Published August 12, 2005

FORMER Governor Sir Edwin Leather strategised a ruthless psychological warfare campaign against those he believed plotted the assassination of predecessor Sir Richard Sharpes ? a campaign he hoped would end with the drug overdose death of an individual he identified as the loose-knit criminal/guerilla group's mastermind.

Sir Edwin believed the individual ? who was never charged with participation in the low-level but lethal Black Power guerilla campaign that destabilised Bermuda in 1972 and 1973 and which left five people dead ? would escape justice because evidence linking him to the killings was so meagre.

The then Governor believed Beret Yellow (pseudonym), a former leading member of the Black Beret Cadre guerilla organisation, had recruited and manipulated three career criminals ? including Erskine Durrant (Buck) Burrows and Larry Tacklyn, both later executed ? to act as an unofficial hit squad for for the Black Power organisation.

Beret Yellow had fled Bermuda in 1973 after attacking a policeman who had discovered a shotgun cartridge during a search at his home ? a cartridge later linked by forensics specialists to one of the four firearms used in the '72/'73 killing spree.

Disguised as a woman and using a borrowed passport, he had taken a flight to New York and then made his way to Canada. He was kept under surveillance by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police while in Canada.

"Our case against Beret Yellow and the real ring leaders . . . hang only on one shotgun cartridge and inadmissible evidence," said Sir Edwin in an aide-memoire he began compiling on September 28, 1973 and forwarded to the FCO in London in October.

"At most Beret Yellow might be sent down for six months or a year if he returned to Bermuda. I am strongly of the opinion that would do more harm than good to the whole situation.

"Therefore it seems to me infinitely preferable that he should stay up in Canada and the more we can harry him the better. The more we can drop stories into the Press the better ? our only means of communication with him ? that might make him say, 'God, they know that do they! I wonder how much more they know'!

"The more we can make his friends, still here in Bermuda, against whom we have no case at all, feel nervous and jittery, the better.

"If it is true, as we have been told, that Beret Yellow has started taking heroin, then it is good news: far better that he should drug himself to death in Canada than come back to Bermuda, do a few months in jail and there- after be a bigger menace to the community than ever before.

"We must employ skilful propaganda to help worry him to further foolish acts, anything but return to Bermuda, to causing his own death by drugs if possible." Sir Edwin, who died in Bermuda in April at the age of 85, succeeded Sir Richard Sharples as Governor in August, 1973.

Sir Richard and Aide-De-Campe Hugh Sayers had been gunned down in the gardens at Government House on March 10 ? almost six months to the day after Police Commissioner George Duckett was killed in a hail of gunfire at his North Shore, Devonshire home.

Less than a month after the Sharples and Sayers slayings supermarket executives Victor Rego and Mark Doe had been murdered execution-style during an armed robbery at the Shopping Centre on Victoria Street.

Sir Edwin, a Canadian-born British citizen, was appointed to succeed Sir Richard Sharples in the summer of 1973 and took up his post in Bermuda in July of that year.

Upon arrival, Sir Edwin made clear his top priority was encouraging the police to solve the still-outstanding murders and a series of concurrent gun attacks, including armed robberies at the Bank of Bermuda's Victoria Street branch as well as random shootings at Fort Hamilton, Police Headquarters in Prospect and other locations.

In October, 1973 Erskine Durrant (Buck) Burrows, a long-time criminal as well as a former janitor at Police Headquarters, was arrested following the largest manhunt in Bermuda history.

His associate, Larry Winfield Tacklyn, had been taken into custody on unrelated charges. Burrows later provided detailed written confessions to the murders of Duckett, Sir Richard and Captain Sayers and was convicted of the Shopping Centre murders.

Tacklyn was acquitted of taking part in the Government House killings but convicted for his role in the Shopping Centre killings. Both men were hanged in December 1977, the last executions that took place in Bermuda.

In a tranche of recently declassified British Foreign & Commonwealth Office communiqu?s, Sir Edwin outlined his theory on the origins of the guerilla campaign/crime wave shortly after Burrows was taken into custody.

"The key to the situation, I believe to be this," he said. "About 14-15 months ago, it just happened that three of the island's most confirmed and hardened criminals were all out of prison at the same time. Buck Burrows, Mr. X (name removed for legal reasons) and Larry Tacklyn.

"They were all long-time criminals of low intelligence but the kind of sly cunning such people often exhibit. At that time they all came into contact with a handful of the remaining leaders of the defunct Black Beret Cadre ? most especially Beret Yellow.

"Burrows and Tacklyn in particular have been known to express the greatest admiration, even hero worship, for Beret Yellow.

Sir Edwin theorised that the former leadership of the Black Berets, still meeting together clandestinely, "realised that fate had put a new weapon in their hands in the form of these easily impressed and not very bright young criminals".

"They played on them, influenced them, almost certainly inspired some of the violent acts that followed, and very probably planned them," he said. "But, of course, none of this can be proved.

"At this moment we have no hard evidence beyond that provided by undercover agents who cannot be blown; and the link in the chain that one cartridge from the shot gun was found at Beret Yellow's apartment'; and the remarkable fact that it was precisely at that instant that Beret Yellow clouted a policeman and took off, first into hiding and a few days later abroad, disguised as a Black Muslim woman."

Sir Edwin argued it would be "a tragedy" if only Burrows, Tacklyn and Mr. X (who was never ultimately charged in connection with any of the '72/'73 crimes) were prosecuted for their roles in the murder and crime spree while those Black Beret veterans who had inculcated them with Black Power revolutionary ideology and provided them with weapons escaped scot free.

"This is psychological warfare and the more the enemy can be made to worry, to fear and ? if humanly possible ? start squabbling among themselves, the greater our chances of finally clearing out the whole lot of them," he said in his aide-memoire.

He suggested detailed information concerning the murders provided to police by a confidential source close to the Black Berets be leaked to encourage speculation that Burrows himself was talking.

"What is important is that someone (emphasis in original document) has squealed," said Sir Edwin, "not who has squealed. Probably the best time to use this (information) will be (in the weeks after Burrows' arrest). We shall encourage speculation that Burrows is trying to save his own skin by ratting on his associates.

"We can force (the former Black Beret leadership) to advise Beret Yellow to stay where he is because the police have a lot more on him than we actually do.

"Let it be hinted, true or not, when the guns are in our possession that several different fingerprints have been found on them. By every possible means we must keep up a war of nerves."

Sir Edwin conceded there were "risks" to his strategy from a legal point of view but held firm in his belief that Bermuda had to ultimately confront the truth behind the murders ? a truth that was at the time eclipsed by wild media speculation.

"There is another side to the war of nerves," he said. "It is the effect on public opinion. It is as certain as anything can be that the total secrecy of many months did not work. It did positive harm.

"Nothing is more anxious making to the general public than a blackout on hard news that leaves the field open to the widest rumour and gossip. There being no confirmed news, the overseas press, especially (Britain's) Fleet Street, filled the vacuum ? and are still doing so ? with misleading and damaging speculation."

Sir Edwin said Bermudians were attempting to avoid some hard realities about home grown criminals and terrorists by buying into British media reports that fingered international drug smugglers, criminals and even the Irish Republican Army as the culprits behind the Bermuda crime spree.

"There is not one single scrap of evidence to support such theories," he said. "People in Bermuda who are still bemusing themselves with vague ideas that this is really not their problem must be bombed out of their cloud cuckoo land.

"The sooner the general public know the true facts, swallow the cathartic truth and face up to their responsibilities, the sooner Bermuda can start to settle down into the new world of reality in which we must all live."

Beret Yellow returned to Bermuda briefly in the 1980s. He was never charged in connection with any of the '72/'73 crimes. He now lives abroad.