For twenty years after the disappearance of the post-war threat to London from Zionist extremists,4 Middle Eastern terrorism ceased to be a significant Security Service concern. In 1968, however, it suddenly became front-page news. This time the threat came from Arab rather than Zionist terrorists. The leading terrorist strategist was Dr Wadi Haddad, deputy leader and head of foreign operations in the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), headed by Dr George Habash. From the day Israeli forces had destroyed his family home in Galilee, Haddad had sworn that the rest of his life would be devoted to liberating Palestine from Zionist occupation. Convinced of the futility of attacking military targets in Israel after the humiliating Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War, Haddad devised a new strategy of aircraft hijacking and terrorist attacks on Jewish and Zionist targets in Europe which attracted worldwide publicity. The first hijack, in July 1968, took place on board an El Al Boeing 707 bound for Tel Aviv which two PFLP guerrillas forced to land in Algiers and renamed (with no acknowledgement to James Bond) ‘Palestinian Liberation 007’. After more than a month’s negotiations, the Israeli passengers on board were exchanged for sixteen Palestinians in Israeli jails.5 Because there was as yet no evidence that British airlines were at risk from the PFLP, Whitehall showed little urgency in responding to the hijacking menace. Following a second PFLP hijack in September, however, this time of a TWA Boeing 747 also en route to Tel Aviv, the cabinet secretary, Sir Burke Trend, set up a working party to study hijacking and other attacks on civil aircraft. Progress was slow. C Branch issued threat assessments to El Al and Jordanian Airlines, which were thought to be most at risk from the PFLP, but did not yet think it necessary to contact British airlines.6
The first PFLP attacks on Jewish targets in London were so amateurish that they failed to give a greater sense of urgency to British counterterrorism. Incendiary devices planted in Oxford Street at Selfridge’s and Marks and Spencer on 18 July 1969 caused minimal damage. A third PFLP bomb attack, not far away at the Israeli Zim Shipping Office in Regent Street, was slightly more successful, breaking several windows and causing minor injuries to a member of staff. None of these incidents was thought serious enough to merit investigation by the Security Service, which left inquiries to the MPSB.7 The Service, however, expected further, more dangerous ‘Arab Terrorist Attacks’. The DG, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, was pessimistic about the prospects for preventing them:
It is not difficult for terrorists previously unidentified as such (as they usually are) to gain entry to Britain for short periods, possibly carrying explosives with them. There are a large number of pro-Arab supporters of different nationalities in Britain, including many Arab students, who would be prepared, or could be induced, to give help in minor ways or provide cover, even though they themselves condemn the use of violence as bad publicity for the cause. In our view, attempts to perpetrate terrorist attacks, not excluding assassination, are likely to continue and not to diminish.8
The Security Service was even more pessimistic about the prospects for ending the violence of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, which began at almost the same time as the terrorism of the PFLP.
The last IRA bombing campaign in mainland Britain dated back to 1938–9. The most recent campaign in Northern Ireland, which began along the border with the Republic in 1958, had little impact and passed almost unnoticed in London. Although the Security Service, at the request of the Unionist government at Stormont Castle, sent a liaison officer to Belfast,9 the RUC were able to cope with the threat from the IRA with only limited assistance from the British army. The IRA blamed public indifference as one of the reasons for ending its campaign in 1962.10 The Stormont government remained cocooned within the complacency generated by almost half a century of one-party Unionist rule in Northern Ireland committed to maintaining the union with Great Britain, and by the Unionist sense of superiority over the supposedly backward Republic in the south, some of whose citizens continued to emigrate in search of a better life overseas. Westminster mostly looked the other way, doing its best not to become involved in Northern Ireland. Long-established convention forbade the tabling of questions by MPs concerning any issue within the direct responsibility of a Stormont minister. Until the late 1960s, despite the presence of Northern Ireland MPs at Westminster, the Commons usually devoted less than two hours a year to discussing the Province.11
Until violence began in the summer of 1968, provoked by some of the supporters and opponents of civil rights campaigns against discrimination affecting Ulster’s Catholic minority, there seemed little in Northern Ireland to concern the Security Service. On 6 November the Home Secretary, James Callaghan, asked Furnival Jones for ‘an up-to-date appreciation of the prospect of violence in Northern Ireland from the IRA’. 12 FJ seems to have been somewhat taken aback by the request. The DDG, Anthony Simkins, told the PUS at the Home Office, Sir Philip Allen, that Callaghan’s request placed the Service in ‘a rather Gilbertian situation as we derived our information from the [RUC] and had no independent coverage’. MI5’s own inquiries would therefore require ‘discreet handling’. 13 The Service appreciation, entitled ‘The Threat of Violence in Northern Ireland’, completed in December, implied that the Home Secretary had too narrow a perspective. Though Callaghan had asked only for an assessment of the threat from the IRA, Furnival Jones insisted that ‘The threat from the IRA cannot be viewed in isolation from the other factors making for violence in Northern Ireland.’ The Service concluded that ‘The IRA may well see in the Civil Rights Movement the broader base necessary for the achievement of its political aims,’ thus provoking a violent backlash from Loyalist extremists. The tone of the appreciation was gloomy and implied that little could be done to resolve the root causes of the violence:
In basic terms the security problem in Northern Ireland is simple. It springs from the antagonism of two Communities with long memories and relatively short tempers. Their differences, originally religious and cultural, largely coincide with political divisions and, with the passage of time since the formal constitution of the Northern Ireland state, have been aggravated by social and economic grievances. Thus, the Roman Catholic and Nationalist minority almost instinctively attributes its problems to what it believes to be the inherent and deliberate bad faith of the Protestant and Unionist majority, while the latter, conscious of the minority’s Southern orientation, with almost equal instinct believes that the demand for the remedying of grievances is a preliminary to the dissolution of the State itself. In this atmosphere attempts to improve relations, however genuine and well founded, only too often are greeted with suspicion by both groups.14
Following the worsening of the Troubles in the spring of 1969, a Head Office Newsletter told staff:
Until very recently the interest of this Service in the security situation in Northern Ireland has been both limited and indirect. In practice we have been almost wholly dependent for information on the Royal Ulster Constabulary who, for good reason, have always regarded the Irish Republican Army as their primary security target. The fact that responsibility for the investigation of I.R.A. activity in Great Britain rests upon the Metropolitan Special Branch has tended to reduce our interest yet further. The total effort deployed by F. Branch in matters Irish was until recently confined to one part-time desk officer in F.1.C.15
Whitehall responded to the beginning of the Troubles with a predictable flurry of committee meetings: among them the newly founded Official Committee on Northern Ireland, chaired by Allen, the Home Office PUS, on which the DDG, Anthony Simkins, represented the Service. In addition, at the prompting of the cabinet secretary, Sir Burke Trend, the JIC set up a Current Intelligence Group on Northern Ireland, which as the JIC (A) Ulster Working Group held its first meeting on 30 April 1969. On 25 April 1969 Simkins told a meeting of Allen’s committee, which acted as the main Whitehall channel for advice to ministers:
The [RUC] Inspector General had told [the Service] a few days ago that [RUC] Special Bran
ch was overwhelmed and that he wished we could help them by posting an officer as we had done in a previous emergency. If we took up this suggestion we should probably get a very good idea of the reliability of the RUC’s intelligence about the IRA. Allen said the Home Secretary approved of our doing so, and the meeting warmly endorsed the idea.16
Four days later a Security Service officer arrived in Northern Ireland as security liaison officer (SLO) and was given an office in RUC headquarters at Knock near Belfast.
At about the same time as this posting, a full-time desk to cover all Irish security intelligence, with particular emphasis on the North, was set up in F1B at Leconfield House.17 By the autumn, F1B consisted of one female assistant officer (then the highest rank usually open to female staff) and the young Stella Rimington, who – after part-time work for the Service in India – had begun full-time work at Head Office only a few months earlier. Rimington recalls in her memoirs:
My boss and I very rapidly became almost submerged, trying to make sense of the information that began to come in . . . I began to have to stay late into the evenings just to keep up with the flow of paper. My colleague had a habit of talking out loud all the time, telling herself what to do next and, as the days wore on and the pressure mounted, her instructions to herself became more and more manic. Anyone coming into the room was faced with two dishevelled-looking women, one chattering like a parrot and the other peering squirrel-like from behind a tottering pile of paper.18
Northern Ireland, previously rarely discussed by the JIC,19 became a regular item on its agenda. In June 1969 it concluded, like Furnival Jones’s report to Callaghan six months earlier, that ‘the potential disorder in Northern Ireland comes from the interaction of three distinct groups’: the IRA, the civil rights movement and the ‘ultra Protestant’ supporters of the Reverend Ian Paisley. It also noted increasing Communist influence in the IRA and Trotskyist infiltration of the civil rights movement.20
On 14 August 1969 the Wilson government took the fateful decision to send British troops to keep the peace in Ulster, thus beginning what almost no one foresaw would become the longest-lasting military operation in British history. Despite the army’s early welcome from Catholics in Belfast and elsewhere, it inevitably came to be seen by nationalist supporters of Irish unity as the defender of the Unionist one-party state. Callaghan realized as much when he gloomily told his cabinet colleague Dick Crossman on 11 September that ‘There was no prospect of a solution. He had anticipated the honeymoon wouldn’t last very long and it hadn’t. The British troops were tired and were no longer popular, and the terrible thing was that the only solutions would take ten years, if they would ever work at all.’21
Despite the fact that the constitution of the Irish Republic claimed sovereignty over the North as well as the South, Dublin was even less prepared than London for the beginning of the Troubles. ‘Northern Ireland in 1969’, writes Eunan O’Halpin, the leading historian of Irish security, ‘might as well have been North Korea, so sparse was the reliable information available.’ Irish military intelligence did not even possess an organization chart of the RUC and made strenuous efforts to assemble one based chiefly on gossip of varying reliability – only to discover that the information it required was freely available in Northern Ireland official publications which were on sale in Dublin.22
Counter-terrorism would have been a higher priority for the Security Service had it known that both the PFLP and the IRA were seeking arms from its main counter-espionage target, the KGB. The first contacts between Wadi Haddad and the KGB took place in 1968 – probably in the aftermath of the first PFLP hijacking. By the spring of 1970 Haddad had been recruited as Agent NATSIONALIST. The KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov proudly reported to the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev (whom he was to succeed twelve years later): ‘The nature of our relations with W. Haddad enables us to control the external operations of the PFLP to a certain degree, to exert influence in a manner favourable to the Soviet Union . . .’ With Brezhnev’s approval, an initial delivery to Haddad of five RPG-7 hand-held anti-tank grenade launchers in July 1970 was followed by the elaborately planned Operation VOSTOK (‘East’), during which a large consignment of arms and ammunition was handed over to the PFLP at sea near Aden under cover of darkness. Thanks to Haddad, the KGB almost certainly had advance notice of all the main PFLP terrorist attacks for which he was responsible.23 News of his recruitment was very tightly held within the Centre. Though Oleg Lyalin began supplying the Security Service in April 1970 with intelligence on the activities of the First Chief Directorate Department V, which was responsible for ‘special operations’ of the kind discussed with Haddad, he appears to have been unaware of the KGB’s links with the PFLP when he defected in September.24
Lyalin was, however, aware that Seamus Costello, a Marxist member of the IRA Army Council, had submitted a request for arms to the Soviet embassy in London but had been rebuffed.25 The Security Service does not seem to have discovered until much later that, following the rebuff, another appeal for arms from Costello and Cathal Goulding, the IRA chief of staff, was forwarded to the KGB by the general secretary of the Irish Communist Party, Michael O’Riordan, confirming earlier Service reports on links between the IRA and Irish Communists. O’Riordan claimed that there was now a serious possibility of civil war between the two communities in Northern Ireland and of serious clashes between British troops and the Catholics. Yuri Andropov, however, was doubtful of O’Riordan’s and the IRA’s ability to keep secret the supply of Soviet arms. It was two and a half years before he was sufficiently reassured to go ahead with the shipment requested by Goulding and Costello. Several consignments of weapons and munitions in waterproof wrapping were submerged by a Soviet intelligencegathering vessel, disguised as a trawler, on a sandbank 55 miles from the coast of Northern Ireland and attached to a marker buoy of the kind used to indicate the presence of fishing nets below the surface. The consignments, picked up by a fishing vessel manned by what the KGB called ‘Irish friends’ (Communists) who were unaware of their contents, went undetected by the British intelligence community.26
Shortly after O’Riordan delivered the request for Soviet arms, the IRA – as the RUC and Security Service had anticipated several years earlier – split into Marxist and nationalist wings: the Officials under Goulding and the Provisionals led by Seán Mac Stíofáin. The sympathies of the KGB were with the Marxist Officials rather than the nationalist Provisionals. But it was the Provisionals, not the Officials, who were to establish themselves as the major protagonists in the Troubles. By the time Soviet arms arrived, the Officials had given up the ‘armed struggle’. The probability is that the weapons smuggled into Ireland by the KGB were used not against the British but in internecine warfare between Republican paramilitaries.27
A mid-air explosion which destroyed a Swiss airliner bound from Zurich for Tel Aviv on 21 February 1970 with the loss of forty-seven lives gave modest impetus to the development of a Security Service anti-hijack strategy. Though responsibility for the attack was never claimed, it was believed to be the work of a breakaway group within the PFLP. The destruction of the airliner at last prompted C Branch to set up a liaison system to enable urgent threat assessments to be passed to British airlines. By later standards, however, these arrangements were primitive. Implementation of protectivesecurity recommendations was left solely in the hands of the airlines, with no supervision or co-ordination by either the Security Service or the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). A proposal for a director of security who would oversee arrangements at airports came to nothing.28
C Branch (protective security) still had an ambivalent status within the Security Service. Though few high-fliers had been attracted to MI5 by the prospect of a career in protective security, new entrants were told that if ‘one wanted to get on in the Service one had to do a stint in C Branch’, which then had the closest contacts with government departments, especially the Cabinet Office. When the future DDG Julian Faux was posted to C Branch in
1971, Personnel ‘went to great lengths to tell me how lucky I was’. The post did indeed provide Faux with far more frequent opportunities for contact with Whitehall than most of his contemporaries enjoyed. Though all government departments were issued with copies of the Service bible, ‘Security in Government Departments’, they frequently required assistance on how to interpret particular cases. ‘I really did not enjoy this esoteric and arcane work,’ Faux later recalled. ‘It all seemed like splitting hairs to me.’29 Whitehall still thought of the Security Service’s role in protective security primarily in terms of vetting and safeguarding classified information rather than protection against terrorist attack. During the 1970s, C Branch dealt with an average of about 300,000 vetting inquiries a year.30
During the last thirty years of the twentieth century, protective security became a steadily more important part of the Security Service’s counterterrorist strategy. But the change occurred gradually and it began slowly. At Furnival Jones’s first meeting with Edward Heath in July 1970, he raised the subject of protective security exclusively in the context of counterespionage. During a wide-ranging survey of Service priorities, the DG mentioned terrorism only briefly, and solely in the context of Northern Ireland. Whitehall, for its part, was unenthusiastic about a major extension of protective security in any context. When FJ stressed its role as a ‘security weapon against espionage’, Burke Trend intervened to say that this was a ‘vexed question’ in the civil service. FJ believed, no doubt correctly, that what really concerned Whitehall was the fact that ‘the complexity and cost of protective security were both very large.’31
The Defence of the Realm Page 81