army outside war time. The biggest set piece gun battles in the North took place here. Finally, the bomb which exploded in Omagh in August 1998 killing 29 people came, where else, but from south Armagh.
A book on this dramatic place was long overdue and Harnden has done a tremendous job, unearthing an abundance of secrets about the most secretive and effective part of the IRA. He spent two years researching this work and successfully insinuated himself into south Armagh society.
His history of the area and its rebel past includes details of the little known ethnic cleansing episode against the small Protestant population in 1922. The cleansing returned in 1976 when 10 Protestant workers were lined up at the side of the road at Kingsmill and mowed down by an IRA gun squad.
Harnden comments on the killing power of south Armagh Provos, saying that one of their number has killed at least 70 people.
If you are to read only one book about the modern IRA, this should be it.
Jim Cusack is the Security Correspondent of The Irish Times