The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  Willie Whitelaw sought to reinforce the deterrent effect of the assault by telling the Commons: ‘The way in which this incident was conducted and resolved demonstrates conclusively the determination of the British Government and people not to allow terrorist blackmail to succeed.’28 Twenty years later (or less) the Home Secretary would have paid public tribute to the role of the Security Service in bringing the siege to an end. But in 1980 public mention of its role was still taboo. Whitelaw, however, wrote privately to the DG to express ‘deep appreciation’ of the part played by the Service and ‘the enormous value of the intelligence which was being produced’.29 The DG and his senior management, however, were criticized within the Service for their failure either to appear on the ground during the siege to provide moral support for hard-pressed staff or to express adequate thanks for their work after the siege was over.30 The Iranian embassy siege provided further evidence of the remote management style of Sir Howard Smith and his DDG, John Jones.31

  Aircraft hijacks were as difficult to predict as the attack on the Iranian embassy, but proved less of a problem in the early 1980s than a decade earlier. The contingency planning developed during the 1970s32 was first put to the test on British soil in 1982. On 26 February an Air Tanzania Boeing 737 on an internal flight was hijacked by a group claiming to be representatives of the previously unknown Tanzanian Youth Democratic Movement. The aircraft with about eighty passengers was diverted to Nairobi, where inconclusive negotiations took place, then to Jeddah for refuelling, then to Athens, and finally to Stansted, where the plane landed on 27 February.33 COBR convened, initially chaired by the Prime Minister for the only time during her years in office,34 and the other elements of the contingency plan were put into action, including the assistance of an A Branch technical support group and Security Service intelligence analysis. Though the motives of the hijackers appeared confused, their principal demands were for the resignation of President Nyerere of Tanzania and for a meeting with Oscar Kambona, a former Tanzanian foreign minister living in exile in London. Eavesdropping on the hijackers suggested that there was a good prospect of a peaceful settlement. After patient negotiations, the passengers were released in groups and the hijackers surrendered. There was no damage to the aircraft and the only injury was to the co-pilot, who was accidentally shot in the back by one of the hijackers. Five hijackers were tried, convicted and sentenced to prison terms of between three and eight years. Among the Security Service team at Stansted was a former member of the Colonial Service who was one of the few people in England able to understand the local Tanzanian dialect used by some of the hijackers in their overheard conversations.35

  Also difficult to predict was the extent to which foreign authoritarian regimes would use state-sponsored terrorism to silence dissidents who had fled abroad. The most persistent, though not quite continuous, statesponsored terrorist threat in Britain during the 1980s came from Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya.36 Qaddafi’s vanity was exemplified by a flamboyant wardrobe which enabled him, for example, to change in the same day from naval uniform adorned with gold braid and medals to Arab dress with exotic Bedouin headgear to a gold cape over a red silk shirt. Its more vicious side was shown by a determination to hunt down critics of his personal dictatorship (misleadingly entitled the ‘Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’) who had taken refuge abroad. Qaddafi was responsible for a series of attacks on Libyan émigrés in Britain, which included three killings at the beginning of the decade. By the spring of 1980 F Branch possessed ‘conclusive evidence’ that the Libyan embassy in London (renamed the ‘Libyan People’s Bureau’) was ‘directing operational and intelligence gathering activities against Libyan dissidents’.37 The first dissident to be killed was Muhammad Ramadan, who was shot dead outside the Regent’s Park Mosque in April 1980. The gunman, Ben Hassan Muhammad El Masri,38 and his accomplice, Nagib Mufta Gasmi,39 were arrested near the scene of the killing by two passing police officers and later sentenced to life imprisonment. A fortnight later another of Qaddafi’s assassins, Mabrook Ali Mohammed Al Gidal, murdered the dissident Libyan lawyer Mahmoud Abbu Nafa in his Kensington office. Al Gidal had formerly shared a flat with El Masri and Gasmi; like them he was caught and sentenced to life imprisonment.40

  The assassinations were intended as a warning to other Libyan dissidents to obey Qaddafi’s demand for them to cease their opposition and return to Libya. The deadline for their return on 11 June was marked by a dissident demonstration outside the London People’s Bureau which caused predictable outrage in Tripoli. Reliable intelligence revealed that the Libyan Foreign Liaison Bureau (Foreign Ministry) reprimanded Musa Kusa, the effective head of the London People’s Bureau, for failing to use force to disrupt the demonstration. He was told that, in order to demonstrate that all opposition would be mercilessly crushed, at least one of the demonstrators should have been killed. Probably in response to this reprimand, Kusa gave an interview to The Times declaring that Libya was prepared to support the IRA and approving a decision by the Libyan ‘Revolutionary Committee’ in the UK to sentence two dissidents to death. Following the publication of Kusa’s interview on 13 June, he was given forty-eight hours to leave the country. That night there was a petrol-bomb attack on the British embassy in Tripoli. No one was hurt and the Libyan authorities absurdly blamed the damage on an electrical fault.41 After Kusa’s expulsion, reliable intelligence continued to suggest that the People’s Bureau was engaged in the surveillance of dissidents in the UK and planning assassinations. Potential targets were warned by the police, and the Service passed intelligence on likely Libyan assassins to the MPSB.42 The fact that no leading dissident was killed or wounded by the People’s Bureau hitmen in the remainder of the year strongly suggests that this was a case in which intelligence saved lives.

  Late in October F Branch received further reliable intelligence that the People’s Bureau had poison in powder form with which to assassinate dissidents.43 The first Libyan hitman to attempt to use the poison appears to have been Hosni Sed Farhat, who was reported to be targeting dissidents in the Portsmouth area.44 Though F Branch was aware of Farhat’s activities, it had no means of predicting that his first target would be Farj Shaban Ghesouda and his British wife Heather Clare, who were not members of any dissident group and appeared to be low in the rank order of Qaddafi’s émigré opponents. Farhat probably selected the Ghesoudas partly because the precautions taken by leading dissidents had made them hard targets, partly because his previous acquaintance with the Ghesoudas gave him a pretext for a social call. During Farhat’s visit on 7 November he quickly aroused suspicion by offering to go into the kitchen and prepare coffee. Fearing a poisoning attempt, the Ghesoudas declined his offer but did not suspect that a packet of peanuts which he brought as a present might have been tampered with.45 As Mrs Ghesouda said later, ‘Arab visitors usually bring nuts or sweets with them.’ The peanuts, however, were laced with thallium. After the Ghesoudas’ children ate them, their central nervous systems were affected, their hair fell out, and only prompt diagnosis and treatment saved their lives. The family’s pet Pekinese, which picked up some of the peanuts from the floor, died. Farhat was arrested four days after his visit to the Ghesoudas and, like the assassins of Ramadan and Abbu Nafa, sentenced to life imprisonment for attempted murder.46

  The final victim of Qaddafi’s hitmen in Britain during 1980 was Ahmed Mustafa, a Libyan student at Manchester University, who was found murdered on 29 November. According to the police, there were elements of ritual killing in the murder.47 The assassins were believed to be Libyan language students who returned to Tripoli immediately after the killing. This time the People’s Bureau was not thought to be involved. ‘Our intelligence’, the future DG, Patrick Walker (then F3), told the police, ‘suggested that the attack on Mustafa was initiated from Libya.’48 An FCO assessment concluded that Mustafa’s assassins might have chosen the wrong target.49 After the killing there was an unexpected lull in Qaddafi’s assassination campaign in Britain, perhaps refle
cting irritation that his hitmen during 1980 had either been caught or had killed the wrong man.

  Among the known terrorist targets in London were several ambassadors, the Israeli and the Turkish chief among them. On 3 June 1982 the Israeli ambassador, Shlomo Argov, was shot in the head by a gunman as he was leaving a diplomatic reception at the Dorchester Hotel. The gunman was then himself shot and wounded by the ambassador’s police protection officer.50 Two other men left the scene rapidly by car but were later arrested. All three were convicted of attempted murder, and sentenced to prison terms of at least thirty years. The ambassador survived, though with terrible injuries. The Service quickly identified as the group responsible for the attack the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO), then sponsored by Iraq, later by Libya,51 which subsequently admitted responsibility.52

  Born into a wealthy Palestinian family in Jaffa which was forced to flee its home during the Arab–Israeli War of 1948, Abu Nidal (born Sabri al-Banna) split from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the early 1970s on the grounds that it was too moderate. After assassinating several of its leading representatives, he was sentenced to death by the PLO in 1974. By the time Abu Nidal ordered the killing of Shlomo Argov in June 1982, he was the most feared terrorist in the Middle East. Two months later an ANO group machine-gunned a kosher restaurant in Paris, killing six people and wounding thirty.53 The way that Abu Nidal had selected the three intended assassins of Argov (one Iraqi and two West Bank Palestinians) made the Service pessimistic about the prospects of detecting future ANO terrorists in Britain. All were students at a London language school with valid passports and visas issued by British embassies in the Middle East. None was known to the Security Service or had any contact with groups the Service was investigating: ‘It is unlikely’, F3/6 concluded afterwards, ‘that they would have come to our notice in the ordinary course of events . . .’ The quartermaster of the Argov assassination team lived inconspicuously in a YMCA hostel, where he stored his weapons: ‘The fact is nothing short of a blanket refusal to admit Arab students can prevent an assassination team in that guise entering the UK.’54

  As a result of Security Service success in identifying and investigating several members in London of the Marxist-Leninist Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), it was able to forestall an assassination attempt on the Turkish ambassador three months after the shooting of Argov. Between 1975 and 1985 more than forty Turkish diplomats and members of their families worldwide were killed by Armenian terrorists.55 On 4 September 1982 a telephone intercept revealed that an unidentified Armenian gunman had travelled to London to carry out a terrorist attack.56 The intercept also revealed that the gunman was staying at the Lancashire Hotel, Norfolk Square, where a police search of the register identified him as a Syrian national, Zaven Bedros.57 A white plastic bag found in his hotel room contained a machine pistol, a Russian-made hand grenade, detonators and ammunition.58 Bedros was later sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for firearms possession.59 Although the Security Service role in the intelligence case was not relevant to the criminal proceedings a police source revealed the Service’s involvement. The Times commented:

  Only a brilliant undercover operation started by MI5, continued by the Special Branch, and completed by Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist squad (C13) prevented Zaven Bedros from [carrying out] a terrorist attack in London . . . it was a brilliant piece of work. It is often said what a lot of duffers the Security Service people are, but this is a classic case of how effective they have been.60

  Technical and A4 surveillance of ASALA almost certainly prevented a serious terrorist attack in London similar to those which took place in France and Turkey. In July 1983, while Bedros was on trial, an ASALA bomb attack at Paris’s Orly Airport killed seven people and wounded fifty-six at the Turkish Airline check-in desk. In August ASALA killed eleven and injured over a hundred in separate attacks on Ankara’s Esenboğa Airport and the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul.61 The rapid and unexpected decline in Armenian terrorism thereafter, due to a series of arrests, the revulsion of much of the Armenian diaspora at the loss of life, and faction-fighting among the terrorist groups, illustrates the difficulty faced by MI5 and all other security services and police forces in foreseeing the rise and fall of terrorist groups.

  Despite the great variety of international terrorist groups operating in Britain at various times in the early 1980s, PIRA continued to pose the greatest direct threat to UK security. On 10 October 1980 Republican prisoners in Long Kesh Prison near Belfast, many of whom were already refusing to wear prison uniform and were engaged in a ‘dirty protest’, wearing only blankets and smearing excrement on the walls of their cells, issued a statement which inaugurated what has been rightly called ‘one of the most dramatic and terrible episodes in Irish history’:

  We, the republican prisoners of war in H-Blocks, Long Kesh, demand as of right political recognition and that we be accorded the status of political prisoners.

  . . . We wish to make it clear that every channel [of negotiation] has now been exhausted and, not wishing to break faith with those from whom we have inherited our principles, we now commit ourselves to a hunger strike.62

  At the time it was widely believed in both London and Belfast that the initiative for the hunger strike, which began on 27 October, had come from the Provisional and Sinn Fein leadership. The IJS Belfast station, however, had reliable intelligence that the hand of a reluctant Republican leadership had been forced by the prisoners in Long Kesh.63 On 18 December, with one of the H-Block hunger strikers, Sean McKenna, close to death, the strike was called off. The official explanation given by Belfast Sinn Fein leaders was that a note from the British (whose contents were in reality vague and ambiguous) had met the strikers’ demands.64 The PIRA prisoners’ disillusionment with the terms of the British note, which failed to resolve their demands for ‘political’ status, led to a new and more determined hunger strike, begun on 1 March 1981 by the twenty-sevenyear-old Provisional officer commanding (OC) in Long Kesh, Bobby Sands. This time the hunger strike was staggered, with other prisoners joining in, usually in groups of two, every two or three weeks. The strike won worldwide publicity with the handsome, long-haired Sands achieving cult status as a revolutionary icon – especially after he was elected Westminster MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone in a by-election on 7 April. Streets were named after him in cities as far apart as New York and Tehran. IJS sources reported that, shortly after Sands’s election, in order not to distract attention from the hunger strike, the PIRA leadership had given instructions to suspend attacks on off-duty members of the security forces and commercial targets in Northern Ireland.65

  On 5 May, with rosary beads sent by the papal envoy around his neck, Bobby Sands died what Republicans and his many foreign supporters believed was a martyr’s death. By 7 July five more hunger strikers had died. The IJS Belfast station reported to London that PIRA had decided to end its earlier ban on attacking off-duty members of the security forces and business premises:

  The reason for this about-face was the pressure from rank-and-file members of the IRA in the North. They had reported to their commanders that they were being jeered at in the streets for their inaction . . . They were also burning to retaliate for the deaths of the ten republican prisoners.66

  Despite reliable intelligence reports that the initiative for the hunger strike had come from the strikers themselves, Mrs Thatcher was sceptical. Even when told in July 1981 by the Catholic Primate of Ireland, Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, that he believed ‘the hunger strikers were not acting under IRA orders’, she was ‘not convinced’.67 Recent historians of the Provisionals, however, corroborate the intelligence provided at the time by the IJS. Most of the PIRA leadership feared that the hunger strike might prove an unwinnable battle, play into the hands of the British government and do severe damage to Republican morale.68 They proved wrong on all counts. Though the hunger strike ended on 3 October after a total of ten deaths without winning major concessions from
the British, the IJS reported that PIRA believed the hunger strike ‘was the greatest unifying force the Republican movement had had for decades’.69 The death of Bobby Sands turned Margaret Thatcher, though she did not realize it at the time, into PIRA’s main target.70 It took over three years, however, for PIRA to put itself in a position to make a serious assassination attempt during a Conservative Party conference – a strategy first devised, according to IJS intelligence, even before Mrs Thatcher came to power.71

  Four days after the death of Bobby Sands, due to a lapse in protective security by British Petroleum (BP), PIRA came close to achieving one of its most spectacular coups. On 9 May 1981, the Queen on the Royal Yacht Britannia and the King of Norway on board the Norge arrived at Sullom Voe in Shetland for the official inauguration of the BP oil terminal, the largest in Europe. Other top brass were conveyed on a P&O ship chartered by BP. Because of several days of dense fog, however, most of a large police contingent from the Scottish mainland was unable to arrive in time to complete more than brief physical security checks before the opening.72 Just as the Queen appeared there was a small explosion at the power station some 500 yards away from the oil terminal, which was believed at first to be an electrical fault and passed unnoticed during the ceremony. The explosion, however, turned out to have been caused by a bomb, though this was not made public at the time. There was very little structural damage and no casualties.73 The Queen was characteristically unruffled. The PIRA Overseas Department was deeply disappointed not to hear news that the inauguration ceremony had been disrupted. Several news agencies received phone calls from people speaking with an Irish accent, asking if they had been sent reports of an incident at Sullum Voe.74 PIRA claimed afterwards to ‘have breached the English Queen’s security’.