The Defence of the Realm
Page 88
The pre-Christmas bomb attacks on English cities were intended to be the prelude to a sustained New Year bombing campaign. On 17 January 1979 a bomb blew a hole in a tank containing aviation fuel at a Texaco oil terminal on Canvey Island, though the fuel failed to ignite as PIRA had intended. In the early hours of the 18th a bomb attack at a gas-holder near the south entrance of the Blackwall Tunnel ignited the escaping gas and caused a major explosion.38 A third bomb, discovered on the verge of the M6 in Leicestershire, was made safe by army bomb-disposal experts.39 Then the bombing campaign ground to an abrupt halt. According to IJS intelligence, the PIRA active service unit (ASU) responsible for the bomb attacks claimed that none of the promised preparations had been made for their arrival in England, thus limiting their capacity to mount operations. Because they were not provided with bogus identity documents, in order to hire a car the ASU had purchased a false driving licence which turned out to have been used before and began a trail which enabled the police to track down the flat they were using. The ASU had devised, but failed to implement, plans for bomb attacks on both Roy Mason and Margaret Thatcher (the latter, ominously, at a Conservative Party conference).40 The relative lack of impact of PIRA mainland operations was emphasized by a spectacular terrorist success by the much smaller Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) at the Houses of Parliament. Barely a fortnight after becoming prime minister in May 1979, Thatcher delivered the memorial address for her friend Airey Neave, whom she had intended to make her Northern Ireland secretary. Neave had been killed by an INLA bomb with a mercury tilt-switch attached to his car as he drove out of the Commons car park on the eve of the Conservatives’ victorious election campaign.
Though the Provisionals’ planned 1979 bombing campaign had been disrupted in Britain, it continued on the continent. On the morning of 22 March, the British ambassador in The Hague, Sir Richard Sykes, and his valet, Karel Straub, were shot dead. The same afternoon a Belgian banker, André Michaux, who had been mistaken for the British minister to NATO, was killed in Brussels. PIRA refused to acknowledge its responsibility for the bungled operation.41 Its only continental attacks in the remainder of the year were the bombing of a BAOR base in Dortmund on 10 July, which caused superficial damage, and an explosion beneath a Brussels bandstand where a British military band was due to play, which injured eighteen people.42 Unsurprisingly, the PIRA leadership was reported to be seriously dissatisfied with the progress of its continental campaign.43
There seemed good reason to fear, however, that PIRA would be more effective in the 1980s than in the 1970s. A British army assessment of ‘Future Terrorist Trends’ by Brigadier (later General Sir) James Glover of the military intelligence staff, which fell into the hands of the Provisionals and was published in the Republican newspaper An Phoblacht on 10 May 1979, concluded that PIRA was becoming an increasingly dangerous opponent: ‘The mature terrorists, including, for instance, the leading bomb makers, are sufficiently cunning to avoid arrest. They are continually learning from mistakes and developing their expertise.’ The Provisionals were acquiring weapons at a faster rate than the army could recover them. Glover predicted that PIRA might also succeed in acquiring sophisticated Soviet SA-7 anti-aircraft missiles, similar to those used by Joshua Nkomo’s guerrillas in 1978 to shoot down two Rhodesian Viscounts.44 IJS sources reported that Glover’s assessment was in most respects ‘remarkably accurate’ and that ‘its flattering picture of PIRA effectiveness had had a strong effect on morale throughout the movement’. The IJS believed, however, that there was no foreseeable prospect of PIRA obtaining Soviet SA-7s.45
In the summer of 1979 PIRA’s Irish operations achieved their most spectacular successes so far. The Provisionals had identified the Queen’s cousin, Earl Mountbatten, who had a holiday home in Sligo with no resident bodyguard, as the softest of prestige targets and killed him (as well as his fourteen-year-old grandson and two others) on 27 August by detonating by remote control a 50-pound bomb placed beneath the floorboards of his boat, Shadow V, as it sailed in Sligo Bay.46 An attack a few hours later on British troops near Warrenpoint in County Down underlined Brigadier Glover’s warning of increasing PIRA technical expertise. A first explosion, triggered by remote control from across the border of the Irish Republic, blew up a British army vehicle. PIRA correctly calculated that the troops who came to the scene of the explosion would take cover in an old gatehouse near by, where a second bomb was also detonated by remote control from the Republic. A total of eighteen soldiers were killed – more than in any other PIRA operation in the history of the Troubles.47 IJS intelligence indicated that the Mountbatten killing as well as Warrenpoint had been carefully considered and approved by the Provisional leadership.48
Though the management of the Security Service reasonably regarded it as illogical that the only aspect of counter-terrorist intelligence in mainland Britain in which it did not possess the lead role was against PIRA and other Republican groups, it was not ready to campaign within Whitehall for the transfer of that lead role from the MPSB. The Service’s main counter-terrorist successes in the later 1970s were in operations against Loyalist paramilitaries on the mainland, for which it had the main intelligence responsibility. An intelligence briefing prepared for Callaghan soon after he became prime minister reported:
There are numerous Loyalist paramilitary organisations varying in size and nastiness. Their objectives are very simple. First to ensure that the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland does not become the Protestant minority in Ireland. Secondly, within the boundaries of Northern Ireland, to try to cow the Catholics.49
Some of the Loyalist paramilitaries were responsible for what the DCI called ‘particularly vicious murders’. Eleven of the sadistic ‘Shankhill butchers’, who tortured and killed their Catholic victims with surgically sharp knives and axes, later received a total of forty-two life sentences for crimes which included nineteen murders. The paramilitaries had, however, one major weakness, noted by the DCI: ‘Fortunately they are ill armed by the standards of the IRA (though they have a worrying capacity for manufacturing machine guns) and have difficulty in getting hold of either weapons or explosives.’50
Combined operations by the police and the Service during 1977 had considerable success in preventing arms supplies from the British mainland reaching the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in Northern Ireland. According to a later A4 report on operations in Scotland:
The [Loyalist] targets habitually drank at run-down inner-city bars, where the clientele generally had criminal tendencies, were unemployed, were heavy drinkers and could spot a policeman immediately. A4 officers did not generally have the same build and demeanour as police officers. They also spoke with an English accent and were generally considered non-threatening.51
In June 1978 the UDA commander in Scotland, Roddy MacDonald, a former soldier, was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for his part in the robbery of an Edinburgh gunshop.52 In June 1979, at two separate trials in Glasgow, twelve members of the UDA received long prison sentences after being convicted on firearms and conspiracy charges. Though the involvement of the Security Service was not mentioned during the trials,53 an undercover police officer described in court how he had penetrated the Paisley UDA and witnessed punishment beatings administered with a red, white and blue pickaxe handle inscribed ‘Snoopy’.54 MacDonald’s successor as Scottish UDA commander, James Hamilton, was sentenced to sixteen years’ imprisonment. The Security Service reported to its Whitehall contacts that the length of the sentences had shocked both the UDA’s Belfast headquarters and its Scottish supporters: ‘The removal of the Scottish leadership will incapacitate the organisation for some time. The deterrent effect of the sentences is likely to be considerable.’55 In February 1979 Scottish UVF members bombed two pubs in Glasgow frequented by Catholics. Ten were later given long prison sentences. In June the local UVF leader, William Campbell, was sentenced, like Hamilton of the UDA, to sixteen years. In the Security Se
rvice view, ‘The main UVF structure in Scotland has been almost totally destroyed during the last 6 months.’ The Service expected it to be rebuilt.56
The main contribution made by the Security Service to countering PIRA mainland operations in the later 1970s was in the field of protective security. Though memories of the IRA’s last bombing campaign in England in 1938–9 had faded, it had then targeted both factories and the electricitysupply system. One attack early in 1939 had cut off electricity supplies to 25,000 people in north London.57 From 1972 onwards C Branch argued that PIRA or other terrorist groups might well, once again, attack economic targets. Whitehall’s response to its protective-security proposals was unenthusiastic. The chairman of the Key Points Sub-Committee of Whitehall’s Official Committee on Terrorism, which oversaw preparations for the protection of vital installations during war or periods of severe international tension, was reluctant to add protection against peacetime terrorist attack to his already large responsibilities.58 In 1972 an attempt by the Service to persuade the Home Secretary, Reggie Maudling, of the need for better protection of what later became known as Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) produced only what it considered ‘a lethargic response’. However, the discovery in 1975 in London and Liverpool of PIRA target lists which included public utilities changed Whitehall attitudes and marked a turning point in the history of British protective security. Harold Wilson was sufficiently concerned to ask the Official Committee on Terrorism to review the terrorist (in particular PIRA) threat to North Sea oil and gas supplies.59 By October 1976 a list of Economic Key Points (EKPs) which required protection against peacetime terrorist attack had been completed and added to the responsibilities of the Official Committee on Terrorism. The Committee approved a C Branch proposal for the establishment of a working group to supervise a phased programme of work for the protection of these installations. In 1977 a C Branch section assumed responsibility for the first time for assessing the sabotage capabilities of PIRA, as well as Welsh and Scottish extremists. Papers on this subject were passed to the working group planning the protection of EKPs.60
This section was staffed mainly by outside experts, mostly with a military background, who joined it in the early 1970s. Lieutenant Colonel David Sutherland, who was appointed head of the section in 1970, had won the Military Cross for his exploits in wartime operations. Its first explosives expert, recruited from the MoD in 1973, assembled forensic evidence which helped to convict some of the perpetrators of PIRA’s mainland bombing campaign in that year. The Service officer who chaired the interdepartmental Forcible Attack Working Group (FAWG), founded on C Branch’s initiative, had had an adventurous career in SOE during the Second World War, which included travelling through Crete dressed as a shepherd with explosives hidden in animal dung. FAWG specialized in devising and testing perimeter fencing and intruder-detection systems.
Its expertise found a growing market during the 1970s, some of it in Northern Ireland. By 1978 it had provided protective-security training for every member of the RUC Security Section.61 The DG reported to the Home Secretary in the same year that C Branch was also providing advice to the Saudis on ‘the protection of their Economic Key Points’.62 Improvements to protective security at British EKPs, however, proceeded slowly, largely because of the expense involved. The budget crises of the Callaghan years and the cuts in government spending necessary to secure an IMF loan made it difficult to argue for extra funds in a field which aroused so little enthusiasm in Whitehall. The fact that not a single EKP was successfully attacked probably owed less to improved protective security than to PIRA’s failure to identify their continued vulnerability.
6
The Callaghan Government and Subversion
Though the Callaghan government ended in, and is nowadays chiefly remembered for, the strikes of its final ‘Winter of Discontent’, it began with a period of unprecedented industrial peace. Its first year saw the lowest number of industrial disputes so far recorded in the twentieth century. Callaghan was (and still remains) the only trade union official to become post-war Labour leader. As prime minister, ‘He was no intellectual, he appeared avuncular to the point of maddening complacency, and behind the scenes he was a fixer and a bit of a bully; to the average trade union official he was almost as good as one of their own.’1 In the summer of 1976 the TUC was persuaded – reluctantly – to extend what had been a virtual wage-freeze policy by agreeing to a limit of 5 per cent for wage increases over the next twelve months.
Despite the apparent industrial calm of the early Callaghan government, however, there was a renewed emphasis within Whitehall on the need for more active counter-subversion, prompted in large part by an F2 threat assessment of April 1976 which identified the CPGB, despite its lack of success as a political party, as a major subversive threat within the trade union movement out to disrupt the economic policy of the elected government. Approximately one in five of the leading full-time officials and executive committee members in thirty-four major trade unions was a Communist or Communist sympathizer (as compared with only one in 500 of the rank and file). F2 argued that even this statistic underestimated the extent of Communist influence. A small, disciplined Communist group, backed by the CPGB’s industrial apparatus, was capable of exerting disproportionate influence on any union executive whose other members did not act in concert. Communist penetration of the union movement had also increased the Party’s political influence on the Labour left. Over the past decade, the threat assessment argued, the CPGB had shown an increasing ability to exploit traditional trade union opposition to interference in free collective bargaining and government attempts to reform industrial relations. The Security Service believed there was a strong Communist influence in the NUM and AUEW (the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, formerly the AEU), both of which had been in the forefront of opposition to wage restraint and industrial-relations legislation. Since Labour’s return to power in 1974, TUC participation in the government’s counter-inflation policy had given the CPGB the opportunity to attempt to drive a wedge between the government and the left wing of the labour movement with the aim of forcing the TUC into opposition to any form of wage restraint.2 The key figure in CPGB industrial strategy remained its industrial organizer Bert Ramelson, who succeeded in assembling a powerful left-wing caucus within the TUC.3 Ramelson was to achieve his greatest influence during the years of the Callaghan government.
Economic crisis acted as the catalyst to industrial disruption. Economic growth from 1974 to 1979 averaged only 1.4 per cent a year, less than half the rate of the previous decade. Annual inflation in 1976 reached 16 per cent with a record budget deficit and government spending apparently out of control. Despite public spending cuts in April 1976, a sterling crisis in September forced the Callaghan government to seek a loan from the IMF, which demanded further cuts. Henceforth the life of the government was dominated by the linked problems of inflation and union challenges to its economic policy.4
In December 1976 new intelligence arrived on links between the KGB and Britain’s best-known trade unionist, Jack Jones, general secretary of the TGWU from 1969 to 1978. Oleg Gordievsky reported that after being targeted for recruitment by the London residency, Jones had been regarded by the KGB as an agent for a number of years in the ‘latter half of the ‘60s’. All contact with him had been dormant for some time.5 It was not, however, until Gordievsky was stationed in London in 1982 after several years working on the British desk in the Centre that he was able to provide more detail on Jones’s contacts with the KGB.6 This intelligence on Jones was very tightly held, known only to a very small number of officers in K Branch and to none in F Branch.7 Eavesdropping at King Street no longer provided evidence of significant contact between Jones and the CPGB. In 1969 Ramelson had been overheard praising Jones as ‘sound politically’, with ‘courage and guts’.8 ‘The only dishonest thing about Jack’, said Ramelson, ‘was that he gave the impression that he was never in the [Communist] Party.’9 By 1976 Ramelson had
changed his mind. Far from being a member of the left-wing caucus in the TUC, Jones was now regarded by the Callaghan government as, on balance, a force for moderation.10
In June 1976 a meeting convened in the Home Office to consider the Security Service’s latest threat assessment of subversion decided to reactivate the interdepartmental group to study subversion in public life (SPL). Founded by the Heath government, it had been virtually moribund since Labour returned to power in 1974.11 Chaired by Robert Armstrong (then deputy secretary at the Home Office) with members from the FCO, Department of Energy, Scottish Office, Security Service, Scotland Yard and the Cabinet Office, the revived SPL was provided with an MI5 assessments officer to prepare reports.12 Its new terms of reference were ‘to give guidance on the collection and to co-ordinate the assessment of intelligence about threats to the internal security of Great Britain arising from subversive activities, and to make periodic reports to the officials concerned’.13 The existence of the group was to be kept secret and its reports so closely held that they were not to be placed on normal departmental files. To advise on counter-subversion policy, the Subversion at Home Committee (SH) of permanent secretaries, which had also become moribund, was revived under the chairmanship of the cabinet secretary, Sir John Hunt, with the permanent secretaries of the Home Office, FCO and Department of Energy, the DG of the Security Service and the chairman of SPL as regular members, with other PUS being invited as necessary.14