•It is beyond credible denial that the security forces had vast intelligence on the IRA. Yet by 2001, senior officials were producing acres of paper guessing what the IRA is up to. This doesn’t immediately add up
Sam McBride
When Government files are declassified, journalists and historians scour them for what is new. But sometimes what they don’t say is itself revelatory.
By the early 2000s, the very top of Government was producing vast volumes of paperwork on Northern Ireland, much of it highly confidential.
In 10 Downing Street alone, for years prior to and after the Good Friday Agreement there was intense focus on Northern Ireland. Far from these Conservative and Labour administrations not caring about Northern Ireland – as nationalists (often) and unionists (sometimes) believe – this demonstrates immense focus at the heart of the Government machine.
By the late 1990s, and for years into the early 2000s, in Downing Street a new file on Northern Ireland – typically running to about 200 pages – was being produced every couple of weeks. On top of that were far larger volumes of paperwork in the Northern Ireland Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and elsewhere.
But after reading through thousands of pages from these files over the last few years, there’s an increasingly stark conundrum.
It is now widely accepted that the Provisional IRA was riddled with informers, from top (or almost the top) to bottom. Freddie Scappaticci personifies the success of this operation from Britain’s strategic perspective: Here the hated Brits had managed to get a top IRA man to not only give them information, but he was actually slaughtering his own colleagues.
Setting aside for now the many ethical and legal problems this entailed for the UK, it was utterly calamitous for the IRA.
He was far from alone. When the IRA pulled off an audacious break-in at RUC Special Branch’s Castlereagh headquarters in 2002, they secured important information.
Various sources say that there was no list of names of informants which was lost, but there was information which might have been used to point to an individual being an informant.
Yet in the wake of that vast security compromise, there wasn’t a slew of murders or the exiling of multiple republicans.
When BBC Spotlight examined this in 2019, the programme reported that both security and republican sources had told it that the Castlereagh break-in exposed so many agents that it “posed an impossible question: How could they kill them all?”
Secret military documents indicate murdered army officer was meeting informer when abducted – and MoD was desperate to hide that
Essentially, the theory goes, if a terrorist organisation finds out that it has one or two informers, that’s good for it and it can eliminate them. If it finds out that 30% or 40% of its members are informants, it’s disastrous for the organisation.
Rather than a spat of killings or expulsions, the embarrassment was avoided by keeping those people in place and watching them or quietly removing them over time.
There is considerable evidence to substantiate the idea that the IRA was heavily infiltrated, and that evidence comes from republicans who saw from their side how many operations were going wrong, as well as from intelligence officers on the other side, who were handling – if not fully controlling – those valuable assets.
But in that context, what’s missing from the multitude of paperwork declassified is evidence of this.
The names of informers would obviously never be made public in these files, nor would detailed intelligence assessments which the Government believes could be used to identify informants. That absence of that information is not at all surprising.
What is surprising is firstly how little of this information has been – at least officially – removed from these files. Where material is censored – sometimes a single word, sometimes many pages at a time – archivists insert dummy pages to make this clear, something which allows them to later reinsert those pages when they are finally declassified, even if that is half a century away.
At the very heart of government, in the Prime Minister’s office, there are a relatively small number of these pages being removed. In many cases, it’s obvious that these involve intelligence.
There are intelligence reports marked in the index of files which have been withheld. There are documents from Stephen Lander, the head of MI5, which have been withheld, along with a considerable number of documents copied to him which have not been withheld.
There would also have been oral briefings for the Prime Minister on sensitive intelligence matters. But Government works by written records; even highly sensitive material is generally committed to paper. Ministers and officials’ trust in the integrity of the classification system is well-founded – it is rare that information classified Secret is leaked and exceedingly rare that Top Secret material emerges inappropriately.
There are those who will cynically say that this material was simply torn out of files by intelligence operatives or shredded in a process of careful vetting.
I have no doubt that some of that goes on. I’ve spoken to some former civil servants who have told me of their personal experience of it.
But I’m sceptical about the idea that this is a mass purging of the record. Government involves material being copied to multiple departments; that means the same document being held in multiple files in different buildings. Government is also an agglomeration of competing factions; what suits one lot to cover up might suit another lot to release because by incriminating one group it exonerates another.
That admittedly involves speculation on my part. But even if there is a sophisticated cleanup operation, these files contain material which doesn’t sit easily with what we think we know about the IRA’s infiltration.
It’s not just the absence of references to high grade intelligence which stands out, but the extent to which most of the top figures in the Government system state to each other that they don’t know what the IRA is thinking or what it might do next. Senior officials create acres of paperwork trying to work out what on earth the IRA is up to.
These key figures steering the peace process numbered only about a dozen at any one point. They were closely knit, largely seemed to trust each other and collaborated meaningfully, working together on a shared problem where every scrap of information was being fed into the system and analysed.
Yet much of this analysis reads like the sort you’d get from a sharp academic or well-informed journalist. It’s often impressive, but lots of it is based on logically-driven speculation, rather than certainty or even really strong confidence about the IRA’s intentions.
There is far more open source intelligence such as newspaper reports or low-level snippets of information gleaned from third parties such as clerics or politicians than there are Security Service or Special Branch pages removed from these files.
There clearly is intelligence entering the system, and some of it appears to come from a high level in the IRA. Jonathan Stephens, for instance, said in an August 2001 memo marked 'confidential and personal' to a handful of colleagues that "we know independently that the PAC [Provisional Army Council] had agreed in principle to the sealing of some dumps" and that "in the run-up to 12 August IRA members were briefed to expect a move on decommissioning that would be characterised by others as decommissioning but that would not amount to decommissioning as the IRA defined it".
Yet that memo from Stephens was entitled ‘What were Sinn Féin about?’. It followed the strong belief from the British and Irish Governments that the IRA was going to decommission, yet it didn’t, leaving them angry and confused.
Stephens – who would go on to become NIO permanent secretary – said his memo was aimed at "kicking off a collective effort to work out what we thought Sinn Féin thought they were doing in the run-up to 12 August, and its implications".
This is on one level the standard civil service way of analysing an issue. But this problem was unique in that it involved a terrorist organisation which the security services had heavily penetrated.
He said: "As ever, we must remind ourselves that we are not dealing with a single rational individual: we are dealing with a small, but nonetheless collective, leadership in which there may well be a mix of motives, objections and tactical preferences among the various players".
He dismissed the idea that the IRA and Sinn Féin were truly very different, even though the Taoiseach had suggested the problem was with the IRA rather than Sinn Féin. Stephens said: "I don't believe it myself. The leadership is too integrated and does not actually reflect the simple distinction suggested by the Taoiseach."
This apparent contradiction may be explained by several factors. Firstly, many informers are not permanent. Stakeknife, for instance, had his cover blown in the early 1990s, and so by this stage was useless to MI5. Willie Carlin, an agent who’d been close to Martin McGuinness, fled in 1985 – in his case after Stakeknife tipped off his handlers that he was to be abducted.
…(continued in comments)
by Jeffreys_therapist
8 comments
…. (article continued)
Secondly, as Professor Richard English, one of the leading scholars of terrorism, observed in his 2024 book Does Counter-Terrorism Work?, “not everything done by someone working as an informer is directed or controlled by the state operatives who are episodically receiving information from them”.
If Britain had an informer on the Army Council, it couldn’t force that person to tell it anything beyond what they were prepared to divulge.
But thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, there is a difference between tactical and strategic intelligence. It is beyond any credible denial that the security forces had enormous tactical awareness of IRA operations, enabling them to repeatedly be thwarted.
But the sort of person who knows where arms are hidden or knows the target of a bomb is not necessarily the sort of person who knows about an era-defining decision such as decommissioning.
There are other possibilities, including that the loss of key intelligence personnel in the 1994 Chinook crash hampered top grade intelligence from the IRA or that there was a source so high up in the IRA that their intelligence went only to the PM to protect their cover.
It’s also possible that political considerations meant surveillance on those in both Sinn Féin and the IRA became impossible.
What’s clear is that by this point the IRA is relatively small – and the number at the top is smaller still.
In a January 2001 phone call, Blair told US President Bill Clinton that even as Sinn Féin was negotiating to support the police, “the IRA themselves were still procuring weapons and targeting opponents, which was a further complication”.
The following month, the new American leader asked Blair how big the IRA was. The PM told him that “there were maybe 500-600 active members, but that was more than enough for planting bombs.”
Referring to a British request to ban the Real IRA in the US, where it had been raising money, Bush said “he was surprised that Americans were giving money for terrorism. Did they not know or were they just naïve…”
Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, said “it was a bit of each.”
Another note marked ‘confidential and personal – not to be copied further’ recorded a highly sensitive political stocktake meeting in Hillsborough Castle in April 2001.
The meeting involved Secretary of State John Reid, Blair’s fixer, Lord Falconer, along with Powell, the NIO’s top official Bill Jeffrey, and several other senior officials.
The note said that “Adams and McGuinness were undoubtedly the dominant figures within the Provisional leadership” but “they could not simply direct the movement and were not prepared to split the IRA”.
The note said that decommissioning was “the holy grail” which would “take the poison out of the situation”. That decommissioning would eventually start in October 2001.
The heavy infiltration of the IRA had been a key reasons why the number of Troubles deaths dropped drastically over the course of the three decades of carnage.
What these documents might – and much here remains opaque – point to is that as the focus shifted to politics, hitherto fruitful sources became far less useful.
Ed Moloney raised the point on Broken Elbow that if Martin McGuinness had been an agent, he would have prevented the execution of Mountbatten (unless, of course, they wanted the paedo dead).
PIRA was obviously infiltrated, but the ‘heavily infiltrated’ notion, continually regurgitated by MI5 approved journalists was/is just part of the psy op.
If that is correct, however, then you have the British paying people to kill others on a wider scale than just Scappaticci.
Either way, the Brits don’t come out of this well
Poor Sam it’ll take him a little while to catch up to what was going on.
The hint of “heavy” infiltration has and always was a tactic used by security services. Its purpose has been to drive disaffection into the Republican movement in the hopes of causing a split.
A split inevitably leads to the setting up of new tiny dissident groups reverting back to violence.
It keeps the Security apparatus busy, It keeps the money flowing into the coffers.
The drive towards peace was disastrous for the security services. What better way to chip at your old foe and secure funding at the same time.
The talk around informers within the IRA from the British state has always been surrounded with lies.
They’ve never quantified the nature of all these ‘informers’.
MRF / JSG / DHU dont puts their eggs in one basket.
They played with the entire populous like toys, still are really. It doesnt seem to end, just different yuppies managing it all.
Playing golf now most of them, trying to write books where they made themseles heroes, itd sad if it wasnt so pathetic.
I have a theory that by the mid-90s, there were no uncompromised members of the IRA. Everyone was a British agent, larping that they were legit.
How else would MI5 have to justify their budgets?
Besides, intelligence services work in their own sphere so it’s not a surprise that the mandarins in Westminster were kept in the dark.
Wasn’t this a psychological warfare tactic from the Brits though? Frank Kitson shit. Sow seeds of division by spreading lies of there being informers
Comments are closed.