by Peter Taylor
The army returned fire and in the gun battles that followed shot dead four civilians, none of whom was a member of the IRA. Eighteen soldiers were wounded, thirteen from gunshot wounds and five from grenade splinters.25
To restore order out of the chaos, General Freeland now employed the military tactic used in Aden to control the recalcitrant residents of the Crater district: the curfew. Three thousand soldiers were sent in to impose it over a wide area of the Falls. The curfew began just after 10 p.m. on Friday evening and was not lifted until 9 a.m. on Sunday morning. For almost thirty-five hours, residents were confined to their houses, except for a couple of hours around Saturday tea-time when the curfew was lifted so people could buy basic necessities. With the streets clear, the army used the opportunity to conduct house-to-house searches. Television pictures of the time show the damage that was done as rooms were taken apart in the search for arms. Around sixty houses were believed to have been affected by the soldiers’ unbridled enthusiasm in rooting out weapons.26 Marie Moore, who later became a prominent Sinn Fein figure, told me what she saw in the aftermath of the army’s searches.
Some of the houses I had seen were totally wrecked. Holy statues were smashed on the floor. Family portraits and pictures were smashed. Furniture was ripped and overturned. Windows were broken and doors off the hinges. Some of the people who’d been beaten were still lying there, bloody and bruised.27
There is no reason to believe that the account is unduly exaggerated.
When the curfew was lifted, an army of women marched into the area, pushing prams loaded with bread, milk and other essential supplies. Marie Moore was one of them. According to republican legend, they returned with the prams full of the arms belonging to the Official IRA that the army had not uncovered. Gerry Adams says they ended up in the hands of the ‘Provos’.28
From the military point of view, however, the curfew and the search were successful, producing a not inconsiderable haul of 100 firearms, 100 home-made bombs, 250 lbs of explosives and 21,000 rounds of ammunition. Stormont and unionist politicians were delighted: the army had got to grips with the IRA, clipped its wings and taught its community a lesson. To add insult to injury, two members of the Stormont cabinet were given a conducted tour of the subjugated Falls by the army.29 One soldier, clearly out of step with the prevailing military view, told me it was like ‘the British Raj on a tiger hunt’. Such a triumphalist display might not have seemed out of place in Crater but was insensitively inappropriate in part of the United Kingdom. The damage was done and was never repaired. The previous Sunday, one young officer, ‘Jonathan’, had marched his men, unarmed, to a church service on the Falls Road. He could never do it again. He looked back on the curfew with sadness and regret. ‘It was absolutely clear that this was a turning point,’ he said. ‘It was felt at the time, militarily, that the best way to prevent any further bloodshed was to seal the place off, search the place thoroughly, remove all the weapons and ammunition and then get back to normal living.’30 But it was not to be. The divorce between the army and the section of the nationalist community it had come in to protect was complete. Unwittingly the ‘Brits’ had handed the IRA an issue that it could exploit to justify its actions against soldiers no longer depicted as saviours but as the ‘forces of occupation’. Bullets and bombs replaced tea and cakes.
Chapter Four
To the Brink
September 1970–March 1971
By the summer of 1970, the Provisional IRA had no doubt that things were going its way. The tougher the army got, the more recruits it gained. Before taking the oath, each one had been made fully aware of the possible consequences of being sworn in – gaol or death. They were known as ‘Volunteers’ because that is what they were. There was never any pressure to join and all those who offered their services were carefully vetted. But as yet, following the split at the turn of the year, the Provisionals did not regard themselves as being on a proper constitutional footing. The organization had been set up on an ad hoc basis following the bitter internal divisions that had prompted the traditionalists to part company with the Marxists. However bizarre it may seem to outsiders accustomed to dismiss the IRA as a murderous bunch of cowboys, the organization has a disciplined structure with a fastidious regard for its own constitutional proprieties. Now the Provisionals, so called because they were only intended to be temporary, had to formalize their existence by calling a new Army Convention in which representatives from all over the country would elect and give their allegiance to a new Army Executive and Army Council. The Convention took place in September 1970 when delegates repudiated the claim of the ‘Officials’ to be the true heirs of the men of 1916. Sean MacStiofáin was now officially confirmed as the Provisional IRA’s Chief of Staff. Technically, they were no longer the ‘Provisionals’, although the name and the nickname, the ‘Provos’, stuck. More than thirty years later, the security forces, with their fondness for acronyms, still refer to them as PIRA, the Provisional IRA. The new Army Council then issued its first statement, setting out its policy objectives.
The Convention decided to continue and intensify the provision of defensive measures for the people of the Six Counties. It re-affirmed that British rule is not acceptable in Ireland under any circumstances and that every effort must be made to bring about its downfall.1
The following month, on 25 October 1970, Provisional Sinn Fein held its own special conference and brought itself into line with its military wing. The caretaker Executive went out of office and a new one was duly elected with Ruairi O’Bradaigh as its President. The Provisional IRA and Provisional Sinn Fein were now officially in business and ready to take on the ‘Brits’.
The Provisional IRA’s statement coincided with the arrival in the province of the soldier who was to become top of republicans’ hate list, the ‘Brit’ they saw as the architect of the ‘dirty tricks’ that they believe have always been used against them. His name was Brigadier Frank Kitson of the Royal Green Jackets, the guru of British counter-insurgency policy who is still demonized today. As ever, the reality does not bear out the myth. When he set foot in the province, he already had considerable experience of counter-insurgency operations. In the 1950s he had fought Mau Mau gangs in Kenya, Communist insurgents in Malaya, and had been involved as a staff officer in planning an operation against rebel tribesmen in Oman; in the 1960s he had taken part in two peace-keeping operations on the strife-torn island of Cyprus where he experienced the communal tensions of a divided community at first hand; and in 1969, as Belfast blazed, he was on sabbatical at University College, Oxford, writing his seminal thesis on counter-insurgency and peace-keeping. Two years later, whilst Kitson was still serving in Northern Ireland, it was published as a book, Low Intensity Operations, which became required reading for all IRA strategists.
Kitson’s philosophy for countering insurgents was based on two cardinal principles: the need to acquire, analyse and act on intelligence and to win the support of the people on whom the enemy relies. To his superiors, his appointment in September 1970 as commander of the army’s 39 Brigade that covers the Belfast area seemed to be a perfect match of the man and the moment. A week before Kitson arrived to take over command, he visited the province to look at a house and is said to have been surprised to learn that the GOC and the Chief Constable were talking of getting the army out by Christmas. The Chief Constable was Sir Arthur Young, the former City of London Police Commissioner, whom Jim Callaghan had appointed in the wake of the Hunt Report to restore confidence in the RUC. Unionists, unhappy at his measured approach, dubbed him ‘Mr Softly, Softly’ after a famous television series. Sir Arthur, like Kitson, had fought terrorists in Malaya. However much Kitson may have had his head down at Oxford, he would have known that the situation was getting worse not better and that the notion that the soldiers would soon be going home was not only totally unrealistic but ludicrous. Nor, judging by what he had written in his thesis, would he have approved of the methods the army had been using to try to resto
re order. Flooding areas with CS gas which affected everyone from a baby to a granny was not Kitson’s way of going about things. It was not the best way of winning ‘hearts and minds’. Nor did he believe that it was effective as it did not stop the rioting which often put a third of a platoon out of action.
Although when Kitson first arrived, the problem was primarily one of civil disorder, it soon became clear that it might escalate way beyond stones and bottles. The names ‘Provisional’ and ‘Official’ IRA were recognized by Kitson and his battalion commanders but they knew them better as the ‘Brádaigh group’ and the ‘Goulding group’, the former associated with Frank Card and the latter with Jim Sullivan. But neither ‘group’ was deemed to constitute any serious threat at this stage and Kitson encouraged his local army commanders to maintain contact with both of them, discussing day-to-day problems like children throwing stones. Kitson himself met Sullivan in his capacity as a member of the Belfast Central Citizens’ Defence Committee whereas in fact he was also the Official IRA’s adjutant in Belfast. Such dialogue was also a useful means of gathering intelligence and weighing up the calibre and intent of those who held sway within their communities. Kitson had no illusion as to who they were but was not yet thinking of the IRA as an insurgent organization although he undoubtedly saw its potential to become one unless measures were put in place to stop it. Hindsight suggests that the Provisional IRA’s statement of September 1970 about bringing about ‘the downfall of British rule’ should have been seen as an ominous warning but, at the time, military intelligence officers probably thought it was little more that bravado. The IRA may have killed five Protestants in one weekend in June but it had not yet turned its guns against the British army. Nor was there any indication that it was about to do so whatever its private intentions were. The army was still fairly relaxed about the IRA although the days were over when soldiers drinking in Falls Road pubs would find that their ammunition and the occasional weapon had suddenly been spirited away.
Having analysed the situation he inherited, Kitson devised a civil and military plan for Belfast. On the civil front, he recognized that the priority was to try to win back the support of the local population that the army had lost through its actions in Ballymurphy and the Lower Falls. Kitson knew that turning things around would be difficult but not impossible. He began by introducing Divisional Action Committees on which the local RUC Divisional Commander, usually a Superintendent, would sit along with the commanding officer of the local army battalion. To ensure a degree of military continuity, a Major from the Brigade reserve battalion would join them as this battalion was there for two years whereas local battalion commanders were there for only four short months. The Committee would sit and discuss local problems from mending street lights smashed during the rioting to the frequency of army patrols. The RUC’s Assistant Chief Constable for Belfast, Sam Bradley, was co-sponsor of the idea. Kitson’s chief complaint was that there were no civil representatives on the Committees and he tried hard to rectify the omission but with little success as the IRA dissuaded well-intentioned locals from getting involved. The IRA was not in the business of helping the ‘Brits’ restore order and start winning back hearts and minds. Despite the lack of this crucial ingredient, the Divisional Action Committees looked good on paper and went some way towards the system used in places like Kenya and Malaya, but Belfast was different. Whatever nationalists felt about the army after the Falls Road curfew, they still saw loyalists as the main enemy and any attempt to introduce a degree of normality into Catholic areas risked being disrupted by their next march or what nationalists saw as the next provocation. ‘The Prods were an endless nuisance, prancing around with their bands and annoying everyone,’ one frustrated army officer told me. The other factor that began to work against Kitson’s civil initiative was the IRA itself which saw his Divisional Committees as a ‘Brit’-run power base in opposition to its own. Sabotaging them became one of the IRA’s goals consistent with its declaration that ‘British rule is not acceptable in Ireland under any circumstances’.
On the military front, Kitson’s priority was to put the gathering, sharing and analysis of intelligence on a proper basis. He inherited a system whereby RUC Special Branch officers collected information on the ground, primarily through a longstanding and somewhat dusty network of informers, then passed it to RUC Headquarters who in turn passed it to the army’s Headquarters Northern Ireland (HQNI) at Lisburn who then passed it down to its Brigades and thence to its local battalion commanders in the field. Kitson wanted to short-circuit the whole process and have intelligence passed directly from Special Branch on the ground to the local battalion intelligence officers with whom they often shared the same quarters and canteen. This would not only be more efficient but, in theory, would reduce the amount of intelligence that was filtered out along the way and not passed on by the RUC to the army. The sharing and coordination of intelligence between the army and the police was to remain a constant source of friction for at least the next twenty years and the IRA was the beneficiary. Because intelligence was power, the RUC was not disposed to share it, and at this time the army had very little of its own. This conflict inevitably led to frustration on the part of military intelligence officers and the soldiers whom they had to support. Many felt they were only getting crumbs from the Special Branch table. Soldiers were there for four months and wanted tangible successes to take home in the form of a ‘contact’, whether it be a shoot-out with the IRA, the interception of a bomb, the discovery of weapons or the arrest of a known ‘player’. Peter, a young officer in the Welsh Guards who first came to Belfast in August 1969, knew the frustrations at first hand.
Soldiers needed to be able to go away feeling they’d done a good job. They needed to justify their training and for this they needed a reasonably quick return. In other words, it took you roughly four weeks to get to know your area. Then you probably had a reasonably productive six weeks in the middle of your tour looking after your area and really getting to know it well and being able to make some inroads given reasonable information. After that there was inevitably a slight sort of feeling, ‘Well we’re going to go home in a month and we must end on a high note, but let’s make sure that we don’t end up with too many tears.’
Most soldiers ended their short tours without ever having fired a shot or made an arrest, although most would have been on the receiving end of stones, petrol bombs and colourful abuse. Given the increasing pressure troops came under as the IRA flexed its muscles, there was even greater resentment that Special Branch seemed to be keeping its intelligence to itself. After all, the police and army were supposed to be singing from the same hymn sheet. Peter had no doubt why the RUC had not given out copies.
Relations with Special Branch were nothing like as close or as good as I suspect that they should have been at battalion level on the streets. We had a uniformed police officer with each battalion who was there to provide straight liaison with the RUC and, we thought, some intelligence. But we were never the recipients of any intelligence and we were very, very rarely the recipients of any visits from the Special Branch. They played their cards pretty close to their chest, I think understandably as they were fearful of compromising their longer-term investment.
The army’s frustrations grew even stronger when the IRA started shooting British soldiers and policemen. By the end of 1970, although soldiers had been wounded, none had been killed. The RUC, however, was less fortunate. Two police constables, Samuel Donaldson (23) and Robert Millar (26), had been killed on 11 August near Crossmaglen in South Armagh. A booby-trap bomb was triggered as they tried the door of a stolen car, exploding 20 lbs of gelignite. They were the first members of the RUC to be killed by the IRA in the current conflict. At the time, Crossmaglen, although staunchly nationalist, was not the IRA stronghold it was later to become. Local people sent wreaths to the policemen’s homes, something that would not happen in the years ahead.2 Less than a fortnight before constables Donaldson and Millar were kil
led, the army had shot dead an alleged petrol bomber, Daniel O’Hagan (19), during a riot in Belfast. Gerry Adams later wrote that the death of O’Hagan made it seem that ‘we were heading inexorably towards war’.3 The IRA maintained that at this stage its actions were purely in response to the way it claimed the army was treating its community.
As the weeks went by and the New Year dawned, the army and the IRA kept up the pressure on each other whilst, remarkably, still carrying on the dialogue across the barricades that Kitson and Major-General Anthony Farrar-Hockley, his Commander Land Forces, had authorized and encouraged, not least to gather intelligence. On 5 February 1971, following an army cordon-and-search operation in the Clonard that provoked serious rioting, Farrar-Hockley went on television and controversially named some of those he believed to be leaders of the Provisional IRA in Belfast, stung by the jibe of some unionists that the army did not even know who the IRA were. Farrar-Hockley had previously met and talked with some of them personally when they presented themselves as members of street committees wishing to discuss local issues with the army. They always denied involvement with the IRA and claimed they were members of local defence organizations (which they also were). Farrar-Hockley told me what happened. ‘With the press and television cameras there, I said, “I now ask the following whether they are members of the IRA and operating in the interests of that organization or not”.’ He then listed the names: Billy McKee, Frank Card, Leo Martin and Liam and Kevin Hannaway.4 ‘That night they all went into hiding thinking they were about to be arrested, which was the sort of effect we wanted. We wanted to show them that we knew who they were and what they were up to and we wanted to warn them off as far as we possibly could.’ Farrar-Hockley’s ‘naming and shaming’ also caused the IRA acute embarrassment as its Volunteers did not know that their leaders were involved in dialogue with the ‘Brits’. These prominent Provisionals had also been a useful conduit for the army to get certain messages across. ‘Sometimes, when we wanted to release a warning or a bit of advice, we let it go down through these channels,’ said Farrar-Hockley. ‘We were very much feeling our way then. The fact must not be overlooked that we were not in there to set strategy with a clearly defined set of tactics. Although our tactics were reasonably well defined, the strategy certainly was not. We had to adapt to the situation as it grew. After all, the IRA was not reacting to a long-term strategy.’ But that was about to change.