by Paul Simpson
Terrorism as it is generally referred to today saw a resurgence at the end of the sixties. In Ireland, the IRA had ended its previous campaign in 1962, citing public indifference. However trouble flared in Northern Ireland again in the summer of 1968. An MI5 report commissioned by Home Secretary James Callaghan, pointed out that ‘In basic terms the security problem in Northern Ireland is simple. It springs from the antagonism of two Communities with long memories and relatively short tempers.’ Although historically, the IRA had been the responsibility of the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) — and the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police for offences committed on the mainland — MI5 began to take a more active role, particularly after the UK government sent troops into Ulster on 14 August 1969.
Intelligence matters regarding the province remained confused over the next few years, with the odd division of responsibilities occasionally leading to costly failures. The Provisional IRA attack on the Parachute Regiment headquarters in Aldershot, Surrey (33 miles south-west of London), on 22 February 1972 led directly to the establishment of an Irish Joint Section (IJS) by MI5 and MI6. Arms shipments to the IRA from other countries were monitored and prevented where possible. Despite this, the IJS were unable to provide information that would deal with the IRA’s worst attacks on the mainland in 1974, in which forty-four people died. However, they were instrumental in setting up a back channel between the IRA and the Northern Ireland Office: this led to the Christmas 1974 ceasefire which then continued into 1975. By the time the IRA ended the ceasefire with a further campaign in London’s West End later that year, the counter-terrorism element of the intelligence agencies was working much more efficiently, with the IRA’s chief of staff Joe Cahill later admitting that ‘In many ways the Brits’ strategy was working and the movement had been caught flat-flooted.’
Numerous agents were run within the IRA over the next twenty years by both MI5 and MI6, but their identities, and successful operations, remain classified: there are still those who would take action against them, despite the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that brought a degree of peace to the province. The British Army and the IJS were also able to turn various members of the IRA, although this inevitably meant that they were, to an extent, condoning murder, since senior IRA men, such as Freddie Scappaticci, code-named Stakeknife, had to maintain their cover. MI5 took responsibility for targeting Loyalist paramilitary groups, assisting in the arrest of various members of the Ulster Defence Association.
However, towards the end of the seventies, the IRA began their campaign again; they attacked a barracks in Germany, and set multiple bombs in English cities in December 1978. A new campaign in England seemed under way but fizzled out. But then an offshoot Marxist group, the Irish National Liberation Army, scored a success, blowing up Conservative MP Airey Neave as he drove out of the House of Commons in May 1979. The IRA equalled this with the murder of the Queen’s cousin, Lord Mountbatten, and three others at Sligo, north-west Eire, as well as detonating bombs that killed eighteen soldiers on 27 August 1979.
The IRA continued to be a threat to security throughout the eighties; the IJS, now run by MI5, provided intelligence that helped counter their activities. MI5 also cooperated with the FBI in an effort to combat American financial aid to the IRA via the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID) and the less well-known Clan na Gael, a secret Republican society. In 1984, the IJS was wound up, and its operations brought totally in-house at MI5. Although the counter-terrorism forces had some successes, they were not able to prevent spectacular coups by the IRA, such as the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton on 16 October 1984 that nearly took the life of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
MI5 did assist with the tracking of an IRA Active Service Unit across Europe in 1988 that culminated in the deaths of three of its members on Gibraltar on 6 March (although the subsequent media controversy over an alleged shoot-to-kill policy did none of the intelligence or army agencies any favours). This was indicative of an increased pan-European policy against the IRA that was spearheaded by the Security Service, while the FBI assisted with the arrest of an electronics expert in the US who had been helping the IRA with their technical requirements.
As borders opened within Europe during 1990, the IRA began a fresh campaign, and in February 1991 they fired a mortar bomb at the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. In November that year, Prime Minister John Major agreed that MI5 should now take over responsibility for all counterterrorism matters; that decision became formal six months later. The IRA’s campaign in the UK continued unabated, with one explosive device at the Baltic Exchange in the City of London in April 1992 leading to around £800m of insurance claims — although back channel contacts between the IRA leadership and the British Government, which would eventually lead to the Good Friday agreement, were reopened for a time.
The Republicans’ campaign suffered a major setback when their key operatives Rab Fryers and Hugh Jack were arrested in July 1993, together with the material for six car bombs. MI5 reported that over the following twelve months, eighteen out of thirty-four IRA mainland operations were frustrated. A ceasefire was declared in August 1994 which lasted until February 1996; bombs planted in spring 1996 at Canary Wharf and Manchester’s Arndale Centre were not as devastating as the IRA had hoped. An Active Service Unit comprising some of the IRA’s most able members was put under surveillance by MI5 and arrested in July before they could disrupt London’s power supply.
The ceasefire came back into effect three weeks after the Labour party’s electoral victory in Britain in May 1997; less than a year later, Prime Minister Tony Blair said it wasn’t the day for sound bites, but he felt ‘the hand of history on his shoulder’, as he prepared to sign the Good Friday Agreement.
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America also faced domestic terrorists. Although counterterrorism wouldn’t become the official fourth priority for the FBI until 1982, they dealt with various high-profile cases before then. These included the bombing at the University of Wisconsin-Madigan on 24 August 1970, in which an Army think tank, the Mathematics Research Center, was attacked by radicalized students protesting the Vietnam War; and the campaign waged by the Weather Underground Organisation (better known as the Weathermen). Their manifesto, Prairie Fire, claimed in 1974 that their intention was ‘to disrupt the empire… to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks’. They carried out over two dozen bombings, including one at the State Department in Washington DC in January 1975. Those responsible were tracked down by the FBI over many years and brought to justice.
The FBI also tried to capture the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, who sent explosive devices over a period of seventeen years from 1978. He was only caught after he sent a ‘manifesto’ to the FBI in 1995 explaining why he was carrying out his attacks; when it was printed, his brother David provided convincing proof that Ted was responsible.
The Bureau spent five years hunting down Eric Rudolph, who had been responsible for a bomb at the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics. He planted further devices over a two-year period at abortion clinics and gay-friendly meeting places in Alabama before disappearing into the Appalachian wilderness and living rough. He was eventually caught while searching for food in a dumpster.
They were rather quicker tracking down the Oklahoma Bomber, former soldier Timothy McVeigh, whose homemade device killed 168 and injured hundreds more on 19 April 1995 — partly because he had actually been arrested for carrying a concealed weapon a mere ninety minutes after the blast. Nearly a billion pieces of information were reviewed in preparation for McVeigh and his co-conspirators’ trial. McVeigh was executed on 11 June 2001. Suggestions that he had connections with Middle Eastern terror groups have never been proven.
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When papers wrote about Middle East terrorists in the forties, they were usually referring to the Zionist extremists who were seeking to set up the state of Israel. However, with the arrival of the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP) in 1968, the emphasis switched to the Arabs, and once al-Qaeda started to make a name for itself with various terrorist attacks during the nineties, the volatile region became the focal point for agencies worldwide.
With the exception of the Israeli security agencies, notably their secret service Mossad, most of the world’s intelligence agencies weren’t particularly pro-active in their attitude to potential terrorist threats emanating from the Middle East during the seventies and eighties. The terrorists of the PFLP, guided by Dr Wadi Haddad, devised a new strategy: hijacking aircraft. The first, in July 1968, was an El Al Boeing 707 bound for Tel Aviv (the one and only time an aircraft belonging to the Israeli national airline would be successfully hijacked). Haddad was eventually recruited as a KGB agent, giving the Soviets some control over the PFLP’s actions. The terrorist group’s actions escalated culminating in the attempted capture of four aircraft on 6 September 1970 with a fifth following three days later. Known as the Dawson’s Field hijackings after the RAF base in Jordan to which the planes were flown and then blown up, this resulted in King Hussein of Jordan taking violent action against the newly formed Palestine Liberation Organisation led by Yasser Arafat.
While most intelligence agencies were focusing on securing airports and aircraft, the Israelis went a step further. When a Sabena aircraft was diverted to Lod airport in Israel by the PFLP in May 1972, they sent in special forces disguised as airport workers and recaptured the plane. This escalated the situation. Three weeks later, members of the Japanese Red Army Faction, working for the PFLP, massacred twenty-six passengers at Lod. And on 5 September, Black September, an offshoot of the PLO, killed two Israeli athletes and took nine hostages at the Munich Olympic Games. A firefight at the airport led to the death of all the hostages. With the help of assets that they had within the PLO, Mossad tracked down those responsible for the attack, and executed them (regrettably killing some innocents along the way, notably in Lillehammer, Norway, in July 1973, when Ahmed Bouchiki was murdered in the belief he was Ali Hassan Salemeh. According to Mossad chief Zvi Zamir:
We are accused of having been guided by a desire for vengeance. That is nonsense. What we did was to concretely prevent in the future. We acted against those who thought that they would continue to perpetrate acts of terror. I am not saying that those who were involved in Munich were not marked for death. They definitely deserved to die. But we were not dealing with the past; we concentrated on the future.
The PFLP’s final reported hijacking resulted in West German forces storming the plane when it was on the ground at Mogadishu airport in 1977. The British took similar strong action when terrorists seized hostages at the Iranian Embassy in London in April 1980. When a hostage’s body was pushed through the front door after the terrorists lost patience with the authorities, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave permission for the SAS to attack. All bar one of the hostage-takers were killed; all bar one of the remaining hostages were released safely. In all such similar situations, intelligence agencies provided information on the hijackers and their causes and assisted with the planning of operations.
Libya, under Muammar Gaddafi, became an increasing threat to the West during the eighties, not simply because of his financial support of terrorist organizations. Regarding those who opposed his regime as ‘stray dogs’ who needed putting down, Gaddafi launched various waves of assassination attempts against émigrés, and assets within his People’s Bureau were able to provide MI5 with information to prevent these. In April 1984, Gaddafi personally ordered Libyans within the London Bureau to fire on demonstrators outside (a fact MI5 learnt from Oleg Gordievsky, who had been passed it from Moscow Centre), which led to the death of WPC Yvonne Fletcher. Diplomatic relations were cut with the regime, and sixty of Gaddafi’s spies were expelled from Britain.
America similarly had problems with Gaddafi. In July 1981, despite a warning from the CIA not to proceed, President Reagan had ordered a naval exercise in the Gulf of Sidra, which Libya considered its territorial waters. The NSA were able to read most of the Libyan diplomatic and intelligence cyphers and intercept Gaddafi’s personal phone calls, which showed the depth of the Libyan leader’s anger and the retaliatory action he ordered against Americans.
The conflict in Lebanon, in which American troops tried to protect a ceasefire between Druze and Shi’ite Muslim militias and the mainly Christian Lebanese army, saw two major setbacks for the CIA. In April 1983, a bomb at the embassy in Beirut killed most of the Agency’s station staff, including the CIA’s top Middle Eastern expert, Robert Ames. A few months later, when the NSA intercepted a message indicating that ‘a spectacular action’ was shortly to take place against American marines, they sent out an urgent warning — but it was ignored. In a horrible foreshadowing of the intelligence mess that would see warnings about 9/11 not passed on because no one put the pieces together in time, the notification was either not taken seriously, or became lost within the bureaucracy. On 23 October, a huge explosion at Beirut International Airport killed 241 marines and sailors.
In 1986, Reagan stepped up the pressure on Gaddafi’s Libya with further exercises in the Gulf of Sidra. After the Navy destroyed a Libyan SAM battery and two guided missile patrol boats, Gaddafi ordered all Bureaus to target American servicemen. On 5 April a bomb went off in a disco in West Berlin, killing three and wounding 230, which the Libyans believed ‘would not be traceable to the Libyan diplomatic post in East Berlin’. Perhaps unwisely, Reagan revealed two days later that they had proof of Libyan involvement in the bombing; the Libyans immediately changed all their codes. On 14 April a huge attack was launched against Tripoli and Benghazi — although most of the information about its success derived from CNN rather than from spies on the ground.
The FBI’s counter-terrorism program was assisted by the Omnibus Diplomatic Security And Antiterrorism Act of 1986, which allowed them to conduct investigations in a foreign country where crimes had been committed against American citizens, with that country’s permission. The first to feel the effect of this was Hezbollah terrorist Fawaz Yunis, responsible for the hijacking in 1985 of a Royal Jordanian aircraft that was carrying four Americans. In 1987 Operation Goldenrod went into effect, in which, according to the court record, ‘Undercover FBI agents lured Yunis onto a yacht in the eastern Mediterranean Sea with promises of a drug deal, and arrested him once the vessel entered international waters.’ Yunis was sentenced to thirty years, of which he served sixteen and was then deported.
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The most horrific terrorist incident prior to 9/11 was the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988. Despite a massive investigation by all the various intelligence agencies affected, there remains considerable doubt over exactly who was involved with this — Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, an agent for Libyan intelligence, the Jamahariya Security Organization, was found guilty in 2000, but until his death in 2012 persistently maintained his innocence (he only dropped his appeal against his sentence in exchange for being returned to Libya in 2009 when allegedly he only had weeks to live). Libya accepted responsibility for the explosion in 2003, but this may have been a method of gaining readmission to the international community. About all that the court in the Netherlands could say for certain was that ‘the cause of the disaster was the explosion of an improvised explosive device, that that device was contained within a Toshiba radio cassette player in a brown Samsonite suitcase along with various items of clothing, that that clothing had been purchased in Mary’s House, Sliema, Malta, and that the initiation of the explosion was triggered by the use of an MST-13 timer’. Even some of those findings have subsequently been thrown into doubt.
Initial investigations focused on the PFLP and Syrian involvement, particularly since the PFLP had warned in 1986 that ‘There will be no safety for any traveller on an Israeli or US airliner.’ One of their cells in Germany was working on similar — although not identical — bombs, and it is alternately possibl
e that after the cell was arrested in October 1988, thanks to the efforts of a Jordanian spy who posed as their bomb maker, the PFLP bosses subcontracted the bombing to the Libyans in the same way that they used the Japanese Red Army at Lod. Former FBI Special Agent Richard A. Marquise, the Chief of Terrorist Research and Analytical Center at FBI headquarters in the eighties, noted in 2008: ‘Did Iran contract with the PFLP-GC? Probably! But it cannot be proven in court. Did Iran ask Libya and [Palestinian terrorist] Abu Nidal… Perhaps, but that too cannot be proven and never will be unless a reliable witness or two comes forward with documentary evidence.’
However, the major terrorist threat of the next twenty years, until the assassination of its leader in May 2011, was only just coalescing into existence when Pan Am 103 fell from the sky. Al-Qaeda was formed by the Saudi Arabian-born Osama bin Laden around 1988 from elements of the international Muslim brigades opposed to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. According to the 9/11 Commission, that investigated the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, bin Laden ‘built over the course of a decade a dynamic and lethal organization’ whose aims are simple: it wants to eliminate Western influence from Muslim countries, and dispose of what it regards as ‘corrupt’ regimes.
Bin Laden never made any secret of his aims: ‘The US knows that I have attacked it, by the grace of God, for more than 10 years now… Hostility toward America is a religious duty, and we hope to be rewarded for it by God,’ he told Time Magazine in 1998. ‘To call us Enemy No. 1 or 2 does not hurt us. Osama bin Laden is confident that the Islamic nation will carry out its duty. I am confident that Muslims will be able to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America.’
