by Peter Taylor
2 Over 40 sheets giving details of the organization and structure of IRA units.
3 Details of possible IRA operations; arms caches; safe houses; communications and supply routes, including those across the border and locations of wanted persons.
4 Details of morale, operational directives, propaganda techniques, relations with other organizations and future plans.
5 The discovery of individual responsibility for about 85 incidents recorded on police files which had previously remained unexplained.18
Lord Parker and Mr Boyd-Carpenter, the majority on the Committee, concluded that the methods could be justified only ‘in cases where it is considered vitally necessary to obtain information’. Lord Gardiner, however, in his minority submission vehemently opposed his colleagues’ view and penned a damning report of such force that the Government could not ignore it. Gardiner concluded that the procedures were illegal in domestic and possibly international law. The memorable words of his last paragraph could have echoed down the following twenty-five years as a reminder to the ‘Brits’ of their responsibilities.
The blame for this sorry story, if blame there be, must lie with those who, many years ago, decided that in emergency conditions in Colonial-type situations we should abandon our legal, well-tried and highly successful wartime interrogation methods and replace them by procedures which were secret, illegal, not morally justifiable and alien to the traditions of what I believe still to be the greatest democracy in the world.19
Ironically, Lord Gardiner wrote those words on 31 January 1972, the day after ‘Bloody Sunday’.
The Prime Minister, Edward Heath, announced on the day that the Parker report was published that the Five Techniques would not be used again. I asked Sir Robert Andrew if he had been surprised by the political storm.
One was aware that methods of this sort had been used in places like Aden and it only became clear, certainly to me and I think to most other people in the Ministry of Defence, at a fairly late stage exactly what was being done in interrogation centres in Northern Ireland. I think in justification for these methods it has to be remembered that there was a desperate need to get intelligence and that it was thought, and rightly so, that lives depended on getting it. If, by using techniques which I think most people felt fell short of torture as normally defined, these methods would give intelligence which would save lives then arguably there was a case for using them. I think the so-called ‘Five Techniques’ were not in the same category as torture as usually understood, such as applying electrodes to tender parts of the body and things of that sort. But they were clearly inhuman methods and I think once it was recognized at what one might call a political level – that’s senior civil servants in Whitehall and of course Ministers – that these methods were in fact being used, they were quickly stopped.
Was it not a case of not being able to use techniques within the United Kingdom that had been widely used in other theatres previously?
Well, when you do the things in the United Kingdom they are viewed rather differently from elsewhere.
The repercussions rumbled on for most of the decade. The Irish Government was not satisfied and took the British Government to the European Commission of Human Rights in Strasbourg which, on 2 September 1976, found Britain guilty of breaching the European Convention on Human Rights ‘in the form not only of inhuman and degrading treatment but also of torture’.20 But this was not the end of the story. The case then went to the higher body, the European Court of Human Rights, which, to the Government’s intense relief, dropped the acutely embarrassing ‘torture’ element of the Commission’s verdict and ruled on 18 January 1978 that Britain was only guilty of the lesser charge of ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’.21 It was no consolation to those like Liam Shannon who had been on the receiving end. Interrogation and other controversies were to continue to haunt the Government as the conflict unfolded. The crackdown by the ‘Brits’ against the IRA had only just begun.
Chapter Six
Aftermath
August 1971–November 1971
However many lives the ‘Brits’ say internment and ‘in-depth’ interrogation may have saved, there is no denying that after its introduction the death toll soared. In the following week, twenty people died, sixteen of them shot dead by the British army and two by the IRA.1 It was almost as many as had died in the previous six months. Only two of the army’s victims were members of the IRA. Most were shot during gun battles and riots as Belfast and the nationalist areas around the province erupted. The city and the province had never witnessed scenes like it before. In North Belfast, where nationalist and loyalist areas met, over 200 Protestant homes in the Farringdon Gardens area went up in flames; their inhabitants, fleeing as a result of intimidation and fear, literally scorched the earth to leave nothing behind for the Catholic ‘tenants’ who would then move in.2
That night, with Belfast seemingly ablaze, soldiers from the 3rd Battalion, The Royal Green Jackets, were flown in, among them Jamie, then a young Second-Lieutenant. He had joined what he thought at the time was still a very colonial army ‘full of end of empire experiences’. But that was to change. Jamie was about to experience the first of nine tours in Northern Ireland, the last one as a senior officer nearly thirty years later. Two of the tours were for two years. As the Green Jackets flew over Liverpool the day after internment, Jamie could see the glow on the far-distant horizon that got stronger the closer they came to Belfast. As they approached the coast, he could actually see the flames and as they came into land over the city, he could make out details on the ground. ‘It seemed to me whole streets were burning. You could see roads that had been blocked and barricaded. You could see fires, from bonfires, burning cars and burning houses. I was shocked. I realized for the first time the size of the problem and the size of the devastation.’
On landing at Aldergrove airport, the Green Jackets drove into Belfast city centre in completely unprotected four-ton trucks because that was all that was to hand at the time. The streets were deserted. Everywhere buildings were smouldering or still burning. Shop fronts were smashed and the roads were littered with rubble and glass. There were burned-out cars used to form barricades, tossed aside like toys as the army tried to clear a way through the debris. It was a scene of utter devastation. Jamie could hardly believe his eyes. ‘You were seeing scenes on the streets of the United Kingdom that you tend to associate with the Middle East, with the Lebanon and Beirut. I was amazed. I was only nineteen at the time and I realized that all this was happening in a city of the United Kingdom. You were passing red telephone boxes and red letter boxes and there were double-decker buses lying around the place, and black taxis too. Suddenly seeing them in this setting was quite a shock.’
Jamie’s reaction was not unlike that of the Hull bus driver Tom, whom I took to Belfast during Easter 1972. Jamie had just returned from a United Nations tour and meeting Northern Ireland face-to-face and becoming aware of the political landscape in which it had existed, was a profound cultural setback. ‘We’d just been upholding human rights and suddenly to come back to a part of one’s own country and find that those human rights had not been available to a sizeable percentage of the population was a shock to us. We were gob-smacked that part of the United Kingdom hadn’t had “one man, one vote”.’
But that was in the past. Jamie and his men were more concerned about the present and staying alive in the mayhem that internment unleashed. They were, he says, ‘pretty bloody days’. Every time he took his men out on patrol they were either shot at, blast-bombed or petrol-bombed. Every night there would be at least one ‘contact’ with the enemy as the army’s casualties mounted day by day. Jamie admitted the military response was tough and alienated those sections of the nationalist community that bore the brunt of it.
I think probably the way we conducted our operations in those days would in fact have strengthened the support that the IRA got in the local communities, certainly. The way we operated was pretty blanket and a
ll-encompassing. I don’t think we differentiated nearly enough between those who were true terrorists and those who were normal members of the population, and I think that we paid very little regard to the impact that our operations would have on the majority of the population.
With Kitson commanding the army’s 39 Brigade in Belfast, there was to be no nonsense. When republican barricades went up, they were immediately taken down, giving the IRA no chance to seal off and make them ‘no-go’ areas. The notion that there could be sections of the United Kingdom into which the army could not venture was anathema to Kitson. As far as he was concerned, there was no part of the realm in which the Queen’s writ did not run, at least in the Belfast area that he controlled. Two of his toughest barricade-busters were 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, stationed in Belfast on their two-year tour, and The Royal Green Jackets. ‘If violence appeared or if roads were blocked, we would clear them at the earliest possible opportunity,’ Jamie said. ‘We were determined not to allow no-go areas and permit the IRA, as part of its counter-revolutionary warfare strategy, to set up its own areas of administration and control its own areas. We dealt with any such attempts in a pro-active and hard manner.’
The Adjutant of 1 Para confirmed what Jamie said. ‘Those barricades would be defended by the IRA and their supporters. We would be going in to restore law and order to remove the so-called “no-go” areas and we’d be resisted. It’s not a situation in which half-hearted measures are going to be successful. If they were half-hearted, you’d be taking inordinate risks with the lives of your own soldiers. Belfast was run in a no-nonsense way.’
The Parachute Regiment’s Support Company that was to play a crucial role on ‘Bloody Sunday’ was never far away. It became colloquially known as ‘Kitson’s Private Army’. Support Company, consisting of the Mortar, Machine Gun and Anti-Tank platoons, was the Battalion’s hard edge and made up of some of the Battalion’s most experienced and toughest men, many of them veterans of Aden. ‘We were very experienced and very highly motivated,’ the Mortar Platoon’s Sergeant, ‘Phil’, told me. ‘When barricades went up in Belfast, they came down very quickly. The whole training of the Parachute Regiment is built on aggression and speed and you can’t afford to hang around. This gets through to the blokes and they get very hard-minded about their work. They know what they’re doing and they’re good at it. I don’t think there was a better Battalion at that time in the world, never mind the British army, in terms of internal security. They’d seen it all in Belfast.’
The men of 1 Para idolized their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Derek Wilford, who had taken over the Battalion in Belfast in June 1971, nine months into its two-year tour. He, in turn, idolized his men. Wilford is a man of many talents. He is an accomplished painter and lover of the Classics who intrigued his men by reading the Roman poet Virgil’s war epic, The Aeneid, in the original Latin. And, like its eponymous hero, Aeneas, Wilford was a man with a mission. He was as tough as the men he led, having served with the SAS in the Middle East, and could not afford to be otherwise. His mission was to combat terrorism from whatever side it came and ensure that his men stayed alive in the process.
In my view, this was a war. If people are shooting at you, they’re shooting not to wound you but to kill you. Therefore we had to behave accordingly. We blacked our faces, we took our berets off, or at least the badges from them, and put camouflage nets over our heads. We always wore our flak jackets and when we moved on the streets, we moved as if we were moving against a well-armed, well-trained army. Now that might have been a compliment to the IRA but it wasn’t really. It was a compliment to my soldiers. I wanted my men to stay alive and I actually said to them, ‘You will not get killed.’ That was really my coda throughout my period of command.3
His men took everything in. One who did not and lit up a cigarette was shot by a sniper in Ballymurphy and paralysed for life. Wilford recognized that his Battalion was not liked by the nationalists but 1 Para was not in the business of currying favour. ‘No, we weren’t popular,’ he admits. ‘I think that was due to the attitude I instilled in myself and my soldiers. I know it’s a much over-used word, but we were being professional.’ That is not the word those on the receiving end would have used. Complaints about the Battalion rained in as they took down barricades and put down riots. ‘Our philosophy was that a guy can’t throw a stone if he’s running away from you and therefore we used to get stuck into them,’ said ‘Phil’.4
Most of the Paras loved every minute. To Mick of 1 Para, those days were idyllic. It was what he had joined the Parachute Regiment for. ‘We had a legitimate fight almost every day and every night. We had as much beer as we could take and we had all the women we could handle. It was absolutely brilliant. A soldier’s dream.’5 And they kept their sense of humour to wind up the enemy even more. One told me of how he used to put on a Pinocchio nose during a riot and stand there with his thumbs in his ears waving at the crowd.
Northern Ireland may have been a soldier’s dream for the Paras but by the end of 1971, with 124 civilians, 44 soldiers and 14 policemen dead in addition to millions of pounds’ worth of damage, it was becoming a security and political nightmare for the British Government. The army, however, still believed it could win. ‘I think we thought that we could defeat the IRA in 1971,’ said jamie. ‘We thought that our success rate, both in terms of arrests and with people being interned, would ultimately force the IRA to realize that continued violence was no longer worthwhile. I think we underestimated the support that the IRA had from the local population and I think we probably overestimated our own capabilities.’
But however confident the army, the Government was getting worried not just because of the intolerable bloodshed that had stained the year but because Britain’s international reputation had been severely tarnished by internment and the Five Techniques. Of particular concern was the damage done in America, sections of whose Irish community helped supply the IRA with large amounts of money and guns. The controversy over the methods Britain felt she had been forced to take because of IRA violence only made the supplies of both flow faster as lurid headlines in Irish–American papers seemed to confirm republican propaganda that Northern Ireland was under the British jackboot. As the situation deteriorated, no amount of commuting across the Atlantic by Government Ministers and officials could convince Irish America that it was otherwise.
At last Ireland had become an issue in the House of Commons and one on which the British public could no longer turn its back, with soldiers coming home in coffins. On 25 November 1971, the leader of the Labour Party, Harold Wilson, now in opposition, set out a long-term fifteen-point plan before the House of Commons to help Britain extricate itself from the mess that his own Government had helped create by ignoring the warning signs in the sixties. Having just returned from Northern Ireland, where he visited the Long Kesh internment camp, Wilson recognized that the situation was now so serious that the problem required new thinking. At the heart of his proposals was a recognition that nationalists’ aspiration for a united Ireland was not only legitimate but had to be the long-term solution, although, critically, he stressed it required unionist consent. On the matter of how that consent could be won, Wilson was vague. His critics believed that his words could only give encouragement and support to the IRA.
I believe that the situation has now gone so far that it is impossible to conceive of an effective long-term solution in which the agenda at least does not include consideration of, and is not in some way directed to finding a means of achieving the aspirations envisaged half a century ago, of progress towards a united Ireland … A substantial term of years will be required before any concept of unification could become a reality, but the dream must be there. If men of moderation have nothing to hope for, men of violence will have something to shoot for.6
Wilson envisaged a time-scale of fifteen years. The unionist response was ‘never’. Four months later, he was involved in secret talks with the IRA.
/> Whitehall’s mandarins may not have agreed with Wilson’s central thesis but they recognized that something would have to be done and new thinking was required. By the autumn of 1971, there was fresh input when a new face arrived at the UK Representative’s Office at Stormont which by now had become almost like an Embassy of the United Kingdom within the borders of the United Kingdom itself. The new occupant was a Foreign Office Diplomat, Howard Smith, who later went on to become Director General of the Security Service, MI5. Smith, who was becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the amount of work required to keep abreast of events on the ground and the doings of Faulkner’s Government, decided he needed a deputy. He knew the man he wanted, a Foreign Office colleague by the name of Frank Steele who worked for the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. Smith had heard that Steele was at home on leave awaiting his next posting and hoped that he might be enticed to join him in the province.
Steele had about as much knowledge of Northern Ireland as most ‘Brits’ had who had never been there. At his personnel interview he was asked what he knew about the place. Did he, for example, know anything about Faulkner? the panel asked. Steele, who had just read a piece in The Times referring to Padraic Faulkner, the Irish Education Minister, thought he would ‘show off’ and impress his interlocutors with his knowledge. It was pointed out to him, no doubt politely, that the Faulkner they had in mind was Brian Faulkner, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. Steele described the panel’s reaction. ‘Of course, in typical personnel way, they said I’d clearly got an untrammelled mind and would be unbiased and therefore just the person to be sent there.’
Frank Steele and his MI6 successor, Michael Oatley, were to play crucial roles in the years ahead in effecting the secret dialogue with the IRA that continued on and off for over two decades. There were rumours, given Steele’s MI6 credentials, that he had been sent over by the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, to establish secret links with the IRA but he told me that nothing could be further than the truth. ‘HMG didn’t want a line of communication with the IRA,’ he said. ‘HMG wanted to beat the IRA.’ Steele was not impressed by the way the ‘Brits’ were going about it.