The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  It was later discovered that the large construction team at Sullum Voe, many of them Irish, had included a number of known or suspected Republicans. After forensic examination of more than sixty dustbin loads of debris, the bomb detonator was identified as coming from the Irish Republic. Subsequent police inquiries established that two parcels, each containing a bomb, had been posted to a Republican militant working on the construction of the terminal. When the second parcel was delayed in the post, he appears to have panicked, believing that it had been intercepted en route, and fled without collecting either his cards or his bonus pay for two years’ service at the construction site. The Republican militant stayed only long enough to plant the first bomb (or possibly give it to an accomplice). The second parcel, containing a 6-pound bomb and a twelve-day timing device, arrived after his departure and remained uncollected in the construction village post office until, absurdly, it was forwarded to (but failed to reach) his address in Northern Ireland.75

  A C Branch officer, who was present at the opening ceremony, had previously paid several visits to Sullum Voe, producing a report on protective security which had been agreed by both BP and Whitehall’s Official Committee on Terrorism. It included a specific recommendation for the security of the power station. BP, however, balked at the cost of implementing all the recommendations, which ran into seven figures, and detailed discussions were still continuing at the time of the attack.76 Cost remained, as it had been for the past decade, the main obstacle to implementing the Security Service’s protective-security recommendations in the private sector. Throughout the 1980s the Security Service believed that, of the hundreds of Economic Key Points (EKPs), ‘only a small number were even reasonably protected.’77 C Branch went by helicopter to inspect most North Sea oil platforms and organized a series of exercises with the Royal Marines to practise recapturing a platform in case one was ever taken over by a terrorist group.78 Whitehall showed little interest. C Branch complained that Whitehall found counter-terrorist protective security boring as well as expensive:

  Security organisations in departments are not staffed by high fliers. The Departments of Transport and Energy seem to find particular difficulty in making decisions quickly on the protection of EKPs. This is frustrating not only for C Branch but also for the industries and organisations concerned. On a number of occasions recently, after lengthy and frustrating delays, both departments have eventually taken the action recommended by C Branch.79

  Security Service staff found arguing the case for improved protective security to unresponsive Whitehall committees a wearisome business.80 The Provisionals, however, failed to grasp how vulnerable many EKPs remained. The Cabinet Office concluded in 1982 that PIRA had no coherent strategy (such as it developed in the 1990s) for causing serious damage to the economy and national infrastructure:

  There has been no attempt to study supply systems, such as electricity or telecommunications. PIRA is therefore unlikely to be able to identify and simultaneously destroy mutually dependent targets in supply systems in Great Britain, although it might be able to do so in Northern Ireland.81

  Even the attack on Sullum Voe seems to have been designed as a spectacular demonstration of PIRA’s ability to penetrate royal security rather than as an operation to do serious damage to the North Sea oil industry. PIRA’s ‘armed struggle’ did not yet aim at undermining the British economy.

  As with the attempted bombing of Sullum Voe, the Security Service had no advance intelligence on the targets of PIRA’s continental campaign, which resumed on 16 February 1980 when Colonel Mark Coe was shot dead at Bielefeld. On 1 March a Royal Military Police patrol in Münster was fired at while approaching traffic lights and the driver wounded. Nine days later a corporal in the BAOR was shot, but not seriously wounded, at Osnabrück. No further attack took place until 3 December when two shots from a slow-moving car were fired at Christopher Tugendhat, a British EEC commissioner in Brussels. It was another month before PIRA admitted responsibility. The Service concluded that there had been a major reappraisal of PIRA strategy, stemming from the fear that further operations might compromise the propaganda success on the continent of Sinn Fein’s campaign to exploit sympathy for the hunger strikers.82 There were no further PIRA attacks on British targets on the continent until 1987.

  PIRA had no such inhibitions about its operations in Britain. In the final months of 1981 there was a series of bomb attacks in London.83 In December the Chief Constable of the RUC, Sir Jack Hermon (who had succeeded Newman in January 1980), proposed that ‘the Security Service should assume responsibility for the investigation of Republican terrorism in Great Britain just as they had responsibility for co-ordinating its investigation outside the UK.’84 The IJS Belfast station supported the proposal. Despite its private criticisms of the MPSB, however, the Security Service leadership was still unwilling to provoke a conflict with the Met by claiming the lead intelligence role against Republican terrorism on the mainland. The DG, John Jones (who had succeeded Smith earlier in the year), was ‘most anxious’ that Hermon’s views ‘should not get back to the Metropolitan Police, who might well suspect us of propagating them’.85 Stephen Lander, then in F5, was struck by what he saw as the generational divide between the cautious Jones and his DDG in London on the one hand and the able, ambitious, proactive young Security Service officers of the Belfast station.86

  For three years after the end of the bombing campaign in London during the final months of 1981, the PIRA threat to the mainland appeared to decline. In 1982 the weekly Directors’ Meetings spent more time discussing the terrorist threat in Britain from Welsh extremists (for which it had the lead role)87 than that from PIRA (for which it did not). After a visit to Ulster in January, the DDG told the directors that ‘On the security side everyone had been relaxed, taking the view that by and large the level of violence had, at least for the present, been reduced to what was about the practicable minimum.’88 Thereafter the Directors’ Meeting did not discuss PIRA operations on mainland Britain for over six months.

  After failing to launch any mainland operation during the first half of 1982, an active service unit (ASU) despatched by the England Department succeeded on 20 July in planting both a car bomb near Hyde Park Corner, which killed four members of the Household Cavalry, and a bomb beneath a bandstand in Regent’s Park, which killed seven bandsmen of the Royal Green Jackets.89 Director F told a Directors’ Meeting held on the day of the Knightsbridge–Hyde Park and Regent’s Park bombs that ‘It had been expected for some time that PIRA would launch a new bombing campaign in London.’90 The IJS later reported that the ASU responsible for the London bombings had returned by fishing boat to the Irish Republic on 30 July, and that its leader was planning further mainland attacks to coincide with the Conservative Party conference in October and the parade celebrating victory in the Falklands War a few days later. Both operations, the IJS believed, were vetoed by the PIRA leadership, which had noted the widespread revulsion both in Ireland and around the world at the graphic media photographs of the carnage on 20 July and wished to avoid damaging Sinn Fein’s prospects during the October elections to the Northern Irish Assembly by further bombing.91

  The main focus of Security Service operations against the Provisionals during 1982 was less the immediate threat of mainland bombing (which remained the primary responsibility of MPSB) than arms procurement in the United States and PIRA operations on the continent (which the Service had the lead role in monitoring). The hunger strikes and the death of Bobby Sands produced a wave of anti-British feeling among the Irish diaspora, especially in the United States, where there were demonstrations in many American cities. In New York a picket mounted by supporters of the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID) outside the British consulate on Third Avenue continued for some years.92 In September 1982, SLO Washington reported to the DG: ‘The FBI investigative effort against the Irish target in New York over the last eighteen months has been most heartening and rewarding and fully vindicates the cajoling an
d pressure we have placed upon them to pursue this target.’93 The problem remained, however, to persuade New York juries to convict, as the Guardian reported on 6 November:

  Five Irish Americans including the 80-year-old president of the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID), Mr Michael Flannery, were found not guilty here yesterday of conspiring to supply guns to the IRA.

  There were cheers from over 100 spectators in the New York Eastern District Court in Brooklyn when the verdicts were announced. The jury had deliberated for nearly three days.

  The defendants freely admitted that over the past twenty years they had smuggled more than 1 million dollars worth of guns and ammunition. But they claimed in their defence that their main arms supplier was a CIA agent, and that the operation therefore had US Government approval.

  The CIA and the federal prosecutor denied that the US intelligence community was in any way involved either with the defendants or with the arms smuggling, nor was any evidence produced to show that it was. The jury, however, appeared to accept the argument of Flannery’s attorney that ‘It is up to the government to prove the CIA was not involved with the defendants, not our burden to prove it was.’94

  By April 1983, SLO was less pessimistic about the prospects for prosecuting PIRA gun-runners: ‘It is clear that the US attorneys are learning by their mistakes . . .’95 Soon afterwards he reported ‘convictions against PIRA and INLA arms procurers in three separate trials in New York’. Director F asked SLO to forward to the FBI an ‘expression of our appreciation’.96 There was continuing disappointment, however, at the Bureau’s limitations in investigating Irish Republicans. Patrick Walker’s successor as F5 wrote in 1984:

  Our exchange of intelligence with the FBI on Irish matters is surprisingly one-way given that the concentration of support for Irish republicanism is greater in the USA than anywhere else in the world outside Ireland. While we supply a great deal of information to assist them we get relatively little back. This is partly because the FBI are legally constrained from passing information about US citizens to us and partly because they suffer from considerable investigational difficulties (eg even doing a reverse telephone enquiry [identifying a subscriber from the number] is a laborious process). However they also seem not to appreciate the value of more open exchanges, and it has to be said that some of their officers are very much ‘Police oriented’ and take exception to our ‘intelligence’ approach to investigations.97

  There was, however, one major limitation in the Security Service’s own understanding of PIRA’s support base in the United States. The widespread publicity given to NORAID misled the Service into believing that it was the main North American Irish Republican fundraiser. Not until the beginning of the 1990s did it discover that NORAID was of less significance than Clan na Gael, a secret Republican society which successfully avoided publicity. Whereas most NORAID supporters were Irish-Americans born in the United States, Clan na Gael’s members were Republican Irish immigrants. According to a Security Service report in 1990: ‘Clan na Gael finds it relatively easy to raise funds for the IRA as many of older generation Irishmen would rather support the military than the political wing.’98

  During the 1980s, Security Service collaboration with some continental services in counter-PIRA operations became closer than that with the FBI and an increasingly important component of its CT strategy. Though the Provisional Army Council suspended attacks on British targets on the continent early in 1982, it decided to set up bases in France and Belgium, using local sympathizers as well as PIRA members, to support bomb attacks in mainland Britain, to conduct arms-procurement operations in France and Belgium, and to assist in the transfer to Ireland of weapons and equipment obtained in the United States.99 The Security Service’s foreign liaisons were crucial to its continental counter-terrorist operations. In June 1982, after an operation involving close collaboration with the Belgians and French a large consignment of arms was discovered near Nantes in a Toyota camper van apparently abandoned by the driver after he detected surveillance.100 Another PIRA arms-procurement operation culminated in the arrest of the Provisional Patrick McVeigh, who was caught red-handed in Limerick by the Garda unloading a container of arms which had been shipped from New York to Dublin via Rotterdam.101

  Intelligence was also accumulating on the renewal of PIRA arms procurement from Libya, which was thought to have virtually ceased in 1978.102 Colonel Qaddafi appears to have been so impressed by the H-Block hunger strikers that he agreed to resume the supply of money and arms. Forensic examination after the Knightsbridge–Hyde Park bombing in July 1982 identified a British-made electronic switch used in the bomb which had been bought by an engineer in Hemel Hempstead who, police inquiries revealed, had purchased a number of the switches at the request of a PIRA volunteer.103 Patrick Walker, then F5, noted in April 1983: ‘Reports are accumulating that Libya is providing money and/or weapons to PIRA. Weapons and grenades of Soviet and East European origin have been appearing in Northern Ireland and in the recent . . . weapons consignment recovered on the Continent.’104

  According to intelligence reports, PIRA’s England Department had to abort a series of planned attacks during 1983, partly as a result of disruption caused by two major arms finds. The mainland bombing campaign eventually resumed in December after a gap of almost eighteen months. There was no advance intelligence on the intended targets. Of the three bombs planted by an ASU, by far the most damaging was a car bomb outside Harrods which killed six people and injured many Christmas shoppers. International public revulsion at the carnage of the innocent was so great that, according to intelligence reports, there was even talk within the PIRA leadership of suspending all mainland operations.105 F5 concluded that the head of the PIRA Overseas Department had personally given the go-ahead for the Harrods bombing, despite the fact that it had not been approved by the Provisional Army Council.106

  In April 1984 the Irish Joint Section was wound up. By agreement with SIS, the Security Service, which had become the dominant partner in the IJS, gained sole control of its Belfast station and set up a new section, F8, at its London headquarters to take over responsibility for the day-to-day management of Northern Irish operations.107 Simultaneously FX Branch was reorganized under a new director, Patrick Walker, as a fully independent branch no longer subordinate to F, with, for the first time, undivided responsibility for counter-terrorism.108 The Northern Ireland Office wrote to Walker soon afterwards:

  Statistics show the considerable decrease in violence in the Province over the last 10 years. For example, nearly 500 people were killed in 1972 in over 10,000 incidents; whereas last year fewer than 80 people were killed in a few hundred incidents. The latter figure of casualties represents less than half the number of people killed on the roads of Northern Ireland each year. Therefore, unacceptable though the present situation is, it is not as bad as some of the media or the terrorists themselves would have the world believe.109

  For the first nine months of 1984, the PIRA threat to mainland Britain occupied the weekly Directors’ Meetings far less than Libyan terrorism.

  Early in 1984 Qaddafi ordered a new campaign against dissident émigrés – or, as he preferred to call them, ‘stray dogs’.110 Over the next few months intelligence reports of Libyan plans for a new wave of attacks on dissidents in Britain led to a series of operations by the Security Service and the Met to thwart the planned attacks. On 9 March the Service informed MPSB by telex of a reliable intelligence report on a meeting in the People’s Bureau in London to discuss further ‘revolutionary’ action against opponents of the Qaddafi regime. But there was no clear indication as yet that the Bureau itself might open fire on demonstrators gathered outside in St James’s Square, London.111 Instead, from 10 to 12 March there was a series of bomb attacks against Libyan dissidents in London and Manchester. The People’s Bureau, F3 noted, ‘has strenuously denied complicity. It is quite clear, however, that they both directed and planned the bombing campaign.’112 A Security Service telex to MPSB o
n 13 March reported reliable intelligence that the Bureau was in high spirits and prepared to step up its campaign against dissidents, though it appeared to be running short of bomb-making equipment.113

  On 16 April MPSB discovered that an anti-Qaddafi group had planned a demonstration outside the People’s Bureau on the following day. A request from the Bureau to the Met for detailed information about the planned demonstration was refused.114 It was not until after the demonstration on the 17th that the Service learned that on the evening of the 16th the People’s Bureau had proposed three options to Tripoli for dealing with the demonstrators:

  (i) To clash directly with the demonstrators from outside the Bureau

  (ii) To fire on them from inside the Bureau

  (iii) To prevent the demonstration by diplomatic pressure115

  The People’s Bureau began by pursuing the third option. At 1.15 a.m. on 17 April a delegation from the Bureau visited the FCO and asked for action to stop the demonstration. The delegation declared that neither they nor their government could be held responsible for the consequences if the demonstration went ahead. Tripoli that night authorized the Bureau’s second option – firing on the demonstrators.116 That is what happened on 17 April. What began as a peaceful demonstration ended in tragedy. While policing the demonstration WPC Yvonne Fletcher was killed by machinegun fire from a first-floor window of the People’s Bureau. Her killer was no doubt influenced by the knowledge that the Bureau had been heavily criticized by Tripoli for not firing on a similar demonstration four years earlier.117

  Next day, 18 April, the KGB residency in London was informed by telegram from the Centre that it had reliable information that the shooting had been personally ordered by Qaddafi. The residency’s head of political intelligence, Oleg Gordievsky, a long-serving British agent, passed on the information to his case officer.118 The Thatcher government broke off diplomatic relations with Libya and, after a siege of the People’s Bureau, expelled more than sixty of Qaddafi’s officials and supporters. The expulsions effectively brought to an end the Libyan terrorist campaign in mainland Britain. On 14 May the Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, formally expressed to the DG, Sir John Jones: