by Mark Urban
MI5’s activities in Northern Ireland are run by the Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence (DCI) at Stormont. The DCI’s duties include the overall direction of intelligence policy in Ulster as well as the supervision of an MI5 force numbering sixty to seventy. Although Army and RUC intelligence officers do not consider themselves subordinate to the DCI, there are several elements of the intelligence effort under the DCI’s direct control. MI5 has a Security Liaison Office at HQNI, Lisburn and another at RUC headquarters, Knock. It also possesses one unit for running agents and one for technical surveillance specialists. The DCI is supported by a group of officers at Stormont sometimes referred to as ‘The Department’.
Those who have worked alongside MI5 in Northern Ireland say that their people come from a variety of backgrounds. Some are Ulstermen and women who have been recruited either direct from the populace or from the ranks of the RUC. Others have come from a more conventional intelligence service background, joining the agency after completing a university degree. And some have served in the British Army. The Security Service’s personnel divide into ‘officers’ – who make up about one in five of its numbers – and ‘support staff’.
Because of its highly secretive nature, and its role in combating subversion (often broadly defined), MI5 is regarded with deep suspicion by many with liberal convictions who question the range of its activities and consider them a threat to civil liberties. However, many in the Army and RUC who have had contact with MI5 during this period are not in awe of it. One person says of the MI5 officers who ran ‘national assets’ in the late 1970s, ‘Some of them were laughable.’
Despite the scepticism of their colleagues in rival intelligence-gathering organizations, the Security Service gradually improved the running of its Ulster operation. Many high-flying officers were sent to Northern Ireland where the value of the work was readily apparent. ‘Ireland, like the operations against Eastern Bloc diplomats in London, was considered worthwhile,’ says one former intelligence officer, adding, ‘Everybody understood the reason for doing it.’ Among those who served there in the late 1970s was Patrick Walker who, in 1989, became Director General of the Security Service.
Although the DCI’s authority was enhanced during the intelligence reforms of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the holder of this office still had no powers to compel the RUC SB or Army to do things they did not want to do. The DCI therefore had to derive power through the exercise of great tact and persuasiveness in the running of high-level intelligence committees at Stormont. On the other hand, the relationship between the resident MI5 chief and the secretary of state was critical. Several ministers were to use the DCI as a personal adviser on intelligence matters from the state of terrorist groups to the areas where the security forces needed to make a greater effort.
The Security Service Act, passed in 1989, made the DCI responsible to the secretary of state for Northern Ireland rather than to the Home Office, as is most of MI5. In practice, MI5 officers tend to communicate frequently with their colleagues in London.
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From 1977 to 1980 an MI5 officer called Michael Bettaney worked at Stormont. Bettaney suffered a personal collapse which in turn brought profound changes in the Security Service. Bettaney spent much of his time in Northern Ireland running agents. He later told MI5 colleagues in London that he had had a number of close escapes in Ulster. Once, he said, he had narrowly avoided being caught in a bomb blast. On another occasion he claimed to have hidden in one part of a house as paramilitaries broke the kneecaps of someone suspected of informing in another. I have been unable to confirm whether these incidents actually took place.
What is known is that Bettaney began drinking heavily while at Stormont and that he converted to Catholicism during the same period. At the same time he underwent a change of political heart – the right-wing views he had held in his early twenties were abandoned as he became interested in the political left. He was later to say that his tour in Northern Ireland caused him to re-examine government policy for the first time. Posted back to London, from 1980 to 1982 he gave training lectures as his personal problems worsened. When he began working in MI5’s K Branch, which is responsible for counter-espionage, Bettaney saw the opportunity to pass information to the Russians. Despite the fact that his attempts to do so were bungled to the point of being comic, in 1984 Bettaney was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison.
While he was on remand in Brixton jail, a light-hearted story appeared in the diary of the Guardian, suggesting that the authorities had gone to great lengths to keep Bettaney apart from an IRA suspect in the same wing. However, during the preparation of this book I was told by an intelligence officer that the Security Service believed Bettaney had actually succeeded in giving the IRA information in prison. He added that MI5 had assumed that the names and addresses of senior officers, including those involved in anti-IRA work, had been compromised, and that the people concerned had taken increased security precautions, some moving house. The alarm at MI5 had followed the discovery that Bettaney had indeed been able to associate with IRA prisoners or suspects. At the time of going to press, neither Bettaney nor his solicitor had chosen to comment on letters sent them by me setting out this extraordinary allegation.
A period of profound turbulence followed Bettaney’s sentencing and the security commission investigation which came after it. MI5 followed numerous other British institutions in receiving what one Whitehall insider calls a ‘hand-bagging’ from Mrs Thatcher. John Jones, Director General of the Security Service, was replaced by Anthony Duff. Whereas Jones was a career MI5 officer, Duff was a diplomat whom Mrs Thatcher had used to run the Joint Intelligence Committee, the intelligence steering group which is part of the Cabinet Office. Several other senior MI5 officers were forced into retirement, including the director of the branch which should have discovered Bettaney’s problems during its vetting interviews.
The service was reorganized under Duff, followed by another shake-up since his departure in 1987. The principle result of these changes, from the point of view of the Northern Ireland conflict, was a substantial increase, by the late 1980s, in the importance attached within MI5 to combating terrorism.
During Bettaney’s time at Stormont, F5 – the London-based section of the service which gathers intelligence on Irish terrorism – was simply a part of F Branch, MI5’s counter-subversion empire. In the mid 1980s the media paid considerable attention to F Branch, and in particular to its definition of ‘subversive’ – wide enough to encompass organizations like the National Council for Civil Liberties.
By the late 1980s counter-terrorism had been given its own branch which combined the activities of the old F5, F3 – which investigated other (mainly Middle Eastern) terrorist threats – and some sections of C Branch which was responsible for the security of MI5 and other sensitive government installations. The director of counter-terrorism was elevated to sit on MI5’s ‘board’ – a position of equal importance to that given, for example, to the director of counter-espionage.
Northern Ireland remained a separate operation, with the DCI also accorded the director-level privilege of sitting on MI5’s board. The job of DCI and director of counter-terrorism were considered to be of the same rank; and late in the 1980s the director of counter-terrorism was even transferred to Stormont to become the DCI.
The emergence of a powerful counter-terrorism branch in the Security Service and indeed of a considerable reduction in its counter-subversion staff were products of the post-Bettaney rethink and of the Service’s desire to redefine itself as tensions between East and West ebbed, following Mikhail Gorbachev’s assumption of power in 1985. In the process the Service was to interest itself in areas of counter-terrorism which, in the early 1980s, had been the province of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch and of various other intelligence and counter-intelligence bureaucracies in Europe, as we shall see in chapter thirteen.
11
Human Sources
The importance of t
he informer to the security establishment, which had been growing since the outset of the Troubles, reached its zenith in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It has never been in the interests either of the British government or the IRA to publicize the degree to which the republican heartlands are penetrated by informers. The security forces wish to protect individual sources and keep from the public eye the fact that the informer campaign requires unenviable moral judgements on the part of those in charge of intelligence. For the Provisionals the issue highlights the degree to which many people, even in the most deprived Catholic areas, despise them to the point of being willing to betray them.
Some security chiefs saw the entire campaign to isolate the IRA from the community in terms of the contest for informers. ‘The crucial line to be crossed’, says a senior Army officer, ‘is one where a passive acceptance in the Catholic community moves to a readiness to betray.’ The intelligence given ranges from a general call on the security forces confidential phoneline to readiness by comparatively senior IRA personnel to turn on their colleagues.
But the campaign to extract information from the republican heartlands sometimes flounders because of the strength of informers’ ties within the community. Very few informers are prepared to stand up in court, and thus identify themselves. Declaring oneself as a ‘tout’ invites assassination by the IRA and ensures the enmity of almost everybody one has grown up with and known. It also brings scorn and anger on the heads of relatives.
An informer’s handler must make difficult judgements about how the information is exploited, not the least of which is the duty to protect the source’s life. The IRA knows that the number of people aware of any forthcoming operation is limited. A decision may have to be taken to bring the informer out of the community, into protective custody and to a new life away from those seeking revenge. The close personal ties in the Catholic community mean that some informers who have been taken into protective custody cannot stand the isolation and take the decision to return, despite the considerable personal risk this involves.
Following the reorganization of the IRA into cells during the late 1970s the security forces stepped up their efforts to recruit informers. In 1980 this prompted the IRA to set up its own Security Department, tasked with hunting out the moles. The IRA Army Council was well aware that there was a growing war-weariness among nationalists and boosted political work by Sinn Fein to maintain the power base. At the same time, they realized coercive measures were needed to prevent people moving from weariness to betrayal.
Killing touts – ‘nutting’ them in IRA slang – had been going on for years. The first had been slain in 1971. However, from the late 1970s onwards the number increased. During 1979 to 1981 the IRA killed eight people for informing, seven of them members of its own units. This was more than the number of Provisionals killed by the police and Army (five) during the same period. In the ten years from 1978 to 1987 at least twenty-four informers or alleged informers were killed by the Provisionals – almost the same number of republican activists as were killed in Northern Ireland by the SAS during this period.
According to a number of journalists who have written about the subject, several of the murders followed the discovery by the IRA of an informer named Peter Valente, a volunteer and organizer of protests in support of the H-Block inmates. Valente told his SB handler that the IRA had an agent inside the RUC. Accounts of the policeman’s motives differ: some say he was selling the information for profit; others that he had taken an extraordinary personal decision to cultivate his own IRA informers as a means of convincing his superiors that he was suitable for acceptance into the SB.
The guilty police officer was arrested in October 1980. Valente and his handler came to the fatal conclusion that he could remain within the IRA. However, following a raid on a house in west Belfast, which police had, on a tip-off from Valente, believed was going to be used in a terrorist attack, the IRA set to work to find the source of the leak. They put the few people who had known of the operation under surveillance, and Valente was followed to a meeting with his handler. After interrogation Valente is said to have revealed the identity of others and four killings were reportedly connected with the IRA’s discovery that Valente was an informer. Maurice Gilvary, a member of the Ardoyne IRA – believed by some to have provided the tip-off which led to the SAS ambush in June 1978 at the Ballysillan postal depot – was killed in January 1981. Eugene Simmons, an IRA quartermaster, was shot dead in the same month in south Armagh. Paddy Trainor, another Belfast Brigade member, was killed in February 1981; and Vincent Robinson was killed in June of that year.
However, key facts about the IRA’s discovery of this block of informers remain unclear. Just how Valente knew the identity of the informers remains unclear, although it is thought that the treacherous RUC man may have given him the information. But how had the RUC man known who they were, given that the identity of informers is probably the most closely guarded secret in Ulster?
More importantly, why was there a gap of around a year between the supposed discovery that Valente was an informer and his own killing in November 1981? Perhaps he had been led to believe that his life would be spared if he delivered others: Gilvary, Simmons, Trainor and Robinson were all killed before Valente himself.
The discovery of several touts within the IRA and of the corrupt police officer were shameful enough to their respective organizations. It may be that the idea of linking separate events with Valente was part of a security forces disinformation ploy designed to obscure other errors on their part. The period in which the deaths took place coincided with the failed attempt by some middle-ranking Special Branch officers to gain control of Army agents.
This case is not the only one to have involved recruitment of agents within the security forces by the IRA. Some people close to the republican movement claim that there have been other instances where senior RUC men have provided information in return for promises from the IRA not to harm them. It is impossible to verify these claims but it is apparent that some police and prison officers have been threatened by the IRA and have sometimes agreed to allow the Provisionals special favours. Early in 1990 a prison officer was convicted of providing information to the IRA which was used to murder one of his colleagues. Although the Provisionals have succeeded in penetrating the RUC on occasions, the evidence suggests that the security forces have far more agents in the republican camp than the other way round.
Senior Provisionals were aware that killing informers might lose them support in the nationalist community and carrots were tried as well as sticks. In January 1982, for example, the IRA announced an amnesty by which informers were given a fortnight to turn themselves in. Articles appeared regularly in republican newspapers in an attempt to demonstrate that the organization was capable of forgiveness. A typical example in 1985 was headlined ‘Never Too Late’. It related how an unnamed man from the New Lodge had been working as an informer for the Army for several years. ‘When picked up he was usually taken to a number of “safe” houses or carparks in Holywood, Lisburn and Ballykinlar,’ the article said. Eventually the anonymous informer had been unable to stand the strain of his double existence. He had apparently told the paper, ‘I thought it was too late, I thought there was nothing I could do. Now I realize it’s never too late. You’re better coming forward.’
The offer of clemency applied only to those who confessed their treachery; the organization continued to kill other informers who had not come forward, often after lengthy interrogation. They were left, sometimes with a folded bank note in a pocket, without shoes and with masking tape over their eyes, and a bullet through the back of the head. Tape recordings were sometimes made of their confessions and played to relatives or others who complained about the punishment.
As well as killing touts, the IRA also carries out punishment attacks on petty criminals. During the 1970s hundreds of people were knee-capped. The aim is not simply to convince people that the Provisionals can provide an alternative system o
f justice on the estates; there is also a practical recognition of the fact that criminals are particularly susceptible to recruitment as informers by the security forces.
Informers are usually recruited in police stations or Army bases following arrests. Some inform out of hatred for the Provisionals while others within the organization have apparently used informing as a means of disposing of unwanted members. But most prospective touts range from the taxi driver stopped on a motoring charge to the IRA member caught with a gun. They are offered the chance to walk free in return for information. Most refuse to co-operate. Republicans claim that when such approaches fail, people are often blackmailed by the authorities. They could be threatened, for example, that if they do not become informers the IRA will be told that they are indeed ‘touts’.
Those who have been involved in attempts to recruit ‘human sources’ confirm that the techniques used to persuade people often are unscrupulous. Sometimes information gained by surveillance teams can be employed as a means of coercion. An Army intelligence officer relates that on one occasion an IRA member was shown photographs of his wife committing adultery with his ASU commander. But the basis for recruitment ‘is usually blackmail’, says an intelligence officer.
By the late 1970s, this had become so widely known as the standard method of recruitment that anybody who had gone free after an arrest was liable to fall under suspicion within republican communities – it became common for people to announce the fact that they had been approached by the police while in custody in the pages of nationalist newspapers as a means of trying to dispel suspicion about themselves. During the 1980s agent-recruiters refined their methods, putting more time into targeting suitable people and more ingenuity into setting up a situation in which an approach could be made.
