The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  On 13 November 1972 the Joint Intelligence Committee issued a notice which for the first time formally established the Service’s lead intelligence role in counter-terrorism:

  The Security Service is the focal point for the receipt, assessment and distribution of intelligence on terrorist activities affecting British security and for the provision of advice to the appropriate authorities on precautions and counter-measures against the threat.

  The role of the [JIC] Current Intelligence Groups is confined to the field of assessment. In that field they are not concerned with the assessment of intelligence of an operational nature relating to specific threats to British security. Assessment of such material is . . . the responsibility of the Security Service.70

  This clear and unambiguous definition of the Service’s central part in the study of terrorism in effect brought up to date the 1952 Maxwell Fyfe Directive and allowed the Service formally to add counter-terrorism to its existing responsibilities for counter-espionage and counter-subversion. A month later the JIC’s Notice was amended to make clear the Service’s international responsibility as ‘the focal point for the receipt and recording of all information on terrorist activities in other countries’. 71 So confused, however, was Whitehall about the divided responsibilities for dealing with Irish terrorism that it was another two years before anyone noticed that the JIC Notice failed to take account of the MPSB’s lead role in dealing with Republican terrorism on (but not beyond) the British mainland. The Notice was duly amended.72

  A report on the handling of terrorist incidents was approved by GEN 129 on 23 February 1973.73 The first full-scale exercise to test the new procedures, codenamed ICON, devised and controlled by C Branch, took place on 10 April 1973, and was based on a simulated terrorist hijack of an aircraft to Stansted Airport with demands by the hijackers for the release of prisoners held both in the UK and overseas. Though the exercise involved the police, armed services, ministers and officials, F3, despite having responsibility for intelligence on Arab and Middle Eastern terrorists in the UK, surprisingly declared itself too busy to take part. The postmortem on the exercise unsurprisingly emphasized the need for intelligence involvement in dealing with future hijacks and exercises, recommending the inclusion of ‘an intelligence officer and an electronics expert from the Security Service’ in the teams assembled to deal with hijackers. A Branch responded to the call for an electronics expert by setting up a technical surveillance team, equipped with cameras, CCTV, radio-microphones and other advanced technology. The team, which at full strength numbered fifteen men and three vehicles, took part in all subsequent exercises. Though the Home Office Police Department took over the co-ordination of CT exercises, C Branch continued to play a central role.74

  The first opportunity after ICON to test the new procedures during a real terrorist incident did not arise for some time. On 5 March 1974 a BOAC VC-10 from Bombay to London was hijacked over Greece.75 Two Arab men brandishing pistols burst into the cockpit and forced the pilot to land at Amsterdam. The hijackers then released the passengers, set fire to the aircraft and surrendered to the Dutch police. A Dutch court later jailed them for five years.76 The incident was over so quickly that there was no opportunity for British involvement on the ground. On 21 November 1974, another BOAC VC-10 was hijacked, and forced to land at Tunis. This time the incident lasted for several days and the Service sent an officer from F Branch, who assisted in interviewing hostages as they were gradually released, in order to obtain intelligence about conditions on board the aircraft. The main lesson learned was the need to try to prevent the release of information by the media which might prove helpful to hijackers. At Tunis the hijackers heard a report on the cockpit radio that the Dutch Prime Minister would be willing to release the two hijackers arrested at Amsterdam in March.77

  Despite the emergence during the early 1970s of international terrorism as a significant feature of international relations for the first time since the beginning of the Cold War and the official recognition of the Security Service’s lead intelligence role in countering it, the proportion of Service resources devoted to counter-terrorism remained surprisingly small. Indeed, it was embarrassed to reveal to Whitehall just how small the proportion was. Director S noted early in 1974 when preparing material for the Intelligence Co-ordinator’s Annual Review:

  The proportion of total Service effort devoted directly to the investigation of terrorist organisations is approximately 3% while another 4½% is directly concerned with Northern Ireland.

  . . . DDG agreed that to use these figures in the Intelligence Co-ordinator’s Review . . . could not pass without startled comment from the Chiefs of Staff and their advisers. Even if we were to use figures reflecting the effort in the field of counter subversion (without giving any figure for that) we should still only be talking about something under 10% on counter terrorism and approximately 15% on Northern Ireland, figures which again DDG considered were subject to a similar objection.78

  By contrast, 52 per cent of the Service’s resources went on counterespionage and 28 per cent on counter-subversion. As Director F from 1972 to 1974 John Jones had responsibility for both counter-subversion and counter-terrorism, but was far more interested in the former. The officer who established the counter-terrorist section in F Branch found Jones ‘not really interested in terrorism as a subject . . . Skulduggery in counterterrorism was not really his scene.’79

  The terrorist debut in Britain in 1973 of the man who became the best-known terrorist working for the PFLP, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, alias ‘Carlos the Jackal’, was memorable mainly for its incompetence. ‘Carlos’ had first arrived in Britain in 1966, accompanied by his wealthy Venezuelan mother and two brothers, as a sixteen-year-old student of the English language. The immigration officer who interviewed them at Heathrow noted that they were ‘a well-dressed family’ but correctly deduced that the ‘unusual forenames of the children’ – Vladimir, Ilich and Lenin – ‘might have some bearing on the political colour of the family . . .’.80 ‘Carlos’ subsequently studied at Moscow University but told the MPSB that he had been expelled in 1970 for ‘anti-Soviet sentiments’. 81 Following intelligence on his involvement with the PFLP, in December 1971 he was made subject by HOW to letter- and telechecks. F Branch later reported:

  Neither check . . . has produced significant information to connect Ramírez Sánchez with Arab terrorist activity and it is probable that once he became aware that the authorities were interested in him (his home had been searched in December 1971 and he was aware of A4 surveillance) whatever plans had been made for him by the PFLP were abandoned.

  A4 reported that he appeared ‘very edgy’ during visits to the ophthalmic department of St George’s (then at Hyde Park Corner) and later to an optician, from which he emerged wearing dark glasses.82

  Though the Special Branch and Security Service lost track of ‘Carlos’ during 1972, it was later discovered that he spent the next few years travelling, often on forged passports, in Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, on operations for the PFLP and paying several visits to Britain.83 On 30 December 1973, during one of these visits, ‘Carlos’ knocked on the door of the surprisingly unprotected St John’s Wood home of Joseph Edward ‘Teddy’ Sieff, an ardent Zionist and chairman of Marks and Spencer. The door was opened by the butler, whom ‘Carlos’ ordered to take him to his victim. ‘Carlos’ fired a single shot which was deflected by Sieff’s front teeth and failed to kill him. The gun then jammed and ‘Carlos’ ran away. A month later ‘Carlos’ tried to throw a bomb packed in a shoe box over the front counter of the Israeli Hapoalim Bank in the City of London but his aim was poor; the box bounced off the door, missed the counter and made a small crater in the floor, causing minor injuries to a nineteen-year-old secretary. ‘Carlos’ ran off once again.84 Though the PFLP claimed responsibility for both attacks, it was only in the summer of 1975 that the Security Service discovered that the terrorist involved had been ‘Carlos’. 85 By that time he had emerged as a fa
r more formidable terrorist elsewhere than he had proved to be in London.

  Though what Walter Laqueur later called the ‘Age of Terrorism’ had begun, Middle Eastern terrorists still made far more impression on the media than on most Western governments. ‘Future historians’, wrote Laqueur, ‘will be intrigued and puzzled by the staggering disproportion between the enormous amount of talk about terrorism and the tiny effort made to combat it and the minute sums of money allocated for this purpose.’86

  Those who do not remember past mistakes, it has been said, are doomed to repeat them. Historical ignorance goes far to explain British policy and intelligence failures in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. If Whitehall or the various components of the security forces had been aware of the serious damage done to British operations against Sinn Fein and the IRA in the years between the Easter Rising of 1916 and the founding of the Free State in 1922 by the lack of co-ordination between the military, the police and the metropolitan intelligence agencies,87 similar kinds of confusion would have been less likely to recur half a century later. The Security Service officer appointed as SLO in Belfast in July 1970 later recalled that when he arrived ‘the scene was chaotic. With mutual distrust between the police and the army, the Home Office was responsible but not in effective political control.’88 The Provisional IRA (PIRA), on its foundation in 1970, suffered from the opposite defect, paying too much – rather than too little – attention to historical memory (and myth), recreating the outmoded and clumsy structure of the IRA of the 1920s. Its pseudo-military terminology of ‘battalions’ and ‘brigades’, ill applied to units a fraction of the size of their military equivalents, was intended to persuade the nationalist community of its legitimacy as an army of liberation.89

  Furnival Jones was pessimistic about what intelligence could achieve in Northern Ireland. He told Heath at their first meeting in July 1970 that ‘no amount of intelligence could cure Northern Ireland’s ills. The most intelligence could do was to define the problem and help the security forces to confine the troubles.’90 With the escalation of violence in 1970–71, both the army and the RUC began to suffer heavy losses. For the army to mount effective counter-terrorist operations, it required intelligence which the under-resourced RUC Special Branch was unable to provide.91 Before the Troubles began, the IRA had been small in size and drawn from Republican families well known to the Special Branch. Between the arrival of the first British troops on the streets of Belfast in August 1969 and the end of 1971, according to credible Republican estimates, IRA ‘Volunteers’ in the city grew from about fifty to around 1,200. Though ridiculed for their failure to act as the ‘armed defender’ of the nationalist community during the violent sectarian summer of 1969, in September 1971 they were able to launch 200 bomb attacks.92 The sudden introduction of internment without trial by the Stormont government on 9 August 1971 exposed the confused state of intelligence in Northern Ireland. In a series of dawn swoops, the army arrested 342 Republican suspects, many from the Official IRA, but 105 were released within two days. Heath complained that the intelligence supplied by the RUC Special Branch before internment proved to be ‘hopelessly out of date’. 93 The limited security benefits of internment were far outweighed by the upsurge of sectarian violence which in three days caused twenty-two deaths and left up to 7,000 people (a majority of them Catholic) homeless as their houses were burned to the ground. For the Provisionals in particular internment produced an upsurge in recruitment.94

  The division of Irish responsibilities between the MPSB and Security Service was all the more bizarre in view of the fact that the Service had the lead intelligence role on the British mainland for intelligence operations against Irish Loyalist paramilitaries, whose largest pockets of support were in Strathclyde and Merseyside. In the early 1970s F5, whose responsibilities included ‘subversive activities’ by ‘extreme Protestant groups’, as well as IRA arms smuggling, had some major intelligence successes which led to convictions for smuggling arms and explosives to Loyalist paramilitaries in Ulster from mainland Britain.95 Julian Faux, who was involved in these operations, believed that their success was due largely to close co-operation with local Special Branches (SBs), authorized by successive home secretaries. ‘There was a real sense’, he wrote later, ‘in which the SBs were the field agents of the Service.’96 In order not to infringe MPSB’s prerogatives, there were as yet no comparable A4 operations against the more serious threat posed by Irish Republican supporters in mainland Britain.

  One further element of confusion in the organization of British counter-terrorism was the fact that, though the Security Service did not have the lead role in countering PIRA mainland attacks, it had the main responsibility for devising protective-security measures against them.97 The counter-sabotage section of the Service had long had a remit to advise on the protection of military ‘key points’ in the UK in time of international tension and war.98 Fear that the IRA might extend its bombing campaign to mainland Britain prompted the C Branch counter-sabotage section on 30 March 1971 to propose to MPSB that the list of ‘key points’ be extended to include potential non-military terrorist targets which were of ‘vital importance to the economy’. When MPSB showed no interest in the idea, the section took it up with the chairman of the Key Points Sub-Committee of the Official Committee on Terrorism, who was equally unresponsive.99 The DG then raised the issue with the PUS at the Home Office, Sir Philip Allen. In 1972 the Home Office agreed to support the compilation of a list of what later became known as ‘Economic Key Points’ (EKPs) which required special protection.100 Due to what the Security Service considered Home Office procrastination, no action to begin assembling the list was taken for several years.101

  At the beginning of 1972, despite continuing confusion in the organization of intelligence in Northern Ireland, both the RUC and the army were still optimistic that Republican terrorism in all its manifestations could be defeated.102 Most of that optimism evaporated during a Derry civil rights rally on what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’, 30 January. The rally led to riots in which part of the crowd tried to climb over a street barrier and were forced back by rubber bullets and water cannon. More than a hundred youths engaged in a running battle, hurling stones and iron bars at soldiers of the Parachute Regiment. Then the shooting began. Major General Robert Ford, Commander of Land Forces, insisted that ‘There is absolutely no doubt that the Parachute Battalion opened up only after they were fired on.’ Nationalists were convinced that, on the contrary, the British soldiers were guilty of premeditated murder. Thirteen men (all apparently unarmed) were shot dead by the Parachute Regiment; eighteen more were wounded, one of whom died later. According to the Irish Press on 31 January 1972, ‘If there was an able-bodied man with Republican sympathies within the Derry area who was not in the IRA before yesterday’s butchery there will be none tonight.’103 On 2 February, after a series of anti-British demonstrations in Dublin, the British embassy was burned down.

  On 22 February 1972 Republican terrorism spread to the British mainland for the first time since the IRA attacks of 1938–9. A bomb planted by the Official IRA in the HQ of the Parachute Regiment at Aldershot, in revenge for Bloody Sunday, missed its target and, instead of blowing up paras, killed five cleaners, an army chaplain and a gardener. The Aldershot killings marked the beginning of a Republican bombing campaign on the mainland which was to continue intermittently for the next quartercentury. On 24 March, following two serious terrorist attacks in Belfast, Heath announced the suspension of the Stormont government when it refused to surrender voluntarily control of law and order to London. In its place a secretary of state for Northern Ireland (SOSNI), initially Willie Whitelaw, assisted by junior ministers, took over the functions of the Unionist government which had ruled at Stormont for the past half-century. In response to the urgent request of the PUS in the newly established Northern Ireland Office (NIO), Sir William Neild, for more intelligence from the Province,104 an Irish Joint Section (IJS) was established by MI5 and SIS with jointl
y staffed offices in Belfast and London.105

  The fact that SIS had a larger role than the Security Service in running the IJS during the early years of direct rule from London reflected not an ambition to encroach on MI5 responsibilities within the UK but the Security Service’s own lack of readiness for a major role in Northern Ireland. One of the Service officers posted to Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s contrasted his own Service, which as yet lacked experience of conducting operations in hostile territory, unfavourably with SIS.106 Though many MI5 staff had experience of working in Africa, Asia and/or the West Indies, Ulster still seemed more alien territory than outposts of Empire thousands of miles away. The story was told of an air stewardess who, before landing at Belfast’s Aldergrove Airport, advised passengers to put their watches back 300 years. The unreadiness of the Security Service for Northern Irish responsibilities at the beginning of direct rule was graphically demonstrated when Whitelaw established the post of director and co-ordinator of intelligence (DCI) in Belfast to act as both his personal security adviser and his main link with the senior army general and the RUC Chief Constable. Though the post was offered to the Security Service, no one of sufficient seniority was willing to fill it. The first DCI, appointed on 31 October, thus came from outside MI5. His Security Service successor remembers him as ‘the right man really to establish the post’: ‘He was there for a year and he did it in tremendous style . . . He lived like a king, he entertained like a king, he used to drink with Willie [Whitelaw] all night.’107