by Mark Urban
What is beyond doubt is that the Army Council of the IRA used the reorganization to remove many members whom they considered to be hot-headed, disloyal or prone to break under interrogation. The ones who remained were a mixture of types. There were those like Mary Farrell, later killed in Gibraltar, who had benefitted from a middle-class upbringing and convent school education. On the other hand, there were brutalized sons of the estates who could live with the screams of people whose kneecaps they had crushed under concrete blocks. The intellectuals not only gravitated towards positions of command: people with special skills were drawn into bomb-making and the IRA’s own intelligence work.
Most people who joined the Provisionals were deeply influenced by their environment. Mark Lennaghan entered the IRA in the late 1970s after his family was bombed out of its house by loyalists. He was subsequently convicted of an attempt to ambush an Army patrol in 1982 and while in the Maze prison renounced violence. In an interview for the BBC’s Newsnight, Lennaghan told me: ‘At that time [the IRA] was very popular, everyone was in it, it was a peer thing … there was a lot of identity, status, prestige, ego-tripping – all that sort of stuff … the whole sub-culture of west Belfast is very political, it gives a great sense of “1916” [the republican Easter rising against British rule], of your identity’.
Although many volunteers shared his sense of being heir to a long history of violent republicanism, few were as intellectually accomplished as Lennaghan, who passed his Queen’s University finals exams while on remand in the Crumlin Road jail. According to one lawyer who has spent much of his career dealing with republicans in police custody, ‘The ordinary volunteer is pretty stupid, he’s not terribly political’. But the Provisionals became adept at providing recruits with what they were seeking: there was a coherent ideology for those who might otherwise have pondered the morality of killing, and there was plenty of action for those who were ready to use violence without question.
The standard of bomb-making in the early years had been low. From 1972 to 1973, dozens of IRA men and women were blown up by bombs which had gone off prematurely. But competent explosives experts had survived this gruesome form of ‘natural selection’. They began to incorporate safety devices in their weapons, as well as introducing other modifications to catch out those sent to defuse them.
Shipments of weapons had improved the standard of firearms available too. In the early days they had relied on a handful of ancient Thompson machine guns and other weapons. IRA members had stepped into streets and engaged patrols with wildly inaccurate fire. The incidents were often poorly planned and prepared, leading to the apprehension or death of those involved.
In 1970 sympathisers in the United States sent several hundred Armalite rifles. In many ways it was a weapon superior to the Self-Loading Rifle (SLR) issued to British Army troops. The Armalite could fire fully automatic like a machine-gun, which the SLR could not. Its smaller, lighter bullet – 5.56mm compared to the SLR’s 7.62mm – was less likely to go right through its target and injure the innocent. The weapon became an important propaganda symbol. It manifested itself in painted murals and in the argot of republicanism.
In 1976 more supporters in America raided a US Army National Guard armoury, stealing seven M-60 machine-guns. The weapons, which fire belts of 7.62mm rounds, were too big to be easily concealed and using them carried a high risk of civilian casualties. But the display of M-60s, like the appearance of Armalites before, had propaganda value in showing nationalists that the IRA could obtain the most up-to-date military firearms.
With the reorganization, the IRA set itself new targets. Attacks on businesses in city centres, common in the early 1970s, were reduced, the leadership realizing rather late in the day how unpopular they had become. In the early days of the Troubles there had been qualms about attacking soldiers and policemen off duty. These attacks, some members believed, ran counter to the principles which the IRA as an army should uphold. But the increasing difficulty of carrying out successful attacks on patrols and the desire to intimidate members of the locally raised security forces led them to put aside such considerations.
Increasingly, members of the RUC and UDR were shot or blown apart at home, often in front of their families. Such attacks were often accompanied by statements in republican newspapers which sought to justify such actions, often by vague references to alleged crimes against the nationalist community or suggestions that the victim had been associated with a loyalist paramilitary group.
Attacks against armed troops and police were more often carried out in rural areas where surveillance was less intense and government forces more dispersed. South Armagh and Tyrone, the biggest county stretching across the south west of Ulster, became more important to the Provisionals as security improved in the cities.
Reorganization, new strategy and improved weapons compounded the problems faced by the security forces. Although some steps had been taken to unify intelligence-gathering activities, by 1977 it had become apparent to senior Army and police officers that there was a real danger that it would not be possible to make further progress against the IRA. This growing realization of the seriousness of the situation prompted moves to make further improvements in intelligence co-operation.
4
Watchers
The growing professionalism of the IRA and the security chiefs’ desire to intensify information-gathering activities were to spawn several ‘undercover’ units – groups whose activities and even names were shrouded in secrecy. At the time of the IRA’s adoption of a cellular structure only one specially selected and trained observation unit existed. The Army’s élite undercover surveillance unit is without doubt its most secret body of soldiers.
In 1987 its members gained the same privileges as those belonging to the SAS and the Special Boat Service, the Royal Marines Special Forces. The members of all three groups qualify for extra pay and are under the administrative control of one brigadier known as Director Special Forces (DSF). Prior to that there had been a brigadier who ran the Army’s special forces known as Director SAS, but it was decided that the different elements should be more closely woven together.
Although members of the surveillance unit are, therefore, the professional peers of the SAS they have received a small fraction of the press and political interest. This is largely due to the fact that the unit was from the outset hidden beneath an extraordinary web of cover names and secrecy. In the Army it became known during the 1970s as the Reconnaissance Force, RF, and during the 1980s as 14 Intelligence Company, the latter having originated as a cover name and become customary.
It was set up between late 1973 and early 1974 following the Army’s realization, in Lord Carver’s words, ‘That it should rely less on Special Branch and do more to obtain its own intelligence’. He added, ‘For some time various surveillance operations by soldiers in plain clothes had been in train, initiated by Frank Kitson when he commanded the [39] Brigade in Belfast, some of them exploiting ex-members or supporters of the IRA.’
Brigadier Kitson’s special unit was called the Mobile Reconnaissance Force (MRF). Kitson himself was a veteran of the counter-insurgency campaigns in Kenya, Malaya, Oman and Cyprus. In Kenya he had been involved with ‘counter-gangs’, British-led groups of former Mau Mau rebels who confronted their former comrades when they found them in the bush.
On his appointment in 1970 to command 39 Brigade in Belfast, Kitson had received the approval of his superiors to set up the MRF. He recruited ‘turned’ IRA members, nicknamed the ‘Freds’, who were sent to live in a British Army married quarters at Palace Barracks in Holywood, east Belfast. The undercover unit started out as a handful of soldiers under the command of a captain who operated only in Brigadier Kitson’s area of responsibility and were known by the nickname of the ‘Bomb Squad’. The name Mobile Reconnaissance Force was only given several weeks after the soldiers had begun to operate.
MRF operations were, to start with at least, basic. Soldiers in plain clothes and unmar
ked cars would sit in places where they expected the IRA to plant bombs. Sometimes they were there on intelligence tips; at others it was no more than somebody’s hunch that the bombers might turn up. The unit recruited many soldiers of Irish origin who would be able to pass for locals. MRF soldiers would cruise Belfast’s Falls or Whiterock Roads accompanied by ‘Freds’, who would point out characters or places of interest.
Within months of its establishment, the MRF’s operations became more unusual. The unit became involved in several operations involving highly complex cover activities, the aim of which was to allow the Army to penetrate the republican heartlands, where the presence of strangers on intelligence-gathering missions is usually noticed quickly. In one operation the Army started its own massage parlour; in another women soldiers posed as door-to-door sellers of cosmetics. But the MRF’s most celebrated operation involved setting up the Four Square Laundry.
Four Square was intended not just to allow disguised MRF members to carry out reconnaissance trips in laundry vans but also, it was hoped, to allow them to inspect the dirty linen of suspected terrorists for traces of explosive. However, the operation was compromised when one of the Freds was turned by the IRA and told the Provos all about various MRF operations, including this one. A van carrying two MRF soldiers, one of them a woman, was ambushed by the IRA as it made its way through the Twinbrooks estate. The male soldier was killed but the female soldier escaped. The Fred who provided the information was said by a later account to have been killed by the IRA.
In another incident Sergeant Clive Williams, who was serving with the MRF, was charged with attempted murder after he had opened fire from an unmarked car on two men at a bus station in Belfast – a third man was also wounded by a stray shot. He claimed the men had been armed and was subsequently acquitted by the court. But during the court case Sergeant Williams revealed many details about the MRF including that it comprised about forty men, how they were trained and how patrols were carried out. By late 1973, a little more than two years after it had been set up, the operation had been thoroughly compromised, with the Irish newspaper Hibernia running a lengthy exposé headlined ‘Belfast’s Dept. of Dirty Tricks’. Much of the reporting about the unit was unclear, and most accounts were mistaken about what ‘MRF’ actually stood for, but the exposure both of the Force and its activities, and of the founding role of the commander of 39 Brigade, with his pedigree of colonial wars, were important propaganda gifts to the Army’s foes.
The republican movement fixed on Brigadier Kitson, elevating him to one of its central hate figures. The Brigadier was unusual among the officers known to republicans in that in 1970 he had published a book, Low Intensity Operations, which had declared publicly what he believed the lessons of Britain’s counter-insurgency campaigns had been. The Brigadier seemed to have provided a blueprint for the security state which nationalists saw emerging around them. That many other officers were trying to apply experiences gained elsewhere to the unique environment of Northern Ireland was something largely ignored because their writings took the form of classified internal army papers.
Even today, in the view of some officers, Sinn Fein continues to overestimate the importance of Kitson in its propaganda. But Kitson’s name, and the existence of the MRF unit, were among the few facts which journalists and republican propagandists could latch on to in seeking to explain the strange events which they saw around them.
One intelligence officer describes the MRF’s operations as ‘a series of cock-ups’. The idea of using the Freds, Belfast’s ‘counter-gangs’, may in hindsight have been foolish. It ignored the nature of the nationalist community – notably its ability to win back the loyalty of IRA men who had changed sides. An officer who was involved with the MRF justifies its use of the Freds on the grounds that there was a dearth of intelligence available to the Army at the time and that there was value in what the turned IRA members had to say before they left the unit.
Lisburn drew two important lessons from the compromise of the MRF. First, the trial of Sergeant Williams had shown the danger that sensitive intelligence-gathering operations might be revealed in court: the Army knew it would have to show greater ingenuity in preventing similar mistakes happening again. Officers of the Army Legal Service were told to be on hand to prepare the soldiers’ statements and senior officers sometimes tried to use their influence with the RUC to prevent prosecutions. Second, the MRF had told the RUC and commanders of normal Army patrols on the streets virtually nothing about its operations. This presented several dangers, not least that the security forces might open fire on one of these undercover units. It also denied the plain-clothes soldiers the possible back-up of uniformed units in a critical situation like the attack on the laundry van and thereby created bad feeling in the RUC because of the lack of co-ordination.
The MRF was disbanded early in 1973. Within a year the new surveillance unit had emerged – later known as 14 Intelligence Company – a group which was to set far higher standards, and to maintain its cover for many years. This unit, like the SAS, was formed from soldiers who had volunteered from other units and passed a rigorous selection course.
The surveillance unit did not consist predominantly of SAS members, although some soldiers with SAS experience were part of it. Neither was the unit part of the SAS in an organizational sense. A few SAS soldiers did help to set up the surveillance unit, but the flow of expertise was frequently in the opposite direction – some of the 14 Intelligence Company’s operators then went on to serve in SAS squadrons bound for Ulster, where their experience was valued. Selection for the surveillance unit, which takes place twice a year at a training area normally used by 22 SAS, emphasizes the need for resourcefulness and psychological strength, rather than the physical stamina needed for the Special Air Service. It is designed to find people, usually bright officers and NCOs in their mid to late twenties, who are able to bear the strain of long-term surveillance, sometimes only a few feet from people whom they know to be dangerous terrorists. An unusual physical characteristic, for example a scar or prominent tattoo, can be enough for a candidate to be rejected since its members must be as unobtrusive as possible. 14 Intelligence Company recruits from the Royal Marines as well as the Army.
By 1975 the unit’s structure had solidified, remaining the same to this day. The unit has one detachment with each of the three brigades in Ulster. Each detachment or ‘det’, in Army parlance, is normally commanded by a captain and consists of about twenty soldiers. Like the SAS it is often short of soldiers, a consequence of the high standards set during the selection course. When they are available, a second officer is appointed to each det, usually a lieutenant or another captain who is known either as the liaison officer (LO) or the operations (Ops) officer.
The surveillance unit has used a variety of cover names. Each is chosen to sound like another army unit which carries out work of a more mundane kind. The screen of secrecy was erected in part to prevent it being compromised as quickly as the MRF was and perhaps, given Lord Carver’s insight into its origins, to prevent the RUC intelligence-gathering agencies from fully understanding its activities. It is also undoubtedly true that the shady identity of the force has prevented the republican movement from demonizing it in the way that it did with the SAS.
In its early days, people posted to the Company were often listed as going to NITAT or NITAT (NI). NITAT stands for Northern Ireland Training Advisory Team. The real NITAT sends soldiers with recent experience of Ulster to train other regiments in Germany or Britain, which are about to go there, in the arts of normal soldiering: for example, how to mount patrols or how not to be caught out by the latest design of booby trap. In fact the people going to ‘NITAT’ in Northern Ireland itself were involved in very different work.
Suspicions at HQNI that the name NITAT was becoming too widely known prompted a change to another cover name by 1978 to 1979 – Intelligence and Security Group (NI) or Int and Sy Group. There is an Int and Sy Group in England and another in
Germany, comprising large bodies of Intelligence Corps soldiers grouped into companies and commanded by a lieutenant colonel. Their daily business in the 1970s and 1980s consisted mainly of disseminating to fighting units the latest information about the Soviet Army and watching out for attempts by Warsaw Pact spies to suborn British soldiers. But Int and Sy Group, like NITAT, meant something very different in Northern Ireland.
In the early 1980s another name was introduced – 14 Intelligence and Security Company. This name, usually contracted in speech to 14 Intelligence Company, 14 Company or simply 14 Int, became widely used within the Army. Indeed most people who have worked with the Army in Northern Ireland know it as such and that is why I will use this name, even to describe activities in the mid 1970s before the Army adopted it. This cover name suggested an analogy with 12 Intelligence and Security Company, a unit of report writers, index keepers and computer programmers rather than an organized force of undercover surveillance specialists.
Research in Army regimental magazines has allowed me to trace the postings of many individuals who have been identified by contacts as members of the unit and through this to chart the development of its cover names. Picking one’s way through this labyrinth requires patience, but is necessary because the unit became involved in several fatal shooting incidents and was to become the subject of ‘dirty tricks’ allegations by Captain Fred Holroyd, the one-time intelligence officer.
One of the unit’s first recruits was Captain Julian Ball. He had served in the ranks of the Parachute Regiment and had done a tour with the SAS. Promoted to officer, he got a commission in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers (KOSBs). Captain Ball passed selection for 14 Intelligence Company and commanded the 3 Brigade detachment of the unit, which used the cover name 4 Field Survey Troop. His number two, or liaison officer, was Lieutenant Robert Nairac, later promoted to captain.