The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  PFLP terrorism, however, made clear the need for greatly improved aircraft security. On 6 September 1970 the PFLP hijacked four airliners bound for New York (a feat unequalled by any other terrorist organization until the Al Qaida hijacks on 11 September 2001) and took them to a remote former RAF airbase in Jordan known as Dawson’s Field. Wadi Haddad gave the most difficult assignment on the day of the hijacks to the world’s best-known female terrorist, Leila Khaled, still photogenic despite plastic surgery to change her appearance after her first hijack a year earlier, and the Nicaraguan-American Patrick Arguello, who together posed as a newly married couple. Their aircraft, an El Al Boeing 707 departing from Tel Aviv, was the only one of the four which carried an air marshal. Though they succeeded in smuggling aboard both handguns and grenades, the hijack failed. Arguello was shot dead by the air marshal and Khaled, who was prevented by other passengers from removing grenades hidden in her bra, was arrested when the plane made an emergency landing at Heathrow. The hijackers aboard a TWA Boeing 707 and a Swissair DC-8, however, successfully diverted their aircraft to Dawson’s Field, which they promptly renamed ‘Revolution Airstrip’. A hijacked Pan Am Boeing 747, which was discovered to be too large to land at the Airstrip, was forced to land instead at Cairo where passengers and crew were evacuated and the aircraft blown up. A fifth plane, a BOAC VC-10, was hijacked three days later and flown to the Airstrip to provide the PFLP with British hostages. As the PFLP had planned, the hostages were eventually exchanged for Khaled and six Palestinian terrorists imprisoned in West Germany and Switzerland.32 The aircraft were destroyed by the hijackers. Discussions within Whitehall about how to deal with future hijacks were confused and sometimes bizarre. The future cabinet secretary Richard Wilson, then working in the Private Office of the Minister for Civil Aviation, recalls ‘surreal discussions’ which included the use of blow-darts to overpower hijackers.33

  The September hijackings swiftly led to further mayhem in the Middle East. King Hussein of Jordan, infuriated by the hijacking of aircraft to a Jordanian airfield and by the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), led by Yasir Arafat, as a virtually independent state within his kingdom, used the Jordanian army to drive it out. Thousands of Palestinians were killed during what became known as Black September. A shadowy terrorist organization of that name was set up within Arafat’s Fatah movement at the heart of the PLO when it regrouped in Lebanon. Following the hijacks, the JIC concluded that the danger to UK interests from Arab terrorism had ‘significantly increased’. A series of JIC and MI5 assessments over the next month envisaged the possibility of further hijackings, kidnappings, sabotage of aircraft, ships and oil terminals in the Persian Gulf, and armed attacks on tankers in the Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean. The Home Secretary was informed that, as ‘the responsible authority for advice on counter sabotage’, the Security Service, sometimes acting in conjunction with the MPSB, the DTI and the armed services, had provided protective-security advice at oil installations in the Gulf as well as in the United Kingdom.34

  For almost two years, however, aircraft and airports seemed the only British interests at serious risk from Arab terrorists. The C Branch Assistant Director responsible for counter-sabotage, Cecil Shipp (a future DDG), took the initiative in the creation of the National Aviation Security Committee, whose first meeting took place in May 1971 with representatives of the police, the British Airports Authority (BAA), the principal airlines and trade unions. C4 officers provided a comprehensive threat assessment and took the lead in discussions on counter-measures. Agreement was reached with BAA that security surveys should be carried out by C4, beginning at Heathrow, and that the implementation of protective security required effective supervision.35

  On 14 December 1971 MPSB reported information that a group of PFLP terrorists had arrived in London with plans ‘either to hijack a plane or to assassinate members of the Jordanian Royal Family’. 36 The target, however, turned out to be the Jordanian ambassador. Next day, as the ambassador’s car was passing down Holland Street, Kensington, a bystander saw ‘a young man pull a Sten gun from under his coat’: ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes. He levelled it at hip level and pulled the trigger and fired about 40 rounds . . . It was like a scene out of a Chicago film.’37 The ambassador, remarkably, escaped with an injury to one hand.38 Like earlier PFLP attacks in London, the attempted assassination was not planned as a direct attack on British interests. Changes in the Whitehall machinery for dealing with intelligence on terrorism owed far more to the resumption during 1972 of PFLP attacks on aircraft and airports than to the attempt on the life of the ambassador.

  On 8 May four PFLP hijackers diverted a Belgian Sabena aircraft to Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport, where they demanded the release of 317 jailed Palestinians. In the first ever assault on a hijacked plane, Israeli special forces disguised as airport workers freed the passengers and killed or captured the hijackers. The successful counter-terrorist operation at Lod provided evidence of contingency planning in Israel of a kind which did not yet exist in Britain. Haddad, however, took a terrible revenge. On 31 May three members of the Japanese Red Army Faction working for the PFLP walked into the baggage-reclaim area at Lod Airport, removed two suitcases from the conveyor belt, took from them grenades and machine guns, killed twenty-six passengers, most of them Puerto Rican Catholic pilgrims, and wounded seventy-six others. The Lod massacre shocked the Security Service into undertaking a major reappraisal of aviation security, which had hitherto concentrated on preventing hijacks rather than protecting airports. By the end of the year C4 had completed a survey of security at thirteen British airports.39

  Counter-terrorism, however, was not as yet a major priority either of the Heath government or of the Security Service. As the Special Air Service (SAS) officer Peter de la Billière (later Director SAS) noted, the government was more concerned about industrial unrest than about the terrorist threat. After the Lod massacre de la Billière ordered the preparation of a paper on the use of the SAS for counter-terrorist operations. Once forwarded to the MoD, however, the paper was quietly shelved.40

  For a brief period in the early 1970s the Security Service feared that Britain, like some continental countries, was developing its own homegrown international terrorist group. On 12 January 1971 two bombs exploded at the Hertfordshire home of the Secretary of State for Employment, Robert Carr. Responsibility for the attack was claimed by a group calling itself the Angry Brigade which declared in a communiqué: ‘Robert Carr got it tonight. We’re getting closer.’ ‘Before Carr’s house was bombed,’ wrote Britain’s best-known anarchist, Stuart Christie, ‘nobody had heard of the Angry Brigade. Now, overnight, it had become headline news and every pundit had his own explanation of its origin.’41 Security Service files, however, contained no likely leads.42 Over the next six months there were further Angry Brigade bomb attacks, on the London offices of the Ford Motor Company, the Biba dress boutique, the Metropolitan Police computer unit, the home of Ford’s managing director, an electricity sub-station near Ford’s Dagenham factory, and the home of the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. Forensic evidence collected by the Met pointed to links with the Spanish First of May Group and other continental anarchists involved in terrorist attacks. The explosive used in most Angry Brigade bombings, as in some First of May attacks, was nitramite, a Frenchmanufactured explosive unavailable in the UK.43

  The first major breakthrough in the police investigation was a lead from a prisoner on remand in Brixton Prison who claimed that a fellow remand prisoner, Jack Prescott, had admitted involvement with the Angry Brigade.44 On his release from Brixton, Prescott went to a commune in Islington, which was raided by the police, who, according to Prescott’s friend Stuart Christie, discovered diaries and address books which ‘provided material for many a happy “fishing trip” for the police in months to come’. 45 The description of the commune in Security Service files was unusually censorious:

  The inhabitants were found to consist of revolutionaries who had
dropped out of conventional society. They were living promiscuously, the only acknowledged relationship being that of ‘brothers and sisters’. A child in the commune was claimed to be the child of all the women in the house. Addiction to hashish and L.S.D. is part of the way of life . . .

  The material found during the police raid, combined with subsequent observation of the commune, eventually led the police to a flat in Stoke Newington which documents, weapons and sticks of nitramite identified as the base of the Angry Brigade. Among the weapons was a Beretta machine carbine which forensic examination showed to have been used in an attack on the US embassy in Grosvenor Square in 1967 for which the First of May Group had claimed responsibility.46 As F1 later acknowledged, ‘We ought to have been quicker in connecting the Angry Brigade with the First of May Group.’47 The documents found in the Stoke Newington flat disclosed ‘a great deal of research into future targets’: among them cabinet ministers, judges, civil servants, police and prison officers, property companies, computer services and private security agencies.48

  Eight inhabitants of, or visitors to, the Stoke Newington flat were charged with conspiring to cause explosions. Four were later sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, the remainder found not guilty. With the trial, Angry Brigade attacks and communiqués came to an abrupt end. As Stuart Christie acknowledged, the Brigade had won few friends even among those in favour of revolutionary violence abroad: ‘A lot of the political left began to turn against the Angry Brigade. Power might grow out of the barrel of a gun in Vietnam and Bolivia but not in Barnet. What was hailed as an urban guerrilla action in Peru was fascist propaganda in Poplar.’49 At the CPGB’s ‘bugged’ King Street HQ, Bert Ramelson was overheard denouncing the Angry Brigade as ‘nutcases’. 50

  The Security Service accepted that it had taken too long to track down the Angry Brigade. When Robert Carr’s house was bombed in January 1971, E1 (later F3), which was responsible for investigating the international dimensions of subversion, was still located outside Leconfield House and in irregular contact with F1 inside Leconfield House, which dealt with domestic subversion. ‘This’, a post-mortem acknowledged, ‘was an immense handicap, slightly reduced but not altogether overcome when F3 joined F1 in Leconfield House.’ Had F1 and F3 been in closer contact, F Branch might well have been quicker to see the links between the British Angry Brigade and the Spanish First of May Group.51 F Branch’s main expertise, however, lay in counter-subversion rather than in counterterrorism. Once Carr’s house was bombed, the lead role in investigating anarchism passed to the Special Branch.52 Since a crime had been committed, however, the MPSB investigation of the Angry Brigade was directed by the CID. The Security Service had files on three of the ‘Stoke Newington Eight’,53 and provided some information which assisted the police. But, as F1B acknowledged, the Security Service and Special Branch were to some extent ‘duplicating each other’s work’. 54 The Angry Brigade bombings provided further evidence of the hesitancy with which the Security Service in the early 1970s was adjusting to a counter-terrorist role. Though the Brigade has since become a mere footnote in British history, there was no means of knowing in 1971 whether or not the bombings presaged something as serious as the terrorist campaign waged in West Germany during the 1970s by the Baader–Meinhof gang and its pretentiously named successor, the Red Army Faction, against leading representatives of ‘the imperialist feudal system’, such as those on the Angry Brigade target list.

  In 1972 Sandy Stuart, one of the few Security Service officers to have been the target of a terrorist attack, was drafted in to C Branch to carry out a review of counter-terrorist protective security.55 As SLO in Aden in 1967 he had survived a bomb attack in which his wife Judi had been killed.56 Stuart found that little had changed since the counter-sabotage measures devised during the Second World War.57 While he was in the middle of his review, an attack by Black September on Israeli athletes competing at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games dramatically heightened the priority given by the Heath government to counter-terrorism. On 5 September seven Arab terrorists (three of whom, thanks to poor security at the Games, had obtained jobs in the Olympic village) burst into the athletes’ dormitory, killing two and taking nine hostage. Though the Israeli government refused to negotiate with the terrorists, the West German authorities agreed to give them safe passage to fly to Egypt with their hostages. At the airport, however, German sharpshooters began a firefight which ended in the deaths of five of the terrorists, a policeman and all of the hostages.58 As a Palestinian refugee told a British reporter, ‘From Munich onwards nobody could ignore the Palestinians or their cause.’ Palestinian terrorists inspired other frustrated ethnic and nationalist groups to follow their example. Though the international terrorist groups which multiplied during the 1970s varied greatly, all had in common ‘a burning sense of injustice and dispossession alongside a belief that through international terrorism they too could finally attract worldwide attention to themselves and their causes’. 59

  As well as demonstrating the unpreparedness and confusion of the German government when faced with a major terrorist attack, the Munich massacre also highlighted the need for further contingency planning and counter-terrorist precautions in the UK. On 8 September, the Director of Military Operations, Major General Bill Scotter, rang de la Billière to tell him that the Prime Minister wanted to know what the army could contribute to counter-terrorism. The earlier paper commissioned by de la Billière after the Lod Airport massacre on the use of the SAS for counter-terrorist operations was promptly rescued from an MoD filing cabinet; he was authorized to create an SAS counter-terrorist unit and told that money was no object.60 The deputy head of a C Branch section, David Sutherland, took an active part in the creation of the unit.61 Julian Faux, who had been bored by his post in another part of the Branch, was delighted to be transferred to Sutherland’s section in 1972 and was much impressed by Sutherland.

  Maudling’s successor as home secretary, Robert Carr, asked the Security Service for an assessment ‘of the likelihood of a Munich-type terrorist operation happening in this country’. Carr can scarcely have been reassured by the pessimistic estimate of the Security’s capacity to provide advance warning of terrorist attacks sent to him by Director F, John Jones (later DG), on 8 September:

  We have no current intelligence to indicate that any Arab terrorist group is currently planning an operation in the U.K. of the kind recently carried out by the Black September group of Al Fatah in Munich. There is, however, some recent intelligence of preliminary planning by the PFLP of sabotage operations directed against El Al aircraft at a number of places including London Airport . . . It is difficult to predict the likelihood of terrorist operations in the U.K. We do not control directly the amount or quality of intelligence we receive about Arab terrorist plans and intentions. The planning of such operations is undertaken in highly secure conditions in the Middle East. Because of this tight security the intelligence we receive from friends and liaison services (including the Jordanians and the Israelis and West European security services) is usually imprecise as regards targets, timing and the identities of those involved. It is in any case the practice of terrorists to travel on false passports . . .62

  How difficult it remained ‘to predict the likelihood of terrorist operations in the U.K.’ was demonstrated only eleven days later when the agricultural counsellor at the Israeli embassy in London, Dr Ami Shachori, was killed by a Black September letter bomb. Seven other letter bombs sent to British addresses were successfully intercepted before they reached their targets.63 On looking through Security Service files, Sandy Stuart found a paper written some years previously by Anthony Simkins saying that giving advice on countering letter bombs was not a Service responsibility. Stuart thought that was ‘crap’ and obtained permission from Simkins, then DDG, to rewrite the paper. He successfully argued that advising on letter bombs was part of the Service’s protective-security responsibilities. Stuart believed that his paper on ‘Postal bombs and measures for ident
ifying them’ had the widest circulation of any document yet produced by MI5; its recipients included all British embassies abroad and numerous security liaisons. He was flattered to find himself referred to as ‘Mr Counter-Terrorism UK’. 64 ‘Terrorist activity’, wrote Stuart, ‘looks to be here to stay for some time.’65

  The development of British protective security during 1972, however, was more influenced by the massacres at Lod Airport and Munich than by letter bombs in Britain (the only form of international terrorist attack against targets in the UK in the course of the year). In the aftermath of the Munich massacre, Edward Heath called for an immediate and comprehensive report on the current state of counter-terrorism ranging from military and police contingency plans to the use of advanced equipment and devices. The Cabinet Office working group originally set up in 1969 was reconstituted with broad terms of reference as GEN 129, later to become the Official Committee on Terrorism, under the chairmanship of the PUS at the Home Office. For some time the DG, Michael Hanley, attended its meetings. The first meeting on 2 October 1972 agreed on the pressing need for contingency planning and an immediate study of anti-terrorist techniques.66

  A report by GEN 129 on 20 October 1972 broke new ground by recommending that existing contingency plans for Heathrow and other airports should be extended to cover all attacks on aircraft in British airspace, and that officials be authorized to call in the military; the decision to commit the military to action, however, would be reserved to ministers. These new proposals would require joint training exercises involving police forces throughout the country, the military and the Security Service.67 Following ministerial approval of the recommendations, study groups were set up to prepare contingency plans for action on the ground in the case of a terrorist incident, operational control and communications (based in a windowless Cabinet Office briefing room, henceforth known by the acronym COBR), and the use of state-of-the-art technology.68 The Security Service was represented on all three study groups and its key position was emphasized by its chairmanship of a further group formed to consider what guidance on handling terrorist incidents could be derived from past experience. Under new alert arrangements COBR was to be manned by officials at one hour’s notice. Director C and C Branch officers were thus for the first time placed on call outside office hours; in 1974 the Post Office provided them with ‘bleepers’ similar to those supplied to hospital doctors.69