The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  As Director F from 1972 to 1974, with responsibility for counterterrorism as well as counter-subversion, John Jones showed no desire to expand the Service’s role in Northern Ireland. While on the Irish desk, a former Security Service officer recalls that he ‘never had one conversation with Jones about Ireland in my whole time’. 108 The title ‘Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence’, held by Security Service officers from 1973, was a partial misnomer. DCIs never directed intelligence operations in Northern Ireland. Their main function was intelligence liaison and coordination,109 which in the early 1970s were difficult and sometimes thankless tasks. At the end of 1973, after two years’ work on the Irish desk and the Irish Current Intelligence Group on the JIC, an F5 officer gave ‘a somewhat sanguine forecast that it is possible that in due course the Provisionals, already badly mauled, will cease-fire, that the Army will be partly withdrawn from Northern Ireland and will diminish its intelligence effort’:

  We, and indeed the southern Irish also, regard [the Official IRA] as a greater long-term threat to UK and the Republic than the Provisionals, chiefly because of its greater political sophistication, its Marxist orientation, and its links abroad.110

  In fact the Official IRA, which in May 1972 had declared what became a permanent ceasefire, rapidly lost influence to PIRA.

  Despite its secondary role in countering Republican attacks in Britain, the Security Service had the lead intelligence role in monitoring Republican activities outside the UK, in particular the crucial issue of arms procurement. Unlike the Official IRA, which in 1972 received undetected arms shipments from the KGB, the Provisionals failed in a series of attempts in 1972–3 to smuggle arms from Europe.111 PIRA’s most willing potential supplier was Colonel Qaddafi of Libya, whom the veteran Republican and PIRA chief of staff Joe Cahill found possessed of ‘an awful hatred of England’: ‘[He] said he did not understand why we did not speak in Irish, and why did we speak in English, the language of our enemies?’112 In August 1972 MPSB discovered that the freighter Elbstrand, soon to be renamed the Claudia, was involved in smuggling weapons to Ireland. For the next seven months the vessel was kept under intelligence surveillance. Cahill himself took part in chartering the Claudia for a first arms shipment from Libya in March 1973.F5 later ‘speculated’, almost certainly correctly, that Cahill and Dáithi Ó Conaill ‘personally supervised the negotiations [with Qaddafi] and the shipment itself to ensure that it did not go wrong’. Colonel Qaddafi was believed to have offered PIRA as many arms as it could carry away.113

  The Security Service was not informed of the surveillance of the Claudia until 26 March when F Branch received a hand-delivered copy from the FCO of an urgent telegram sent three days earlier by the Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, to the British ambassador in Dublin, informing him that intelligence reports over the past twenty-four hours indicated:

  that the Claudia left North Africa a few days ago carrying up to 100 tons of small arms and explosives reported to have been provided free by the Libyans for delivery to the IRA in the Republic. At least one senior member of the IRA is believed to be on board. The ship is due to rendezvous with two Irish fishing trawlers off the coast between Dungarvan and Waterford . . .

  Claudia is to be located and kept under discreet surveillance by British maritime forces. The latter will not repeat not attempt to intercept or board on the high seas, nor take any action in the final stages which would infringe Irish sovereignty. The primary purpose of the surveillance operation is to establish beyond all reasonable doubt that Claudia is proceeding to the rendezvous. We consider that interception of this arms shipment should be a matter for the Irish government . . .

  You should take urgent steps to inform [the Taoiseach, the Irish Prime Minister] Mr Cosgrave of the above . . .114

  Since the Security Service was responsible for collating intelligence on Republicans’ foreign arms procurement, F Branch reacted with understandable indignation to the discovery that it had previously been kept in the dark over surveillance of the Claudia. ‘This mistake’, minuted a probably furious head of section, ‘must not be made again.’115 His point appears to have been taken.

  During the voyage from Tripoli neither Joe Cahill nor the other PIRA members on board the Claudia suspected that they were being tracked by a British surveillance operation.116 When they were intercepted by the Irish navy off the coast of County Waterford on 28 March, there was, according to a report from the British embassy in Dublin, ‘apparently complete surprise and consternation amongst those on Claudia when the boarding party came alongside’. 117 Cahill, who was in the ship’s galley, later recalled being unaware even that the Claudia had been boarded until he felt a gun muzzle pressed against his temple and heard a young Irish navy officer say, ‘Don’t move.’ Five tons of arms, ammunition and explosives were discovered in the hold – far less than had been expected. Intelligence reports that the Libyans had originally intended to supply much more were, however, correct. Qaddafi had been deterred by poor PIRA security and had scaled down the shipment.118 If the 5 tons had got through safely, they would no doubt have been quickly followed by more and larger consignments. The capture of the Claudia was thus of major significance in limiting PIRA’s ability to expand its operations.119 When large-scale arms smuggling from Libya began in 1985, it was to transform the Provisionals’ operational capability.120

  During 1973 PIRA seemed to be losing ground in Northern Ireland. Despite angry protests by the Provisionals and Sinn Fein, Willie Whitelaw succeeded in drawing the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) into power-sharing negotiations. In November 1973 the Official Unionist Party, the SDLP and the small Alliance Party agreed on setting up a power-sharing executive to restore power at Stormont and end direct rule from London. The framework of the new Executive was set out a month later in the Sunningdale agreement between the three parties and the British and Irish governments. Many Unionists, however, were almost as suspicious of Sunningdale as the Provisionals were. The new Executive lacked popular support from the moment it took office on New Year’s Day 1974. In the general election to the Westminster parliament at the end of February the pro-Sunningdale Unionists were routed by the hardliners. What finally brought the Executive down was the Ulster Workers Council (UWC), founded by Unionist trade unionists who controlled most of the key services in Northern Ireland, with the backing of the Loyalist paramilitaries. A combination of telechecks and local Special Branch reports on the paramilitaries’ Merseyside supporters, from whom the UWC attempted to drum up support, provided advance warning of UWC plans before it called a general strike on 14 May.121 A State of Emergency was declared on the 19th. Good intelligence made little difference to the outcome. Though 2,000 British troops were flown in to help run the power stations and deal with the Emergency, it was clear that power had passed from the Executive to the UWC. ‘This’, concluded Merlyn Rees, SOSNI in the final Wilson government, ‘was the Protestant people of Northern Ireland rising up against Sunningdale.’ On 28 May the power-sharing Executive resigned and Northern Ireland returned to direct rule from London.122

  Though PIRA’s violence continued to be concentrated in Northern Ireland, in February 1974 it made its first lethal attack on a British mainland target, planting a 50-pound bomb on a coach carrying soldiers to Catterick Military Camp, which exploded on the M62 killing nine soldiers, one civilian and two children. The lack of intelligence on PIRA operational planning made the Irish Joint Section pessimistic about the prospects for countering the mainland bombing campaign.123 The 1974 campaign cost more lives in Britain than any other in the history of the Troubles. The forty-four deaths (twenty-nine civilians, fourteen members of the security forces and one PIRA bomber blown up by his own bomb) accounted for 38 per cent of those killed in England during the entire period from 1973 to 1997. A majority of the civilian deaths took place on a single day, 21 November 1974, when PIRA bombs in two Birmingham pubs killed nineteen people and wounded 182 (two of whom died later from their injur
ies). The Security Service’s credibility with the RUC was enhanced by a PIRA bomb attack on the home of the Service representative at RUC headquarters. After a farewell dinner at his home on 5 January 1975 for a departing colleague, attended by army and police officers, a brigadier pointed to a plastic bag outside the house and, with a feeble attempt at humour, called to his host: ‘I see someone has left you a bomb!’ The officer thought it more likely that the bag contained his wife’s shopping or a salmon from a friend. On closer inspection, he discovered that the contents consisted of five sticks of gelignite and a timer which had run its course but failed to detonate the explosive. Thereafter he had the impression that the RUC considered him ‘one of us’. 124

  Despite the bombing campaigns in Britain and Northern Ireland, a secret back-channel had been established to the Provisional leadership which was to play a major role in later ceasefire and peace talks involving the Security Service as well as SIS. The main intermediary (the ‘Contact’) through whom clandestine talks with the Provisionals were intermittently conducted was a Derry businessman, Brendan Duddy, who knew Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, the president of Sinn Fein.125 Duddy said later that his ‘mission’ of ‘replacing violence with dialogue’ was driven by his ‘Christian faith’: ‘I was completely opposed to the bombs, the blood and the bullets on all sides.’126 Contacts with the Provisionals were among Whitehall’s most tightly held secrets. When Harold Wilson returned to power in March 1974, he instructed that only he and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, should be kept informed of them.127 In January 1975 Duddy helped to arrange direct talks between NIO officials and PIRA representatives. Intelligence briefings by the DCI and others to Rees identified two other initiatives which helped to make the talks possible:

  First, as a direct result of a meeting at Feakle in the Republic with some Northern Protestant clergymen, the Provisionals declared a temporary ceasefire over Christmas 1974. They indicated to the clergymen that this was to give us a chance to open negotiations for an indefinite ‘truce’. Secondly, David O’Connell [Dáithi Ó Conaill], then the Provisional IRA Chief of Staff, made a similar proposal in a letter to the Prime Minister delivered through the intermediary of Dr John O’Connell, a Labour Deputy in the Dail.128

  On 9 February the Provisionals announced an indefinite ceasefire. Rees concluded, chiefly on the basis of his intelligence briefings, that PIRA’s motives, though not known with certainty, were probably, in declining order of importance:

  a) A belief that the British Government and people were so fed up with Ireland that all they were looking for was an honourable way out;

  b) An awareness that a number of incidents, notably the Birmingham bombs, had eroded some support from the Provisionals in the South. This meant there was a need to take stock and show a responsible face to the Catholic community;

  c) An element of war weariness;

  d) A desire to re-group and re-equip.129

  Even if, as proved to be the case, the ceasefire did not prove to be indefinite, in addition to saving lives it served, in Rees’s view, ‘two vital short-term objectives’. First, it provided a period of peace in which elections could be held on 1 May 1975 for a Constitutional Convention at which it was hoped that all parties, including those linked to paramilitaries, would debate the future of Northern Ireland. Though Sinn Fein boycotted the elections and the Convention achieved little, it was able to meet during a period of comparative peace. Rees’s second objective during the truce, also successfully accomplished, was to end internment without trial in Northern Ireland – which would probably have been politically impossible in the middle of a major PIRA bombing campaign.130

  By the time the PIRA truce began, the early confusion over the role of the Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence had been largely resolved. Though the DCI never directed intelligence in Northern Ireland, his liaison and advisory functions made him nonetheless an influential figure. He became SOSNI’s chief intelligence adviser with regular access to him, ran an office which produced daily intelligence summaries, and acted as the channel for passing intelligence on Northern Ireland to the JIC, travelling every fortnight to London to brief the Assessment Staff. The DG, Sir Michael Hanley, also showed increased interest in intelligence on PIRA. The desk officer responsible for monitoring the threat of renewed Republican terrorism during the 1975 ceasefire saw Hanley at 9 a.m. every Thursday – partly to ensure that the DG was fully briefed in case he was summoned to the Home Office or, occasionally, to Number Ten before the weekly Thursday cabinet meetings.131 On instructions from the Prime Minister, however, the DG did not brief the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, on the talks with the Provisionals which continued during the truce. Harold Wilson insisted, as before, ignoring the 1952 Maxwell Fyfe Directive (which made MI5 directly responsible to the Home Secretary), that only he and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland should be briefed on them.132 On occasion the Prime Minister took a personal, somewhat conspiratorial interest in intelligence on PIRA. When the DCI reported that, unusually, he had obtained a copy of an important PIRA document, he found himself summoned, not to Number Ten (which Wilson had mistakenly come to believe was bugged),133 but to Chequers where, to his surprise, the door was opened by the Prime Minister himself. Wilson asked him if he thought the document was genuine. The DCI said it was. Later in Whitehall he found himself criticized for having bypassed the JIC to deal directly with the Prime Minister.134

  4

  The ‘Wilson Plot’

  Harold Wilson returned to power in February 1974 after a narrow election victory which left Labour only four seats ahead of the Conservatives, with no overall majority. During his preceding four years in opposition, some of the business friends Wilson had made while involved in East–West trade during the 1950s attracted the unfavourable attention of the Security Service. The friend who gave the Service most cause for concern was the Lithuanian-born Joseph (later Lord) Kagan, whose company Kagan Textiles made the Gannex macs which became one of Wilson’s trademarks. While chancellor of the exchequer in the later 1960s, Roy Jenkins had once been ‘practically run over’ by a sports car as he was walking along Downing Street to his official residence at Number Eleven. A stocky figure emerged from the car and hurried to the door of Number Ten which was promptly opened for him. Finding the figure faintly familiar but unable to identify him, Jenkins asked the policeman outside Number Ten ‘Who was that?’ ‘Oh, don’t you know, sir?’ was the reply. ‘That’s Mr Kagan. He’s very well known here.’1

  In August 1970 a Lithuanian officer in the KGB residency, Richardas Vaygauskas, was reported to have congratulated Kagan on his knighthood (awarded on Wilson’s recommendation), claiming to be ‘so proud’ that Britain had at last a Lithuanian knight.2 Kagan returned the compliment by inviting Vaygauskas to his investiture at Buckingham Palace, possibly the first ever attended by a KGB officer.3 The KGB defector Oleg Lyalin4 confirmed that Kagan was being actively cultivated by Vaygauskas, who in September 1971 was among the Soviet intelligence officers expelled from Britain in Operation FOOT. When interviewed by a K5 (counter-espionage operations) officer two months later, Kagan said that Vaygauskas had visited his flat almost every week since being posted to London in 1964, and that he had introduced Vaygauskas to all his friends (including a number of MPs), not realizing that he was a KGB officer.5 At a subsequent meeting with Tony Brooks (K5B/1), Kagan admitted that Vaygauskas had asked him to use his influence with leaders of the Jewish community in Britain to call off demonstrations and the media campaign against trials of Russian Jews in Leningrad. Kagan had agreed to do so, having been convinced by Vaygauskas that ‘If the outcry in the Western world were stopped the sentences would be light and further action against Jews would probably be stopped.’ Brooks noted after the meeting:

  I thanked Kagan for telling me this as it was a first class example of the KGB exploiting him as an agent of influence, because surely he was not so naive as to believe that calling off the legitimate protest in the West would
have any effect on the fate of Jews in the USSR . . . Kagan was by now subdued and very worried and he quietly asked me whether what he had done was indictable. I said not in this country . . .6

  Kagan also admitted that, if Vaygauskas had been collecting ‘dirt’ on people in public life, he would have provided him with a great deal: ‘You know what it is in our sort of world, we gossip a lot and tend to make and destroy people’s reputations.’ Among the gossip was Harold Wilson’s alleged affair with a female member of staff (whom he did not name). Vaygauskas would sometimes interrupt his evening chats with Kagan in order to go and see his ‘ambassador’ (in reality, almost certainly the KGB resident) before returning with ‘a shopping list of questions’.7

  In October 1972, Wilson himself requested a meeting with the Service to discuss information given him by Kagan. He was visited in his Commons office not by the DG or DDG (as he would have been had he still been prime minister), but by K5. Though Kagan’s information was of little significance, K5 used the meeting to brief Wilson on Kagan’s contacts with Vaygauskas:

  It seemed clear to us that Kagan was being used unconsciously by Vaygauskas to supply items of news or scandal and as a medium for obtaining access to the famous. Kagan now accepts this.

  Here Wilson interrupted to say that Kagan has two main faults – he cannot stop gossiping or chasing women . . . Wilson said that Kagan was a very sharp Jewish businessman and that he wished that he would stick to business.