The British Spy War with the Irish Republican Army
The British Spy War with the Irish Republican Army
During “The Troubles”—the long struggle of the British state against the terrorist-revolutionaries of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland—the military component was obvious: the British Army was deployed in 1969 under Operation BANNER, which lasted formally until 2007. What has only become clear more recently is the shadow war waged in parallel by British intelligence, specifically the Security Service (MI5), and just how successful it was.
THE CASE OF ‘INFLICTION’
As mentioned in recent post, one British agent within the IRA, codenamed INFLICTION, became a slightly sensational part of the Saville Inquiry, the investigation into the “Bloody Sunday” episode in Londonderry on 30 January 1972 that concluded in 2010. INFLICTION attracted so much media and other attention for two reasons. First, because of the elaborate security procedures the Inquiry adopted to keep the agent’s identity hidden. Many witnesses were able to testify to the Inquiry with their anonymity preserved in various ways; this was considered too risky with INFLICTION. And second, because of the contents of the evidence that INFLICTION contributed.
The INFLICTION evidence was recorded in 1984 and relates to the activities of Martin McGuinness on “Bloody Sunday”. McGuinness was one of the most senior IRA officials in Londonderry in January 1972 and by 1976, aged just 26, he was a member of the Provisional IRA (PIRA) executive committee, the Army Council. McGuiness, eventually, testified to the Inquiry in 2002. By that time, McGuinness had been the lead negotiator for “Sinn Fein”—the IRA’s political front—in concluding the Belfast Agreement (or “Good Friday Agreement”) in April 1998, which was put to a referendum in Northern Ireland the next month, and under its terms he had become a leading member of the Northern Irish government.
An intelligence summary after an April 1984 meeting between INFLICTION and “Officer A” of MI5 reads:
Martin MCGUINNESS had admitted to INFLICTION that he had personally fired the shot (from a Thompson machine gun on “single shot”) from the Rossvill [sic] flats in Bogside that had precipitated the “Bloody Sunday” episode.
In November 1984, INFLICTION told Security Service “Officer B” that “one thing that bothers McGuinness is, er, the Bloody Sunday thing, that he fired the first shot, which no one knows”. INFLICTION said McGuinness had “talked to me a few times about it” and felt guilty about it. Fascinatingly, the “conversation between the two of them [INFLICTION and ‘Officer B’] was taped [italics added]”, meaning that somewhere in the British archives there is a recording of INFLICTION speaking.
INFLICTION’s position within the IRA was kept deliberately vague for obvious reasons, though the Inquiry did disclose that INFLICTION “knew Martin McGuinness quite well and was friendly with him”. Since INFLICTION could not appear at the Inquiry for security reasons, his credibility had to be assessed indirectly, by interviewing his handlers. The Inquiry notes:
Officer A said that he could not think of any credible reason for INFLICTION to lie to him when providing the information about Bloody Sunday. INFLICTION did not seek and was not given any additional payment for the information. INFLICTION, as far as Officer A was aware, did not dislike or resent Martin McGuinness.
“Officer A” noted that while “INFLICTION’s reliability was not fully assessed in April 1984”, in the early 1990s “INFLICTION’s reporting was reassessed … in order that the Security Service could check whether there was information of value that had not been fully exploited”, and the conclusion of “the people … in the service who were knowledgeable about the entirety of INFLICTION’s reporting” was “that INFLICTION’s reporting was, with the benefit of hindsight, reliable.” Other intelligence officers who had more fleeting contact with INFLICTION reported dealing with cases where his information was verified.
Another source, “X”, recalled that “the first shot he heard [on ‘Bloody Sunday’] was the thud of a Thompson and [he] was convinced the IRA had fired first that day”, and believed it was part of a plan “to attack the Army to draw them into the [Rossville Flats] area and then fall back leaving the soldiers vulnerable to sniper fire”. (“X” was warned to keep quiet about this and responded: “Why? It was their [the IRA’s] fault [but] the Army are being blamed”.)
The Inquiry concluded: “we consider it likely that Martin McGuinness was armed with a Thompson sub-machine gun on Bloody Sunday and we cannot eliminate the possibility that he fired this weapon after the soldiers had come into the Bogside”. McGuinness’ shot is reported to have come from the upper floors of the Rossville Flats; it was in the car park below where many of the killings took place on “Bloody Sunday”.
Three PIRA officials told the Saville Inquiry that “riots were regular occurrences and were used to provide cover for civilian snipers”. The British had received a lot of information ahead of the 30 January 1972 march in Londonderry that the IRA was planning to use the riots that were expected to follow the march to draw British troops into a dangerous gun battle in a densely-populated civilian area. A specific warning three days before said events “might well develop into rioting and even a shooting war”. “Observer B” said he had witnessed “IRA auxiliaries drilling in the area of Rossville Street” days before “Bloody Sunday”, “a process which included concealing themselves on the landings of Block 2”. “INQ 2241”, a former military-intelligence officer for Northern Ireland, told the Inquiry that the IRA’s standard operating procedures (SOPs) were “to use disturbances as cover for its activities. The real surprise would have been if they had not followed these SOPs.”
The Saville Inquiry recorded substantial evidence of an armed IRA presence in the Bogside area on “Bloody Sunday”, and that these terrorists fired shots at British soldiers during the ten minutes when most of the killings occurred. It is, further, clear that the Official IRA (OIRA) fired a shot at British soldiers fifteen minutes before the killings at the Rossville Flats and the Glenfada Park across the road, a shot which significantly altered the Paratroopers’ sense of what they were walking into. There are other witnesses, like Monica Barr, who report seeing IRA operatives firing down from the Rossville balconies, and the Inquiry was in no doubt that an OIRA operative at ground level fired three shots at British troops in the Rossville car park during the critical period.
For all that this complicates the narrative over “Bloody Sunday”, the Inquiry ultimately found that the IRA shootings were not the cause of the Paras losing their self-control and McGuinness was “mistaken” in his belief that his shot precipitated the disaster in the Bogside.
At one point INFLICTION said in the 1984 interviews, “How many people know [McGuinness believes he caused ‘Bloody Sunday’]?” and the answer is surely: not many. It does not seem like the kind of thing McGuinness would have shared around. In his book, Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies, and the Saville Inquiry, Douglas Murray points out that, for this reason, it is very likely McGuinness knows who INFLICTION is, and gives a run-down of the options from the available evidence.
INFLICTION could be a woman, which would partly explain why the tape had to be prevented from being played at the Saville Inquiry, or it could be a priest, which would explain why McGuinness had talked to INFLICTION about feelings of guilt.
It is also possible that McGuinness and his supporters are correct and that INFLICTION is a whole-cloth British fabrication, though even if that were so it is not necessarily true in the way the IRA suggests. McGuinness, of course, says INFLICTION has been invented to implicate him—and absolve the British—for the “Bloody Sunday” catastrophe. There is an alternative explanation. The British, having decided to hand McGuinness power in one of Her Majesty’s provinces, had to deal with the fact that there were some ultras in the PIRA who could not see the scale of their victory and viewed McGuinness as a sell-out: fabricating a document that made it appear that there was an effort from London to fabricate evidence to smear McGuiness gave him credibility with these ultras, and kept the majority of them under McGuiness’ control. In other words, the British might have fabricated INFLICTION to help McGuinness. This kind of double bluff might seem outlandish or conspiratorial, but such active measures are standard fare in the world of espionage.
There is a final possibility, visible once it is seen that the British—however deludedly—had come to see their interests as in alignment with McGuinness’, and that is simply that INFLICTION is McGuinness.
Unlike most of the senior PIRA officials, McGuinness never spent much time in jail: he went to prison just twice, both times early on (1973 and 1974) and very briefly—and the main effect of these imprisonments was to raise his status within the Republican movement. Indeed, McGuinness’ rise within the ranks of the PIRA was startlingly rapid and he remained at the top of the organisation for an unusually long time, without any serious challenge. There are curious reports that British soldiers sent to thwart PIRA operations in which McGuinness might be present were instructed that “he was under no circumstances to be shot”.
Then there is the fact that McGuiness has never been accused in court of connections to any specific murder, again an oddity among senior PIRA officials. Even Gerry Adams, who absurdly denies he was ever a member of the PIRA, has been publicly accused in the case of Jean McConville. The nearest McGuinness ever came to being accused was by a television program for ITV, The Cook Report, in 1993, which did an excellent job of taking apart the nonsensical claim that there is a distinction between Sinn Fein and the IRA, and found witnesses who testified about McGuinness’ involvement in terrorism and targeted murders, specifically of Frank Hegarty, an alleged British informer, shot in 1986. The program triggered a legal investigation in Britain—which the John Major government swiftly suppressed so it could engage in the “peace process” that Tony Blair completed.
There have been rumours for a long time that there was another British agent at the top of PIRA’s command structure who remains to be exposed. McGuinness being INFLICTION would tie up that thread.
OTHER AGENTS
One “former high-ranking intelligence officer” described Britain’s intelligence approach in Northern Ireland as having three prongs: (1) the infiltration of agents into the IRA and its political fronts; (2) the turning of IRA operatives; and (3) the use of regular patrols, surveillance, and police work. Far and away the largest proportion of the work was (3), carried out by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). The purpose of the multiple streams of intelligence was to enable cross-checking of information as the British built up a picture of the IRA’s network and command structure. The intention then, in the immediate term, was to prevent terrorist atrocities, and over the long term to strategically incapacitate the organisation, which could be done in multiple ways, such as destabilising it by exacerbating personal and political tensions, sowing distrust and paranoia, and eliminating competent terrorists and facilitating the promotion of lesser men and, if possible, agents.
In Aaron Edwards’s book, Agents of Influence: Britain’s Secret Intelligence War Against the IRA, he notes the statement of an RUC Special Branch officer explaining how this all fits together:
[It is] an “intelligence pyramid”, with uniformed Security Forces at the bottom and “two-legged agents” [in categories (1) and (2)] at the top. Such agents may have been at the forefront of Britain’s secret war against the IRA, but the intelligence they provided was only useful when all the cogs of the counterterrorism machinery operated in sync.
An example of somebody in category (1) was Willie Carlin, known by the codename 3007, who has recently written his own book, Thatcher’s Spy: My Life as an MI5 Agent Inside Sinn Féin. Carlin is a distant relative of Martin McGuinness’ and was from within the “Five Families” that dominated the militant Republican scene in Londonderry. When the MI5 officer pitched Carlin, who had been a soldier, in 1974, it was specifically for work in the “political” section of the IRA, in Sinn Fein, not among the frontline terrorists. Carlin believes he helped steer the IRA towards “peace”, which is open to question on multiple levels. Nonetheless, Carlin, as one the IRA’s key money men, was able to manipulate events to a degree, and provided political intelligence that was very helpful to London in assessing the IRA’s strategic direction and its decision-making processes until his exposure in 1985.
An intriguing detail from Carlin is his claim to have seen McGuinness at an MI5 safehouse and later to have seen McGuinness in a car talking with an MI5 officer. Carlin does not believe McGuinness was an MI5 agent, or not consciously. Rather, Carlin thinks MI5 had seen the utility of McGuinness relatively early on and worked to assist in McGuinness’ promotion within the IRA. It has been public knowledge for some time that McGuinness had been in contact with Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) officer Michael Oatley in 1991, as the Soviet Union entered its terminal phase, in “back-channel” communications that initiated the so-called “peace process”, but the communications Carlin is referring to were a decade and more earlier.
The British have not always kept their compact with their former agents very well. Eamon Collins, an MI5 spy who had worked for the PIRA’s internal security bodies, had his cover blown in the mid-1980s and became a semi-public figure in 1997 after the publication of his book, Killing Rage. Just over a year later, in January 1999, Collins was hideously butchered by the PIRA, his face stabbed and slashed more than twenty times “as an act of revenge and to prevent an open coffin at the wake”. Five months later, Martin McGartland (CAROL), another former British spy within the PIRA (author of Fifty Dead Men Walking), was shot multiple times after repeatedly complaining that his security needs were not being taken seriously; thankfully he survived.
Denis Donaldson was not as lucky as McGartland. In December 2005, it emerged that Donaldson, one of Gerry Adams’ most trusted aides and a senior Sinn Fein official, had been an RUC and then MI5 agent for the preceding two decades. In April 2006, Donaldson was murdered in Donegal in the Republic of Ireland. Evidence later emerged of what was never in doubt: Adams ordered the hit, and the fact that the “Real IRA” claimed the assassination in 2009 only underlines how ludicrous it is to pretend these “dissident” factions are independent of the PIRA/Sinn Fein; they are kept around as “deniable” instruments for the ostensibly decommissioned PIRA to carry out its wetwork, on the model of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) use of “Black September”.
(Not incidentally, the PLO, acting as wardens of the terrorist menagerie the KGB set up in 1980s Lebanon, an ecosystem overseen by the Soviets’ Syrian ally, provided various forms of support, including training, to the PIRA, and it was in this environment the PIRA established its connections with the Iranian theocracy.)
It was a considerable embarrassment to the PIRA/Sinn Fein when it was revealed, in 2008, that Roy McShane, Gerry Adams’ driver and part of Adams’ security team, had been a British agent for more than a decade. As the Guardian noted at the time, this was “an indication of the depths to which the security forces penetrated the organisation in the latter years of the Troubles.”
The most impressive person we know of who worked to destroy the PIRA from within was Sean O’Callaghan, who joined the organisation as a teenager and in 1974, at 19-years-of-age, participated in a rocket attack on the base of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), which killed a female soldier, Eva Martin, and three months later O’Callaghan walked into a pub and shot dead a member of the RUC Special Branch, Peter Flanagan, a Catholic who had broken out of the sectarian straight-jacket in Ulster to join the police. Within a year, however, O’Callaghan had seen through the PIRA and quit. The final straw was when he was watching a television report on the murder of a policewoman in Bangor and Kevin McKenna, then a senior official in the Tyrone/Monaghan Brigade and later the PIRA Chief of Staff (1983-97), said, “Maybe she was pregnant and we got two for the price of one”.
In 1979, O’Callaghan re-joined the PIRA as an agent of the Gardai, the Republic of Ireland’s security service, which coordinated reasonably well with the British. O’Callaghan rose to become commander of PIRA’s Southern Command and a member of Sinn Fein’s ruling council. Among the terrorist plots O’Callaghan helped to thwart was a July 1983 attempt to murder the Prince of Wales and Princess Diana. O’Callaghan gave the intelligence for the British to intercept weapons shipments to the PIRA from the United States, and was involved in exposing the arms pipeline from Libya’s Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi—who acted as another cut-out for the Soviet Union—to the PIRA, specifically the role of Thomas Murphy (a.k.a. “Slab”) in organising this. With the IRA closing in on O’Callaghan, and being somewhat disillusioned, especially after one of his colleagues was killed because of the Gardai’s carelessness, O’Callaghan turned himself in to British police in 1988, confessing to the murders of Ms. Martin and Flanagan, and forty other crimes; he was given a sentence of 539 years in prison.
O’Callaghan was given a Royal pardon in 1997, and was convinced to write a memoir, which came out the next year as The Informer. O’Callaghan threw himself into making the “peace process” work and over the next twenty years, until his death in 2017, O’Callaghan worked to publicise the reality of the PIRA and the combat the ideology that had drawn him into this movement.
Given that the IRA is a clandestine organisation and intelligence operations are not exactly publicly advertised, there are some murky, if suggestive cases.
In November 1981, Robert Bradford, an Ulster Unionist MP, Methodist minister, and member of the Orange Lodge, was shot dead by the IRA during a political surgery, after they had murdered, execution-style, Kenneth Campbell, a 29-year-old Protestant who was working as the caretaker at the Finaghy Community Centre where Bradford was hosting the event. Bradford was the only MP murdered in Northern Ireland during “The Troubles”. (The other three MPs assassinated by the IRA were killed in England: Airey Neave in London in 1979, Sir Anthony Berry in Brighton during the bombing that nearly murdered Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984, and Ian Gow in Sussex in 1990.)
There was never any doubt that the PIRA’s General Headquarters (GHQ) had organised the murder of Bradford and nor did there seem to be much question about the men holding the guns. John Haughey, sometimes called Joe Haughey or Joe Buck, and often known as “The Hawk”, had not bothered to disguise himself when he went into a room of people with a Thompson sub-machine gun and shot Bradford. A known PIRA hitman, Haughey’s fingerprints were found on the weapon, and his fingerprints were already on record after an arrest in 1972 for armed robbery and illegal weapons’ possession. But nothing happened. It is, of course, possible that this was a case of gross incompetence, but there is the curious question of Haughey (allegedly) being related by marriage to an Ulster Defence Association (UDA) commander. Why the British would allow one of their agents to engage in murder is an issue we will get to.
HOW SPY WARS END
Another man around whom suspicion lingers is John Joe Magee. Magee was born in 1929, served in the Royal Marines and was a member of the Special Boat Service (SBS), before joining the Provisionals in the 1970s. Magee, regarded as one of the “originals” within the PIRA, died in 2002. The important thing about Magee is that from some time in the mid-1980s until around the time of the Belfast Agreement, he was the head of the Internal Security Unit (ISU), universally known as the “Nutting Squad”, which is to say the PIRA’s counter-intelligence division, charged with detecting informants within the organisation. The ISU is, as Aaron Edwards so well phrases it, “the IRA’s very own Gestapo”.
For PIRA members who had been “Green Booked”—i.e. formally recruited (the Green Book is the PIRA training manual)—and were then found to have betrayed the organisation, the sentence was death, and at least seventy-one people suffered this fate. For the PIRA, as the Donaldson case among others shows, there is no statute of limitations on this. Everyone who has been revealed as a British spy since “The Troubles” supposedly ended remains under a death sentence and has to live with extreme security precautions in place.
Edwards describes the almost-ritualised process the ISU went through with suspected informants (or “touts”), who were invariably tortured—for information about their collaborators, British methods, and so on—and then shot in the back of the head. This was usually done “within a fifteen-mile radius” of Magee’s home in Dundalk, near the scenic Cooley Peninsula. Edwards notes: “Magee’s squad liked to abduct suspected informers in Northern Ireland and take them over the border to Omeath in County Louth, which had long been a safe haven for the IRA and the launch pad for its massacre at Narrow Water on 27 August 1979.”
The acronym “MICE” is often used to describe the motivations for spies, standing for: “Money, Ideology, Compromise/Coercion, and Ego”. Magee clearly took this to heart, and, ever a stickler for rules and regulations, swore by the PIRA’s Green Book as the antidote, wherein recruits were told that “[n]o members should succumb to approaches or overtures, blackmail or bribery attempts, made by the enemy and should report such approaches as soon as possible”.
It is, therefore, significant that as early as 1977 a member of the Army Council, probably Billy McKee, recommended killing Magee for breaches of the Provos’ codes—in that case, running a private brothel. Anthony McIntyre, a convicted murderer and a genuinely former PIRA member, one of the zealots who could not take “yes” for answer, relates to Edwards a conversation he had in prison in 1986 with Brendan Hughes, the PIRA officer commanding of the Belfast division, who died in 2008. (It was a posthumously-released audio recording of Hughes that pointed to Gerry Adams as the man who gave the order for Jean McConville’s murder.)
McIntyre told Hughes he was convinced there were moles in the PIRA, specifically in the ISU, and his reasoning was sound:
[They] are in position for a long time. They don’t go to jail and they would be a great asset to have for the British. … They knew who were coming into the IRA because they had to give them security clearance. They had to go in and investigate IRA operations that went wrong and, of course, in investigating IRA operations that went wrong, they would have known who were doing the operations.
Hughes says bluntly: “There was a major problem with informants” by the late 1980s. The IRA had “always had a problem with informers”, Hughes notes, especially at the lower levels, but by the late Thatcher years there was an obvious problem with high-level treachery in the IRA and “there was an awful sense of mistrust”.
Whether Magee was one of the PIRA’s high-level turncoats, there is no doubt about his deputy in the ISU and one of the most senior PIRA officials since 1980, Freddie Scappaticci (STAKEKNIFE). When Scappaticci was unmasked in 2003, it created a scandal and raised moral questions that have plagued the “second-oldest profession” since the dawn of the human species. Scappaticci unquestionably saved countless lives, by crippling the PIRA’s ability to carry out terrorist operations, and getting other agents (and suspected agents)—including Carlin—to safety when the PIRA planned to kill them. At the same time, to maintain his cover, Scappaticci was allowed by his handlers to oversee or participate in dozens of murders—some counts say as many as fifty.
A utilitarian moral argument would find Scappaticci saved more lives than he ended, and he certainly served the British national interest, preventing multiple massacres of British subjects and assisting not only in the military but the political aspect of the war against the IRA (Scappaticci was involved in The Cook Report, for example). In a law-based society, though, “murder is murder is murder”, as Mrs. Thatcher once said. This fact caught up with Scappaticci in January 2018, when he was arrested “in connection with the investigation into allegations of murder, kidnap and torture”. The bitterness that some felt over this was that it was part of Operation KENOVA, which was investigating alleged crimes by the RUC, while the terms of the Belfast Agreement released proven IRA murderers and de facto ended all potential future investigations into Republican criminality.
Scappaticci—who, it probably should be noted, denies he is STAKEKNIFE—was convicted of “extreme” (animal, not child) pornography charges in 2018, after his computers were seized as part of the investigation, and continues to face lawsuits on multiple fronts from victims’ families, as he probably will until his dying day.
Whatever the moral and legal judgments one makes about Scappaticci, the capture of the enemy’s counter-intelligence system is what victory looks like in a spy war. When the KGB’s predecessor managed, in 1944, to install Kim Philby as head of Britain’s Section IX, the counter-intelligence division focused on the Soviet Union, Moscow was able to turn British intelligence inside-out. Attempted Soviet defectors like Konstantin Volkov who could do political and practical damage to the Revolution were intercepted and fed to Moscow Centre; enemy actions against the Soviets, like the early “rollback” efforts behind the Iron Curtain, were thwarted, with hundreds of men killed; and the information stream throughout the Anglosphere was hopelessly polluted, diverting attention away from what the Soviets wanted unseen and fabricating that which the Soviets wanted their enemies to believe. So it was for the IRA.
By the late 1980s, “penetration of the IRA had reached a peak”, as Edwards documents. “Many operations had to be cancelled or aborted, even while in motion”. MI5 was able to thwart “a series of well-planned” IRA bombings in London in the 1990s; that these atrocities were planned at a time when the Major government was engaging with the IRA on the “peace process” (and suppressing the evidence against McGuinness) tells its own story. After all the mistakes, after all the moral compromises, after all the sacrifices—by British troops, the RUC, and the agents who risked their lives day after day knowing that one slip-up would result in torture and murder—the IRA had been rendered effectively operationally incapable. The question this leaves is why Britain, after this tremendous cost and from this position of strength, then signed the Belfast Agreement, which gave the IRA/Sinn Fein everything it wanted.