by Mark Urban
Eventually, in 1979, Chief Constable Newman set up the Bessbrook Support Unit (BSU), an undercover outfit numbering twenty-eight. Details of the BSU’s operations were later published by the Irish Times. The unit was commanded by an inspector and had three squads each led by a sergeant. The BSU operated very much on military lines. Members wore camouflage outfits and set up long-term covert observation posts. Several, apparently all ex-members of the British Army, were deployed as an OP team with one of the other squads waiting nearby as a QRF.
As the number of RUC special units grew to match the Army’s expanding undercover operation, training in observation and surveillance techniques was given to an increasing number of men. Between 1975 and 1980 the number of Army soldiers available for specialist surveillance duties trebled to about 300. At the same time the RUC developed its own units, adding perhaps another 100 to the total. The result, according to a senior officer who served at Lisburn was that, ‘We began to pick up an immense amount of information through visual sightings.’
By mid 1978 an IRA suspect might have been under observation by men or women from one of 14 Company’s three detachments, one of the four SAS troops in Northern Ireland, or the seven Army Close Observation Platoons, the Special Patrol Group’s Bronze Section, or one of several squads from E4A. Although each of these units had its place in formal police and Army command structures, their use often depended on a complex market driven by the personalities of various security chiefs. There were dozens of people who could request the use of specialist surveillance units, ranging from an Army brigade commander, to the Commander Land Forces, to a police division commander or a local head of Special Branch. The attitude of these people differed for quite arbitrary and individual reasons: one SB member might be a great believer in 14 Company but another might veto its use because of an unhappy experience on a previous operation.
Although the Army helped train Bronze Section and E4A, during their early years there were few joint operations. The command arrangements were complex. The Special Branch initiated most surveillance operations because it had the most informers – people whose tip-offs were most likely to lead to close observation of a particular individual. Having E4A helped the SB a great deal, but the unit was clearly too small to allow all leads to be followed. So the SB often asked for help from Army units. They were most often used at the discretion of the CLF and his three subordinate brigade commanders and, despite the fact that the Army understood the quality of SB’s sources, could not always be spared. The Army had no desire to compromise the activities of its special units since Lieutenant General Creasey, the General Officer Commanding, believed the police were not ready to undertake many of the more ‘muscular’ aspects of counter-terrorism. The RUC contained very few officers with experience of covert operations, and the familiar fears remained that the organization harboured loyalist extremists.
While some security chiefs insisted there was no problem, others understood that the confused arrangements over the use of surveillance units, while explicable because of the speed with which such squads had proliferated, could not be allowed to continue. Help was on its way from two of the key protagonists. Kenneth Newman was overcoming rivalry and poor co-ordination between the RUC’s CID and SB by the creation of Regional Crime and Intelligence Units – a system with obvious potential for involving Army operations as well. At the same time, Brigadier James Glover, the General Staff intelligence officer in London who had proposed improved intelligence-sharing procedures, understood that the Army’s interest in maintaining control over its surveillance units would have to be sacrificed in the cause of improved co-ordination. But while these two men struggled to make new systems for undercover operations work, they remained constrained – as security chiefs had been before and have continued to be since – by persistent allegations of collusion between locally recruited members of the security forces and Protestant paramilitaries.
5
A Question of Allegiances
Uncertainty about the ultimate loyalties of many members of the RUC and UDR has produced a rich vein of speculation about their involvement in terrorist groups and the exploitation of these groups by intelligence agencies in Ulster. These allegations are based on an extension of the simple fact that the forces of law and order are drawn largely from a Protestant community which considers itself under siege, to the suspicion on the part of nationalists and some of the Labour left in Britain that the link between the lawkeepers and loyalist terrorists has been exploited by security chiefs to terrorize the republican movement through a policy of assassination.
Some soldiers from Northern Ireland regarded their Regiment as a legitimized form of loyalist ‘doomsday force’, able to defend the Protestant enclaves if Westminster ever abandoned them. These UDR members were also sometimes members of the largest loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). The UDA grew out of the inner-city violence at the outset of the Troubles as an umbrella for loyalist vigilante groups. Even in the late 1970s its membership was estimated to be as high as 10,000. Most, however, were people who were available to defend their estates in the event of trouble but did not belong to the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), the UDA’s military wing, outlawed in 1974, which carried out a campaign of sectarian killing.
The idea of Protestants banding together to fight the prospect of rule from Dublin, as they had in 1912 when thousands of armed men had paraded, was a potent one among loyalists. Another branch of the UDA revived the name given to those early loyalist formations, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Sir Edward Carson, architect of the original UVF, had become a key figure in loyalist legend by organizing the appearance of thousands of armed men on a hillside, demonstrating to Whitehall the dangers of abandoning the Protestants to rule by the Catholic majority of Ireland. Carson’s powerplay still influenced people sixty years later: the British government feared the possibility of a large-scale loyalist insurrection if it pushed them into a closer bond with the Republic of Ireland; and the Protestants themselves longed for the unity and decisiveness of which Carson had been capable but their contemporary leaders were not.
The modern UVF was not, however, the armed wing of a united loyalist movement but a sectarian terrorist group, which by 1972 was believed to have around 1500 members. Its attacks on Catholics in the mid 1960s were an important stimulus first in the development of the Catholic civil rights movement and later for contemporary armed republicanism. The UVF and UDA were riven by deep factional rivalries which undermined their operations against the republican groups. Much of the daily energy of these groups was devoted to fund-raising through racketeering. They did not attack the Army, although there were often street confrontations with it, but relations with the RUC were often tense – particularly in the days following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in November 1985.
The notion that the UDR and RUC contain men and women whose loyalty is to the principle of Protestant hegemony in Ulster rather than to the rule of law finds currency at many levels within the Army. During the early 1970s soldiers often found that loyalist paramilitaries had been tipped off prior to raids. Lord Carver, the former Chief of General Staff, casts doubts in his memoirs about the loyalties even of some Special Branch men. However, most of the disquiet both within the Army and among Catholics surrounds the locally recruited soldiers of the UDR. The Army’s classified training manual for intelligence specialists bound for Ulster in the late 1970s noted with a candour absent from its public pronouncements: ‘Units must be aware of the fact that, in some instances, the UDR has been penetrated by extremist loyalist organizations, and this will affect the permissible limit of intelligence dissemination, particularly in relation to Protestant extremist activities’.
At its foundation almost one-fifth of the UDR were Catholics. But the IRA’s policy of assassinating Catholic UDR men and the difficulty facing the soldiers in upholding policies like internment which were deeply unpopular in the nationalist community led to the steady ero
sion of this figure. By the 1980s only about three per cent of UDR members were Catholic, the RUC doing rather better with about one in ten. There is a general consensus in Ulster that the RUC has maintained higher standards of professionalism and has had more success keeping Protestant extremists out of its ranks.
The UDR pays its members considerably less than the RUC (who also give generous overtime rates). Relative poverty is at the root of many of the UDR’s problems. While the RUC is considerably oversubscribed – there being more than ten applicants for each vacancy – the UDR is less able to be choosy. UDR members are often unable to afford housing away from the working-class estates where extreme loyalism is entrenched. One senior figure who had served at Stormont referred in private conversation to a particular UDR battalion as being recruited from ‘the cesspits of east Belfast’. RUC applicants are also vetted by the SB, and community ties are sufficiently close for one person from Ulster usually to be able to establish whether another has connections with loyalist extremism. In contrast, UDR vetting remained largely in the hands of Intelligence Corps members from other parts of Britain.
Outsiders who have become involved with the police in Northern Ireland are usually deeply impressed by the commitment of its officers. Kenneth Newman has described the RUC as containing the finest police members he has encountered in a long and varied police career. Michael Asher, however, the former paratrooper who served as a constable in the Special Patrol Group in the late 1970s, did detect prejudices against Catholics and the English, the latter being considered outsiders. He sums up the complex motivation of police on the beat: ‘Most RUC men were scrupulously honest. They were the bravest men I ever met. But most of them had been reared in the strong loyalist culture which had also bred the paramilitaries like the UDA and the UVF. Sometimes they were required to go against “their own people”, but they could never forget where they had come from.’
Interviews with police and soldiers reveal a widespread perception that only a minority of UDR soldiers are actively involved with extreme loyalism, although many sympathize. There is also broad agreement that the figures are still smaller in the RUC. Although many Catholics say they find the theory of a few ‘bad apples’ in the security forces unconvincing, recognition that the RUC has maintained higher standards of professionalism can be seen in various demands made by the non-violent nationalist parties. Their request that UDR patrols should be accompanied by police officers, to reduce the possibility of threats and other misbehaviour by the troops, is evidence of a measure of trust in the police as well as a concern about the UDR.
As the targets for republican terrorism, but with few opportunities to confront it directly, the rank and file of the police and UDR sometimes vent their feelings on Catholics whom they encounter at roadblocks or in holding cells. Republicans frequently complain that their lives have been threatened or that they have been beaten. Intelligence officers confirm that taunts of the ‘we’re going to get you’ variety do occur, giving them as the reason for the increasingly restricted dissemination of intelligence during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ordinary police officers and soldiers are told virtually nothing about forthcoming undercover operations because of the risk that they may taunt suspects with this knowledge.
Events like the murder of three members of a Catholic pop group, the Miami Showband, in 1975 implanted deep mistrust of the UDR among nationalists. The killers, members of the UVF, had been dressed as soldiers. Two UVF terrorists killed at the scene were UDR part timers and two of those later convicted for the murders were also UDR soldiers.
It is sometimes claimed that intelligence agencies have exploited loyalist sympathies to eliminate republicans of whom they cannot openly dispose, providing the information, weapons or freedom from arrest for loyalist paramilitaries to kill them. On this question a profound gulf opens between the views of those in the republican community and what those who have been involved in intelligence work say even in private – and even if they are being sufficiently candid to admit to other misdemeanours by the security forces. During the mid 1980s serious allegations of collusion between the intelligence services and loyalist paramilitary groups were made by Fred Holroyd, the former intelligence liaison officer who had worked in the border area during the mid 1970s. Colin Wallace, a former Army information officer who made allegations about ‘black propaganda’ campaigns directed at politicians against whom the security forces held a grudge (see chapter seven), also said that there were links between the intelligence apparatus and killings by loyalist terrorists.
Some of Holroyd’s allegations concern Robert Nairac, the young Grenadier Guards officer who had served as liaison officer for the 3 Brigade Detachment of 14 Intelligence Company, known by the cover name 4 Field Survey Troop. Holroyd says that Nairac told him he was involved in the killing in January 1975 of John Francis Green, a prominent republican, inside the Irish Republic. Holroyd says that Nairac gave him a photograph of the dead man, with fresh blood on the ground around him – evidence that the young Guards officer had been at the scene around the time of the shooting. Holroyd says that ‘the evidence suggests’ that Nairac was also involved in the Miami Showband killings. A pistol used in this attack was later matched ballistically with one used to murder Green. He believes that the Army and SB ‘worked closely’ with loyalist terrorists. He says that 4 Field Survey Troop had a stockpile of untraceable non-Army issue weapons which it could hand out for such crimes.
Captain Nairac returned to Northern Ireland in May 1976. He was apparently requested by Julian Ball who, promoted to major, was then serving with 22 SAS. Someone who knew the two men says that Ball wanted Nairac to fill a newly-created post, liaising with the RUC for the SAS squadron committed to south Armagh that year – similar to his previous role for the surveillance unit detachment. In May 1977 he was kidnapped from a pub where he may have been on an information-gathering mission, tortured and shot. He was later awarded the George Cross and lionized by the popular press. Captain Nairac was not a member of the SAS, even if he worked closely with it – his George Cross citation indicating that he was a member of the 3 Brigade staff.
Colin Wallace has also made allegations about connections of this kind. In 1986 he wrote to Peter Archer, a Labour MP, saying: ‘During the first six months of 1975 thirty-five Roman Catholics were assassinated in Ulster. The majority of these were killed by members of the security forces or loyalist paramilitary groups such as the UVF, UFF, PAF, UDA etc., working as agents of the security services and supplied with weapons by the security services.’
Albert Baker, a loyalist terrorist sentenced to twenty-five years in jail for involvement in a series of attacks in 1972 and 1973, has claimed that UDA killing squads were given weapons and told their targets by the RUC. His allegations are seen by many nationalists as supporting the claims of Holroyd and Wallace, although they do not specifically refer to the Green and Miami Showband incidents or the killings of early 1975 mentioned above.
Those who believe the Holroyd, Wallace and Baker allegations point out that the three men stood to gain little from making these claims but had much to lose by antagonizing the security apparatus in the ways which they undoubtedly have. Others point out that each of them did in fact have something to gain: Holroyd wanted to erase the stain on his record left by the way he was removed from duties in Northern Ireland and referred for psychiatric observation; Wallace also wanted to clear his name having been dismissed from his civil service job at Lisburn and subsequently sent to prison for killing a Sussex antiques dealer – a crime which he has consistently denied; Baker, facing a life jail sentence, could have been trying to get his case reopened. However, more importantly, in many interviews with people involved with undercover warfare, none has endorsed these allegations of widespread collaboration between intelligence officers and loyalist paramilitaries; on the contrary, they deny such claims vigorously.
One former senior officer says that the security forces did sometimes have foreknowledge of attacks by o
ne IRA faction on another, during the feuds in the organization in the early 1970s, which they made no attempt to stop. Another indicates that the intelligence agencies deliberately stirred up the rivalry between the Officials and Provisionals by planting stories in the press. Although admitting these activities against the IRA, the senior officer adds, ‘Never, ever, was there any suggestion of us playing the loyalists off against the Provisional IRA. If you light that fire, it’s like putting a match to petrol.’
I have interviewed two people who worked with Robert Nairac. Both deny Fred Holroyd’s claims of involvement in assassinations. One, a member of 14 Intelligence Company, says that he remembers the killing of John Francis Green and that both Captain Ball and Lieutenant Nairac were involved in a surveillance operation in a different part of Ulster at the time. He denies that the unit kept non-standard weapons and says, ‘There’s no way we’d go out and murder people. You have to fight wars within the law.’ The idea that the surveillance operators carried non-standard weapons is further undermined by the evidence of the McNutt and Heaney shootings and that of Corporal Harman in 1977 and 1978: in all cases the undercover men were carrying standard issue 9mm pistols.
Those who believe the Holroyd allegations may argue that it is hardly surprising that those who worked with Captain Nairac deny them. Holroyd’s most serious allegations involved people who are dead. Cynics in the Army say that, of all the people whom Holroyd could have chosen to link to such crimes, he has courted controversy by choosing an officer regarded by many as a hero, and who is hardly in a position to sue him.