Journalism

2024

Frank Kitson and the Myth of the Counter-Insurgent – an essay in Engelsberg Ideas (March 2024)

Frank Kitson was lauded for his prowess in counter-insurgency, but those who celebrate his legacy should question whether his tactics ultimately exacerbated the violence he sought to stop.

Frank Kitson, who died on 2 January 2024, was the architect of ideas of counter-insurgency that have been implemented, condemned and venerated throughout the world and across the political spectrum. Yet, although the British general’s contributions to military doctrine have been often quoted, they are little read or properly understood.

Kitson was born in London on 15 December 1926. His father, Vice Admiral Sir Henry Kitson, was a war hero who fought in the First and Second World Wars, and his mother, Marjorie, was the only daughter of Sir Eliot de Pass, a wealthy merchant involved in imperial trade in the West Indies. The marriage symbolised the fusion of the imperial pillars of military service and free trade, with Frank Kitson’s early life intimately shaped by the social structure of empire.

Kitson joined the Rifle Brigade in 1945, spending the last days of the Second World War in England before being posted to the British Army on the Rhine in West Germany. He would later complain about his time in Europe, which he said encapsulated everything he hated about soldiering. His unhappiness was soon replaced by a feeling of excitement when he was posted to Kenya to work with the local police, who had been facing a growing revolt by the Kikuyu ethnic group and the Mau Mau insurgency, which emerged as a dissident challenge to the Kenyan African Union (KAU) led by Jomo Kenyatta.

The Mau Mau revolt against the British colonial authorities in Kenya in the early 1950s came at a time when the European imperial powers were contracting around the world. Britain faced challenges to its rule on several fronts, including in Malaya and Cyprus. The governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, even visited Kuala Lumpur to learn how the authorities there were fighting insurgents from the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Returning to Nairobi with a ‘Malaya Plan’, Baring decided to form a ‘war cabinet’ that would preside over the decisions taken by joint civil-military-police committees at provincial and district level. The Kenyan police’s Special Branch division was to be the eyes and ears of these committees, working in conjunction with the army, the colonial administration and MI5 to provide intelligence on the insurgents. The individuals directly responsible for liaison with the committees were the District Military Intelligence Officers (DMIOs).

Frank Kitson arrived in Kenya in August 1953 for a two-year posting as a DMIO. He was attached to the Special Branch headquarters responsible for the region of Kiambu. Kitson’s work centred on the concept of ‘pseudo-gangs’, who would pose as Mau Mau fighters to draw out the enemy from the forests and mountains. The idea revolved around complementary and overlapping tactics, such as the capture and interrogation of Mau Mau suspects, payment of informers, the turning of Mau Mau fighters to become trackers, and the management of a vast card index on suspects. It was Kitson’s leadership, however – particularly in directing these small teams – that enabled them to provide the security forces with the intelligence necessary to locate the enemy.

Frank Kitson reflected in his memoir Gangs and Counter-Gangs (1960): ‘In some cases the presence of the leader acts also as a spur to the efforts of those below him, but in my case that was not necessary’; he maintained that his subordinates were self-motivated and dedicated, which made his job easier. Kitson’s second in command, Dennis Kearney, was a member of the Kenya Regiment on loan to the police. He spoke fluent Kikuyu and Swahili and, as Kitson observed, his ‘chief characteristic, other than his enthusiasm for slaughtering Mau Mau, was his liking for practical jokes’.

Despite his reputation for no-nonsense, counter-insurgency tactics, Kitson was not beyond indulging in a form of cultural relativism. In one incident he hired a witch doctor to participate in the interrogation of a Mau Mau fighter, who then led Kitson and his team to a weapons cache. ‘Telepathy is a widely accepted accomplishment and that is the only acceptable explanation I can give’, Kitson later wrote. He was awarded the Military Cross in the 1955 New Year’s Honours in recognition of his role in building up an effective intelligence machinery to defeat the insurgency in the areas where he had been deployed.

Kitson’s next deployment was to Malaya. The Malayan Emergency began in 1948, when insurgents from the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), the fighting arm of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), turned their guns on the British colonial authorities. Their objective was to use guerrilla warfare as a means of securing independence. Following the Communists’ assassination of High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney on a lonely mountain road above Kuala Lumpur in 1951, Winston Churchill, as prime minister, appointed General Sir Gerald Templer to take the fight to the Communists. Templer’s success against the insurgents was not instant, however, and he left without eliminating them.

In the summer of 1957, Kitson found himself in charge of a company of troops coordinating operations against the Communists in west Segamat, along the Johore-Malacca border. Kitson fought bravely and was rewarded with a bar to his Military Cross. His citation noted that he had ‘always been to the fore leading his troops against the terrorists’ and possessed ‘almost uncanny skill’ by which he ‘conducted these operations’, winning ‘the complete confidence of everyone acting under his command or in concert with him’. His troops killed half of the MNLA fighters they were sent to destroy, meaning ‘two complete Malayan Communist Party branches… virtually ceased to exist’.

From Malaya, Kitson went to Muscat in Oman, where he met with the commanding officer of the Special Air Service (SAS), Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Deane-Drummond, to advise him on Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) that the SAS might use in their operations against rebels in the mountainous Jebel Akhdar region.

Kitson’s driver on this occasion was Major Malcolm Dennison, an intelligence officer on secondment to the Sultan’s armed forces, who later offered considerable insight into Kitson’s thinking on his counter-insurgency plan for defeating the rebels as they drove from Muscat to Nizwa. ‘I poured cold water on it’, recalled Dennison. ‘To me it smacked too much of fighting the Mau Mau, to which he made frequent reference – jungle squads, turned-round rebels, disguised British officers. He was insufficiently aware of local conditions – scant cover, very little water, no British officers who pass off as Omanis. I could see he regarded me as pretty negative, another case of what you call Jebelitis. But he impressed me nonetheless. Here was a man with a logical mind.’

There could be no doubting that his military superiors also saw Kitson as an impressive thinker on military strategy. He had built up a firm reputation in the Ministry of Defence, leading those involved in directing military operations to ‘regularly seek his opinions and advice’ because of his ‘reputation for realistic and practical good sense, and for helpful and reliable hard work’. Interestingly, the senior general who wrote Kitson’s citation for his OBE was Cecil Blacker, who had commanded 39 Airportable Brigade in Lisburn, in Northern Ireland, in 1962-64 and would rise up through the ranks to become the army’s Adjutant General in the early 1970s. The brigade had been operationally deployed to Cyprus and Kenya in the 1950s and South Arabia (later South Yemen) from May to October 1964. With recommendations by senior officers like this, it is unsurprising that Kitson would find himself on a similar trajectory, even assuming command of Blacker’s old brigade in the early stages of the Northern Ireland Troubles in September 1970.

In the late 1960s protest marches in Northern Ireland sought to highlight discrimination against the Catholic minority in employment, housing and electoral politics. Sectarian clashes led to a deterioration in the security situation. The local police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), were unable to contain the violence and requested British military assistance in August 1969. The army deployed and 39 Brigade became responsible for operations in Belfast, the largest city in the province.

A major concern for Kitson at this time was the looming prospect of civil disturbances giving way to insurrection. As Kitson himself observed in his much-cited, though little read, book Low Intensity Operations (1971), published a year after he arrived in Northern Ireland:

‘If subversion fails to achieve the aim, it merges imperceptibly into insurrection, which at one end of the scale covers the activities of small sabotage or terrorist groups but which spreads across the operational spectrum to include the activities of large groups of armed men. If these gangs become sufficiently numerous and well-armed to take on the forces of the government in open combat on relatively even terms, insurgency merges into orthodox civil war, because at this stage force has again become the senior partner.’

In his important new study of army operations in Northern Ireland, Uncivil War, Huw Bennett has cautioned against the temptation of reading too much into the colonial model adopted by some army officers, including Frank Kitson. While they were prepared to take forward certain ideas from their colonial experience, ‘which seemed to have some validity, such as ideas about riot control’, they were also aware ‘that many colonial techniques were now unacceptable’. Nevertheless, the contention of Kitson’s critics is that he pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in taking his war to Britain’s enemies wherever they were to be found.

One of the most controversial episodes in the Troubles was the formation of the Military Reconnaissance Force (MRF). The British army’s Intelligence Corps Museum has recently revealed that this highly secretive unit was known internally as the ‘Mobile Reaction Force’, ‘a small unit of approximately 40 soldiers’, who were ‘tasked with sowing division with [sic.] PIRA ranks and gaining intelligence via double agents, front companies and undercover surveillance’. Despite claims to the contrary by Kitson’s critics, he does not seem to have had a hand in the disbandment of the MRF and the setting up of its replacement, given he had already left Northern Ireland in May 1972 prior to any reorganisation taking place. Moreover, it could even be argued that Kitson’s tenure in Northern Ireland was too short-lived to have any meaningful strategic impact. Looking at his time in command of 39 Brigade, it is perhaps more accurate to see it as a failure, especially given Kitson presided over a massive upswing in violence on the streets. British policy at the time had been focused on de-escalating conflict.

In a lecture at the US Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in late January 1973, Frank Kitson looked back at his time in Northern Ireland, evaluating the threat posed by the IRA and the efforts he took to defeat them. Apart from a reasonably good general insight into Irish history and the dynamics of militant republicanism, Kitson lamented the lack of actionable intelligence, which took far too long to filter down from Special Branch headquarters to his troops. It threw the ‘fundamental difficulty posed by insurgency in a vivid light’, Kitson told his audience, which he thought was the inability of the Catholic community to ‘express itself freely or respond to moves by the government once a terrorist organisation becomes established within it’. In an observation shared by later generations of army officers, he acknowledged how the pursuit of the defeat of the IRA was theoretically possible, though in practice it risked alienating the population by doing so. Kitson was remarkably prescient in his observation that the IRA could turn any heavy-handed tactics by the army into a propaganda coup. Despite his pragmatic disposition on this occasion, Kitson did not address the question of whether he might have had a guiding hand in driving opposition to army operations.

Insurgency was regarded as more than a military problem by the British army long before Kitson applied his own TTPs to try and combat it. What made Kitson’s approach so different was that he advocated evaluating every insurgency on its merits; in his words, ‘without regard to customs, doctrine or drill’. However, while he had applied his model in Malaya in a way that relied on locating and neutralising a jungle-based enemy, his application of the same techniques in the heavily urbanised city of Belfast, where the insurgents moved among the people, had mixed results. When he was summoned on 24 September 2002 to give evidence at Lord Saville’s Tribunal into the events of Bloody Sunday it was clear his reputation as a practitioner of the dark arts of counter-insurgency loomed large in his cross-examination by legal counsel. In what may have been a sign of false modesty, Kitson told the inquiry: ‘you keep saying I am a… counter-insurgency expert, [though] this is on the strength of my year… on the defence fellowship at Oxford. I do not think anyone else thought I was more of an expert than they were themselves’.

The problem for Kitson, however, was that the label of ‘counter-insurgency expert’ had a sticky quality to it. A few years after he gave evidence to Lord Saville’s Tribunal, an army officer, responsible for drafting the updated doctrine on counter-insurgency, observed that ‘Kitson’s influence on Army thinking was considerable, introducing novel approaches as a brigade commander in Northern Ireland, commandant of the Staff College, a divisional commander and, finally, as Commander-in-Chief United Kingdom Land Forces’. On Kitson’s contemporary influence, one former officer told me in relation to his reading of Low Intensity Operations in 1971 how some people read it while others ignored it. It is also worth considering how a stubborn culture of what the military historian Michael Howard once called a ‘complacent anti-intellectualism’ has periodically afflicted the British army and was at least partly to blame for the strategic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For Irish republicans Frank Kitson’s name conjures up an evil genius who used overly oppressive means to try and stamp out their insurgency. There is little point in challenging this one-dimensional characterisation, given the power of ethnic myth-making and the IRA’s propensity for armed propaganda. For those who prefer to closely examine the historical record, including Kitson’s own writings on counter-insurgency, there is evidence of an inconsistency in his ideas. When considered alongside his own self-deprecating style, false modesty and, as the army’s own folk wisdom goes, blunt, sardonic personality, it is tempting to read too much into his influence. That said, there can be no doubting Kitson was representative of a knee-jerk tendency within the British army when dealing with irregular adversaries to rush highly improvised approaches from the past to new frontlines. Frank Kitson’s legacy, therefore, will forever be mired in controversy for as long as that continues.

When US military officers and their civilian advisors came to draft their own counter-insurgency doctrine amid the Iraq intervention after 2003, Kitson’s Low Intensity Operations was hastily retrieved from military academy libraries and rushed to the front. According to the US Field Manual 3-24, Kitson’s work was seen as an ‘explanation of the British school of counterinsurgency from one of its best practitioners’. Writing in a US Army War College in-house journal Parameters – 30 years after Kitson’s speech at the same institution – military historian Robert R. Tomes noted how ‘students of ongoing efforts in Iraq will benefit from Kitson’s comparison of counterinsurgencies and peacekeeping’. This observation was, ironically, something that might have been taken on board more seriously by British forces responsible for security in Basra in Iraq. At the time they were struggling to contain the violence from a multitude of bad actors, including Shia militias, disgruntled Baathists and elements of the growing Sunni insurgency.

It was the noted underperformance of British troops in counter-insurgency that led to one academic advisor to the US-led Coalition, Daniel Marston, to articulate a case for learning lessons not only from success but also from failure. As Kitson noted in Bunch of Five (1977), ‘ignorance or excessive diffidence in passing along such knowledge on can be disastrous’. A similar view might also be taken of Kitson’s own work as we face new and emerging challenges in irregular warfare today.

A Bodyguard of Lies – an essay in the Dublin Review of Books (February 2024)

Stakeknife’s Dirty War: The Inside Story of Scappaticci, the IRA’s Nutting Squad, and the British Spooks who ran the War, by Richard O’Rawe, Merrion Press, 254 pp, €18.99, ISBN: 978-1785374470
The Padre: The True Story of the Irish Priest who armed the IRA with Gaddafi’s Money, by Jennifer O’Leary, Merrion Press, 256 pp, €18.99, ISBN: 978-1785374616

In his novel The Human Factor (1978), the wartime MI6 officer turned novelist Graham Greene takes us on an exploration of the motives of those involved in secret intelligence. The plot revolves primarily around a mole hunt for a spy leaking classified information, though what really drives the story forward is the rivalry between different intelligence agencies. Greene’s depiction of a conference held between MI5, which had responsibility for running agents in former British colonies, and MI6, which was meant to deal with threats outside Britain and the Commonwealth, speaks to how intelligence work was akin to what would pass for office politics in normal workplaces. ‘Rivalry,’ C said, as he opened the conference, ‘is a healthy thing up to a point. But sometimes there is a lack of trust. We have not always exchanged traces of agents. Sometimes we have been playing the same man, for espionage and counter-espionage … To me espionage is a gentleman’s job, but of course I’m old-fashioned.’

For Greene the gentlemanly nature of intelligence came down to the idea that bonds forged between people run much deeper than any surface commitment to some abstract ideal or, for that matter, their loyalty to their country. In a letter to Rufa Philby shortly after the death of her husband, Kim, the high-ranking MI6 officer turned KGB spy, Greene referred to him as a ‘good and loyal friend’. Greene attracted criticism for remaining friends with Philby despite the latter being unmasked as a double agent in the early 1960s. Philby fled first to Beirut and, finally, to Moscow. In selling out his friends as well as his country Philby exemplified the moral conundrum at the heart of spying – exemplified in the character of Maurice Castle, who is suspected of being a traitor in The Human Factor. It is implicit in the language of those who disliked him that he ‘cultivated friendships – and the friendships took over’.

This is a story that travels well to other places. In his final book, Tomás Nevinson (2023), renowned Spanish novelist Javier Marías follows the infiltration of one intelligence operative into the lives of the locals of a small town in the Basque country. Posing as a schoolteacher, Nevinson is sent to uncover the person responsible for ETA bombings in Barcelona and Zaragoza. An undercurrent in the book is that Nevinson is never certain who has issued the orders for his mission. ‘The high-ups of MI5, MI6 and CESID, organisms of the Crown in all cases,’ Nevinson says, ‘would know nothing of my activities … and would never have authorized them. Or perhaps they did know about them and were pretending not to, those labyrinthine orders do not always begin at the top, but do always end up at the bottom.’

The idea that ordinary people – whether spies or their targets – are victims of an overly-bureaucratic state presided over by shadowy figures is one that Greene would have had much sympathy with. It is an idea explored in Richard O’Rawe’s Stakeknife’s Dirty War, a major new biography of leading Provisional IRA member turned British agent Freddie Scappaticci. For twenty years Scappaticci was the subject of considerable controversy after it was leaked to the press that he had been a long-time spy at the heart of the IRA’s internal security department, known colloquially as ‘the nutting squad’.

The Provisional IRA ran a determined campaign against the British state between 1970 and 2005. It was responsible for killing around 1,800 people during the Troubles. For much of the 1970s the British state and its security forces struggled to contain the IRA’s violence, with thousands of members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the British army deployed onto Northern Ireland’s streets continuously for over three decades.

For many of these police officers and soldiers, their operations were principally reactive. Their purpose was to detect crime, arrest perpetrators and deter violent acts. Like fire-fighters, they only responded when contacted. For a smaller number of specialist intelligence practitioners within their ranks, however, there was a need to get ahead of the curve and prevent attacks from happening in the first place. As one of their number, a former RUC Special Branch officer, once told me in interview, this was ‘not an exact science’ and relied upon experienced people who had the psychological resilience to incur risk, to think laterally, to innovate and, above all, to adapt under fire and in the absence of an overarching strategic and legal template.

One of the most controversial strategies that the British state had tried and tested in various contexts in its long imperial history was employing paid informers and agents to infiltrate insurgent groups. In his account of counter-espionage operations against German spies in England during the Second World War JC Masterman, the great architect of MI5’s counter-espionage strategy, wrote in his book The Double Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945 (1972): ‘The high-souled fanatic may repudiate even the suggestion that he would be capable of giving way to pressure and of acting as a double agent, but the majority of spies are not of this Spartan breed, and many, perhaps a majority, of them are ready and even willing to commit treachery either under pressure or for simple reasons of self-preservation.’

O’Rawe’s book on Scappaticci demonstrates how the British turned one high-souled fanatic in 1970s Belfast, perhaps under coercive pressure, perhaps even because he judged working for the British to be a guarantee for self-preservation. Scappaticci was once a committed IRA volunteer who rose steadily through the group’s ranks to become their officer commanding in the Markets area of Belfast. At the heart of O’Rawe’s book is a paradox: How could Freddie Scappaticci, a trusted member of the IRA, betray his comrades and, moreover, live with the knowledge of such betrayal?

We get a glimpse into the divided loyalties of some IRA volunteers in the words of a former MI5 officer who wrote in the Daily Telegraph on February 9th, 1992 how it was essential for deep penetration agents to ‘join enthusiastically in the activities of the organisation even if they are seriously criminal. To succeed, a deep-cover agent must become the ultimate method actor. He must firmly believe in the organisation penetrated while at the same time remembering who he really works for. Dedication to both sides has to be absolute.’

There have been plenty of memoirs written by former British agents inside the Provisional IRA which speak to what Kim Philby called a ‘cover personality’. Many are high-octane, testosterone-fuelled books written principally by men – never women – who were recruited by one or other branch of the security forces. From Sean O’Callaghan’s The Informer to Martin McGartland’s Fifty Dead Men Walking and Kevin Fulton’s Unsung Hero, they give first-person perspectives on feats of derring-do by silent warriors operating ‘deep behind enemy line’. Upon closer inspection these books are hugely formulaic. Their character arcs typically take us from childhood broken homes to even tougher military and/or paramilitary regimes, strained personal relationships and, finally, to the principal arena of bombs, bullets, and betrayal. Here we encounter larger than life comic book heroes and villains. Deeper, more serious, themes explored in some of the better additions to this sub-genre include the psychological pressures triggered by betrayal, though they all too easily sidestep the moral and ethical dilemmas faced by those involved in spying, the often mundane nature of their recruitment and handling, and the inevitable disillusionment that follows their ‘retirement’ from the game of intelligence collection.

|Those who deal with intelligence matters are confronted with lies on an everyday basis. In a state like the United Kingdom, with its insistence on ‘neither confirming, nor denying’ media reporting on intelligence matters, the truth is obfuscated by the kind of bureaucratic silence written about so eloquently by Greene and Marías. As Winston Churchill put it in conversation with Stalin at the Tehran conference in late 1943, ‘In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’ And the same can be said of that genre of boastful semi-fictional memoir that J. Bowyer Bell once called ‘Troubles trash’.

In interviews I conducted with former agents for my book Agents of Influence they often spoke of living with the constant fear of being unmasked. Willie Carlin, who worked for MI5, put it best when he told me how his handler, Michael Bettaney, a drunk and something of a Walter Mitty character, almost got him killed by trying to visit Martin McGuinness at his home. Carlin intercepted him just in time. ‘I’d love to meet McGuinness and I’ll tell him what’s going on behind his back,’ an inebriated Bettaney shouted. ‘That was personal,’ Carlin told me. ‘Bettaney knew that McGuinness was chatting with … MI6 … MI6 and MI5 never spoke to one another. Suspicions about McGuinness’s connections with British intelligence remain a source of contention, with some of his former comrades expressing serious concerns on that score in O’Rawe’s book.

Disappointingly, the intersection between human rivalry and bureaucratic rivalry is not fully explored in O’Rawe’s work, nor is the rationale for tasking agents to get closer to intelligence targets like McGuinness. According to secret correspondence between secretary of state for defence Tom King and the attorney general Patrick Mayhew on March 19th, 1991, revealed by Sir Desmond de Silva in his review into the murder of Belfast solicitor Patrick Finucane, agents were ‘the key to the fight against terrorism, both in Northern Ireland and elsewhere … without good intelligence, [King said], we are be [sic] unable to target our limited resources to best effect. It is the single most potent force in countering the activities of all paramilitary groups. The information which we obtain from agents and informers is critical to our assessments of their policy, plans and psychology.’ For the IRA, agents – or ‘touts’ in their parlance – were seen as the greatest inside threat for this very reason.

In the wake of the nutting squad’s brutal torture and murder of alleged informer Paddy Flood in July 1990, the IRA released a statement in which it said informing was ‘abhorrent and is unjustifiable’, though it also claimed that the organisation understood how ‘those who give information to the British forces are often victims themselves. People whose vulnerability is used in the most cynical manner by the Crown forces to trap them into informing on their neighbours and fellow nationalists.’

It is difficult to impress upon people who remain deeply suspicious of the British security forces that the human factor is a key determinant in their operations. One has only to review the evidence in the de Silva review on the loose nature of intelligence operations which goes some way to explaining how the Finucane murder could have happened in the way that it did. For former members of the Provisional IRA like O’Rawe, there is much more damning evidence of British state complicity, leaving London ‘open to the charge that they aided and abetted in British citizens being executed by both the IRA and the UDA’. For other former Provos, including Anthony McIntyre, serious questions remain about the role of the British state in utilising informers and agents. As he told me in interview a few years ago, ‘Special Branch will tell you about the killings they stopped, but they are not prepared to tell us about the killings that they didn’t stop, that went ahead. It now has to be considered joint enterprise on many of those operations. Freddie Scappaticci’s killings: was it the IRA? Was it the British and the IRA? Then it was joint enterprise. How can we now say that it was the IRA that was responsible for this? I think the British state were much more involved at some levels …’

McIntyre points to another hidden dimension in British intelligence operations against the IRA that rarely gets an airing and that is the central role of human agency and, specifically, the complacency of intelligence officers. ‘Overall … the British state strategy in terms of the IRA was remarkably successful but even if you watch a great football team, like Liverpool or Manchester United, you know, they might score great goals but they might have Martin Škrtel in the back line scoring own goals and you might have a leaky defence, you know. You come out on top and your greatness is talked about. It doesn’t minimise your efficiency but when you see how sausages are made, you might just say, “hmm I don’t really want to eat them.”’

It is a reasonable assumption that all organisations, even secretive ones, have those who are good tacticians and those who might be better utilised in different positions than the ones they have been allocated to. Intelligence historians may well complain that intelligence is the ‘missing dimension’ in our understanding of decision-making in war but for McIntyre incompetence should not be discounted. ‘The British have made lots of mistakes,’ he told me. ‘I mean, you’re bringing guys in – I mean, what’s their pay grade? Lance Corporal – [they] might even be a Private? And they’re brought into something called the F.R.U., same way with Constable Plod … Back in the 1970s and 1980s, what were they really producing?’

In the British secret state, where special national security clauses still inhibit the declassification of much intelligence product under the Freedom of Information Act (2000), it is impossible to determine if the allegations made by McIntyre and O’Rawe are true. The de Silva review certainly suggests that there is merit in further exploring them as new evidence emerges. However, it goes without saying that few individuals are going to own up to incompetence or poor decision-making. Conversely, it also raises the question of whether British failures were often attributable to the IRA’s own counter-intelligence efforts and the suggestion that its own operatives proved highly resourceful in furthering the armed struggle.

One IRA associate who posed considerable dangers to British national security was the Catholic priest Father Patrick Ryan, the focus of Jennifer O’Leary’s fascinating biography The Padre. Born in 1930, Ryan spent much of the 1970s and 1980s raising money for the IRA as well as becoming active in terrorist activities. He used the cover of his clerical collar to groom people into helping him help the IRA. ‘Belief can be a powerful persuader,’ Ryan tells O’Leary. He used the power of religion and the aura that his priestly role gave him, even winning over a Protestant woman who attended his Masses in London and turning her into a money mule for the IRA.

Throughout his time as an IRA agent, Ryan criss-crossed Europe planning operations, obtaining bomb-making equipment and even engaging in surveillance of targets. He worked indirectly with the IRA, using an intermediary who, on his behalf, would meet face-to-face with IRA volunteers operating on the continent. ‘The IRA hit team never saw me, that was the whole point of using … the intermediary, because I was convinced that if I made direct contact with the IRA, especially in Belfast or Dublin – well, I thought I may as well be talking directly to the Brits,’ Ryan tells O’Leary.

By the mid-1980s Ryan had been sent to Libya on behalf of the IRA, where he built up a firm relationship with key figures in Libyan intelligence. He would serve as the central intermediary between the IRA and Colonel Gaddafi, who shared Ryan’s hatred of the British.

Ryan, whose ‘nationalism was more important to me than the Catholic Church’, he saw no problem in committing the mortal sin of murder. As he infamously told O’Leary in her instalment of the award-winning BBC Spotlight series, The Secret History of the Troubles, which is also repeated in her book: ‘The only regret that I have was that I wasn’t more effective; that the bombs made with the components I supplied, didn’t kill more. That is my one regret.’

Ryan had come to the IRA of his own volition and worked with them only so long as they shared his commitment to armed struggle. As the IRA leadership began to wean itself off its strategic dependency on violence, courtesy of Martin McGuinness, Ryan began to doubt their commitment to the cause of freeing Ireland by force. Following a fractious meeting with McGuinness in St Stephen’s Green in Dublin in the late 1980s, Ryan broke off formal contact with the IRA leadership. After returning to the continent, he was arrested by the Belgian security services and extradited to the Republic of Ireland.

Writing to the New Zealand-born Caribbean-based journalist Bernard Diedrich in April 1988, Graham Greene observed how his close association with Panama’s dictator General Manuel Noriega had provoked criticism. ‘If I had to choose between a drug dealer and United States imperialism, I hope I would be brave enough to prefer the drug dealer,’ he remarked. Greene’s binary thinking probably originated more from his late conversion to Catholicism than his involvement in wartime intelligence. It suggests he had not fully returned to the fold of moral certitude and was more comfortable with Philby’s betrayal than he should have been. After all, he wrote the foreword to Philby’s memoir, My Silent War (1968). The upside-down world that Philby inhabited was shared with those like Scappaticci, Ryan and others who donned ‘cover personalities’ to perpetrate a long-term deception. The human factor ultimately played an important role in helping them come to terms with the enormity of what they had done.

2023

“‘For God and Ulster‘: Adrenaline coursed through my veins. A red mist descended over those around me” – Aaron Edwards: Although my recollections of the angry confrontation during the marching season in 2001 emphasise conflict, behind the scenes it was a different matter – an essay in the Irish Times, 3 June 2023

THE BRICKS AND BOTTLES RAINED down thick and fast. I ducked to avoid a golf ball hurtling in my direction. I wove to narrowly miss a bottle smashing on the ground beside me. Up ahead was a solid line of police Land Rovers blocking the bridge. Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers in full riot gear huddled closely together in front of their vehicles in a well-disciplined formation, holding their reinforced shields tightly to their chests.

Facing off against the police officers that July in 2001 were about thirty Orangemen, who had also formed up in orderly ranks, their standard-bearer spearheading their advance towards police lines. The young man carrying the bright blue, gold and red bannerette depicting the local lodge’s emblem – a crest emblazoned with the words ‘For God and Ulster’ – was a friend of mine. We grew up in the same housing estate and occasionally socialised together.

As I stood observing the lodge at close quarters, I felt like I was amongst friends. Amongst people like me. The lodge regalia was completed with a huge banner depicting a painting of soldiers from the 36th Ulster Division going over the top in the trench warfare of the First World War. The soldiers on the banner were portrayed as stoic, defiant and determined. It flapped in the warm July breeze, a reminder of the slaughter of the Somme, held aloft by two Orangemen as bricks and other debris flew above our heads, thrown by angry nationalists behind police lines.

Adrenaline coursed through my veins. A red mist descended over those around me. Fear, anger and frustration animated them, and I could see it was taking considerable willpower for the Orangemen to maintain their dignity in the face of such violent provocation.

I began to question why I was even here.

The truth was I liked to accompany this lodge every Twelfth of July. It was my grandfather’s lodge. Like my grandmother, he had been born and reared a few hundred yards along the Whitewell Road in a tough, working-class row of terrace homes in Barbour Street.

They were hard times, when the shadow of the Great Depression touched their lives and the lives of their Catholic neighbours in what was known locally as ‘Pope’s Row’.

Relations between the two communities were generally good except for times, such as in the mid-1930s, when loyalist and republican gunmen re-emerged to wreak havoc.

After my grandparents married, they moved to Mill Road, a few hundred yards from where I now stood on Arthur’s Bridge, before finally settling in East Way, Rathcoole, in the mid-1960s.

As the Troubles picked up pace in the 1970s, fear and intimidation drove between 8,000 and 15,000 families out of their homes, leaving places like Greencastle, Bawnmore, Longlands and the Whitewell Road predominantly Catholic and nationalist, while Protestant families moved in large numbers to the neighbouring White City and Rathcoole estates.

Against this backdrop of changing demographics, my grandfather and his Orange brethren were confronted by the harsh reality of social and political upheaval. Their traditional route was now blocked by those who did not want them to pass.

It was a tense situation, only defused when two members of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) appeared on the scene to exert a calming influence.

Angry though my grandfather and the other Orangemen were, they respected the PUP’s call for restraint. They agreed to disperse, with the hope that one day they might complete their march.

They never did.

In her celebrated travelogue on Northern Ireland, A Place Apart (1978), Dervla Murphy found herself amongst Orangemen like these. Murphy referred to them as belonging to a ‘close-the-ranks tradition, always suspecting threats, plots, betrayals, conspiracies and the look-out for danger’. It was not difficult to see what had brought them to this point. The 1970s were the high point in the Troubles. Fear stalked the streets and death lurked around every corner.

Just over two decades later in the afterglow of the Good Friday Agreement (1998) did little to neutralise sectarian confrontations and they continued to escalate, with occasional murders punctuating an uneasy peace.

In my new book, A People Under Siege, I write about how sectarianism in this part of Belfast, like other parts of the North, pre-dated partition. The historical reality was that Protestants and Catholics had been drawn into conflict during the marching season ever since a local lodge was consecrated in Greencastle in 1886.

Against the backdrop of such ancient enmity, it was, therefore, not difficult to appreciate how this fear and insecurity can provoke a closing of the ranks.

In another sense, it would be wrong to see violent confrontation as the only way of understanding this divided society.

Although my recollections of the angry confrontation during the marching season in 2001 emphasise conflict, behind the scenes it was a different matter.

Some of the older members of the lodge, including my grandfather, agreed wholeheartedly with the PUP’s analysis that de-escalation, not escalation, was the key to resolving tensions in the area.

The 1998 Agreement gave those who wished to resolve their political differences peacefully an opportunity to make the world a better place for their children and grandchildren. It was this compulsion that meant they could be confident in exerting a calming influence even midst the angry shouts across the barricades.

To appreciate this kind of restraint though we need to look beyond stereotypes.

My grandfather, Jackie Graham, was more than an Orangeman. He was better known, perhaps, as a former footballer who had played for Portadown and other Irish League teams in the 1940s and 1950s. He had even gone on to coach several football teams up until the 1980s.

For much of his working life my grandfather worked in textile mills and later as a machine operator in the multinational firms, Carreras and ICI in East Antrim. As a trade unionist who spent much of his time in the company of other trade unionists, he believed in ‘thinking Christianity’ and a progressive form of unionist politics that was open to everyone.

Amongst those who he spent time was his close friend Bobby Gourley, who had been the chair of the Northern Ireland Committee of the ICTU, and the local councillor for Rathcoole, R.J. ‘Bob’ Kidd. Bob had been a member of the Northern Ireland Labour Party during its halcyon days in the 1960s, becoming an independent after the party died an electoral death in the 1970s.

I have fond memories of early morning dog walks with my grandfather where we would encounter Bob near Macedon Point and the two of them would indulge in progressive political conversations.

My grandfather and grandmother loyally cast their votes for Bob, along with another ardent socialist, Mark Langhammer, who was elected to represent the same area in the 1990s.

It was my grandfather who taught me the value of the mantra “it’s nice to be nice” and to strive always to understand other people’s perspectives, even if I might disagree with them.

Given his politics, he frequently disagreed with Ian Paisley and the DUP who he believed were responsible for winding up young people to the extent that they ended up in prison. Apart from my one abiding memory of him remonstrating with a seller of Paisley’s Protestant Telegraph outside his housing executive home, it was my grandfather’s analysis of the DUP as a political cult that has stayed with me all these years.

Interestingly, I found this analysis shared amongst my grandfather’s other close friend, Geordie Heslop, a Second World war veteran. One of my favourite stories both men used to tell was of Geordie’s serial heckling at Paisley’s rallies. At one rally in the 1970s he heckled Paisley for dispatching young men to “prison camps”, a charge that was greeted by the rancour of older women beating him with their umbrellas and accusing him of being a “Lundy”.

In Paisley’s decades-long leadership of the DUP, those who broke ranks and stood against the herd were deemed a “Lundy”.

As I detail in my book, unionism is generally divided between those who are more progressive in their politics and those who are not.

For over half a century the DUP have fallen into the latter category, something that has accelerated since the party eclipsed the Ulster Unionist Party in elections twenty years ago.

The DUP have made a virtue over escalating their rhetoric to keep their followers in a constant state of anxiety.

Their support for Brexit was predicated on Paisley’s religious-based millenarianism regarding the broadening of EU membership, which he once infamously labelled a ‘new tower of Babel’ in his valedictory address to the European Parliament.

In this sense, the DUP’s opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol and Windsor Framework Agreement is not so much about a technocratic fix to the messy issue of an open border on the island of Ireland as it is about the party’s inability to do anything other than close the ranks.

It is little surprise that we hear murmurs within the DUP about a break with the Conservative Party and a strategic orientation towards Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, which many commentators predict will win the next UK general election. The party is predisposed to save its political skin even if that means becoming a political chameleon.

And what of those unionists who continue to rally around the DUP’s political millenarianism? They may well feel a sense of security in saying no to a return to devolved government. After all, closing ranks, as I discovered all those years ago, gives you a sense of belonging even if you have nothing else to show for it.

For those unionists more receptive to more calming influence of other forms of political unionism, they will continue to stand against the herd until such times as a political project with their material interests at heart emerges.

2021

Leaders and Followers in Ulster Unionism – an essay in Fortnight Magazine (April 2021)

The announcement by loyalist paramilitary groups that they are withdrawing their support for the Good Friday Agreement has been a largely symbolic move that may herald a variety of unintended consequences, argues Aaron Edwards.

That there has been general anxiety amongst Ulster unionists surrounding the Northern Ireland Protocol is unsurprising. It is a crisis that has been brewing for some time and can be traced back to the DUP’s bullish position on Brexit, which has oscillated from preferences for a hard or soft border, depending on the mood music coming from Downing Street. There was always at least an outside chance of the Conservative government pursuing its own agenda since the DUP lost the balance of power at Westminster in the 2019 election.

Despite the best efforts of Arlene Foster to reassure the DUP’s support-base by talking up the prospective benefits of Northern Ireland’s unique place in a post-Brexit world, loyalist paramilitaries have claimed they may be unable to contain the more destructive tendencies of their followers. There is anger out there amongst loyalists, no doubt, many of whom remain incredulous at what they see as the dilution of their British identity. If you cannot be treated equally, like your fellow citizens elsewhere in the United Kingdom, so the argument runs, then the union itself is almost certainly in jeopardy.

This is ironic given that some of the very same people have attempted to halt the extension of British rights for British citizens in Northern Ireland by way of the access to health care provision for women. It took a Sinn Féin Minister, Deirdre Hargey, to remind the DUP of their duty to extend these rights to everyone, including unionists. In an unprecedented move, the British government will now compel Stormont to implement new abortion laws.

Despite attempts to place the blame elsewhere for these political failures, the fact remains that the DUP have held the leadership mantle for Ulster unionism since the electoral eclipse of the UUP in the early 2000s. This presents something of a paradox to those loyalists who, on the one hand, turn out to vote for the DUP, even if they frequently find themselves at odds with the decisions that leadership has taken.

16 years ago, I watched as a UVF chief of staff told dozens of his top commanders that they were awaiting a leader, saviour-like, to take them out of the current political impasse. Given that loyalists regarded Rev. Ian Paisley with suspicion at the time, he was not seen as the prophet who would lead them to the promised land.

Many loyalists saw Paisley as speaking from two sides of his mouth on their armed campaign. They remembered, bitterly, how Paisley enthusiastically marched them up to the top of the hill and abandoned them. Despite their scepticism, loyalists continued to pay deference to Paisley and the DUP at the ballot box. Loyalists never believed they could shape the big political decisions within unionism. They merely followed, head down, chest out, providing the muscle to strengthen the hands of leaders like Paisley.

Nowadays, the relationship between unionist leaders and loyalist followers has changed. Unlike in the nationalist community, where a radicalisation amongst supporters has taken place thanks to Sinn Féin’s democratic centralism, unionist leaders have had to win the consent of their loyalist supporters. This is a support base that has rejected time and again the progressive politics of parties like the PUP. The long tail of the 2012–13 flag protests saw, at first, the return and accentuation of left-leaning voices who were subsequently rejected at the ballot box in favour of the DUP.

Ironically, we now have unelected gatekeepers of the 1994 ceasefires corralled into a Loyalist Communities Council who were the same people who delivered the Good Friday Agreement to their followers. Now they find their same followers have rejected it. If this flip-flopping proves anything it is that there is a fundamental disconnect between leaders and followers within the broader unionist family.

This disconnect is not unique and has been mirrored in different parts of the world, from electrifying protests in Arab countries to driving white, pro-Trump militias to attempt a coup on Capitol Hill. Northern Ireland is not a place apart.

In his pioneering research on Ulster loyalism, Dr Sean Brennan has referred to our local militias as a kind of ‘warrior regime’, led by and beholden to a privileged class. Think soldiers of the Ulster Division charging the German guns at the Schwaben Redoubt on the Somme in 1916 led by posh public school educated officers. Another obvious example is the loyalist mobilisation against the power-sharing Executive in 1974, which, after its fall, handed power back to the unionist political class.

Today, as the union looks increasingly under threat to many unionists, the loyalist warrior regime seems to be stirring, once again threatening a violent reaction. There are signs of potential trouble on the horizon once COVID restrictions have been lifted.

Although the continuing presence of loyalist warrior regimes is concerning, it is by no means certain that they will return to killing or large-scale street violence. For one thing they haven’t yet worked out who they should direct their ire towards. And for violence to have any strategic utility, as all good analysts of war know, it must have a clear objective, otherwise it is nothing more, or less, than senseless, mindless criminality.

Loyalists face momentous decisions in the weeks and months ahead. The withdrawal of support for the Good Friday Agreement – an Agreement they supported and, indeed, even killed and maimed some fellow loyalists to maintain – is regrettable. What would be even Imore regrettable is if loyalists – who now find themselves in a leadership position – fail to prevent their own followers from committing acts of violence and, thereby, rip up the democratic gains of the past 25 years.

That would be the real tragedy.

2021

Blame Games – a review essay in Fortnight Magazine (January 2021)

Anatomy of a Killing: Life and Death on a Divided Island, by Ian Cobain, Granta 2020

Who was responsible for the Troubles, by Liam Kennedy, McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020

Peace or Pacification, by Liam Ó Ruairc, Zero Books 2018

In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Joseph Marley who returns to haunt him one cold winter’s night. ‘No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse,’ he tells Scrooge, informing him that he will be visited by three spirits, the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. It is difficult to read books on the Troubles without feeling a little like Scrooge. We are haunted by the Troubles in the same way he is haunted by these apparitions. Unlike Scrooge, who soon comes to see the error of his ways, our penance is to forever blame other people for our own mistakes. This is certainly evident in each of the books under review.

Ian Cobain’s Anatomy of a Killing places the micro-history of the murder of an RUC officer, Constable Millar McAllister, in a broader context. Cobain tells the story of McAllister’s death in forensic detail. History is a web of coincidences and Cobain reveals that this was the first IRA murder of a police officer in Lisburn since the group assassinated District Inspector Oswald Swanzy six decades earlier. Cobain’s book records the IRA’s plan to kill McAllister, the volunteers they selected to carry out the killing, the weapons they used to arm them, and the minute by minute reconstruction of the murder. An unfortunate missing piece in this jigsaw is the impact the killing had on Millar McAllister’s family and friends. Cobain tried and failed to gain the cooperation of the dead officer’s family, which, some might argue, serves to silence the victim further while amplifying the voices of his killers.

None of the perpetrators interviewed for Anatomy of a Killing express what might pass for regret or remorse for their actions. A generation after the guns fell silent and a peace process emerged, one would have expected some attempt by the IRA squad to seek out a form of reconciliation for what they did. Not a bit of it. Instead we find unapologetic IRA volunteers who appear to sleep soundly in their beds at night, proud of what they did. Cobain examines some of the academic literature to ascertain what drove them to do what they did. Here we find the account thick with bold brushstrokes pointing to structural and historical forces that somehow propelled individuals into the circumstances where they murdered a man in front of his young son. Unfortunately, this tends to blot out the rough edges of intersection between individual motives and group dynamics, like peer pressure or internal IRA discipline, which help us better understand the broader tapestry surrounding this human tragedy. Apart from this small quibble, Anatomy of a Killing is a fine book, very much the product of serious research and prodigious analysis.

Liam Kennedy’s Who was Responsible for the Troubles? is an equally fascinating cross-examination of the historical record in light of its bloody tapestry of death, destruction and mayhem. Professor Kennedy suggests that many of the structural reforms were in place by the early 1970s, thereby removing the raison d’être of the IRA’s armed struggle. By then, however, the security situation was spiralling out of control, prompting a seemingly endless cycle of coercion, revenge and retribution. Today, we are still living with the legacy of that violent past, which, as Liam Kennedy concludes, means any kind of progressive politics ‘is unlikely to be built on twisted folk histories and rationalisations of past atrocity’. Much of the book is dedicated to an analysis of the social control exerted by paramilitary organisations. Here we find the painful stories of broken bones, exiling, shunning, shaming and killing that constitute the ugly face of the conflict, made all the more insidious by its ethno-national trappings.

Professor Kennedy does not shy away from attempting to reset our moral compass in showing us the consequences of the mobilisations by the more extreme fringes of loyalism and republicanism. The horror of realising that many of us, to some degree, turned a blind eye to the violence in our midst is only really counter-balanced by the reality that terrorism remained a minority sport and that some people took risks to face down its brutality. Liam Kennedy is one of those who descended from the ivory tower to challenge the ‘punishment’ attacks meted out to some of his fellow citizens. I recall interviewing one former paramilitary several years ago who told me he was ‘embarrassed’ at having presided over some 50 of these ‘punishments’ on people in his own community. He expressed little personal regret as he recalled his self-appointed ‘policing’ function, perhaps belying an equally misguided view that his time would have been better spent attacking people on the other side of the fence. Professor Kennedy’s impeccable work of scholarship records these contradictions but also shows us how we can learn from them, lest we should find ourselves spectators in a re-run of the tragedy of the past.

Liam Ó Ruairc’s Peace or Pacification? is a present-centred audit of the peace process. ‘The origin of this conflict lies in the British state’s refusal to recognise the right of the
people of Ireland as a whole to self-determination, for which it had massively voted in 1918’, he concludes, which sets the tone for the remainder of his book. Ó Ruairc identifies partition as the perennial cause of all of Ireland’s ills and, perhaps unsurprisingly, refuses to take Unionism seriously, decrying their ‘artificial majority’ in Northern Ireland. Although he brushes aside Unionist views on sovereignty as an important rationale for their support for Brexit, he does have plenty to say about European views on partition.

Ó Ruairc recounts the publicity stunt by EU politician Guy Verhofstadt, in which he pondered the ethno-national preference of a herd of meandering cows as he stood on the Irish border in 2017. The irony of a visiting Belgian politician – himself from a divided society, albeit one fractured along linguistic fault-lines – labelling ethno-national identities in Ireland as an ‘illogical divide’, is lost on Ó Ruairc. Alluding to Surrealism, Verhofstadt conjures the ghost of fellow countryman René Magritte in pointing out that “This is Not a Border”, a pronouncement worthy of caricature, the constraints of my word count do not permit. Suffice to say, not everyone agreed with Magritte’s absurdism either – nor did he believe they should.

There is much that is illuminating about Ó Ruairc’s book. His lively critique of the neo-liberal trappings of the peace process is rewarding to read, especially as he builds on Professor John Nagle’s characterisation of Northern Ireland as a ‘Potemkin Village’.

As we face more deadly security threats in the world today, all three books remind us of the dangers of thinking about the past in too uncritically a manner. In their own ways,
the authors recognise that Northern Ireland remains haunted by its past, though by confronting our ghosts, as Scrooge did, we may be capable of change.

2020

Divided Loyalties – a review essay in the Dublin Review of Books (December 2020)

Thatcher’s Spy: My Life as an MI5 Spy inside Sinn Fein, by Willie Carlin, Merrion Press, 280 pp, £14.99, ISBN: 978-1785372858
The Accidental Spy, by Sean O’Driscoll, Mirror Books, 326 pp, £8.99, ISBN: 978-1912624287
The Intelligence War Against the IRA, by Thomas Leahy, Cambridge University Press, 350 pp, £18.99, ISBN: 978-1108720403

“It was never a war of win or lose – that wasn’t the purpose,” a retired RUC Special Branch officer told me recently. “You don’t set out to eradicate terrorism in a military sense – it is about rendering it incapable of pursuing its violent ideology.” And the principal method for achieving this outcome? “The capacity of two or three well-placed agents to have a disproportionate effect well beyond their number ‑ you infected the organisation, triggering paralysis.”

This kind of view was common in the higher echelons of Britain’s intelligence community, who fought a long war on multiple fronts against their opponents in the Provisional IRA. Gaining access to the intentions and capabilities of the enemy and disrupting them has been the objective of intelligence practitioners since time immemorial. The ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu devotes an entire chapter to the use of spies in his Art of War. “Advance knowledge cannot be gained from ghosts and spirits, inferred from phenomena, or projected from the measures of Heaven,” Sun Tzu observed, “but must be gained from men for it is the knowledge of the enemy’s true situation.” Apart from describing different spies, including what he called “expendable spies” and “double agents” who are given the task of spreading deception, Sun Tzu recommended that spies be recruited and directed only by the most talented individuals. These “handlers”, he argued, must possess wisdom, benevolence and subtlety. As one of the world’s oldest professions, in which the trade is in the human capacity for deception and treachery, it is little surprise that spying, like war, remains more of an art than a science.

Over the course of several decades of the Troubles, the British security forces, in the form of the RUC, British army and Security Service, MI5, were charged by successive governments in London with gathering intelligence on their opponents in the IRA and loyalist paramilitary groups. As the former secretary of state for Northern Ireland Tom King put it in a document made public by Sir Desmond De Silva’s review into the 1989 murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, “[i]ntelligence from agents and informers is the most important source of information we have about the policy, plans and psychology of the terrorist groups we are fighting”. King was Northern Ireland secretary in the mid- to late 1980s and subsequently moved onto the role of defence secretary. He knew better than anyone else why human intelligence (HUMINT) sources were so invaluable and, like those who held high office before and after him, frequently made decisions based on the single source insights provided by HUMINT. It is all too tempting to lose sight of the political role of intelligence, defined by senior British intelligence officer Michael Herman in his book Intelligence Power in War and Peace as the means by which secret information serves to “influence government action, however remotely”.

Despite the bureaucratic function of state intelligence, much of our understanding of its dark arts has been shaped and influenced by popular culture. James Bond and George Smiley are two of the most recognisable characters in English literature, with Ian Fleming’s character spawning a multi-billion-dollar film franchise. In Ireland too, books on secret agents have tended to come from former members of the Provisional IRA who betrayed their comrades at the behest of the British. From Sean O’Callaghan’s The Informer to Martin McGartland’s Fifty Dead Men Walking and Kevin Fulton’s Unsung Hero, these memoirs give the first-person perspectives of silent warriors operating deep behind enemy lines. Journalist Kevin Toolis explored the theme of the informer as “villain” and “cultural bogeyman” in his evocatively written Rebel Hearts. “Over the centuries informers have been used, with devastating effect, to disrupt and destroy republican rebellions, and despite the electronic hardware of the twentieth century,” he wrote, “the Crown’s most powerful weapon in the present-day Troubles remained the human informer.”

Thatcher’s Spy is the memoir of a former secret agent who was recruited by MI5 and inserted into the Republican movement in Derry at the height of the Troubles in 1974. He was charged with bringing back news from the paramilitary frontline in a part of Ireland that had suffered from years of discrimination by the local unionist regime. Born into a Catholic family in the Waterside area in 1949, Carlin followed in the footsteps of his father and uncle by breaking free of the deprivation and joining the British army. He served in the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars and was based in Germany and England prior to outbreak of the Troubles in 1969. Carlin did not see action with his unit in Operation Banner, the codename for the British army’s longest-running deployment in support of the RUC. The mission of his tank regiment was to confront a conventional enemy in the form of the Soviet Third Shock Army. As he prepared to leave the army in 1974, he was handpicked to return to Ireland to spy for MI5.

Carlin’s story is straight out of a John Le Carré novel. It is littered with mysterious liaisons with agent runners along the windswept beaches of Northern Ireland’s north coast, of his mission to get close to IRA leader Martin McGuinness, and of his extraordinary exfiltration aboard prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s RAF jet in 1985. Carlin’s secret information found its way into intelligence reports that were circulated among the upper echelons of the British government. Indeed, some of these documents have since been declassified thanks to my own efforts under the Freedom of Information Act (2000). For the first time we can now see what “intelligence product” British officials were receiving from their agents in the field. One weekly intelligence assessment marked “Secret ‑ UK Eyes Alpha”, and dated October 15th, 1976 gives an overview of the strategy and tactics of each terrorist group, offering fascinating insights into the thinking of the leaders. “One report suggests that the PIRA are now helping to finance the BOGSIDE Community Association in order to curry favour,” it reads. “The LONDONDERRY PIRA are reported to be about to start a campaign aimed at gaining maximum publicity for every incident of alleged Army misbehaviour. They feel it may be necessary to stage manage some form of confrontation in the hope of inducing an overreaction by the Army, which the PIRA could claim as indiscriminate brutality.” Secret information obtained by Carlin and others within paramilitary groups not only enabled intelligence officers to “stress-test” their own analysis of the IRA but also provided insights into the political ambitions of Sinn Féin. Carlin’s story as an “agent of influence” inside the Republican movement helps us understand the process by which Britain’s spymasters sought to capitalise on the IRA’s decision to move to embrace the ballot box. By the time Carlin’s cover had been blown – he was betrayed by his former MI5 handler Michael Bettaney ‑ he had managed to pass on significant intelligence about the Provisionals’ “policy, plans and psychology”.

Carlin perfected his own intelligence tradecraft by adopting what Soviet double agent Kim Philby called a “cover personality”. As another secret agent inside the Provisional IRA once impressed upon me, infiltrating a terrorist group was not a “short-term informant job”. You could not “pretend to be one of them; you had to be one of them”. It was the former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, who confided in his friend Tony Cavendish that he preferred to “turn” members of the opposition, rather than to “infiltrate rogues”. In this approach, Oldfield differed from his colleagues, whom he advised that infiltration would only store up trouble for the future. Nonetheless, the use of agents remained the principal method of intelligence collection throughout the Troubles.

In The Accidental Spy, we find the counter-intelligence practitioners of the FBI enthusiastically embracing the infiltration of agents into Provisional IRA splinter groups by the mid-1990s. In 1994, FBI agent Ed Buckley paid a visit to David Rupert, a bored American trucker who had been visiting Ireland and keeping company with several “players” from the Provisional IRA and Continuity IRA. Despite being an outsider with no familial ties to Ireland, Rupert soon won the acceptance and friendship of republican paramilitaries on both sides of the Irish border. At 6ft 7in in height with an imposing gait and weighing in at 300 lbs, Rupert, one might say, stood out. Rupert first visited Ireland in 1992, when he met the veteran Bundoran republican Joe O’Neill. O’Neill ran the Ocean Bar where Rupert spent much of his trips drinking and listening to old IRA tales of derring-do. The Bundoran IRA had close connections on both sides of the border and O’Neill was their public face on the local town council. He had been a long-time Provisional but later walked out of their ardfheis in 1986 to join Republican Sinn Féin (RSF). By the time Rupert was introduced to him, O’Neill was RSF’s national treasurer and the key link to supporters and sympathisers in Irish America.

It was on a trip to Ireland in 1994 that O’Neill took Rupert to a windswept rural pub in Co Sligo. Rupert’s American accent and republican sympathies soon attracted locals with connections to the Continuity IRA. By 1997 he had become a key fundraiser for the dissidents and soon found himself privy to the secrets shared by those militant republicans who carried on the fight as the Provisionals embraced the peace process. It was Rupert’s transition to the Real IRA, however, that would see him placed in the maelstrom of activity surrounding the group’s bombing of Omagh, in which twenty-nine people and two unborn babies were killed on August 15th, 1998. It was one of the conflict’s worst terrorist atrocities. O’Driscoll’s retelling of Rupert’s account of the fall-out after the attack and the intra-republican wrangling that followed is packed full of detail. He paints a vivid picture of the group’s isolation from mainstream republicanism and the extraordinary violence that peppered dinner table conversations with leading members.

Heroes and villains populate the narrative of Thatcher’s Spy and The Accidental Spy. Reading both accounts, we come away with the impression that Carlin and Rupert fell in love with the image of themselves as spies straight out of an Ian Fleming or John Le Carré novel. For their handlers, however, they are merely conduits through which governments could get the inside track on their enemies. Intriguingly, in Rupert’s case, the growing internationalisation of the Irish conflict meant that his intelligence became central to the development of the Anglo-American special relationship. He was handled by the FBI in the US, but the intelligence was shared with their partners in Belfast, London and Dublin.

The intelligence strategies depicted in Thatcher’s Spy and The Accidental Spy appear to have gone unchanged since Sun Tzu’s time. Deep down it is about finding the lever that would prompt a man or woman to betray their friends and comrades. In Ireland, this betrayal was more insidious. In a conflict marked by its tribalism, it was about betraying the republican family, which has always been more than an imagined community. It is bound by blood as much as it was rooted in Irish soil. The big question is whether the IRA knew about the betrayals. The execution of around seventy members or close affiliates of the group suggests that they did, though the revelations surrounding “Stakeknife” point to a more profound network of agents inside the Provisionals than has ever been admitted. Accounts provided by veteran republicans like Brendan “The Dark” Hughes, Anthony McIntyre and Tommy Gorman suggest the IRA leadership sometimes overlooked betrayal, despite launching high-profile “tout hunts” in the 1970s and 1980s. These clampdowns on the leakage of secret information were, at least in the eyes of Hughes and some of his comrades, merely cosmetic. He believed Belfast was “rotten” with informers and agents by the early 1990s.

Thomas Leahy is sceptical of such dissenting voices. In his The Intelligence War Against the IRA, he instead places considerable stock in the Sinn Féin narrative that the IRA was not infiltrated “to any great extent” and cites excerpts from interviews with the likes of Danny Morrison and Séanna Walsh to reinforce his own argument. Leahy also suggests, somewhat controversially, that the IRA’s campaign persisted for so long because it was primarily designed to bring the British back to the negotiating table. He claims the strategic objective of the IRA’s “Brits out” mantra was only really about “motivating volunteers”, though he does not offer much evidence in support of this proposition, merely a reference to the work of one other scholar. Although his conclusions may not be shared by other analysts of the security dimension of the Troubles, they cannot be easily ignored. At its root, this heated debate is really a question of agency: Did the IRA choose to end its campaign for its own strategic reasons ‑ as articulated in its August 1994 ceasefire statement ‑ or was it forced to do so by the British state? There are certainly cases to be made for both positions, though it is, of course, perfectly permissible to conclude that it was a bit of both. Indeed, Leahy’s argument is much more convincing when he places the IRA’s decision-making in the context of a broader politicisation of its armed struggle in the 1990s. In Leahy’s own words, the republican leadership “only agreed to these ceasefires because the political limitations and opportunities at that time suggested that the republican movement could gain no more concessions from the IRA’s armed campaign”.

Leahy is keen to pour cold water on other analysis that sees the strategic utility of intelligence as having played a more decisive role in the British government response to IRA violence. While it is perfectly acceptable to make such bold claims, it would have assisted his cause to factor in more explicitly the question of the politicalisation of intelligence. During the Troubles, intelligence was collected, collated, validated, assessed and disseminated so as to inform government decision-making in London. The Cabinet Office was primarily responsible for implementing the government’s stated policy of defeating terrorism by coordinating the various departments of state. In this it worked hand in glove with the NIO, MoD and security and intelligence agencies in ensuring that the ends of government policy were closely aligned to the means. Surprisingly, The Intelligence War Against the IRA carries no interviews with former RUC Special Branch officers. This is curious given that the RUC’s intelligence unit ran the vast majority of front-line operational agents during the Troubles. As MI5 have themselves now publicly admitted, they had around fifty officers in Northern Ireland at any one time during the Troubles, most of whom provided technical and analytical support to the police. Only a handful of agent-runners did, however, cultivate sources who gave them greater coverage of the higher-level strategy of the IRA and Sinn Féin, as Thatcher’s Spy reveals. This is corroborated by British Intelligence disclosures to the Bloody Sunday inquiry and the de Silva review, which maintain the narrative that MI5 were primarily concerned with the strategic direction of paramilitary groups, while the RUC dealt with the operational and tactical running of sources inside IRA squads. In limited circumstances, the army also ran agents inside republican groups, though these were eventually brought under the direction of MI5’s director and controller of intelligence in the early 1990s.

Despite the contentious nature of his arguments, one of the positive attributes of Leahy’s book is his synthesis of broader academic debates on how the Troubles ended. There are those, like Leahy, who assert that the armed conflict ended in “stalemate” between the British and Provisional IRA, and others who claim otherwise. Much of this debate has generated more heat than light as far as the darker recesses of the Troubles are concerned. Fortunately, while Leahy appears to relieve the embattled foxhole positions occupied by proponents of Sinn Féin’s peace strategy, he is mindful of the need to connect the dots to the broader intelligence studies literature. “Alongside the damage done to paramilitaries or insurgent groups by the work of actual informers, the paranoia and suspicion that revelations about an informer can create sow fear.” It would have been useful at this point to pay closer attention to how this impacted on IRA operations. My own interviews with former intelligence officers have unearthed a deliberate strategy of sowing the seeds of paranoia to curtail the tactical effectiveness of terrorism. Although it is impossible to say with any great certainty what results this strategy produced, we do need to triangulate the claims made by those who actually spearheaded intelligence operations during the Troubles with the available historical evidence.

As Leahy’s book is based exclusively on his 2015 doctoral thesis, it would appear that he has not taken full advantage of the available archival material, including the kind of declassified intelligence mentioned earlier in this review. There are, therefore, limitations in terms of other bold claims he makes. To give one example featured in The Intelligence War Against the IRA, one hundred days into his tenure as secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke made off-the-cuff remarks to journalists that “[i]n terms of the late 20th Century terrorist, organised as well as the Provisional IRA have become, that it is difficult to envisage a military defeat of such a force because of the circumstances under which they operate though the Security Forces can exercise a policy of containment to enable, broadly speaking, normal life to go on within the province”. Brooke was quickly rebuked by DUP leader Ian Paisley and sought to qualify his remarks by insisting that the IRA could “not win”. In another statement after the IRA attack on the Derryard security forces base ‑ in which two soldiers were killed ‑ Brooke reassured MPs that the government’s intention remained “to defeat terrorism in all its forms by the concerting of military, social, economic and political policies”. Leahy asserts that Brooke’s misspeaking was actually part of a concerted attempt to “create a political compromise” with republicans. He concludes that Thatcher and Major “obviously supported the new political strategy since they allowed Brooke to make conciliatory statements and to reopen backchannel negotiations”.

A closer reading of the Brendan Duddy archive at NUI Galway suggests an alternative perspective. It shows MI6 officer Michael Oatley going out on a limb to run a more ambitious operation at arm’s length from MI5’s DCI at Stormont, John Deverell. When Deverell learned about the reopening of “The Channel”, he quickly moved to wrest control of the venture from Oatley, who was forced to retire, missing out on an opportunity to become chief of MI6. Although it is tempting to see this as an internal power struggle, it is important to recognise that intelligence agencies work at the behest of their political masters. As we now know from the extensive work of scholars like Eamonn O’Kane, Graham Spencer and Paul Dixon, the British had not yet, in O’Kane’s words, “decided to embrace inclusiveness and abandon exclusiveness”. It was not until after the arrival of New Labour in 1997 that the spirit of political compromise came to the fore in Britain’s security policy. As we have since learned from Lord Butler’s review of British intelligence operations in the run-up to the intervention in Iraq in 2003, political parties in power sometimes place severe limitations upon intelligence operations, to the detriment of clear-sighted assessments. In his influential book Why Intelligence Fails, Robert Jervis argues convincingly that “[p]olicymakers say they need and want good intelligence. They do need it, but often they do not like it.” As in Iraq, so in Northern Ireland.

In the light of the politicisation of intelligence, can we say anything concrete about the contribution spying made in helping to end the Troubles? Assessing the impact of secret intelligence amidst armed conflict is difficult due to the cloak (and dagger) of secrecy surrounding such activities. In the absence of official comment, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that accounts by individuals – keen to amplify their own exploits – tend to fill the gaps in our knowledge. Yet such first-person narratives often conflate the tactical role of intelligence-gathering with its exploitation for strategic – and, ultimately, political – advantage over opponents. While it would be wrong, on the one hand, to argue that single-source intelligence played a definitive role in ending the Troubles – it was merely one tool among many – it would be equally wrong, on the other, as Leahy intimates, to claim that it played no role at all. The truth must lie somewhere in between. Unpicking what intelligence was used, why and with what consequences is the work of historians. To a greater or lesser extent, the books under review add to historians’ understanding of the role of secret intelligence and offer some rare glimpses into a deeply controversial aspect of our recent history.

2019

Edwards, A. ‘That Labour refused to run candidates in Northern Ireland this time around reflects poorly on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership’, Belfast Telegraph, 19 December 2019.

Edwards, A. ‘1979: the year the gloves finally came off in the battle against the IRA’, Belfast Telegraph, 28 August 2019.

Edwards, A. ‘Wet Work in Salisbury: Sergei Skripal and the Human Factor of Russian Active Measures’, War on the Rocks, 15 February 2019.

Edwards, A. ‘Strategic response needed to eradicate paramilitarism for good’, Belfast Telegraph, 2 February 2019.

2017

Edwards, A. ‘Cantrell Close: If the political vacuum isn’t filled, paramilitaries are here to stay’, Belfast Telegraph, 6 October 2017.

Edwards A. ‘Serious questions about where the UVF will go in future’, Belfast Newsletter, 26 June 2017.

2016

Edwards, A. and S. Byers ‘Joe Law: trade unionist, communist, united Irishman’, Irish News, 5 November 2016.

Edwards, A. and C. Parr ‘Ethnic divide in Northern Ireland leaves little space for people to focus on politics of Left and Right’, Belfast Telegraph, 14 July 2016.

Edwards, A. ‘Militant loyalism and the hunger strikes’, Irish Times, 5 July 2016.

Edwards, A. ‘Labouring to make an impression on politics’, Belfast Telegraph, 16 May 2016.

Edwards, A. ‘Country Focus: Yemen’, Political Insight, 7(1), (April 2016), pp. 36-39.

Edwards, A. and D. Shaw ‘How Labour’s Northern Ireland activists could cause a row in family over partition’, Belfast Telegraph, 4 March 2016.

2015

Edwards, A. ‘We all have a role to play if loyalist leopard is to change its spots’, Belfast Telegraph, 16 October 2015.

Edwards, A. ‘Film world’s rare focus on loyalism often hazy’, Belfast Telegraph, 25 September 2015.

Edwards, A. ‘A greener Labour party isn’t inevitable’, Belfast Telegraph, 19 September 2015.

Edwards, A. ‘Yemen at War’, Open Democracy, 15 May 2015.

Edwards, A. ‘ISIS and the Challenge of Islamist Extremism’, Political Insight, 6(1), (April 2015), pp. 12-15.

Edwards, A. ‘Yemen’s Frail Faultlines’, Open Democracy, 6 March 2015.

Edwards, A. ‘Yemen: Descent into Anarchy’, Open Democracy, 28 January 2015.

2014

Edwards, A. ‘ISIS: The Spreading Cancer’, Open Democracy, 14 August 2014.

Edwards, A. ‘Yemen: A State Born of Conflict’, Open Democracy, 26 July 2014.

Edwards, A. ‘Is ISIS on the march in Iraq?’, Open Democracy, 14 June 2014.

Edwards, A. ‘Comment: Right to remember the past as it happened’, Belfast Newsletter, 15 May 2014.

Edwards, A. and S. Bloomer ‘The Progressive Unionist Party’s brand of civic unionism’, Open Unionism, 12 May 2014.

Edwards, A. ‘Yemen in the frame, again’, Open Democracy, 28 April 2014.

Edwards, A. ‘Recasting History’, The Pensive Quill, 17 April 2014.

Edwards, A. ‘Yemen’s troubled transition’, Open Democracy, 6 March 2014.

Edwards, A. and C. McGrattan ‘When the guns fall silent, the battle over the past begins’, Discover Society, 4 March 2014.

Edwards, A. ‘Marking time in the homeland of the dead’, EamonnMallie.com, 6 January 2014.

2013

Edwards, A. ‘Iraq: The Masked Democracy?’, Political Insight, 4(2), (September 2013), pp. 12-15.

Edwards, A. ‘PUP membership back to Good Friday Agreement Levels’, EamonnMallie.com, 4 April 2013.

Edwards, A. ‘Britain and the Formation of Modern Yemen’, History and Policy, 14 October 2013.

Edwards, A. ‘Establishing trust is essential for moving beyond protests and violence’, EamonnMallie.com, 16 January 2013.

2012

Edwards, A. ‘Rediscovering the Principles of Loyalism for a new generation’, EamonnMallie.com, 3 December 2012.

2011

Edwards, A. ‘The passing of former UVF leader Gusty Spence may give loyalists time to think about their efforts in making peace with the past, writes Aaron Edwards’, Belfast Newsletter, 30 September 2011.

Reed, R. and A. Edwards, ‘Loyalist paramilitaries and the peace process’, Fortnight, No. 477, (July/August 2011).

2010

Edwards, A. and S. Bloomer ‘Dawn Purvis and the End of Progressive Loyalism’, Fortnight, (August 2010).

Edwards, A. ‘After the resignation of Dawn Purvis, is there any future for the Progressive Unionist Party? Asks Aaron Edwards’, Belfast Newsletter, 8 June 2010.

2009

Bloomer, S. and A. Edwards ‘UVF Decommissioning: A Pyrrhic Victory?’, Fortnight, August 2009.

2008

Edwards, A. ‘What now for the Protestant working class?’, Sunday Life, 11 May 2008, p. 24.

2007

Edwards, A. ‘The UVF Abandons its Campaign of Terror’, Fortnight, No. 452, May 2007, pp. 12-13. Featured on the cover of re-launched magazine.

2006

Edwards, A. and S. Bloomer ‘Loyalist Crossroads’, Fortnight, No. 444, May 2006, pp. 7-8; article also featured on Sluggerotoole.com.