The law should be used as just another weapon in the Government’s arsenal, and in this case it becomes little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public. For this to happen efficiently, the activities of the legal services have to be tied into the war effort in as discreet a way as possible.
Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations
St Andrew’s Hotel,
Exchequer St.
Dublin
Dear––—
Have duly reported and found things is [sic] a fearful mess but think will be able to make a good show, [sic] Have been given a free hand to carry on and everyone has been very charming. Re our little stunt I see no prospects until I have got things on a firmer basis but still hope and believe there are possabilities [sic]. As I intend to put in for my allowances for February should be awfully grateful if you would kindly tell me the War Office rates for Ration, Servant, Lodging Fuel and Light and shall I send them to you for signature or put them [indecipherable]?1
The foregoing was written by a junior British officer, known as ‘Captain X.Z.’, on 2 March 1920. Almost seventy-five years later, in the course of researching this book, I asked a very senior one if, during the period of his counterinsurgency work in Northern Ireland, he and his men had studied the career of Michael Collins. He replied that he could not recall Collins’ name ever being mentioned. I found this curious for two reasons. First, it appeared odd that, engaged in the same type of struggle against Collins’ successors which Collins had waged earlier in the century, the British Army in Ireland still apparently preferred to ignore the brutal lessons taught by the Irish founder of modern urban guerrilla warfare in favour of relying on techniques developed by Frank Kitson against unfortunate members of the Mau Mau in far-off Kenya.2 In the same way that he had used former Mau Mau activists to attack their erstwhile comrades, Kitson, then a brigadier, attempted to use ex-IRA members or supporters, known as ‘freds’, to confront serving Provos. Whatever success this scheme may have had in Kenya, it seems to have achieved very little in Ireland.3 Kitson, because his was the first name to be associated with army intelligence, and because he wrote books, has achieved a paradoxical notoriety for being the IRA’s bête noire, although his service in Northern Ireland appears to have been confined to the years 1970–2.
The second reason I was surprised at the senior officer’s reply to my question was that in fact the army were still using the sort of tactics hinted at in the 1920 letter. The officer’s ‘free hand’ to carry out his ‘little stunt’ required him to live under an assumed name and occupation at a civilian address, from which he and his comrades in British intelligence would sally forth, generally under the cover of darkness, to carry out unattributable assassinations against Sinn Fein targets. The letter was intercepted by Collins, who, on Bloody Sunday 1920, wiped out the leading members of the ‘little stunt’ operation. In shooting a driver for the ‘Four Square Laundry’, and carrying out an attack on an army-run massage parlour in Belfast on the same day, 2 October 1972, the IRA drew public attention to the existence of the Military Reconnaissance Force attached to the 39th Infantry Brigade. The MRF was formed by Frank Kitson during his tour of duty in Northern Ireland, as commander of the brigade. Its stated objective was ‘surveillance’, but amongst the ‘surveillance’ activities which can be attributed to it was a tendency towards shooting at Catholics from passing cars.4
One significantly maladroitly timed shooting, for which two MRF members were actually subsequently charged with (but acquitted of) attempted murder, took place on the day after the June 1972 IRA truce began, following the Cheyne Walk talks. This, as has been pointed out, could have wrecked the peace talks, which MI6 were keen to further and had indeed taken an active part in setting up.5 Like the Foreign Office, MI6 ‘believed neither that the Labour Party represented the Parliamentary end of a subversive wedge, nor that the IRA was some rough equivalent of the Malay Communist Party… the Provisional Irish Republican Army was a political organisation which could be outwitted, not merely a terrorist organisation which must be destroyed.’6 However, the fatal flaw which emerged in British policy towards Ireland over the next twenty years was that the issue was seen largely as being merely one of eradicating or containing terrorism. Initially, some elements in the British Establishment, with a memory of the help given by the Six Counties during World War II, provided Unionist politicians with sensitive intelligence information. Merlyn Rees, who constantly tries to play down the attacks on him from within the British Establishment during his period as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, was stunned when Kevin McNamara revealed to him at an off-the-record Oral History seminar that the hard-line Bill Craig received information from MI5. Craig, MacNamara said, had told him ‘specifically he got things from the British Government’7 – and then pleaded the Official Secrets Act to protect his sources. All Rees could muster in reply was a bemused: ‘Well, blow it!’8
After the ending of the 1972 truce the Foreign Office and the hardliners in the security forces rivalrous to MI6 gained the ascendancy. One result of this was a smear campaign, largely orchestrated by elements in the security forces and the NIO targeting both Wilson and Rees, by ‘expanding the category of “the enemy” to include Westminster politicians’.9 In his memoirs Rees makes light of suggestions that his relationships with the army were something less than ideal. He stresses the good relationships he enjoyed with the GOC, Sir Frank King. But he does concede that tensions between the army and the RUC had led to ‘serious army criticism of my office’.10 However, the record of the period shows that there was a good deal more involved in the army’s attitude to Rees than the rivalry between it and the RUC. The army were opposed to Rees’ policy of phasing out detention. Figures were concocted and issued to journalists at a briefing in Lisburn in July 1974 ‘proving’ that more than half of all released detainees returned to terrorism within months. The army also said that a recent upsurge in violence was caused by the release of some sixty-five internees that year. The fact that the violence might have had something to do with the Loyalist workers’ strike, which had just brought down a historic effort to resolve the conflict, was not mentioned. Three years later, in March 1977, both the Sunday Times (on the 13th) and the Irish Times (on the 21st) carried reports saying that the true figure for internee recidivism was 20 per cent.
Moreover, the year after the Lisburn briefing, General King publicly criticised Rees’ political leadership. He told a meeting of the St John’s Ambulance Brigade in Nottingham that the IRA would have been beaten in a matter of months were it not for political interference from Whitehall. Afterwards it was suggested that it was not merely the St John’s Ambulance Brigade that brought the General to Nottingham – it was also the town in which one Maurice Tugwell was stationed. Tugwell was a former head of Information Policy in the Six Counties. Nottingham is not exactly the focal point of the information highway; nevertheless, as Robert Fisk wrote afterwards, King’s comments reached the papers ‘with extraordinary speed’.11
To follow the details of this campaign by British security force personnel against their own elected leaders would be fascinating, but outside the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that the MRF was but one of a myriad of similar operations created with a similar objective: to gain, and act on, intelligence in such a way as to destroy the IRA by fair means or foul. To paraphrase the 1920 letter: things were still ‘a fearful mess’. For example, though I have already described the effect of internment in 1971, I think that, in the context of intelligence-gathering, the following is worth reproducing:
The next fortnight saw a huge batch of wholesale arrests in Dublin. Big internment camps were started for Sinn Fein prisoners at Ballykinlar, in the North, and at the Curragh. Whole neighbourhoods in the city were ‘combed out’, street by street, and practically house by house, and every young man against whom there was a shadow of suspicion was sent to an internment camp. Under the circumstances it was amazing to see how little damage was done to the Volunteers by these manoeuvres. Most of the Dublin fighting men were already taking the precautions of not sleeping at their homes, and so evaded capture.12
That was written by a colleague of Michael Collins, Piaras Beaslai, about an internment round-up which took place fifty years before that of 1971, but with remarkably similar, ineffectual, results. From certain British points of view, the problem was the same. William Craig informed Kevin McNamara that ‘the information he had from MI5, which he had got as Minister for Home Affairs, said that the civil rights movement was riddled with IRA’.13 How was the problem to be combated? Much the same formula was evolved in the post-1971 years as had been arrived at in earlier times. The army were used to the extent that public opinion would allow, and then reined back, generally after a bout of bad publicity, in favour of a police-based operation. In both the Collins and Provisional phase of hostilities the war between the British and Irish forces was not a matter of pitched battles between uniformed soldiers, but a contest, often a fearful one, between two sets (on the British side a multiplicity of sets) of secret services.
The British Army was visible – uniforms and armoured vehicles abounded on the streets in both sets of conflicts – but it had a limited practical value in operational terms and some decided drawbacks in the all-important propaganda war. Sinn Fein, for example, were able to make particularly good use of the SAS’s activities in the Republicans’ PR campaign. As one authority has stated: ‘The Regiment’s acronym became associated with every mysterious happening. It acquired a mystique equal to that of the hated and feared Black and Tans.’14 And, one might add, not without good reason. The activities of the SAS will be described later (see p. 341). Here it is sufficient to note that one result of this malign mystique was that the chant of ‘the primacy of the police’ became so irresistible that the concept of a ‘police war’ was dusted off and refurbished. The British were again portrayed, just as in Collins’ time, as dealing not with politically motivated violence but with Mafia-style ‘godfathers’ and ‘racketeers’; in short, the doctrine of criminalisation was adopted as an arm of security policy. Along with this there went, as we have seen, a bending of the legal code to produce the ‘conveyor belt’ system. When even this did not produce the required results, the ‘supergrass’ system was introduced. Paid informers signed whatever statements the police required in order to obtain convictions. Censorship was employed, as was the hotly debated, frequently denied, policy of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. In other words, whether officially or no, intelligence, and sometimes weapons and training, were placed at the disposal of Loyalist paramilitaries so that people targeted by the security forces were eliminated without any smoking guns being left around.
In a strange way, perhaps deriving from the nature of the conflict, perhaps from something deeper in the nature of man, the various forces in the field tended to react to the duress of the circumstances in similar fashion. Both the British/Unionist security forces and those of the Republicans and the Loyalists were riven by rivalries which must have detracted from their respective abilities to pursue their stated objectives. On the British side the divisions were caused by two major factors: cultural differences and interservice rivalry. So far as we know, unlike the feuds in the Loyalist and Republican ranks, these did not lead to actual blood-letting, but the bureaucratic infighting appears to have been ferocious. The British and Unionist security personnel impacted on each other with the same abrasion that characterised the arrival of British civil servants amongst their Stormont counterparts. And from the outset there were difficulties between the heads of the army and the RUC. For example, I found that, unprompted, senior military personnel voiced criticisms of Sir Arthur Young’s view of his role as RUC Chief Constable.
Subsequently, morale problems within the badly shaken RUC, unwillingness to share information, and rows over who was in control, the army or the RUC, contributed to the tensions. From the time of the Ulsterisation, normalisation and criminalisation policy formulations in the mid-seventies it had become obvious that, if the conflict was to be Vietnamised and the natives were to do the fighting, then the much-talked-about ‘primacy of the police’ would have to become a reality. The policy was officially instituted in 1976. But if one had to point to a watershed date as a result of which the police actually wrested real power from the army I would select 27 August 1979.
This was the day of the slaughters at Warrenpoint and Mullaghmore which wiped out, amongst others, eighteen paratroopers and Lord Mountbatten. Lieutenant-General Timothy Creasey, the GOC, attempted to use Margaret Thatcher’s visit to the Six Counties in the wake of Warrenpoint to lobby her to restore military primacy. Thatcher in fact had visited the province as a result of the crise de moral which Warrenpoint engendered. General Creasey, known as ‘the Bull’ in military circles, ‘freaked out’, according to one report.15 His position was exactly the same as that of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson during the Collins era. Then too the thought was that the terrorists could be defeated by the army if only the politicians showed the necessary will to declare all-out war on the IRA.16 Wilson ultimately ended up advising the new Six County Government on the formation of the RUC, and was later shot on Michael Collins’ instructions. Creasey was luckier than Wilson in escaping a like fate, but he lost the war over police supremacy. Mrs Thatcher turned to the force Wilson had established, rather than the one Creasey commanded, to deal with the situation. She accepted the arguments of Kenneth Newman, the head of the RUC, who asked her for an extra 1, 000 men. An all-out war as advocated by Creasey was not a political or a PR option. Newman got his extra police.
However, there was much bad blood as a result between the army and the RUC, to say nothing of the various undercover units. On the suggestion of Frank Cooper, the Iron Lady prised the former head of MI6, Maurice Oldfield, out of his retirement at All Souls College, Oxford, in October 1979, to act as a peacemaker. Oldfield, who had earlier experience of Northern Ireland, was given the official title of Security Co-ordinator. He is said to have had a soothing effect during his brief interlude in Ireland, but he died the following year. As we will see later, he was allowed neither to die nor rest in peace. Ruffled feathers were also smoothed by the departures of both Creasey and Newman within the same period. The redoubtable Jack Hermon succeeded Newman, who became Commandant of the Police Staff College and later Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Creasey was succeeded by Lieutenant-General Richard Lawson of the Royal Tank Regiment. Whether General Lawson’s experience of armoured warfare was reckoned to have fitted him more for the situation in the streets of Belfast or for that obtaining between the rival security forces was not stated. Although the policy was to generate much controversy as to whose finger was actually on the trigger, the police’s or the army’s, it did have positive advantages from the British point of view, cutting down army casualties and, politically, making it easier to extract from Dublin Gardai co-operation with the RUC than would have been the case with the army. Personalities apart, a principal source of friction between the army and the RUC was intelligence-gathering. Colin Wallace, who was involved in army intelligence himself at the time, once wrote that:
To understand fully the complexities… that existed in Northern Ireland… one would need to have a detailed knowledge of conflicts and rivalries that plagued the Intelligence community at the time. The 1973/4 period was particularly critical because it was, in my opinion, a watershed in the battle for supremacy between MI5 and the SIS (MI6). In UK the problems associated with the increase in international terrorism, the miners’ strike, the 3-day week, alleged increases in power and influence by Left Wing activists all had a profound effect on the roles of these two services. In Northern Ireland the chief intelligence post was given to an MI5 officer… much to the chagrin of the SIS… There was a strong difference of opinion between MI5 and the SIS over who should have overall responsibility for the Irish problem – particularly in the case of operations in the Republic. To make matters worse, the two services regarded Army Intelligence as amateurs and the RUC Special Branch as totally unreliable.
Normally the SIS (Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6) served abroad, and MI5 at home, but the difficulties about defining whether the Six Counties were part of the ‘UK mainland’ or the ‘UK overseas’ had resulted in MI6 taking over, or rather being given the turf, after the 1971 internment fiasco. Heath overcame the objections of Sir Maurice Oldfield that MI6 should not become involved. Oldfield’s preference was for political-type activity. He favoured the planting of long-term informers and ordered MI6 to desist from the use of assassination as a tool worldwide. It was not until the period described by Wallace that MI5 won the battle, having begun to ‘invade’ the province from the time in 1972 when the IRA started to extend its bombing campaign to the ‘UK mainland’. The outcome of these rivalries in Ireland, according to two experts, Dorrill and Ramsay, corroborates Wallace’s opinion:
By 1973, the British state [the ‘state’ referred to is the powerful underworld linkage of the intelligence community and the security forces] had introduced into Ireland its standard counter-insurgency kit, developed in the Empire in the post-war era. The Army undercover units, Army intelligence, IRD (Information Research Department), MI5 and MI6 – and the RUC, RUC Special Branch and the Ulster Defence Regiment – were all jostling each other in this tiny patch, deployed against an enemy whose ‘territory’ consisted of a handful of housing estates and a strip along the Border with the Republic.17
Two points should be noted here. First, the IRA’s strength was, and is, somewhat greater than the foregoing would suggest. For example, in parts of Tyrone, which does not lie along the border, an IRA man on the run would probably be safer than he would in the Republic. Secondly, the area we are talking about is relatively tiny – the entire Six Counties is only the size of Yorkshire, which must say something about the efficiency of the British military effort in Northern Ireland. Nevertheless, Dorrill and Ramsay’s description of the security forces’ overlapping is accurate enough. The authoritative Mark Urban has noted: ‘…distrust and rivalry between the Army and RUC was to plague the whole anti-terrorist campaign’.18 The body which was supposed to eliminate these differences was the Northern Ireland Security Policy Committee.
Two major new players joined this committee in 1976: Roy Mason, who succeeded Merlyn Rees as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland; and Kenneth Newman, the Chief Constable of the RUC. The latter faced a rather different police landscape from that which had confronted Sir Arthur Young. From 1976 on, the RUC began to develop ‘a variety of specialist surveillance and firearms units of its own’.19 Mason, the key figure on the committee, was security-oriented, remembered in Belfast as being uninterested in political activity and in favour of economic expenditure on the area, combined with a tough policy towards the IRA. This was summed up by his resonant declaration that he intended to squeeze the IRA ‘like a tube of toothpaste’.20 The year after Mason arrived he was joined on the security committee by two army commanders who shared his outlook towards the IRA. They were the GOC, General Creasey, and Major-General Richard Trant, Commander Land Forces (CLF). This high-powered quartet, together with another forceful personality, Jack Hermon, combined on the NISPC to step up the level of covert operations in the province.
In military terms these operations probably did attain a degree of success. One can only speculate as to what the IRA’s reorganisation and regrouping in the cell system/Green Book era would have achieved without the NISPC’s operations. However, this type of underground warfare, conducted in what was portrayed as a west European democracy, was doomed inevitably to attract publicity, criticism and controversy. As a British general who conducted counterinsurgency operations put it to me: ‘It gets dirty when you get down to that level.’ The level the general was referring to may be thought of as the Deniable Zone. For several years it was denied that ‘dirty tricks’ were an integral part of security policy. The notion that there could be collusion between the security forces and Loyalist paramilitaries was scoffed at. So too were Nationalist claims that the RUC and the army were operating a shoot-to-kill policy in which targeted IRA men, and sometimes innocent people who were mistaken for IRA men, were summarily ‘taken out’ by the forces of law and order.
Throughout the seventies and eighties these and related claims of security force brutality were well documented by a group of priests, acting either separately or together. These were Fr Brian Brady, Fr Denis Faul and Fr Raymond Murray. Between them they produced a flood of pamphlets and dossiers on human rights abuses by the security forces – and sometimes, particularly in the case of Fr Faul, by the IRA. No student of the troubles can overlook their courageous, exhaustive, and exhausting, work. Fr Brady for example was a pioneer in the field of job equality. His ideas were taken up by Nationalist politicians and eventually led to the setting-up of the north’s Fair Employment Agency. It was he too who conceived the idea of the MacBride Principles, governing American investment in the Six Counties. Sean MacBride agreed to lend his name to the scheme after a visit from Brady. Though often denied and resisted, sometimes by their own conservative, episcopal superiors, the claims of ill-treatment by the three priests gradually forced their way on to the agendas of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin, civil rights agencies such as Amnesty International and the Association for Legal Justice, and, probably most tellingly, Irish-American activists.
The shoot-to-kill incidents generally tended to occur as a result of the mounting of stake-outs or checkpoints. After the fusillades died away it would be alleged that the dead had opened fire when challenged to put up their hands, or perhaps had driven past the checkpoints, firing at the security personnel, or somesuch. In any event, only insiders realised that the deaths resulting from these sanguinary encounters usually included prominent IRA activists such as a local OC, or a much-wanted sniper or bomber. Usually, but not inevitably. To give but one example: sixteen-year-old John Boyle, shot dead in broad daylight by the SAS on 11 July 1978, had nothing whatever to do with the IRA. He had entered a graveyard out of curiosity to examine an arms cache which his family had reported finding to the police. Although he then went on to acquit the soldiers involved Mr Justice Lowry found, on 4 July 1979, that after the teenager’s death the soldiers had emptied the contents of the bag containing the guns on to the ground to make it appear that the lad had been shot moving the cache. The judge said:
The Army and Soldier A [in such cases it is common practice to refer to soldiers by letters of the alphabet only, so as to protect their identities] and the patrol gravely mishandled the operation because they shot an innocent boy who, whether he was holding a gun or no, had no capacity to harm them.21
Cornelius Boyle, the boy’s father, told friends22 afterwards that he felt the police had let him down. They should have warned him that a stake-out was mounted after he reported the cache. Had they done so he said his son would still be alive. But speaking about the army he said: ‘I have little to say about the army. They have not deviated one inch from the path ever trod by their predecessors in Ireland.’ It was a sentiment many Nationalists would have echoed. However, in shoot-to-kill cases, outsiders, particularly Unionist and Tory outsiders, tended to share the views of another prominent Northern Ireland judge, Lord Justice Gibson. Acquitting three RUC officers of murder, Gibson commended them for having brought three men, shot dead at a roadblock, to ‘the final court of justice’.23
The most significant figures involved in publicising the ‘dirty tricks’ and ‘shoot-to-kill’ policies are two former army operatives, Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd, and three senior British detectives, John Stalker, Colin Sampson and John Stevens. All, undeniably, spoke from a position of having inside experience of how the system worked. I will therefore confine discussion of the policies to matters concerning them and exclude allegations emanating from Nationalist circles. I am also excluding the examination of Loyalist claims, of which there are many. These range from well-known UDA figures like the former soldier, Albert Wallace Baker – from whom Fr Faul took lengthy and disturbing statements concerning army involvement in unacknowledged deaths – to contacts of my own who, over the years, have given examples of collusion between some branches of the security forces. Baker, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1973 for a series of robberies, mutilations and murders, was allowed to serve his sentence in England. Here, in addition to being interviewed by Fr Faul, he gave a tape-recorded interview24 to the Labour MP, Ken Livingstone, in the course of which he said that RUC weapons were given to the UDA ‘on higher authority’. He gave details of an assassination carried out ‘with police guns and machine-guns – Sterling sub-machine guns’. Apart from such dramatic statements concerning the illegal disposal of material to known killers, I have been supplied with lesser details, which nevertheless indicate Loyalist paramilitary collusion with the security forces. For example, I was given the name of a military installation where one notorious UDA figure, reckoned to have notched up some thirty murders, could be seen regularly filling up his car with free petrol. Such small anecdotes can speak volumes.
All of the five security figures mentioned above were in their turn involved in events which created massive publicity. All must have endured a greater or lesser degree of frustration as a result of their work in Northern Ireland; certainly the three detectives did. Initially, at least, the authorities failed to act on the findings of Sampson and Stevens. Holroyd, Stalker and Wallace all suffered severe reverses in their careers. Wallace actually served a prison term for manslaughter on what he avers was a trumped-up charge.
This is how his saga began. In the early stages of the Troubles the Foreign Office sent to Northern Ireland a team of psychological warfare experts who had worked in other colonial trouble spots.25 They were members of the Information Research Department (IRD). One of their number, Hugh Mooney, was seconded to the army to set up a psychological warfare unit. It carried out what was known in Brigadier Kitson’s terminology as ‘information policy’, operating from Army HQ in Lisburn under the guise of the Army Press Office. Colin Wallace was officially described as the Senior Information Officer (Psychological Operations), Army HQ. He was a member of the Northern Ireland Information Co-ordinating Committee. At various times he posed as a member of the UDR and as a barrister involved in the Bloody Sunday Tribunal set up under Lord Widgery. In plain language, information policy, from 1971 onwards, meant engaging in professional lying. Wallace was one of its principal exponents. But, unlike those around him in the IRD world, he was an Ulsterman. This fact may have had a bearing on what befell him.
Until his career fell apart, Wallace had been a highly successful operator. For example, he was so successful in planting propaganda on one journalist, who figured large in the Belfast media circus, that the man’s life was threatened by the IRA. He had published a story concocted by Wallace describing IRA ‘embezzlement’. Wallace had to secrete the journalist in Butlin’s Bognor Regis holiday camp until the fuss died down. He became internationally known through his dealings with the hordes of correspondents who swarmed into Belfast as the Troubles gathered momentum. Wallace later described information policy as containing, apart from normal press briefing, the following function:
Information policy… was seen as a counter-propaganda organisation dealing in white information. It did have a… totally undeniable role in which black operations popularly known as dirty tricks were used. Being the only unit of its kind in the province, the Information Policy undertook other assignments for other agencies such as the Northern Ireland Office, the RUC, etc….26
Some of the ‘other assignments’ included preparing a bogus speech for Merlyn Rees in which he inveighed against the savagery of the IRA internees who had deliberately burned police dogs to death when they burned their huts at Long Kesh. In fact the only dogs ever killed in the conflict were shot by army snipers in the Ballymurphy area of Belfast because their barking betrayed the presence of army patrols. The Rees speech was concocted with an eye to the British dog-loving public. Other planted stories included ‘eyewitness’ accounts of IRA units raping girls at gunpoint. Some were said to have been made pregnant. Wallace, a cool, self-controlled individual who relaxed by doing parachute jumps, was dismissed for allegedly passing a classified document to Robert Fisk, then the Times correspondent in Belfast. At the time of writing he was working on what he described as ‘management consultancy, engaged in the selection and training of graduates’.27 Fisk in fact never saw the document which the authorities claimed Wallace attempted to leak to him.28 He was in London, making arrangements in connection with a transfer to the foreign desk which had been agreed some time earlier. He had just been named Journalist of the Year and intended to round this out by writing two major stories: one a series on the fact that the army were running undercover death squads; the other that there was a ‘black propaganda’ unit operating out of Lisburn.
I have known and admired Fisk and his work for more than twenty-five years; Wallace I only met as a result of my researches for this book. He was obviously conspiracy-minded, but he impressed me as a sane, rational individual. The following account is based on what Wallace told me.
Towards the end of 1974, Lisburn became aware that both sets of paramilitaries, Loyalist and Republican, had been giving indications to journalists of the existence of collusion with death squads. At this stage there was a lot of leaking to journalists; partly because of the RUC/army rivalry. But partly also because of a general unhappiness amongst some of the more morally conscious in both police and army. I have known journalists to receive unsolicited information of a highly sensitive nature from officers who had decided that their reporting made them trustworthy. One reporter, stopped at what appeared to be a routine army checkpoint, suddenly found himself being handed a classified document and told: ‘You know we’re being pulled out.’ In another incident an unidentified RUC Special Branch man pulled alongside a prominent journalist and began reading to him from a diary specific examples of army misbehaviour. Apparently the RUC man was angered by some of the army shootings which had taken place shortly before.
Fisk’s investigations into ‘dirty tricks’ and the use of black propaganda were potentially fissionable in this uncertain climate. It was decided that, if leaks had reached such proportions that there was a prospect of the Journalist of the Year writing in the London Times about things which had even been kept from the ears of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, then special measures were called for. The army’s civilian PR head, Peter Broderick, had already tried to report Fisk to The Times as a ‘hostile reporter’.29 According to Wallace it was decided to deal with the affair by staging what was described as a ‘study day’ on psychological warfare.
The study day, held in mid-January 1975, was supposed to be under the auspices of General Peter Leng, then Commander Land Forces. It was attended by various branches of the security forces, including the RUC. It was said at the time that the RUC would be most likely to leak details of what transpired. Wallace did not attend the study day, but he wrote the script for it. The picture of psychological warfare which was to emerge from the carefully crafted seminar was bland, and dealt mainly with the use of information. There was no indication that the army went in for disinformation, black propaganda or dirty tricks, nothing sinister. Wallace’s understanding of the operation was that, being conducted with apparent secrecy, it would give the desired impression of what the army press section was doing when leaked to the media. Wallace later talked to Fisk about the sanitised version of information policy and promised to deliver the script to him. He says he cleared this with his superiors.
At the time the study day was held, Wallace, like Fisk, was also preparing to leave Belfast. He had been posted to Preston, to serve at Army HQ, North West, and had thrown a farewell party. On the day he was leaving, he drove first to the docks to place his belongings aboard a ship for Liverpool. He realised he was being followed, and thinking his shadowers were terrorists pulled into an army installation, Tyrone House, on the Malone Road, to phone Lisburn, but when he came out the car had disappeared. He says he then carried on to Hillsborough, to push the envelope containing the script through Fisk’s letter box. Outside the house was a post office van containing what Wallace now believes to have been members of MI5. He took up his Preston posting early in February and was visited soon afterwards by a sergeant and an inspector from the RUC investigating the Fisk incident.
Wallace says now that he thinks the entire study day operation was a ‘sting’ aimed at himself. He says he had earlier fallen out with his superiors over other dirty tricks he disapproved of, principally the Kincora House scandal and the ‘Clockwork Orange’ operation. Clockwork Orange involved stratagems such as falsifying ‘IRA records’ to show misappropriation of funds, involvement with communism and other pieces of disinformation. He says that this falsification involved producing bogus Sinn Fein Ard Fheis resolutions, also designed to show a pro-communist slant, and that these efforts were not confined to the Republicans. The Orange paramilitaries were subject to the same treatment. For example, the Tara organisation was used to fabricate links between the UVF and communism. He alleges that the dirty tricks went even further afield, linking both Stan Orme and Merlyn Rees with left-wing groups through the operations of the Housing Executive, and involving the forging of CIA identity cards.
The RUC told Fisk that a neighbour of his had seen a document while in his house. Fisk did not believe this story and refused to accompany three RUC officers, and instead asked the officers to read back the notes which they were making of the interview so that he could tape them!30 They were understandably nonplussed, as readers will deduce for themselves when they come to read about Castlereagh (see p. 325): this was not how RUC men from Castlereagh interrogation centre were accustomed to conducting their interviews. Fisk added to their confusion by asking them to show him the document. They could only show him its heading, marked ‘Confidential’. The police left after Fisk agreed to go to Castlereagh in his own time.
Instead he packed his files and notes and headed south. Across the border he phoned his boss, Charles Douglas-Home, the editor of The Times, to say that something strange was happening. He then booked into Jury’s Hotel, Dublin. What he did not do was phone the British Embassy. The next evening, however, he received a visit from Michael Daly, who described himself as First Secretary of the British Embassy but who was thought by the Irish security authorities of the time to be an MI6 agent. Fisk was later to be informed by an Irish diplomat that Daly had raised eyebrows by abruptly departing from an official dinner shortly beforehand. He certainly caused Fisk to raise his when he explained his mission.
Daly said that he had reason to believe that Fisk was ‘in possession of documents the property of Her Majesty’s Government’.31 Obviously there was panic at a high level that Fisk had got his hands on something more explosive than a document dealing with the study day. It is quite possible that Wallace did push such a report through Fisk’s door, but that someone else retrieved it and substituted something stronger.
At all events I have been told that the document which the police were worried about dealt with Kincora. Daly wanted Fisk to take him to his room, but instead Fisk threatened to call the police to have Daly charged with threatening behaviour. Daly left, and Fisk informed the Irish diplomatic service what had happened. His safety in the Republic was guaranteed and he stayed on in Dublin for another two weeks. During this time his editor approached Merlyn Rees, who said the affair was ‘a police matter’. Fisk himself got word to the RUC, threatening that if they had set up the document’s ‘discovery’, then this would amount to a conspiracy to commit breaking and entering.
As he had also publicised Daly’s approaches in the Times, the pressures bore fruit. A mysterious invitation to tea with the RUC Chief Constable was pushed under his hotel bedroom door. Fisk checked that the invitation was real and drove to Belfast. The tea passed off swimmingly. Nothing was said about what had gone before and Fisk was granted the privilege of spending a night on tour with the RUC’s Special Patrol Group. Douglas-Home suggested that it would be a good idea for Fisk to stay on in Belfast for a couple of months before taking up his new posting so that it could not be said that he had been pulled out of Belfast as a result of the affair.
During this time Fisk managed to get his hands on a parachute officer’s report on another house Fisk had occupied, ‘complete with furnishings and wallpaper but that was about all’.32 He also spoke to the person who was supposed to have gone into his house, who confirmed that the RUC had made the approach to go into the house to ‘discover’ the Wallace document. Fisk’s assessment of the affair was that it was an army/RUC ‘sting’ designed to nobble both himself and Wallace under the Official Secrets Act. This would have rendered Wallace liable to prosecution and prevented Fisk from writing about what had happened. Both men could then have been easily smeared by the information policy operators at Lisburn and there would have been plenty of time to unearth, or plant, whatever other classified documents had allegedly gone missing.
Fisk later had the satisfaction of revealing some highly sensitive information concerning information policy, including the fact that the dirty tricks brigade at Lisburn had been forging journalists’ press passes. Fisk also established that a committee, known as the Information Co-ordinating Committee, had been set up at Stormont, under Michael Cudlipp, which had decided, amongst other things, to use details about ‘the personal lives of extremist leaders’ to discredit them in the eyes of their supporters.33 One of the dossiers described by Fisk consisted of information about Americans alleged to be supporters of the IRA. The dossier gave their names, home telephone numbers and addresses. It also contained titillating information such as the fact that one of those named had ‘40 adulteries during a three month period’. It was the army’s decision to generate details about the personal lives of not only ‘extremist leaders’ but also politicians and community leaders that led to setting up the rent-a-boy ring, drawn from boys’ homes in the Six Counties, and to the Kincora scandal described below.
Wallace’s subsequent career can be traced through the world’s headlines, and a mountain of filmed interviews.34 In September of 1980, while he was working as Chief Information Officer to Arun District Council in Sussex, he was charged with the manslaughter of Jonathan Lewis, a Brighton antique dealer. Wallace had been having an affair with his wife, Jane. The Duke of Norfolk, a former army intelligence officer with the Ministry of Defence, offered to give bail for him. Wallace’s wife, Eileen, was the Duke’s secretary. The following March Wallace received a ten-year sentence. Readers can learn more of the story from Paul Foot’s book, Who Framed Colin Wallace.35 It should preferably be read in conjunction with that of the former British intelligence operative Peter Wright, Spycatcher,36 whose publication Margaret Thatcher tried to prevent. Between the two books there emerges a picture of skulduggery and partly out-of-control intelligence agencies operating in an England in decline. A combination of the old-boy network and the power of the British security establishment, both of which have strong links to the media, facilitated the spread of disinformation about anything they wished to target, including their own Labour government, with a view to keeping themselves in business.
A principal smear was that the Comintern had Wilson and his cabinet in their pay. Speaking of the period between the two elections of 1974, Marcia Falkender, Wilson’s much-discussed secretary, said with feeling: ‘It is difficult to write about those few months without inviting a charge of paranoia.’37
Robert Fisk, who covered the situation on the ground in the Six Counties, recalled that it was
a time when naval officers allegedly booed Wilson on a visit to a Royal Navy vessel and when Charles Douglas-Home, the then Home Editor of The Times… was able to suggest in The Times, in all seriousness, that British officers might in some circumstances consider mutinying against the Labour government (I even think that it was the same period that Cecil King asked Mountbatten if he’d like to run the country…).38
When I asked him how it felt to serve such a sentence in the circumstances, Wallace replied laconically: ‘They were seven long years.’39 Their length, however, has not made him any the less inclined to fight his case. He is suing the Attorney-General and still defends startling claims about the shoot-to-kill policy in the Six Counties such as those contained in a letter he wrote in 1986 to the Labour MP, Peter Archer:
During the first six months of 1975 thirty-five Roman Catholics were assassinated in Ulster. The majority of these were killed by members of the security forces or loyalist paramilitary groups such as the UVF, UFF, PAF, UDA, etc., working as agents of the security services and supplied with weapons by the security forces.40
In conversation with me, Wallace went even further than this, giving chapter and verse of how, to protect a particularly nasty piece of collusion, the authorities connived at the murder of an RUC sergeant who had begun to pursue the case. Wallace named the man whom he said had carried out the murder, a notorious UDA hit man in the Lurgan–Portadown area. The unsavoury affair involved another RUC death, that of an inspector who was driven to commit suicide. ‘The RUC is not clean, ’ said Wallace musingly.
The case of Fred Holroyd has also received enormous publicity. Ironically enough a major TV expose of his case, by Duncan Campbell and Christopher Hird in a Diverse Reports programme, was screened on Channel Four on the evening (2 May 1984) of the publication of the North of Ireland Forum Report in Dublin.41 The juxtaposition provided a classic illustration of the contrast between real life – and death – in the Deniable Zone and the talking-shop activities of politicians, largely carried on for the benefit of the optics.
In 1974–5, Holroyd was a captain in military intelligence on undercover attachment to the RUC Special Branch unit in Portadown. He also worked closely with the HQ of the army’s 3rd Brigade which was responsible for the Republican stronghold of South Armagh and carried out assignments for MI6, who had a unit at Army HQ in Lisburn known as ‘the political secretariat’. He was thus in a cockpit position to know exactly how the war was being waged. One of those who saw how in turn Holroyd waged his part of that war, RUC Assistant Chief Constable Charles Rogers, described him as ‘…a man of unquestionable loyalty, outstanding courage with a devotion to duty that one looks for but rarely finds today’.42 It was said that he had a success record against terrorists that ‘had not been equalled before or since’ his period of service.43
That service came to an end in 1975, apparently as a result of the MI6 war with MI5. The SIS chief in the Six Counties at the time, Craig Smellie, was also transferred in 1975 (to Athens, to take over its station there). Holroyd’s downfall may have occurred because Smellie asked him to brief him on his activities without telling his superiors. Holroyd did tell his boss and found himself the piggy in the middle in the resultant crossfire. He was peremptorily transferred from his post in the Six Counties on the grounds that he needed psychiatric treatment which could only be supplied in a British hospital. He resigned his commission in 1976 and joined the Rhodesian Army.
Subsequently he became increasingly bitter at his treatment, and at the pressures which he felt were brought to bear on employers who might otherwise have given him jobs commensurate with his previous status. During 1994–5 when I had knowledge of his circumstances he was working as a £3-an-hour security guard. He showed me army-issue utensils and items such as coffee, tea, and packet soups supplied by friends at the nearby paratroop base. Only this sort of help, he said, had enabled him to survive on his return to England from Rhodesia. Amongst the disclosures which he felt driven to make on the Channel Four programme as a result of his experiences were: that Loyalist killers were deliberately allowed to go unpunished; that British forces carried out kidnappings, snatching wanted men from the Republic; that sometimes the security forces deliberately allowed operations which they had foreknowledge of to go ahead so as to discredit the IRA, thereby putting civilian lives at risk; that similarly, instead of capturing weaponry and explosives found in IRA dumps, they would sabotage the material so that it would booby-trap its owners; that the security forces carried out acts of intimidation, such as sending threatening letters containing bullets to civil rights activists; and that they carried out bank raids and conducted illegal break-ins.
I can certainly testify to the truth of some of these charges. For example, I know that Sean McKenna, the hunger-striker whose condition caused the calling-off of the first big IRA hunger strike, was kidnapped at Christmas 1980 by the SAS from the Republic and brought across the border, thus fetching up in the H Blocks. The existence of a shoot-to-kill policy, sometimes involving Loyalist paramilitaries, will, I think, hardly be disputed after reading this chapter, nor indeed can one doubt that acts of intimidation and activities such as bank robberies also took place in view of what happened during the H Block protest and the Littlejohn saga, for example. Where dirty tricks are concerned, there are those who might demur at entering in this category one of Holroyd’s ruses concerning a Catholic woman informant in Lurgan. In effect he reversed the IRA’s ‘honey-trap’ enticement of sometimes using women to lure unsuspecting soldiers not to bed but to the tomb. In return for information, he had the woman’s sexual needs attended to at regular intervals by soldiers who added a new dimension to the term ‘volunteering for service’.
But there can be no dispute about including in the dirty tricks category the deliberate derailing of a train in a Catholic area of Portadown, after the army and the RUC were informed that it contained an IRA bomb.44 The bomb failed to go off, thus frustrating the hope that it might have killed Catholics and thus discredited the IRA.
Holroyd was also telling the truth when he cited as a dirty trick the case of Eugene McQuaid, who was blown up while ‘doing a turn’, ferrying an IRA rocket on his motorbike. The explosion was not accidental. Having learned of the rocket’s existence in a dump south of the border, the British Army, instead of tipping off the Gardai, crossed the border secretly and doctored the explosives so that they became highly volatile. Thus, on the morning of 5 October 1974, as he drove along the busy main road to the bustling, predominantly Catholic town of Newry, McQuaid in fact constituted a serious danger to himself and to the public. The bomb went off, blowing him to pieces, after he had executed a sudden U-tum on spotting an army checkpoint, which he could just as easily have destroyed. By chance I drove past about ten minutes after the explosion. Pieces of McQuaid’s body were being covered with sheets and there were dozens of armed soldiers on the road and in the fields around, all obviously in a high state of alert. Not the place to pull up. But rounding the first corner after the scene, about two hundred yards away, I saw an RUC man and slowed to ask him what had happened. Had there been an explosion? He looked at me hard and then, speaking with a distinctly hostile air, made a response which symbolises the entire official policy towards dirty tricks. ‘Explosion, what explosion? I didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything. I mind my own business…’
Obviously officialdom was also keen to discredit Holroyd and Wallace’s claims. A major effort in this direction appeared, surprisingly, or perhaps cleverly enough, in the London Independent. The paper’s Northern Ireland correspondent, David McKittrick, came into possession, or was fed, information which caused him to write a lengthy piece challenging some of the Holroyd/Wallace evidence.45 In particular he disputed a claim by Holroyd that he had heard from Captain Robert Nairac’s own lips a boast that this famous (or, if one is a Republican, infamous) young officer had crossed the border to kill a prominent IRA man called John Francis Green. Holroyd claimed that Nairac had given him a Polaroid picture which he had taken of Green after he had killed him. Green’s death was one of the reasons the 1975 IRA ceasefire finally ended. MI6 had helped to engineer the truce; MI5 wanted it broken down.
Wallace complained to the Press Council that the Independent articles had contained inaccuracies about him. His complaint was upheld. Later, in 1990, the Calcutt Inquiry, set up under David Calcutt QC, found that Wallace had been unjustly dismissed, and said that his appeal against being fired had been rejected after the Ministry of Defence had contacted the appeal board. Calcutt recommended that Wallace receive compensation. Holroyd too received a small gesture of atonement, indicating that his departure from the army was not what was claimed. The ‘mental stability’ allegation was expunged from his record. Another indication that the pair could have been the victims of disinformation came from Archie Hamilton, Minister for the Armed Forces, in reply to a parliamentary question, when he announced the setting-up of the Calcutt Inquiry. He said:
It has not since the mid-1970s been the policy to disseminate disinformation in Northern Ireland in ways designed to denigrate individuals and/or organisations for propaganda purposes.46
Decoded, that means the Government was at least admitting there was a disinformation policy in operation at the material time. But it also marked a further effort to convince public opinion that the dirty tricks campaign had been an aberration which had now concluded. Information was leaked to the Sunday Times and the Guardian in 1977 which led the Guardian to conclude: ‘…the so-called “dirty tricks” department seems to have all but ceased operations in 1975. There is little evidence of organised skulduggery after that.’47
There was in fact a great deal of ‘organised skulduggery after that’. In saying this, I am not attempting to evaluate the claims of Holroyd and Wallace. I am concerned to show two things: first, the nature of the war in Northern Ireland; secondly the fact that despite efforts to discredit both men, the policies they spoke of continued in operation after their departure from Northern Ireland, right up to the ending of hostilities in 1994. Let us for a moment allow for the possibility that either, or both, men could be malicious, misinformed or simply mistaken. Are we to believe that then, after Holroyd and Wallace’s service in the Six Counties had long ended, successive teams of detectives, led by experienced, respected English policemen, were also wrong and malicious? I think not. Certainly, whatever evil was going on in Northern Ireland in the world of counterinsurgency, it worked a powerful alchemy. Michael Bettaney, the MI5 officer who was involved in counterinsurgency at Stormont from 1976 to 1978, went to jail in 1984 for twenty-three years for passing secrets to the Russians. His rethinking of his attitude to his government was stated by the Guardian to have been caused by his Belfast duties. The paper said: ‘The experience set off an emotional and intellectual earthquake in him and he began to have serious doubts about the British role in Northern Ireland.’48
Before discussing the activities of the policemen concerned, an attitude of distrust towards the north’s courts system, widely prevalent in the security forces, has to be borne in mind. The army, realising that the Diplock courts, in the absence of juries, were unlikely to convict soldiers accused of killing a civilian ‘in the line of duty’, saw little virtue in disclosing soldiers’ identities by having them arraigned before such courts in the first place. Both the army and the RUC tended to regard the presence of lawyers in court as a source of aid and comfort to terrorists. Mark Urban, a former soldier and defence correspondent for the Independent for three years, found that:
…officers regard many of the lawyers representing suspects or the families of people shot dead by the Army as unofficial agents of the IRA. They suggest, for example, that a lawyer may agree to pass a message from a terrorist to his commander, or might use cross-examination of a security force witness in an attempt to probe whether an operation has resulted from a leak within the IRA.49
He quotes a ‘senior officer’ as saying: ‘If you go into underground warfare, you know that you will never fully be able to explain that side of life.’ Nor that side of death, it might be added. For it was these attitudes that cost the life of one of the most prominent lawyers in the Six Counties, the Nationalist solicitor, Pat Finucane. Finucane was having his evening meal with his wife and children on 12 February 1989 when Loyalist gunmen called at his Belfast home and shot him dead. Other Nationalist lawyers have received death threats.
Another area of legal procedure where the army’s views on due process demonstrably brought about change is that of coroners’ verdicts. Urban quotes Frank Kitson’s attitude to the law in a counterinsurgency situation:
Everything done by a government and its agents must be legal. But this does not mean that the government must work within exactly the same set of laws during an insurgency which existed beforehand.50
This sentiment falls squarely within the grand tradition of British justice in Ireland. The law should not be broken, merely changed. And changed it duly was in 1980. Up to that year security force shootings, including those of the SAS and of RUC undercover squads, were subject to normal inquest proceedings. Then the Conservatives directed that coroners’ rules be amended so that open verdicts could not be recorded. This meant that a coroner could no longer indicate that it was not the deceased who was responsible for his or her death. Instead coroners were restricted to ‘findings’ saying when, where and how the person had died. The change helped to increase the controversy over (and the number of) shoot-to-kill incidents. The Armagh coroner, Mr Gerard Curran, resigned (on 22 August 1984), telling the media that he was doing so because of ‘grave irregularities’ in RUC files dealing with the deaths of two INLA members, described below.
These deaths formed part of a cycle of seven killings in November and December of 1982 which moved the debate on the shoot-to-kill policy on to a new plane. Although individual responsibilities were not fixed, and the policy was continued by other elements in the security forces, notably the SAS, the ill-fated Stalker Inquiry did establish that history was repeating itself in Ireland.
In reply to the success of Michael Collins’ unit, ‘The Squad’, in wiping out informers and intelligence agents, the British formed not only ‘Captain X.Z.’–type army units, but RIC death squads also. In Dublin the principal police assassination team was led by Head Constable Igoe.51 In Belfast, the doings of Inspectors Harrison and Nixon of the (then newly formed) RUC are still remembered with horror by Catholics, acclaim in certain Loyalist circles.52 The incidents which established that latter-day Igoes and Nixons were again active were as follows.
On 11 November 1982, an RUC death squad shot dead three unarmed men at Tullygally, near Lurgan, Co. Armagh. They were Eugene Toman, Sean Burns and Gervaise McKerr. On the 24th of the month the same death squad shot another two youths, again near Lurgan, at a hayshed in Ballyneery Road North. One, a seventeen-year-old, Michael Justin Tighe, died; the other, nineteen-year-old Martin McCauley, was badly injured but recovered. Neither was armed. On 12 December another member of the squad shot two men dead ‘at a roadblock’. The dead were Seamus Grew and Roddy Carroll of the INLA; again, neither was armed.
The foregoing formed the core of the ill-fated Stalker investigation. Because of a mounting tide of adverse publicity, London was forced to concede an inquiry. John Stalker, one of the rising stars of the British police firmament – at the time Deputy Chief Constable of the Greater Manchester area – was asked, in May 1984, to head an investigation into the allegations of the existence of a shoot-to-kill policy. Too late, Stalker discovered that by accepting the invitation he had destroyed his police career. His enquiries and those of his team were resented and resisted by, amongst others, Jack Hermon, the then Chief Constable of the RUC, and he was eventually forced into resigning from the profession which he had both loved and adorned.53 Said Stalker: ‘There undoubtedly developed a strongly hostile feeling towards us at middle and senior levels of the RUC Special Branch.’54 The doings of the NISPC were not for the prying eyes of an idealistic Manchester cop. ‘Remember, Mr Stalker, you are in a jungle now’ were Hermon’s parting words to Stalker after their first meeting.55 On that occasion Hermon also surprised Stalker by handing him Stalker’s mother’s family tree, sketched on the back of a flattened cigarette package – the tree, containing the names of relations Stalker had never previously heard of, showed that she was a Catholic… However, though his official inquiry was aborted, Stalker’s efforts, and the court cases resulting from some of the shootings, chiefly those of Grew and Carroll, did establish some undeniable facts about the shoot-to-kill policy.
These included the fact that there was a linking factor in the first two fatal shootings listed above. The three dead men, Toman, Bums and McKerr, and the wounded McCauley had all been named by an informer as having being implicated in the blowing-up of three RUC men at Kinnego, near Lurgan, on 27 October 1982. As there was no other evidence against them they were never interrogated but, as Stalker says, they ‘were shot by police within the next six weeks’.56 The hayshed in which McCauley was wounded and his companion, Michael Tighe, was shot dead was the same one in which the Kinnego explosives had been stored. At McCauley’s trial the police admitted that they had told lies about having seen a gunman enter the hayshed. They had, they said, reiterated a story laid down for them by their seniors.
Moreover, the old inter-service rivalry factor reasserted itself. It transpired that, unknown to the RUC, MI5 had planted an electronic bug in the shed which had recorded the true sequence of events. However, Stalker was not allowed access to this crucial piece of evidence. Hermon at first refused to hand over the tape, and finally told him that it had been destroyed.
During his trial for the murder of Seamus Grew, of which he was acquitted (no one was charged with Carroll’s death), Constable John Robinson also stated that he had been instructed by his superiors to tell lies about the incident. It later transpired that Grew and Carroll had not been shot because of a chance roadblock, but as a result of a lengthy surveillance operation, which had involved entering the Republic, not so much to follow the two dead men as to get a line on their leader, Dominic McGlinchey, the head of the illegal Republican group, the Irish National Liberation Army (see p. 328).57 But again the deadly Keystone Cops nature of the RUC–army rivalry played a malign role in the affair.
The cover story statement put out by the RUC after the shootings of Grew and Carroll said that they had been shot after crashing a roadblock and injuring a policeman. Stalker felt that he might have been able to prove that, to bolster this story, an RUC constable was made to roll in mud so as to make it appear he had been hit by a car.58 In fact Grew and Carroll had avoided police surveillance because of yet another cock-up between the army and the RUC. There was a crash involving an undercover army car and a police car in which a policeman suffered a broken leg. The police later claimed that the policeman’s broken leg was caused by Grew and Carroll crashing the checkpoint. (The case could have been worse: in another RUC/army incident, trigger-happy RUC men shot two British soldiers dead.)59
The RUC inspector who had trailed them in the Republic seeing the crash realised that his quarry had slipped by unnoticed in the confusion. He stopped to pick up Constable Robinson, who was a member of E4A, the RUC undercover death squad which was trained by the SAS, and followed the two escaping INLA men. At Mullacreavie Park, a Catholic area of Armagh, the inspector pulled ahead of Grew and Carroll, causing them to stop. Robinson shot both men dead, emptying and reloading his revolver. Stalker comments:
The Special Branch Inspector, who had had the opportunity to see everything and knew the truth, drove off, and his evidence was kept secret from the CID investigating the deaths and from the Director of Public Prosecutions and courts. Records were altered to hide the use of undercover cars in that part of Northern Ireland.60
In fact there was another witness who ‘knew the truth’. There was a second policeman involved in the shooting. He fired a number of rounds from a .223 Ruger rifle into the car. As Michael O’Connell has commented: ‘It is a fact that the last moments of Seamus Grew and Roderick Carroll were witnessed not only by the man who killed them both, but also by another eyewitness who could have supported his version of events but did not do so.’61
John Stalker ceased to be a policeman on 13 March 1987, and the following month the IRA concluded this particular vignette of justice, Northern Ireland–style, with a car bomb which sent Mr Justice Gibson and his wife to ‘the final court of justice’. Of course the sort of incident investigated by Stalker did not end there. His inquiry was wound up, the NISPC was not. The policy-makers in Whitehall and Stormont continued in their old ways with some new variations.
As the Stalker affair had aroused not only national, but international criticism, particularly in America, a token effort was made to appease public opinion by apparently continuing his efforts to investigate the shoot-to-kill policy. Another English policeman, Colin Sampson, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, was appointed. In 1988 Sampson recommended to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Barry Shaw, that eleven members of the RUC be charged in connection with the six killings in Armagh in November and December of 1982. The DPP agreed, but the Attorney-General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, ruled that while there was prima-facie evidence of attempts to pervert the course of justice, there would be no prosecutions on the grounds of ‘national security’.62
However, the following year, 1989, the savage immorality of the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ policy burst upon the public consciousness once more in such a way as to force yet another official inquiry. This time the investigating team of British detectives was headed by John Stevens, the Deputy Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire. Their work was to establish the most revealing insight into how British intelligence operated in the Six Counties which the public had yet been afforded. In fact the public were not given the full story. Part of what follows is based on court proceedings, but some of the information given below has not hitherto been published and was supplied to me privately in the course of my researches.
The inquiry was prompted by the killing of Loughlin Maginn, on 25 August 1989. He was shot by the UDA as he sat in his home watching television. The UDA announced that he had been a Provo, but his family claimed, correctly, that he had been the innocent victim of a sectarian assassination. Stung, the UDA attempted to prove their case by publishing a leaked, top-secret security file. It was but the first of a flood of such documents which the UDA unleashed. All had clearly been supplied either by sources within the RUC or by one of the various British intelligence agencies milling around in the north’s murky underworld. Some in fact came from the army. The documents massively reinforced the claims of Catholic spokesmen who averred that the RUC were supplying information to Loyalist paramilitaries to enable them to kill Catholics. Dublin, understanding full well the implications of this disclosure, communicated its extreme displeasure to London, using the growing leverage provided by the intergovernment conference set up by the Anglo-Irish Agreement. But the UDA proceeded to rub salt into the wounds by circulating still more files and photographs to the media. Pictures of alleged IRA men given to the UDA by the army, the RUC and British intelligence were openly displayed in Loyalist Belfast.
Examination of the RUC’s files by the Stevens team led them to Brian Nelson, the UDA’s chief intelligence officer, who was also working for General Glover’s brainchild, the Force Research Unit, then headed by a ‘Colonel J.’. The Force Research Unit, apart from being an intelligence-gathering agency, is another example of the intelligence community’s tendency to bureaucratic overlap. The unit owes its existence to the belief within the army’s upper echelons that it is better at the spying business than either the RUC Special Branch or MI5. Lord Carver has stated openly in his memoirs that he would have preferred a ‘total integration of police and military intelligence’.63 But he felt that the RUC had lost the will to carry out rigorous interrogations. Independent army intelligence-gathering, however, became necessary because of ‘…the inefficiency of the RUC Special Branch, its reluctance to burn its fingers again, and the suspicion, more than once proved, that some of its members had close links with Protestant extremists’.64
Day after day Nelson had sat in the UDA headquarters collating intelligence material on a computer, controlled by the UDA leader, John McMichael. Everything that he put on to that computer was available to the security forces. I know this from a source of my own, a former member of the UDA and of the UDR, who was at the time working for the RUC Special Branch.65 He also worked with Nelson, and his reports too went on to the computer. One of the operations of which he placed a report on the computer was the result of his surveillance, south of the border, of the Irish Foreign Minister, Peter Barry, whom the UDA were planning to murder at the time in retaliation for the Anglo-Irish Agreement.
Apart from the ‘official’ UDA computer, Nelson also used a personal computer in his house to build files. Rarely can paramilitary activities have been so well documented. But his card-indexing system of Catholic and Loyalist suspects was hidden by the army to prevent the Stevens team from scanning its contents. The fact that named Catholics were being targeted for death had not led to security forces acting to save their lives. Using what in the circumstances might be termed restrained language, Mark Urban has stated: ‘…it is clear that attempts to exploit this intelligence to ambush loyalists have rarely if ever been made’.66
In a mini re-enactment of the Larne gun-running, the army allowed weapons from South Africa to be landed on the Co. Down coast in January 1988. In the three years prior to the landing the UDA are reckoned to have killed some three people only. However, after the weapons arrived the Loyalist death squads appear to have acquired not only materiel, but a mysterious expertise as well. Their training, their efficiency as killers, their ability to withstand police interrogation, all seemed to suddenly improve to a point where, prior to the IRA and Loyalist ceasefires of 1994, the Loyalist paramilitaries were claiming more victims than were the Provisional IRA. In the five years to January 1993 the Loyalist death squads succeeded in killing 160 people, using the South African weaponry. Amongst those who died were thirteen Sinn Fein members, including some councillors, the Catholic solicitor, Patrick Finucane, and the bystanders whom Loyalist gunman Michael Stone shot down in Belfast’s Milltown Cemetery as they were attending the funerals of the IRA trio who died in the SAS’s extension to Gibraltar in-March 1988 of the shoot-to-kill policy.
Was this another facet of ‘Ulsterisation’? Had someone adapted to the nineties a deadly version of Frank Kitson’s 1970s doctrine of making the Catholics glad to ‘vomit out the IRA’? As the Loyalist campaign was still in full swing when I began researching this book, I took the opportunity presented by the necessary interviews with several British decision-takers to get their views on the matter. One distinguished gentleman blandly summed up the general reaction: ‘The Catholics have been handing it out to the Loyalists and now the Loyalists are handing it out to the Catholics.’ No one could offer any assistance, however, on the question of who might have assisted in the handing-out process. Certainly the presence at UDA headquarters of Nelson, the most celebrated though far from being the only British agent in the ranks of the Loyalist paramilitaries, was not caused by a simple desire for revenge on Catholics. Nelson in fact wanted a more specific focus on known IRA men than the random assassination of innocent Catholics which the UDA were carrying out with the army’s connivance. In the course of their investigations the Stevens team were told by British officers that the UDA was used as surrogate killers.
Nelson, a former Loyalist paramilitary, who had earlier links with the FRU, had left Belfast and gone to work in Germany, but in 1986 it appears that all the British intelligence agencies’ purse strings were untied, and he returned to the Six Counties after an attractive offer from ‘Colonel J.’. The customary bout of inter-agency infighting ensued between the FRU and MI5, which had also been given more money and wanted to spend some of it on Nelson, whose pre-departure reputation still shone brightly in the murky undercover Loyalist paramilitary world. ‘Colonel J.’ won out and Nelson operated unscathed until Maginn’s death put Stevens on his trail. It was decided to arrest him and two other members of the UDA against whom evidence of collusion with MI5 in the deaths of Catholics had been accumulated.
However, the first arrest date, 8 January 1990, was leaked, and there were press enquiries. The arrests were postponed for three days. On the night before they were to take place, fire broke out on the third floor of the Police Authority headquarters at Seapark, Carrickfergus, near Belfast. The fire destroyed much of the Stevens team’s hard-garnered evidence. During the conflagration, which appears to have reached a remarkable intensity between 10 p.m., when the offices were locked, and 11.05, when some returning members of the team discovered the blaze, a number of peculiar phenomena were discovered.
Two sets of alarms and the phone system failed to alert the fire brigade or RUC Headquarters. Despite all this, Stevens went ahead with his plan to arrest Nelson, but discovered that he had fled to England some hours before the fire started. The peculiarities of the affair did not end there. In order to get some of the files sought, the team had also to exert extreme pressure on the army even to get Nelson back to Ireland for questioning.
The opening of the Nelson can of worms caused enormous tensions between the various intelligence-gathering agencies. On 20 January 1992, two days before his trial began, no less a personage than John Major unexpectedly flew into the Six Counties for conversations with members of the NISPC and other interested parties in the security world. I have been informed that the Nelson case was discussed during the Major visit, and was probably the principal reason for it. It has been suggested that the manner in which the Crown handled the prosecution indicates that high-level influences were brought to bear. Nelson was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment on 22 January. He pleaded guilty to five charges of conspiracy to murder and to fifteen other offences, after a bout of plea-bargaining had led to two charges of murder being dropped.
Later that year, on 8 June, a BBC Panorama programme claimed that Nelson had been involved in ten murders or murder plots carried out by the UDA with the knowledge of the army. Panorama said that he had also targeted sixteen other people who were subsequently killed or had attempts made on their lives. The programme also revealed that army intelligence had failed to pass on to the RUC information about certain planned attacks. However, by pleading guilty Nelson ensured that no FRU personnel were called upon to explain their involvement with him. I am reliably informed that had this been done, documents uncovered by the Stevens team would have proven FRU involvement in many more murders and woundings than came out in court. The documents concerned were the notes taken for the record in FRU debriefings.
‘Colonel J.’ gave evidence as to Nelson’s worth and character, claiming that his activities had saved many lives. The Colonel’s estimates as to how many have, I understand, subsequently been revised downward drastically by police investigators – to some 2 per cent of what he claimed. However, one result of this testimony was that the sentencing judge described Nelson as a man who had ‘shown the greatest courage’. Understandably, he was allowed to serve his sentence in England where, within two years, he had qualified for compassionate Christmas leave. The then Secretary of State, Tom King, also showed a degree of compassion towards Nelson by writing a letter to the court on his behalf. Readers, remembering the composition of the Northern Ireland Security Policy Committee, may decide for themselves why King should have written such a letter in the light of ‘Colonel J.’s’ evidence. Having told the court that he conducted regular high-level briefings, at which Nelson’s information was passed on, the Colonel explained to the court the sort of level he had in mind: ‘The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland might also be interested in such information.’67
What the Nelson case really illustrates of course is not so much the equal-parts-brutality-and-inefficiency nature of British intelligence operations in the Six Counties as the vacuum created by the absence of a coherent British political policy. It was a vacuum in which the power of the British security establishment exerted an undue and unhelpful influence. The inevitable coda to the affair was that ‘Colonel J.’, and some of Nelson’s handlers, were interrogated under caution and files were sent to the DPP. He in turn contacted the Attorney-General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, who once again decided not to prosecute. Evidently Sir Patrick agreed with Tom King, who said:
There is only one ‘shoot to kill’ policy – that carried out by the IRA. They shoot anybody, shoot first and often. That’s the ‘shoot to kill’ policy. The Army and the security forces operate under the rule of law and I have the greatest confidence in the way they conduct their operations.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, Sir Patrick eventually became a successor of Tom King as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Equally unsurprisingly, Nationalists generally continue to regard the police with intense suspicion. Prior to the ceasefires of 1994 it took an escort of, on average, between eight and sixteen soldiers to guarantee the safety of a two-man RUC foot patrol on a west Belfast street. Even after the ceasefire those memories, and what gave rise to them, will not go away. Thus is a great injustice perpetuated on many decent members of the RUC who are not involved in undercover squads and who want nothing more than to be allowed to get on with their lives as ordinary policemen. However, the sort of thing outlined above allowed them to be shot at by the IRA as ‘legitimate targets’, with the (at least tacit) approval of large sections of the Nationalist community. The fact that what might be termed ‘rule-of-law-England’ could produce policemen like Stalker and Stevens, and wish to see their efforts succeed, was completely lost in the bloody wash of life as it was lived, and lost, in the Catholic ghettos.
There are some people in the legal and security establishment who are not prepared to see the Nelson affair die uninvestigated. Their influence, and that of Dublin, resulted in an effort being made to kick-start the Stevens inquiry back into life. In August 1993 Hermon’s successor as RUC Chief Constable, Sir Hugh Annesley, who was born in Dublin, and a new Northern Ireland DPP, Sir Alasdair Fraser, formally invited Stevens to reopen his investigations. He did so, and the papers were sent to the DPP the following January. I understand that they squarely implicate four named members of the RUC as being involved in sectarian killings. However, on 13 May 1995 it was officially announced that there would be no prosecutions. The DPP was taking no action. Most Nationalists would agree with Seamus Mallon’s comment: ‘Fundamental issues of collusion that put people in danger and led to loss of lives have been swept under the carpet.’68 But such comments were made following the hushing-up of other inquiries, to no avail. By way of a coda to the Stevens affair, in the same week a judge upheld a governmental gagging order preventing John Stalker from giving evidence on matters affecting ‘national security’ in a case involving a businessman’s successful civil action against Manchester police.
Prior to the fate of the Stevens Inquiry being made known, greater control over undercover operations had been promised, and a new Deputy Chief Constable of the RUC, Blair Wallace, was tasked with directing operations. Of course, under the doctrine of ‘police primacy’ the RUC should have been fully conversant with and in control of such operations all along. The 1994 Defence White Paper states clearly that the RUC Chief Constable is ultimately responsible for the control of all security operations in the Six Counties. However, what White Papers, circulated at Westminster for the benefit of mere MPs, say, and what the British security establishment decides are two separate matters. In the event, along with the Blair Wallace appointment, the RUC were also given some security toys to keep them happy, including a new spotter plane. The best that one can say of this sorry chapter of events is that hopefully the IRA ceasefires will mean that they have nothing to spot.
Readers will not of course need reminding of the nature and extent of the calendar of events I outlined in Chapter 8. On the Irish, as on the British, side of the abrasion there were reprehensibilities of a high (or low) order. The IRA acts as judge, jury and executioner when it wishes. To take but one set of circumstances, the provision, or the securing, of information was the key element in the underground war between the two secret services. The journalist John Ware has truly (see next chapter) said that ‘good advanced intelligence can do more to save a life than all the 20, 000 soldiers and armed police on the streets in the province today’. But Ware also points out that:
vital though this undercover war is, it has become a very Dirty War. There have been too many unexplained killings, too many examples of collusion between Loyalist paramilitaries and rogue members of the security forces, too many stories of unjustifiable pressure applied on young men and women to become ‘informers’ against the paramilitaries – for which the penalty in Northern Ireland is usually hideous torture and death.
I don’t know how ‘rogue’ the security personnel involved in the Dirty War are, and how much in reality they are obeying the orders of their superiors. One thing is certain; because of the centrality of the intelligence factor some sixty people, including a number of women, have been shot by the Provisionals as informers. On what evidence, and under what circumstances, we can generally only guess. I have been told of yet another parallel with Collins’ time. There is said to be a Provisional IRA unit, like his ‘Squad’ which dealt with informers, in the South Armagh area set up to interrogate and execute informers. Fr Denis Faul has been quoted as saying he knew of premises used by the IRA for interrogations in which electrodes and other vicious methods of extracting information were used.69 Certainly it is generally accepted that Robert Nairac, the British intelligence officer whom the Provisionals captured on a spying mission in the Three Steps Inn, a pub in South Armagh, on 14 May 1977, was brutally tortured before being killed. His body has never been found.
Nairac was something of a latter-day Lawrence of Arabia. The son of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, he was educated at the leading English Catholic public school, Ampleforth, and at Oxford. An all-round athlete, he became a boxing blue and joined the Grenadier Guards while still at university. Much of his knowledge of Irish ballads, and Irish culture generally, stemmed from his boyhood friendship with Lord Michael Killanin’s sons. He used to holiday at their home in the Irish-speaking district of Spiddal in Connemara. This background, combined with an almost uncanny ear for dialect, enabled him to pass himself off in IRA districts of Northern Ireland under a variety of aliases, gathering information for the SAS, until his luck ran out.
Another different, but similarly notorious, case in IRA circles also does something to illustrate both how the IRA’s system of justice sometimes worked and how British intelligence apparently took advantage of its workings.
In 1974, Vincent Heatherington, aged eighteen, and Myles McGrogan, nineteen, were both remanded to Crumlin Road jail, Belfast, on charges relating to the shooting of two policemen in the city that May. They opted for, and were accepted into, the Provisional area, A Wing. As standard pattern dictates, the two teenagers were debriefed as to the circumstances of their capture so that the IRA could find out what slip-up had occurred, or whether an informer might be at work. When the results of the debriefing were analysed on the outside it was realised that the pair were not involved in the policemen’s deaths. Nor were they in the IRA. Inside the jail, the intensity of Heatherington’s interrogation was stepped up. He admitted that he had been working for the RUC under duress, but that he had done little else beyond infiltrating himself into the prison. Then, under extreme pressure, at the point in such procedures at which the victim either demonstrates convincingly that he has told all he knows, or breaks down and reveals his real secrets, Heatherington apparently broke down. He told his tormentors that he had been suborned into working for the RUC Special Branch. Two officers had attempted to make him fire on a football crowd. When he failed to pull the trigger they took the gun from him and, indicating that they were wearing gloves, warned him that the only fingerprints on the weapon were his own. It would be used to commit a murder and he would be blamed.
Amongst the activities which he said that he and McGrogan subsequently carried out on Special Branch instructions were the bombing of a Catholic pub, and several armed robberies. All were seemingly aimed at discrediting the IRA. Some of his other disclosures were even more alarming. Further interrogation elicited details of not only IRA, but Loyalist informers. Heatherington revealed that he had been trained at venues in Dublin and England by British-accented specialists in various undercover skills, including anti-interrogation techniques. During his sojourns at these places, money, sex and alcohol was also made available, he said. As these disclosures were being made, in what at the time seemed an unconnected incident a prisoner attacked a warder. Later it was remarked that this prisoner was not a Republican and should not have been in A Wing. However, the A Wing prisoners were locked in their cells as a result of the attack. When they were reopened McGrogan and Heatherington were found to have been transferred elsewhere. At the subsequent court hearings into the policemen’s deaths in March 1975, they were acquitted of all charges.
However, in the North’s prisons, and particularly in Long Kesh, their revelations, in particular Heatherington’s, caused consternation. Something like a witch-hunt occurred. There was more brutal interrogation by IRA prisoners of colleagues either directly implicated or brought under suspicion by the A Wing revelations. A Long Kesh governor told me that piano wire and electric current were among the torture devices used. As a result men admitted to crimes they could not have committed.
The story now moves on two levels. On one, a dreadful spate of killings occurred because of the ‘evidence’ produced by the interrogations. Some prominent Belfast Republicans died as a result of a two-year campaign to root out informers. Heatherington and McGrogan were among those killed. The second level, however, takes us deep into the Deniable Zone. There is a thesis that the whole Heatherington/McGrogan saga was a British intelligence ‘sting’.70 Heatherington did not crack under pressure, but was programmed to start releasing tainted information into the IRA’s intelligence stream, at a point where his seemingly desperate condition would give his disclosures credibility.
At the time there was an increasingly bitter debate within the ranks of the IRA. On one side was a ‘Young Turk’ element, which later rallied to Gerry Adams’ leadership. On the other were older men, who at the time were conducting truce negotiations with the British. The older men felt that a withdrawal was imminent. The younger element thought the whole thing was a ruse, that a long war was inevitable, and that the emphasis on physical force would have to be broadened to include political activity. The older faction got their truce in February 1975. It nearly destroyed the IRA, which was both penetrated by British intelligence and weakened by becoming involved in sectarian warfare with the Loyalists, who were inflamed by the rumours that the truce was in fact a prelude to withdrawal. Thus the pressures of both sets of paramilitaries were deflected from the British. The policy of divide et impera at its best. A Provisional spokesman has been quoted as saying:
We were had. We knew we had fallen for it. It was very much in the mould of the MRF operations, clever, well planned and brilliantly executed. The IRA knew and found it difficult to admit that British military intelligence was brilliant. They almost destroyed us. They created paranoia in the ranks and left us severely damaged.71
One can certainly argue that all’s fair in love and war and that the Provisionals’ fire had to be met with fire. No one can excuse IRA atrocities such as the Enniskillen bombing of November 1987, which killed eleven innocent civilians and injured sixty-three more; the wiping-out of the entire Hanna family, all Protestants, in July 1988, by a bomb-blast; the planting of a bomb in a Shankill Road fish shop in October 1993, which killed ten shoppers and one of the bombers and injured scores of other people. But there is another side to the coin. The British, after all, had one power denied to the IRA, the UDA, the Unionists, the SDLP and the Dublin Government: the power of initiative. In the event, they chose to exert this, not with a view to seeking a political solution, but with an eye on the Unionist MPs’ effect on the parliamentary balance at Westminster. From the fall of the power-sharing executive of 1974 until the IRA ceasefire of 1994, Britain presided over a political vacuum that spawned a violent degeneracy not seen elsewhere in western Europe since the ending of World War II.
Readers will be able to judge the truth of this assertion in the brief glimpse afforded by this chapter of some of what occurred as a result. Hence the diseased clarity of vision that produced the Heatherington ‘sting’. I should also point out that it is a demonstrable fact that the ‘turning’ of young ghetto-dwellers like Heatherington by the sort of methods used by the RUC detectives to get his fingerprints was a widespread practice. The fate meted out to these young ‘touts’ was a commonplace one, on both sides of the religious divide. Life in the Deniable Zone for this sort of player, be they voluntary or involuntary, did indeed tend to be nasty, short and brutish. Whitehall’s moralistic condemnations of ‘the men of violence’, delivered behind a façade of pinstripe and plummy accents, are probably best summed up by the unknown Dublin wit who described the formulation of ‘Ulster’ policy as follows: when you ring the office of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, you are greeted by an answerphone message, spoken in an Oxbridge accent, which tells you to: ‘speak after the high moral tone…’
Sometimes the lack of imagination, and lack of commitment, on the northern issue by Dublin governments facilitated this approach, but it never excused it. At all times London held the power of initiative. Its dubious exercise of that initiative in Ireland does not appear to have been confined to the northern part of the country. Dublin’s wariness on the northern issue was not always dictated solely by questions of commitment, or lack of it, to ancestral Irish Nationalist goals. During the twenty-five years of hostilities in the Six Counties some very stark warnings occurred as to what could happen in the Republic also. In 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday, and of the consequent burning of the British Embassy in Dublin, MI6 was still in a powerful position in the Irish intelligence-gathering world. At that time, despite the fact that the Official IRA had declared a ceasefire the previous May, the SIS still saw the Officials as presenting the greatest threat to the status quo in the Six Counties.
Amongst other counter measures the agency (MI6) recruited two British agents, the brothers Keith and Kenneth Littlejohn, to penetrate the Official IRA. As part of their brief the brothers apparently felt free to rob banks throughout the greater part of 1972. This eventually led to Kenneth receiving twenty years’ imprisonment, and Keith fifteen, in the Special Criminal Court, Dublin, on 3 August 1973.72 In his defence Kenneth Littlejohn used the same argument advanced years later on behalf of Brian Nelson, claiming that his actions had saved the lives of many people.73 Whatever debate there may be on that point, it is incontrovertible that the Littlejohns’ presence in the dock came about as a result of Dublin pressure on London to have them extradited. However, the extradition proceedings were held in camera for ‘reasons of national security’. The case was tried before Lord Widgery, who also presided over the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. The in camera decision meant that the Littlejohns failed in their two stated objectives: first, to make public the role of several distinguished English people, including Lord Carrington, in both their recruitment and their subsequent activities in Ireland; secondly, to give details of what Kenneth, a former paratrooper, claimed were specific instructions from the SIS to carry out not only bank robberies, but assassinations. The Dublin court case dealt only with matters arising from the Grafton Street robbery and could not be used by the Littlejohns as a pulpit from which to publicise other facets of their activities. Much of what Kenneth had to say only came to light after he broke out of Mountjoy jail on 11 March 1974 and began giving press conferences on the Continent. But these were not as well publicised in England as they were in Ireland. His criminal record also served to detract from his credibility, so that the Littlejohn affair became largely forgotten about in the UK.
But, whether connected or not, as mentioned earlier a happening in Dublin serves to keep the Littlejohns’ memory alive in Ireland. On the evening of 1 December 1972, I was working at my desk in the Irish Press offices in Burgh Quay, Dublin, when suddenly a bomb went off just across the river. A second explosion followed, the two blasts between them killing two and injuring 127 more. At the time the Dail was debating the introduction of a new anti-IRA law which London was keen on seeing passed. The Offences Against the State (Amendment) Bill proposed to make it possible to secure a conviction in the Republic if a garda superintendent swore that he believed an accused to be a member of the IRA. The Fine Gael party was unhappy with the Bill and there was every indication that it would fail. However, when word of the explosions reached the Dail Fine Gael abstained and the Bill sailed through by 69 votes to 22.
But though the Fianna Fail Government had won a victory it was not prepared to accept it at any price. On 19 December the Gardai arrested a John Wyman in the act of receiving documents from Garda Special Branch Sergeant Patrick Crinion. Wyman was the MI6 handler who ran the Littlejohns and other British agents in the Republic. However, a deal was struck between Dublin and London: as soon as the extradition of the two Littlejohns was agreed, Crinion and Wyman were put on a plane to the UK. But Jack Lynch did publicly indicate the feelings of the Cabinet on the Dublin bombings by saying that there was a ‘suspicion’ in Dublin that the bombs were the work of British intelligence.74 It was after this episode that MI6’s wings were clipped and MI5 gained its ascendancy in Irish spying.
Britain may fairly claim to be one of the world’s more advanced democracies. But even the most benign tree in the forest kills others in its shade. The 1972 Dublin bombings perfectly illustrate the problems ‘backyardism’ presents for small countries in the lee of big ones, whether they lie across the Irish Sea or in Latin America. The Lynch administration was caught between the Scylla of curbing subversion and the Charybdis of being seen to do nothing about a most curiously opportune bombing of its capital city. What protest could it make that would be in any way effective in London without at the same time inflaming Irish public opinion and thus giving aid and comfort to the IRA? There was suspicion in plenty amongst Irish intelligence and political circles, but where was the proof? The Provisional IRA solved its part of the problem in its own way on 21 July 1976 by blowing up the then British Ambassador to the Republic, Christopher Ewart-Biggs. He, it was alleged, had been an MI6 agent.
Dublin was to be again faced with the problems of the December 1972 bombings in greater, more ghastly, form two years later. The worst single day of the troubles occurred on 17 May 1974 when no-warning car bombings claimed thirty-five lives in Dublin and Monaghan. This was the period when the Loyalist strikers were in the process of destroying the power-sharing executive in the Six Counties. Initially, public opinion in the south assumed vaguely that the bombs were in some way connected with the strike. But shortly afterwards one began to hear other suspicions voiced. I was told by people I trust in both Special Branch and military intelligence that they suspected that the explosions were the work of Loyalist paramilitaries from Portadown who had been trained and led by British intelligence agents. The agents were said to have actually provided the bombs.
Various motives were suggested: on the Loyalists’ part a desire to bring home to Dublin the horror of no-warning car bombing, which had become a feature of Belfast life; on the intelligence side a wish to impress upon Dublin what could happen if there was not better co-operation against the IRA, combined with the laying of a marker warning that it would not pay the Republic to be too zealous in pressing London to stand up to the strikers and uphold the Sunningdale agreement. All that can be said about this with certainty is that the Merlyn Rees–army approach did cause a coolness in Dublin–London relations which lasted throughout most of 1974 and well into 1975. Also, the Dublin Government, a coalition between Fine Gael and Labour which included the rabidly anti-Nationalist Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien, was particularly tough on the IRA, adopting extremely strict policies in the areas of censorship, jail conditions and police behaviour. All of these, particularly the activities of a ‘heavy gang’ in the Gardai, eventually combined to rouse public opinion to a point where the ‘gang’ became a factor in the Government’s eventual downfall in 1977. But in 1974, in the absence of really hard evidence, such a government was a priori disinclined to be seen to raise the matter too publicly with London, lest the affair redound to the credit of the IRA. And hard evidence was not forthcoming – the RUC refused to co-operate with the Gardai in furthering enquiries in the Six Counties. Dublin does not appear to have pressed very strongly for co-operation. My information is that a file compiled by Irish Military Intelligence and the Garda Special Branch which was forwarded to the Government contained material which went some significant way towards establishing British complicity in the bombings. The matter lay fallow for several years, during which the names of those said to be responsible for the bombings gradually came to be generally known in informed circles.
Fred Holroyd attempted without success to widen the circle in 1987. On 6 December of that year the Sunday World published a written statement from him. For fear of libel the paper suppressed the names he supplied, but printed his allegations. He said flatly that a Sergeant X of the RUC Special Branch controlled a number of key activists in the UDA/UVF. He gave details of Loyalist paramilitary operations planned by Captain Nairac when on secondment to the SAS. He also said that the weapons used in the Miami Showband atrocity (see p. 226) had come from a cache whose presence he had disclosed to Sergeant X. Holroyd said: ‘On one occasion while on duty with Sergt. X during a surveillance operation, he confided in me that the Portadown UDA/UVF were responsible for the car bombs that detonated in Dublin.’
By 1993 the political climate had altered somewhat. There was another coalition in power in Dublin, again depending on Labour support, but a different style of Labour Party to that of the Cruise O’Brien era. Its leader, the Foreign Minister Dick Spring, had placed Northern Ireland at the top of his agenda, and later in the year the new taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, achieved a historic breakthrough in the north by securing from John Major, with the aid of White House pressure, the Downing Street Declaration (see Chapter 12). It became known that official Dublin co-operation was being extended to Yorkshire TV in the making of a documentary on the bombing of Dublin in 1974 for the First Tuesday series.
When the programme was screened, on 6 July 1993, it contained material supplied by garda and Irish military intelligence sources, and interviews with former officers in both services. This was a notable departure from traditional Irish security information policy, and clearly required prior official clearance. The material, coupled with the testimony of former British intelligence agents who also appeared on the programme, included the names of the Loyalists whom I had previously been told were implicated in the bombing. By then those mentioned were all dead, most of them either killed in Loyalist feuds or by the IRA. The programme also included the names of two dead British officers who were alleged to have prepared the bombs: Julian (also sometimes known as Tony) Ball, who died in a car crash in Oman in 1988; and Robert Nairac, killed by the IRA in 1977. At the time of the bombings, Ball and Nairac were a captain and a lieutenant respectively in an intelligence unit based at Castledillon House near Co. Armagh, known as the ‘Fourth Field Survey Troop’.
The contributions made by the British agents who appeared on the programme included statements that the UVF, at the time of the bombings, was controlled by British intelligence and that the Loyalist paramilitary organisation did not have the expertise necessary to make the bombs used. Albert Reynolds ordered an inquiry into the programme’s allegations, but at the time of writing this appears destined for the fate of other inquiries, such as the one led by Stevens in the north, although the reasons for the south’s lack of progress are somewhat different: Reynolds being ousted, yet another Fine Gael–Labour coalition taking power, and the overall delicacy of Dublin–London relations because of the tough secret negotiations which followed the ceasefires.
The list of dirty tricks employed by the security forces neither began nor ended with the shoot-to-kill policy, or the other matters discussed above. The use of torture and of highly paid informers, supergrasses, who gave whatever evidence the police required, was also a feature of the conflict. Again, as in the case of the shoot-to-kill policy, I will largely confine discussion of the torture question to information emanating from official reports. The first of these we have already encountered: the Compton Report, the result of the inquiry set up under Sir Richard Compton75 in November 1971 into the practices which accompanied the internment swoop of the previous August. The Compton Inquiry suffered from the disability that, with but one exception, all of the detainees involved refused to give evidence on two grounds: first that the inquiry was not held in public; secondly, that there was no opportunity to cross-examine official witnesses. But even so, its efforts to sanitise what had happened – finding that there had been ill-treatment, but not brutality – aroused such widespread criticism that the Government was forced to set up another inquiry almost immediately.
This time the investigating committee was headed by Lord Parker of Waddington. It issued a majority and a minority report on 31 January 1972. The majority report, by Lord Parker and John-Boyd Carpenter, found that the methods used were illegal under UK domestic law, but not immoral. Lord Gardiner, however, dissented and issued the minority report saying that the techniques investigated were not morally justifiable. Public opinion agreed with him. The Prime Minister, Ted Heath, was forced to make a declaration in Parliament (on 2 March 1972) that:
The Government, having reviewed the whole matter with great care and with reference to any future operations, have decided that the techniques… will not be used in future as an aid to interrogation.
But Heath’s promise came too late to defuse the controversy. Moved by the furore surrounding the issuing of Compton’s report in November, the Irish Government had acted the following December76 to bring ‘the torture case’, as it was known in Ireland, to Strasbourg. The case chuntered around the labyrinth of the European Commission and Court procedures for several years, before judgement was delivered on 18 January 1978. By a majority of 16 to 1, the judges of the European Court of Human Rights found ‘…that the use of the five techniques in August and October 1971 constituted a practice of inhuman and degrading treatment, which practice was in breach of Article 3’.77
Article 3 of the Convention on Human Rights states that no one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. However, having found that the use of the ‘five techniques’ was in breach of Article 3, the court then proceeded to find that ‘they did not constitute a practice of torture within the meaning of the Article’. The court had visited Greece during the hearing of a Greek torture case to interview witnesses. However, in the Irish case the British had argued that attempts to interview witnesses would jeopardise their lives. Accordingly the judges did not visit Northern Ireland. The result was that not only were witnesses not examined, neither were the barracks wherein the five techniques had been employed (Girwood, Hollywood and Palace). But even the finding concerning the techniques not constituting a practice of torture did not satisfy Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice, the one judge who opposed. His findings have abided with me through the years. He had this to say:
According to my idea of the correct handling of languages and concepts to call the treatment involved by the use of the five techniques ‘inhuman’ is excessive and distorting, unless the term is being employed loosely and merely figuratively…
He then went on to give examples of figurative speech:
One hears it said, ‘I call that inhuman’, the reference being to the fact that there is no dining-car on the train. ‘It’s degrading for the poor man’, one hears with reference to an employee who is being given all the unpleasant jobs. ‘It’s absolute torture to me’ and what the speaker means is having to sit through a boring lecture or sermon. There is a lesson to be learned here on the potential danger of hyperbole.78
Unfortunately Patrick Shivers and some of the other ‘hooded men’ on whose behalf the torture case was begun did not have very much time to study Sir Gerald’s warnings on the dangers of hyperbole. As indicated earlier, they began dying shortly afterwards as a result of their experiences.
Two other reports dealing with torture which were issued shortly after the Court of Human Rights decision have to be considered jointly as they deal with the police interrogation methods which developed in the wake of the setting-up of the Diplock courts. One was an Amnesty International finding, published in June 1978 following the visit of an Amnesty team to Northern Ireland. The other was the result of the Bennett Commission, published in March 1979, which, at least in part, owed its origin to the Amnesty report. In his introduction to the report which led to the establishment of the courts that bore his name into Irish folk memory, alongside such terms as ‘packed jury’, Lord Diplock said:
We would not condone practices such as those which are described in the Compton Report (Cmnd. 4823) and the Parker Report (Cmnd. 4901) as having been used in the crisis resulting from the simultaneous internment of hundreds of suspects in August 1971. The use of any methods of this kind has been prohibited for many months past. As already mentioned they are, in any event, now regarded as counter-productive. Certainly the official instructions to the RUC and the army are strict. So are the precautions taken to see that they are strictly observed. There is stationed on permanent call at the centre where suspects are questioned by the police an army medical officer who is not attached to any of the operational units stationed in Northern Ireland, but is sent out on a rota from England for a period of four to six weeks. He conducts a thorough medical examination of each suspect on arrival in the absence of the police and similar examination at the conclusion of the questioning. He informs the suspect that if he wishes he will be allowed to see the doctor at any time while he is at the centre. The possibility of ill-treatment which injures the suspect physically or mentally going undetected is remote.79
‘Remote’ is an apt description of the extent of the contact between Lord Diplock’s observations and reality. He also admitted in his foreword that he had made his findings on the basis of two visits of two days each to Northern Ireland. During these visits he recorded the fact that he had met ‘members of the security forces on the ground’. The rest of the seven weeks taken to produce his report were spent in London. Rarely can any seven-week stint have impacted so strongly on what is normally understood by the phrase ‘due process’. Six years after Diplock penned the foregoing, the Sunday Times reported as follows:
Researches undertaken by the Law Department of Queen’s University, Belfast, showed that ninety-four per cent of the cases brought before the Diplock Courts resulted in conviction. Between seventy per cent and ninety per cent of the convictions are based wholly or mainly on admissions of guilt (self-incriminating statements) made to the police during interrogation.80
Before the Sunday Times report appeared, the thirty solicitors who most commonly worked in the Diplock courts had written to Roy Mason stating that:
…ill-treatment of suspects by police officers, with the object of obtaining confessions, is now common practice, and that this most often, but not always, takes place at Castlereagh RUC station and other police stations throughout Northern Ireland.81
Sir Kenneth Newman had been responding to such charges with the bizarre allegation that prisoners ‘were injuring themselves as part of an IRA propaganda campaign against the police’.82 However, mounting public unease at what was happening in Six County police barracks led to the Amnesty report, which was sent to Roy Mason on 2 May 1978. It had become common practice to use beatings and threats to extract confessions. Heath’s declaration forswearing the use of the five techniques did not prevent men having their testicles kicked, beaten and squeezed; women being threatened with rape; threats that if a suspect did not talk, his family would be harmed; and, shades of Heatherington and McGrogan, the interrogation of minors without the presence of their guardians or parents. Under the Special Powers Act it was virtually impossible for a suspect to see a solicitor while in police custody, against the wishes of his, or her, interrogators.
Naturally the system created a burning sense of injustice in the Nationalist community against whom it was mainly, if not exclusively, directed. The 94 per cent conviction rate obtained by the ‘conveyor belt’ system explains both the high prisoner population, and the sense of outrage amongst the population that led to the outbreak of the hunger strikes. The Amnesty report found that: ‘maltreatment of suspected terrorists by the RUC has taken place with sufficient frequency to warrant the establishment of a public inquiry to investigate it’.83
Readers will recall Lord Diplock’s references to the efficacy of the presence of an army medical personage in preventing such abuses. Several police doctors complained about what was going on. But when one of them, Dr Robert Irwin, went on television after the publication of the Amnesty report to describe what was happening at Castlereagh, where he was the police surgeon, he became the victim of a smear campaign orchestrated by the Northern Ireland Office. The campaign made a mockery of Hamilton’s assurance to the House of Commons that ‘dirty tricks’ had been brought to an end by that date. The fact that Dr Irwin’s wife had been raped was put about so as to make it appear that he was in some way unhinged by the experience and bitter against the RUC.
The Irwin controversy helped to bring to light a number of other facts concerning the police and Sir Kenneth Newman. It was revealed that the Northern Ireland Police Authority had a number of meetings with him to discuss the doctor’s complaints, at which they warned him that, having hired him, they could also fire him. Newman, however, added a new dimension to the term the ‘primacy of the police’ by quoting the Northern Ireland Police Act to prove that though they could hire him – they could not fire him! Newman had strong backing in his stand. Because of the Ulsterisation policy the British were keen to support the Chief Constable. We have seen how Margaret Thatcher adopted his advice over that of General Creasey. Moreover, I have been told that as part of her ‘hands-on’ approach to the war against the IRA, she kept in touch with the Chief Constable by phone. Then, on 16 March 1979, the report of the inquiry called for by Amnesty was published. It was conducted by Judge Harry Bennett, QC, who found that: ‘…examination of medical evidence reveals cases in which injuries, whatever their precise cause, were not self-inflicted’.84
This finding destroyed the RUC stock response, that prisoners were deliberately injuring themselves, either to discredit the force, or to gain compensation. Bennett made a number of recommendations. These included improved access to solicitors for defendants and the supervision of police interrogations. These reforms made it difficult for the RUC to obtain confessions by their previous methods and led instead to the reliance on supergrasses. On the UK ‘mainland’ the police already had a tradition of using supergrasses, criminals who had turned Queen’s evidence to put away accomplices. In return they received a variety of rewards, ranging from reduced sentences to large cash payments and a new life abroad. The system was adapted for use in Northern Ireland. As in England, the supergrasses received inducements to tell what they knew about their former comrades. But, as the Diplock courts accepted uncorroborated evidence, the procedure was amplified so that the RUC also programmed the supergrass witnesses to tell the courts anything the police wished them to say.
The first supergrass was Stephen McWilliams whose appearance in court during March 1980 caused the jailing of four IRA men. Twelve more followed in September of that year on the word of supergrass James Kennedy. By March 1983 some 300 suspects were behind bars on the word of supergrasses. But there were limits to what even the Northern Ireland judicial system would tolerate. Also in March, Mr Justice Higgins threw out charges against forty-two Loyalists based on the word of one William ‘Budgie’ Allen. Allen, said Judge Higgins, was a ‘liar’.85 Liar or no, three years later, on 11 May 1986, Allen was granted the Royal Prerogative of Mercy by the then Secretary of State, Tom King. In 1984 a report by Lord Gifford said that the supergrass system was ‘not justice’, it led to the ‘telling of lies’ and the programming by the RUC of witnesses to ‘concoct and rehearse statements’.86 Nevertheless, for a time the supergrass phenomena – or, in the malodorous euphemism used by Sir John Hermon in the RUC’s Annual Report for 1985, the ‘converted terrorist process’ – posed a serious threat to the IRA. In the report Sir John claimed that in parts of Belfast, ‘terrorist murders dropped by 73% and all terrorist crimes by 61%’. These results were achieved because, as two authorities have written, apart from avoiding prison:
potential supergrasses were offered the prospect of a new life and identity in the country of their choice, private education for their children, a healthy pension for life – like supplementary benefit only far more – and even elocution lessons to neutralise their Belfast accents.87
This description of how one set about creating a born-again terrorist is accurate insofar as it goes. What it leaves out is the cost. In 1985, the then Northern Ireland Secretary, Douglas Hurd, said that over the previous seven years it had cost £1.5m in ‘direct expenditure’.88 This expenditure covered such items as paying for information, pocket money, and finding living accommodation and jobs abroad. But Hurd was only referring to eight of the twenty-seven supergrasses who had given information by that time. Nor did his figures refer to the cost of the RUC men who had rehearsed the supergrasses. These rehearsals often took place out of the country in expensive hotels. And in addition there was the cost of guarding the informers, and frequently their relatives. The expense and difficulty of securing the supergrasses was such that in 1986 a newly built prison at Maghaberry, costing £40m, held only four prisoners, all supergrasses.
At that date there were reckoned to be twenty living under assumed names in Britain. No other country had proved willing to take them. By way of underlining the increasing futility of the supergrass experiment, the appeals of eighteen men jailed on the word of supergrass Christopher Black were upheld the same year (in July 1986). But it was the IRA, not distaste on the part of lawyers for the supergrasses, that really ended their effectiveness.
Initially the Provos were seriously worried by the supergrasses, who at long last appeared to be destroying the IRA’s hitherto successful safeguards against informers. These safeguards were not relaxed, but two additional tactics were introduced. Lawyers sympathetic to the Provisionals devised a method of turning the damaging effect of the use of uncorroborated evidence against their enemies. For so long as the only evidence against suspects was uncorroborated, then its retraction meant the end of the prosecution’s case. It was therefore conveyed to supergrasses, via their families, that if they retracted their evidence no harm would come to them. To underline this promise the IRA also announced an amnesty for informers (in 1982). Sometimes pressures such as kidnapping of relatives were brought to bear on the families concerned. The tactics worked: one by one the supergrasses began retracting their evidence and the system virtually collapsed.
Stephen Greer, a legal expert, writing in the Law Quarterly Review at a time when the supergrass experiment was demonstrably failing to secure the results claimed for it by its apologists, said that the system might ultimately do as much harm to respect for law and order as had the introduction of internment.89 I disagree with that assessment. By 1986, after seventeen years which had seen not only internment but the Falls Road curfew, the shoot-to-kill policy, dirty tricks, and all the other ‘little stunts’, there was no respect left for the supergrass system to damage. That fact constitutes the bedrock of the IRA’s support.
It is a support which the Republicans themselves have often done a great deal to erode, even to the extent of alienating sympathisers by vicious feuding in which they kill each other. I have already adverted to the feud between the Official and Provisional wings of the IRA (see Chapter 4). This broke out again briefly in October 1975, and claimed about a dozen deaths and some fifty other casualties. Mediation by two priests, Fr Alec Reid, and Fr Des Wilson, eventually restored a peace which more or less held throughout the subsequent hostilities. However, within the ranks of the Officials, personality clashes had already created another, internal, feud, which continued throughout the year. The vicious Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) and its political wing, the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), had been formed on 8 December 1974 in a Co. Dublin hotel.90 The split cost the lives of leaders on both sides. Hugh Ferguson, a prominent member of the IRSP, was murdered in February. Billy McMillen, the Belfast Official IRA leader, was gunned down in April by a sixteen-year-old, Gerard Steenson, whose subsequent career, which ended in a hail of bullets twelve years later, earned him the nickname Dr Death.
Bernadette McAliskey, who, with Seamus Costello, formerly of the Official IRA, had founded the IRSP, left within a year of the foundation because of the militarism. Costello, who, independently of McAliskey, had also founded the INLA, was assassinated in 1977. However, the movement still had sufficient killing strength to murder Airey Neave in March of the following year. His public utterances had marked him out as an enemy of Irish nationalism, particularly of a militant nature. He was not in favour of power-sharing and had made encouraging noises about the death penalty, internment, and an increased use of the SAS. He was also expected to get his wish to be sent to Ireland to replace Roy Mason when, as appeared inevitable, the Tories won the general election scheduled for April 1979. Moreover, the movement had an informant who averred that Neave had a private agenda. He intended to institute a rightist ‘backlash’ in England, using Margaret Thatcher, whose rise he had masterminded, as a front.91 Accordingly, on 30 March 1978, an INLA unit killed him with a bomb, activated by a mercury tilt switch, which was placed in his car at the Palace of Westminster car park.
Though the INLA carried on a war against the British Army, as one would expect of a militant Irish Republican organisation, it also indulged in sectarian murder, racketeering and torture. Its quotient of idealism, which did lead three of its members to die on hunger strike during 1981, was vitiated by its failure to develop either military discipline or a political wing. The three INLA members who died on hunger strike were Patsy O’Hara, Michael Devine and Kevin Lynch – 30 per cent of the ‘Ten Men Dead’ who had such a crucially significant effect on the electoral fortunes of Provisional Sinn Fein. The Official IRA made little impact in the Six Counties, but achieved some success in the Republic. Elements in OIRA first evolved into Sinn Fein, the Workers’ Party, subsequently mutated into the Workers’ Party and, then after a split, into the Democratic Left, which in 1994 became part of a ‘rainbow coalition government’ in the Republic.
During the hunger strike period the INLA succeeded in attracting more recruits than did the Provisionals in parts of Belfast, particularly in the Markets district. Here the INLA operated quite openly, wearing distinctive military-style clothes and making little effort to hide either guns or identities. There is a suspicion that a certain blind eye may have been turned to the organisation’s growth in this early phase. British intelligence was not unaware of the benefits which could accrue from the growth of a movement that might draw off strength from the Provisionals. INLA’s path, however, led relentlessly to the depths. In 1982 Dominic McGlinchey became the movement’s leader and for a time the best-known Republican leader in Ireland. Some of the worst atrocities of the entire Troubles took place under him.
Like many another young man in the Nationalist community his fearsome career began through an encounter with the security forces. He had been taking part in some local civil rights marches, but was not a member of the IRA, when he was picked up at the age of seventeen in the internment swoops of August 1971. For five days he was subjected to some of the brutal interrogation methods which landed Britain before the European Court of Human Rights. But on emerging from Long Kesh, McGlinchey had recourse not to courts but to the Provos. He became one of the Provisionals’ most-wanted men, a legendary figure in his native South Derry. He was captured by the Gardai in 1977 and served a five-year sentence for possession of weapons and the hijacking of a garda car. But, although he had been one of the Provisionals’ most-admired figures, he appears to have fallen out with the Provisional leadership while serving his sentence in Portlaoise jail. On his release in February 1982 he joined the INLA.
The subsequent history of the movement is appalling. On 6 December 1982 the INLA bombed the Droppin’ Well Inn at Ballykelly, which was frequented by British servicemen. A no-warning explosion killed eleven soldiers and six civilians, four of them girls. The Grew and Carroll shooting referred to earlier occurred a few days later. The RUC mounted the operation thinking that the men would be driving McGlinchey back to the Six Counties from the Republic. A year later another awful slaughter followed, the ‘Darkley massacre’, an attack on a religious service. Ostensibly this was the work of an organisation known as the Catholic Reaction Force. The CRF was in fact a cover name for an INLA group: the Deniable Zone was not completely confined to the British side of the conflict. Shortly before Darkley there had been a number of sectarian killings of Catholics in that part of South Armagh. Some members of the UDR were boasting openly that they had carried them out. In revenge, a relative of one of the dead took part in the CRF attack on Darkley Pentecostal Mission Hall. Using INLA weapons the murderers sprayed a gospel service with bullets on 21 November 1983, killing three church elders and wounding several of the congregation.
From November to the following March, when he was finally arrested after a shoot-out, McGlinchey became the most wanted man in Ireland, becoming known as ‘Mad Dog’ to the tabloids. Paradoxically, he also contrived to inject something of a Robin Hood element into this image by adding a new definition to the term ‘peeler’, a sobriquet referring back to the police force initially formed by Sir Robert Peel in the nineteenth century. McGlinchey updated it on a number of occasions by holding up gardai and forcing them to peel off their uniforms. After his capture he made legal history by becoming the first Republican to be extradited to the Six Counties to face a murder charge, that of Ms Hester McMullen, a sixty-seven-year-old postmistress, accidentally shot dead during one of McGlinchey’s many armed robberies. He was freed on appeal by Lord Justice Gibson, the judge who entered (and departed) our story earlier for taking a somewhat less lenient view of terrorists. Gibson said that McGlinchey’s fingerprints, found in the car used for the killing, could have been placed there after the murder.
McGlinchey was re-extradited to the Republic on 11 October 1985 and subsequently imprisoned in Portlaoise on charges relating to the shoot-out in which he was captured. On 1 February 1987 his wife, Mary, was bathing their two young sons, Dominic and Declan, at their home in Dundalk when two men wearing balaclavas burst into the house and shot her dead in front of the screaming children. My information is that she was killed in revenge for the murder of the brother of her assailants. Mary McGlinchey is known to have taken an active role in her husband’s operations, and is said to have been involved in some of his killings. McGlinchey asked me to visit him in Portlaoise some months after her death – why, I was never quite sure. He seemed anxious to talk about commonplaces as much as about anything related to his former life. He seemed to have an idea who it was who had killed his wife, but expressed no bitterness. He denied involvement in the Darkley massacre, but admitted to an involvement in the Droppin’ Well atrocity. All he seemed to want to do when he got out of jail was look after his two children. Short, slight, balding, he seemed tired, reduced by his past and by prison, and in no way threatening or a ‘mad dog’. My impression was shared by the governor of the prison and by every member of the staff who came in contact with him.
However, there may have been a darker side to McGlinchey, even at that stage. Prior to his imprisonment he had run the INLA in dictatorial and ruthless fashion. He had been responsible for literally scores of deaths, while in both that organisation and the Provisional IRA. Many of these were by his own hand. He conducted interrogations with the aid of instruments such as a red-hot poker. But on his release in March 1993 he appeared to be chiefly concerned with making good his promise to devote time and care to his children. He was taking them to a birthday party for his son Dominic, in June 1993, near Ardee in Co. Louth, when an attempt was made on his life. Describing it afterwards, McGlinchey said that a machine gun and a pistol were used by two men who spoke with ‘English accents’.92 He was categoric in his assertions that the men were British agents. This claim, however, has to be questioned. A second, successful, attempt was made on him the following February. He was shot down on a Drogheda footpath, dying in front of his son Dominic on 10 February 1994. It subsequently became generally accepted, by both police and former associates, that he had been murdered by revenge-seeking ex-colleagues. McGlinchey, it was said, had intended both to extract revenge for his wife’s murder and to resume his role of gang leader.
By the time of his death the INLA was splintered and weakened, from both its own internal dissensions and a crackdown by the Provisionals. McGlinchey would have had a choice of a number of splinter groups, all murderously feuding with each other, as a vehicle for reasserting his authority. The various components of the INLA had degenerated into drug-dealing, something which had always been anathema to the Provos, and racketeering of all kinds. Torture was commonly used. A member of one INLA splinter group, the Irish Revolutionary Brigade, boasted of using a bolt-cutter to lop off a man’s fingers before he murdered him because he ‘wanted to give him a hard death’. An autopsy revealed that he had forced another of his victims to eat his own fingers before killing him. The leader of this wing, Dessie O’Hare, who became nationally known as the ‘Border Fox’, is now in Portlaoise jail following a notorious kidnapping in 1987. A prominent Dublin dentist, John O’Grady, was captured by his gang and his fingertips were hacked off with a hammer and chisel for inclusion with a ransom note.
A ‘peace conference’ arranged between representatives of the INLA leadership of the time and its main rival faction, the Irish People’s Liberation Organisation, turned out to be in effect a Chicago gangster-style ‘set-up’. When the four INLA men arrived at the Rosnaree Hotel in January 1987, they were gunned down by hit men aligned with, and possibly led by, Gerard Steenson, by then better known as ‘Dr Death’. Two of the INLA men, Ta Power and John ‘Big Man’ O’Reilly, died; the other two recovered from their wounds. After the murders, both the Steenson and the O’Reilly wings issued statements to the media, each claiming that the other side had been acting as British agents. Again, in the circumstances, one would have to question such allegations.
However, an incident later in the year does raise valid questions about police/army activity, or lack of it. In March Steenson made another murderous attempt on his rivals. This time he and a henchman badly wounded the McQuillan brothers in their home in New Barnsley, Belfast. The shooting took place in the small hours of the morning, a matter of yards from an RUC barracks. But according to Kevin McQuillan, who was badly injured in the attack, it took two hours and several phone calls appealing for assistance before either police or army crossed the road to investigate.93
A little later there occurred an event which gives a degree of substance to allegations of undercover security force involvement in the INLA/IPLO feuding. Steenson had only a few days to live after the McQuillan incident. On the night of 14 March, not long after midnight, he and a companion, Anthony McCarthy, drove into Springfield Avenue, Belfast. Behind them a member of a waiting gang closed the security gate into Springfield Road. McCarthy and Steenson were trapped. Their lives ended in a fusillade of bullets. According to some authorities the man who closed the gate was one Alexander Lynch.94 It is known that Lynch was at the time an RUC agent.95 As the feuding died away the RUC advised him to join the Provisionals. He did so, but came under suspicion and was captured and interrogated by the Provisionals. On 7 January 1990, the second day of his interrogation, the house he was being held in was surrounded by an army patrol. Amongst those arrested, and later sentenced, was Provisional Sinn Fein’s leading publicist, Danny Morrison.
The fact that Lynch was regarded as being of sufficient importance to engage the attention of a figure of Morrison’s stature would seem to indicate that another Heatherington and McGrogan-style ‘sting’ had come to a successful conclusion. Obviously the security forces would have had a vested interest in the sort of mayhem involved in the foregoing. It weakened republicanism generally. Specifically it resulted in several activities that assisted in the godfathers-and-racketeers image of the IRA which the NIO spin doctors were keen to foster.
While also continuing to kill police, soldiers and UDR personnel as opportunity offered, the divided INLA indulged in fratricidal murder of its former comrades, drug-dealing, extortion, robbery, heavy drinking, and sexual promiscuity. The Provisionals finally took a hand in the action on Halloween night, 31 October 1992. A prominent IPLO leader, Sammy Ward, was shot dead and a wave of kneecap-pings and warnings to leave the country literally crippled the organisation. It was disbanded, and several former members of both the IPLO and the INLA subsequently became professional criminals, both north and south of the border. The INLA still exists, but very much in the shadow of the Provisionals. Whatever co-operation there is between the two movements lies deep in the Deniable Zone.
I do not wish to burden the reader with a further catalogue of horrors, but when discussing dirty tricks one must advert to the Loyalists also, however briefly. Here two sets of occurrences have to be noted: first, that the Republican feuding was replicated amongst Loyalist paramilitaries; secondly, that, despite the nature of some of the appalling events catalogued in the foregoing pages, it is probably true to say that if one had to pick out the worst single set of atrocities of the entire troubled era, then that grisly accolade should go to the activities of the Loyalist group known as the Shankill Butchers.
Taking the feuds and splits first, it can be fairly stated that these were both numerous and ferocious. The first hard-core killing machine to emerge from the ranks of the Loyalists was the Ulster Volunteer Force which, as we have seen, committed the first murders of the period in 1966: three years before the turning-point Derry civil rights march of October 1968; four years before the Provisionals were formed; and five before the Provos killed Gunner Curtis, the first British soldier to die in the Troubles. Even after the emergence of the numerically superior UDA, whose growth has already been noted, and with which it sometimes came into brutal conflict, the UVF remained a tightly organised, dedicated and deadly force. Outside Belfast the UVF founded and controlled other front organisations in rural areas, notably the Protestant Action Force and the Protestant Action Group. These were responsible for scores of murders, particularly in the notorious ‘murder triangle’ area of Dungannon, Moy and Portadown.
Several other smaller Loyalist paramilitary organisations came into being over the years, but did not show either the cohesion or the staying power of the UVF. These included the Shankill Defence Association, founded by John McKeague, which took a leading part in the attempts to burn out Catholics during 1969. The Red Hand Commando was another McKeague creation, set up after he had fallen out with the SDA in 1972. The RHC and the SDA were both aligned with the UVF. The Orange Volunteers was also founded in 1972, amongst members of the Orange Order. Tara, one of the earliest anti-Catholic groupings of the troubles, was formed in 1966 by William McGrath of Kincora ill-fame. Another early anti-Catholic creation was the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, which, as we have seen, supported Paisleyite agitation in the years leading up to the August 1969 riotings and burnings. Like McKeague’s organisations the UPV’s membership overlapped with that of the UVF. There were also a number of organisations which derived from the disbanded B-Specials. The Ulster Service Corps was the largest of these and was chiefly active in rural areas throughout the seventies. In Belfast, the Woodvale Defence Association became subsumed into the UDA, which also ran a youth wing, the Young Militants. The YM had a sinister history, being used for a time in the seventies by the UDA as a front organisation to carry out several murders. The Young Citizen Volunteers stands in the same relationship to the UVF as does the Fianna to the IRA: a military scouting movement which acts as a youthful recruiting agency.
The sheer multiplicity of all these organisations made rivalries inevitable, chiefly in Belfast where numbers, and opportunities for racketeering, were greatest. McKeague’s organisations, for example, frequently came into conflict with the UVF. A petrol bomb meant for him caused the death of his mother. He was eventually shot on 29 January 1982, apparently not by the UVF, but by the INLA, who phoned newspapers to claim his killing. However, the McKeague/UVF feuding was but a skirmish to the war which broke out between the UDA and the UVF. There had been trouble between the two groups during the Loyalist strike of 1974, but this was as nothing to what happened in 1975. Trouble first broke out on the night of 30 March in Belfast, when the UDA shot up the homes of a number of UVF men. There was more shooting the following night and counterattacks by the UVF over the next week. Bombs as well as guns were used. Two UDA leaders were seized and murdered. Their bodies were not found until October when their discovery, near Islandmagee in Co. Antrim, led to the jailing of thirty-one UVF men.
The UVF created such carnage in that month that the organisation was proscribed on 3 October. The previous day a series of UVF attacks had killed twelve people, three of them women, and injured forty-six others. Were British intelligence agents behind the UVF’s self-destructive activities? Professor Steve Bruce says that there was a ‘…constant “stirring” by the security forces, who used such black propaganda vehicles as the fictitious Ulster Citizens’ Army to exacerbate the always considerable tensions within the UVF’. Evidence is always difficult to come by in these matters, as the Stalker and Stevens affairs demonstrate.
The UDA, though highly threatening to outsiders, appeared to be able (or was directed) to control its inner tensions better than the UVF. After the upheavals of the Tommy Herron era passed, the leader of the UDA, Andy Tyrie, remained in office until he was forced out in 1987, a long sit in such a hot seat. His departure followed a sanguinary sequence of events which will shortly be described. These events contributed to the low esteem in which the UDA was increasingly held. And not merely by the Nationalist spokesmen who incessantly, but unavailingly, called for the organisation to be banned. As we have seen, even Rhonda Paisley joined the chorus. Nevertheless, in September of that year the Secretary of State, Peter Brooke, was still stoutly denying that British intelligence was directing its operations,96 even though by then of course the Nelson affair was well known. Brooke’s denials were rather undercut a few days later by a Dispatches programme shown on Channel 4 on 2 October which gave very chilling indications of collusion between an ‘inner circle’ within the RUC, the UDR, and the UDA. The RUC reacted with fury, placing newspaper ads, north and south of the border, carrying Sir Hugh Annesley’s denials of the programme’s charges. But the ads were not placed until 2 August 1992. On 31 July Channel Four and the programme’s makers, Box Productions, had been fined £75, 000 in London’s High Court, under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, for refusing to name their sources. The programme had been prompted by the increasing ferocity and expertise of the UDA’s onslaught on Catholics, not merely in Belfast, but elsewhere in the province.
A string of some thirty-eight sectarian assassinations seems to have led Sir Patrick Mayhew to ban the UDA on 10 August 1992. It would appear the organisation had finally become too much of an embarrassment, even for the men running the Northern Ireland Security Policy Committee. Sir Hugh Annesley, the head of the RUC, was quoted as saying of the UDA that: ‘the team that are coming through are more aggressive. I think they are prepared to match some of the atrocities the PIRA have committed.’97 But the ban was not accompanied by any discernible affirmative action. In the succeeding five months the combined total of UDA men charged with membership was – one! And even he was held less for being a UDA member than because of a murder charge. The ban may equally have been a cosmetic move designed to bait Sinn Fein into talks. Unionists claimed that it was angled to attract the SDLP leaders into talks with the NIO and should have been extended to Sinn Fein as well. The UDA itself authorised a newspaper interview in which its spokesman threw more light on Sir Hugh Annesley’s description of the ‘team’ that were ‘coming through’. The UDA man said that the security forces had directed the organisation for the past sixteen years and that the ban had been introduced because ‘they couldn’t direct us any more’.98
One has to be just as careful in assessing this claim as in considering the counter-assertion that the British had nothing to do with the UDA’s policies. For example, it was quite clearly the British who put down a movement in Scotland to aid the UDA. In June 1979 eleven members of the Scottish UDA – there is of course an ancient tradition of Orangeism in Scotland – were given long sentences for aiding the UDA in Northern Ireland in arms procurement. The leader of the group, James Hamilton, got fifteen years. The truth as to where lies the real balance of control and inspiration in the ranks of the Loyalist paramilitaries must obviously be, to some degree, a matter of speculation. Probably the best way to assess the issue is to view it in terms of two agendas which sometimes had a shared objective.
First, that of the security forces, which obviously had a vested interest (a) in knowing what was going on in the world of paramilitarism, be it Republican or Loyalist, and (b) turning that knowledge to advantage, wherever and whenever possible. Second, that of the Loyalists themselves. Loyalist paramilitary motivation has always retained something of the visceral, anti-Catholic, anti-Republican response that first gave it a rebirth at the start of the Troubles in 1966. That rebirth was a direct reply to the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 rising. Other reasons for becoming a Loyalist paramilitary presented themselves as the Troubles wore on: revenge for IRA atrocities; fear that a ‘doomsday’ situation was approaching in which ‘Ulster’ would be thrust out of the Union and placed at the mercy of the IRA; a sincerely held belief that it was a man’s duty to defend his heritage from a ruthless enemy; encouragement from Loyalist women for their menfolk to show the courage to ‘do what the IRA is doing’. This last was sometimes a more powerful factor in recruitment, particularly in the early stages of the UDA’s growth, than is always acknowledged. Per contra, it was a growing abhorrence of killing amongst the women of the Loyalist community that played an important part in bringing about the Loyalist ceasefire in 1994. Two other less defensible and more widespread causes of Loyalist paramilitary activity were the encouragement and advice given surreptitiously by some Loyalist politicians, and racketeering.
The bloody deeds with whose description I will conclude this brief outline of Loyalist paramilitary activity concern the first and last reasons given above for joining the UDA, the UVF or one of the organisations in the penumbra: hatred and racketeering. Lenny Murphy was impelled by both motivations. He operated out of two well-known Shankill Road UVF drinking dens, the Lawnbrook Club and the Brown Bear Bar. From the patrons of these establishments he put together a gang which became known as the Shankill Butchers. Court proceedings and the researches of Martin Dillon99 have established that not only did the Butchers murder their victims, they tortured them savagely as well. The IRA’s bombing atrocities of Bloody Friday, 21 July 1972, would appear to have been the pretext for Murphy’s first venture into ritualistic murder. In revenge a Catholic, Francis Arthurs, was kidnapped, taken to the Lawnbrook Club and systematically beaten to a pulp by a UVF group, including Murphy, until he was finally shot dead.
Murphy subsequently participated in a number of other murders before being taken into custody for the murder of one Edward Parvis in January 1973. Thomas Madden, whom he helped to kill before being apprehended for the Parvis murder, died a particularly terrible death. He was suspended from the roof of a garage, stripped, and slowly stabbed one hundred and forty-seven times. While on remand in Crumlin Road jail, Murphy stole cyanide and administered it to the man who had accompanied him on the Parvis killing, Mervyn Connor. Before doing so he forced Connor to write a confession saying that he was the one who had killed Parvis.
With Connor dead there was no evidence against Murphy and he was released from jail in 1975 after a brief sentence imposed for attempting to escape while on remand. When he emerged from prison he formed a gang from the Brown Bear clientele which proceeded to murder Catholics using the methods described in Madden’s case. In addition to knives, axes were also used. As part of a litany of beatings, shootings, robberies and extortions, the gang also took part in the UDA/UVF feud, shooting a number of UDA men. Murphy was again jailed, on a firearms charge, in 1976 and was not released until 1982. In his absence his gang continued their slaughters until they were rounded up in May 1977.
On 20 February 1979, eleven of the gang were convicted of 112 offences, which included nineteen murders, and were given a total of forty-two life sentences. It is said that their capture resulted from the testimony of one of their victims, Gerrard McLaverty. On 10 May 1977, McLaverty was beaten and stabbed and left for dead, but recovered and was able to identify his assailants when taken around the Shankill in a police car. This may well have been what happened, but it is also a fact that by that time the authorities’ attitude to the Loyalists had changed markedly from that of 1974. Another Loyalist strike took place that month, but this time the authorities faced it down. Roy Mason took a more hands-on approach than had Rees in the negotiation with workers and security chiefs. Paisley was amongst those arrested and charged with obstruction. In the event the power workers did not support the strike, which collapsed on 13 May.
Unquestionably the unfortunate McLaverty did survive and did identify his assailants from a police car. But what were the RUC and all the intelligence forces doing in the months while the Shankill Butchers were operating more or less openly out of well-known paramilitary drinking haunts? As Martin Dillon has pointed out:
…it is clear that many policemen compromised their neutrality by continuing to frequent and socialise in premises controlled by the paramilitaries. In the Shankill area the UDA often killed people in illegal drinking clubs and were not concerned about leaving traces of the victim’s blood on the floor or walls… The police knew such places were being used for murder… I uncovered evidence that as late as 1975 policemen in the Shankill were drinking in pubs which were the haunts of UDA and UVF units…100
In addition to having the opportunity of drinking in clubs and pubs frequented by criminals and used for crimes, the RUC possessed what would appear to be another invaluable aid to successful detection: most RUC members were drawn from the Loyalist community and had sources of intelligence and insight which they were denied in the case of the largely Catholic IRA. One would have thought this circumstance should have simplified the task of preventing the spate of Loyalist murder. It is a matter of speculation as to whether the changed attitudes of the authorities to Loyalists in 1977 had anything to do with the Butchers being put away. Dillon is certainly correct in his assertion that Shankill drinking clubs were well known as murder sites, or, in the gallows humour of Belfast, ‘romper rooms’, after a popular TV programme. Albert Baker, mentioned earlier, received his life imprisonment sentence for his part in crimes such as the following:
Baker struck McCartan repeatedly on the back with a wooden pickshaft until it broke in two… Baker produced a dagger and stabbed McCartan twice through the palm of his left hand and once through the palm of his right hand… someone suggested ‘cutting the balls off him’. Baker ran the knife up his left buttock, opening up a long shallow incision. They tied a rope round one hand and another round his ankles, held him by the ankles and dropped him on the concrete floor on his head…101
The unfortunate McCartan was finally bundled into a car, ‘frogmarched’ to a piece of waste ground, hooded and shot. But the circumstances of his death were revealed, not through detection, but because Baker, a deserter from the British Army, walked into an English police station and gave himself up. Nor was Murphy’s career terminated by the police. On his release from jail in 1982 he resumed both his killing and his racketeering. This brought him into conflict with a leading Loyalist gangster, and UDA leader, Jimmy Craig. Craig secretly passed information about Murphy’s movements to the Provisionals. On 16 November 1982, Murphy had just stopped his car outside his girlfriend’s Belfast home when a van pulled up in front of the car. Two gunmen jumped out and shot him twenty-six times.
The deputy leader of the UDA, John McMichael, had been becoming increasingly disturbed by both Craig’s racketeering activities and his contacts with Republicans. He ordered Craig to break off his contacts with Republicans and apparently initiated an inquiry into both the circumstances of Murphy’s death and those of other Loyalist paramilitaries. McMichael’s movements were conveyed to the Provisionals, who planted a bomb under his car on 22 December 1987.
Sir John Hermon’s handling of a question at a press conference, a week after McMichael’s death, gave rise to speculation that it was someone in the UDA who had helped to set up McMichael. Hermon said:
The murder of John McMichael, whoever committed it, or whoever orchestrated it regardless of who may have committed it, was designed to cause grievous dissension and disruption and to eliminate a threat to whosoever that threat may have existed. I would not wish to take it further than that. But think of my words very carefully.
The RUC and, it appears, MI5, were also keeping Craig under surveillance and after McMichael’s death a video film taken during this surveillance was leaked to the UDA. It showed Craig in a pub with a prominent Provisional. On 15 October 1988, Craig was shot dead in a Belfast pub. Earlier that year, on 11 March, following the discovery of a bomb under his car four days previously, Andy Tyrie lost a vote of confidence in the UDA inner council. McMichael had been his ally on this council. He prudently resigned his chairmanship of the UDA and the younger, ‘more aggressive’ elements mentioned by Sir Hugh Annesley subsequently took over the running of the movement. One of the complaints against Tyrie was that he had not been ‘militant’ enough.
While interviewing him once he mentioned to me that the IRA’s no-warning car bombings were ‘maddening’ the Loyalist people. As a result, demands for tit-for-tat sectarian assassinations were mounting. I mentioned this to Daithi O’Conaill, the IRA leader who is said to have first advocated the use of car bombs. O’Conaill authorised me to tell Tyrie that the car bombing would stop in the expectation that assassinations would follow suit. Both cessations duly occurred and lasted for some time. Tyrie also figured in another creditable incident in UDA history. Early in his reign there was yet another demand from the ranks for an intensification of sectarian killing. Tyrie called a meeting and threw down a revolver and a list of names and addresses of known IRA men, telling his audience that whoever wished could pick up the gun and the list with his blessing. No one did. Both incidents tell us something about the character of Loyalism. Certainly it contains a strong revenge-seeking element, but it also contains a continuing questioning element which seeks to advance politically, outside the ranks of the established political groupings.
Glen Barr, at the time both a leading member of the UDA and of Craig’s Vanguard Party, inaugurated a long-running debate on ‘Ulster Nationalism’ in a widely reported speech to the assembly at Stormont on 25 October 1973. He said:
I have no intention of remaining a British citizen at any price… Ulstermen have got more pride than to accept a white paper that has been thrown across the Irish Sea at them… An Ulstennan’s first allegiance must be the state of Ulster. True Ulstermen must reject anything which in any way indicates that Ulster is going to be put into a United Ireland. True Ulstermen must therefore reject the Constitution Act. Let it be put on record that I stand here as an Ulster Nationalist.
In 1978 Tyrie, Barr and another former prominent UDA leader, Harry Chicken, co-operated in setting up a group called the New Ulster Political Research Group. This came into being during January, and by July of that year Tyrie could be heard making statements to the effect that the UDA ‘would no longer be the willing tool of any aspiring or ready-made politician’.102 Another notable effect of the new thinking was the fact that the number of Loyalist paramilitary killings dropped to a mere eight in 1978.
The NUPRG experiment attracted a good deal of media attention. Barr and Chicken were advocates of a negotiated independence for Ulster. I remember once sharing a speaking occasion with Barr103 at which he summed up his and Chicken’s thesis about Northern Irish people having a distinctive identity. He said they were: ‘…not second-class Englishmen but first-class Ulstermen’. Barr and Chicken visited the US amongst other countries, and were impressed by the US Constitution. They published a policy document (in 1979), ‘Beyond the Religious Divide’, which embodied their American experiences. The new policy envisaged a bill of rights to protect civil and religious liberties, and a president, nominated from outside the political parties. The president in turn would have chosen an executive from the worlds of academia, the professions and the trade unions. The activities of the executive were to have been overseen by a committee system drawn from elected representatives. Unfortunately, this type of thinking became stifled within the UDA by internal jealousies and the more traditional preoccupations with killing Catholics and racketeering. Barr and Chicken resigned from the UDA and John McMichael became the movement’s political guru.
Given McMichael’s reputation as a hard man there was a surprised welcome when he too showed signs of trying to reach a political accommodation with the minority, if not to the same extent as either Barr or Chicken. He was behind a document, ‘Common Sense’, which the UDA unveiled on 29 January 1987. This proposed a constitutional conference, including Sinn Fein, with a view to creating a devolved assembly wherein a coalition government would operate on the basis of party strengths. However, McMichael was dead by the end of the year and in a very real sense common sense did not prevail. Nevertheless, the UDA’s ‘political interludes’ do indicate that, given responsible leadership, Loyalist paramilitaries can answer to that leadership rather than to the urgings of the insensate, or the shadow intelligence figure.
The Special Air Services (SAS) regiment, with a headquarters in Hereford, and another in London, in the Duke of York Barracks on the King’s Road, was founded in Egypt during 1941. It was designed to carry out sabotage and intelligence operations behind enemy lines. These generally fell squarely within the Deniable Zone. For example, it was agreed to send the SAS to Oman in 1958 (where the regiment has since served on and off in aid of the Sultan’s forces), ‘provided all possible steps were taken to avoid publicity. We should maintain… it was intended to assist in the training of the Sultan’s own forces.’104 Even membership of the SAS is deniable, since many of its members are assigned from other regiments. For example, in discussing allegations of dirty tricks by Holroyd involving Robert Nairac, Mark Urban writes:
Lt. Nairac was never in the SAS; although he died later in Northern Ireland, his name was not inscribed on the clock tower at the regiment’s camp in Hereford where all SAS men who fall in action are listed.105
Nairac was, in fact, on assignment from the Grenadier Guards at the time of his death. Members of the SAS have a high level of fitness and train to be impervious to pain, both by direct physical maltreatment and by procedures such as carrying out ‘a 45-mile endurance march to be completed in 24 hours while carrying a 50lb bergen rucksack’.106 The regiment is also expert in the infliction of pain. It was the SAS who conducted the ‘deep interrogation’ of the ‘hooded men’ at Ballykelly Barracks in 1971 after internment. They are also suspected of involvement in the training and running of the undercover ‘pseudo-gangs’, the Dublin and other cross-border bombings, and a number of assassinations south of the border. The SAS is acknowledged to have shot eleven people as a result of stake-outs in 1977–8 alone. SAS men’s training is aimed at enabling its members to live for days in the open, on spartan rations, in dugouts, defecating into plastic receptacles while waiting for a suspect to show up.
The veil of secrecy over the SAS’s operations was lifted to a degree in 1976. Harold Wilson announced on 7 January that units of the force were to be sent into South Armagh. Opinions differ as to why the announcement was made. Some say it was because the IRA had previously succeeded in killing, or blowing up, forty-nine soldiers in the area. Others point to a bout of horrific sectarian warfare over the previous six months. This reached a peak with the shooting of eleven Protestant workmen by the ‘South Armagh Republican Action Force’, an organisation lying very much within the Deniable Zone, along the lines of the Catholic Reaction Force mentioned earlier. The slaughter came in retaliation for the killing of five Catholics by Protestants a few days earlier. Later, on 7 March 1978, Roy Mason announced that every army unit in the Six Counties was to have its own undercover SAS support group. The intensification of the Ulsterisation policy also meant more work for the SAS in training UDR and RUC squads and in planning undercover operations. SAS men were deployed in plain clothes on the streets. Humphrey Atkins in fact spoke publicly on two occasions in 1979107 of the existence of a ‘Secret Army’.
The SAS’s involvement in the shoot-to-kill policy is thought to have accounted for thirty-one deaths between 1981 and 1989, including ‘spectaculars’ such as the Loughall and Gibraltar shootings. The regiment is also thought to have trained UDA squads in collaboration with John McMichael. It is believed that McMichael provided men while the SAS supplied the training and intelligence to enable a number of killings to take place during the H Block agitation. Though at the time these appeared to have been linked solely to the H Block issue, a connection has subsequently been alleged with ‘operation RANC, a series of revenge killings following the murder of Airey Neave by an INLA car bomb in March 1979.108 British intelligence is said to have masterminded the plot, which claimed the lives of the H Block activists John Turnley, Miriam Daly and Ronald Bunting and very nearly claimed that of Bernadette McAliskey and her husband. Ronald Bunting had taken a remarkably different path from that of his father, Major Ronald Bunting, Paisley’s one-time henchman. Bunting Junior was an active member of the INLA. The others, however, were engaged only in constitutional political activity.
This particular spate of killings would appear to have ended following some very strong private representations by the Dublin Government. All I can say on the matter is that I know from my own sources that the representations were made. In the case of Turnley, a Protestant civil libertarian, it was stated in court, by one of the four-man UDA team sentenced to life imprisonment on 10 March 1982 for the murder, that the killing was committed at the instigation of the SAS. The UDA man, Robert McConnell, who named the SAS men he said he had worked with, said that they had given him weapons and discussed the activities not only of Turnley but also of Daly, Bunting and McAliskey. An RUC officer admitted at the trial that notes of an interview with McConnell’s brother Eric, also sentenced to life imprisonment, had been destroyed because they contained ‘sensitive information’.
The McAliskey attempt paralleled one on Gerry Adams’ life in a number of ways. In the McAliskeys’ case the assailants were captured after they had carried out the shooting and were preparing to drive off. Their captors were a group of paratroopers who had been on a stake-out nearby. It was never explained why paratroopers were involved, as the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were stationed locally. Nor, of course, was it made clear why the paratroopers did not appear until after the shootings had taken place. When they did show up, the soldiers said they could not summon aid as their radio was not working and the McAliskeys’ phone lines had been cut. They left to find the Argylls, who arrived twenty minutes later and rendered the medical aid that saved the couple’s lives.
In Adams’ case, the shooting occurred on 14 March 1984, during the lunchtime adjournment of a case he was involved in at Belfast Magistrates’ Court. He told me afterwards that he had been expecting something to happen that day. ‘All my sixth senses were working. I had a presentiment.’ He and three companions were wounded by three UDA men. The UDA men were captured immediately afterwards by what were described as an off-duty UDR man and two members of ‘the Royal Military Police’, who happened to be driving by in plain clothes and an unmarked car. While the authorities have denied SAS involvement, Adams has always maintained that the shooting was an SAS/intelligence operation and that the UDA men were set up. As in the McAliskey case there were no smoking guns found on military personnel. In fact, men with army connections were made to appear as saviours in both cases. John McMichael, the UDA leader who had helped to plan the attempt on Adams, was, as we have seen, subsequently killed by the IRA. One of the soldiers involved in capturing Adams’ assailants lost both his legs in an IRA bomb attack five years later.
In the incidents at Loughall and Gibraltar there is no dispute about SAS involvement. In the former, which occurred on 8 May 1987, the SAS were lying in wait for a top IRA ASU which had arrived in the village to blow up what they thought was an untended RUC station. The ASU drove into an ambush, not an arrest. All eight were killed, three after surrendering. A passenger in a passing car was also shot dead. It was the biggest single loss for the IRA since 1921, when twelve volunteers had been killed in an engagement at Clonmult, Co. Cork.
The IRA may have been planning a revenge ‘spectacular’ in Gibraltar for Loughall and for a number of other incidents which had occurred prior to 6 March 1988. It is believed that the planned target was a band and changing of the guard ceremony involving the Royal Anglian Regiment at Ince’s Hall, Main Street, Gibraltar. The bomb was found across the Spanish border in Marbella two days later after the SAS had cut down the IRA scouting party without warning. The British Government had been aware of the IRA group’s activities for some months, an earlier visit to Spain by the group having come to the attention of British intelligence the previous November (1987). An SAS team was flown to the Rock on 2 March 1988, and whatever action it took, I cannot believe that it did so without official authorization. Three people – Mairead Farrell, Danny McCann and Sean Savage – were shot dead. All were unarmed. Savage was a nephew of Billy McKee, the former Belfast IRA Commander. Farrell had been the leader of the dirty protest in Armagh Jail. I had last seen her coated in filth in a dingy cell lined with faeces and menstrual fluid. McCann, who by the time of his death had become a top IRA operator, was from Clonard. He had been twelve years old the day the mobs invaded his district…
Apart, however, from illustrating aspects of the northern struggle, such as the continuing importance of the Clonard area, Gibraltar has a deeper significance. In the last analysis an army, or a part of an army, such as the SAS, is only a tool, an instrument of policy. If the tool is misused its actions can have a knock-on emotional and, ultimately, political effect, particularly in a complex situation like Northern Ireland. What the SAS could get away with safely in Oman might have unforeseen results close to home. This is what happened over Gibraltar. As the victims were being buried in Belfast on 16 March 1988, a Loyalist gunman, Michael Stone, made a gun and grenade attack on the mourners, killing three of them. While one of the victims, Kevin Brady, was being buried three days later in an atmosphere of extraordinary tension, two British corporals in plain clothes drove into the funeral, apparently unaware of what was going on. The soldiers, Robert Howes and Derek Wood, were dragged from their vehicle by a mob, beaten, stripped and then shot. For me the photograph of Fr Alec Reid, who had vainly tried to save the men, praying over one of the bodies subsequently became one of the most searing images of the entire Troubles.
But the harmful effects of Gibraltar did not end with the soldiers’ deaths. The Amnesty International Report for 1992 cited the trial of seven men charged in connection with their deaths in support of Amnesty’s contention that the United Kingdom’s behaviour in Northern Ireland had made it into one of the worst human rights violators in Europe. The report pointed out that the courts ‘…drew adverse inferences against defendants for having remained silent during police questioning or at trial’. The case is bracketed in many Nationalists’ minds with the miscarriages of justice in the Birmingham Six and Maguire family cases.
One could go on and fill many books with accounts of other forms of ‘dirty tricks’. I know of one case involving an English woman journalist and a prominent Northern Irish Nationalist politician who were filmed by an RUC undercover unit in flagrante. It took intercession by a taoiseach with the British Government to prevent the videotape being used for blackmail purposes. Other incidents, like the disgraceful saga of Kincora, the boys’ home in east Belfast which MI5 used as a source of male prostitution, are at least partly known. Colin Wallace was one of the first to allege that MI5 and the army were not only fully conversant with what was happening there but encouraged it.109 He says that his complaints were ignored because Kincora was in fact an MI5 blackmail operation, designed to give the agency a hold over certain prominent people.110
Kincora was run by William McGrath, a member of Ian Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church, who also ran the Loyalist paramilitary group Tara, a specifically anti-Catholic, as opposed to merely anti-Republican, organisation. Several of Tara’s members were also in the UVF, one of the more deadly of the Loyalist paramilitary groupings. Apart from abusing the boys himself, McGrath hired them out to stag clubs.
This may have been the cause of his undoing. My understanding is that two of the boys, whom he had sent to a stag club in Scotland, made a pact that they would commit suicide. While one subsequently drowned himself, the other did not, but his information set in train an RUC investigation which was aborted by British intelligence. Eventually, as a result of public disquiet, largely fuelled by some first-class investigative journalism by the Irish Times and the Irish Independent, yet another police inquiry was held, under the aegis of a British policeman, Sir George Terry, formerly Chief Constable of Sussex. His report was made public on 24 October 1983. It proved inconclusive. Sir George said he could find no evidence that civil servants, RUC or military intelligence were involved in a homosexual ring or that they had conspired to withhold evidence.
That is probably true. Such evidence would be extremely difficult to find. Kincora was one of the most deniable of the Deniable Zone scandals. McGrath received only a two-year sentence for his Kincora crimes. His Tara activities drew no penalty whatever. Martin Dillon, one of the most exhaustive researchers in the Deniable Zone, is not alone in his assertion that McGrath was shielded in order to protect the identity of well-known homosexuals within the British military intelligence community. The disclosures could also have damaged others in high places in British public life. Dillon bears out some of Colin Wallace’s allegations about Kincora:
[McGrath] had been working for British Intelligence… He also monitored the life of his fellow loyalists, but his other life included the provision of boys for homosexual colleagues within the British Intelligence community in Northern Ireland and for several leading members of the British Establishment who visited Belfast regularly… In 1979 a Military Intelligence liaison officer sabotaged RUC attempts to trace the history of McGrath and his British intelligence connection.111
Not only were the RUC sabotaged. Of my own knowledge I can state that a UDA leader who interrogated McGrath in jail was subsequently murdered, and that journalists who tried to follow up the story were intimidated. I know some Kincora-watching journalists who smiled grimly on 23 April 1987. On that date, following disclosures by the journalist Chapman Pincher, Margaret Thatcher felt compelled to reveal in the House of Commons that the former head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, was a homosexual who had lost his positive vetting clearance. She said that Sir Maurice had admitted to being a homosexual, but denied that this had ever led to security being compromised. After Thatcher’s declaration, former colleagues of Oldfield’s in MI6 denied indignantly that he had ever been a homosexual. He had had some fleeting sexual experimentation as a student, but nothing subsequently. However, information supplied from Belfast to London which found its way to Pincher and later to Thatcher alleged that Oldfield’s Special Branch guards had observed him partaking of Kincora’s facilities. The unfortunate Oldfield, whose term in the Six Counties was cut short by stomach cancer, had to contend with both his illness and these allegations in the last days of his life. By the time Thatcher made her revelations, Oldfield had been dead for six years. But it would appear that, even beyond the grave, the war between the intelligence services continued. Colin Wallace has been quoted as saying that the reason for the allegations about Sir Maurice was that:
Oldfield had a Mr Clean approach in Northern Ireland, particularly against assassination plots and the dirty tricks war. There was a remarkable campaign of character assassination directed against Oldfield which could only have been co-ordinated by people who actually had very detailed inside information… MI5 wanted him removed from Ulster because he would never have sanctioned the E4A-type activities [E4A is the RUC undercover death squad, referred to on p. 305]. It was no secret to anyone who knew Maurice Oldfield that he was totally opposed to assassination. MI5 saw him as a threat to their activities in Ireland.112
As to the myriad forms which the intelligence war takes on this side of the Styx, one can only speculate. Were there, for example, attempts to poison John Hume and Gerry Adams? Adams suffers from hepatitis-like symptoms from time to time. He also has some kidney problems, dating from a bout of interrogation in Castlereagh when he was kicked unconscious and drenched in cold water. Was more than cold water used while he was unconscious? John Hume certainly does not rule out the possibility. Since the mid-eighties he has had periodic bouts of ill-health which may or may not be traceable to a certain SDLP fund-raising dance. On the crowded dance floor Hume suddenly ‘felt a jag’ in his thigh. He started feeling unwell shortly afterwards. Later he discovered a circular inflamed blotch on the affected limb. In London shortly afterwards he began to feel progressively worse. Chris Patten, then a Northern Ireland Office minister, arranged for him to be admitted to a London hospital, where he received treatment. The blotch subsided but Hume never subsequently enjoyed quite the same robust health he had previously. We discussed the incident in Jury’s Hotel, Dublin, on a bright May day in 1994 before the IRA ceasefire was announced.113
Our interview was delayed while John talked to a detective. Outside the hotel window a Garda squad car circled the grounds. He had just been warned that ‘the Loyalists were going to try to get him in the Republic – to make a point’. The threat was obviously both explicable and real. But I remember thinking at the time (and still do) that it was curious that the Loyalist paramilitaries would have chosen that moment to make such a point. They could have shot him ten times over in his native Derry, or in Belfast. John Hume is one of the most visible, and therefore vulnerable, public figures in Northern Ireland. I have known his car to break down in the middle of the night on lonely roads where he had to wait for almost an hour before getting a lift. He has had innumerable death threats. In times of controversy, the Provisionals have been known to fire on his home. All that has kept him alive has been the understanding between the Republicans and the Loyalists that if anything happened to a leader such as himself or Adams, then leading Loyalist politicians would be ‘taken out’ in retaliation. But at the time we spoke there was a good deal of outrage in the Tory press, amongst Conservatives, and, of course, in Unionist circles about talks which Hume had been conducting with Adams. Hume, ‘St John’, the revered leader of constitutional nationalism, was perceived as giving aid and comfort to the process of respectabilising Sinn Fein. Yet, as has been demonstrated since the ceasefire, it was obvious that if Sinn Fein were brought in from the cold, the Loyalist paramilitaries would automatically follow and reap any benefits in the way of amnesties, etc. which might ensue. Why shoot a man who was helping to bring this about?
Whatever attitude one may take to all of the foregoing, it must be acknowledged that the episodes, described and surmised, unquestionably point towards a very dirty form of warfare all round. The first essential, therefore, if this form of 1920s, secret service, colonial-style ‘dirty tricks’ war was to succeed in a west European democracy was the muzzling of the media.