Big Boys' Rules

by Mark Urban

  Under the questioning of his former colleagues in the Provisionals, Young apparently admitted to his activities as an informer. The IRA say he confessed to providing advance warning of several bomb attacks as well as revealing the presence of stores of weapons and explosives. He was shot once through the head and his body left on a roadside near Crossmaglen in south Armagh. Young himself had reportedly not been told that the weapon he handed over to his IRA colleagues had been bugged. The exact reason for the Provisionals’ curiosity about the weapon remains obscure even today.

  In the wake of the Young incident, the Provisionals began to examine their weapons much more carefully. After years of success, jarking became a mixed blessing for the intelligence operators, because it provided the IRA with a method of uncovering informers. Despite the threat to agents which continued use of jarking represented, the Army, SB and MI5 carried on doctoring weapons. The experts at the government laboratories which developed the bugs put greater ingenuity into disguising them. The units which placed them also tried to improve their procedures to lessen the chances of discovery.

  Jarking was not a perfect system. Placing a transmitter in a weapon brought an opportunity to monitor IRA members for a short time. Like other types of bugging device, the ones used in jarking weapons were powered by batteries with a limited life. And although WIU experts would take large numbers of polaroid photos of a cache before touching anything so that they could ensure that everything was left as they found it, they suspected that in some cases the IRA had become aware that a cache had been compromised and the weapons were never recovered.

  Another possibility open to the WIU was to sabotage bomb-making materials found in the caches. Peter Wright, in his book Spycatcher, says that MI5 studied the possibility of booby-trapping terrorist weaponry found in arms caches, but decided not to do so. Fred Holroyd suggests that this was in fact done on one occasion, leading to the death of an IRA man in south Armagh in 1974. People who have been involved in intelligence work in Ulster say that they do not booby-trap weapons because of the risk to innocent parties.

  However, a solution was found by interfering with weaponry to render it harmless. Bomb-making materials can be made harmless. Minute transmitters can also be planted to allow them to be tracked. The identity of an informer who has pinpointed the bomb can thus be protected because the IRA knows that it has dud ordnance from time to time. This type of operation left the IRA profoundly unsure whether its bomb-making materials had been neutralized or whether it was simply a bomb that didn’t work, although the Provisionals knew that on occasion its explosive devices were being tampered with and said so publicly in 1988 when a device failed to go off in Londonderry.

  The Jas Young case had alerted the IRA to the dangers of jarking. In 1985, things went wrong again, when an IRA man noticed something unusual about his gun. It was examined by Provo technical experts who realized what they had found. The weapons had been stored by Gerard and Catherine Mahon, a couple in their twenties living on Belfast’s Twinbrook estate. The Provisionals launched a counter-intelligence operation.

  The couple were followed to meetings with Special Branch handlers. They were subsequently abducted and interrogated, during which it was established that they had agreed to work for the SB the previous year in return for being let off prosecution for unpaid fines. They had allowed SB technical experts to go into their house and jark the weapons stored there. The SB had given them a ‘panic button’ to press if they felt they were in danger of being caught, but they had been unable to use it.

  In the middle of one September night in 1985 a taxi stopped on the Turf Lodge estate. The Mahons and their executioners got out. Mrs Mahon was forced to watch as her husband was shot in the face and back of the head. She was then cut down with a burst of machine-gun fire. The Special Branch had been paying them £20 a week.

  13

  Beyond Ireland

  During the 1970s the IRA developed contacts abroad to provide it with arms and money, although at this stage it was not using these contacts to help attack targets on the continent. Early shipments of weapons from America – where there was a strong Irish Catholic community with links with the IRA – had been followed by deals with Libya and with Palestinian guerrillas. The IRA gained a bewildering variety of weapons from these and other deals with arms merchants: weapons recovered by the security forces included Venezuelan army surplus self-loading rifles, 0.357 magnum revolvers bought over the counter in American gun shops and Chinese-made assault rifles. In addition to standard sniping weapons, the IRA also acquired RPG-7 anti-tank rocket launchers and heavy machine-guns.

  Attempts to thwart these shipments had met with limited success. In 1973 five tons of arms from Libya on board the freighter Claudia had been intercepted and in 1977 a consignment from the Middle East was seized in Antwerp. This included seven RPG-7 launchers and thirty-six rockets. Both of these operations had involved collaboration between various intelligence services. In spite of such examples, many more shipments were still slipping through customs, as the variety and quantity of weapons turning up on the streets in Northern Ireland showed.

  In the United States and many other parts of the world Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service attempted to intercept these shipments. But the IRA had well understood the difficulties facing SIS. As each country protected its sovereignty jealously, the ability of MI6 to act on any information received was limited. The IRA had only to spread its activities across several frontiers to multiply the number of intelligence bureaucracies searching for them, decreasing the likelihood of any co-ordinated effort to detect its operations.

  These weaknesses could also be exploited by attacks on British targets overseas. Sinn Fein had become aware that another bomb in Northern Ireland was less likely to make headlines than one in London. The IRA had consequently committed ASUs to various campaigns in Britain, and, during the early and mid 1970s the organization pulled off a series of bloody attacks on pubs and other targets in England: in Birmingham in 1973, and at Guildford and Woolwich in 1974. The British police were ill-prepared to meet the threats of these outrages and, under political pressure to find the culprits, moved against the Irish community in Britain. The result was a number of false convictions. In 1990 the ‘Guildford Four’ were freed after serving sixteen years for bombings which they did not commit. Then, less than a year later, six men who had been convicted of the IRA’s bloodiest murder of the mid 1970s, the Birmingham pub bombings, were also freed. In both the Guildford and Birmingham cases convictions were secured on the basis of confessions which the prisoners later claimed were beaten out of them.

  Chris Mullin, an investigative journalist and later MP who championed the Birmingham Six, claimed in 1990 to have uncovered evidence that the police knew for years who the real culprits were. One man was even alleged to have gone on to take part in subsequent bombing campaigns in England.

  After this early wave of violence in Britain both the IRA and the police refined their methods. The Metropolitan Police Special Branch had a supervisory role in co-ordinating the activities of smaller SB detachments around the country. Increased contact with the RUC SB, directly and via the Security Service, allowed the Metropolitan Police SB to act more effectively in monitoring individuals as they moved between Ireland and Britain, where greater efforts were also made to establish informer networks in Irish communities. As the SB and MI5 became more effective, the IRA too changed its method of operation. For instance, more care was put into keeping ASUs apart from unreliable elements in the Irish community.

  In another important change of strategy, the IRA Army Council decided in 1979 to carry the fight to British targets on the Continent, where the security establishments were still temptingly disorganized and unco-ordinated. In March 1979 the IRA killed the British ambassador to the Netherlands. A simultaneous attack aimed at a senior British diplomat in Belgium went wrong, claiming the life of a businessman. Shortly after, a bomb attack was made on a British Army mess in West Germany, b
ut there were no casualties.

  During 1980 several more attacks were directed at British military installations in Germany. A British Army colonel was shot dead. Then several shots were fired at a group of military police. In another attack a British officer out jogging was fired on, but survived. These events naturally triggered counter-moves by British and West German intelligence, but as in Northern Ireland a few years before, the lack of clear lines of control and responsibility was a recipe for rivalry and unscrupulous behaviour.

  In 1980, SIS, under the direction of the Cabinet Office Joint intelligence staff, started an operation code-named SCREAM to establish agents in expatriate Irish communities in various parts of the world. It was an ‘offensive penetration operation’, meaning that those agents taking part were meant to involve themselves actively in republican movements in the countries concerned. It is known that one SCREAM agent arrived in Düsseldorf late in 1981.

  At the same time, the Army Intelligence Corps started its own activities in Germany. Neither organization knew what the other was up to. The Int Corps attempted to recruit agents in the Irish expatriate community in Germany, which numbered more than 100,000, on the assumption that IRA cells would need support from these people. Unfortunately, the British Army omitted to tell the West German government about these operations – a breach of the understanding between Western nations that they will not carry out intelligence operations on one another’s territory without seeking permission to do so.

  To confuse matters further, there was yet another player seeking to influence events. The Security Service, the domestic counter-intelligence and counter-subversion organization, also had a presence in West Germany – its Security Liaison Office in Cologne – a relic of the period of British occupation after the Second World War. And sitting organizationally between MI5 and the Army Int Corps was yet another body, the British Services Security Organization (BSSO) which originated from the days when Germany was the world’s foremost spy battleground. BSSO has headquarters at Rheindalen in the same camp as the commanders in chief of the British Army of the Rhine and Royal Air Force in Germany. It is meant to uncover plots by Warsaw Pact intelligence services or German fifth columnists to subvert British service personnel. BSSO is part of the Ministry of Defence and its members are classified as civil servants within that department, although their relationship with the Security Service is close.

  BSSO and MI5 discovered the Army operations and realized that it could cause offence to the Bonn government. Despite MI5’s reputation in some quarters as the most ruthless and ‘cowboy’ of Britain’s intelligence organizations, its chiefs realized that the whole matter would have to be put on a legal footing with Bonn, whatever the difficulty in admitting what had been going on.

  Just as MI5 had in the mid 1970s used the threat of Irish terrorism in Britain to gain an operational foothold in Ulster, squeezing out its rival MI6, so now it was presented with an opportunity to extend its role on the Continent. Although SIS enjoyed close ties with Bonn’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichten Dienst (BND), this agency was forbidden by the West German constitution to adopt any role in internal affairs. SIS was therefore forced to approach the equivalent of MI5, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) or State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, for intelligence on Irish terrorist activity. As the BfV had already developed much closer ties with the Security Service, the IRA continental campaign of 1979 to 1980 came as something of a gift to MI5 in pursuing its traditional competition with the Secret Intelligence Service. Having vanquished SIS in Ireland, MI5 was now ready to position itself as the central force by bringing together the various agencies hunting the IRA in Europe.

  In the United States the constitutional position also favoured MI5 since the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – SIS’s counterpart – is constrained from carrying out operations against the Irish-American communities in the United States which support the Provisionals. This task falls to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) which is organizationally closer to MI5. Liaison with the FBI is sufficiently important for the Security Service to maintain a liaison office at the British embassy in Washington. Despite MI5’s involvement in Germany and the US, SIS remained responsible for operations in many other countries. And, in an attempt – at least at an official level – to co-ordinate their efforts and pool information, the agencies had founded a group of experts called the Irish Joint Section.

  A new operation, code-named WARD, was set up in 1981. It took the informers recruited by the Army and placed them under a Control Group of bureaucrats, including representatives of Army intelligence in West Germany, the BSSO and the Irish Joint Section. In belated deference to the West Germans, it was stressed that they were not running ‘agents’ but ‘listening posts’, people who could give the British early warning of a forthcoming IRA campaign. The BfV were to be kept fully informed of any good intelligence coming from the informers.

  The introduction of WARD, however, was not enough to stop unconstitutional behaviour by Army intelligence. In June 1982 member of 28 Intelligence Section, an Army unit, were discovered by the West Germans mounting surveillance on an Irish expatriates’ political meeting in Düsseldorf. It was all the more embarrassing since the official duties of 28 Section were to tail the Soviet military liaison officers living in West Germany, a hangover from the old occupation arrangements. As a secret BSSO memorandum put it, ‘The use of 28 Section in a WARD context was certainly not envisaged in the acceptance of WARD as given by the President of the BfV.’

  At some point after 1984, the IRA succeeded in obtaining several documents relating to these operations, papers which included the identity of several informers recruited under operation WARD. They were published and this account is based on them. When it resumed its attacks in West Germany in March 1987, the IRA was therefore able to steer clear of the informer network. Members of its ASUs in the later campaign were to avoid Irish expatriates in general, dealing mainly with West Germans.

  The loss of these sensitive papers represented a shocking breach of security. While there have been instances of documents and photographs relating to suspects having been lost in Ulster, this was of a different magnitude. The papers relating to WARD and SCREAM represent the only written insight into the anti-IRA activities of agencies like MI5, SIS and BSSO ever published. Their content is more likely to leave the reader believing in the stereotype of Britain’s intelligence officers as factional bureaucrats who cloak their failures in a heavy mantle of secrecy, rather than as acute architects of perfect conspiracies.

  All the effort of establishing an agent control system acceptable to the Bonn authorities and various British organizations would have been worthwhile if terrorists were apprehended as a result. But of the total of sixteen people recruited as agents under WARD, the secret BSSO papers said, ‘Only two can be said to be active in the sense of reporting anything at all.’ The remainder provided nothing or proved an embarrassment to their handlers.

  Two of the agents were arrested by the West German authorities for working illegally. One was dropped after he was caught lying to his handler. Another two fell under the suspicion of the Irish expatriate community and were excluded from the group. After several years of effort, BSSO concluded, ‘Operation WARD has not so far produced any worthwhile intelligence.’

  The people responsible for the killings of the British ambassador, the businessman and the Army officer were never caught. In fairness to the intelligence operators, IRA continental operations then stopped for several years. This, of course, provides the most important indication as to why, even if better organized, WARD would have produced little.

  In 1989, following the publication of the secret BSSO documents, a leak inquiry was launched at the organization’s headquarters in Rheindalen. The initial suspicion was that a German civilian employee might have obtained the papers and given them to republican sympathizers. The best efforts of BSSO, Army intelligence and MI5 failed to prove this hypoth
esis, according to someone involved with the inquiry. That person also told me that by late 1991, at the time of writing, British intelligence still did not know how the IRA had obtained the sensitive documents.

  *

  Early in the 1980s the IRA hatched a number of sophisticated plans to obtain weapons from the United States. The collaboration between the various agencies involved in frustrating these activities was of a more impressive nature.

  The IRA had become increasingly preoccupied with the idea of shooting down British helicopters. Republican propaganda likes to emphasize that the IRA is able to strike anywhere and that nobody in the Army is safe, but in practice helicopters were being used to move soldiers around freely, particularly in the border area, often allowing them to forsake their vulnerable vehicles.

  In the early 1980s the IRA developed a plan to design and produce its own anti-aircraft rockets in America. Developing an anti-aircraft missile is a multi-million pound undertaking, and even though the IRA intended to cut the costs, it would still take years of effort. The project showed the degree to which highly qualified sympathizers were prepared to get involved with republican terrorism. Richard Johnson, an American electronics engineer working with top-level security clearance at a defence contractor, was one of them. Another US citizen involved was also qualified as an electronic engineer.