by Mark Urban
Brigadier Glover had grasped the crucial fact that the IRA itself had developed into a highly sophisticated organization and had adopted a new strategy. It was clear, too, that the old anti-terrorist tactics would have to change. Senior officers in the Army, RUC and MI5 would come to the conclusion that improved co-operation among the information-gatherers and stepped-up covert operations were vital in order to counter the evolving IRA.
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PIRA
The late 1970s were not only a time of flux for the security forces. Their opponents in the Provisional Irish Republican Army – or PIRA, to use its British Army acronym – were also experiencing profound changes.
The organization was trying to regain the initiative after the collapse of the 1975 ceasefire engineered by Merlyn Rees. This began in February but broke down later in the year, as a result of the IRA leadership’s feeling that the government was not serious about concessions, and its increasing difficulty in containing the frustrations of its members in the face of a large-scale campaign of killing by loyalist terrorists. Many British and loyalist politicians had questioned the wisdom of a ceasefire, fearing it would confer legitimacy on the republicans. In fact it had caused profound problems for the IRA. The Provisionals had found themselves unable to attack the Army and police. Instead they carried out attacks on Protestants, often in retaliation for killings by loyalist paramilitaries in the bloody spasm of sectarian violence which occurred during the ceasefire.
Many of the IRA’s members drifted away during the ceasefire. Martin McGuinness, the IRA leader from Londonderry, alluded to the negative effects of the ceasefire when he commented, ‘Good operations are the best recruiting sergeant.’ The strains which arose from the deal also caused a shift in power, from the South to the North, from older to younger men. The Army Council, the IRA’s ruling body normally composed of seven senior figures, had hitherto been dominated by southerners, older men who were veterans of skirmishes against the British in the 1950s. But the people now in the forefront of the movement, in the North, became disillusioned with the southern leadership during the ceasefire and in November 1976 held the first meeting of the newly formed Northern Command. This body, while still stressing its loyalty to the IRA Army Council and ‘GHQ’ in the South was to be a vehicle for the ambitions of emerging northerners like McGuinness and Gerry Adams.
Adams, a native of west Belfast whose father had been imprisoned for his republican activities in the 1940s, was released from the Maze prison in 1976 after serving three years for an attempted escape from internment. Although even Adams’ adversaries now respect him as an astute politician, he spent many years at the sharp end of the ‘armed struggle’. According to the Special Branch, Adams had been commander of the Ballymurphy unit of the Provisionals before he was interned in 1971. He was released the following year, taking part in secret talks in London with the British government, and becoming commander of the Belfast Brigade. During his second period of incarceration, Adams and Ivor Bell, another leading Belfast Provo, are believed to have drawn up the plans for a fundamental transformation of the IRA.
The changes in the IRA were a culmination of a process which had begun in December 1969, when the IRA had split into the Provisional and Official factions. The leaders of the Provisional wing left because they believed the IRA should maintain a policy of abstentionism – of remaining outside the political process and boycotting elections.
The Officials stopped being a worry to the security forces in 1972 when they began an indefinite ceasefire. However, the committed left of the republican movement produced another breakaway faction three years later when Seamus Costello founded the Irish Republican Socialist Party. The Trotskyite IRSP had a military wing, the Irish National Liberation Army, which was to gain a reputation for ruthlessness though failing to match the IRA in competence or even rudimentary standards of discipline.
PIRA was interested less in the Marxist, utopian ideology of the Officials and IRSP, which envisaged the proletariat replacing British rule with a workers’ state, and more in the simple but potent egalitarian tradition of Irish nationalism which burned in the Catholic estates. The triumph of the northerners was marked in 1977 by the appointment of McGuinness as Chief of Staff of the Army Council, and therefore head of the IRA.
McGuinness had originally joined the Officials, but they had appeared more concerned with interminable debates on Marxist ideology than with carrying out attacks on the British state. The Officials believed in a form of republicanism which involved the entire working class, whatever its religious origin: it had even recruited a company in Shankhill, bastion of Belfast Protestantism. The Provisionals did contain a handful of Protestants, but greater efforts were made to recruit them by the Official IRA and by the INLA. The Officials’ Shankhill Company was a short-lived affair – most of its members drifted away as soon as the sectarian battle lines were drawn after the Troubles began. Only a few individuals continued to be involved with republican groups, the most important of whom was probably Ronnie Bunting, son of a scion of Ulster loyalism, who became commander of the INLA in Belfast during the late 1970s. The Provisionals, while anxious in their public pronouncements not to come over as a sectarian force, were privately more ready to accept that they did fight for a community which was, almost to the last family, Catholic.
Northerners like Adams and McGuinness had for some time realized that the tone of much republican propaganda, which implied that another week of struggle would be enough to kick the Brits out, was unrealistic. Since the breaking of the ‘No Go areas’ in 1972 and the peak of violence which followed, the conflict had changed. The willingness of both Conservative and Labour governments to hold ceasefire talks had been at the root of the republican leadership’s conviction in the early 1970s that one more ‘big push’ could bring victory. But the leadership was coming to the conclusion that Rees had never intended to make a permanent deal, rather he had used the ceasefire to buy time. And during the ceasefire the struggle had subtly changed in character. It was no longer a mass rising but instead had begun to take on the characteristics of a protracted guerrilla struggle.
A new doctrine, known as the ‘long war’, was conceived. It was first floated in June 1977 at the annual republican commemoration at the grave of Wolfe Tone in a speech by Jimmy Drumm, a member of an influential republican clan. The idea gained approval and republican propaganda changed accordingly. The significance of the change, and the reaction of volunteers – as the IRA calls its frontline members – was described years later in an interview with an IRA man:
During the early 1970s everyone had this belief that freedom would come the following year. It’s now been accepted by the IRA, particularly by ordinary volunteers, that this is going to be a long, long war. We’re not prepared to set a time on it. At the same time we’re not prepared to take an all-out offensive in such a way that it would jeopardize our chances of chipping away at the British Army and therefore the British government.
But admitting to its supporters that the struggle was going to be a long one meant that the IRA needed to step up its political work. Republicanism would have to be carried forward not just by arms, but by agitation and participation in elections. The activists of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the republican movement, found a new campaigning issue in the conditions in which republican prisoners had been held.
By early 1976 the government was introducing ‘criminalization’, abandoning the special category status for those convicted of terrorist offences which had allowed them rights not enjoyed by prisoners anywhere else in the United Kingdom. Under the new rules loyalist and republican terrorists would be treated as ordinary felons. The drill parades and other paramilitary trappings which had been permitted in internment camps were no longer allowed. From May 1976 this was to become a major issue in the nationalist community as the first inmate in the newly built H-Blocks at the Maze prison refused to wear regulation clothing.
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The shift of power in the IRA fr
om South to North created uncertainty in Army intelligence. It was evident that the northerners were becoming more powerful, but intelligence chiefs were confused about the extent of the shift and about the role of Southern Command. In 1978 James Glover, the Brigadier General Staff (Intelligence) who was trying to consolidate information-gathering activities, wrote another report, Northern Ireland: Future Terrorist Trends. A copy of the secret document was subsequently obtained by the IRA, much to the embarrassment of Whitehall. In it Glover confessed:
‘We know little of the detailed working of the hierarchy in Dublin. In particular we have scant knowledge of how the logistic system works, nor do we know the extent to which the older, apparently retired, republican leaders influence the movement.’
The use of military terminology by the IRA infuriates many in the British Army and the loyalist community, and the association of the IRA’s bombing and assassination activities in the 1970s with its struggle decades before is also offensive to many in the Republic. However, sympathy for the Catholics of the North in their struggle against social disadvantage runs deep within mainstream politics in Ireland. Many politicians who were critical of the Provisionals’ methods were therefore reluctant to take concrete action against them. The issue of cross-border security – or rather why the Irish government was not doing more to improve it – remained a major irritant with the chiefs at Lisburn and Knock. Despite this, there was a gradual shift in attitude in Dublin. Slowly Irish governments were beginning to recognize that the IRA represented a threat within their own state. The advent of Police Primacy in 1976 was a positive step for Dublin, since it removed the Army, with whom the Gardai would not deal, from control of operations.
Apart from the ignorance of the security forces about the command structure of the IRA, the generally lacklustre performance of the intelligence community had been reflected in the dramatic drop in seizures of weapons during the period 1974 to 1978. But by early 1977 a combination of factors was leading to a greatly improved performance. The Army had been systematically expanding its undercover surveillance since the beginning of 1976 – the same year that the RUC had also set up special surveillance units.
Besides these exceptional measures Kenneth Newman, first as senior deputy chief constable and later as chief constable, had attempted to improve the basic standard of police work. He had, for example, organized the shipment of more than 20,000 fingerprints to England for analysis. As a result there had been several hundred arrests. Newman tried to instil better practices in the force, with greater effort made to protect forensic and other evidence which might offer the only chance of gaining convictions.
The RUC’s CID officers took over interrogation of suspects, mainly at Castlereagh, from the Army. The reorganization of police work meant that interrogators were more often able to confront suspects with a full dossier on their associations and activities. This panicked many into confessions. At the same time changes in the law allowed people suspected of terrorist crimes to be held for three or seven days, allowing interrogators to work for longer on hard cases. However, subsequent investigations were to show that the CID’s improved results – there was a steep rise in confessions during 1974 to 1976 – was in some cases being achieved by recourse to beatings. The Commanding Officer of an infantry battalion returning from a tour in Belfast’s Andersonstown told his superiors in a classified report: ‘The CID are not emasculated by the same restrictions on the methods of questioning terrorist suspects as those imposed on the [Special] Branch at Castlereagh, all of which work to the advantage of the terrorist. The results CID have achieved during our tour have been impressive.’
Newman also set up a Regional Crime and Intelligence Unit at each of the RUC’s three regional headquarters. The units were jointly staffed by CID and Special Branch officers so that the activities of the two departments became interwoven.
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IRA chiefs became increasingly concerned at the effectiveness of the interrogation process coupled with the introduction of longer terms of detention under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. At a trial in Dublin in 1978 the court heard extracts from an internal IRA paper which had been found in the possession of Seamus Twomey, a leading Provisional, when he was arrested. It stated that, ‘The three- and seven-day detention orders are breaking volunteers and it is the Republican Army’s fault for not indoctrinating volunteers with the psychological strength to resist interrogation.’
Twomey’s paper also discussed the inefficiency of the IRA’s command structure and the need for reorganization. It was precisely this restructuring which Ivor Bell and Gerry Adams had already been addressing themselves to in the Maze.
Volunteers had, until then, been grouped into companies. These usually contained ten to thirty people rather than the ninety or a hundred which is normal in armies. The companies were grouped into battalions, containing volunteers (the active terrorists) and auxiliaries. The auxiliaries were a sort of ‘Dad’s Army’ combination of older men and younger ones who lacked the experience for incorporation into active units. It was intended that auxiliaries should be available for protection of the nationalist community in the event of a major sectarian conflict and to carry out less sensitive tasks in the meantime. In Belfast and Derry battalions were grouped into brigades.
Using military terminology to describe its units was part of the Provisionals’ attempt to root themselves in the tradition of insurrectionary republicanism which had won independence for the South, the Republic of Ireland, nearly sixty years before. Then, the IRA had deployed an extensive military force, organized in a conventional way. Sinn Fein propaganda always attempted to paint the Provisionals as soldiers fighting a struggle akin to that of the French resistance in the war, and following in the tradition of the armed republicanism which made possible the formation of the Republic of Ireland. Perhaps because of this, the organization has maintained a higher degree of control over its members and been capable of more ambitious operations than other paramilitary groups.
However, this organization led to several problems. The most important was that far too many people knew who was who in their local IRA infrastructure, exposing the organization to informers. In addition, maintaining the administrative structure of companies required the recruitment of too many unreliable people and kept a large number of those who could be trusted tied up with organizational work rather than operations.
Under the reorganization the people who actually carried out acts of violence were to be regrouped into cells. The IRA drew on the example of urban guerrilla movements in Latin American countries, which had used cells to great effect in the 1960s. Instead of a gunman knowing the identity of his superior commanders, explosives experts, quartermasters and members of other units, he would in future have contact only with the three or four other members of his own cell. The IRA called its new groups Active Service Units (ASUs). Only the ASU commander would have contact with the next level of authority.
The IRA cut away the company level of command and eliminated many battalions too. It was left with brigades in Belfast and Derry, although the term continued to be used by groups elsewhere. There were smaller units in south Armagh, Newry, east Tyrone, mid Tyrone, west Tyrone, north Down, north Antrim and north Armagh, as well as across the border in Donegal and Monaghan in the Republic. It was intended that only the commander and possibly his adjutant or assistant should know the full details of a forthcoming operation. They would order ASUs to complete various tasks with different groups observing the target, hijacking vehicles and actually carrying out the attack.
Brigadier Glover, in his report Future Terrorist Trends, noted that, ‘By reorganizing on cellular lines PIRA has become less dependent on public support than in the past and is less vulnerable to penetration by informers’. It was not that the intelligence services could not find informers, but rather that the knowledge available to any one volunteer was dropping significantly. The identity of many IRA men and women was still widely known in the tightly-knit communities
of west Belfast’s Turf Lodge or the Creggan, but the reorganization meant that people were less aware of what they were actually up to.
Transition from ‘one more push’ to ‘long war’, and from companies to cells, together with the stepping-up of convictions based on confessions, meant that IRA membership shrank. Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie, in their authoritative book The Provisional IRA, estimated the number of active members to have gone down from about 1000 in the mid 1970s to around 250 ten years later. The drop happened despite the release of many men being held on short prison sentences which had been predicted by Brigadier Glover in his report. He had believed that the expected release of 761 republican and loyalist paramilitaries in the three years after his report was completed in 1978 would fuel the terrorist campaign.
The Brigadier’s own estimate of the Provisionals’ strength was a high one. He believed them to have 1200 active members. This contrasted with public pronouncements by the Army which usually stressed the small size of the organization but also shows that Army intelligence was slightly behind in understanding the slimming down which reorganization would bring. By the mid 1980s some Army officers were suggesting there were as few as fifty active IRA members, which appears to have been a deliberate underestimate. I estimate that the Provisionals’ strength remained between 250 and 350 active members – meaning those with the means and prepared to kill – during the decade after the reorganization.