by Mark Urban
Most Army officers believed the RUC was more professional than the UDR, although in 1976 many still considered the police incapable of taking charge of security on the ground, as opposed to in the committee rooms. The RUC had grown in numbers from 3500 in 1970 to 6500 in the mid 1970s.
Like the Army, its forces were organized on a hierarchical system. Police stations were grouped into sixteen ‘divisions’ corresponding roughly to Army battalions. Several divisions were grouped into each of three ‘regions’ – Belfast, South and North – each with an assistant chief constable in charge who had the same degree of authority as the Army’s three brigadiers. The three assistant chief constables reported to the chief constable at RUC Headquarters at Knock in east Belfast.
Army and RUC activities had been integrated from the top down. The chief constable and GOC saw one another at least once a week at meetings of the Security Policy Committee. The deputy chief constable and CLF usually had daily discussions to co-ordinate operations. Lower down there would be similar conferences, for example between a police division commander and his local Army battalion commanding officer. But there were often problems at the local level. Members of the police considered Army commanders to have too short-term a view; while RUC officers frequently refused to accompany the Army on missions, either because they thought it too risky or felt they would antagonize local people.
The police faced the unenviable task of having to carry out ordinary duties such as regulating traffic, investigating petty crime or serving court summonses while under lethal threat from the IRA. Despite the plan for Police Primacy, the reality in the mid 1970s, a senior RUC officer concedes, was that ‘In the more difficult places you found the police staying in their stations and going out occasionally to accompany the Army.’
In the early days of the Troubles the police force had aroused the hatred of the nationalist community by driving into their neighbourhoods firing machine guns and appearing to represent the repressive arm of the Protestant establishment. Following the riots of 1969 and the Hunt Report the following year the RUC’s chief constable had declared that the force would be restructured along what he had called non-aggressive, non-retaliatory lines. As a result, in republican areas the RUC had effectively ceded responsibility for policing to the Army. In these areas soldiers had been left to face riots and exercise law and order. Police Primacy required the restoration of the RUC’s anti-riot units and the emergence of a police force with the protection and arms needed to go out on the streets.
Kenneth Newman, a diminutive Englishman who had started his career in the Palestine police, was given the job of implementing Police Primacy in 1976. Most constables’ work kept them in their stations. Yet in order to make the new policy effective the Chief Constable required squads trained in the use of firearms and riot control which needed to be mobile in order to respond effectively to trouble. In some senses Newman needed to militarize the police. The Special Patrol Group (SPG) was the nearest he had to such a thing in 1976. The SPG was founded in the early 1970s replacing the Reserve Force, a skeleton unit of fulltimers, fleshed out by reservists during crises, as the RUC’s mobile anti-terrorist squad. There were SPG squads in Belfast, Londonderry, Armagh, Omagh and Magherafelt. With the advent of Police Primacy came an expansion from about 100 full-time police officers assigned to such duties to about three times this number. Under Newman they were given riot control training and improved firearms. Police appeared on the streets with flak jackets and Ruger rifles. The Chief Constable also started a public relations campaign designed to create a more favourable image of the police, particularly among young people.
Although they expressed admiration for one another in public, it was inevitable that soldiers and police officers would feel a degree of mutual disdain. It was important for the self-esteem of many Army officers to feel that the RUC was in some sense tainted by sectarianism, because this view helped to justify their own presence. One officer says, ‘I don’t know what the RUC would do if the Troubles ended. It is so important to the Protestants’ view of themselves as a community under siege. They are rather like the Boers in South Africa.’
And many police officers regarded the Army as outsiders, often on short tours of duty, who alienated the population with needless shows of force. As one RUC chief inspector puts it, ‘We will never make permanent progress until we have no military support. It is far better for the IRA for the British war machine to be seen bearing down on them.’ The adoption of Police Primacy as official policy would do little to resolve this rivalry.
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The primary effort of the security forces, both police and Army, was directed against the republican groups, the Provisional IRA and the smaller Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), although during sectarian fighting in the mid 1970s loyalist terrorist groups had killed more people. But the loyalists did not attack the security forces and the number of incidents attributed to them declined in the late 1970s. Many Army officers see combating the better-organized republican terrorist groups as the real challenge. As one officer puts it, ‘Among some people there is a kind of admiration of the IRA, of its professionalism. Nobody has any respect for the loyalists.’
By 1977 the level of republican and loyalist terrorist incidents had reduced considerably. In 1972 there had been more than 10,000 shootings – the only year of the Troubles in which more than 100 soldiers had died; in 1977 there was one-tenth the number of shootings. The terrorists realized that allowing their members to roam the streets with arms was a sure route to large numbers of casualties and arrests. Instead, they put more preparation into their attacks and refined their methods. Soldiers posted to Ireland from the mid 1970s no longer expected on their patrols to walk into what one referred to as the ‘Wild West-style gun battles’ which erupted during the early days; now they were faced with sophisticated terrorist operations. Better intelligence was needed to combat this threat.
From 1977 to 1979 rivalry between the police and the Army was to become acute. It was often focused on intelligence matters, the lifeblood of the anti-terrorist effort. The Army’s manual Land Operations Volume III – Counter-Revolutionary Operations (Northern Ireland is defined as a counter-revolutionary conflict) was issued in August 1977 and became the bible for Army operations in Ulster. It states that intelligence is the ‘key to success’. Events had already demonstrated this to the security hierarchy.
The internment policy had proved counter-productive largely because the intelligence had been so poor. The IRA, too, had learned from its early mistakes and was more careful about how and when it engaged the security forces and about leaving evidence which could convict a member. The need for a competent, centrally directed intelligence apparatus to replace the existing web of feuding agencies was clear.
Before the reorganization, anti-terrorist intelligence activities were handled by departments in both the Army and the RUC. There were, moreover, two departments within the RUC: C Department, the Criminal Investigations Department (CID), was in charge of interrogating suspects and gathering evidence following incidents; E Department, the Special Branch (SB), ran the informer networks vital to successful anti-terrorist measures. SB had been relieved of the task of interrogation after the end of internment. Putting the CID in charge of interrogation, or as the Army liked to call it, ‘screening’, was partly a gesture. It matched the official policy of treating terrorism as crime rather than subversive activity following the ending in March 1976 of political status for all paramilitary prisoners. However, the CID’s assumption of responsibility for interrogation also followed a series of damaging public allegations and government inquiries into inhumane treatment of suspects by the SB.
It was crucial for the success of anti-terrorist operations for these two departments to work together. A CID interrogator, for example, might believe a suspected member of the IRA was ready to work as an informer for the SB. In practice there were frequent problems with the relationship. A senior RUC officer recalls, ‘There had been a slavish
adherence to the need-to-know principle. The Special Branch was passing minimal information to the CID.’
Following an internal reorganization by Kenneth Newman, the two police departments presented a united front, though their relationship with Army intelligence remained poor. The Army ran its own informers or ‘touts’ in Ulster’s slang. Ordinary officers who had no experience of Northern Ireland could find themselves running an agent while on a four-month tour. The life of that agent sometimes depended on the competence of those ordinary officers.
In addition to the intelligence activities of ordinary units, the Army had some specialist units. Lisburn was also headquarters for 12 Intelligence and Security Company, a part of the Intelligence Corps formed in Ulster in 1972, which grew to number more than 200. The Company was divided into sections servicing Lisburn and the brigade headquarters. Although initially it engaged in some agent-running, its members were involved largely in paper-pushing: preparing reports for senior officers and keeping card indexes of suspects.
From 1972 the Army also had the Special Military Intelligence Unit (Northern Ireland) – (SMIU NI) – an organization of about fifty officers and NCOs who were meant to act as go-betweens for Army chiefs and the RUC Special Branch at various levels of command. They were involved in most of the exchanges of sensitive intelligence between the Army and the RUC and were to be particularly affected by the growing competition between the two organizations.
Among the officers to have served at SMIU in the mid 1970s was Captain Fred Holroyd, an officer in the Royal Corps of Transport who sought an attachment to Army Intelligence in Northern Ireland. In a series of press interviews and in his book, War Without Honour, he was subsequently to detail the rivalry between various intelligence organizations and the incompetence of some of his fellow operators. Others who served in similar posts confirm Captain Holroyd’s allegations about battles between the different intelligence-gathering organizations. Investigations by Duncan Campbell, a journalist working for the New Statesman magazine and the Irish Independent newspaper, corroborated other aspects of Holroyd’s story. However, controversy surrounds some of Holroyd’s more serious allegations, which will be examined in chapter five.
In addition to Army and police information-gathering organizations, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) and Security Service (MI5) were also active. Both organizations attempted to recruit agents and were more concerned with the political dimension of the unrest than were the Army or police. Although SIS had played a prominent role during the early days of the Troubles, its influence had been shaken by allegations in 1972 that it had encouraged two agents, Kenneth and Keith Littlejohn, to rob banks in the Republic of Ireland. The Irish Government asked for the two men to be extradited from Britain following the discovery of their fingerprints after a bank robbery in Dublin in 1972. Kenneth Littlejohn, a former member of the Parachute Regiment who had turned to robbery, subsequently alleged that SIS had intended to use his gang to discredit the IRA through robberies and to assassinate its members. Maurice Oldfield, at that time the second highest ranking officer in MI6, is reported to have called staff to a meeting at the organization’s headquarters in London to deny the allegations. Although the Service may have dismissed some of the Littlejohn allegations, it was clear that the brothers had been agents of the British government – the Attorney General having insisted that the hearing on their extradition to Ireland be held in secret for reasons of national security. The Littlejohns were subsequently sent to the Republic where they received heavy sentences for the Dublin bank robbery.
At the same time as the Littlejohns’ extradition was happening, John Wyman, a man believed to have been an SIS officer, was arrested in Dublin. He was detained, along with a sergeant in the Gardai Special Branch who had provided him with sensitive intelligence documents. Wyman was released early in 1973 after serving a three-month sentence on remand. The Littlejohn and Wyman cases were said to have convinced Oldfield, who became chief of SIS in 1973, that his organization should not sully its hands with the business of fighting the IRA in the United Kingdom, and to have prompted him to begin scaling down its activities.
The succession of MI5 from MI6 as the leading agency in the anti-republican secret intelligence effort was accompanied by much rivalry and ill-feeling. Both organizations maintained liaison offices at Lisburn and Knock. By the late 1970s SIS had lost most of its agent network in Ireland and, although SIS maintained its liaison office at Stormont and its station in the British embassy in Dublin, MI5 had assumed a greater role.
The Army was well aware of the principles which should have governed the running of the intelligence establishment. Its manual, Counter-Revolutionary Operations, states: ‘Intelligence and security must be centrally controlled to ensure the efficient and economic exploitation of resources. Thus there should be a single, integrated intelligence organization under either a director of intelligence or the senior intelligence officer in the area of operations.’
But in practice, the generals were violating such principles by building up the Army’s own rival intelligence operation. In his memoirs (published in 1989), Lord Carver, Chief of the General Staff in the mid 1970s, stressed that the RUC’s Special Branch had lost the will to carry out rigorous interrogation, and highlighted the problem of gaining convictions. He wrote:
The Army’s frustration in both these fields led to gradual and increasing pressure that it should rely less on Special Branch and do more to obtain its own intelligence, a tendency which I was initially reluctant to accept, all experience in colonial fields having been against this and in favour of total integration of police and military intelligence. However, the inefficiency of the RUC Special Branch, its reluctance to burn its fingers again, and the suspicion, more than once proved, that some of its members had close links with Protestant extremists, led me finally to the conclusion that there was no alternative.
As a result of this decision, the Army set up a new élite surveillance unit, which would become known as 14 Intelligence Company, and increased the resources committed to intelligence-gathering. But the new policy exacerbated rivalries with the RUC. Although many constables and soldiers on the ground continued to co-operate, by 1977 the situation in the corridors of Lisburn and Knock had grown more difficult.
A senior officer who was party to the rivalries remembers that the most difficult area was the sharing of informer intelligence: ‘There was an element of “if you tell them everything we haven’t got a position have we?” In the intelligence business knowledge is power.’ Another officer who served at Lisburn says, ‘Fighting the Provisional IRA was about number nine on my list of problems every morning.’
The consequences of compulsive secrecy and non-co-operation could be seen at all levels of the security effort. Peter Morton, the Commanding Officer of the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, recalled in his later book, Emergency Tour, a typical incident during a tour of south Armagh in 1976 when soldiers received information from a member of the public:
I should have known better, but I agreed to let them search seven occupied houses which they did at 06.35. In terms of organization it was a miracle. But the result was to find two shotguns and to incur the wrath of HSB [the local Head of Special Branch], because we had not cleared the searches with him. One will never know, but in all probability at least one of the houses searched belonged to one of his contacts.
Accidental arrests of informers, the failure to inform other security organizations of movements of key IRA figures, and the compromising of one another’s sources became routine. A senior officer who served at HQNI concedes, ‘I have no doubt that the Special Branch regarded the Army, and its attempts to gather information, as cowboy.’
A member of a Whitehall team subsequently sent to Ulster to conduct a review of intelligence-gathering activities is blunt about the situation in the late 1970s: ‘I was surprised and shocked at what we found. We came across some phenomenal cock-ups. Many of the problems surrounded the use of hig
hly sensitive human source material. There was over-confidentiality and secretiveness in the management of the work.’ People died as a result of these errors, he says, but declines to give specific examples. However, he does reveal, ‘Information had been available, there had been foreknowledge of bombs, for example, which people had never been told about.’
In the mid 1970s an intelligence official had been sent to Stormont to act as Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence (DCI). But the holder of the post could not compel recalcitrant Special Branch or Army intelligence operators to work more closely. Caught between feuding organizations the DCI was effectively impotent. An intelligence officer recalls, ‘The situation deteriorated and it became obvious that the DCI couldn’t perform the tasks which were set him.’
The mismanagement of intelligence and improved expertise of the IRA combined to blunt the activities of the security forces. The seizure of weapons caches are a good indicator of the quality of intelligence management since they most often result from tip-offs. Statistics show how things were going wrong for the security forces. In 1974, 465 rifles were found; in 1976, 275 and in 1978, 188. The amount of explosives seized dropped from 53,214lb in 1974 to 7966lb in 1978. It was not that there were fewer informers, but rather that the information being given by them was not being shared properly and the IRA was becoming more expert at hiding its munitions.
At the Ministry of Defence in London events were being viewed with increasing alarm by Brigadier James Glover, a wiry, ambitious infantry officer who headed the intelligence section of the General Staff. Some time after taking up the post in 1977, Glover prepared a highly classified paper, Future Organisation of Military Intelligence in Northern Ireland, setting out the way ahead. It stressed the need for more effective central control of intelligence, with the DCI wielding greater authority, and for setting up an effective system for sharing intelligence lower down the chain of command. His suggestions, combined with changes which were taking place in the RUC under Kenneth Newman, were to do much to reduce friction and improve the effectiveness of intelligence-gathering and dissemination.
