by Peter Taylor
But you’re a woman.
So? I wanted to be part of Special Forces. It didn’t matter if I was young, old, black, white, or a woman. It didn’t matter. I wanted to be part of that group and part of that was undergoing the interrogation. What you must remember is that if ever we were captured by the IRA or any of the splinter groups, or by any terrorist organization, then they would undoubtedly play with us in the form of interrogation before they would kill us. So you had to be equipped for those instances and that training was part of it.
There were around 120 people on the course with ‘Mary’ at Camp Two. Only twelve made it and she was one of them. She said she survived through ‘inner strength, an instinct for survival and pride. Pride has a lot to do with it. You will not fail. You will not go back to your old unit.’ She was too exhausted and drained to feel elation at the end. ‘It was more of “Oh God, this is it. Here we go. I’ve passed the course but now it’s a reality check. I’m going on to the streets of Northern Ireland. I hope I’ll be able to cope.” It’s not something to celebrate because you’ve passed a course. Now it’s time to put the training into action.’ ‘Mary’, like ‘Alan’ and all ‘Det’ operators, lived on a knife-edge. Despite the training, not all operators survived.
Chapter Thirteen
Success
March 1973–May 1974
14 Intelligence Company could not act on its own. It had to be guided. ‘Targets’ had to be identified before they could be followed; premises had to be pointed out before they could be put under surveillance or ‘technically attacked’; and weapons hides had to be located before their contents could be ‘jarked’. The ‘Det’s’ guide in all this was the RUC’s Special Branch, a unit as secretive and self-contained as ‘14 Int.’ with the risks often just as high. The ‘Branch’ cultivated, recruited and handled informers or ‘sources’, from those on the periphery of the republican and loyalist paramilitary organizations to those close to the top. Special Branch’s investment was long term. The skill of its officers was to identify someone in the early days who clearly had the potential to rise within the organization, recruit him or her and then stick with them as they penetrated the higher levels of whatever group they belonged to. Prime targets were those in the IRA’s ‘Quartermaster’s’ Department because they knew where the weapons were and, at least until the late 1970s when the IRA reorganized, who was using them.
As with the ‘Det’, the human price was high. Marriages were destroyed because the job came first, and lives were lost because the nature of their work meant that Special Branch officers were often dangerously exposed. Unlike ‘Det’ operators, some of their faces became familiar in republican areas as sources could not be recruited and handled by remote control. The cases of Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee who fingered the Four Square laundry show that the IRA could always ‘turn’ sources back again, although their subsequent chances of survival were thin. From time to time, as the inroads made by Special Branch took their toll, the IRA offered amnesties with a promise that informers would be allowed to live if they told all. They would then often be paraded before Sinn Fein press conferences to extract the maximum propaganda advantage and invariably allowed to live pour encourager les autres. There was a difference between a Volunteer coming forward and making a confession and one extracted by the IRA’s ‘Unknowns’.
‘Mike’ joined Special Branch in July 1971, a month before internment, and spent a lifetime in it, becoming one of its most experienced and successful agent-handlers. ‘We joined a service to give of our best and suddenly we found we were fighting a war,’ he told me. ‘I ran the arse off my trousers for years.’ ‘Mike’ went to West Belfast in 1972 and was based there through most of the 1970s and into the 1980s, working alongside many of the army officers already mentioned. All spoke highly of him and said ‘Mike’ knew everything. After years of experience, he acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of just about every family in the area, its relations, its history and, above all, its IRA connections. Unlike many regular soldiers who viewed ‘touts’ with almost as much contempt as the IRA, ‘Mike’ had great respect for his sources. ‘It was our function in those days to infiltrate these organizations and the only way to do that was to get people to talk to you,’ he said. ‘We didn’t pull any punches. We told them the facts, what they were doing, how we expected them to do it and the risks they would run. We told them what we would do to look after them and, in truth, our life was in their hands as much as theirs was in ours.’ Often agent and handler became very close, sharing a common danger and common purpose. One agent ‘Mike’ handled rose to an extremely high level within the IRA until, to keep him alive, he was finally ‘exfiltrated’ and resettled outside Northern Ireland with the help of the Security Service, MI5, who assist in such matters. But given their importance, no source was turned away, whatever the value of the information he or she might bring. ‘Mike’ knew that every scrap of information helped with the big picture.
As far as I was concerned, this was a war, and we had to gain the best intelligence we could. Sources are the lifeblood of intelligence and it all stems from there. You’re fighting against a secret organization that wants to keep its secrets and you want them to impart those secrets to you. Terrorist organizations don’t advertise their working parts so it’s up to us to penetrate them.
But why would anyone risk becoming an informer when exposure meant death?
It’s a very complex question to which I’ve never been able to find out the answer. But when you’re working with these people, or talking to these people, there is some trigger that will decide whether they’re doing the right thing or the wrong thing. Pure greed is one of the lesser attractions about it. The monetary incentives aren’t huge. We’re talking 1970s here. It could be anything from £5 to £500. It depends on the status of the individual. If you give somebody who’s used to having a few shillings in his pocket, fifty quid, it soon becomes obvious that there’s something wrong.
Did they get bonuses?
For particularly good information relating to finds of weapons or explosives or to the arrest and charging of terrorists, yes, there were inducements.
‘Mike’ agreed that money was important but it was far from being the only motivation.
Spite and grudges against a particular person or organization all play their part, as does the feeling that the group they represent is not doing the right thing, like killing innocent civilians or children. Then there’s the ‘James Bond’ element where some people get a real buzz out of being involved, the feeling that they’re actually doing something and they can see the result. It’s things like that. I couldn’t possibly explain the complexities of it but the bottom line is, it works.
The critical step was recruiting an agent or informer. It was rather like fishing: for most of the time, the fish never took the bait, but then suddenly one did and that made all the effort worthwhile. There were certainly plenty of fish in ‘Mike’s’ West Belfast pond. Catching them required skill, patience, courage and nerve.
It’s no use lying, saying you’re a travelling salesman who can make them a lot of money selling blinds. You have to be up front about it and you have to tell them who you are, what you are, and that they may be able to help you. You wouldn’t walk up to somebody in the street and say, ‘Excuse me, I’m Jo Bloggs from the RUC. Will you work for me?’ You’ve got to do your homework, you’ve got to know who you’re talking to. You’ve got to know where he’s coming from, what his background is and what his associations are. You do it anywhere you can have a chat with them, where you can explain your point of view, convincing them that perhaps they’re on the wrong side. It may be their own feeling of self-importance. You help them feel that they are going to become an important part of a larger organization and can have a huge input in it.
Sometimes ‘Mike’ would make a direct approach on the street. Most knew he was from the ‘Branch’ or the police. So what happened then?
Stunned silence sometimes! On other occ
asions, a lot of verbal abuse. Some would tell you to go away. Others would ignore you and walk past or sometimes listen and walk off. Then maybe one out of twenty, thirty or forty would make a phone call.
‘Mike’ never lost a source but came close to death himself. He knew that any weakness could be exploited and any opportunity seized. When Special Branch received anonymous letters detailing the IRA activities of ‘Theresa’, a member of ‘Cumann na mBan’ (the women’s section of the Republican Movement), ‘Mike’, who was nothing if not direct, got in touch with her and indicated that he had something she might be interested in. Some time later, ‘Theresa’ rang and arranged to see him. They met in one of the dozens of cafés in Belfast city centre. ‘Mike’ explained that he had a collection of letters which he assumed she would not like to fall into the wrong hands. ‘You give me an arms dump,’ he said, ‘and I’ll give you one of the letters.’ Presumably the others were being held for further trading. It might be blackmail but to ‘Mike’ the end justified the means. He knew that if ‘Theresa’ took the bait, she was hooked and there would be more finds and high-grade information to come. Even when the letters ran out, ‘Theresa’, once compromised, would have no escape. If she became unco-operative, ‘Mike’ or one of his Special Branch partners could always drop the hint to her IRA associates that ‘Theresa’ was not as loyal to the cause as she might seem.
To complete the transaction, ‘Theresa’ agreed to meet ‘Mike’ at 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon in the casualty department of the Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH) in the heart of the Falls Road. ‘Mike’ had done his homework. There were two telephone boxes at the RVH and his plan was to have ‘Theresa’ ring him from one and give him the location of an arms ‘dump’. He would then have his colleagues confirm the accuracy of the information and, if it checked out, he would then give ‘Theresa’ one of the letters. He had no intention of handing over an original but had arranged for one of his female colleagues to make a hand-written copy. But ‘Theresa’ had clearly weighed up the risks of each course of action. Becoming a ‘tout’ would mean certain death if she was ever found out and the IRA had no scruples of putting a bullet in the back of a woman’s head as well as a man’s. Coming clean with the IRA about how she had been compromised, though uncomfortable, would at least preserve her life and might even enhance her own standing within the organization were she able to deliver a dead Special Branch man.
On Sunday afternoon, ‘Mike’ went to the RVH as agreed, unaware that he was going to almost certain death, although he knew the risk was always there. As luck would have it, one of his Special Branch colleagues was also at the hospital but purely in a private capacity. His daughter had fallen off a horse and he was taking her to the casualty department for treatment. On the way in, he noticed two well-known IRA ‘hit-men’ stalking the hospital and immediately rang Special Branch and alerted ‘Mike’s’ boss. ‘Mike’ got the warning just in time. He never got the arms dump and ‘Theresa’ never got her letter. But ‘Mike’ got to live. I asked him if he feared death. ‘None of us could have done the job if we had,’ he said. ‘I think if you’re on your knees and it’s your last thirty seconds, of course you fear death. But on a day-to-day basis, no. It’s like being hit by a bus or falling in a river, it’s never going to happen to me. Unfortunately it happened to too many.’ Two of ‘Mike’s’ colleagues were shot dead in the same area around the RVH within a few hundred yards of each other in the space of a few months. I asked him what he felt he had achieved. ‘Personally, a pension,’ he said. ‘Collectively, taking into account all that we and the other intelligence agencies did, the achievements are too great to enumerate. Together we saved thousands of lives and people will never know.’
Although there were rivalries and jealousies at senior level between army intelligence and Special Branch, at the operational level relationships between ‘Det’ operators and Special Branch officers like ‘Mike’ were excellent. 14 Intelligence Company was formed around the beginning of 1973 at a time when the IRA had already suffered a series of devastating blows to its leadership on both sides of the border, not least as a result of the clearance of the ‘no-go’ areas in ‘Operation Motorman’ the previous summer and much-improved co-operation with the Irish police, the Garda Síochana. Since then, 200 IRA ‘officers’ had been arrested, including key leaders like Seán MacStiofáin, Martin McGuinness, Martin Meehan and John Kelly. Billy McKee, still in gaol and now enjoying ‘special category’ status, admitted the IRA was in crisis and agreed that it was now time for the IRA to start bombing England. ‘Our people were suffering,’ he told me. ‘The English people were telling us that they knew nothing about the situation. It’s time they were made to find out what was going on here and not brush it under the carpet.’1
On 8 March 1973, the Provisional IRA planted its first bombs in London with strict orders, given the lessons of ‘Bloody Friday’, to avoid civilian casualties. ‘I agreed with the strategy,’ McKee said, ‘but I didn’t agree with bombing civilians and pubs that were full of people.’ An hour’s warning was given, with details of the cars containing the bombs, their registration numbers and their locations in London. Scotland Yard immediately gave the order to ‘Close England’ to make sure the bombers did not escape. The Metropolitan Police were on standby having already received intelligence, presumably from RUC Special Branch, that London was going to be bombed that day. Two car bombs were defused and two others exploded, one of them at the Army Recruiting Centre in Whitehall and the other at the Old Bailey. The police had not been able to clear the area around the Old Bailey in time and 180 people were injured. One of them later died of a heart attack. Shortly afterwards, members of the IRA’s bombing team were arrested at Heathrow as they prepared to return to Belfast on a scheduled flight. They were tried and sentenced in London on 14 November 1973. Eight of them received life sentences. The escape plans for future IRA operations in England were to become far more sophisticated. Among those arrested and sentenced were the Price sisters, Dolours and Marion, who had met Gerry Adams when he was released from internment to meet the British, and Gerry Kelly who subsequently escaped from prison, ran guns in Europe, and became a senior member of the Sinn Fein leadership years later.2
But the Provisionals’ propaganda coup in bombing England was soon offset by a series of dramatic setbacks driven by British and Irish intelligence. The ‘Brits’ now regarded the Irish as being more ‘onside’ in the ‘war’ against the IRA. On 28 March, barely three weeks after the London bombs, the Irish navy arrested Joe Cahill off the coast of County Waterford on board a Cyprus-registered boat, the Claudia. It was brimful of weapons from Libya destined for Cahill’s colleagues in the North. In the hold were 250 rifles, 240 small arms and a quantity of anti-tank mines and explosives.3 The consignment was believed to have been tracked by British intelligence. Cahill later admitted the interception of the Claudia was a disaster for the Provisionals’ campaign.
By the summer of 1973, it had become increasingly clear to the ‘Provos’ that the ‘Brits’ had got their act together. But an even bigger blow was to come that struck at the heart of the IRA in Belfast, which remained the epicentre of the ‘war’. If the IRA was to succeed in getting rid of the ‘Brits’ – which was still its professed aim – they had to win there. Special Branch and 14 Intelligence Company, now forged in a new partnership, were determined to prevent that happening as they put pressure on the organization at every level. This culminated in spectacular success when the army swooped and arrested twenty-three known IRA Volunteers and thirteen known IRA Officers. But they were not the main targets, as members of the IRA’s rank and file could easily be replaced. The ‘Brits’ knew that the key to crippling the IRA was to hit the leadership of the Belfast Brigade in the hope that, if they cut off its head, the terrorist body would die. British intelligence believed that two of the Brigade’s most senior members at the time were Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams, who was reported to have risen through the ranks of the IRA in Ballymurphy to become on
e of the IRA’s key strategists and most prominent commanders in the city. Although Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA, the ‘Brits’ never had any doubt about it. Adams, Hughes and other members of the Brigade Staff were placed under close ‘Det’ surveillance. Their movements were monitored and meeting places identified. The plan was not to pick them off one by one, which would have alerted the others, but to net them all in one decisive swoop. It was meticulously planned and executed. For the first time, the ‘Det’ really came into its own. The date of the operation, 25 June 1973, was a milestone in its history.
That day, Adams and Hughes had arranged to meet other members of the Brigade Staff in a house on the busy Falls Road. It had already been staked out by the ‘Det’. The arrest operation was only to be triggered once Adams and Hughes were inside. ‘Alan’ was a member of the ‘Det’ team charged with triggering the signal for the army to move in. He was in the most vulnerable position, sitting in a car on the other side of the road fifty yards from the house, pretending to be an insurance salesman.
He watched most of the Brigade staff go inside except Gerry Adams who, to ‘Alan’s’ horror, came across and sat on the bonnet of his car. ‘I was nervous, very nervous,’ he said. Whatever he felt, he knew he must not show it and carried on flicking through his papers lying on the empty passenger seat beside him.
To his relief, Adams gave him a little wave and ‘Alan’ waved back, knowing that the Fianna, the junior IRA, who were keeping a look out for ‘Brits’ whilst the Brigade staff held its meeting, would not be suspicious. To them and to Adams, the stranger in the car parked in the road across from the house was just someone going about his business. ‘It was brilliant’, he said, ‘because the wave gave me a clean bill of health. I knew too that if I’d have been “clocked”, Adams would not have been around and certainly would not have sat on the car bonnet. Yes, I was worried but not to the extent that I thought I had to do a quick reverse.’ Adams then got off the bonnet, walked across the road and went into the house.