Martin Dillon,
Doubleday, London, 1994.
This one, the third book called ‘the enemy within’ of last year, slipped by me at the time: I didn’t notice a single review. Most of it describes the IRA’s various campaigns against the British, not something I am interested in. However there is one rivetting chapter called, ‘The Intelligence War’, which anyone even slightly interested in the story of the British intelligence and counter-insurgency operations there in the 1970s and 80s ought to read.
Reviewing Dillon’s 1990 book on the subject, The Dirty War (in Lobster 21), David Teacher quoted from Dillon’s introduction:
‘In the late 1960s and early 1970s, while the conventional forces of government were openly combating terrorism in Ireland, other agencies within the intelligence community in the United Kingdom believed that unorthodox methods and techniques were required in the war. The intervention of these groupings, which included Special Branch, military intelligence, MI5 and MI6, was uncoordinated, Much has been written about that period, some of it honest journalism, but most of it propaganda inspired by the terrorists and their supporters….’ (emphasis added)
Boy, has Dillon changed his tune! As usual with British authors working this field, most of his sources are unnamed; but his ‘former officer at the Yard’, ‘a contact in MI5’, ‘a senior IRA intelligence officer’, ‘a former general’, ‘a friend in the RUC’ and so forth, tell a story of continuous internecine warfare between the various bureaucracies, and covert operations and counter-terror completely out of political control.
- Scotland Yard leaks against MI5 (p. 180); Anti-Terrorist Squad officers leak against MI5. (p. 197)
- Stories about Maurice Oldfield ’emanated from the ongoing conflict between MI5 and MI6…..MI5 used RUC Special Branch to circulate stories about Oldfield going to the town of Comber to pick up young men…(and) that the ageing spy chief was involved in the abuse of young boys from the Kincora boys’ home in East Belfast’. (p. 192) (This story, I seem to remember, was first run through the Sunday Times.)
- A secret army unit kidnaps and tortures a student. A policeman investigating the assault is told by a retired Special Branch officer that he should look under his car if he continued to make inquiries. The student is too afraid to do anything. (p. 186)
- ‘Within British Army HQ…….. groups… employed loyalists terrorists and targeted members of the IRA for assassination….. covert units…….. were trained by the SAS to gather intelligence, assassinate terrorists and run loyalist agents. Loyalist paramilitaries were supplied with intelligence files on members of the IRA to enable them to kill people considered a threat by the authorities’. (p 180)
- ‘A former general…..said it was debilitating for the regular army to find the two leading organizations MI5 and MI6 were more concerned with their struggle for power than “on-the-ground operations” ‘. (p. 181)
- ‘The absence of proper guidelines permitted abuses in the employment of terrorists as sources and as agents provocateurs…… many agents were sacrificed to IRA execution squads for the purpose of concealing the presence of more highly placed informants’. (p.183)
- ‘Some agents were used by their intelligence handlers to bring about the deaths of certain members of the IRA’ (p. 193)
- ‘After twenty years, parts of the military machine were out of control’. (p. 192);
Sound familiar?
There is also what seems to me to be substantial new material pertaining to the Stalker and Stevens inquiries.