The Defence of the Realm (115 page)

One further element of confusion in the organization of British counter-terrorism was the fact that, though the Security Service did not have the lead role in countering PIRA mainland attacks, it had the main responsibility for devising protective-security measures against them.
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The counter-sabotage section of the Service had long had a remit to advise on the protection of military ‘key points' in the UK in time of international tension and war.
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Fear that the IRA might extend its bombing campaign to mainland Britain prompted the C Branch counter-sabotage section on 30 March 1971 to propose to MPSB that the list of ‘key points' be extended to include potential non-military terrorist targets which were of ‘vital importance to the economy'. When MPSB showed no interest in the idea, the section
took it up with the chairman of the Key Points Sub-Committee of the Official Committee on Terrorism, who was equally unresponsive.
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The DG then raised the issue with the PUS at the Home Office, Sir Philip Allen. In 1972 the Home Office agreed to support the compilation of a list of what later became known as ‘Economic Key Points' (EKPs) which required special protection.
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Due to what the Security Service considered Home Office procrastination, no action to begin assembling the list was taken for several years.
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At the beginning of 1972, despite continuing confusion in the organization of intelligence in Northern Ireland, both the RUC and the army were still optimistic that Republican terrorism in all its manifestations could be defeated.
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Most of that optimism evaporated during a Derry civil rights rally on what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday', 30 January. The rally led to riots in which part of the crowd tried to climb over a street barrier and were forced back by rubber bullets and water cannon. More than a hundred youths engaged in a running battle, hurling stones and iron bars at soldiers of the Parachute Regiment. Then the shooting began. Major General Robert Ford, Commander of Land Forces, insisted that ‘There is absolutely no doubt that the Parachute Battalion opened up only after they were fired on.' Nationalists were convinced that, on the contrary, the British soldiers were guilty of premeditated murder. Thirteen men (all apparently unarmed) were shot dead by the Parachute Regiment; eighteen more were wounded, one of whom died later. According to the
Irish Press
on 31 January 1972, ‘If there was an able-bodied man with Republican sympathies within the Derry area who was not in the IRA before yesterday's butchery there will be none tonight.'
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On 2 February, after a series of anti-British demonstrations in Dublin, the British embassy was burned down.

On 22 February 1972 Republican terrorism spread to the British mainland for the first time since the IRA attacks of 1938–9. A bomb planted by the Official IRA in the HQ of the Parachute Regiment at Aldershot, in revenge for Bloody Sunday, missed its target and, instead of blowing up paras, killed five cleaners, an army chaplain and a gardener. The Aldershot killings marked the beginning of a Republican bombing campaign on the mainland which was to continue intermittently for the next quartercentury. On 24 March, following two serious terrorist attacks in Belfast, Heath announced the suspension of the Stormont government when it refused to surrender voluntarily control of law and order to London. In its place a secretary of state for Northern Ireland (SOSNI), initially Willie Whitelaw, assisted by junior ministers, took over the functions of the Unionist government which had ruled at Stormont for the past half-century.
In response to the urgent request of the PUS in the newly established Northern Ireland Office (NIO), Sir William Neild, for more intelligence from the Province,
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an Irish Joint Section (IJS) was established by MI5 and SIS with jointly staffed offices in Belfast and London.
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The fact that SIS had a larger role than the Security Service in running the IJS during the early years of direct rule from London reflected not an ambition to encroach on MI5 responsibilities within the UK but the Security Service's own lack of readiness for a major role in Northern Ireland. One of the Service officers posted to Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s contrasted his own Service, which as yet lacked experience of conducting operations in hostile territory, unfavourably with SIS.
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Though many MI5 staff had experience of working in Africa, Asia and/or the West Indies, Ulster still seemed more alien territory than outposts of Empire thousands of miles away. The story was told of an air stewardess who, before landing at Belfast's Aldergrove Airport, advised passengers to put their watches back 300 years. The unreadiness of the Security Service for Northern Irish responsibilities at the beginning of direct rule was graphically demonstrated when Whitelaw established the post of director and co-ordinator of intelligence (DCI) in Belfast to act as both his personal security adviser and his main link with the senior army general and the RUC Chief Constable. Though the post was offered to the Security Service, no one of sufficient seniority was willing to fill it. The first DCI, appointed on 31 October, thus came from outside MI5. His Security Service successor remembers him as ‘the right man really to establish the post': ‘He was there for a year and he did it in tremendous style . . . He lived like a king, he entertained like a king, he used to drink with Willie [Whitelaw] all night.'
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As Director F from 1972 to 1974, with responsibility for counterterrorism as well as counter-subversion, John Jones showed no desire to expand the Service's role in Northern Ireland. While on the Irish desk, a former Security Service officer recalls that he ‘never had one conversation with Jones about Ireland in my whole time'.
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The title ‘Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence', held by Security Service officers from 1973, was a partial misnomer. DCIs never directed intelligence operations in Northern Ireland. Their main function was intelligence liaison and coordination,
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which in the early 1970s were difficult and sometimes thankless tasks. At the end of 1973, after two years' work on the Irish desk and the Irish Current Intelligence Group on the JIC, an F5 officer gave ‘a somewhat sanguine forecast that it is possible that in due course the Provisionals, already badly mauled, will cease-fire, that the Army will be partly withdrawn from Northern Ireland and will diminish its intelligence effort':

We, and indeed the southern Irish also, regard [the Official IRA] as a greater long-term threat to UK and the Republic than the Provisionals, chiefly because of its greater political sophistication, its Marxist orientation, and its links abroad.
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In fact the Official IRA, which in May 1972 had declared what became a permanent ceasefire, rapidly lost influence to PIRA.

Despite its secondary role in countering Republican attacks in Britain, the Security Service had the lead intelligence role in monitoring Republican activities outside the UK, in particular the crucial issue of arms procurement. Unlike the Official IRA, which in 1972 received undetected arms shipments from the KGB, the Provisionals failed in a series of attempts in 1972–3 to smuggle arms from Europe.
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PIRA's most willing potential supplier was Colonel Qaddafi of Libya, whom the veteran Republican and PIRA chief of staff Joe Cahill found possessed of ‘an awful hatred of England': ‘[He] said he did not understand why we did not speak in Irish, and why did we speak in English, the language of our enemies?'
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In August 1972 MPSB discovered that the freighter
Elbstrand
, soon to be renamed the
Claudia
, was involved in smuggling weapons to Ireland. For the next seven months the vessel was kept under intelligence surveillance. Cahill himself took part in chartering the
Claudia
for a first arms shipment from Libya in March 1973.F5 later ‘speculated', almost certainly correctly, that Cahill and Dáithi Ó Conaill ‘personally supervised the negotiations [with Qaddafi] and the shipment itself to ensure that it did not go wrong'. Colonel Qaddafi was believed to have offered PIRA as many arms as it could carry away.
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The Security Service was not informed of the surveillance of the
Claudia
until 26 March when F Branch received a hand-delivered copy from the FCO of an urgent telegram sent three days earlier by the Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, to the British ambassador in Dublin, informing him that intelligence reports over the past twenty-four hours indicated:

that the Claudia left North Africa a few days ago carrying up to 100 tons of small arms and explosives reported to have been provided free by the Libyans for delivery to the IRA in the Republic. At least one senior member of the IRA is believed to be on board. The ship is due to rendezvous with two Irish fishing trawlers off the coast between Dungarvan and Waterford . . .

Claudia is to be located and kept under discreet surveillance by British maritime forces. The latter will not repeat not attempt to intercept or board on the high seas, nor take any action in the final stages which would infringe Irish sovereignty. The primary purpose of the surveillance operation is to establish beyond all reasonable doubt that Claudia is proceeding to the rendezvous. We consider that interception of this arms shipment should be a matter for the Irish government . . .

You should take urgent steps to inform [the Taoiseach, the Irish Prime Minister] Mr Cosgrave of the above . . .
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Since the Security Service was responsible for collating intelligence on Republicans' foreign arms procurement, F Branch reacted with understandable indignation to the discovery that it had previously been kept in the dark over surveillance of the
Claudia
. ‘This mistake', minuted a probably furious head of section, ‘must not be made again.'
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His point appears to have been taken.

During the voyage from Tripoli neither Joe Cahill nor the other PIRA members on board the
Claudia
suspected that they were being tracked by a British surveillance operation.
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When they were intercepted by the Irish navy off the coast of County Waterford on 28 March, there was, according to a report from the British embassy in Dublin, ‘apparently complete surprise and consternation amongst those on
Claudia
when the boarding party came alongside'.
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Cahill, who was in the ship's galley, later recalled being unaware even that the
Claudia
had been boarded until he felt a gun muzzle pressed against his temple and heard a young Irish navy officer say, ‘Don't move.' Five tons of arms, ammunition and explosives were discovered in the hold – far less than had been expected. Intelligence reports that the Libyans had originally intended to supply much more were, however, correct. Qaddafi had been deterred by poor PIRA security and had scaled down the shipment.
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If the 5 tons had got through safely, they would no doubt have been quickly followed by more and larger consignments. The capture of the
Claudia
was thus of major significance in limiting PIRA's ability to expand its operations.
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When large-scale arms smuggling from Libya began in 1985, it was to transform the Provisionals' operational capability.
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During 1973 PIRA seemed to be losing ground in Northern Ireland. Despite angry protests by the Provisionals and Sinn Fein, Willie Whitelaw succeeded in drawing the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) into power-sharing negotiations. In November 1973 the Official Unionist Party, the SDLP and the small Alliance Party agreed on setting up a power-sharing executive to restore power at Stormont and end direct rule from London. The framework of the new Executive was set out a month later in the Sunningdale agreement between the three parties and the British and Irish governments. Many Unionists, however, were almost as suspicious of Sunningdale as the Provisionals were. The new Executive lacked popular support from the moment it took office on New Year's Day 1974. In the general election to the Westminster parliament at the end
of February the pro-Sunningdale Unionists were routed by the hardliners. What finally brought the Executive down was the Ulster Workers Council (UWC), founded by Unionist trade unionists who controlled most of the key services in Northern Ireland, with the backing of the Loyalist paramilitaries. A combination of telechecks and local Special Branch reports on the paramilitaries' Merseyside supporters, from whom the UWC attempted to drum up support, provided advance warning of UWC plans before it called a general strike on 14 May.
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A State of Emergency was declared on the 19th. Good intelligence made little difference to the outcome. Though 2,000 British troops were flown in to help run the power stations and deal with the Emergency, it was clear that power had passed from the Executive to the UWC. ‘This', concluded Merlyn Rees, SOSNI in the final Wilson government, ‘was the Protestant people of Northern Ireland rising up against Sunningdale.' On 28 May the power-sharing Executive resigned and Northern Ireland returned to direct rule from London.
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Though PIRA's violence continued to be concentrated in Northern Ireland, in February 1974 it made its first lethal attack on a British mainland target, planting a 50-pound bomb on a coach carrying soldiers to Catterick Military Camp, which exploded on the M62 killing nine soldiers, one civilian and two children. The lack of intelligence on PIRA operational planning made the Irish Joint Section pessimistic about the prospects for countering the mainland bombing campaign.
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The 1974 campaign cost more lives in Britain than any other in the history of the Troubles. The forty-four deaths (twenty-nine civilians, fourteen members of the security forces and one PIRA bomber blown up by his own bomb) accounted for 38 per cent of those killed in England during the entire period from 1973 to 1997. A majority of the civilian deaths took place on a single day, 21 November 1974, when PIRA bombs in two Birmingham pubs killed nineteen people and wounded 182 (two of whom died later from their injuries). The Security Service's credibility with the RUC was enhanced by a PIRA bomb attack on the home of the Service representative at RUC headquarters. After a farewell dinner at his home on 5 January 1975 for a departing colleague, attended by army and police officers, a brigadier pointed to a plastic bag outside the house and, with a feeble attempt at humour, called to his host: ‘I see someone has left you a bomb!' The officer thought it more likely that the bag contained his wife's shopping or a salmon from a friend. On closer inspection, he discovered that the contents consisted of five sticks of gelignite and a timer which had run its course but failed to detonate the explosive. Thereafter he had the impression that the RUC considered him ‘one of us'.
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