by Mark Urban
The Secret Intelligence Service, Security Service and to some extent the Army, have gone to great lengths to recruit agents because, unlike the police, they do not have easy access to republicans in holding cells. During the 1970s, SIS set up a fake holiday firm so that it could tell a number of leading republicans that they had won free trips to Spain. When they took these holidays they were approached by intelligence officers who asked whether they would work as agents. Subsequent journalistic inquiries traced Caruso, the front company, to SIS’s London Station which deals with operations in Britain.
In 1985 Gerry Young, a Sinn Fein activist, revealed how he had been approached by plain-clothes police officers during a visit to his children who were living in Birmingham. Young says the officers threatened him with an exclusion order, separating him from the children, unless he agreed to work for them. This is believed to have been an operation carried out on behalf of MI5 by the local Special Branch.
Much effort goes into targeting people whom the intelligence specialists believe are suitable for recruitment for whatever reason. If they agree to provide information they are given a code-name and details of how to contact their handler.
Meetings normally take place in areas away from republican strongholds. There is a preference for the haunts of the respectable Protestant establishment – the carpark of a golf club, the area around Queen’s University in Belfast or outside a school in a middle-class suburb. Most informers are paid small amounts, often only £10 or £20 each week. A successful tip-off, about an arms cache for example, may lead to a bonus of £200 or £300. But top sources – people within the upper echelons of Sinn Fein, the IRA or INLA – have been paid thousands of pounds. The money is often banked in mainland accounts and it is frequently not possible for the informer to use it, because to do so would attract attention.
Meetings with handlers are often set up by telephone. The agent will ring a local police station or Army base on an unlisted number and ask to speak to his or her handler. Arrangements will then be made to meet. Agent-runners may arrange the rendezvous so as to be able to follow the source prior to the meeting in order to make sure that he or she is not being followed by the IRA.
Agent-running in Northern Ireland has taken the security forces into many profoundly difficult moral areas. The dangers of using informers are well known to intelligence officers. The information itself may be unreliable. The source may be fabricating evidence to get even with someone. They may even be involved in serious crimes and, by providing information on others, may thereby seek to remove themselves from police scrutiny. The security forces dilemma is often, most simply, that they find themselves developing uncomfortably close relationships with people intimately involved in terrorism. As one senior Army officer with experience of undercover operations in Northern Ireland explains, ‘for the informer to be any good, you can almost guarantee that he is going to be part of the operation’. In the battle for intelligence, SB or Army agent-runners found themselves developing close working bonds with people whom they suspected or even knew to have been responsible for killing their colleagues.
In 1982 a case came to the courts which highlighted the close ties between an informer and his handler. Anthony O’Doherty and his one-time SB handler Charles McCormick were charged with carrying out a series of crimes, including the murder of a police officer and a bank robbery. As a detective sergeant, McCormick had been O’Doherty’s contact during the early 1970s. O’Doherty had gone on the run after coming under suspicion within the IRA. He relied on the detective sergeant, who felt a bond of loyalty to his ex-agent, for protection and help. O’Doherty was to claim in court that McCormick had joined him in the series of crimes.
The judge in the case cast doubt on some of O’Doherty’s allegations, warning of the dangers of accepting uncorroborated statements which implicated the former police officer. Nevertheless, McCormick was found guilty of robbing a bank, hijacking cars and of firearms offences. He was sentenced to twenty years but was released after a successful appeal in 1984. O’Doherty himself came out the following year, leading many to speculate whether further unknown deals had been done with the authorities.
British police forces are bound by Home Office guidelines on the use of informers, but the RUC is not – another measure of the degree to which it does not operate under the same rules as its British counterparts. The guidelines say the police should not let a serious crime go ahead if an informer has told them about it, that they should not mislead a court to protect an informer, and rules out the granting of blanket immunity to an informer. All of these principles have been breached in Northern Ireland. RUC officers regard this as a necessity in the fight against terrorism but many outsiders are critical of some of these practices.
The confident tone adopted by many Army and RUC officers when discussing the actions of individual terrorist suspects is often founded on little more than the half-truths, self-interested speculation and pub gossip provided by low-grade informers. This may be the product of a syndrome well known in intelligence work whereby the agent’s handler paints an overly optimistic picture of the reliability of his source in order to enhance his own position. Running a high-grade source can, after all, make the career of an SB or MI5 officer. In other cases well placed informers may allow them to assemble considerable genuine information about the activities of individuals.
Particular efforts are made to recruit quartermasters – the IRA’s weapons supply experts. These people can pinpoint arms caches which can then be watched, allowing the intelligence specialists to learn the identity of cell members. Since weapons must be issued before an attack, the quartermaster may play a critical role in giving the SB or the Army foreknowledge of a terrorist attack.
Eugene Simmons, whose body was only found four years after his murder in 1981, was believed to have been a quartermaster whose information on the location of dumps of bomb-making materials led to the arrest of several Provisionals. Frank Hegarty, forty-five years old, who was killed by the IRA in 1986, worked in the Deny Brigade quartermaster’s department. Hegarty’s knowledge of large supply dumps in the Republic marked him out for handling by MI5 as a ‘national asset’. On the night before the Gardai were due to raid a dump containing dozens of rifles, Hegarty was taken into protective custody. He went to a Ministry of Defence-owned safe house in Sittingbourne in Kent. He was visited there by his girlfriend, and told her that his minders were MI5 men. After one month in hiding he could not bear being away any longer. He returned home, pleading his innocence of any treachery, a ploy which failed to save his life. The IRA interrogated him, saying he admitted to having worked as an informer for seven years.
Sinn Fein made plain what lessons others should draw from the Hegarty case. In an interview with Peter Taylor of BBC TV’s Panorama, Martin McGuinness, the Deny republican leader and one-time Chief of Staff of the IRA Army Council, said that if republican activists ‘go over to the other side then they more than anyone else are totally aware what the penalty for doing that is’. ‘Death?’ asked Taylor. ‘Death, certainly,’ McGuinness replied.
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By the late 1970s attempts to gain more information and to process it more efficiently through the TCG joint operations centres were yielding results. One area where this was evident was in arms finds. Most finds are normally the result of the SB passing informer information to the Army, which then conducts the search. A battalion intelligence officer says, ‘We get Special Branch information that a house is worth searching. They don’t really tell us why, but they give us a few hints as to what we might find.’
Finds of explosives and guns fell steadily from 1974 to 1978. However, in 1979 – although the number of houses searched was cut to one-third as many as in 1978 – the amount of explosives found was almost the same. The cut in searches was ordered by Kenneth Newman, who understood that better intelligence could help the security forces in their relations with the nationalist community, which bitterly resents house searches.
Al
though important progress had been made in intelligence collaboration, one major issue remained unresolved between the SB and the Army. With the advent of Police Primacy, during the years 1977 to 1980, the RUC tried to reduce Army agent-running to the minimum, hoping that it could take over the Army’s sources. In fact, it does not appear that Assistant Chief Constable Slevin, HSB, endorsed the argument for closing down the Army’s entire agent-running operation, but rather that this was the prevailing view held at the middle levels of command within the SB.
Predictably, their moves were strongly resisted by the Army. Partly as a result of RUC pressure, Major General James Glover – both in his role as CLF and in his previous intelligence post in London – had tried to improve the efficiency and professionalism of Army agent-running. Until 1977 each battalion had run its own agents, passing them on to its successor after four or more months in Ulster. But it had become clear that many of the unit agent-runners were inexperienced and inept. Their sources must have questioned the wisdom of placing their lives in the hands of these young men, most of them English, who went around trying to look like civilians but who quickly revealed their ignorance of Northern Irish ways. At the same time Lisburn accepted that suspects could no longer be interrogated or ‘screened’ by battalion intelligence officers, and that the amount of time they could hold people before handing them on to the RUG was reduced – all of which made recruitment of sources by the Army more difficult.
Major General Glover, in his reorganization of military intelligence in Northern Ireland, stopped battalions running their own agents and transferred this responsibility to brigades, the next level up in the chain of command. Each of the three brigade headquarters had what was called, rather coyly, the Research Office, which consisted of full-time agent-runners. This arrangement did not last long, however, and in 1980 Glover established a centralized human source handling group known as the Field Research Unit (FRU) at HQNI, Lisburn. The FRU joined 14 Intelligence Company and the SAS in forming the trinity of Army undercover operations units in Ulster. It has remained more secret than either of these organizations and this book is the first to discuss its role.
Like the surveillance unit and SAS, the FRU took recruits from various branches of the armed forces and trained them for tours in Northern Ireland. But its Commanding Officer and several other key figures were drawn from the ‘green slime’, so that the FRU has remained more closely under the direction of the Intelligence Corps than 14 Intelligence Company or SAS. The FRU, like MI5’s agent-runners, had only limited access to people in holding cells, and thus needed to use greater ingenuity when deciding how to make the first approach to potential agents.
Despite this initiative, SB men often saw the Army’s agent operations as a waste of effort. A senior police officer says, ‘80 per cent of the valuable intelligence sources belonged to the RUC.’ An Army man says this charge is ‘balls’ – a measure of the passion which the issue still arouses. Other soldiers considered many of the SB’s agent-runners to be time-servers and that the Army was carrying out more imaginative agent recruitment efforts.
Maurice Oldfield, in his role as Security Co-ordinator, was soon drawn into these rivalries. Oldfield had found the pace of work difficult to handle. He was more suited to analyzing papers at Stormont House than constantly climbing in and out of helicopters to visit remote bases. And, more importantly, by early 1980 he was beginning to succumb to stomach cancer.
The Army argued that it was important to maintain its own human sources because, as one officer puts it, ‘Many Catholics feel much happier talking to a Brit than to a policeman.’ There was another related but more basic reason for the Army’s position. Informer intelligence was so important that Lisburn was reluctant to trust the SB with it all. The misgivings of some officers, that the SB had in its ranks too many Protestant ‘hard men’, meant that the generals did not want to be completely dependent on Knock for their information of what was going on in the IRA.
MI5 took the same attitude. It maintained its agent-running unit partly because it saw dangers in allowing the SB a monopoly of human source intelligence, according to an important figure at Stormont during this period. Oldfield apparently agreed with the Army and MI5 on this, realizing the dangers of putting too much power in the hands of the SB.
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Early in 1980, shortly after it had become clear that he was seriously ill, Oldfield’s positive vetting security clearance was withdrawn. This step – remarkable considering he had been involved in some of Britain’s most sensitive covert operations during the previous forty years – was taken because he had not declared his homosexuality during positive vetting interviews at various times in his career.
He returned to England, terminally ill, to face a series of interviews with senior MI5 officers. They had been ordered to find out if Oldfield’s homosexuality had been exploited by any foreign power. In March 1981 at the age of sixty-five, he died of cancer. At about the same time Oldfield’s replacement as Security Co-ordinator, Sir Francis Brooks Richards, completed the studies ordered by Whitehall. Sir Francis returned to London and the Planning Staff dispersed. The reports completed by the Security Co-ordinators and their staffs were circulated to senior civil servants and ministers. Although Maurice Oldfield’s mission had begun with much publicity as a government attempt to address problems in the security edifice following the Warrenpoint ‘spectacular’, its effect was, in the end, largely to endorse the status quo. The reports backed the Police Primacy policy and the centralization of intelligence, but preserved the diverse information-gathering activities of the Army, RUC and MI5.
Six years later, the reasons for Oldfield’s removal became public in a newspaper article which suggested that his Special Branch guards in London had alerted their superiors to the fact that the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service was having casual sex with young men. An article by the Northern Irish journalist Chris Ryder in the Sunday Times said Oldfield had been removed from Ulster after an incident in which he had approached a man in the toilets in a pub not far from Stormont.
Mrs Thatcher made a public statement confirming that he had ‘confessed’ his homosexuality and had, as a result, been removed from his position as Security Co-ordinator. Many in SIS and at Stormont considered the Prime Minister’s behaviour to be a betrayal of a man who had forsaken the short-lived pleasures of his retirement in order to serve her. They found it hard to understand why, when governments normally never comment on the security and intelligence services, she had needed to be so explicit about a man who was dead and in no position to defend himself.
Some people have detected the hand of MI5 or the RUC’s Special Branch in Oldfield’s fall. If a senior SIS officer had been taking young men to his flat, why hadn’t it been noticed before? The allegations about the incident in Northern Ireland itself are puzzling. One of Oldfield’s colleagues from Stormont says the story about the pub is wrong, and that the former SIS chief was questioned about an incident which had happened well before he arrived in Northern Ireland. The possibility exists that the ‘security and police sources’ cited by Ryder as the providers of the information in his story had known about Oldfield’s homosexuality for some time and that they chose to use the information because he would not back the middle-ranking SB detectives who wanted to take over the Army’s agents in Ulster.
12
‘Jarking’ and the Technology of Terror
Although informers remained the prime source of intelligence for the RUC and the Army, the use of technical means of gathering information was on the increase. By 1980 both the security forces and their republican opponents had invested considerable resources in new technology. From state-of-the-art surveillance equipment to sophisticated bomb detonators, both sides tried to give themselves an advantage by exploiting the evolving technology.
The IRA had learnt from its early disasters in bomb-making and was able to produce devices of much higher quality, using more stable explosives and more reliable timers. And radi
o-controlled bombs, with which the organization had experimented since 1972, also became common during the late 1970s. Notably, the Provisionals used them in the bombings at Warrenpoint and of Lord Mountbatten at Mullaghmore.
A standard device would be triggered by a transmitter known as a McGregor, designed for use with model aircraft and boats. At first this was used to activate a simple switch, also often acquired in model shops, which would then set off the detonation. It was not long before the Army began to explore the possibility of sending jamming signals on the 27Mhz wave band used by this transmitter. This tactic presented risks, however, in that there was a chance that the Army, by transmitting on the same frequency, would cause the bombs to go off prematurely, possibly injuring innocent people.
As time passed, the IRA made various changes to its radio-controlled devices. Advanced electronic equipment, obtained overseas, was used to modify both transmitters and receivers, by means of a coded signal to activate the bomb. As a result Army jamming, based on transmitting a constant frequency, would no longer be able to set the bomb off or disarm it; and the security forces were not able to find out which modulations in the signal were necessary to arm the bomb. Although this represented a significant technological development for the IRA, both sides were to progress beyond simple coding.
Ministry of Defence scientists at research establishments in England were constantly pitting their wits against IRA bomb-makers, and the adoption by the IRA of coded arming signals for their bombs forced the scientists to consider new ways of protecting soldiers. They came up with the idea of ‘inhibitors’ which would prevent the bomb from functioning – an intervention which would save many lives.