Military Intelligence knew it was important for Nelson to set up a good cover for his real jobs, working for the UDA and British Intelligence, and so they were in no hurry to push him to start producing the material they needed. They believed they could look forward to gaining accurate, sound intelligence from the very heart of the UDA and so, at first, they showed great patience towards Nelson, who soon dropped back into his old ways of drinking, talking to everyone and showing off to his former mates. But FRU officers still believed that their new agent would eventually become a source of valuable information vital to their task of finding what the UDA were planning. They would not be disappointed.
But no one could have foreseen how Nelson’s job as the UDA’s intelligence officer, covering the whole of Ireland, would result in one of the most extraordinary and bizarre episodes in the history of British Intelligence. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher, her security chiefs, senior advisers and the men and women responsible for fighting terrorism on the ground in Northern Ireland would all be dragged into a web of murder, deceit and intrigue which would last for two traumatic years. Its repercussions would go on for many more.
Chapter Five
Thatcher’s Baptism of Fire
The IRA bombing of Brighton’s Grand Hotel during the Conservative Party conference in October 1984 caused anger and consternation among the Cabinet and the security services. At 2.54 a.m. on Friday, 12 October, a bomb containing between twenty and thirty pounds of explosives, shook the hotel to its foundations, causing four floors to collapse and the centre of the building to cave in. The act of terrorism infuriated Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who herself only narrowly escaped death in the blast. It also resulted in fury and demands for retribution.
The explosion trapped and injured a number of Tory MPs and their wives and killed Sir Anthony Berry MP, Roberta Wakeham (the wife of the government chief whip), Jeanne Shattock, Eric Taylor and Muriel MacLean (the wife of Donald MacLean, a senior figure in the Scottish Conservative Party).
The bomb, hidden behind wall panelling in the bathroom of room 629 – on the floor below the one on which Margaret Thatcher and her husband Denis were staying – had been planted some three weeks earlier. It had been equipped with a timing device of the sort found on video recorders, which allows the recording time of programmes to be pre-set weeks in advance, and heavily wrapped in Cellophane. Search teams with specialist sniffer dogs, which scanned the hotel before the conference, did not detect the explosives.
The IRA’s claim for responsibility of the bombing added a chilling rider: ‘Today we were unlucky, but remember – we only have to be lucky once; you have to be lucky always.’
Understandably, the very fact that the Provisional IRA had succeeded in planting and exploding a bomb at the Tory Party conference hotel was a severe blow to Thatcher, who had taken a hard line against the IRA from the moment she formed her first government in 1979. Indeed, the IRA’s small but potent rival terrorist organisation, the Irish National Liberation Army, had also demonstrated its professionalism in a campaign of direct action against the Tories. They succeeded in planting a bomb under a vehicle in the well-guarded underground carpark of the House of Commons, the epicentre of Britain’s democracy. Indeed, that attack, in March 1979, had shocked and deeply saddened Margaret Thatcher for the bombers had killed their target, Airey Neave, the Tory Party spokesman on Northern Ireland. Neave, a right-winger, had not only been a close personal friend of Thatcher, but had also been one of the men primarily responsible for her rise to the leadership of the Tory Party.
Neave, too, had been fiercely anti-IRA. In a celebrated speech in August 1976, in a bid to whip up support for the peace campaign of the mid-’70s, he had said: ‘There must be a change in security tactics. The army and the local security forces must be released from their present low profile and go on the offensive . . . the time is ripe to smash the Provisional IRA.’
Eight years later, in her speech to the Tory Party conference the day after the Brighton bomb, Mrs Thatcher echoed Neave’s words. She did not dwell for long on the ghastly and dreadful events of that night, but said: ‘The bomb attack . . . was an attempt not only to disrupt and terminate our conference. It was an attempt to cripple Her Majesty’s democratically elected government. That is the scale of the outrage in which we have all shared. And the fact that we are gathered here now, shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.’
Those who planted the bomb in Brighton would not escape the investigation that was set up to track them down. The attack had shocked the world, making people realise that the Provisional IRA were not do-gooders demanding civil rights for the Catholic minority of Northern Ireland but, rather, a group of ruthless and determined terrorists using the bomb and the bullet indiscriminately to achieve their political ends. Their goal was the coercion of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland, who had demonstrated their wish to remain part of the United Kingdom, into an all-Ireland state.
Understandably, Thatcher, the Cabinet and members of all political parties were determined that those responsible would be brought to justice. This had been a dastardly and cowardly attack on the British government and it was imperative that the bombers be caught and severely punished. The government and opposition parties were determined to send a strong message to the Provisional IRA: attack our leaders and you will be hunted down, arrested, tried and sentenced to a long period in jail. Every effort was put into the search for the guilty men.
On the ground in Northern Ireland every tout and intelligence agent working for the RUC or the British was told to find out what was being said on the streets and in the pubs, clubs and bars – what were the names of those directly responsible for the outrage which had sent shockwaves through the Thatcher government. Until that moment those in power had believed there was an unwritten agreement not to attack Britain’s political élite in exchange for the British not targeting the Sinn Fein/IRA leadership. This attack had ended that cosy little mistaken arrangement.
Prodigious and painstaking forensic work over many months finally led to the discovery of a single fingerprint on one of the Grand Hotel’s registration cards. It had been signed by someone naming himself Roy Walsh on 15 September 1984. The fingerprint was identified as belonging to Patrick Magee, a known Provo bomber, who was wanted in connection with an arms discovery in England in 1983. Following a tip-off and first-rate surveillance, Magee and two other Provos were captured in an armed police raid on a flat in Glasgow in May 1985.
At the time the men were captured, they were planning a bomb blitz on eleven English seaside and holiday resorts – Brighton, Ramsgate, Dover, Southend, Southampton, Margate, Folkestone, Blackpool, Torquay, Great Yarmouth and Eastbourne – as well as an ‘IRA spectacular’ in the Rubens Hotel, opposite Buckingham Palace. In another Glasgow flat close to where the men were arrested, an arms and explosives hide was discovered, with rifles, booby-trap devices, detonators, ammunition, maps, batteries and twenty-five packets of explosives. All three men were later convicted of conspiracy to cause explosions. Magee was also convicted of the murders of the five people who had died in the Grand Hotel bombing.
Following the appalling security blunder of Brighton, Margaret Thatcher, as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which met weekly at Downing Street, ordered a complete review of the security and intelligence set-up in Northern Ireland to ensure that no such mistake would ever be repeated. She could not understand how the RUC Special Branch or any of the intelligence agencies or their informants had not known that such a attack was being planned. Despite whatever excuses were put forward, the very fact that the IRA were able to penetrate the tight security ring around the Prime Minister and her entire Cabinet, and explode a murderous bomb so successfully, made MI5 and the rest of Britain’s security services look like amateurs, if not downright incompetent. Outwardly, this extraordinary lapse was barely reflected in open cri
ticism; but in the Whitehall corridors Thatcher was incandescent with rage that they should have proved themselves so thoroughly incompetent. Internal memos flew hard and fast at all those the Prime Minister felt were to blame for such a breakdown in security, and senior officers were left in no doubt that their performance had to improve significantly if they were to keep their jobs.
From that moment on, Margaret Thatcher decided to become far more closely involved in what she would call ‘the Irish question’. By the mid-1980s she had her new security set-up in operation; the various agency chiefs were in place, their staffing levels were increased and, as a result, she expected there to be no repeat of the Brighton bombing nor of the murder of political allies such as Airey Neave.
Thatcher’s own instincts were profoundly Unionist but when she came to office she realised the political realities of Northern Ireland not only prevented a return to majority rule but also meant that the Catholic minority had to be included in any agreement. She would suffer a quick and brutal baptism for only four months after her election victory Earl Mountbatten and three members of his fishing party were blown to pieces when an IRA bomb was detonated within minutes of their fishing smack putting to sea off the Irish coast at Mullaghmore, Co. Sligo. That same day eighteen British soldiers were killed and five others injured in a double explosion triggered by remote control at Narrow Water, Warrenpoint, near Newry, close to the border with the Republic. The Provos had exploded the first bomb and then waited for those who arrived by helicopter to rescue the wounded before they set off the second. Mrs Thatcher was enraged.
In her autobiography The Downing Street Years, Margaret Thatcher wrote that she immediately visited Northern Ireland to show the army, police and civilians that she understood the scale of the tragedy and to demonstrate the determination of the government to resist terrorism. By that time 1,152 civilians and 543 members of the security services had been killed as a result of terrorist action since the troubles began ten years before. She would not forget those two terrible outrages but she was determined that, whatever happened, the IRA would not gain their political aims through terrorism.
Considering that Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom, was on the edge of civil war for much of Thatcher’s time at Downing Street, it seems extraordinary that in her autobiography her plans and policies of how she dealt with the men of violence should have received so little attention. She wrote a thirty-five-page chapter entitled ‘Shadows of Gunmen’ with the subtitle ‘The political and security response to IRA terrorism 1979 – 1990’; yet virtually no clues were given of any practical policy the Thatcher government introduced to take on the Provo gunmen and bombers.
Mrs Thatcher perceived the IRA to be the core of the terrorist problem and she believed that their counterparts on the Protestant side would probably disappear if the IRA could be beaten. In her book, she explained what she believed was the best chance of beating the IRA: by persuading the nationalist minority to reject the IRA, to deprive the IRA of international support and to maintain good relations between Britain and the Republic of Ireland. But Thatcher’s term in office was peppered with problems and terrible tragedies – the hunger strikers of the early 1980s, the mainland bombings in July 1983 when eleven soldiers were killed, the Christmas bombing of Harrods shoppers in 1983, the Enniskillen cenotaph bombing of 1987, the killing of eight British soldiers in a landmine booby-trap near Omagh in August 1989, the slaughter of ten bandsmen at the Royal Marines School of Music at Deal, Kent, in 1989, bombings in the City of London, Warrington and the Para HQ at Aldershot . . . Thatcher recalled suffering deep personal grief once more when the IRA struck in the heart of London, killing another of her close political friends, the staunch Unionist Ian Gow, when a booby-trap bomb exploded under his car on the morning of Monday, 30 July 1990.
Understandably, of course, Thatcher would not have wanted to detail any of the security or intelligence measures introduced by her government to fight the war of attrition against the IRA for fear of providing free information to the enemy, and yet no mention is made in The Downing Street Years of the vital role she played in co-ordinating the services through the powerful and influential JIC. In fact, no mention of that particular committee is made anywhere in the history of her time in office, though its discussions and decisions would undoubtedly have made fascinating reading. And yet, to many, the foundations of the 1985 peace accord in Northern Ireland were laid by Mrs Thatcher in conjunction with the prime ministers of the Republic during her years in power. There are also those who have been involved in the Good Friday peace accord of 1998 who believe that the foundations of that agreement can be traced to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, of which Mrs Thatcher was a prime mover.
Yet she would come to rue signing that Agreement. In a review of Simon Heffer’s biography of the great orator and political thinker Enoch Powell, Thatcher wrote in November 1998 that Powell was right to oppose the Anglo-Irish Agreement which gave the Dublin government a formal say in the running of Northern Ireland for the first time.
Enoch Powell, who died in February 1998, was then an Ulster Unionist MP, having quit the Tories in 1974 over disagreements on Europe. Powell condemned the accord as a betrayal and considered it the first step towards Irish unification, claiming the agreement resulted in an unprecedented arrangement under which control of part of the United Kingdom had been granted to foreign ministers. During a bitter exchange with Mrs Thatcher in the House of Commons at that time Powell accused the Prime Minister of ‘treachery’. According to Heffer, Powell believed that in her heart Thatcher had not wanted the agreement. One ‘had only to watch the Prime Minister at the signing at Hillsborough to understand that here was someone doing what she knew was wrong and what she knew was contrary to her instincts and knowledge of the position’. In her review, Lady Thatcher wrote of Powell’s objections to the accord: ‘I now believe that his assessment was right, though I wish on this as on other occasions he had been less inclined to impugn the motives of those who disagreed with him.’
There were many Ulster Unionists together with the vast majority of Loyalists who in 1985 agreed wholeheartedly with Enoch Powell. And there are numbers of professionals in the security services who believe that the hardline tactics introduced against the IRA during Mrs Thatcher’s Downing Street years, when a far more aggressive policy was permitted, was what finally convinced the Sinn Fein/IRA leadership that they should adopt less confrontational policies and go for a political settlement, for they must have realised they could never win the war against the British Army.
In an effort to co-ordinate and streamline intelligence gathered by the RUC and the army, the Thatcher government decided to reconstitute and strengthen the high-level security directorate, the Joint Irish Section, under the command and control of MI5. There had been a fiercely fought battle between MI5 and MI6 over who should control Northern Ireland. In the past MI6 had had the greater say but MI5 forced the issue and finally won the day. They also demanded and won control and management of intelligence-gathering in the Republic; it was logical, they argued, for MI5 to cover the Republic because there was so much cross-border activity by the Provisional IRA. JIS, which was originally formed in the 1970s, was responsible for co-ordinating both the intelligence and security services in Northern Ireland. The head of the JIS was an Assistant Secretary (Political), who had two senior assistants, as well as three other senior MI5 officers who worked out of HQNI in Lisburn. Also assisting them were six MI5 staffers involved with clerical work and administration. At Stormont Castle a further twenty MI5 clerical and admin staff were employed together with five political specialists and advisers. Two MI5 liaison officers worked closely with the RUC at Knock, near Castlereagh, and a single MI5 officer at Castlereagh acted as liaison with the RUC Special Branch. One MI5 officer also sat in the same office as the operations officer of the Force Research Unit.
The Joint Irish Section was supported by an administration staff of between forty and fifty people, mainly civ
il servants who had volunteered for the two-year tour of duty in Northern Ireland. In effect, the JIS was the British government’s eyes and ears in the Province, responsible for collating all high-grade intelligence flowing into various offices in the Province. The JIS was also responsible for passing on all relevant reports to the Joint Intelligence Committee in London, that is, to Mrs Thatcher. She would demand reports on a weekly basis.
The JIS would keep files on all intelligence agents, informants and what the officers and handlers called touts, those people on the ground who, for small sums of money, would often risk their lives providing information for the British government’s fight against both the Republican and Loyalist terrorist organisations. The JIS would also keep records of money spent on the fight against terrorism, including the amounts paid secretly to the many informants on the books of the various agencies. And, like any well-ordered civil service, details would be meticulously filed on computers of all past and present covert operations, the handlers and informants, as well as details of those terrorists suspected of being involved. A complicated cross-reference record would also be updated on a weekly basis so that everyone involved in the fight against terrorism, and the suspected gunmen and bombers, could be monitored constantly.
The RUC and the Special Branch did not come directly under the command of the Joint Irish Section, however, though they did of course work very closely together and they were both represented on the Tasking Co-ordination Group, the organisation responsible for co-ordinating police, military and security service operations throughout the Province.
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