by Peter Taylor
To Gavin, ‘Motorman’ was in military terms the turning point of the campaign. ‘It had to be done to put a stop to chaos and anarchy and violence, and to try and allow time for the situation to settle down and sort things out.’ Until this time, the ‘Brits’ had been fighting a counterinsurgency campaign, that is one directed not only against the ‘terrorists’ but against the community that supports their insurgency. From the summer of 1972, it became a counter-terrorist campaign, now focused almost exclusively on the ‘terrorists’ themselves. The problem was how to identify them, infiltrate them and stop them. The covert agencies of British intelligence were about to come into their own.
Chapter Eleven
Piratical Ventures
Late 1972
Although fighting an undercover war was nothing new to the ‘Brits’, it was never something they had expected to do within the borders of their own country. Most recently the SAS had carried out covert operations in Aden and had infiltrated the notorious Crater district disguised as Arabs to seek out the gunmen who had been accounting for far too many of the local Special Branch officers. They were known as the ‘Keeni-Meeni’ men, Swahili for ‘snake in the grass’.1 The technique, as the origin of the nickname suggests, was pioneered in the forests of Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency of the early 1950s by Frank Kitson who was then a young Major attached to the Special Branch of the Kenya Police as a Military Intelligence Officer.
Kitson realized that in order to engage the terrorist enemy, you first had to find out who he was and then where he was and the best way of doing this was to induce someone from the enemy camp to change sides and show you. The inducement, as in Northern Ireland, might take many forms, from paying money, to letting them off or convincing them that they were on the wrong side. Once a person had been identified and won over, Kitson’s men would ‘black up’, dress in Mau Mau rags and follow the defector to the enemy camp in the forest. Exact information could then be passed to the army or, in certain circumstances, the enemy could be attacked on the spot. It was simple, dangerous and effective. These undercover units were known as ‘counter gangs’ and featured in Kitson’s first book.2 By 1972, the army was applying similar techniques in Northern Ireland in increasingly controversial circumstances. What undercover soldiers might have got away with in the dense jungles of Kenya, the barren wastes of Oman or the dusty alleyways of Aden, was not ‘acceptable’ on the streets of Belfast when the ‘natives’ were British citizens.
The army used these methods in Northern Ireland because they had worked before, because the situation lent itself to them and because it had to take the initiative, given the paucity of the intelligence being passed on by Special Branch. IRA suspects were arrested, ‘screened’, and where possible ‘turned’, either by money or by having potential and often relatively minor charges dropped. To those who used them, such methods were legal and seemed justifiable in the face of an increasingly vicious and unscrupulous enemy. Few had any doubt that the end justified the means. Army intelligence did not need many defectors to try to turn the tables. In those days, because the IRA was structured along British military lines with Brigades, Battalions and Companies, a well-placed defector would know most of the IRA men in his area. Half a dozen dedicated ‘turned terrorists’ would do, and that was roughly the number employed. They became known as the ‘Freds’ and were housed in army quarters at Palace Barracks, Holywood, and looked after by a woman from the Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC).
The idea of recruiting and using the ‘Freds’ came from 39 Brigade in Belfast, was approved by HQNI, and became ‘operational’ around November 1971. Gradually, the ‘Freds’ helped army intelligence piece together the IRA’s ‘ORBAT’, its ‘Order of Battle’. Surprisingly, no one seemed to know what the word ‘Freds’ stood for. I guessed it was an acronym for something like ‘Friendly Republican Enemy Defectors’. I mentioned this interpretation to those who knew of their existence and was met with a smile and a negative shake of the head. I was told it was ingenious but not correct. The ‘Freds’, it seems, was simply a way the army referred to ‘those guys at Palace Barracks’. They would travel round republican areas in Belfast in armoured cars, identifying IRA men and women through small slits in the side of the vehicle. The army would then know who to watch, who to follow, who to stop and search and who to arrest.
The information that came in from the spying trips of the ‘Freds’, along with other sources, was then fed to a covert unit known as the Mobile Reconnaissance Force (MRF) that had been set up by HQNI a few months earlier in the escalating violence of the midsummer of 1971. As the MRF’s activities became increasingly controversial, its acronym became interpreted as the Military Reconnaissance Force and then, by republicans and others, as the Military Reaction Force. The MRF’s origins lay in the army’s bomb squad, previously set up by HQNI, that had tried to curtail the IRA’s increasing attacks on the city centre and elsewhere by driving around in plain clothes in unmarked cars. But the MRF had more men, more cars and a broader brief. Initially, its personnel had no special training and no officers out on the ground with them. To the IRA, the MRF, whatever its initials stood for, was a British undercover murder gang.
Inevitably, the recruiting of the ‘Freds’ and the establishment of the MRF were laid at Brigadier Kitson’s door because they appeared to be based on the ‘counter gangs’ he had used so effectively in Kenya, and Kitson was, at the time of their establishment and until April 1972, the commander of 39 Brigade in Belfast. Although the MRF was not actually Kitson’s brainchild, he certainly encouraged its use as it was consistent with the techniques he had developed in Kenya. Many soldiers on the ground, frustrated at the way the IRA appeared to be running rings round them, wanted to see more senior officers with Kitson’s qualities and attitudes running operations in Northern Ireland. ‘Alan’, of 1 Para, who had cleared more barricades in Belfast than he cared to remember, saw Kitson and his no-nonsense approach as the answer to countering the IRA.
‘Alan’ had been on duty in Belfast on 20 March 1972 when the IRA exploded the car bomb in Donegall Street that killed seven people including two policemen and two pensioners. ‘I was seeing things I hoped I would never see,’ he told me. ‘If ever there was a defining moment for me, that was it,’ he said, reliving the experience with tears in his eyes. ‘It made me realize the kind of people we were fighting. I began to wonder how they slept at night and it seemed that they didn’t really have a problem doing so. That’s what changed me, I think, that they really didn’t care about who they killed.’ But ‘Alan’s’ revulsion and horror also took on a more tangible form. ‘If ever there was a point when I wanted to catch and kill those responsible, that was it. I wanted to sort out the terrorists once and for all. A terrorist who drives a bomb into a street should be as likely to be shot for that crime as someone with a gun who is pointing it at me or my comrade. And I wanted to hit the people who told that man to do what he did on that day.’
‘Alan’ was aware that besides the ‘green’ army that conducted endless uniformed patrols around republican and loyalist areas, there was another side to soldiering in Northern Ireland. They were ‘guys in flares with long hair’ who used to wander in and out of military bases, keeping themselves to themselves. ‘Alan’ did not know who they were or what they did until one day at the time of ‘Operation Motorman’ he was asked if he would like to join them. The approach was made by the commander of the MRF in Belfast whom ‘Alan’ knew because he was an officer in the Parachute Regiment. ‘He said, “Would you like to join me?” and I said, “Yes” because I knew what he was doing was OK.’ At least, ‘Alan’ assumed it was OK because the secret organization he was joining was operating with the blessing of HQNI. He said the MRF’s role was ‘defensive’ and, in certain circumstances, ‘offensive’.
But what ‘Alan’ did not know was what the MRF had been up to in the months between ‘Bloody Sunday’ and ‘Operation Motorman’ that had given the organization such notoriety in republica
n circles. On 12 May 1972, the day the Government announced that there would be no disciplinary action against the soldiers involved in ‘Bloody Sunday’,3 an MRF unit operating in the Andersonstown area approached a trestle table stretched across the road with a red warning light. It was an unauthorized checkpoint being operated by members of the Catholic Ex-Servicemen’s Association (CESA), vetting all cars entering the area and probably on the look out for suspicious vehicles which might contain loyalist gunmen or plain-clothes ‘Brits’. In this case, it was the latter. The MRF car stopped and then reversed. One of the undercover unit opened fire from the car with a sub-machine gun and killed Patrick McVeigh (44), an ex-serviceman who lived close by. Four others were wounded. As ever in such controversial shootings, there were conflicting accounts. The MRF soldiers said they had been fired on by six men armed with rifles and revolvers. Local eye-witnesses insisted there were no weapons involved on the CESA side and that McVeigh was not even manning the checkpoint: he had just wandered over to have a chat with friends. At the inquest in December 1972, the Coroner heard that neither McVeigh nor the four wounded men had fired weapons. The soldiers were never prosecuted.4
The following month, the MRF was in hot water again in the same general area. On 22 June, the day the IRA announced they would be calling a cease-fire as a prelude to the Whitelaw talks, an MRF unit opened fire from its car on a group of men standing at a bus terminal in Andersonstown’s Glen Road. Three black-taxi drivers – Hugh Kenny, Joseph Smith and James Patrick Murray – were wounded. A fourth person, Thomas Shaw, was injured by a ricochet. This time the car was stopped by an RUC patrol and its occupants were arrested. Inside was a Thompson sub-machine gun, for years the IRA’s favourite weapon before the Armalite rifles started flooding in from America. One of the two plain-clothes soldiers arrested was an officer in the Parachute Regiment, Captain James McGregor. The other soldier was Sergeant Clive Graham Williams, Williams who fired the Thompson, was charged with attempted murder and subsequently acquitted on 26 June 1973. He said they had come under fire and he had responded. McGregor had been cleared the previous month when the charge of possession of the Thompson was withdrawn after it was shown to have been legally held.5 It had apparently been used by the military for training purposes. Although the court was convinced, republicans were not.
At HQNI there was a realization that this was the kind of publicity that the army could do without, since it appeared to confirm republican propaganda that the MRF was a ‘Brit’ undercover hit-squad with a licence to kill. The fact that both of these incidents occurred after Kitson had left Northern Ireland did not deter the IRA from laying such operations at his door. As Secretary to the Director of Operations Committee (D. Ops), Gavin was aware of the ripples such ventures caused.
There was some concern about some of their activities vis-à-vis the law and the way they were operating. We did get the information that things weren’t quite right in the MRF and that the results were affecting the rest of the army potentially adversely.
But you didn’t expect to find soldiers, including an officer, in a car with an IRA Thompson sub-machine gun shooting at Catholics, did you?
I wouldn’t have anticipated that, no. I would anticipate that the army needed to get involved in some of these grey areas and that we shouldn’t fight shy of being involved in that sort of activity, but only under very careful control and with the proper authorities behind it.
But even the questions raised by the discovery of an IRA weapon in the hands of the MRF were not enough to curb its activities. Clearly military intelligence calculated that the potential gains far outweighed the risks.
The MRF also relied on intelligence provided by the regular ‘green’ army battalions. On 27 September 1972, a month after he joined, ‘Alan’ saw how that intelligence was used. The Green Jackets, ‘who had done a good job in getting the locals to talk’, had information that an IRA ambush was to take place in West Belfast and the MRF was tasked to stop it. Again, the circumstances were controversial. The army said that a plain-clothes surveillance patrol came under fire and the soldiers responded. In their statements, the soldiers said they were shot at five times and returned fire with a Sterling sub-machine gun and Browning 9 mm pistol. According to the army version, two men were hit, one of whom, Daniel Rooney (19), died soon afterwards in the nearby Royal Victoria Hospital. Although the Green Jackets claimed that Rooney was a known gunman, there was no IRA funeral nor was his name placed on the IRA’s roll of honour. Again, local people said he was totally innocent and was simply chatting to a friend when he was shot from a passing car. At the inquest held in December 1973, the court was told that lead tests on Rooney’s clothing gave no indication that he had been firing a weapon.6
But although the IRA tended to attribute all undercover operations to the MRF and Kitson, military intelligence was running other intelligence operations that did not always involve the MRF. As a planner Gavin had nothing to do with intelligence-gathering, but his position as Secretary to the ‘D. Ops’ committee meant that he was privy to what was going on when such matters were discussed at the highest level at Army Headquarters. He knew, for example, that, as one of its covert intelligence-gathering operations, the army was monitoring the ‘Gemini’ massage parlour at 397, Antrim Road. Apparently IRA men or their associates from nearby Ardoyne would come in for a bit of relaxation and, in the intimacy of the parlour, would say things they would not repeat outside. What they did not know was that the army was upstairs, watching and listening. Gavin, a man of probity and strict moral principle, thought ‘Gemini’ was fair game. ‘One thought, well, if that’s what is useful to gain intelligence, then so be it. I wasn’t shocked to hear about it as some people might be. Get on and do it, but under the proper arrangements.’ It appears that these covert operations were being backed up by undercover soldiers based in premises in College Square in Belfast’s university area. Peter and the ‘funny people’ in the tower at Stormont Castle also knew what was going on, although they were not the instigators of it. The MRF and enterprises such as the massage parlour were operations they inherited and had no wish to stop as long as they were producing results. With Stormont suspended and Direct Rule now imposed, the ‘Brits’ wanted to squeeze the IRA in every way possible, in the belief it would improve the climate for a political solution. But Peter knew how risky such operations were.
There was a slightly ‘piratical’ atmosphere prevailing at the time. There were gaps to be filled and there was no point in sitting back in an ivory tower of any sort and not doing something about it. Some of these slightly piratical ventures failed, some had to be modified and led to very good things. But the idea was you had actually to go out there and do something because clearly intelligence wasn’t working as it should have been. You had to make the overtures yourself. The military were carrying out these kind of ventures on their own, in itself a kind of piracy I suppose, but it was only because they themselves felt that there were gaps to be plugged.
The most contentious and dangerous ‘piratical’ venture of all was a bogus laundry service run by military intelligence. It was called the Four Square laundry and its van drove around republican areas collecting and returning washing to its clients. Everything was thoroughly washed, neatly pressed and delivered back to its owners. The laundry itself was carried out by a genuine laundry service that presumably had no idea who its client really was. The Four Square laundry’s prices must have been highly competitive as not many people living in these generally depressed republican areas could afford such luxury. But what its customers did not know was that Four Square did other things besides washing. When the clothes were returned they had been forensically tested for traces of explosives and firearms. The woman who went round knocking on doors, offering the laundry’s services and collecting and delivering the washing, belonged to the Women’s Royal Army Corps and came from Northern Ireland so her accent would not arouse suspicion. Farrar-Hockley was one of Four Square’s great champions.
&
nbsp; I supported it whole-heartedly and it went on far longer than anyone expected. It was extremely efficient and the prices were right and the goods were right when they were returned. It enabled us to operate in republican areas right in front of the eyes of all those who lived there without people saying, ‘Watch out, there’s an RUC patrol or there’s an army patrol.’ There was no sign of any of those things. And so one had a look-in at what was going on, in particular in areas where you knew that weapons might be moved or explosives planted or people having meetings. We could watch all this by simply looking out of the van windows. It was a little observation post going round on wheels with nobody cottoning on to the fact that it was picking up a very useful flow of information.
By the autumn of 1972, the IRA had become increasingly concerned about where the MRF and military intelligence were getting their information from. Brendan Hughes, who was then a senior figure in ‘D’ Company of the IRA’s Second Battalion in Belfast, was well aware of how vulnerable the organization was to penetration. Paranoia about informers or ‘touts’ within its ranks has always been endemic in the IRA, to the extent that a procedure for dealing with informers was clearly set out in its ‘Standing Orders’. The suspect is ‘tried’ before an IRA ‘court’ and, if found guilty, ‘executed’ – usually by means of a bullet in the back of the head. The body is invariably found hooded and bound by the side of the road, sometimes covered with a black bin-liner.